Points of Order
Thursday 26th January 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am glad the Brexit Secretary is here for his moment of history, but perhaps I could just detain him a second. During Brexit questions, he quoted my successor as First Minister—Nicola Sturgeon —somehow suggesting she wanted to deprive 160,000 European citizens of their right of residence in Scotland. By the wonders of modern technology, I have traced the original quote from July 2014. In fact, Ms Sturgeon was arguing exactly the opposite: that their right of residence was one of the reasons why Scotland would remain, as an independent country, a member of the European Union. I know the Brexit Secretary well—he is a decent and honourable man—but I found that another Minister used the same smear last October, so I am bound to conclude that some teenage scribblers in his Department are feeding out misleading information to hapless Ministers, who are then repeating it to the House. I am sure the Brexit Secretary—perhaps even before he has his moment of history—will want to correct the record.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Further to that point of order, I call Mr Secretary Davis.
The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Davis)
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Of course, if I am wrong, I apologise. I will send the right hon. Gentleman the quote that I gave from The Scotsman at that time.
Madam Deputy Speaker
I will first answer the point of order from the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), which, as he and the House know, was not a point of order. The right hon. Gentleman sought, in his usual rhetorical way, to set the record straight. The Secretary of State has responded adequately to the point raised by the right hon. Gentleman, and I hope that honour is satisfied on all sides. A point of order— Mr Bryant.
Chris Bryant
And this one is a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As you know, when a Minister makes a statement to the House, a printed copy is circulated around the Chamber the moment they sit down by the Doorkeepers. That is very useful for many Members—we can check exactly what the Minister has said, in case we slightly misheard something. The one time we do not do that is for the business statement. Now, I admit that it is a business question, so it is slightly different, but would it not be for the convenience of the House if, the moment the Leader of the House finished announcing the forthcoming business, it was circulated around the House for all hon. Members?
Madam Deputy Speaker
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point of administration, and it might be that the Leader of the House would like to say something further to the point of order.
The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr David Lidington)
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I completely concede that it is a perfectly reasonable request, and I will make sure that that happens.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Once again, that was not a point of order for the Chair, but we are having a very well-balanced session of points of order.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
It gets better, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Madam Deputy Speaker
As the right hon. Gentleman says, it gets better. Would he care to make a point of order?
Madam Deputy Speaker
No? This seems a good point for requests to Ministers, as we seem to be having a 100% record of having requests fulfilled. That was not a point of order for the Chair, so we will move on.
Bill Presented
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Mr Secretary Davis, supported by the Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary Boris Johnson, Secretary David Mundell, Secretary Alun Cairns, Secretary James Brokenshire, Ben Gummer and the Attorney General, presented a Bill to confer power on the Prime Minister to notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 132) with explanatory notes (Bill 132-EN).
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Wednesday 1st February 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Notices of Amendments as at 31 January 2017 - (1 Feb 2017)
18:58 - The House divided: - Ayes: 100 / Noes: 336 - Question accordingly negatived.
19:12 - The House divided: - Ayes: 498 / Noes: 114 - Question accordingly agreed to.
19:32 - The House divided: - Ayes: 329 / Noes: 112 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Mr Speaker
Just before I call the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who will open the proceedings today, I should point out that there will be an initial, but short-lived, time limit on Back-Bench speeches of eight minutes.
Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)
I want to say at the outset that this is clearly a fateful moment in this country’s history, and the excellent speeches on day one of the debate reflected the gravity of the moment. We should all respect the way in which colleagues on both sides of the House are wrestling with their consciences as they decide how to vote on the Bill. No one should pretend that this is easy. For me, the actions I will take tonight were determined by the result on 23 June.
In case the House needs reminding, I did not want the referendum. I made a strong case to my colleagues before deciding that my party would not support David Cameron’s decision in the last Parliament. I believed that, with the many other problems the country faced, the referendum would become as much about the state of the country as about Britain’s place in Europe. Indeed, I believe that that is, in part, what happened. However, that is water under the bridge. I took part in the referendum campaign and I said that I would accept the result, which I do. That is why I will be voting for the Bill’s Second Reading tonight, not least because I feel that the referendum stemmed in part from the sense of disaffection and deep frustration about politics that exists in the country. A heightened reason for saying that the process must begin is that we do not want to give the people who voted for Brexit a sense that they are being ignored once again.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
Like my right hon. Friend, I accept the result in the country and in my constituency. Does he agree, however, that no one, whether they voted to remain or to leave, voted to become poorer, and that the test for the Government now is to produce a prosperous, post-Brexit Britain and a deal that is in the country’s best interests?
Edward Miliband
My hon. Friend makes his point very well, and I shall come on to that in a moment.
Our responsibilities do not end here tonight or with the passing of this Bill. It is deeply problematic that the Government are embarking upon this process without any objective economic analysis of its implications, without clarity on key issues such as the customs union and without any sense of what transitional arrangements might look like, on the basis of what I believe is the fanciful proposition that all the future arrangements can be tied up within 18 months.
On day one of the debate, a number of speakers powerfully made the point that, given the paucity of information we have been given before article 50 is to be triggered, it is even more important that there should be proper parliamentary scrutiny, including a meaningful vote in this House, before the end of the process. The Prime Minister’s apparent wish that our choice will be to accept her deal or face a hard Brexit on World Trade Organisation terms is quite wrong. Such a take-it-or-leave-it option would fly in the face of the central proposition that won the referendum—namely, that we want to take back control and restore parliamentary sovereignty. So I hope that Members—particularly Conservative Members—however they voted in the referendum, will support the amendments that seek to ensure proper parliamentary sovereignty throughout the process. I believe that parliamentary scrutiny will help the Government. It will improve any deal, it will strengthen their hand with the European Union and it will make it more likely that the Prime Minister will end up with a deal that has the support it needs in the country.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that, without the safeguards he seeks, there may be a crock of something at the end of the rainbow but it might not be gold?
Edward Miliband
My hon. Friend puts it very well. This is deeply uncertain, and the truth is that the Government have not really levelled with the country about the trade-offs. At the moment, they are saying that they can have everything, and I fear that pretty soon in the negotiations we will discover that that is not the case.
I want to focus not on the economic questions, which were well worn yesterday, but on an equally important issue that has received less attention in this debate but is absolutely crucial: our place in the world and our foreign policy relationships after Brexit. The foundation of our foreign policy for a generation has rested on the combination of a special relationship with the United States and, crucially, our relationship with the European Union.
Enlargement of the EU following the fall of the Berlin wall—as a nation, we advocated for that enlargement; leadership on climate change under the last Government and, I freely say, under this Government; a commitment to the rule of law and human rights; a belief in the importance of multilateral institutions—all of these have been bound up in our relationship with the European Union, and we should not be under any illusion about the real risk that, following our departure, our influence in the world will be weaker, not stronger.
I negotiated on climate change for the last Labour Government, and our strength, our power, our standing on that issue came from our membership of the European Union because we accounted for 10% of global emissions, not just 1%. The House should therefore recognise that the question of what strategic relationships come after Brexit is fundamental to the issue of real sovereignty and our ability to have an effect on the big issues that will affect us.
Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman raises the important issue of the future not only of ourselves but of the European Union. Is he not concerned that the European External Action Service now has 139 overseas posts and is increasingly asserting the authority of the European Union over the member states? That process will continue and we will not be part of it. We will be reasserting the sovereignty of these islands.
Edward Miliband
I will not get extra time, so I am not going to indulge in that argument because we are leaving the European Union—the hon. Gentleman and I agree on that. The question is: what comes next? We all need to address ourselves to that question.
Of course the terrible irony is that, with the election of President Trump, our European co-operation is so clearly needed more than ever. I believe in the special relationship with the United States, but it must be based on values. The Foreign Secretary said after President Trump’s election, and I slightly scratched my head at this, that
“he is a guy who believes firmly in values that I believe in too—freedom and democracy.”
I do not agree and I hope that on reflection, after a few days of the Trump presidency, the Foreign Secretary does not agree, either.
My central point is this: I can go along with the Prime Minister that Brexit means Brexit, but I cannot go along with the idea that Brexit means Trump. I do not believe that that is inevitable, nor do l believe that it is what the British people want. The danger is that the Prime Minister feels it is an inevitable consequence of the decision to leave the EU that we are driven into the arms of President Trump.
So what should be done? This is the fundamental point. The Lancaster House speech was no doubt an improvement in tone on what had gone before, but not one of the Prime Minister’s 12 principles concerned foreign policy, defence or climate co-operation. To put that right in the course of the negotiations I sincerely hope that the Government come up with an architecture for foreign and strategic policy co-operation with the European Union, not just ad hoc arrangements. I want to be clear—this relates to the question asked by the hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth)—that that co-operation would be intergovernmental, but there are many issues, from Russia to refugees, climate and defence, where we will be stronger, not weaker, if we have institutions that continue to mean co-operation between ourselves and the European Union.
We not only need the right institutions, but institutions founded on a strategic orientation that continues to value our role in Europe. We must be willing, even as we leave the EU, to join our European allies, whose values we share, in speaking up for the rule of law and human rights. I ask this of all European countries: where has been the co-ordinated response to the Trump Muslim ban? Why have the Government not been pushing for that response?
David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Edward Miliband
I will not give way because I want to get to the end.
As I understand it, the dual citizenship exemption won by the UK will be extended only to New Zealand, Canada and Australia. Of course it is good that we have that exemption, but we should be standing in solidarity with our European allies in calling for the ban to end.
There are other questions for the Government, too. In the wake of President Trump’s election, Foreign Ministers sought to agree a joint statement on the continuing need for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian people, but they were blocked by a few countries, including—shamefully—the United Kingdom. It is no wonder that Europe fears that we are throwing in our lot with President Trump and turning our back on it. No good will come of that. These are the tests of who we are as a nation, of our values and of how we intend to apply them in the years ahead. It matters to whether our world is governed by the rules of international order—rules that we helped to design and promote—or, alternatively, by something far, far worse.
Incidentally, surely there must be no more talk, particularly in the current context when human rights seem so at risk, of our leaving the European convention on human rights. I truly hope that the Government will be prompted by President Trump’s first few days in office to think again about their approach.
I end on this point. History will judge us not just on the decisions we make on this Bill tonight, but on the decisions beyond. The Government have a heavy responsibility, and we expect them to exercise it on behalf of the whole nation, not just the 52%. For that we will hold them to account in the months and years ahead.
Mr George Osborne (Tatton) (Con)
The right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) speaks, as he always does, with passion for an international Britain and for European solutions to the many problems we face.
Democracy is easy to defend when we agree with the majority. In many other political systems, such as dictatorships, people can get their way, but democracy has the added advantage of legitimacy and popular consent. Democracy is much more difficult when we disagree with the majority. As people know, I argued passionately in the referendum that leaving the European Union would weaken Britain’s trade and commercial links, would diminish Britain on the world stage, would make international approaches to things such as climate change and atomic research more difficult and would weaken a multilateral institution—the European Union—that has been vital to our collective security for many decades.
I made those arguments, and it saddens me that Britain and Brexit are bracketed in the same group as other isolationist and nativist movements across the world. We should strive to be, as the Prime Minister says, a more global Britain. But I lost the case. I made it with passion, and I sacrificed my position in government for it.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Osborne
I will make some progress before taking interventions.
We have to accept that, in a democracy, the majority has spoken. Although I am a passionate believer in an open, internationalist, free-trading Britain, I am also a passionate believer in Britain as a democracy. It is unfashionable in schools these days to teach what I believe to be a true tale of our nation’s history, which stretches from Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution, the founding fathers of the American constitution, the Great Reform Act, female emancipation and the like, but we have given the modern world a version of democracy that has spread far beyond our shores.
Therefore, to vote against the majority verdict of the largest democratic exercise in British history would risk putting Parliament against people, provoking a deep constitutional crisis in our country and alienating people who already feel alienated. I am not prepared to do that, so I will be voting for the Bill tonight.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Osborne
I wish to make some progress, and I want others to have a chance to speak, so I will not take interventions.
There is a mandate to leave the European Union, but that was the only question asked of the British people in the referendum. We cannot assume that the British public gave a set of answers to the questions we now face as a Parliament. Indeed, those questions are now entrusted to us as we approach the negotiations.
I call them negotiations but I do not think they are going to resemble the negotiations that we currently read about in the media. The truth is that although Britain is seeking the maximum possible access to the single market for goods and for services, and we hope that the fact we have a trade deficit and a very important financial centre will count in our favour, the Government have chosen—and I respect this decision—not to make the economy the priority in this negotiation. They have prioritised immigration control, which was a clear message from the referendum campaign, and removing European Court of Justice jurisdiction from the UK and, in that sense, asserting parliamentary sovereignty, although I would point out that Parliament can choose to leave the EU, as indeed we are choosing to do in the coming days.
So we are not prioritising the economy, although we hope for the best possible arrangement, and the European Union is not prioritising it either in these negotiations. Having spent the past couple of weeks in Berlin and in Paris talking to some French and German political leaders, it is clear to me that although they understand that Britain is a very important market for their businesses, their priority is to maintain the integrity of the remaining 27 members of the European Union; they are not interested in a long and complex hybrid agreement with the UK. Therefore, both sides are heading for a clean break from the EU for the UK.
The only thing I think the negotiation will come down to in the end is how that break is achieved. The Prime Minister, in her speech of a couple of weeks ago, made it clear that Britain is seeking a transition agreement, and that is obvious because it is simply not possible for this Parliament to introduce all the domestic legislation that is going to be required to replicate the arrangements we currently have with the EU, even with the great repeal Act. We will also need to have some kind of bridge to the free trade agreement that we seek with the EU. At the same time, the EU needs from us financial commitments that it believes we entered into to pay for European projects that were undertaken while we were a member. In practice, that means the negotiation will be a trade-off, as all divorces are, between access and money. We will try to scale down our payments to the EU, while scaling down our commitment to EU rules and access, until we reach that free trade agreement which we hope to negotiate.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point?
Mr Osborne
I will just finish my speech and then others can speak.
That is what the negotiation is going to be like. I suspect it will be rather bitter. I spent four years negotiating with Michel Barnier, and I advise my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union to be well briefed, as he always is, and to pack a packet of Pro Plus, because there will be many long nights ahead.
It is very important that in the bitterness of that discussion we do not forget that there are some fundamental reasons why Britain wanted to be part of a European Common Market in the first place; nor should we allow the Europeans to forget that there was a fundamental reason why they created a European Community, which was to bring the nations of Europe together. We must try to keep those thoughts and hopes alive as we exit the EU.
The final thing I want to say is this: we have made a decision to leave the EU and, as the successful leave campaign put it, to take back control, but that means a series of issues are going to come to this Parliament that completely divide Brexiteers from each other, remainers from each other, Conservatives from each other and members of other parties from each other. We are going to have very lively debates about free trade, as we are beginning to see at Prime Minister’s questions; these are debates about what kind of agricultural produce we want to allow into this country or the kind of public procurement contracts we want. We are going to have a very lively debate about immigration, how many people we want to let into this country, how we welcome skilled people into this country, and how we support our universities and scientific research institutions. We are going to have an argument about agricultural subsidies and whether we are happy for the poorest people in this country to pay taxes to support subsidies to some of the richest. We are also going to have an argument about state aid and whether we should be able to bail out failing commercial enterprises. I will be in those fights in the couple of years ahead.
Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)
May I start by congratulating the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), on his speech, which was a good deal shorter and a great deal less lucrative than the ones he is used to giving these days? [Interruption.] As is being pointed out to Tory Members, he is anything but cheap these days. He may have argued the case with passion during the campaign, but his tendency to take perfectly reasonable Treasury forecasts on the long-term damage that would be done to the GDP and wealth of this country as a result of withdrawal from the single market and turn them into apocalyptic, emergency Budget, day of judgment scaremongering was one reason why the remain side lost the campaign. Campaigns have to be built on more than fear.
I want to talk about the politics, the economics and the procedure, and about Scotland. My hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) asked me yesterday whether I could remember, in the last 30 years in this place, a time when the House was gripped by collective madness. Obviously, that time was Iraq, when this House was mesmerised by a strong Prime Minister into the blood and disaster of the Iraqi war, but it is certainly not mesmerising rhetoric that is responsible for mad MP disease in this case. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) yesterday made a comparison with “Alice in Wonderland”, but Alice only took herself into the hole; this Prime Minister is taking virtually all the Tory party, half the Labour party and the entire country into the hole. What is being done is politically crazy.
In 1962, Dean Acheson said:
“Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.”
After listening to the speeches of some Tory Back Benchers yesterday, I am not so sure that they are reconciled to the empire bit. Successive Governments and Prime Ministers found a solution by pursuing a role as a leading country in Europe, and balancing that with a special relationship with the United States of America. A German Chancellor once said that the relationship was special because only one side knew about it, and that is certainly true, but none the less, it was a rational policy. Some Prime Ministers took that far too far, into the desert of Iraq, but none the less it was a rational, logical policy.
We cannot, having pursued that policy of having influence in Europe and the good things that come from it, as the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) reminded us, cut that off and then pursue the special relationship with the USA. That leaves us caught in the headlights, as the Prime Minister was earlier this week. When asked to condemn the obvious thing that any human being would have condemned, she refused to do so three times, in case she offended her new bestie in the White House—and incidentally, if she had said it, she would have offended her new best friend in the White House. So she goes headlong into the arms of a United States President who is, at best, unpredictable. This is going to get worse and more embarrassing because of the imbalance in the relationship.
Then we must consider the economic damage—
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
Earlier, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) mentioned climate change and the American President, who said he will tear up the agreements on that subject. Where will Britain stand then? What support will it get?
Alex Salmond
That is an excellent example of the embarrassments to come. As for the economic damage, there was nothing wrong with the Treasury medium-term forecasts on coming out of the single marketplace; even if there is a bespoke deal, it will result in a 6% loss in GDP.
Michelle Thomson (Edinburgh West) (Ind)
Will my right hon. Friend help confirm my understanding that it was the Tories who wanted to safeguard British interests in the single market? Am I correct in recalling that in their manifesto?
Alex Salmond
The Tory 2015 manifesto is not my bedtime reading, but as I recall, page 72 said:
“We say: yes to the Single Market”.
The Tories were right to say yes. It was funny that yesterday all the Conservative speakers remembered the commitment to a referendum, but not one of them remembered their commitment to the single marketplace. Of course it was not the case that a withdrawal from the European Community meant a withdrawal from the single marketplace. During the campaign, I had the pleasure of debating with Daniel Hannan MEP, who said:
“Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market”.
Of course it is possible to honour the result of the referendum and stay in the single marketplace, and even if people think there will be an exit from the single marketplace, it is madness, in diplomatic negotiating terms, to abandon that position now. The UK should keep its place in the single marketplace and allow the other European countries to negotiate it out of it, not give it away before the first word is spoken in the negotiations.
I come next to the procedures of this House. I have here the list of amendments tabled to the Bill, stretching to 103 pages; we are told that they are to be debated in three days. Eighteen months ago, the Scotland Bill, which was not the greatest constitutional change in history, got six days of debate. I say to Labour Members such as the right hon. Member for Doncaster North, who listed all the things wrong with the Government’s approach, that if they believe that now, they should vote against the Government; if they cannot do that, they should at least vote against a programme motion that will make it impossible to debate the sensible changes that the right hon. Gentleman outlined.
As was well pointed out yesterday, the process is procedurally deficient, not only in terms of the time given, but in terms of the question that will eventually be put to the House. The final vote will be on the deal that comes back from a Prime Minister who said that
“no deal…is better than a bad deal”,
so the choice the House will likely get is a bad deal or no deal. It is therefore crucial that when the House debates it and comes to a decision, there is a meaningful vote—a vote that can make a difference—as opposed to Hobson’s choice, made with a metaphorical gun to the House’s head.
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
If we end up in a situation in which the only deal on the table is a bad deal, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the responsibility for that will lie with the Prime Minister? It is not as if she can deny responsibility for that being a problem.
Alex Salmond
Yes, I would agree, but of course if we are all in the soup, finding out that it was the Prime Minister’s responsibility will avail this country very little. It is far better to try to ensure by our votes that we get a realistic choice that can actually make a difference.
