For what it is worth, I can claim consistency because for years I was the only member of the Tribune group who voted for membership of the EC and closer European integration. For a very long time, that was thought to be a neo-fascist aberration, but now I find myself pedalling almost comfortably in the mainstream of my party's policy. I do not like it very much, so I shall have to find some new eccentricity as soon as possible.

Over the years, the debate about our relationship with the EC has been marked by deception—or, to be charitable, self-deception—and certainly by hypocrisy. Parliament has never been allowed to take developments in Europe as seriously as it should. It has always followed the Government in believing that the EC is a club, the rules of which we can alter at will. Until recently, Ministers pretended that the so-called Luxembourg compromise would give us a veto over anything that we did not like. We then invoked subsidiarity as a principle that would limit EC interference in our internal affairs. However, the Select Committee found that the term "subsidiarity" had no meaning and could be taken to mean the accretion of powers to the central institutions or no change at all. In fact, the legal adviser—probably giving a very expensive opinion—suggested that the matter was best left undefined.

Now we have invoked opt-out clauses as though, while we are opted out, the EC would not continue to develop in a way that would make it more difficult for us to opt in at a later date. There is more than a little hypocrisy in the Government's horror at the mention of the word "federal", which is now conveniently interpreted as a highly centralising arrangement, yet we created federal institutions in our former dominions and in post-war West Germany to prevent centralisation. It is hypocritical to trumpet our parliamentary sovereignty when this is the land of the royal prerogative, Crown immunity and the massive use by Government of unamendable instruments, regulations and codes of practice.

It was especially ironic that in the pre-Maastricht debate the right hon. Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher) trumpeted about the "supremacy of Parliament". She headed a Parliament that guillotined 66 Bills in 10 years and produced 10,000 pages a year of unamendable instruments and regulations, some of which had a profound effect on our legislation. It ill behoves us to boast of our parliamentary democracy when we consider the autocratic power of the Executive over this legislature.

The exclusion of "federal" from the Maastricht treaty —one of the Prime Minister's victories, we are told—led to its replacement by the words "an ever closer union", interpreted throughout Europe as a move towards democratic federalism with the central institutions having competence over more and more areas of policy.

The Government conceded a number of competencies to the EC at Maastricht and they were not reported too loudly. One such area was immigration policy, to which in three years' time majority voting will apply. It will also apply to environmental issues and to education and training, and to powers of veto for the European Parliament—