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European Union (Amendment) Bill

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I listened to the concluding remarks of the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks, I felt that they were the comments of someone who knows that he has lost not only the vote in this House but the argument as well. The reality is that the British Conservative party is now more isolated and isolationist than it has ever been. That is not what the British people want. The majority who believe that membership of the European Union is good for Britain is even larger—significantly larger—than seven years ago. That is true among young people in particular. Three quarters of them support Britain's membership of the EU. They take our membership increasingly for granted, just as they take for granted all the benefits that flow from membership—particularly the fact that, as European citizens, we can all travel, study, work, live or retire in any part of the European Union. As the Bill goes to another place, we—the majority of the House who so strongly support it—can look beyond the ratification of this treaty and look forward to a different kind of debate on Europe. I am thinking of a debate dominated not by questions of institutional reform, but by the real challenges that face our world. As we have heard so often in these debates, those can be tackled effectively only if we work with our partners in the EU. The challenges include climate change, international terrorism and international crime. They include our global competitiveness on the one hand and how we end global poverty on the other. The immense challenge is how different nations, tribes and faiths can live together safely and sustainably on our planet. Those are the issues that our constituents care about; they expect us to deal with them—in this Parliament, internationally and through our membership of the European Union.