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European Union (Amendment) Bill

It is a little late in the timing, and certainly in my speech, to branch off into political philosophy. It is also possibly too late to sing the words of ““Abide with me””, which I think is Hymn No. 354, but not, ““one step enough for me””. I ask noble Lords to leave all that aside and merely allow me to say that the answers to our concerns, and the understanding about where Europe should be going, are shallow and unsatisfactory in the minds of ministerial and Liberal Democrat spokesmen. A new and much better Europe can be constructed, and we are quite ready to bring forward our ideas about how that should be done. We have the very large support of many wise people throughout modern Europe, which is a quite different place to the one it was 10 years ago with the return of the ex-communist countries, which I visited last week and which have a new liveliness and realism about how much centralisation they want and how much they do not want. I move, I am afraid, beyond the amendment in saying these things, and merely note that we will return to these issues and much greater ones behind them later on in our debates. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.