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European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, this is very much a front-door amendment because it seeks to introduce a test and a third lock, to use the Minister’s terminology, of parliamentary approval. I do not want to go back over previous debates, although they have been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and by the Minister, but I really ought to correct what the noble Baroness said about noble Lords describing the procedure that she outlined earlier as ““scrutiny-plus””. I thought that the most effective description of that procedure came from my noble friend Lord Jopling, who pointed out that it is very much a second-tier, or second-class, system. What can be better than requiring parliamentary approval? The Minister seeks to persuade me that this is never going to happen. She is saying, ““Please don’t concern yourself with seeking to entrench parliamentary approval first, because it will never be required. This will never trouble Parliament, because it is not something that will ever happen””. I recall that, when the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and I sat on a sub-committee of the European Union Committee, we used to hear evidence from time to time about the efficiency that would be introduced by some form of cross-border justice system. Both he and I had a healthy scepticism of any such move in that direction. I suppose what I am seeking to do here is to say that there are a number of other situations where parliamentary approval would be required. After all, all this amendment does is to say that—