Estates of Deceased Persons (Forfeiture Rule and Law of Succession) Bill

Lord Spicer Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Spicer]

My Lords—

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, and I have something to say.

[Lord Spicer]

My Lords, I had not meant to say anything at all until I heard some of the arguments. It seems that the 1972 Act is not totally invulnerable. Factortame was a nasty scare. Therefore, the last thing that we want to do at this stage is to throw further doubt on the 1972 Act by talking about “an Act” rather than the 1972 Act.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I have two questions for the Minister that I asked in Committee but to which I did not get an answer. First, will he confirm that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, is 100 per cent right when he says that when the happy day comes—he did not put it like that—when the 1972 Act is repealed by the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House, it will then be definite that we are out of the European Union?

However, the question is not quite as simple as that. In January 1997, your Lordships were good enough to give Second Reading to a Bill in my name that did exactly that—it repealed the 1972 Act. At the time I was advised by the Clerks that this would still leave us with a problem from the Eurosceptic point of view, which wants nothing to do with any European legislation whatever. That problem would be that all the EU law that had been sewn into domestic law since 1972 would remain valid in British law. At the time, the Clerks advised me that one is not allowed to introduce a Bill into your Lordships’ House that is not capable of practical fulfilment. Their advice at the time was that it would have taken 12 parliamentary draftsmen some three months to identify all EU law sewn into domestic law, which could then have been repealed at our leisure. I am glad to say that they even suggested having a massive Henry VIII clause at the end of the procedure. Therefore, my first question to the Minister is: would it really still be the case that EU law remained in British law? There is far too much of it; nowadays the majority of our national law is passed in a wholly undemocratic process in Brussels to the exclusion of Parliament in this country.

My second question to the Minister was, and is, as follows. When, as I say, the joyous day comes that the 1972 Act is repealed, that surely means that the Lisbon treaty falls in its entirety, because the Lisbon treaty is only an amendment to several other amendments to the 1972 Act. When that happens, is this country still obliged to follow the provisions of the Lisbon treaty which govern how a country leaves the European Union? That is a process, I think—I may be wrong—under Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which takes two years and puts the Council in charge of the process and, indeed, the cost of the country leaving the European Union. When we repeal the 1972 Act, does that provision fall as well? Are we then, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, free of the whole wretched thing, or are we still bound by Lisbon? What about the domestic law which is sewn into our law? Surely that remains binding until repealed by Parliament.