Finally, I come to the situation in Scotland. Scotland has a 1,000-year history as a European nation. There is a plaque to Sir William Wallace in great Westminster Hall, the site of his unjust trial—for which, presumably, he will get a pardon at some point soon. After his greatest victory in the battle of Stirling bridge, which was akin to Leicester City winning the premier league last season, in terms of upset and surprise, his first act was not to hold a cèilidh, but to write to the Hanseatic League in Lübeck and elsewhere to secure Scotland’s trading concessions throughout Europe. The importance of Scotland’s European connections stretches back a millennium, and we are not going to allow this non-vision—this act of madness from this House—to take Scotland out of those connections.
The Scottish Government have put forward the proposition, “Scotland’s Place in Europe”, which offers the Prime Minister a way for Scotland to stay in the single marketplace, regardless of what she wants to do to this country. She said today that a frictionless border in Ireland was quite possible under the circumstances, without realising that if it is possible in Ireland, it is of course possible in Scotland. I see the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) nodding; in the early hours of this morning, I think I saw him, or perhaps it was one of his hon. Friends, say much the same thing on the BBC’s “HARDtalk”—a sad case, watching “HARDtalk” at 1 o’clock in the morning—and it was an important admission. Actually, it was the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). It is important to understand that there are examples in Europe at present.
The Prime Minister has it within her power and capacity to accept the Scottish Government’s compromise proposals and allow Scotland as a nation to retain its trading place in the European context. If that is not to happen; if the House says, “We will go ahead with a hard, Tory Brexit,” or a full English Brexit, as we are now calling it in Scotland, and says, “We’re going to sweep aside concerns from across the House about the economic and political damage, and we will not accept the proposals from Scotland to follow the votes of the people in the nation of Scotland and retain their European connection. We are not interested in preserving Scottish jobs and investment”; if those are the criteria and that is the attitude of the Government; if that is what the Prime Minister wants to do with Scotland, and she is determined to throw down that gauntlet, she can be absolutely sure that Nicola Sturgeon, as First Minister, will pick it up.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. I call Dr Caroline Johnson for her maiden speech. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]
Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
Sleaford and North Hykeham is not only the constituency that I am proud to represent; it is my home, and I feel a personal responsibility to nurture it. It is a thriving, predominantly agricultural area, with pockets of industry and a strong military tradition.
The town of North Hykeham is built directly on top of the old Roman road, the Fosse Way. To the south is Sleaford, where one is welcomed by the Handley monument, a large, ornate stone structure, within which is a statue of Henry Handley, who was the MP for South Lincolnshire from 1832 to 1841. He was such a popular MP that the townspeople created the memorial in his honour. It is not clear now whether he was so popular for his innovative ideas regarding science, technology and farming, or because of his strong opposition to the taxation of malt. Nevertheless, it is clear that I have a lot to live up to.
My predecessor was Stephen Phillips, who, like his predecessor, Douglas Hogg, is a silk. They brought great intellect and legal acumen to the House, and Stephen is particularly to be commended for his work on the Public Accounts Committee. Probably his greatest virtue, though, is his sense of timing: he resigned at exactly the right time for me to be able to stand for the seat. I thank Stephen for the personal encouragement he has given to me in this endeavour. I also thank the many Members of this House who have given me wonderful support, especially my hon. Friends the Members for Newark (Robert Jenrick), for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), and for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman), to whom I am very grateful. In these challenging times, Mr Speaker, I promise to uphold the fine traditions of the House and serve my constituents to the best of my ability, ensuring that their voices are heard.
As a new MP, it is right for me to explain briefly who I am. I am a mother of three, a farmer’s wife and the product of a loving family. I am a consultant paediatrician and therefore have particular interests in the health, education and general wellbeing of children. I am a committed Brexiteer, and I am also interested in farming, infrastructure and defence. I am not a silk, or even a lawyer, but I have firm principles based on what I believe to be morally right, and on the ideal of democracy under the rule of law.
I have spent all my working life as a doctor in the NHS, and care passionately about it. The NHS is not perfect; in fact, I doubt any organisation as large and so dependent on human judgment ever could be. However, although there are areas that could be improved, I feel many are too quick to decry the faults in the NHS without adequately recognising the brilliant work done, day in and day out, in helping more people than ever before. I look forward to contributing my knowledge and experience to help to ensure that the NHS goes from strength to strength.
Improving the wellbeing of children remains a topic close to my heart, and I am delighted with the Government’s commitment to young people’s mental health. We must ensure that young people with mental health issues have access to the right treatment; however, as with physical health, we must also focus on prevention. That should include improvements in children’s social care and helping to foster resilience. Resilience is very important. I feel we let down children with the “all must have prizes” culture. Young people should understand their strengths and weaknesses by being allowed to compete and take controlled risks; to win, but also to lose; and to learn from that experience, which better prepares them for the challenges they face in life ahead.
It is truly a privilege to give my maiden speech today in this historic debate. As someone new to the world of Westminster, the greatest surprise to me was that so many seemed surprised by the result of the EU referendum. I was brought up to believe that a good democracy is ruled by the majority, with protection for minorities. As I talk to my constituents, however, I increasingly understand that they perceive that we have rule by a vocal minority elite who are disregarding the views of the majority, and they are angry. Why is that important? Well, because so many people seem to have been surprised by the Brexit vote, having failed to understand the genuine concerns of the majority. This disconnect with the electorate has been seen not just here, but in the results of the US presidential election, and in the rise of far-right parties throughout Europe. There can be no democracy without an understanding of the views of the majority, and those views must be respected, heard and responded to by Members of this House.
There has been much debate recently over whether the referendum was mandatory or advisory, and over the relative authorities of the Government, the legislature and the judiciary. As I said earlier, I am not a lawyer, but I fail to understand how one can ask the electorate a question and then even consider disregarding the result. The referendum is not advice, but an instruction to us. We asked the people, and the people said “Out”, so out we must go.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. More than 80 right hon. and hon. Members still wish to contribute to the debate over the ensuing five hours, in consequence of which it is necessary, with immediate effect, to impose a time limit on Back-Bench speeches of four minutes. I am trying to ensure that everybody has a chance, on top of those who have already had their opportunity. It would be helpful if those who have already spoken were to refrain from intervening, because such self-restraint might increase opportunities for others. I am sure that all colleagues are concerned about others. I call Yvette Cooper.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
May I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) on an excellent maiden speech? She will do her constituents proud if her speech is anything to go by.
We have now a challenge for this whole House—what we do over the next two years and whether what we do strengthens or weakens our democracy. Over the past 40 years, Britain has worked with the EU to achieve some amazing things, but we have done so by sharing sovereignty. We were able to do so, because, when we went into the Common Market in the 1970s, we had popular consent expressed through a referendum. Last summer, we lost that consent, which should be a lesson to all of us who wanted to keep it. Surprisingly, I agreed with some of the things that the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) said, but disagreed with him over whether we should have done more. We could not make the referendum simply about the economy, and we took for granted too many of the things that we needed to argue, particularly about the necessity for politics to come together.
Christina Rees (Neath) (Lab/Co-op)
I am a remainer, but I accept the democratic will of the people. Surely now is about securing the best deal for our constituents—the people we are here to represent.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. I, too, will vote for article 50, although I argued against leaving the EU last year. I am worried about the backdrop to all of this, because, across western democracies, democratic values are being undermined. We have seen: attacks on judges as the “enemies of the people”, even though they should be defending the rule of law; attacks on the Human Rights Act and on the protection for minorities against the tyranny of the majority; the steady undermining of democratically elected representatives; the assault on the free press; and the attack on truth itself. The challenge that we face over the next few years in many European countries is how we defend those democratic values. It will be much harder for me to defend that faith in democracy in my constituency if we ignore the results of the ballot box last summer.
Pontefract is the home of the very first secret ballot. We still have the first ballot box, and we see it as a symbol of peaceful democracy—of asking people to be part of that democratic process. That democratic process does not end with the article 50 vote, and that is my concern with the Government’s approach. They are trying to concentrate power in the hands of the Executive, when, in fact, they should be involving all of Parliament and the public in the debate about what kind of country we want to be and about where our future lies. There will be issues on which we will disagree. For example, I feel strongly that we should stay inside the customs union, because that will help our manufacturing in the future. On the rights of EU citizens who already live here, I feel that we should not be leaving them in the lurch while we start the negotiations when we could put them on a sure-footing straight away.
There will be issues about how we balance so many different things, such as how we get our security right, and we will need to debate them here in this House. At the moment, the process that the Government have set out does not give us the secure opportunity to have votes and proper debates and to be sure that we will not be left at the end of this process with what the Prime Minister has described as her way to change the British economic model if we do not get what we like. To the Opposition, that sounds far more like a tax-haven Britain that would undermine people’s rights and the kind of British values that we want to stand up for.
I urge Members from all parts of the House not just to look at the array of amendments and not just to decide how we respect the referendum result last summer and the different and strongly held views of our constituents, but to look at how all of us, from all parts of the House, vote for the kinds of amendments that will ensure that parliamentary sovereignty is strengthened and that Parliament has a say. I urge Government Members to vote for some of those amendments to ensure that we have a real vote on the final outcome and that we can make real choices.
So much of this has been about how we defend democracy by voting for article 50. It should not be about that; it should be about how we strengthen democracy over the next two years. If this was about parliamentary sovereignty for all of us, let us have the strength and the confidence to use it.
Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). I did not agree with everything that she said, but the one thing with which I most certainly did agree was her congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) who made an excellent first speech in this House. It is probably the case that she will never speak in a more important debate in this House no matter that she has, I am sure, a long career ahead of her here.
My first political act was to take part in the referendum campaign in 1975. I put leaflets through doors calling on people to vote yes in that referendum. I did so because I believed in free trade, and because I believed the assurances that were written on those leaflets that the decision taken would not affect the sovereignty of the UK Parliament.
I was working for Margaret Thatcher when she first delivered the Bruges speech, which highlighted the fact that that assurance was being steadily eroded and that the European Community was heading in the wrong direction. As a result, when I entered this House I opposed the Maastricht treaty, the Amsterdam treaty, the Nice treaty and indeed the Lisbon treaty as it was becoming steadily clearer that, although there may or may not have been economic benefits from our membership, this was a political project that was heading in the one direction of ever closer union.
It was a project on which the British people had not been consulted and which they did not support. I had hoped that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, would negotiate an arrangement that allowed us to opt out from the elements that we did not want. He tried valiantly, but what he came back with was insufficient, which left us with no alternative but to leave and then to seek new arrangements allowing us to co-operate in those areas where there was a benefit. The result of the referendum was clear. In my constituency, it was nearly two to one, and people did understand what they were voting for. It does not matter that a majority of younger people may have voted to remain, that a majority of those with degrees may have voted to remain, or even that some parts of the UK may have voted to remain. This was a nationwide referendum of the British people, and the British people spoke. I agree with the Prime Minister that we have no alternative but to leave the single market, as it is essential that we have control over our borders once more and that we are no longer subject to European Union law.
Mr Whittingdale
I really am sorry, but I do not have time.
We have to leave the customs union if the condition of remaining in it is that we are unable to negotiate our own trade agreements. There are precedents, although I would not necessarily want to follow them completely. The new arrangements, for instance, between the European Union and Canada, and between the European Union and Ukraine, offer no application of European law in those countries and no free movement, but do give them access to the internal market and allow them to negotiate their own trade agreements. Ultimately, the European Union is flexible and an arrangement is perfectly possible.
The negotiations will be complicated. I am concerned, for instance, that we must have recognition of the adequacy of our data protection, so that data can continue to flow across borders. I would like us still to be recognised under the country of origin principle. However, it is vital for European businesses still to have access to our markets, so they will be putting pressure on their Governments to reach a sensible deal. The one thing I have found most astonishing is that when Britain voted to leave the European Union, the reaction of other member states has been more to seek to punish Britain than to ask the question why. The European Union is a flawed—
Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)
I will be brief and to the point, as many other hon. Members want to take part in the debate. We have heard some remarkable contributions, and I will mention two that were made yesterday. The former Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who has just left the Chamber so will not hear my remarks, challenged everyone who will be voting in favour of this Bill tonight, as I will be, to examine our consciences. They particularly challenged those of us—I strongly count myself among this number—who voted, argued and campaigned for a remain vote. I believe that, as we lost the vote, we have to face the consequences, although the former Deputy Prime Minister and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe feel that we should not.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) also said that this is an issue of conscience. I regret to some extent that we will be voting on a three-line Whip, as it is a deeply moral, conscious decision that we all have to take. However, I would have much more difficultly justifying and coming to terms with my conscience if I were to vote against the Bill and, effectively, in favour of delaying and frustrating the beginning of the negotiations and, therefore, the whole process of leaving the European Union. We have only to re-read the referendum question. It was so simple, asking:
“Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”
There were no ifs or buts. It was a simple question understood by everybody who took part in the referendum. It is no good now to say that the referendum was really only advisory and that we should have a second referendum or a confirmatory vote.
I campaigned widely in the west midlands, strongly on the remain ticket. I went out of my way to warn my constituents about the economic consequences, although warnings, particularly from the then Chancellor, may have been overdone throughout the whole campaign, which did not particularly help us. I warned people that the referendum was a one-off, that it was a yes or no question and that there would be no second referendum or further bite at the cherry if we did not like the outcome. Members who are telling us that tonight’s vote is a matter of conscience for those who were on the remain side and who felt strongly about remaining, as I did, believe that we should vote against the Bill. On the contrary, there is not a conceivable material argument for doing so. Indeed, to do so would be to betray the very basis on which we conducted the referendum; that is certainly what I spoke to, and I believe that it is what all Members who actively took part in the referendum spoke to.
We come to the question of how this House can be involved in and influence the negotiations. My experience of negotiations—business and others—tells me that we have to get real about this. The issues and choices will become clearer once we are in negotiations. I agree with the former Chancellor, who brings us great advice from Davos and other centres of learning, that perhaps economics will not be the big issue of the negotiations. However, the outcome on the economic and trading front is the essence of what this is really about for working people. My advice is simply this: soft Brexit and a transition period. Anything else would predict a harsh and uncomfortable future for the working people of this country.
Mr Speaker
As I said yesterday and perhaps I can be forgiven for repeating today, it would be hugely appreciated if colleagues did not keep coming up to the Chair either asking explicitly when they will be called, or doing so implicitly by inquiring whether it is alright if they go for lunch, repair to the loo, consume a cup of tea or eat a biscuit. It is not necessary. All I would say is, please be patient. I want to accommodate everybody—I am on your side—but it does not help if people keep coming up to the Chair all the time. It is incredibly tedious, especially when one is trying to listen to what colleagues actually have to say.
Dame Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)
Having originally been elected on a slender majority of 582, I certainly understand that we have to accept the outcome of democratic elections, however narrow the margin, but I must admit that I was surprised by the leave result in the west midlands, given that the region is in substantial trade surplus with the EU. Of course, I am delighted that the automotive industry has achieved so much success that it exports 82% of all its cars, mostly to the other 27 countries of the EU.
The subject of immigration dominated the conversations I had on the matter, even when standing outside the gates of the car factory. No distinction was made between EU and non-EU migration, which each account for 50% of migrants. I worry that our electors expect that taking back control will mean that very few migrants will arrive here. However, our history as an empire means that there are family obligations to non-EU migrants and an absolute obligation, through the Geneva and The Hague conventions, to provide safe haven for the most vulnerable people, many from countries for which we drew the lines on a map.
I heard mixed motives for voting leave. Some second-generation migrants told me they did not want any more coming in. Article 50 will be triggered and we will be in uncharted waters, trying to negotiate the things that are vital for our success. Access to our principal market is key. The car industry is desperately short of engineers, and its success will be choked if it cannot get the skilled labour it needs. If we are honest, migrants are more willing to do some jobs, such as picking fruit and vegetables. A spring onion producer told me he cannot rely on local labour to get the harvest in. We must ensure that horticulture is not destroyed by taking back control without being able to meet the demand for labour. These are not easy things to say in public, but we are about to make a momentous decision, and, as the Prime Minister says, we have to make a success of it. That will only be achieved if we are honest about some of the problems we face.
I am no starry-eyed Europhile. The political leadership in Europe failed to inspire its citizens about the benefits of working together. Other countries are seeing the rise of extreme right parties that promise to solve their problems. This goes beyond Europe. The leadership of the rich nations around the world are struggling to find answers to the impact of globalisation for the low waged. In America, Obama tried to extend healthcare to the poorest, and here we have the introduction of the living wage, but maybe we need to look to places such as Scandinavia for better models of wage equality and fairness in society. Those are the big questions left when we exit the European Union and we will need to answer them in our own way.
I expect that the EU will change after we have left, because it must collectively try to find answers to the big questions of globalisation, mass migration and robotics. By contrast with the US, we have decided to turn outward, not inward, partly because we have to and because our heritage is one of trade and exploration. I hope the electorate will be patient, but they will judge our efforts on their experience, not on our rhetoric. I hope that all that is great about Britain is not sacrificed in pursuit of an unrealistic ambition to go back to some mythical time when we were in control of all we surveyed.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
She is not in her place now, but I want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) for her excellent maiden speech.
Liberal Democrats have always been proud internationalists. It was the Liberals who backed Winston Churchill’s European vision in the 1950s, even when his own party did not do so. Since our foundation, we have been champions of Britain’s role in the European Union and fought for co-operation and openness with our neighbours and with our allies. We have always believed that the challenges that Britain faces in the 21st century—climate change, terrorism and economic instability—are best tackled working together as a member of the European Union.
Being proud Europeans is part of our identity as a party, and it is part of my personal identity too. Personally, I was utterly gutted by the result. Some on the centre left are squeamish about patriotism; I am not. I am very proud of my identity as a northerner, as an Englishman, as a Brit, and as a European—all those things are consistent. My identity did not change on 24 June, and neither did my values, my beliefs, or what I believe is right for this country and for future generations. I respect the outcome of the referendum. The vote was clear—close, but clear—and I accept it.
But voting for departure is not the same as voting for a destination. Yes, a narrow majority voted to leave the EU, but the leave campaign had no plans, no instructions, no prospectus and no vision. No one in this Government, no one in this House and no one in this country has any idea of what the deal the Prime Minister will negotiate with Europe will be—it is completely unknown. How, then, can anyone pretend that this undiscussed, unwritten, un-negotiated deal in any way has the backing of the British people? The deal must be put to the British people for them to have their say. That is the only way to hold the Government to account for the monumental decisions they will have to take over the next two years.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman not think that his party is partly responsible for the outcome of the referendum, because immigration became a proxy for issues like the pressure on the NHS and the inability to see a doctor, and the inability to get the right class sizes, owing to policies that his party supported which squeezed public services and meant that people looked for someone else to blame?
Tim Farron
I am staggered by the hon. Gentleman speaking the language of Nigel Farage—what a terrible disgrace.
The deal must be put to the British people for them to have their say. That is the only way to hold the Government to account for the monumental decision they will have to take over the next two years to ensure that the course they choose serves the interests of all the people, however they voted.
Several hon. Members rose—
Tim Farron
I will not take any more interventions because other people need to get in.
Here is the likelihood: 48% of the people will not like the outcome of the deal, and half of the 52% will feel that they were betrayed by the outcome of the deal. The only way to achieve democracy and closure is for there to be a vote at the end.
The fact is that the Prime Minister is the one making the strongest case for giving people a vote on the deal. She had the choice to pursue a form of Brexit that united our country, reflected the closeness of the vote, and sought to heal the divisions between leave and remain. Instead she chose to pursue the hardest, most divisive form of Brexit, which tears us out of the single market and leaves us isolated against the might of world superpowers. Never mind that six months ago she herself argued the case for remaining in the EU. Never mind that numerous leave campaigners championed the Norway and Swiss models and spent the referendum campaign assuring voters that we would not leave the single market. Never mind that 48% of people—16 million British people—wanted to stay in the EU. Never mind that Britain’s young people, who have more of a stake in our country than most of us here, voted three to one to remain.
