---

EUC Report: MiFID II

My Lords, I am minded to say that never in the field of markets and financial instruments has there been so interesting, so sexy and so stimulating a debate as has taken place here this evening. I thank

all who have participated in it, especially the two Front-Benchers, but also my colleagues such as the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I would particularly like to thank our officers, Rose Crabtree and Stuart Stonor, for the work that they do for us behind the scenes, which is very considerable.

I was going to end on a humorous note, saying that I wake up every morning and thank the Lord that the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, is not like other men. That has been well demonstrated. In fact, he reminds me of the story that William Hazlitt tells in one of his essays about going for a walk with Coleridge. He says that he set off with Coleridge down a Somerset lane. He, Hazlitt, would walk in a straight line; Coleridge was forever diverting, off up on the left, off up on the right, forward and backward and then eventually coming back to join his friend Hazlitt. This debate has been a little bit like that. I began to puzzle why it strayed off the beaten path of MiFID in the way that it has. I think that it was for an important point, and I know that the Minister does not have the opportunity to come back.

I hope that the Minister takes away the intensity of feeling that those of us who were posted away to Committee Room 3 to look at some of these difficult and brain-tingling matters are getting with a greater and greater sense of urgency. This country is not recognising some of the real confrontation that is being borne in upon us by having adopted what I understand to be a negligible position—that of the head in the sand— where we say that these things can be decided by others, but we must progress and let them progress in the way they so wish, and it will not have an effect on us.

I will finish on this one point about Mr Bergmann, who was referred to several times this evening. It was quite clear to us that the defence that the Commission mounts—that this is wholly legitimate under subsidiarity and in other ways because it does not infringe the single market—is simply wrong. It does infringe the single market, and it infringes not the gang of 11 who are going forward, but the gang of 16, who are not participating. If we as the UK are not alert to that and if we are not very careful, we will lose our goose that lays a golden egg. In losing that golden egg of the City of London, we will lose it not just for the United Kingdom: we will also lose it for the European Union. That is why we must take such care. We are in conversation with the FST, Greg Clark, and I was in conversation with David Lidington this afternoon. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Newby, will take it upon himself, with his deep knowledge of the City of London that he has demonstrated so often, to express the urgency and concern that has caused this debate on the narrow subject of MiFID to spill over into the other dossiers that are before us which cool and chill our hearts.