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European Union Bill

In a sense, this whole group of amendments is a con trick and an illusion. The test to be applied in regard to the number of people who vote in an election is a matter on which I spoke very strongly in the AV referendum debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) said, many of the people who tabled amendments on thresholds were not the slightest bit interested in them at that time. There is therefore an inconsistency of principle involved. What they are promoting, and everything that they have been doing over the past 27 years since I have been on the European Scrutiny Committee, during which time I have had the pleasure of watching their perambulations and machinations, is designed to force us further and further down the route towards European integration. They have advised Governments of all hues on the Maastricht treaty, the European Government, the exchange rate mechanism and the Nice and Amsterdam treaties. I must have tabled the best part of 1,000 amendments against those treaties over the past 27 years, and with great pleasure. I have devoted, I suppose, almost a political lifetime to opposing every single thing that those noble Lords have put forward. I do not need to specify them individually; all I will say is that I regard them as having conducted a process that has led to the destruction of the European Community and, now, the European Union. One has only to look at what is happening today and to ask who is responsible for what has occurred. It has been a concert party—a concert party involving not only the United Kingdom establishment but, worse still, the European establishment alongside the United Kingdom establishment—that has led to the mess that the European Union is in now. As I said to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister when he came back from the European Council the other day, although we are glad that he felt obliged to deny that we would be involved in the Greek bail-out—having conceded, I am sad to say, that we would be involved in the bail-out of Portugal—he now has the opportunity, as the Prime Minister of this country, to go forward in the national interest and renegotiate the treaties, to get us out of the mess that those noble Lords, individually and collectively, have got us into.