The Prime Minister has made her choice—fine; she has chosen hard Brexit—but if she is so confident that what she is planning is what people voted for, she must give them a vote on the final deal. What started with democracy must not end with a Government stitch-up. When all is said and done, the decision on whether the deal the Prime Minister negotiates is good enough will be decided by someone; someone will make that decision. Should it be the Prime Minister, should it be those privileged to be here, or should it be the British people who have to live with that decision? I say that it should be put to the people in a referendum. That is why the Liberal Democrats are fighting for the British people to have the final vote on the deal that this Government negotiates. Democracy means accepting the will of the people, at the beginning of the process and the end of the process. Democracy means respecting the majority, and democracy means not giving up your beliefs when the going gets tough.
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), who always speaks with passion. However, let me put it squarely on the table that I will never vote for another referendum while I am in this House, given what we experienced last year.
I agree with those who have said that this is a conscience vote; forget the three-line Whips. We asked the people, “What do you want to do?”, they said, “Leave,” and as far as I am concerned that settled the matter. I will of course be voting for the Bill this evening.
I want to make three very quick points. First, I believe that the Prime Minister deserves personal credit for her leadership on Brexit since she emerged last July. Casting our minds back to the extraordinary events of last summer, we were shell-shocked, not knowing where the public vote would take us. “Brexit means Brexit”, she said,
“and we’re going to make a success of it.”
That phrase, much mocked in some quarters, gave a sufficient sense of direction to steady the ship. It became apparent by January that we then needed a more detailed plan, and at just the right time, the Prime Minister gave her Lancaster House speech, which set out a clear, coherent and credible plan for the way forward. It was one of the most significant speeches I have heard in my 25 years in this House, and it was a game changer for me and for many people.
The plan is ambitious and not without risk. In particular, we will be leaving the single market and turning our backs on free movement, but seeking to negotiate a free trade agreement. That is a high-risk strategy, but I recognise that to remain in the single market would not properly reflect the desire of the majority who voted leave to control immigration. It is, however, vital that putting in place a bespoke free trade agreement is successfully completed as part of the overall deal. The one fear that companies in my constituency have is not so much tariffs, bad though they might be, but non-tariff barriers, which can play havoc with sensible trading arrangements and must be avoided if possible.
One part of the Lancaster House speech has received insufficient attention—the reference to transitional arrangements. I know that there are some, and some in this Chamber think that all this can be done in the blink of an eye, but it cannot. It is complex, it will take years, and we have to exercise patience. Once we start detailed negotiations—once we start to consider which parts of the acquis we want to ditch and which to keep—we are probably looking at a 10-year project. We might well leave the EU in 2019, but we should prepare ourselves for substantial transitional arrangements, and thereafter, I hope, a positive working relationship.
Secondly, we must now be brutally honest with the British people about the likely short-term impact of Brexit, not in an alarmist way, but simply making the point that because of uncertainty—because we have now made it clear that we will not be in the single market—there is likely to be an impact on Government spending for the next few years. We know that tax receipts have fallen against forecast since June, and that trend may well continue. There may well be long-term gains from Brexit—I certainly hope so, and we must strive for that end—but there will most likely be short-term pain, especially now that the phoney war is drawing to an end. International companies will weigh the certain knowledge that we will be leaving the single market against the hope of an equivalent free trade agreement, and some of them who crunch that calculation will decide to invest or expand elsewhere. Some financial institutions are already getting itchy feet, so there might not be as much money available for the NHS and social care and schools as we would like over the next two to five years, and we should prepare the British people for that fact.
Finally, living in these very turbulent times when all kinds of things are going on in our world, I encourage those on the Front Bench—those who are negotiating—thus: we have a clear plan, but let us not be slavish about it; let us be flexible and wise.
Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)
It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak in this debate on this historic day for Parliament and for this country. None of us who believed in withdrawal from the European Union believed that we would ever see an Order Paper displaying the words, “European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill: Second Reading”. It is a very historic, landmark occasion.
The Bill implements a decision that this Parliament decided to hand to the people. It would be utterly wrong, therefore, to reject what the people of the United Kingdom decided in a national vote. I utterly respect those who have spoken who campaigned hard, enthusiastically and vigorously to remain but are saying that, as Parliament handed the decision to the people, we must respect the will of the people. I have little time for those who argue that we should now engage in procedural games to thwart the will of the people. That is dishonest and undemocratic. I agree with the Liberal Democrats about believing in democracy and listening to the will of the people, so let us get on and implement what the people have said, not engage in efforts to thwart it. This was a national vote across the United Kingdom and everybody’s vote was equal.
I want to address the issues that affect Northern Ireland in particular. It has been said that, because Northern Ireland voted to remain by 56% to 44%, it should not be part of the withdrawal or it should be given a special status. I can think of nothing that would be more calculated to undermine the Union between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom than for Northern Ireland to be able to thwart the will of the people of the United Kingdom as a whole. That would be a deeply anti-Unionist position to take.
It is right and proper that we respect the special needs of Northern Ireland, and we are arguing them vigorously with the Government. We are engaged with this House and with Ministers back home, and that is why I deplore the fact that at this crucial juncture our locally devolved Assembly and Executive have been brought down needlessly. The people who brought it down are the very people who are now making speeches saying, “Brexit undermines the Good Friday agreement.” Thankfully, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has completely demolished that argument and made it clear that nothing in the Good Friday, St Andrews or any other agreement is in any way impaired or imperilled by the decision to leave the European Union. Those who are now complaining the hardest about Northern Ireland have denied themselves a voice by not taking their seats and arguing their case in this House or engaging with Ministers. They have now brought down the elected Government in Northern Ireland, so they do not have any input there, either.
The reality is that of course this presents challenges for Northern Ireland. However, when we kept sterling and the Irish Republic joined the euro along with other European partner nations and states, we were told that it was a massively detrimental act and that it would cause all sorts of major problems on the island of Ireland and lead to all sorts of disruption, both economic and political. None of that happened—people adapted. They were told that we would have to change our currency at the border. Northern Ireland has a different currency from that of the Irish Republic, but trade continues—it is flourishing—and the economy has done extremely well. None of the dire predictions of terrible consequences came to pass.
I am confident that we will see a better future for the United Kingdom and for Northern Ireland. I welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment to maintaining the common travel area. I reject the idea of a special status for Northern Ireland, and I am glad that the Taoiseach of the Irish Republic rejects it too, because it is code for separating Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom and undermining our—
Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)
This is indeed an historic moment in our nation’s history. This is the moment that we begin to take back control of our laws, our borders and our money. Once again we become a sovereign nation state in command of our own destiny, and I am absolutely delighted about that.
I was brought up in post-war Germany. I campaigned to leave in the 1975 referendum and, along with 43 others, I voted against the Single European Act in 1986, so I have form. The hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner), the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and I are the last remaining members of that band. Although Margaret Thatcher pushed for that Act, I have no doubt that, if she were with us today, her response to this Bill would be, “Rejoice!”
I pay tribute to all those, on both sides of the House, who have campaigned over the years for this outcome. I also salute David Cameron for honouring his commitment to give the British people a referendum on membership of the EU. Many said that he would renege on that, but he kept his word.
The referendum was not advisory. It was an instruction to withdraw from the European Union. The Bill simply authorises the giving of notice to leave, without which negotiations cannot begin. It is touching to hear the new-found respect for parliamentary democracy from the Bill’s opponents—the same people who for four decades have been complicit in the relentless campaign to transfer power from this Parliament to Brussels.
Mr Charles Walker
Does my hon. Friend agree that, having asked the people to give us their voice, we now need to respect that voice and get on with it?
Sir Gerald Howarth
Absolutely, and I think that the overwhelming view, not only in this House but across the country, is in favour of that proposition.
A number of speeches during this debate, principally yesterday, have sought to rerun the referendum arguments, but it is no good complaining that the people did not know what they were voting for. The Government spent £9 million of our money on a brochure riddled with inaccuracies, and they mounted an extraordinary and utterly counterproductive “Project Fear” campaign warning of dire consequences if we voted to leave, none of which have come to pass. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), the former Chancellor, who is sitting in front of me, predicted an
“immediate and profound economic shock across the country”
and a DIY recession, but none of that happened. Instead, the economy grew by 0.6% in the third quarter of 2016, compared with 0.3% in the first quarter, before the referendum. Major companies such as SoftBank, Google, Novo Nordisk and Nissan have announced significant investment in the United Kingdom.
Some have argued that the public were not told that a leave vote would require us to leave the single market, but recovering control of our borders and restoring to this Parliament responsibility for the laws of these islands—in other words, a return of sovereignty—was at the heart of the debate. Membership of the single market is completely incompatible with those objectives. As my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) said yesterday, the people knew what they were voting for and it is patronising to suggest otherwise.
Some suggest that the validity of a referendum in which more than 33 million voted is in doubt, yet no such question troubled them in 1997 when Tony Blair secured a majority of 179 with just 13.5 million votes. By contrast, 17.4 million voted to leave the European Union. We are leaving and there will be no second referendum. We undoubtedly face challenges ahead, but let us not kid ourselves: there would have been major challenges if the United Kingdom had voted to remain.
There are 70 billion reasons why our EU partners will want to reach a mutually beneficial trade deal with us, because they have a £70 billion trade surplus with us. I hope that those countries that in large part owe their liberation from the Soviet yoke to the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher will respect our decision and help us forge a new, constructive relationship. I hope that the same will apply to those countries that we helped rebuild after the second world war.
Free from the EU customs union, we will be able to embrace the world and negotiate trade deals with our Commonwealth friends, encouraging fair trade deals, and the tiger economies of the world. However, it will be hard graft; the US may be our closest ally, but commercially they will be no pushover.
I have another note of caution: the EU’s determination to create an EU defence identity shows no sign of relenting. Such a policy presents a direct threat to the ultimate guarantor of European security, NATO, and risks alienating its principal paymaster, the United States of America. I shall support this Bill tonight.
Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)
I have been a Member of this House for almost seven years and rarely have I spoken on a Bill of such great importance, not just to the country and to Scotland but to my own constituents. It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth). Although we fundamentally disagree about the European Union, it is right that we are able to express our views in this House on behalf of our constituents and the country.
If that is what taking back control is about, let us talk about that democratic process. We have been able to debate this Bill yesterday and today only because the public took the Government to court to express the view that they were railroading through a decision without due process or the taking back of control that they had promised this Parliament. We should pay tribute to those people for making it possible for us to make these arguments on behalf of our constituents.
Like many right hon. and hon. Members, I campaigned vigorously for a remain vote. One of my party members, Gordon Dalyell, the son of Tam Dalyell, campaigned alongside me night after night. I pay tribute to Tam. Our thoughts are with Gordon, Pam, Matthew and the rest of the Dalyell family.
I campaigned vociferously for the UK to remain a member of the European Union because it was in our national interest. When I was tramping around the streets of my constituency in 2010 and 2015, I was not knocking on doors promising my constituents that if I was elected to this House I would do everything I possibly could to make their lives poorer. Indeed, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer has said quite clearly on the record that nobody votes to make themselves poorer. It is incumbent on everyone in this House, throughout the process, not simply to railroad the Bill through as though it did not matter, but to fight for every single amendment so that the House sends a strong message—both to the Government and to our European partners—that we will make sure that the country gets the best deal for our constituents.
Ian Murray
I will not give way, if my hon. Friend does not mind, because of the timescale and the fact that other people wish to speak.
At the end of the EU referendum campaign, 78% of my constituents voted to remain. Many Members from across the Chamber in the last day or so have talked about not respecting the democratic will of the people, but, as far as I am concerned and according to “Erskine May”, we are representatives of our constituents. None of these decisions in the House is taken easily; in fact, it is with a heavy heart that I will vote against triggering article 50 this evening, but I will do so in the knowledge that I will be able to walk down the streets of Edinburgh South, look my constituents in the eye and say to them that I have done everything I possibly can to protect their jobs, their livelihoods and the future of their families.
When the Bill goes through Third Reading and the Lords, as we know it will, I will work enthusiastically to get amendments to it and hold the Government to account. Brexit might mean Brexit, but to my constituents and to many people across the country Brexit does not mean Tory Brexit. The rhetoric we have been hearing from the Government is wrong. I do not know why they are fighting the people to stop Parliament having a say, and I do not know why they are not reaching out across the Chamber to try to get a common sound and a common voice, to make sure that Britain can get the best possible deal from our European partners. I will vote no this evening, against triggering article 50, but rest assured that I will spend the rest of the time in this Chamber fighting for my constituents’ lives.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for calling me to speak in a debate that I never wanted to happen, ahead of a vote that I never wanted to cast. This summer, I will have been an MP for 30 years, in which I have supported the pro-European cause with a passion. I do not think I need to elaborate.
I believed that the referendum that forms the basis of the Bill had become an inevitability, and I supported David Cameron’s call. I may have been wrong, and I envy the steadfastness of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), and his consequent vote on the Bill. I am in a different place; I voted for the referendum Bill believing that the result of the referendum would count. On the public platforms on which I argued to remain, I made the bargain with the good people of North East Bedfordshire that we would honour the result of the referendum; if we voted to remain, that would be that, and if we voted to leave, I would support the decision if I was required as an MP to vote on the matter. We have, and I will.
I am not giving up fighting. I want the very best for my constituents out of the new arrangements. That is why I stood to be a member of the Exiting the European Union Committee, and it is why I will work with others in Parliament and beyond to assist the Government who have been landed with this in making the best of it. The Bill does not provide much opportunity for the addition of detail governing future negotiation. The Government need a pretty open hand, although one or two amendments might help them to retain parliamentary support.
I will fight for a negotiated settlement, watching carefully for any sign that “no deal” is moving up the agenda. I want the Government to be as open as possible to as many options as possible. The degree of detail to be covered is staggering, both for us and for our partners, and new consequences are being uncovered every day. This is way more complicated than some of our colleagues ever wanted to believe, and not all the consequences will be beneficial.
There is one fight that I want to see an end of, and on which I am calling time. I do not believe there is any realistic prospect of the UK remaining in or rejoining the EU, certainly not in my lifetime in the House. I think it is time for me to place my support for the EU and Europe on a different footing—one that recognises the reality of what we have done. I will work for the future prosperity of the EU, for our partnership relationship with it and for all the things we must continue to do together from that new position. I will defend the EU against those who still wish it further harm—from those misguided enough to believe that the further disintegration of the EU is of some benefit—whether that is those in some quarters in the UK with a viewpoint of malevolence, those with a viewpoint of ignorance in the United States.
I have decided that I will not, at present, fight for the UK somehow to find a quick way back to the EU. Let me be clear: I believe sincerely that the decision of those who voted out was wrong, as was the view of those who led them. I am reconciled to Brexit, but I am not yet persuaded of the wisdom of the decision. However, spending the next few years trying to reverse 48:52 and make it 52:48 does not seem to me to be in the UK’s interest. I do not want an already divided country to become more so. Honest patriotism has merged seamlessly into jingoistic nationalism, and the national debate has become sad and dispiriting. As a confirmed remainer and supporter of the EU, I do not want the next generation of Conservative MPs to have the blight of this argument dogging them, their associations, their members and their voters in the way it has dogged us. It has soured friendships, deepened bitterness and damaged relationships—I swore at a mate in the Tea Room, and I am sorry.
Instead, I want to work towards a new partnership with the EU that will start to command ever-increasing support. We should aim higher than a minimum of support and look towards the vast majority of those in the UK supporting such a partnership. It is possible to be pro-European and not define oneself solely in terms of membership of the EU. It is time to be proud to be British without hating the EU. I hope it will help if some of us who lost take the opportunity to create something better out of what has happened. Although I will vote for the Bill with a heavy heart, that is the relationship I am looking for.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
I have listened to yesterday’s and today’s debate, a lot of which has focused on process and procedure. I want to focus on people. I made a very simple promise to the people of Bermondsey and Old Southwark in May 2015 that I would never support anything that would damage them, their lives or their children’s lives. I made that promise precisely because my predecessor was a Liberal Democrat who backed Tory measures—the bedroom tax, cuts to legal aid and tripling tuition fees—that damaged my community. I made that promise, and I stand by it.
I hear from people, day in, day out, about the damage that has been done since the referendum. The universities in my constituency—the London School of Economics, King’s College London, South Bank University and the University of the Arts London—are worried about research funding from the European Union, the Erasmus programme and a drop in international student numbers, which could mean higher fees for British students. That was not in the referendum last year.
I hear from medical professionals who are worried about recruitment. The NHS is not getting £350 million extra a week, and it is struggling, even with 54,000 staff who are non-UK EU nationals. I hear from the financial sector—my constituency has the third-highest level of financial sector employment in the country—that 7,000 jobs have already gone. Nobody voted to lose their job. I hear from food importers, such as Brindisa today and Mamuska! last week, that have seen costs rise since the referendum by 15%. Those costs are being passed on to consumers and customers. People did not vote to pay more for a dinner out.
I hear from hotels. Although tourism has gone up since the referendum, there are many non-UK EU nationals working in our hotels, and there are simply not enough unemployed, unskilled Londoners to fill those jobs if we leave. I also hear from exporters in my constituency, who worry about future tariffs and the cost of things such as having to print a different label for beer bottles that will go into the EU market. I hear from people who are very worried about their economic prospects—young professionals who supported the Conservative party at the last election, but who are now politically homeless.
The former Prime Minister John Major referred to the likes of the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), as “bastards”. The former Prime Minister could not have known that his party would become a whole Government full of bastards, who are absolutely causing economic damage to my constituents and the whole country. At the risk of offending my own Front Benchers as well as Government Front Benchers, I say that my members campaigned vigorously to remain in the European Union, and they deserve a Front-Bench position that is not us signing up to the Government’s position, the Government’s timetable and the Government’s curtailing of debate. It is a disgrace.
Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker.
Mr Speaker
Order. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but there is no need for a point of order. I say to the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) that he should not have used the word he used. He tried to wrap it up in a quote, but it was very unseemly, rather undignified and quite unnecessary. He should not have done it, and he should apologise.
Neil Coyle
Although I share the former Prime Minister’s sentiments, I apologise if it was unparliamentary language.
Mr Speaker
It was unparliamentary language, and the hon. Gentleman should not do it again. Has he finished his contribution?
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, for calling me to speak in this historic debate. Although he is not in his place on the Government Benches, I want to pay tribute to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), my constituency neighbour, for his wonderful speech. Boy, does he show us how it is all done.
This is a short Bill with huge ramifications for all of us for years to come. Like other Conservative Members, I campaigned for remain, but I accept the democratic vote, and I think we should allow the article 50 notice to be triggered. I agree with those who have said that if we do not do so, the crisis in our democracy that this Bill’s defeat would lead to will help no one.
Yesterday, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union said that the outcome he wanted was a country that was
“stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking”.—[Official Report, 31 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 821.]
I agree with him, and the Government’s negotiations must lead to that outcome. As colleagues have said, Parliament must be involved, not just at the start of this process, but throughout and particularly at the end. The manner of the vote at the end of the process is important. Ministers will have noted the amendments that have been tabled about that parliamentary vote, and I hope that they will add to the Prime Minister’s words about that, either in the closing speech tonight or in Committee next week.
I welcome the fact that a White Paper is to be published, and particularly the Prime Minister’s announcement that it will be published tomorrow, but I have been clear that the Bill and the White Paper, which will set out the Prime Minister’s 12 pillars, are separate and should be considered as such.
For me, the tests leading us to a successful new relationship with the European Union are threefold. First, leaving must not undermine our economy. It must not unduly affect the jobs, household finances and financial security of our constituents. I hope we will get a chance to debate that as part of the discussions on the White Paper. Secondly, leaving must not undermine our constitution. That was tested in the courts, and I welcome the decision of the High Court, which has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Finally, leaving must not undermine our values as a country. I thought that the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) spoke very powerfully about values, as have other Members on both sides of the House, yesterday and today. Upholding values is up to us as Members of Parliament, the Government and Ministers.
I have to be honest: never in my adult life have I felt so concerned about the stability and state of the world in which we live. With the Brexit vote, we have added an extra layer of uncertainty to our world. However, I want to take the Secretary of State at his word when he said yesterday:
“This is just the beginning”.—[Official Report, 31 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 819.]
To paraphrase a great former Prime Minister who believed in a united Europe, the Bill is not the beginning of the end, but may be the end of the beginning, of the Brexit process.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) for trailing my speech in his remarks.
