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European Union Bill

I was concluding my remarks until various Members got up to intervene. My conclusion is simply this. There may come a time—not now, I accept—when a majority in this House and a duly elected Government feel that they want to take the lead to alter a European Union treaty—to propose a new one or make amendments to an existing one. They will then find that they are being held back by the tone, if not the strict legal content, of this Bill. This is coming dangerously close to what an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Mr Henry Hopkinson, said about Cyprus in 1956—that it would ““never”” be free. I genuinely worry about the signal we are sending to our EU partners at a time when we all, quite irrespective of our party political positions, need more co-operation and more enforcement in Europe, whether it be on Tunisia, on growth policies or on finding solutions to the problem in Ireland, where, as the Prime Minister rightly pointed out, we export three and a half times more British goods than we do to China. I worry greatly that this Bill, and particularly the new clause on the need for effective prosecution of criminality in Europe, will send out precisely the opposite signals. Our nation might well suffer, not tonight or in the next few weeks or months, but in the future, as a result of this deeply isolationist proposal.