---

European Affairs

I do not think that we have been foul about the Poles. In fact, a party that contains my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) could not possibly be foul about the Poles, because we would get in a lot of trouble. The right hon. Gentleman puts the case for giving up the rebate—[Interruption.] Well, he puts the case for giving up a large part of the rebate, then. Our point is simply that if the Government were going to do that, they should have driven a hard bargain, which is what previous Governments would have tried to do. To give up £7 billion of the rebate—an act that was not shared by other countries, as he suggests, because the rebate was an arrangement particular to the UK—and not receive in return concrete answers on the reform of the CAP was weak negotiation. The same weakness has characterised the Government's approach to the European constitution and its reincarnation as the Lisbon treaty—[Interruption.] The Foreign Secretary mentioned that in his speech, so he cannot just roll his eyes when I mention it. It is an item for discussion at the forthcoming European Council, and, looking at the draft conclusions, it is one of the few items on which they do not yet know what they are going to say. Item 1 is the Lisbon treaty, and then there is a gap. It would be extraordinary if we did not raise that issue. What they ended up signing contained a huge number of provisions that they had vigorously opposed in the first place. What has been worse about their conduct of the negotiations on the constitution—[Interruption.] The Foreign Secretary is now asking the shadow Foreign Affairs team for copies of the conclusions, with which he ought to be familiar. If I were Foreign Secretary, I might have looked at them in advance rather than now. What has been worse about the Government's conduct of the negotiations is the anti-democratic nature of the decision to break a solemn election pledge to hold a referendum in the United Kingdom. Those actions have fed cynicism about politics and the European Union and the Government have compounded that error by joining the refusal to listen to the people of Ireland, who so sensibly said no to the Lisbon treaty in their referendum last June.