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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am pleased to have the opportunity to sum up for Her Majesty's Opposition on this important Bill. It may surprise hon. Members to hear that I am going to miss this process. I will miss listening to the Foreign Secretary's speeches. In particular, I will miss further contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague), the shadow Foreign Secretary. He has led us very ably throughout the process. He has combined precision, determination and good humour. It was the Foreign Secretary who generously said at the beginning of this Third Reading debate that my right hon. Friend was one the best debaters in the House of Commons. On that point, I agree with the Foreign Secretary, even if I have agreed with him on virtually nothing else. I will also miss sparring with my opposite number, the Minister for Europe. Even though we have disagreed strongly on a number of occasions about the implications of the Bill and the treaty that it would enact, I accept that he has acted throughout with courtesy and good humour. He has loyally stuck to the Government's hackneyed line that the constitutional concept has been abandoned, even after the Prime Minister referred to the Lisbon treaty last Wednesday at Prime Minister's questions as ““the constitutional treaty””. When even one's ultimate boss admits that something is a constitution, it is difficult to plough on, but the Minister has stuck loyally to his brief. I will also miss the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee and his oft-quoted report, which has become almost the standard text for our debates. That report reminded the House that the EU constitution and the Lisbon treaty are ““substantially equivalent”” and that to argue otherwise is, in the words of the Committee—a Labour-dominated Committee—““misleading””. The Committee also highlighted how whole swathes of the original EU constitution were brought forward into what is now the treaty of Lisbon. That case was argued so strongly that The Economist subsequently described the Government's case—that the two documents are really quite different—as ““a farce””. I am also grateful to Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee for reminding the House so eloquently on the ““Today”” programme that the Government's much-vaunted red lines would ““leak like a sieve””. That bears repetition because it was so accurate.