---

European Union (Amendment) Bill

I hope noble Lords will forgive me for absenting myself for 20 minutes while I attended the European Union Select Committee and also if I fall into the trap offered by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and speak to the amendment before us and examine it line by line. The amendment would add to the rubric of the Bill the words, "““which amends and alters constitutional arrangements between the European Union and the United Kingdom””." I will vote against it for the reason that it does not improve the Bill and could be thought of as misleading because it highlights a constitutional basis to the Bill. I listened hard to the noble Lord, Lord Owen, in his interesting intervention. It may be true and that all such Bills have some constitutional element, but it is for Members of the Committee to judge how potent or otherwise the constitutional element is. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said, the 1972 Act establishing the European Community, the Single European Act 1986 and the Maastricht treaty in 1992 all contained clear and obvious elements of constitutional change in respect of the United Kingdom vis-à-vis the European Union, and might be considered transparent. As far as I know, we did not have any such rubric saying, ““Watch out, there is a constitutional change being made””. It would be misleading to add this now to the Bill. I have heard some interesting examples from both the leader of the Conservatives and the leader of UKIP in this House today. They have both invoked the familiar idea of the straw that breaks the camel’s back. My memory of recent political history is that back in the 1970s the Conservative Party brought along bales of straw and loaded the first load on this unfortunate camel. Mrs Thatcher’s Administrations brought further bales of straw to put on its back; then Mr Major, in his turn, brought his tithe of bales of straw. By now, the poor camel was labouring under the European constitution in all its brightest form, yet it is now our Government who bring along the single straw that breaks its back. All the constitutional elements that the men of straw opposite have brought over the years are as nothing compared with the straw that now breaks the camel’s back. The noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, who I am sure is very familiar with loading bales of straw on camels, plucked out of the air the notion that the amending treaty before us is 96 per cent—so precise—of the former constitutional treaty. From where does he pluck that figure? Is it from the same pocket or shelf as that from which his colleagues plucked 99 per cent, 92 per cent and 88 per cent? During his opening speech, he mentioned his assessment that an element that has been excised from the original constitutional treaty is the simplification that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, talked about, although it performed the useful function of trying to simplify and make more readable all the Acts that have been through this Parliament with reference to the European Union constitution on previous occasions.