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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I laid out three myths, but if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, this is a fourth one: that somehow everything that happens in the House of Commons is entirely dictated by the Government. Opposition Members tabled amendments, and were able to divide up their time as they wish. The shadow defence spokesman could have led in that debate, had the Front-Bench team so decided. Let us look now at what the United States is doing and saying. From trips to Washington as a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, I believe that we are witnessing an important change in American strategic thinking. The go-it-alone ideas expressed by Donald Rumsfeld—perhaps sometimes brutally when he was Secretary of Defence—and some others who are loosely called neo-conservatives are now perceived by the State Department, the Pentagon and, I believe, the White House, to be redundant. America needs to rebuild its partnership with Europe and we, as Europeans, need to rebuild our partnership with America. Victoria Nuland, the American ambassador to NATO —a Republican appointee and very high representative of the United States, who does not say anything that is not cleared at the highest level—said recently in Paris that she wanted ““a stronger EU””, able to ““act independently””. The American decision to give a major US air force contract to Airbus, which is important for British jobs and British industry, signals an American desire to work more closely with Europe and accept the sort of thinking that the former Prime Minister set out in the St. Malo declaration of 1998 about building more coherence around European defence. I welcome that. The security challenges of the world are too serious to be handled exclusively by the United States—or even exclusively by the United States and Britain.