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European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, has been so praised tonight that I am sure that, if he were a lesser man, it would go to his head. However, I add my words of thanks for what he and our committee—I am a member of it so I suppose that I should not praise it too much—achieved in the report. In fact, it is so stupendous and such a blockbuster of a report that it reminds me of the Cecil B DeMille definition of the ideal film, which is that you start with an earthquake and then you build up to a real climax. The report’s conclusions go from page 247 to page 276, and good luck to anyone who has time to read not merely the conclusions but the rest of the report as well. This has been a momentous debate of high quality. I am sure that we all appreciate the usual channels and the noble Baronesses the Lord President and the Chief Whip on the government Benches providing an intelligent amount of extra time on an exceptionally long day and night. Everyone has been accommodated on a fair basis, with ample time to speak. The only exception we were beginning to worry about was the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, at the beginning of the gap. Because of the various confusions that arose in the other place as the Bill proceeded through the Committee of the whole House and the atavistic and bizarre nature of most of the Tory contributions to both the debate and the amendments, I feel that a much better lead has now been given in your Lordships’ House on what the public need to decide, with their parliamentarians advising them on their own conclusion, about this crucial Bill. As others have done, I deliberately pay tribute tonight to the speeches made by eight or nine of the more enthusiastic Members of the Tory Benches about membership of the European Union. They were remarkable contributions, not least from the two ex-Commissioners. Although they may be described malevolently by others as ““pensioners of the European Commission””, the work they did as Commissioners for Europe as a whole—as well as for their own country directly, although that is not the main purpose of their oath—was outstanding in both their cases. That applies too to the two Labour ex-Commissioners we have heard from tonight, the noble Lords, Lord Kinnock and Lord Clinton-Davis, and to the work that they did. The difference in their case, however, was that it was nice to see how those who originally had been quite Eurosceptic, in the old days of Labour Party history that we remember so vividly, had gone native very soon after getting to Brussels—