---

European Affairs

A European arrest warrant was not involved, but the fact is that such warrants are now part of the law of this country. I happen to think that they were a very bad idea and have argued against them on many occasions, but the fact is that they are part of the law of this land. Allowing that to happen was a great mistake, and it has meant that another constitutional issue could arise in certain circumstances. That is a possibility for the future. I move on to the other questions. The Foreign Secretary said that the European Union was now constructed as a grouping of nation states. I wonder whether he realises what he was saying; the EU is not so much a grouping of nation states as a consolidation through the legal framework of the European Union which needs to be renegotiated into an association of nation states. I have made that case before and I do not need to make it again. I just want to put it on the record. For the benefit of my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) and his distinguished colleague the shadow Foreign Secretary, I shall repeat a point that I have made before. I shall deal with it just once, to get it out in the open: I strongly believe that we should have agreed to my amendment about the supremacy of Parliament which I tabled for the debates on the Lisbon treaty. My hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh knows that, but it does no harm in a debate such as this to say that that should have happened, without going into why. I trust that when the time comes we will make sure that it does happen. Otherwise, we will get into problems of sovereignty, of which the European arrest warrant could turn out to be an unfortunate example. We have to assert the supremacy of the United Kingdom Parliament and require the judiciary to obey our laws. I am therefore extremely glad to have read the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on the repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998. As I said to him, he set out the case extremely well, and it is well worth reading his speech. It left out the point that I have just made about the supremacy issue, however. Within the framework of the 1998 Act, it is open to us, in the exercise of our sovereignty here in Westminster, to override, amend or repeal the Act as and when we choose to do so. The sovereignty issue is implicit in that. We will come to the matter in due course, and I hope that it will feature in our manifesto in the run-up to the European elections. This may be the last opportunity for us to debate the issue in any detail before the manifesto is completed. I call on my party leadership to ensure that we deal with the issue emphatically and in the correct terms, as I have described them in relation to the supremacy of Parliament and the sovereignty of the House in all the matters to which I referred in that amendment.