I did not intend to speak yesterday or today, but as I listened to the speeches yesterday, it occurred to me that the House of Commons has quite clearly taken leave of its senses. That happens at times, but the difficulty and danger is that the public trust the House of Commons at moments such as this. They trusted the House of Commons on Iraq, when it had taken leave of its senses, and on the poll tax, when it had taken leave of its senses. On the poll tax, that was quickly corrected, but Iraq still lies in ruins. It is at times when the Opposition unite with the Government that the House particularly takes leave of its senses. If ever there was a time to beware, it is now.
I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), who is not in his place. He gambled with his scare stories on the EU and on Scotland. On Scotland, he won; on the EU, he lost. This time, are we feeling lucky? A deal is in the gift not of the UK Government alone, but of 38 assemblies and regional parliaments across Europe, 27 sovereign nation Parliaments and one EU Parliament. We are but one in 67 voices, and we have to get that into our heads.
The Prime Minister has said that no deal is better than a bad deal, but no deal would mean for farmers that meat had 22% tariffs, dairy had 36% tariffs and fish—this particularly affects my constituency—had 12% tariffs. People assume that the House of Commons knows what it is doing, but it does not. It is crossing its fingers and hoping for the best.
We are told time after time in the Chamber that people know what they voted for. Perhaps they knew what they were voting for—to leave the EU—but they certainly did not know the destination, and neither does this House. The International Trade Committee, of which I am Chair, does not know the destination, nor does the Department for International Trade. The Prime Minister does not know the destination. The pretence that because the people voted to leave the EU, they knew the destination is beyond facile. People who have appeared before my Committee from BASF, Manchester Airports Group, the CBI, the National Farmers Union, Dairy UK, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, Tech City UK and the Law Society do not know the destination for the UK. The UK is on a precipice.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is speaking as though that is a great perception. Has he ever come across a negotiation between two parties in which it was possible to predict the outcome in advance?
Mr MacNeil
The right hon. Gentleman makes precisely my point, and I am grateful to him for doing so. He may be able to tell me how many member states of the United Nations are not in a regional trade agreement. Anybody? [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Braintree (James Cleverly) knows: he was at my Committee session today. There are only six member states of the United Nations that are not in a regional trade agreement.
Mr MacNeil
I will. They are Mauritania, Palau, São Tomé and Principe, Somalia, South Sudan and East Timor, and soon to join this illustrious group is the United Kingdom. This is playing fast and loose; it is “Cross your fingers and hope it works out for the best.” The UK will find itself, for the first time since 1960, not in a free trade agreement. It joined the European Free Trade Association, the original free trade agreement, in 1960, and that is how it has been since then. I have been told by the Library that every member of the OECD is in a regional trade agreement, and even North Korea signed up to one in 1988. The UK is boldly going where even North Korea fails to go.
If that does not give Members pause for thought, what will? As they head over the edge of the cliff, they will take their constituents and the poorest people of society with them. Let us remember who paid for the bankers: the poorest in society. Who will pay for this fashion of Brexit? The poorest in society will be paying for it. We are feeling our way and crossing our fingers. It is not the best deal for the UK.
Let us remember that the best deal that the UK will now have with Europe will be after we have smashed up the Rolls-Royce. We will head down to the second-hand car dealer and ask him for the best motor he has got, because we have smashed up our Rolls-Royce and thrown it to one side. Having refused to travel in the best possible transport, we are now going for the best after we have smashed up the Rolls-Royce.
This House has to come to its senses, as it did on Iraq, the poll tax, the bedroom tax and numerous other matters. Unfortunately, the people who will pay for this are not here. Members are hellbent on going to any destination so long as it involves leaving the EU. That is gross irresponsibility. There is only thing—I repeat, one thing—that can save Scotland, and that is independence, and independence very soon.
Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
I am very much looking forward to voting tonight and to the debates on universities, education, immigration and the economy that will take place in the Chamber during the next two years. I truly feel that, as a result of this referendum, we as MPs and Parliament as an entity are closer to the people now than we have ever been. I believe that they will watch those debates and follow what we are talking about. We will be responding to a mandate that has been given to us by the people. I, for one, am looking forward to the vote tonight.
I cannot speak in this debate without responding to the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), because he called for a second referendum. Does anybody remember the hon. Gentleman calling for a referendum in 2010? His party leaflets and posters said:
“It’s time for a real referendum”.
They also called for a referendum on the alternative vote in 2011. They lost that referendum, and they lost the most recent referendum. They had the best of three, and it is time for them to stop calling for referendums.
The hon. Gentleman spoke with passion, in the same way that he spoke with passion about tuition fees. I must just say that, as we are speaking in the Chamber, the news is breaking that some Liberal Democrat Members are going to abstain, some are going to vote for and some are going to vote against. He has divided his party of only nine MPs in a far more efficient manner than the Labour party. Well done—what an achievement with nine MPs.
That brings me to the Labour party. I have a better example than the one used by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth). In 2005, 9.5 million people voted for Mr Blair to lead a Labour Government, but 17.2 million voted against. More people voted for Brexit than voted for the Labour party to be in government in 2005. The point is this: some Opposition Members who served as Ministers in that Government and voted for the referendum are going to vote against the result and the mandate given to them by the people. That is slightly rich coming from Members who served as Ministers in a Government that achieved only 9 million votes. Did anybody call for a second referendum then? No. Did anybody refer to the rule of law then? No, of course not, because the people of this country respect a democratic vote.
I apologise for my tone, Mr Speaker, but it was with some dismay that I woke this morning to the news that a former Prime Minister had tried to skew and influence the outcome of the referendum by attempting to have the editor of the Daily Mail removed from his post. I say this with a degree of shame: a leader of my party allegedly attempted to manipulate and distort the freedom of the press—not the editor of The Guardian, the editor of the Daily Mirror or a paper that subscribed to his world view, but the editor of the Daily Mail. I find that so distressing, because it brings into relief the way that those who could did wield their power to try to achieve the result they wanted: from The Guardian’s and the IMF’s fantasy doom-and-gloom projections, to Mr Carney’s inaccurate forecasts and Obama’s back-of-the-queue threat.
I caution those thinking of voting against the Bill tonight to be careful what they wish for and to be careful of wishing for second referendums. I think the people—advocates of free speech, a free press and a powerful democracy—would view their wishes dimly.
Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)
George Orwell said:
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
I would like to try to tell some truths in the brief time I have.
Every Prime Minister in my political lifetime has fostered the elitism that bit back in the referendum. Those leaders held that the European project was far too precious to share with our people. They failed to build a British vision for a reformed EU, and they failed to build a credible immigration policy with the public. They fed the beast that roared last June and we all bear some responsibility for that.
Fear of the hard right in the Conservative party has led two Prime Ministers to gamble recklessly with the future of our country. One called a referendum he never thought he would lose; the other has been pushed into triggering exit before even thinking through how it will actually happen. Weakness and incompetence then, weakness and incompetence now. One lesson we should all learn is that never again should a complex economic and international issue be reduced to an “X Factor”-style plebiscite.
Last week, embarrassingly, the British Government were caught acting unconstitutionally by the Supreme Court, when trying to use a Trumpian style Executive order to bypass Parliament on exit. The Government’s fear of Parliament, even one whose agenda it controls, led to wasted months fighting a legal action when every MP could have been put to work helping to craft the best exit deal for the UK; time the Prime Minister could have used to tour the capitals of Europe to work out a position and build the goodwill we will need to get us a good deal. The Government are doing the bare minimum they think they can get away with, without being in contempt of court. They do this by bringing this derisory and undernourished Bill before Parliament. No apology. No White Paper. No plan for leaving the EU. Today, we are meant to meekly aid and abet this incompetence, and buckle to the dog whistle threat that if MPs dare to do their job and believe in parliamentary sovereignty the wrath of the social media mob and the Conservative press will be unleashed against us. I ask my colleagues to show some strength today. This day will not be repeated. This is the moment that, in 10 years’ time, they will think about what they chose to do.
We are not voting on in or out. That is history. That has been decided. We are voting on whether we believe that the Government are ready to trigger article 50, when clearly they are not. The emperor has no White Paper. Let us take heart from the judges who stood firm in doing their duty despite the “enemies of the people” media headlines. Let us take heart from Gina Miller and individual citizens who have held the Government to account, acting where this supine Parliament feared to even seek legal clarification of its own rights before the courts.
Yes, we should vote for a Bill authorising exit from the European Union, but we should do that when we have done our duty on due diligence: when we and our constituents know what the Government have planned, which of the thousands of exit permutations they are going for, and how they want to meaningfully involve Parliament. The Bill is not about ignoring the referendum result, it is about realising it and ensuring that our whole democracy works to secure the best deal possible: unifying our nation, not glorying in its division into winners and losers.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. When my hon. Friend spoke about a White Paper and a date of publication, the Minister said, from a sedentary position on the Government Front Bench, that the White Paper would be published tomorrow. Is that news for the House?
Mr Speaker
It is not news for the House in the sense, if memory serves me correctly, that the Prime Minister indicated as much in the course of Prime Minister’s questions.
Mr Speaker
If there is one thing I know about the hon. Gentleman, it is that he is invariably listening to his own wisdom. We are grateful to him for that.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
Parliament, since its beginning, has been the place where elected Britons debate and make the decisions that affect our country’s future, so it is only right that tonight this House will vote to trigger article 50. I was one of the 544 who voted for the referendum to give our people a choice on our future, so it would be entirely inconsistent to reject the verdict of that referendum, even if it is at odds with my own view. I voted and campaigned for the UK to remain in the EU, and I was disappointed by the result. Some 71% of my constituents voted to remain. In the past week, I have received literally hundreds of letters telling me that I should represent them tonight and vote against the Government. As much as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), I too am a defender of democracy. I voted knowing full well that if leave won the debate then that is what would happen. Tonight, therefore, I will be in the Lobby voting to trigger article 50.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
Since September, the Exiting the European Union Committee has been established, there have been 26 debates and seven statements relating to the EU and our exit from it. Does my hon. Friend agree that those statistics highlight the many hours of debate available to all Members, contrary to what some might suggest, and that it is time we respect the majority of the public and support the British people tonight?
Stephen Hammond
I do not know if my hon. Friend heard me, but I said that I would certainly be respecting the result of the referendum. We have had those debates in Parliament, but what is crucial is where we go from here. What the people did not say to us in the referendum was how, or on what terms, we would leave. I believe that the best way to decide those issues, and to mitigate the impact of uncertainty, is for the Government to keep Parliament updated as much as possible throughout the negotiations and allow this House to have a meaningful input on those negotiations. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), I absolutely welcome the publication of the White Paper tomorrow. I hope the Bill will build on the Prime Minister’s speech and create some certainty.
I believe it is also in the Government’s best interests to have the fullest possible involvement of Parliament. I believe that that will help our negotiating position. Our negotiations will carry much greater weight with the EU 27 if it is clear that our negotiating stance has the backing of this House. Among all the talk of sovereignty and the hope of trade deals, we must not forget the effect of this process on individuals—our constituents. Many of the people who live in Wimbledon are EU citizens. I hope that the Government will find a very early resolution to guarantee the rights of those people who may not be British citizens. Many of them are my constituents.
I have said several times, in the debates to which the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) referred, that uncertainty is a key concern for industry and financial services. The financial services sector is vital for London’s success. It employs 2 million people and is our biggest tax generating sector—I do not need to go on. We should therefore strive for a deal that has financial services at its heart, including equivalence and mutual recognition. Equally, as my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) said, the negotiations will be complex, so we need to guarantee certainty through a proper transitional process where everybody can adjust to the new rules without sudden shock. That can be achieved, and I hope the Front-Bench team will clarify that it is at the heart of their ambitions.
The Bill gives the UK the ability to trigger article 50, and almost everybody in the Chamber will vote for it tonight. I am pleased that the Prime Minister has promised Parliament a vote on the final deal, but it needs to be clarified at what stage in the process that will take place and that all information will be given to Parliament. It also needs to be clear that Parliament will be able to vote if the Government seek to withdraw from the EU without a deal. I hope that the Secretary of State will commit, if the Government believe that no deal is achievable, to coming back to Parliament with all the options placed before us. If the vote is after the agreement of the treaty but prior to ratification, as is the current legal position, it will probably be too late and therefore meaningless.
In my view, therefore, the vote must occur before the Government conclude the agreement. If anyone has read article 50, they will know that that is what will happen in the European Parliament. Are we suggesting that the European Parliament should be more sovereign than this Parliament? I think not. If the deal needs the consent of the European Parliament, it should need the consent of this Parliament as well. As Churchill said of the Battle of Britain, the Bill is the end of the beginning, but it also gives the House the chance to show our constituents that we can come together, heal divisions and find the best deal for this country.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
As Members, we make difficult decisions every day. Some of them are of local significance and others take on national significance. The only reason we have the ability to make these decisions in the House is that our local constituents gave us their consent and voted for us at the general election. The point has been made to me that we are not delegates, but when all my neighbours, local business people, local pharmacists, local health professionals and local political allies and, indeed, opponents are telling me to take a stand, I cannot help but feel that this is the right course of action. I did not want to resign from my Front-Bench role. I know it was not a great office of state, but it was an important role that allowed me to hold the Government to account over their aspirations for social mobility.
Today, we are debating whether to trigger article 50 and give the Prime Minister permission to exit the EU. I feel that I would be abandoning my duty to my constituents, who have overwhelmingly and unwaveringly made the point that they do not want to leave the EU—75% voted to remain—if I voted for the Bill. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) made the point powerfully from the Dispatch Box yesterday that this decision has not been easy. It has been in a haze of conflicting emotions that the Labour party has sought to decide what to do, but for me there are two main reasons for voting against the Bill.
The first concerns the future of the 17,000 EU nationals living in my constituency. Some people have accused me of taking this stand only to ensure my re-election at the next election, but those EU nationals cannot vote for me anyway. I am taking this stand because in Hampstead and Kilburn we do not wince when we hear people speaking a different language on public transport; we do not scapegoat others for the pressures on our health system, criminal justice system and housing just because they do not look like us or sound like us; and we do not indulge in baseless theories that our country is at breaking point. Rather, we celebrate these EU nationals—they are as much a part of our fabric as anyone else and have as much right to be here as the generations before them. If I vote for the Bill, I will be abandoning my responsibility to these EU nationals.
The second reason I will be voting against the Bill concerns the lack of access to the single market, which will affect three main groups in my constituency. The first are the self-employed, who have argued that they need tariff-free trade with the EU. The second are those in the scientific and technical industries. In the last 10 years, the scientific funding from EU sources has increased by 73%, and at this point their projects are in jeopardy. The final group are those in the financial services and insurance sectors, who have no clarity over the future of their passporting rights.
These are the reasons why in good conscience I cannot vote for the Bill. To quote my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), this is not how we do things in the House. We need clarity. We need to see the economic impact of this decision. In good conscience and for the sake of my constituents, whether they can vote for me or not, I will not be voting for the Bill today.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who expressed herself with clarity and passion, and though I will not be in the Lobby with her this evening, I very much share many of the sentiments she has expressed.
In 1519, Hernán Cortés arrived in the new world, and the first thing he did was to burn the ships that had brought him there. Pointing up the beach, he told his astonished crew that since retreat to Europe was no longer an option, the only way forward was up the beach, to the opportunities he saw in the new world. Britain now stands on the brink of its Cortés moment. When article 50 is triggered, there will be no way back. Brexit Britain must of course broker the best possible deal it can with the EU, but our future long term will depend just as much on our ability to operate freely and globally.
Meanwhile in Europe, Mr Tusk this week told us that “assertive and spectacular steps” were needed to
“revive the aspiration to raise European integration to the next level”.
Whose aspirations? They are plainly not those of the British public. Mr Tusk, however, has done moderates like me—people who admit the risks as well as the benefits from Brexit—a real service. His remarkable candour and his false prescription have explained more eloquently than I ever could why it was that the British public voted to leave on 23 June.
We have had some truly excellent contributions today and yesterday, and I pay tribute to hon. Members who have expressed their positions forthrightly, even if I disagree with them. This is the House at its very best. This is the House listening to the public we serve.
Last week, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, in an interview for the engagingly titled Civil Service Weekly, said that the EU was “operationally irrelevant” to defence and security. He was wrong. The EU is relevant to our defence and security. I am fully supportive of the Petersberg tasks—the use of assets for humanitarian and peacekeeping operations—under the EU’s common security and defence policy. I admire Operation Atalanta, which is run from our own fleet headquarters at Northwood, and I accept that the European Defence Agency, a body whose budget I tried to contain as a Minister, runs a number of projects from which Britain benefits. My point is that we must seek to engage with Europe post-Brexit wherever it is expedient to do so. I urge Ministers, representing as they do Europe’s principal military and naval power, to continue engaging, in particular, on the CSDP whenever that is to our mutual benefit.
Yesterday, TheCityUK reversed its previously held Euroscepticism and announced that in its view the EU was a “straitjacket” and that Brexit presented “an unprecedented opportunity”. I agree absolutely. It spoke of achieving a global Brexit. That reminds us that in all those years, the only trade deals concluded by the EU were with South Korea, Mexico and South Africa. Britain pooled its ability to do deals with the EU in the mistaken belief that Brussels would undertake the task on its behalf. Clearly, it was asleep on watch. Now is the time for Britain to rediscover its historical engagement with global markets, and I hope that in the years ahead Ministers will do just that. We have seen the bizarre spectacle of Germany making more money from exporting coffee than the developing countries that grow coffee—
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), the shadow Brexit Secretary, said at the beginning of the debate, this is very difficult for many of us on the Opposition side of the Chamber. I strongly supported remain in the referendum campaign, and I did so because I believed it was in the interests of the country and the constituency I represent. I thought that the economic arguments advanced by the remain campaign would, in the end, succeed, but that was not the case. In the end, I did not ask the people for their views in order not to listen to what they said.
I accept that a vote for this Bill only opens the exit door, but ultimately it is likely to mean that, as a result, we leave the EU. In the end, I will listen to my constituents and their views, because my constituency voted overwhelmingly to leave. The reason my constituents gave me on the doorstep was that many of them felt left behind by economic progress over a number of decades; they felt they were not in control of their lives; they felt that we, the political class as their representatives, were not listening to them. One of the fundamental issues of concern related to unrestricted immigration from the EU. That is the honest information that they gave to me, which I am relaying to the House.
People who are not racists still have genuine concerns about the impact on their public services and their jobs, pay and conditions from that unrestricted immigration. Those concerns were expressed to me by people from different ethnic backgrounds—people from the Pakistani, Kashmiri, Bangladeshi and Somali communities, as well white British residents. I feel that if we now fail to listen to those genuinely held concerns, the disillusionment with politicians and politics will simply grow, and we risk driving those people into the arms of the racists, who actually do want to put forward a completely different agenda.
At the same time I recognise that although I will vote for the Bill, it is still important for Sheffield’s industry to have free access to EU markets. My constituents do not want to pay tariffs on imports from the EU; they want assurances that the food they eat in the future will be safe, as it is now; they want to see co-operation on environmental matters, on defence, on security and on science and research; and they want to keep the same employment rights and protections as they now enjoy. They do not want to see a race to the bottom to reduce taxation on corporate matters so that we can compete with offshore tax havens elsewhere.
In the end, if we are to keep those issues on the agenda, it is important that Parliament is regularly updated on progress on the discussions, and this Parliament must have a vote on the final outcome, just as the European Parliament will. I still have concerns about voting for the Bill—concerns that I felt when I argued strongly for remain in the referendum. In the end, though, I am more concerned about the damage to democracy if I do not vote for the Bill.
Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)
I am not one to brag, but I humbly suggest that I know something about how to negotiate in Europe. My personal best was what the civil service calls “a three-shirter”—three days and two nights of continuous negotiation. I wish my right hon. and hon. Friends well as they enter this process, and I ask them to ignore all those who suggest that they might like to share with us and the world every single red line and every single negotiating nuance, because nothing would be likely to secure a worse deal for this House and this country.
I have to break it gently to some Members and some of the people deluging our in-boxes that most people out there are not absolutely fascinated by the politics of Brexit, but are rooted in the realities of it. This is about the small family farming business in the Berkshire downs concerned about what Brexit means for them; the life sciences company in Newbury that wants to sell its world-beating products to health services in Europe; and companies that will be part of consortia or supply chains, some of which will be in, some of which will be outside, the European Union, and how it will work for them. It is about people who want to study abroad and people who are concerned about the future of our environment.
