Member

Amendment 25 comes back to the point I touched on in the debate on Amendment 1 about the possibility of the Bill opening the way to a Swiss-style deal, which the Minister—who is not in his place—carefully side- stepped. Just making a cross-reference to EU law does not make UK law formally the law of the European Union, but it opens the possibility that the UK could reach an agreement with the European Union to consider that law to be EU law. If the EU were to agree, that would require the court, the Commission and all the panoply that the EU always requires to enforce its law. Maybe the Government intend to go down that road; maybe they do not. I do not know. There are certainly strong rumours that that is the intention, particularly in the SPS world, which is not covered directly by the Bill.