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European Union Bill

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, but I hope that if he wants to criticise me in future, which he is very welcome to do, he will do so on the basis of what I actually said and not on what I have not said. I did not rubbish the Government of whom I was proud to be a member; I said that this was a general principle that applies to the Minister today and that applied to me when I was a Minister. If you bring forward a Bill in this House or the other House, you must be expected to defend the text on its own merits. It is no excuse to say simply that you are replicating text from the past. That was the point that I made. I made no normative statement about the text at all in that context; I simply made that general principle clear.