Lord Neill of Bladen speech to House of Lords on 18 June:

My Lords, I support the amendment. The Foreign Secretary said in his Statement the other day:

“The rules of the treaty and of the EU are clear. All 27 member states must ratify the treaty for it to come into force ... There is no question of ignoring the Irish vote or of bulldozing Irish opinion. Ireland clearly cannot be bound by changes that it has not ratified”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/6/08; col. 704.]

He is completely correct in what he said. I hope that I shall be forgiven for reminding your Lordships of some of the relevant legal provisions, as I do not think that we spent any instant of time on them. You have to go to the treaty of Lisbon in its unreadable form, which is in Command Paper 7294—the hunks and not the rewritten version that we have all been working from, which the Government kindly produced. If you toil your way through to page 156 of the treaty as printed, you come to the final provisions. The key provision for today is Article 6:

“This Treaty shall be ratified by the High Contracting Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements. The instruments of ratification shall be deposited with the Government of the Italian Republic ... This Treaty shall enter into force on 1 January 2009, provided that all the instruments of ratification have been deposited, or, failing that, on the first day of the month following the deposit of the instrument of ratification by the last signatory State to take this step”.

Those provisions require ratification of this treaty—not some other amended or altered version—by all 27 member states. The treaty will not enter into force until the last of the 27 has deposited the instrument of ratification with Italy. That event, we know, will never happen.

Ireland has duly followed its constitutional requirements and a referendum was held. I have looked at the Constitution of Ireland. Articles 46 and 47 deal with proposals for an amendment of the constitution, which have to be,

“submitted by Referendum to the decision of the people in accordance with the law for the time being in force”.

That law is the next article, which simply says that a proposal for amendment of the constitution should be,

“submitted by Referendum to the decision of the people”.

The proposal will be held to have been approved if a majority cast their votes in favour at such a referendum. I am shortening it, but that is the gist.

That event has not happened. The opposite has happened. The people have refused it; they have rejected it. For the sake of accuracy, I should record that there are two referendum Acts in Ireland—those of 1994 and 1996. As far as I can tell from a textbook summary, they add nothing of relevance to the present debate.

What are the facts as they are today? The best source for me was today’s Irish Times. On page 8, we are told that the Taoiseach, Mr Brian Cowen, said in the Dail yesterday:

“In my discussions with my colleagues”—

he is talking about discussions that will take place tomorrow—

“I will be stressing that the people have spoken and that the Government accepts the result”.

The Labour leader, Eamon Gilmore, spoke in a similar vein. The Irish Times quoted him as saying that it was important that everyone accepted and respected the decision made last Thursday. The Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, joined in, emphasising his disappointment with the result but adding that the decision must be accepted and respected.

Meanwhile, the first page of the Irish Times carried the headline, “EU may offer concessions and opt-outs to win new treaty vote”. We read from the reporter:

“France and Germany are quietly hoping the Government will consider holding another referendum in the spring before the next European elections on the basis of several opt-outs from core EU policies or declarations explaining how the Lisbon Treaty does not affect Irish tax or abortion laws. British diplomats are more cautious, believing a second failed referendum could provoke an EU crisis”.

One understands from that that the discussion has moved on from the text of the Lisbon treaty to some improved version that the Irish—and, we must add, the other 26 member states—will be content with. That will be a new treaty and will lead to a new Bill coming to this House and to the House of Commons for approval.

We must be prepared to face the facts—the legal facts and the facts of the world—which are that the Lisbon treaty is dead and that there is no possibility of the treaty in its existing form ever coming into operation. Ireland, by its own due process, has rejected it. All the political parties in Ireland accept that result. It is inconceivable that the text, without a change, will ever be put before the Irish people again in a referendum. It is possible that there will be something different in a few months’ time, but the Government are planning to ratify a dead treaty. I say “dead”, because the treaty itself so dictates by insisting on unanimous ratification. Nothing in existing law on the Lisbon treaty says that there is some way in which you can deal with it now with less than a 27-member vote.

The other thing that we need to think about and to which the Government have given no consideration, so far as I can see, is the effect on the Bill, of which we are being asked to give a Third Reading, of the Lisbon treaty never coming into effect. I will take your Lordships to that, but I can summarise in advance by saying that the absence of a Lisbon treaty strikes a lethal blow at the Bill as it is. I shall start with the commencement clause, Clause 8, which states:

“Section 3 (and the Schedule) come into force in accordance with provision made by the Secretary of State by order”.

Clause 3(3) says:

“The Table in the Schedule to this Act sets out substitutions required to reflect terminology after the commencement of the Treaty of Lisbon”.

The whole exercise of relabelling and amending existing treaties will not come into operation until the treaty of Lisbon has commenced—an event that I submit to your Lordships will never happen. Clause 8(3) says:

“The other provisions of this Act come into force on Royal Assent”—

that is, in a day or two from now.

Let us look back to see what we have in the rest of the Bill. Clause 1 defines the treaties that we are talking about. They are defined in terms of signature. I make that point in case anyone seizes on it. The clause states:

“In this Act ‘the Treaty of Lisbon’ means the Treaty of Lisbon Amending the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty Establishing the European Community signed at Lisbon on 13th December 2007”.

Clause 2, which is headed, “Addition to the list of treaties”, says:

“At the end of the list of treaties in Clause 1(2) of the European Communities Act 1972 ... add—

‘; and

(s) the Treaty of Lisbon Amending the Treaty’”,

et cetera. That is the language. We are to add to the list of treaties a treaty that will never have any effect. What, precisely, is Parliament doing in telling everybody who writes a textbook or completes a list of up-to-date legislation on the EU that they are to add to the list of relevant EU treaties a treaty that is, at the moment, completely dead? A new one may come along, but we have not got there. In Clause 3, we have the changes in terminology. I am not going to take any more time. I have referred to subsection (3)—

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