The experience of the referendum campaign was, for me, a miserable one. It was a new low in the political discourse of the nation, and I put the blame for that on both sides. As the dust settles, I, like many in the House, have a choice—whether to play the role of some sort of parliamentary insurgent, finding devious mechanisms with which to do down the view taken by the public in an open and fair referendum; or whether to represent the views of our constituents, the vast majority of them, who want us to act in their best interests and who understand that the Government face a heavy burden as they seek to achieve an orderly exit.
One notable voice is absent from our debates in these historic proceedings—that of my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles). He wrote an article, difficult though it must have been for him in the middle of his treatment for cancer, that was full of intelligence and common sense. It had an understanding of what it is to be a liberal Conservative at a time like this. He reminded us that we need to look forward to a world in which we can have a decent, open and generous relationship with our European partners. That is what we believe, not just because it is in our nature, but because free trade and a belief in markets are important to us. The article is also a reminder of why we want our hon. Friend back here in good health in the near future. He reminded us that we need to co-operate on issues such as climate change, science, countering terrorism and all the other things that matter to us; and that we should show generosity and decency to our partners and reject the kind of insular, backward-looking and small Britain that has infected this debate for too long.
I, as a remainer who thinks that the country has taken a wrong turn, will passionately support this Bill tonight. I give those on the Treasury Bench full notice that I shall at every available opportunity hold them to account to ensure that we reach the best deal for our constituents and all the people of our country—and do that in a constructive way.
Jim Dowd (Lewisham West and Penge) (Lab)
I shall be as brief as I can. It is slightly depressing when, because of collusion between the Front Benchers, the result is, as everybody knows, a foregone conclusion. Eric Forth, whom many of us will remember, always used to say that when the Front Benchers agree with each other, it is time for the House to be at its most active in examining precisely what that alliance means.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) mentioned the fact that yesterday my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) said this is a very difficult issue for the Labour party—and indeed it is. I think it is a very difficult issue for every Member, presenting us with a paradox in knowing what is the right thing to do. Some say the result of the referendum means that supporting the Bill is the right thing to do, while others disagree, saying that their duty to their constituents transcends even party loyalties.
Let me make my position perfectly clear. I am in a very fortunate position. As I told the Prime Minister during her statement on the Monday after the referendum, on 27 June, my constituents voted by about 2:1 to remain in the European Union. As I said then, I always regard my prime responsibility to be towards my constituents.
My constituents have written to me in unprecedented numbers—I am sure that most Members will have had more contact with, and information from, constituents over this issue than just about any other; it certainly applies to me in my 25 years in this place—urging me to support the constituency’s vote. I will support their objection to leaving the European Union, and I will vote against Second Reading tonight. I will vote for the SNP amendment and against the programme motion—and I will continue to do so. I say to my Front-Bench team that I will be active next week, when the Bill is in Committee. I will seek to amend it, but I will vote against Third Reading as well. I will not be complicit in something that I know and feel to be wrong, and to be against the best interests not just of my constituents or this city, of which my constituency is a small part, but of the whole country and all its people. Anything else—whatever negotiations take place, whatever agreements are made—will be sub-optimal. Reform of the European Union, staying in the European Union and leading the campaign of reform was in the best interests of the British people, and I will do nothing now to undermine their position.
People have mentioned the status of European Union citizens in this country. I am sure that the Prime Minister is in earnest, and is being genuine, when she says that she wants to secure early agreement on reciprocal arrangements in Europe for British nationals living in EU countries. I say, as do others, that the answer is in her own hands. She can reassure EU nationals living in this country now by saying that their future, and that of their families, is secure. She can then go, quite rightly, to the chambers and the councils of Europe, and say, “We demand the same from you.” [Hon. Members: “What if they say no?”] There is only one reason why I would ever turn my back on the European Union and agree that we should leave. I would only do that if members of the EU denied British citizens the right that we can give to EU nationals.
Kevin Brennan
Conservative Members shouted “What if they say no?” Surely that is the point. Is the Prime Minister seriously suggesting that if the other countries said no, she would ask the European Union citizens who are currently resident in this country to leave?
Jim Dowd
That is indeed precisely the point. We can do that, and we can do it now.
The reason UKIP has so little traction in London, for example, is that most Londoners, within a generation or two, are immigrants themselves—not necessarily from overseas, but from other parts of the United Kingdom: from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the north or the south-west. The idea of “the other” is nothing new to Londoners. I agree with what Members have said about the pace of social change. People need to feel that they are in control of it, that there is a role for them, and that they understand the nature of the change that is being effected.
I will vote as I have indicated because I believe it to be right. That might, in the fullness of time, prove to be a mistake on my part, but I nevertheless believe it to be right. What worries and depresses me about today’s proceedings is that I fear that many Members will vote tonight for something that they know is not right, because it is expedient for them to do so. I shall not join those ranks. I shall do whatever I can to ensure that the deal that will inevitably follow is the best it can possibly be, but I will not be complicit in undermining the position of the British people.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
For centuries Dover has had an important role as the gateway and guardian of the kingdom. During the referendum campaign, I was concerned about the potential impact on border security and cross-border co-operation and the potential impact on trade, because Dover is, in a very real sense, on the front line. I set out those concerns to.my constituents, as well as my concerns about the medium-term risks to the economy that the former Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), alluded to earlier.
The referendum followed a long and thorough debate. Whatever Members may think of its quality, there was a proper debate. People knew what they were voting for, and they made a clear decision. I, for one, will vote to respect the result.
The leader of the Liberal Democrats seems to think that it is all like “Hotel California”: you can check out, but you can never leave. I do not think that that is the right approach. Members of the Scottish National party think that there should be multiple referendums until one of them possibly produces the right result, but given their track record—losing the referendum on the alternative vote, losing the independence referendum and losing the European Union referendum—they are not doing too well. They might start to think that perhaps they ought to accept and respect a referendum result. I shall respect this result.
We need to be very clear about the red lines that we were given by the British people. My constituents have made very clear that, No. 1, there must be an end to unchecked EU migration, and, No. 2, there must be no more billions for bloated Brussels bureaucrats. That plainly indicates that we must leave the single market, and that if we want to do unfettered trade deals with the rest of the world, we must leave the customs union.
I make no bones about the fact that there will be a real impact on Dover, which is why I am working hard to make this a success. I have put together proposals on how we can restore border controls at Dover effectively, and I have convened a group to discuss how we can manage customs duties if we leave the European Union in two years, and how we can be ready on day one.
It is the job of the House, and the job of each and every one of its Members, not just to respect the result but to make it work for the good of the British people. We cannot be here hoping for doom, hoping for things to go wrong. We need to recognise that if things do go wrong, that will have an impact on the people whom we serve and represent. They will lose their jobs; they will lose their homes; they will be less well off. That is why I am making every effort to make this work, and why I implore everyone in the House to make it work and make a success of it. We must recognise that we shall have to leave the single market, recognise that we shall have to leave the customs union, and recognise that we shall have to be ready on day one.
We also need to recognise that there may not be a deal. We should work tirelessly, in good faith, for a deal, but it may be that no deal is immediately forthcoming—again, for the reason set out by my right hon. Friend for Tatton: that the mindset of our European colleagues is not currently conducive to a deal. That is why we must be ready on day one, and we must be ready for the fact that the EU may not wish to do a deal at that time. We should also bear it in mind that, as any deal-maker or negotiator will tell you, the best way to land a deal is to be prepared for no deal to take place. That is why we need to be ready for border controls, ready for customs duties, and ready for trade with the whole wide world, as well as being ready to do a positive deal and have positive engagement with the European Union in the years to come.
I implore the House to think and act constructively, to respect the result, and to look to the future of this nation believing that the best days are yet to come.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
I arrived in the House with my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd) 25 years ago. I am delighted to be sitting on the Bench with him today, and I am delighted to say that I agree with every word he said— which gives me four minutes in which to talk about other things.
President Donald made a very important statement yesterday—President Donald Tusk, that is. Donald Tusk pointed to the threats that face Europe: the threats from Russia, the threats posed by climate change, and the threats from across the Atlantic, from the other Donald. I suspect that if this situation had arisen before the referendum, we might have seen a different result. More and more people in this country are realising that we need our European partnership, and that this is not the time to be leaving the co-operation of European foreign and security policy, not the time to be leaving the European Defence Agency, and not the time to be leaving that co-operation with our European partners.
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)
I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying, and he is arguing with passion, but neither is it the time to replay the arguments of the referendum. The British public have spoken, and now it is down to us to act on their views and vote with the Government this evening.
Mike Gapes
I am not replaying the arguments. I am dealing with realities. It is interesting to note that, at the last general election in 2015, the hon. Gentleman may have stood on a manifesto in which his party said yes to the single market. It also said that it would hold a referendum: it had a mandate to do that. But as the former Europe Minister, the right hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington), said in June 2015:
“The referendum is advisory, as was the case for both the 1975 referendum on Europe and the Scottish independence vote last year.”—[Official Report, 16 June 2015; Vol. 597, c. 231.]
This Parliament must decide how, when and if the referendum should be implemented. The problem with the position that is being taken by both Front Benches is that triggering article 50 early will place us on an escalator travelling in one direction, with no ability to get off. A legal process is taking place in the Irish courts at this moment about whether—about the possibilities, the implications—article 50 is reversible. We do not know the judgment yet. Why on earth are we triggering before we know the legal position on article 50? Why have our Government decided to go for the hardest possible leaving of the EU—no customs union, no Euratom, problems for Gibraltar, and problems for the Northern Ireland peace process and the Good Friday agreement? All those things have been done before we know whether we could decide in a year’s time, or perhaps in two years’ time, before this process is complete.
We need not be on this escalator. We need a means to stop this process, and that is why we need clarity before we start triggering it. We did not need to trigger it in March this year; we could have waited. This did not need to be done before the French election and the German election.
The reality is that the ratification process requires decisions in 27 national Parliaments, in the regional Parliaments of Wallonia and elsewhere in Belgium, and in the European Parliament. If we have that process, we will have a narrow window of opportunity—perhaps just about a year from the autumn of this year to the autumn of 2018—and then there will have to be a ratification process. We will not get a good agreement. We could be in the disastrous position of going off the cliff with no agreement at all—with the terrible economic consequences of World Trade Organisation terms only. That would be an unmitigated disaster for my constituents and for the country.
I am doing what the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) talked about yesterday: I am voting as Members of Parliament should—I am following my own judgment and I am listening to my constituents and to the country.
Mike Gapes
No, I have to conclude.
I will not be voting to trigger article 50 at any stage.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
I cast my personal vote for remain in the referendum. I had, and have, concerns about the security implications of leaving the EU. I have always been opposed to an EU army, and I wonder whether one may come about without us there to veto it. Many of the concerns I had about security issues across Europe have still not even been addressed or answered. I also had concerns about the inflationary effects of leaving, and some of those are kicking in, but I note that inflation has not reached the 2% level that the Bank of England aims for.
I surprised many of my colleagues, and especially those I sat with on the European Scrutiny Committee, by voting to remain, because they recognised that I never had any truck with the federalisation of Europe—the political side of Europe. I felt that that was wrong and that it impinged too far on the work of this Parliament. Indeed, many people in my constituency said to me, “We joined a common market. We didn’t join an EU.”
Even though my personal vote was for remain, there was one thing I always passionately felt and fully supported. I do not class myself particularly as one of the hard right wingers of the Conservative party—one of those whom Opposition Members and those who are against this policy have painted as the only reason why the former Prime Minister was forced into a referendum. I passionately believed that there had to be a referendum, because people were never given their say on the European Union. They were given their say on the common market, and they said they wanted to be in it, but they were never given their say on the European Union.
What has been clear since the result of the referendum is that the EU has not taken seriously any of the lessons, in terms of why people in this country moved against it. I have to say that I would tomorrow vote to leave. We had an opportunity to negotiate with the European Union and work on some of the issues that were a problem for people in this country, but the European Union ignored our former Prime Minister, David Cameron; it did not think our country would vote to leave. I see the same issues now in the comments of the Maltese Prime Minister and of Donald Tusk, and there are real warnings on the horizon for such people in some of the elections taking place across Europe. This is an organisation that needs to reform; if it does not, I fear for where it will go.
Above all, the referendum was an exercise in democracy. It would be folly in the extreme for the other place, where politicians may be dominated by parties that have been diminished in the elected House, to try to go against the will of this House. It would be a suicide bid by the other place if it tried to amend or disrupt the will of this House. That is a warning that I give. I am on the record as wanting Lords reform. We cannot get Lords reform if the public are not behind us, but believe me, they will be right behind us if the Lords try to stop the will of this House over the next few weeks. I send that as a friendly warning that the Lords must take note of what this House says, because what this referendum has been about, above all else, is democracy: people saying they did not want to be controlled by unelected bodies in Europe.
People had their choice, and they expect us to action that choice. The result may not have been the one I voted for, but I am a democrat. Above all, I respect the ballot box and the outcome of the ballot box, and this House must respect the outcome of the ballot box, too.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
We as a Parliament and a democracy have not done that well by the people who elected us. We took the country into a referendum that had nothing to do with the best interests of Britain and everything to do with attempting to heal deep divisions in the Conservative party.
Labour Members did not oppose the referendum, because we did not wish to appear not to trust the voters, and I have to admit that we had some divisions of our own. However, all of us failed to set the rules for the referendum. We did not impose a super-majority, and we did not have a requirement for a road map showing the implications of a leave or a remain vote and the cost implications of the two alternatives. Then came the shockingly irresponsible referendum campaign, which was full of lies, misinformation, dog-whistle politics, fear and xenophobia.
When the people of Bridgend voted by a majority to leave the EU, they did so for a variety of reasons. They wanted the money back that the battle bus told them was going to Europe while, apparently, nothing came back to the UK, and they wanted it spent on the NHS. They are not going to get it. They wanted control of immigration and spending. They wanted an end to austerity, and they wanted to wipe the smug look off the faces of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor—well, they achieved that one.
On the doorstep, people did not tell me they would be happy to lose their workers’ rights, to lose their jobs, to have lower standards of living or goods, or to have reduced opportunities for their children and grandchildren. Nor did they talk about wanting to leave the single market or the customs union, or to pursue a bold and ambitious free trade agreement. Somehow, we as politicians were to square the circle: stop immigration, get our money back, get control back and become more affluent. I cannot keep on voting for a process that gives the people of Bridgend no assurance of a secure future for them and their children. I will not be voting to trigger article 50.
Kevin Brennan
I have taken the unusual step of listening to the debate, rather than contributing to it. Having listened for many hours over the last two days, I will join my hon. Friend in voting against Second Reading this evening.
Mrs Moon
I welcome that information, because my hon. Friend is someone whose integrity and contributions in debates I always take note of, and I am deeply pleased that he will be joining me in the Lobby.
We are voting today, with the White Paper promised for tomorrow; it was not in place before this debate. We have no risk assessment, no financial assessment and a total lack of clarity on the Government’s policy. We have nothing bar the thin promise of the sunlit uplands—this is not in the Prime Minister’s gift anyway—of a passporting and tariff-free agreement that means that costs will not rise for financial services, or for my Ford engines plant and for Tata Steel next door in Aberavon, both of which send over two thirds of their output into Europe.
I intend to keep voting no until I see a position that is the best we can obtain for this country. I am ashamed at the way we have abandoned EU citizens and their families, who give their lives, their love and their settled future to the UK. I have a wonderful German daughter-in-law and an extended German family. I have many friends who are MPs across Europe and members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and who are deeply saddened by the words and threats emanating from the UK Government.
I accept the outcome of the referendum. We are leaving the European Union, but that does not mean that I am willing to vote for the Conservative party to lead this country into a treacherous, uncertain future. There is a Gramsci quote that, depending on the translation, says that the old order is dying, the new one is struggling to be born, and in the interregnum monsters are abroad. They most certainly are. We are voting before we know the outcome of three European elections that will influence the deal we finally face. And then there is Trump’s America. Can we trust any part of our economic security to an America that has just had Trump’s inauguration speech: support for torture, a ban on Muslims entering the US, anti-climate-change rhetoric, the clear statement of “America first”, and the commitment to end trade agreements that are not in America’s best interests?
I am voting as I am particularly because I do not trust this Government taking me to the right place. I trust the British people; I do not trust this Government.
James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)
I am in an easy position: I have an easy decision to make—in fact I have no decision to make. I campaigned and voted for Brexit, as did my constituency and the United Kingdom, so I am not torn on what to do this evening. However I will not demand that hon. Members vote a certain way, or even suggest how they should vote, because each one of us has a unique combination of local constituency pressures, and I cannot look into the heart of other Members of this House to see where those pressures sit, so I will not call on anyone to vote one way or another. Instead, I will reflect on the implications of the Brexit vote for all of us, irrespective of our political position and how we choose to vote in the Divisions this evening and in Committee next week.
Brexit provides us with an opportunity, but it also exerts upon us an external discipline; discipline guides our actions and decisions, and also encourages us to do what is difficult but right. The discipline that Brexit imposes on us is to listen very carefully to people in Britain who clearly feel that they have not been listened to up until this point. It is very easy for us to project our own prejudices on to why people voted the way they did, and we all do it. We have seen those who voted for Brexit projecting base motivations on to those who will vote in alignment with their constituents, but we would be wrong to do that. However, we also have to understand why some communities in Britain are concerned about their standard of living, migration and globalisation, and we have to respond to those concerns. Also, we Government Members have to understand that at some point we will need to explain why we are, perhaps, prioritising certain markets and business sectors in our negotiations above others. We will need to explain the value that international migration brings to the British economy, and perhaps why immigration will not suddenly stop overnight, the day after we leave the EU.
David Rutley
I thank my hon. Friend for the speech he is making, and his important points on the next steps. Does he agree that the modern industrial strategy that is now being set out will be vital in paving the way for our economy in a post-Brexit world?
James Cleverly
It is incredibly important that the Government lay out a pathway for moving forwards that explains to many people in Britain how a global economy can work for not just the greater good, but their individual good.
Ultimately, when Members of this House state that the British people need to have a say, they are absolutely right, but they should remember that Brexit is the start of an ongoing existence, not a discrete process, and that the deal that the Prime Minister and Ministers negotiate will be the deal that is put to the British people at the 2020 general election. Members from other parties might feel that they have a better version of a relationship with Europe. They might prefer a version that prioritises market access over border control. That is not necessarily a position that I would agree with, but it is none the less a legitimate position. If they wish to prioritise membership of the customs union over our ability to strike independent free trade deals, that, again, would not be a position that I would agree with, but it is none the less a legitimate position.
Parliamentary sovereignty means that those alternative versions of Brexit—a Scottish National party Brexit, a Liberal Democrat Brexit or a Labour Brexit—can be put before the British people in the lead-up to the 2020 general election, and those hypotheses can be tested in the ultimate crucible of the British democratic system. If their versions of Brexit are seen to be more palatable than the Government’s version, we will know, because Members will be returned here in proportion to how palatable or otherwise those various versions of Brexit are. That is how British democracy should work, and how it has been prevented from working up until now, which is why I will not just vote to trigger article 50 this evening and in future Divisions, but will do so passionately and happily—because it means that for the first time in 40 years, the way British parliamentary democracy is meant to work will be the way it is able to work. But I will not ask or force others to vote with me.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
My constituency voted to remain. My country voted to leave. My conscience continues to believe that the country’s interests are best served within the EU. I believe that my job is to act in accordance with my conscience, in the interests of my constituents, within the parliamentary democracy I am proud to uphold. I believe that my constituents’ trust and belief in parliamentary democracy is the greatest security our country has against the rise of fascistic leaders and the destruction of our national value system. So it would be wrong to reject the result of the referendum. Newcastle is part of a nation, and that which unites us is greater than that which divides us. For that reason, I will vote for the Second Reading of this Bill.
But there is a “but”, and there was always going to be. This Government are attempting a constitutional land grab. The referendum was about the will of the people, not the will of a Prime Minister who is not even elected. Some 52% voted to leave the European Union but they did not vote to leave the single market, and they did not vote to leave the customs union.
