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European Union Bill

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, did not take my brief intervention, which is slightly against our school rules—he is something of a new boy, so I of course forgive him—I would just comment that it is of course true that if the corrupt octopus in Brussels does not want or try to take any more powers, it is because it does not need any. As the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, pointed out today, and as I have often pointed out in the past, you have to look only at the European Union’s use and abuse of Article 308 to see how it takes powers, even when they are not clearly sanctioned by the treaties. My main point is to the noble Lord, Lord Empey, who extolled the virtues of governmental collaboration. We all agree with governmental collaboration, but I am afraid that that leads me to the question I put to the Minister in our earlier debate. I do not expect him to answer now, but I would like to keep it on the agenda, because he moved magnificently from the proceedings on the Bill to the Statement, and then straight back to these proceedings. Perhaps he therefore has not had time to consider my point, which was echoed by my noble friend Lord Stoddart. It was that the idea behind the European Union—the object of the exercise—is precisely that the nation states should lose their national democracies. It is precisely that the nation states were responsible for two world wars and all the rest of it, and they therefore had to be emasculated and diluted into this new form of supranational government, which is not working. The euro—a subject that noble and Europhile Lords are going out of their way to avoid—was never an economic project, as I have pointed out many times over the years since its conception. The euro was designed as a cement to hold the emerging mega-state together. The euro is in deep trouble. With any luck it will not be with us in its present form for much longer. However, that does not get us away from the original project of European integration, which remains highly dangerous and is finally being rumbled by the people of Europe. Quite frankly, the sooner the whole thing collapses and we go back to intergovernmental collaboration, as extolled by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and others, with democratic nations freely trading and collaborating together, the better. It is impossible to think of any so-called achievement of the European Union that could not have been achieved by friendly intergovernmental collaboration among the consenting democratic nations that the countries of Europe, thankfully, are. I want to keep that deep question on the Minister’s agenda, and I trust that we can address it before we conclude on the Question that the Bill do now pass.