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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I hate to give a piece of anecdotal evidence to the noble Lord, but I was actually in France at the time of the referendum. My next-door neighbour, who farms, showed me the large tome that had been put through his letterbox and said, in the vernacular, ““What the hell am I meant to do with this?””. He then threw it in the waste-paper basket. There is a great deal of evidence better than my anecdotal evidence that the large number of French people who support the National Front—the neo-fascists—and the large number of French people who support the Trotskyite wing of the socialist party, who made up the backbone of the no vote, were not voting about the treaty at all. That evidence has been confirmed by any number of sources. I do not want to press the point but I wanted to illustrate why—this will come out more when we finally get on and debate the other amendments—a referendum does not have democratic legitimacy.