The north-east is the only region in the country to export more than it imports, and more than half of that goes to the European Union. It is estimated that 160,000 jobs are directly linked to our membership of the single market, while our great universities received £155 million in EU funds in the current funding cycle alone.
When I talk to businesses, they are incandescent that Tories are rejecting the greatest free trade alliance on the planet. I can also tell the House that, having negotiated joint ventures, regulatory undertakings and multi-million pound contracts across three continents, I have never come across a negotiating position as inept as the one being adopted by this Government: “Give us what we want or we’ll duff up your economy.” I have zero confidence in their negotiating trade deals, in which Parliament will have no say. They will sell our socioeconomic birthright for a mess of right-wing pottage. When the Chancellor talks of changing our economic model, he means turning the UK into a low-wage, low-skilled tax haven with little or no welfare support.
More than a third of children in Newcastle live in poverty, and one in five of my constituents claim benefits. North-east workers are, on average, almost £4,000 a year worse off than they were 10 years ago. Am I going to vote for a Trumpian, dystopian, “alt-right” free market future for them? Absolutely not. Already, constituents are asking me questions I never expected to hear. They are asking whether they could be deported to the European Union. They want to know just how racist an insult has to be before they should complain. And they are asking whether there will be a nuclear war, and which side we would be on. The Government need to accept amendments to the Bill that will ensure that our values, our socioeconomic model and our membership of the single market are safeguarded; otherwise, democracy for my constituents, and my conscience will—
Mr Speaker
Order. I am sorry, but in a bid to accommodate all would-be contributors, I shall have to reduce the time limit on Back-Bench speeches to three minutes with immediate effect.
Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
It is a privilege to take part in the debate on this historic Bill, which is designed simply to start a process. A number of hon. and right hon. Members have signed amendments to the Bill, and I say to them that there will be plenty of time over the next two years to debate aspects of European Union legislation when we introduce the great repeal Bill. To those who feel that now is the time to begin discussing our terms of membership or to cling to certain aspects of the EU, I would simply say that they are too late. Since joining the EU in 1972, we have been subjected to mission creep and stealth integration with no votes and no say. The great British people were clear with their instruction on 23 June: they said, “Leave. We have had enough.”
I know that voting on this Bill will present a moral dilemma for many in this place, but for me, it is a relatively easy matter because the will of the people in North Cornwall is clear, with 60% in North Cornwall and 55% in Cornwall as a whole voting to leave the EU. They voted with their eyes open, clear in their belief that they wanted to leave. Some have suggested that the vote was advisory, but I am a democrat and I say to those Members across the Chamber that it was an instruction, and I will vote this evening to ensure that it is carried out. To those discussing the question of a hard or soft Brexit I would say that there is no such thing. There is leaving, and there are different levels of remaining in.
We have seen the effects of globalisation and EU integration in Cornwall over the past four decades, including coastal communities being left behind while cities increased in wealth and growth. There has been no trickle-down to our rural communities, and it is little wonder that they felt disconnected, under-represented and powerless as decisions taken inside the EU affected their day-to-day lives. Whether because of restrictive Brussels farming policy, foreign trawlers in our territorial waters or immigration levels, people in North Cornwall and the UK have said that they want to be in charge of their own destiny. The erosion of our sovereignty has stopped us dealing with those and other issues, but that will be no more. I know that people across this great nation voted on 23 June for many different reasons, but we in Cornwall have seen with our own eyes the destruction of the fishing industry by the common fisheries policy. Leaving the EU will be seen as a success in that area if the common fisheries policy and common agricultural policy are replaced by British versions that work much more effectively for the people involved.
The people of Britain have spoken, and the people of North Cornwall have spoken. I stood at the general election to oppose EU membership unless significant reforms were negotiated. That did not happen, and my constituency voted to leave the European Union. That is why I will walk through the Lobby this evening to vote in support of a Bill to trigger article 50, to ensure that the democratic process that started with the referendum is completed in full.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
At the very first hustings I attended in 2001, at Treorchy comprehensive school, the first question I was asked was, “Will you always vote with your conscience?” I recently visited Ysgol Cymer, also in my constituency, and asked members of the school council how I should vote today, after setting out the problems involved. Every single one of them said, “With your conscience”, and that is what I intend to do. I am a democrat, and most of those in my constituency voted in a different way from me. I am a democrat, but I believe in a form of democracy that never silences minorities. The 48% in this country and, for that matter, the 46% or 45% in my constituency, or whatever the figure was, have a right to a voice, so today I am voting and speaking on behalf of a minority of my constituents.
All my life I have believed that the best form of patriotism is internationalism. My first political memories are of Franco’s guards in Spain. I was thrown out of Chile in 1986 for attending the funeral of a lad who had been set on fire by Pinochet’s police. I distrust politicians who spuriously use the national security argument to launch campaigns against migrants, refugees and ethnic minorities. I fear the turn this world is taking towards narrow nationalism, protectionism and demagoguery. Distrust of those who are different from us can all too often, although not always, turn to hatred of foreigners. That way lies the trail to war.
I know that is not the tradition of the Rhondda. We were built on migrants from England, Scotland, Ireland and Italy. This country was built on the sweat, the courage, the ingenuity and the get up and go of Huguenots, Normans, Protestants fleeing the inquisition, Irish Catholics fleeing famine, Jews escaping persecution, Polish airmen, Spanish nurses, Indian doctors and Afro-Caribbeans who wanted to help make this country great.
I have stood at every election on a platform and a party manifesto that said we would stay in the European Union. That was my solemn vow to the voters of the Rhondda. I admit that I lost the vote, including in my constituency, but I have not lost my faith. It remains my deep conviction that leaving the European Union, especially on the terms that the Government seem to expect, will do untold damage to my constituents, especially the poorest of them.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a very brave and compelling case. I came into the Chamber today not having finally decided which way to vote. Does he agree that, if I believe the Government’s plan is not in the interests of my country and my constituents, I should join him in the Lobby and vote no to the Bill tonight?
Chris Bryant
I am going to vote for the reasoned amendment tonight because I believe it is in the interest of my constituents. I know that many of my constituents will disagree with me, and maybe they will take it out on me, just as it was taken out on Burke in Bristol. In the end, there is no point in any of us being a Member of this House if we do not have things that we believe in and that we are prepared to fight for and, if necessary, lay down our job for.
This moment is so dangerous because the Government have stated that it is irreversible. This is it, folks: now or never. In this most uncertain of times, we are being asked to vote for a completely unknown deal. Yes, I know we are going to leave the European Union and that the House will vote for it. My vote cannot change that, but I believe this Bill—this way of Brexiting—will leave us poorer, weaker and at far, far greater danger in Europe, in the west and in this country, so I say not in my name. Never, never, never.
Amanda Solloway (Derby North) (Con)
It is a great honour to speak in this historic debate. On 23 June we saw 52% of the United Kingdom, and 57% of Derby, vote for the UK to leave the European Union. In Derby, voter turnout was 70%, almost double that for our local elections, with 18,000 more people voting to leave than to remain.
I deliberated for a long time over my decision, and I spent time listening to both sides of the argument. I could see strong reasons to leave and to remain. I started veering towards leave, but I finally decided that remain, in my opinion, would be best for the country. I campaigned hard for us to stay in the EU.
While I was out campaigning, people came to me with clear messages. They said that they wanted to clamp down on immigration and how this was an opportunity to stand on our own and make our own decisions. On the other side, there was uncertainty about the country’s future outside the EU and about the long-term implications and potential consequences. The decision will shape this country for generations, and it is one that we must respect. We must ensure that it becomes a reality, and we must look forward so that future generations benefit from this opportunity. It is now the time to look for the opportunities Brexit can bring to our country. Of course that will be challenging, but the Government are already working hard to create new avenues of trade and investment with new friends and partners, inside and outside Europe. Since the referendum, I have been talking to a wide range of people and businesses in my constituency, and they tell me they are now looking forward to the opportunity that Brexit brings. There is a feeling of optimism about ensuring that small, medium-sized and large businesses thrive after we leave, while of course there is an acknowledgement of the complexity of the negotiations.
Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)
My hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann) spoke about eyes being wide open and looking to the sunny uplands. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Amanda Solloway) agree with the many constituents who have written to me to say that they knew what they were doing, they saw both sides of the argument and we should now be looking forward, just as my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall said?
Amanda Solloway
Absolutely. As my hon. Friend said, people did know what they were doing, and it is clear that in my constituency people are looking for opportunities and the way forward. I am excited by the prospect that lies before us, as I believe we have a genuine opportunity to forge new trade deals and new relationships, and make this great country even greater, taking us forward proudly and successfully. The great repeal Bill will be the starting point for us to look at legislation. I am confident that this Government will, as they must, safeguard and indeed enhance employee and human rights, holding dear the British values that we all share. We should of course be mindful that we are not leaving Europe; we are leaving the EU.
As I mentioned, 57% of those who voted in Derby voted to leave, and we now have a responsibility to negotiate the very best deal, not only for the people of Derby but for the people of this country as a whole. Democracy is about listening to the people. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) said in her excellent maiden speech, this was not a request—it was an instruction. This should therefore be a time for us to come together and not be divided on this decision. Our duty is to the public we represent, which is why I shall be supporting the Bill.
Tom Elliott (Fermanagh and South Tyrone) (UUP)
I welcome this debate, which has in general been a good one, both today and yesterday, with people speaking from the heart and honestly giving the facts as they see them. This is a historic decision that we are taking in Parliament, but let us not forget that the decision has already been delivered by the people of the United Kingdom. We gave them the opportunity to have their say and they have had it; it was not, as was said earlier, an act of madness of this House. I deplore that suggestion, as this decision was delivered by the people and we must respect it, although people can have their views in here, and I respect those, too.
My constituency is right out in the west of the UK and is bordered by four counties in the Republic of Ireland. We therefore need to have flexibility, but let us move on and get that. Let us have that common travel area and an open border—one that is as open as possible—so that we can have good friendships with the EU when we leave it. We are not leaving Europe; we in Northern Ireland are just as good Europeans as anybody. Our ancestors went to fight for Europe, just as our colleagues from Scotland, England, Wales and many other Commonwealth countries did. We went to help those Europeans, and we still want that common relationship. The people have delivered a decision for us, and it is more important now that we look to how we make the best of that decision. We need to get the best for all of our constituents—for the people of the United Kingdom—and the only way to do that is by working in harmony, as far as is reasonably possible.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a key part of maintaining that harmony is by ensuring that we have unfettered access to travel across these islands, that a border between Northern Ireland and southern Ireland would be unacceptable, and that any border controls between Northern Ireland and the mainland UK would be unforgivable?
Tom Elliott
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and we in Northern Ireland totally support that position. We want that for the whole United Kingdom, because there is great trade between the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain, and between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and we want to see that flourish.
We must move on, because it is the indecision that is putting our economy in a difficult position. It will progress into a more difficult position if we do not continue to take decisions. The best thing we can do is move on with this decision. Hopefully, we will have negotiators who will do their best for the United Kingdom. I have heard the arguments today: some people are saying that we do not know what the agreement is or what we are getting out of the deal. That is absolutely right, but it is what the people voted for. We need the best negotiators, and we need to have faith in them. It is up to Parliament to make sure that we keep up the pressure on those negotiators to get the best deal possible. We in the Ulster Unionist party will certainly be scrutinising all the amendments. Hopefully, there will be some that could make the Bill better that we will look at positively.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
One of the benefits of making a later contribution to a debate is the opportunity to reflect on earlier speeches. The standout one for me came late yesterday evening, when my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman), who supported remain in the referendum but represents a constituency that voted to leave, set out very clearly why it is important to recognise the referendum result and why we should vote to deliver the wishes of our constituents and the country as a whole. That is also my position.
Last week, I met some children in my constituency when I visited their school. I was asked some pretty serious questions. They asked me why I voted remain, and I explained why I felt that remaining would have been better for our businesses and given us a sense of certainty. They asked why so many people voted to leave, and I explained that I believe that people were attracted by the proposition of taking control, particularly of immigration. They then came up with the tough one: what happens next? This debate is all about that—the process of triggering article 50 and the negotiations that will take place over the next two years.
We have before us a clear, simple Bill that represents the result of the June referendum. I supported the Government’s decision to give the people a say. It was in the Conservative party manifesto, and in 2015 my constituents gave me a significantly larger majority and Parliament voted six to one in favour of it. It therefore follows that support for the referendum requires respect for its outcome. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) argued, I do not see how anyone can suggest otherwise. No decision had been made for more than 40 years and the body of which we were a member had changed, so it is entirely right that we voted for a referendum. As with the United States election, though, if we ask the public a question, we should not be too surprised if the electorate come back with an unexpected answer. It is now our job to implement their decision.
The decision to leave the EU presents us with opportunities, as was underlined to me in a discussion with a small business owner in my constituency. He was an ardent remainer who had joined me to hand out leaflets to commuters at the station. Nevertheless, he described the referendum as being like a business owner pitching to retain an account and the custom for his business. The decision had gone against his company—the customer decided not to renew and was not going to change his mind. A businessman in that position has to start to look for other deals elsewhere.
That is precisely the approach the Government are taking. They have formed the new Department for International Trade and are making deals with new partners and managing the process of the leaving. I have some misgivings about the route we are about to go down, but we must accept the wishes of the people and proceed with the Bill in support of what the people decided.
Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)
I campaigned for and voted to remain, but I will respect the result of the referendum and vote in favour of the Bill. However, like many of my colleagues, that does not mean that I am voting to give the Government a free ride to pursue a right-wing hard Brexit. It is our responsibility to show how divisions can be healed. We need to speak not only of process but about what sort of country we want the UK to be and how we can build new relationships with Europe and countries around the world. We must watch and scrutinise. It is not about whether the UK is leaving the EU, but how.
For so many people in my area, the referendum was an emphatic shout of “Enough!” from those who felt left behind by globalisation—people who have had enough of being economically, politically and socially excluded. They feel powerless and excluded, with nobody listening to them on issues such as immigration. The referendum was an opportunity for many of them to take decisive action in the hope of bringing about change. We must now listen to that demand for change and act. The change must begin by ending the characterisation of some leave voters as people who did not know what they were doing. That serves only to deepen the chasm running through the UK today. We need to take time to understand the pain and anger of those people.
What we also must do is hear the legitimate concerns of the 48% of people who voted remain. We should not just brush them off as remoaners who are attempting to frustrate the will of the people. Rhetoric is powerful and can be incredibly divisive. We are one country, and the stark divisions of the referendum must be allowed to heal. That should start with a common narrative from the Government that the Brexit negotiations will strive to get the best deal for everyone, not just for those who voted leave. That is why the amendment process is so crucial—the amendments set out a vision, which we, the Labour party, and many others want to see. The whole process is about looking to the future, not the past, which is why we now have to work to find a way through the process.
After we have left the EU, globalisation will not cease to exist, nor will the refugee crisis, the problems with immigration, the threat of terrorism, the lack of funding for the health service and education, and the pervasive inequality that exists in the UK. Brexit must seek to address those issues in a liberal, open and inclusive way—a way that insists on a plan that supports jobs and the economy, tackles inequality and is based on building a new consensus here in Britain on immigration. It must include the protection of workers’ rights and guarantee legal rights for EU nationals living in Britain. That plan must be progressive and united by our common principles of respect, tolerance and open-mindedness. In that way, hope can overcome despair, and a brighter, fairer future for all will seem possible, even if we are no longer part of the EU.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
I have listened to this debate for the past couple of days, and I can quite understand why constituents feel that we are voting on coming out of the European Union tonight. We are not. The Bill is a simple and straightforward matter that simply puts us back to what we believe the situation was before the Supreme Court judgment. That is all the Bill does.
I disagree with those who tell me that the referendum was only advisory. In our manifesto, we said explicitly that we would accept the result of the referendum whatever it was. The referendum effectively ceased to be advisory at that point. No one has ever said how voting against giving the Prime Minister permission to start article 50 negotiations complies with that, or indeed how we could ever be trusted again to take democratic decisions in the interests of the people.
Those like me who voted to remain need to accept that we lost the argument and the vote—but I am not throwing in the towel. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), I am doing all that I can to work on the aspects that are needed to take us forward. That includes, for example, this morning’s meeting of the Justice Committee in which we had yet another session with leading lawyers about what we need to carry forward in the justice system.
Both Houses of Parliament have already spent 60 hours discussing the EU and our leaving of it. That is 60 hours of debate to which the Front-Bench team has listened.
Let me quickly comment on two things. The first is the term “hard Brexit”. It is one of the laziest forms of journalism I have ever heard. It is a great shame that it has been used in this House. How maintaining the common travel area with Ireland and the rights of EU nationals in Britain, and protecting workers’ rights and the best places for science and innovation can possibly be called a hard Brexit, I do not know.
I would like Ministers to give us some confidence on the issue of Euratom. The Joint European Torus project is located at Culham in my constituency. I heard what the Secretary of State said yesterday, but I would like some reassurance, because it was negotiating in good faith and then this suddenly occurred.
Michelle Thomson (Edinburgh West) (Ind)
There has been a lot of Sturm und Drang around this debate over the past couple of days. I will try to reflect how I feel about it. I have a sense of disbelief and despair at the decision that is about to be made, and significant doubt in the abilities of those who seek to give voice to my constituents in going any way towards meeting their needs. Let us be clear: 71% of my constituents in Edinburgh West voted to remain.
The Scottish National party’s reasoned amendment is backed by many of my constituents, the vast majority of whom voted against independence in our independence referendum and many of whom are not SNP supporters. To a man and to a woman, they are writing to me, saying, “If this goes ahead, I am firmly in favour of taking the next steps to protect my business, my child who wants to go through Erasmus, and my ability to travel, work and live freely within Europe.” How strongly we feel about the matter in Scotland—for those in and without the SNP—is fundamental.
This is not just about economics, although stepping away from that matter is, incidentally, a vast collective madness. The philosophy of Europe as a unifier to protect against the sort of madness and rhetoric we hear from Trump—racist, misogynistic and protectionist—is a fundamental for me. So, yes, I feel disbelief. With every breath in my body, I am going to ensure that Scotland can continue to access the single market.
Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)
I congratulate my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), although she is not currently in her place, on a fantastic maiden speech that bodes well for the future of Lincolnshire. My contribution will be short and to the point.
In the 2015 general election, my Conservative colleagues and I stood on a manifesto pledge that we would let the British people decide whether to stay in or leave the European Union, and that we would honour the referendum result, whatever the outcome. We won the general election and kept our promise on holding the referendum. We must, therefore, keep our promise on honouring the result. It is on that basis that I will vote with the Government tonight to trigger article 50.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
I am fortunate; my personal long and strongly held views align with those of the three quarters of my constituents who voted to remain. I will therefore be voting against triggering of article 50, by whatever route someone is empowered to do it—royal prerogative, referendum result, prime ministerial diktat or whatever. I am against it and my constituents are against it, and I will not be moved from that.
Let me explain why I feel so strongly. I ask your forgiveness, Mr Speaker, if my contribution is a touch personal. Both sides of my family suffered from the wars of the last century. It was my grandfather on my mother’s side who formed my early views. Joe Mead, an agriculture worker from Shepreth, a village outside Cambridge, was a keen and competitive race-walker. I grew up surrounded by his trophies. When he moved to Chingford in north London, he used to walk home at weekends—50 miles each way—but that was before the first world war. Like many other brave young men, he stood knee deep in water in the trenches for months at Passchendaele. He at least came home, but the gangrene meant that he lost one leg—a race-walker no more.
A few decades later, there was another war. My father, who was born in Austria, was forced to flee Vienna when the Nazis marched in because, as I have recently learned, of his family’s left-wing views. He came to Britain and was made welcome, for which he and our family are eternally grateful.
I recount the story because the reason I am passionate about the European Union and the part it has played in keeping a fractious continent from falling out. Some people say that it was not the EU but NATO, but the EU was born out of a desire to stop war in Europe, and there is no doubt in my mind that having a political framework to resolve conflicts and differences, to negotiate and to compromise, has made a huge contribution to keeping the peace. My generation is a privileged one—we have not, most of us, had to go to war.
