"Is there not an important difference, however, between the circumstances today and those that would prevail in the context of future legislation that the Government concluded was not sufficiently significant? Putting such a killer amendment to the Bill would mean that no Member who would have supported that amendment if …..." Stephen Dorrell - View Speech
"I do not always agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), but when he describes this as a mouse of a Bill he is rather closer to the truth than the rhetoric of the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who slightly overstates the dangers …..." Stephen Dorrell - View Speech
"Orange. The right hon. Gentleman is quite right. We regard all those developments as steps in the right direction, but, although there is a chain of causality back to the European Union, it is a relatively modest one.
"They may have ambitions, and people within those organisations plainly do have ambitions, but that is exactly what the Bill seeks to address. It introduces not an irreversible, immovable, permanent safeguard that can never be overcome, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) said, …..." Stephen Dorrell - View Speech
"My hon. Friend is entirely right. Like him, I would have much preferred it if the Lisbon treaty had not been introduced, so that the pillars of intergovernmentalism in the Maastricht treaty were protected. But that does not alter the fact that if we attend a Council of Ministers meeting …..." Stephen Dorrell - View Speech