---

European Council

My Lords, does the noble Lord accept that the talk in the Statement about scrapping EU rules and bureaucracy, bringing back powers to Westminster and reforming the EU generally is all just a dishonest red herring, because he will be aware of the requirement for unanimity among all 27 member states before a single comma can be retrieved from the treaties? Secondly, why does he yet again come up with the often-repeated propaganda that somehow millions of British jobs depend on our membership of the European Union? Can he tell us why a single job would be lost if we left the political construct of the EU? After all, EU countries sell us much more than we sell them, and Switzerland and 62 other countries have free-trade agreements with the European Union. If we are to continue these debates, can we please drop this obvious propaganda?