Sir Gerald Howarth
I fully understand the hon. Gentleman’s personal circumstances and his passion, but does he not agree that the European currency—the euro—has done more to divide Europe by impoverishing Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, and that so long as that continues there is likely to be further division in Europe?
Daniel Zeichner
No, I do not agree. I think our continent is much more united than when it was at war.
How quickly we have forgotten just how this was achieved. At this of all times, when the world is such an uncertain place, this is not the moment to turn away from our European home, and to take a huge gamble on getting a deal with the most reckless and unreliable American President any of us have known.
There is much more that I would like to say about Cambridge and the threat to our universities and to our research institutes. I associate myself with many of the comments that have been made by my hon. Friends. I am particularly concerned about the 9,000 non-UK EU nationals in and around Cambridge whose future is so uncertain and whose future could have been assured if the Government had moved more swiftly, and the damage that it will do to our country if those people start to leave. The effect that that will have on our university and research sector troubles me a lot.
Last week, out of the blue, as we have heard, the Government announced that they want to pull out of the European nuclear agency, Euratom. This appeared to happen without discussion or consultation with the industry, and without thought to the wider consequences.
There are so many other things to say about the threats to our environmental protections, to our rights at work, to our data and privacy rights, and to our world-leading life sciences sector—but I return to my starting point. Three quarters of people in Cambridge voted to remain. I came into Parliament to represent their views. They put their trust in me, and I will not betray that trust. There is a real risk that the Government will lead a retreat to turn Britain into an isolated island. The United States is building a wall. At such a time, we must be brave and go on making the case that retreat, isolation and walls do not a modern world make. The European Union is far from perfect, but we should be working to make it better, not weakening it at a dangerous time.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
This is a long Second Reading debate, and yet the Bill is very succinct, and rightly so. I therefore think it is incumbent on me to be concise in my remarks.
In the lead-up to the referendum on our membership of the European Union last June, the Government published—at the cost of a little over £9 million, from memory—a booklet that went to virtually every household in the UK explaining why they believed it was best for us to remain members of the EU. The booklet also said, however, “Whatever decision the British people make, we will implement.” It is therefore, I believe, our duty to ensure that we pass this Bill tonight, without delay or amendments designed to wreck it, so that the Prime Minister has the authority to start the official formal withdrawal process, and so that this Parliament can once again exercise its sovereignty in rightly holding the Government to account to ensure that we get the best possible deal as we leave the European Union and once again broaden our horizons as a global Britain.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
I rise to speak in this debate as a European. I was born a European. Those who supported the Brexit cause told us that if we left the European Union we would be no less European. I say this to them: I will hold them to their word.
I do not believe that the referendum was our finest democratic moment. I disagree with the Brexiteers about that. Many of my constituents have raised serious concerns about the referendum, but that is not what the debate is about any more; it is about the beginning of the most important question that our country has faced for a generation.
We must rapidly move on from the process and on to substance. To those who proudly say that immigration is not a problem in our country’s metropolitan areas and who disparage those areas that feel strongly about it, I say that they are not taking the right approach. We need to understand that all parts of our country have benefited from immigration and that all British people are tolerant and respectful of others. Those are the best of British values, and the Prime Minister is wrong to design an economic policy entirely based on shutting down immigration.
Economic division in our country was the cause and will be the consequence of Brexit. Our economy is designed for London to charge ahead like Singapore, while the northern regions of England are held back like eastern Europe, and that is why people feel left out. The reason for that economic division is that power is hoarded here in this city. People in the north feel that for too long they have not had enough of a say, and they voted to leave as a result. The answer must be to address that power imbalance, never again to hoard power here and to have a truly federal Britain.
In my maiden speech, I said that Wirral was an internationally minded and cultured place. It was then and it is now. To those in our country who have been shocked, horrified, embarrassed and ashamed by the disgraceful racism and xenophobia that we have seen, I say that those are not our values and that is not my country, and we move on from this point with our values at our heart.
Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
The manifesto on which I stood in 2015 not only promised an in/out referendum on Europe, but stated:
“We will honour the result of the referendum, whatever the outcome.”
During the referendum campaign, I committed to respecting the result, even if it was decided by just one vote. In the end, the difference was more than 1 million votes. That 72% of the population turned out showed just how seriously the British public took the task of deciding their future. In my constituency, the turnout was more than 80%. By contrast, 58% turned out for the recent US presidential election. That was an election with huge consequences, not only for the USA but for the world, yet nearly 100 million Americans could not be bothered to turn out and vote.
As others have said, the referendum was not a consultation but an instruction. Today, I will do my duty and vote to trigger article 50. Then the work really begins. To use the analogy of a flight, we have boarded the plane and we are leaving Europe. Although we know the general direction, we do not yet know the destination. Some passengers believe that we are heading for some kind of tropical paradise, others an icy wasteland. Luckily we have a pilot who has a clear flight path, and I suspect that after flying around for a while, we will land not on an icy wasteland or in a tropical paradise, but somewhere quite familiar and similar to where we originally began.
I do not wish to belittle the great challenge ahead of us, but the fact is that the British economy is strong, resilient and dynamic. I never for one moment believed that the sky would fall in if we left the EU, but different segments of our economy will inevitably be impacted in different ways by Brexit. Some will obviously benefit and some will obviously struggle, and all are impacted to some degree by uncertainty. We must work hard and quickly to reduce that uncertainty, and we must provide every support and comfort to those sectors of the economy that we know are at most risk from Brexit.
We must listen to people with deep knowledge and expertise in sectors that are perhaps not well represented in this place, yet face particularly complex challenges due to Brexit, including the aviation industry, digital and creative industries, and those sectors for which there is no clear World Trade Organisation alternative. I encourage the Government to continue to engage with industry and with experts, and I look forward to playing my part by providing constructive input and holding the Government to account to ensure that they deliver a successful deal that helps Britain and secures my children’s future.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
I intend to vote in favour of activating article 50 tonight out of respect for the result of the referendum, despite its flaws and despite the deceit of the leave campaign, but I will write no blank cheques to anyone, least of all this simultaneously incompetent and ideological Government. I reject the assertion that the result of the referendum is the will of the people. It is not; it is the will of a slim majority. The use of that sinister phrase “the will of the people” to airbrush out of existence the 48% who voted remain is deeply troubling.
All Labour Members recognise the growing individual and geographical inequality in our country, the growing pressure on public services, the growing competition for low-paid jobs and the fear of cultural change from rapid social and economic transformation, but I certainly do not understand how a hard Brexit and the Government’s vision of a low-tax, low-regulation Singapore Britain is the answer to any of those legitimate concerns. That will destroy jobs, employers and our public finances, and make it more difficult to address the social and economic challenges that we now recognise.
We need a vision of a Britain that is closely integrated with our European partners and the European market, to which we are most close. Our manufacturers, our service sectors, our creative industries and our universities are hugely dependent on those markets and on European skills. If we walk away from Europe out of petty malice, we will cut off our nose to spite our face, and we will destroy livelihoods, opportunities and hopes throughout the land.
That vision is the antithesis of what those who are driving forward the Government’s agenda want. They threaten to create a low-tax, low-public-service haven on the coast of Europe if we do not get a trade deal with the EU, but that is precisely the kind of UK that they want, free from what they see as the constraints of employment rights and environmental protection. They want a UK with low corporation tax, low income tax for the rich, no protection for people at work and minimal public services. The Government have taken the understandable concern about immigration and the justifiable anger about bad employers using cheap imported labour to drive down nationally agreed pay rates, and have used those concerns to drive through their own vision, which, ironically and tragically, would end up hurting most the people who are most concerned about the current arrangements.
The Government are so desperate for a trade deal with the United States that we go cap in hand to the racist President Trump, because we need his good favour to get such a deal. At the same time, we are alienating all the other countries with which, until recently, we shared the values of decency, tolerance and respect.
Tonight I will respect the result of the referendum, but after that, all bets are off. I will not allow good people who voted to leave for understandable reasons to be hoodwinked by the hard right of the Conservative party, and I will not allow our wonderful, beautiful, decent and tolerant country to be abandoned to a vision of ultra-hard Brexit, shorn of the standards we have all come to enjoy and, perhaps, take for granted.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Like my Conservative colleagues, I stood in the general election on a manifesto that promised an in/out referendum and promised to respect the result. I campaigned hard before the referendum for this country to stay in the European Union. It pains me that my side lost, but honour and decency bind me to the pledge I made before the referendum, and I will vote to support the Government tonight.
That said, it is also my duty to my constituents and to the country, as it is for all of us, to make sure that we get the best possible outcome thereafter. To my mind, that means the following. First, in my constituency, some 35% of people work in the financial and professional services sector. That is one of the highest percentages anywhere in the country. It is critical that that key economic interest of the United Kingdom be central to our negotiating objectives. In my judgment, it should not be regarded as secondary to anything. If we have to, we should be prepared to make pragmatic compromises to secure the welfare of that key economic sector.
Secondly, we should not forget the interests of our territory of Gibraltar. It does not have anyone to speak for it here, but I shall take the liberty of doing so. Its economy must be protected and its border flows must be uninterrupted and free. Thirdly, we must make sure that our parliamentary sovereignty is real. We are acting in accordance with the process set down by our highest courts, where the judges acted in accordance with their judicial oaths and constitutional duty. That should be accepted, and they should be commended for having done so. That means that Parliament must now be prepared to have proper control of the process.
I welcome the commitment to publishing the White Paper, and I accept the words and good faith of the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, but there are two other things we must do. First, it is very important as we go forward that Parliament has the maximum information available to it. In particular, it would be quite wrong if Parliament at any stage had less information than our European counterparts. Secondly, the pledge of a vote in both Houses on the final deal must be a meaningful one. That means it must be a vote before the deal is put to our European counterparts for ratification, otherwise it will be a Hobson’s choice of little value. I hope that Ministers will reflect very carefully on those key points as the Bill makes progress through the House.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)
Despite my constituency producing two enormous Brexiteers—one Sir Teddy Taylor, who went on to represent Southend, and Tom Harris, who led the Brexit campaign in Scotland—I have the Glasgow constituency with the highest remain vote; it was over 70%. I get why lots of people did not feel that they had a connection with the European Union. It felt as though the EU did not have a relationship with their daily lives, and as though it was something done to them, rather than something inclusive. Sadly, however, this Brexit deal is going in exactly the same direction. The Prime Minister did everything she could to try to prevent this House from having a say or a vote on it. In fact, we are only in the Chamber for this debate today because the Government were taken to court—and the case had to go to appeal at the Supreme Court. The Prime Minister has done everything she can to freeze out Parliament, the public and the devolved Administrations, and that is highly regrettable. This Brexit process has all the hallmarks of a hostile takeover. The vote on 23 June 2016 is being used; all sorts of other issues—the single market, the customs union—are being couped in alongside it, which is just not good enough.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
The hon. Gentleman has expressed concern—indeed, confusion—about the Brexiteers’ position. Will he help to alleviate my confusion about the Scottish position that SNP Members seem to be putting forward, which is that they want a free, independent Scotland, but it has to be ruled from Brussels? Will he explain that conundrum?
Stewart Malcolm McDonald
I will not explain it. The hon. Gentleman makes such a lazy argument that he must have heard all the points before. I will use my extra minute to make the arguments that I wish to make. The Prime Minister has no consensus on proceeding—[Interruption.] I suggest that the Deputy Leader of the House takes that back.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald
No. The Prime Minister has no consensus on proceeding as she is doing. The failure to get consensus is hers and hers alone. She talks about
“a country that works for everyone”,
but the Brexit negotiation and the article 50 process have been incubated and kept in Downing Street. That will do nothing for our attempts to fight against the poison of political cynicism that is eating away at liberal democracies around the world, including the liberal democracy that we serve here. Our party’s position is well known. The Britannic isolation that this Government are seeking is something that I cannot and will not back, and I will vote against the Government tonight.
Michelle Donelan (Chippenham) (Con)
I voted remain in the referendum, not for any nostalgic or ideological love of Europe, but more in the pragmatic belief that it was not the right time for us to leave. However, the point that has sometimes been overlooked in the debate in this Chamber is that this vote on article 50 is different for one reason: it is not our decision. We have a duty as democrats, and a fundamental duty as Members of Parliament, to enact the result of the referendum.
I have not changed my mind, but it is important to remember that the Conservative manifesto—the one on which we Conservative Members were elected—pledged to hold the referendum. I was proud to vote in Parliament to hold the referendum, and I promised my voters that I would honour the result. It was made abundantly clear during the referendum campaign that it would be final, no ifs and buts, and when I make a promise to my voters, I intend to keep it—no ifs, no buts.
To me, this debate is less about triggering article 50, and more about democracy. The mere suggestion that we could consider riding roughshod over democracy, destroying what is left of the British public’s faith in politicians is, quite frankly, absurd. Yes, we can all think of loopholes and justifications to rationalise voting against the referendum result, but we are surely in a sad state if it comes to that. And is it not patronising to claim that people did not really understand what they were voting for?
It is important that we do not distort the meaning of this debate. The vote should not be turned into a pro-immigration or anti-immigration vote. It is simply recognition of how the public voted, in part through a desire to take back control. There has been a lot of talk in this debate about immigration and the end of free movement. Members have spoken about the cultural and economic benefits of immigration, and I echo that message wholeheartedly. However, I seriously question whether that can only be achieved by European immigration. It disadvantages those from the Commonwealth and the wider world, who should have exactly the same rights and opportunities as those living in Europe. Europe has bound our hands and given us no chance to link our immigration to skills. It deeply saddens me that some Members have distorted this debate.
Let us be clear and not misguide the public today. This vote is about starting the process. Yes, we could spend several weeks speculating about what we might be able to negotiate, and what we can and cannot change, but we have a duty today. Our economy and businesses need certainty. The last thing they need is another referendum, or more speculation. Now is the time to get on with the job, be positive, work together and get the best deal for Britain. We have a duty to honour the result and a promise to keep. We need to show the British public that we can listen, can be in touch, and are the Parliament for the people, not a Parliament superior to the people.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
May I say first that I respect the views of any Member who acts according to their conscience, and that I have nothing but contempt for any Member who acts purely out of self-interest or self-preservation?
The Government can claim a mandate to take the United Kingdom—or what is left of it—out of the European Union, but nobody can claim a mandate to take anyone out of the single market. That, essentially, is a major part of the reasoned amendment tabled by the Scottish National party. We are being asked to hand complete control of the process to a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary who between them cannot even handle a dinner invitation without creating an major international, political and diplomatic stooshie.
The Government, if anything, have a mandate to keep us in the single market. That is what was in the 2015 Conservative election manifesto. I know that Conservative Members do not like to be reminded about it now, but that is the mandate they were given by the people. As recently as 24 October 2016, the Prime Minister told the House:
“I want to get the best possible deal with the maximum possible opportunities for British businesses…to operate within the single market and to trade with it in both goods and services.”—[Official Report, 24 October 2016; Vol. 616, c. 36.]
The fact that as recently as October the Prime Minister wanted to stay in at the very least should tell us that membership or non-membership of the single market is far too important to be dealt with without a single debate or vote in this House.
Some MPs have been subject to unfair pressure to vote in a particular way. Nobody here has the right to tell anybody that they are being dishonest or anti-democratic by exercising their vote. I have had that as well. I received an email darkly hinting that there are a number of people in my constituency who want to leave and threatening me with deselection if I dare to vote against the Government tonight. Given that the email came from Labour Leave, I have no intention—[Laughter.] It did cross my mind that, pension-wise, I could get a much better deal by losing rather than retiring. Maybe when I decide that the time has come to leave, I will stand as a Labour candidate to guarantee my “loser’s pension”. [Laughter.]
The Secretary of State concluded his speech yesterday by asking us to trust the people. What we have heard from the Tory Benches is actually much more than that: what we are hearing from the Tories today and yesterday is the abolition of the sovereignty of Parliament. They have finally accept that the people are sovereign. I welcome that. It is 700 years after some of us accepted it, but they are welcome.
There are four different sovereignties represented here. The sovereignty of my people tells me that 62% want to stay in. We put forward a compromise that respects the wishes of those who want to leave, respects the wishes of those in Scotland who want to remain, and respects the issues of the 55% in 2014. If we are forced to choose between the 55% and the 62% who want to remain in the European Union, I think the Conservative party might get a very nasty surprise indeed.
Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)
I campaigned and voted to leave the EU, in line with the boroughs I represent, Bolton and Wigan, which voted overwhelmingly to leave. It was an incredibly important referendum, and I am a little disappointed sometimes to get the impression that people think we should never have had it. It was vital that we did. When there is a transfer of power, it is for the people to approve, even if retrospectively. It was for the people to approve the vast transfer of power from Westminster to Brussels. Otherwise, it would have been like the SNP taking Scotland out of the UK without a referendum, or the Liberal Democrats changing our voting system without the approval of the people. We had to have the referendum to approve the transfer of powers to the EU.
Dissatisfaction with the EU seemed to grow in proportion to the powers handed to it. Whether we wanted to remain or leave, we could all see that the referendum was vital. David Cameron, in his Bloomberg speech, set out a fantastic vision of EU reform, but every visit to Brussels or a European capital whittled away that vision until there was almost nothing left—and that was the proposal put to the British people: either we leave or we have this almost non-existent programme of reform. It now seems that there is a campaign to resurrect the Bloomberg vision through the soft Brexit that people keep talking about, but that was the vision already rejected by the EU.
During the campaign, there were problems and misleading information on both sides, but that £350 million figure for the NHS is overstated. In a general election, we look at the policies and the ideas developed over months and years. We look at the performance of the Government and we listen to the arguments of the Opposition. We have years to make up our minds at the general election, and the British people had 40 years to make up their minds about the EU. It was not about the last few weeks of the referendum campaign; it was about the lived experience in the EU. That is why the people rejected it. It was not because of a few debateable arguments on one side or another. I look forward this evening to voting for the Bill and supporting our leaving the EU.
Julie Cooper (Burnley) (Lab)
Since the vote nearly seven months ago, a shadow has been cast across this country. The decision to leave the EU has weighed heavy on us all. It has divided communities, workplaces, families and political parties. The campaigns were not our finest hour. I campaigned to remain in the EU not because I thought the EU was perfect but because I did not want the UK to close its doors and shut itself off from the rest of the world. I want us to work with our European neighbours to find common solutions to the multitude of problems every developed country faces, from a rapidly aging population and its impact on our healthcare and pensions system to the co-ordinated action necessary to tackle climate change and terrorism.
My constituents voted 66% in favour of leaving the EU, and I respect that decision. Some voted to leave because of concerns over immigration and fears that this was negatively impacting on the availability of jobs and local services; some voted out because they thought it would mean more money for the NHS; and for some, the referendum was an opportunity to register their discontent not just with the EU but with the direction the country was travelling in as a whole. While globalisation has brought wealth and economic growth, it has also left many people behind. In Burnley, people have seen manufacturing jobs decline and wages stagnate while bankers pay themselves million-pound bonuses and the rich increasingly find ways to dodge paying tax. They have been told consistently by the Government that the UK is the fastest-growing economy in the G7, and yet they have not seen that growth. They do not see more job opportunities or wage increases; all they find is that things are getting harder.
Because I respect my constituents and the democratic process, I will vote to trigger article 50, but I will not vote blindly for a Brexit deal that leaves my constituents poorer or worse off. First, the deal must protect jobs, which means access to the single market. Some 5,000 people in Burnley work in manufacturing and many of our biggest employers are European. It is vital that these jobs be protected. Secondly, workers’ rights must be protected. I am proud that past Labour Governments have championed workers’ rights. Thirdly, Burnley receives £5 million a year from EU funding. This money is vital, and has helped us to expand. The Government must commit, beyond 2020, to replacing that investment.
These circumstances were not of my making, but I believe that we must now seize the moment and all work together to do our very best to achieve a deal that will serve the interests of all our people and, in so doing, begin to heal the divisions in our country.
David Warburton (Somerton and Frome) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper). Her words about healing division and working for the will of the people—a phrase we are not allowed to use any more—very much chime with me.
This is clearly an historic moment—the result of decades of campaigning in this House and outside it, and of course the result of a decision by the people of the UK. It is perfectly reasonable and perfectly rational for people to hold the view that we should not go ahead and free ourselves from Brussels, but to try to frustrate the decision by trying to show that the referendum result was in some way illegitimate or incomplete so that others can impose their view of what they think ought to have happened, is really not quite the ticket.
I reckon that no one voted thinking, “I’ll vote leave, because I’m pretty sure that we’ll still remain a member of the single market, so it will all be okay”. No one said, “I’ll vote leave because I’m pretty sure Parliament won’t vote to trigger article 50”. No one said, “I’ll vote leave, because I’m pretty sure that when the final deal is put to Parliament, they will reject it and we will go back”. People voted to leave because they wanted to leave.
The two district councils that make up most of my constituency voted to leave by 13,000 votes, and they voted to leave because they wanted to leave. That means triggering article 50. In its judgment on 24 January, the Supreme Court, in common with the divisional High Court, made it clear that once given, article 50 notice cannot be withdrawn. When this House makes the decision on that final deal and the choice is put, it is only to approve the deal. Our choices thereafter will be to approve the deal, seek a renegotiation or exit the EU with no deal. There will be no option of remaining in the EU. This is a simple choice, and we have a very short Bill before us, although we have an awful lot of long amendments. The Supreme Court agreed in its judgment that Parliament can perfectly well content itself with very brief legislation. As many Members know, length need not equate to quality.
The Prime Minister’s speech at Lancaster House was the exception that proves the rule, splendidly setting out the 12 areas of work that the Government will now seek to address. The next two years, I must say, impose an obligation on every Member not only to heal the divisions, as we heard from the hon. Member for Burnley, but to help shape the negotiations and ensure that our future relationship with the EU emerges in a way that reflects an open, tolerant spirit of exchange and accord—without political control. We should believe in the future, just as the country did on 23 June last year.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union finished his speech yesterday by saying:
“For many years, there has been a creeping sense in the country…that politicians say one thing and then do another.”—[Official Report, 31 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 823-4.]
I am not sure which country he was talking about, because the UK is, of course, a Union of more than one country. What I can tell him, however, is that, for the country of Scotland, the sense that politicians sometimes say one thing and do another is more than a creeping sense, it is a well-founded and widespread concern, and it relates in particular to the Conservative party, its Prime Minister and its leader in Scotland.
Tonight we shall vote on an SNP amendment, and I welcome the support from other Members for that amendment. The amendment is, in part, designed to ensure that the Conservative party delivers on promises made by politicians to the people of Scotland during the 2014 independence referendum—promises made by Ruth Davidson, such as the idea that voting to remain in the United Kingdom was a guarantee of our EU citizenship; and promises made that Scotland is an equal partner in the Union.
Listening to yesterday’s debate, one could be forgiven for thinking that Scotland is seen as an unwelcome distraction from the main event. The message seems to be, “Get back in your box, and know your place”. Gone are the lovebombs, which have been replaced with instructions to “Sit down, shut up and put up with it”.
The EU referendum did not take place in a void in Scotland, separated from what has gone before. In 2014, the question of Scotland’s future membership of the European Union was central to the independence referendum. The SNP, and the wider “yes” campaign, warned that a “no” vote would be a threat to Scotland’s ancient trade links, about which my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) spoke so eloquently earlier. We said that voting to remain in the United Kingdom was a threat to our membership of Europe because of Tory Euroscepticism.
John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that there has been much misreporting of the recent Supreme Court decision? While it established that Scotland need not be consulted legally, there was no requirement that it should not be consulted constitutionally.
Joanna Cherry
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Paragraph 151 states:
“The Sewel Convention has an important role in facilitating harmonious relationships between the UK parliament and the devolved legislatures. But the policing of its scope and the manner of its operation does not lie within the constitutional remit of the judiciary”.
So, basically, it is up to the politicians.
When we in the SNP warned that staying in the UK was a threat to our EU membership, the “no” campaign said that we were scaremongering. Ruth Davidson said.
“No means we stay in”,
that is, stay in the EU. The Liberal Democrats and Labour Members who were in the Better Together campaign told us that voting to remain part of the UK guaranteed our EU membership. The question for the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats now is this: what are they going to do to deliver on the promises that they made at the time of the independence referendum? What are they going to do to protect and guarantee that EU citizenship that they told us was guaranteed by our voting to remain in the UK?
The Scottish Government, unlike others, have produced a document—“Scotland’s Place in Europe”—which sets out a detailed plan. It is a plan which, as we heard from the Prime Minister’s own lips today, is possible, because it is possible to have a soft and open border between a country that is in the single market and a country that is not. The question for all Members in the House—Labour, Liberal Democrat and Tory—is this: “What are you going to do to deliver on the promises that you made to the people of Scotland? Or are you just going to sit there and admit that those promises were lies?”
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
This is an historic debate. I was in the Chamber during the Maastricht debates 25 years ago: it has been a long time. The British people voted by a margin of 1.35 million to leave the European Union, and two thirds of the constituencies in the country voted to leave. I respect all my constituents who voted to remain—and The Cotswolds voted very narrowly to remain: it was 51% to 49%—and I totally reject the Liberal Democrats’ assertion that I cannot represent those constituents.
The British people, through this referendum, have regained the sovereignty of this Parliament. We will no longer be subject to the directives and regulations laid down by Brussels. We will regain control of our borders, and, above all, we will be able to reassure the Europeans who are living in this country that they are welcome here, provided that our European partners give reciprocal rights to us. Shorn of the EU competence for trade, we will be able to regain our old entrepreneurial spirit and go round the world, trading openly with all its nations. Some people assert that the peace in Europe has been maintained by the European Union. I say that the peace in Europe has been maintained by NATO—and it is absolutely right for our Prime Minister to ensure that all NATO members abide by their obligation to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.
As many speakers have said during this debate, we shall not be leaving Europe. We shall be leaving the European Union, but the Europeans will still be neighbours and friends. I think that, pragmatically, we will do a deal for this country that will be in the interests of all its people. It is a byzantinely complex negotiation on which our colleagues on the Front Bench are about to embark. I say to them that we have an absolute duty to get the best deal that we possibly can for this country. However, I am confident that when our partners look at what we have to offer them and what they have to offer us, it will, pragmatically, be in their interests to make sure we do a deal that suits both of us.
We will reset our relationship with Europe: it will be an easier relationship; it will be a relationship that all parts of this kingdom can relate to—whether that is England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. I simply say to our Scottish nationalist friends, echoing the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”: beware of referendums—you cannot be certain what the result will be.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
Periodically, a nation has to stand tall and say what ideas it is driven by, and what values lead its sense of direction and its destiny. I am proud of all we have achieved as members of the European Union in terms of not only our economy and our security, but the peace between our nations, which, twice in the last century, were at war.
I campaigned hard for remain, but I accept the result. I will not vote against Second Reading, but I will not criticise others for making a different choice. I am sad that tonight this House will take the first step in what I believe is the wrong direction for this country—a country in which I was proud to be born, which has shaped me through its openness and generosity of spirit, and which has shaped my very firm sense of partnership with other nations and of the need for an internationalist politics. The Government’s responsibility has never been greater.
This must not be, or feel like, the end of the debate. It is right that tomorrow the Government will be publishing a White Paper; it is wrong that we did not have it before. It is right that we have a vote; it is wrong that it took the Supreme Court to make it happen. A vote for article 50 today is not a blank cheque. It must be for this House to be consulted and to meaningfully vote on the final deal. This Bill has been tightly written to limit the ability of MPs to amend it, but it is clear that the views of Members of this House will not be silenced.
I want to make three broad points in my contribution to this debate. First, we should not rule out membership of the single market, but instead make the case for EU-wide reforms of the freedom of movement that can give member states greater control if they wish it.
Secondly, we must engage the public. That is why the Prime Minister should bring forward a national convention that includes MEPs, elected Mayors, nations, devolved Administrations, local government, universities and higher education, civil society, business and others. The public were asked their view about our membership of the European Union, and they should also be properly involved in the debate about our future.
Thirdly, there are the needs of our young people. They are our future, and we have a stake in their success, too. The way we conduct this debate and make decisions, the language we use and the way we design in relationship-building between young people across borders will be a gift we give to the next generation. That is why I am tabling amendments that call on the Government to set priorities for young people in their negotiations, retaining the rights and opportunities for young people to work, study and travel visa-free if they are under 25, so that they do not become worse off than their European counterparts.
The referendum was not a proud moment in our nation’s history, but there is more than one way to Brexit. There are risks, and we must be open about that, but we must also have an evidence-based debate: our prosperity, our security, and our respect and our place in the world depend on it.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra). Like her, I campaigned for remain, and I did it passionately. I argued that if we left, we would miss the opportunity to be the largest country in the EU that was not in the euro. That is an amazing position, but it is gone, and I accept that. Like the hon. Lady, I will support the Bill. I would, in the most extraordinary way, be reneging on my vote for the European Union Referendum Act 2015—one of the first pieces of legislation I voted for as a new MP—if I now turned against it just because I campaigned for the remain side.
However, that does not mean that I do not have concerns, and there are two primary areas where I am worried about the future. The first is trade. At all costs, we must avoid a game of protectionist chicken with the EU. That could happen, particularly given what is going on in Washington, where we have an openly protectionist President. This is not “Project Fear”, but hon. Members should be under no illusion: if protectionism breaks out on both sides of the Atlantic, we could have a severe economic crisis, and we know where that finishes.
The other point is on immigration. It is absolutely right that we cannot control immigration from the EU unless we leave, but we cannot reduce the numbers, which is what the country actually wants, unless we have a native British workforce who are willing and able, and available in sufficient numbers, to step into the breach if the immigration shutters come down. I recently joined the Work and Pensions Committee. We have held evidence sessions on this and heard from employers who are completely dependent on migrant labour and struggle to recruit locally, including in the care sector and construction, which are vital parts of our economy. We should not pretend to the British people that immigration will be slashed if we leave.
It is particularly important that we discuss one part of this topic, and I might not agree with all my colleagues on it. At the moment, it is not true that there are no restrictions on EU migration. At the moment, legally, people cannot come to this country as an unskilled migrant—which, by the way, includes many skilled people; that is just an immigration term—if they are from outside the EU. They can only legally come in from within the EU, and I think that we should be very cautious about changing that, because the British people might like the idea of going global, but I do not think they would support globalising unskilled migration to this country, which is by far the largest part of it. We need to debate that and be open about it.
Having said all that, I voted for the referendum Act and we must implement the will of the people. As many of my colleagues have said, we are democrats, and we should do this in a way that is open and united, because if the national interest at this moment is best served by maximum unity, a show of strength by Parliament—
Sir Gerald Howarth
I am grateful to my hon. Friend and son-in-law for giving way, because I want to endorse what he has just said. We have shown that it is possible on this very divisive and complex issue for members of not only the same party but the same family to hold different views, and yet now to look forward to going ahead united to secure the best possible deal for our country.
James Cartlidge
The local paper did speculate on this matter, and when asked about my wife’s views, I said, “Well, she is my father-in-law’s daughter”—[Interruption.] Not just in biology and spirit, obviously. On the morning after the referendum, I purchased her a bottle of champagne and congratulated her as she was on the winning side.
Yes, we do have to unite, and we have to show a positive and open spirit in our negotiations with Europe. We have to have a deal that is in its interests too, and that is why this is about openness, free trade and a positive Brexit. We can and should all get behind that, and we do that by voting for this Bill tonight.
Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)
When I campaigned as one of a fairly beleaguered minority in the Labour party in the 1970s to join the EU, little did I think that many years hence I would be standing up today to vote in favour of triggering the negotiations for our exit, but I am. It is against all my historical instincts and my preference for an international way of delivering our business, and it is also against the economic logic that says that a large and uniformly regulated home market is a prerequisite for a fast-growing economy and the benefits that accrue from it.
I am going to vote this way for three reasons. The first is the democratic argument that has been articulated by many. There is a lack of faith in Parliament and our democratic institutions, and for Parliament and politicians to win an election on a promise of a referendum, to hold that referendum, and then to not implement the result of that referendum would have profound implications in terms of faith in our democratic system.
I also believe that, given the complexities and difficulties of the negotiations we are going to be confronted with, the public will expect this Parliament to do its very best to implement the will that they have expressed. I do not want conspiracists to be able to blame the very real problems that will arise from the negotiations on the reluctance of Parliament, rather than the difficult issues that will be confronting us.
I will also vote this way because it is in the interests of business. A decision has been made, and my discussions with businesses run along the lines of, “We’d prefer to remain in, but we recognise we are coming out, and what we want is certainty about our future trading relationships.” That will depend on investment decisions and recruitment decisions, and until we start to negotiate and try to shape the future that our business is going to be confronted with, that uncertainty will continue, and it will severely affect our economy.
I want to make it clear that in voting to trigger article 50, I am not committing myself to accepting the final outcome. I will work with others to ensure that we shape the negotiations in a way that will be beneficial, and I reserve the right to vote against the subsequent outcome if I do not feel that that has been achieved.
Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)
My constituents have a great deal of common sense. They are intelligent and thoughtful, and they go about their lives with incredible diligence. When people wrote to me to say that they did not understand what they were voting for, I did not believe it, because I know my constituents and I trust in them. We trust in our constituents enough to put them on juries, and I trust in mine enough to make a decision when they are exercising their vote.
I, too, argued for remain. I believed the Prime Minister when he said he would go to Europe and seek to negotiate a better deal for Britain. He went out there in good faith and he played those negotiations with a straight bat. Unfortunately—to paraphrase another speaker—he found out when he came back here to stand at the crease that his bat had been broken, his shoes had been nicked and his stumps had been hidden. He was hampered by Europe’s failure to recognise that it needed reform and that it needed to deal with the crucial issue of free movement. That failure to recognise the concerns that he was raising on behalf of Britain bears a great deal of responsibility for the outcome of the vote. I was deeply concerned when I heard the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) say yesterday that he had it on great authority that the Germans had offered a deal involving an emergency brake after the referendum. If that was indeed on the table and people were willing to sign up to it, it would have been far too late to do it afterwards without it having drastic consequences for this country.
I very much welcome the approach being taken by the Prime Minister. I welcome the fact that she wants to reach out globally, and that we will still be members of Europe even if we are no longer members of the European Union institutions. It is vital that we build on those links and continue to look outwards. We must work on co-operation in crime, terrorism and national security, and we must negotiate the best possible deal for our economy. My constituents knew that there was a risk to the economy. That was explained to them very seriously. The point was made yesterday that the risks were understood and accepted by the British electorate when they voted to leave, and I think we have to respect that decision. I will work hard to deliver the best outcome for my constituents.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
Benjamin Franklin famously said that if we fail to plan, we plan to fail. That is exactly what this Tory Government have done over Brexit, leaving this supposedly equal family of nations with a very stark choice. If you will indulge me, Mr Speaker, I want to pay tribute to Irvine Welsh, Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor, because I saw “T2 Trainspotting” recently and it inspired me. Choose Brexit. Choose making up numbers from thin air about the NHS and plastering them on the side of buses. Choose racist and xenophobic sentiments seeping out from some corners of the leave campaign. Choose hate crime rising by more than 40% and LGBT hate crime rising by more than 150% in England and Wales following the Brexit vote. Choose taking the people of our nations to the polls on one of the most important issues in a generation with nothing written down and no plan. Choose ignoring the interests of the people of Scotland and my constituents in Livingston, despite the fact that they voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU. Choose leaving the single market, risking 80,000 Scottish jobs within a decade and costing the people of Scotland an average of £2,000 a year in wages. Choose lowering Scotland’s GDP by more than £10 billion and Scotland’s exports by more than £5 billion. Choose vital EU worker status being under threat, with widespread uncertainty to families, businesses and the economy. Choose risking our international standing in the academic, research and innovation communities as we lose access to funding, expertise and people from the EU. Choose walking away from the European Medicines Agency and Euratom without any detail or thought of the impact. Choose the great Brexit power grab, taking back control of straight bananas. Choose returning to the Thatcher era of poverty and austerity. Choose the UK turning its back on Europe.
Those are not the choices that the Scottish people made. Scotland chose differently. Scotland chose to look outward, to face the world and to embrace the EU and all the protections and advantages it brings. Scotland chose life in the European Union, not a hard Tory Brexit. This Tory Government must respect that.
Conservative Members quoted Churchill, saying that this could well be the end of the beginning of the Brexit process. If they do not respect the democratic will of the Scottish people to remain in the EU, it will be the beginning of the end of this disunited kingdom.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
This evening I will vote to begin the formal process of leaving the European Union because, though I voted remain, the referendum result was clear. In my constituency, and in the country as a whole, the majority voted to leave. Had the result gone the other way, all of us who voted remain would have expected that result to be honoured. Whether voting to remain or voting to leave, British people voted last year in the expectation that the Government would enact the result, so we must see it through.
The referendum has shone a light on the divisions in British society. There is a divide between those for whom life is working out and full of opportunity and those for whom life seems to be going nowhere. If we think that people are angry and divided now, just think what anger there would be if MPs rejected the referendum result, effectively telling so many voters that they got it wrong. The Government’s job now is to make a success of Brexit and, in so doing, truly tackle the problems that the referendum laid bare.
As a first step, we must give the Prime Minister the scope to negotiate the best possible Brexit deal. To those who ask for more and more detail at this time, I say—drawing on my experience of negotiating business deals, albeit at a much smaller scale—that giving away more detail does not generally enable people to secure a better deal. We need to be clear, as the Prime Minister has been, that we will walk away if we do not get a good deal.
To those who want a second referendum to choose between a final deal and staying in, I ask: could there be any stronger incentive for the European Union to offer us unattractive exit terms? Proposing a second referendum may be in their political interest, but it is clearly not in the UK’s interest.
Now we must get on with it and use this time of change as an opportunity to frame the sort of country that we want to emerge—an open Britain, engaged with Europe and the world, that offers opportunities to all with the confidence and identity that enables people to be tolerant and welcoming. That is the task ahead when we have honoured the referendum result and enacted the Bill.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
Like many others, I hoped that this debate would never take place. I campaigned to remain in the firm belief that it is the best way to protect jobs and stability for my constituents. However, my constituency voted by a clear margin to leave. I respect the democratic process, and I respect the views of all my colleagues and my constituents.
I will vote for the Bill tonight but, now that we are having this debate, it is my duty to speak up and fight for the people I was elected to serve. For decades the benefits of the EU were not sold to people. The European Parliament was shrouded in mystery, leaving a vacuum for UKIP to sell an alternative narrative of what the EU did and does for us. At times during the referendum campaign it felt like I was trying to share with people in a few months things that we should all have been sharing with them for years.
I campaigned in the referendum against the backdrop of an increasingly dark and globalised world in which things are constantly shifting at an alarming and dramatic pace and in which intolerable cruelty is inflicted on people simply because of their race or religion. People are being displaced and humanitarian crises are happening right across the globe. Disasters, poverty and disadvantage are becoming the norm for so many, and the old answers to our country’s and the world’s problems are just not coming from our politicians any more. The vacuum left in British politics as MPs and parties struggle with how to respond to this pace and veracity of change has been filled with racist, misogynistic and divisive rhetoric, which is creating an inward, nationalist, isolationist environment.
When experiences like those of my dad are thrown into the mix, we see that it was no surprise that people voted out. My dad, Davey Lewell, is a retired welder. He is a kind, considerate, hard-working man. He used to work in the shipyards with economic migrants from Europe, who came to work alongside him. He hated seeing them being exploited. He wanted them to have rights, and the same terms, conditions and pay that he had, but instead they continued to be exploited, to such a degree that the yard owners could pay them so little that it was no longer a good business model to have people like my Dad employed there. In short, he lost his job. When people see Governments not fighting for them and allowing people to be exploited, they lose faith and they become angry. No Government should ever underestimate what unemployment can do to an individual, to their family and to their community, because these scars last. This referendum was a chance for people like my Dad to vent his hurt. In areas like mine this referendum was lost a very long time ago.
Maggie Throup (Erewash) (Con)
For me, this Bill is about just one thing—process. Like many other hon. Members, I began on a Brexit “road to Damascus” by advocating that Britain remain in the EU. That is not because I am a die-hard Europhile; it is because I am a pragmatist. I believe that, on balance, retaining EU membership was the safer option for Britain, both economically and socially. However, the collective majority of the British people, including the overwhelming majority of my constituents, disagreed with that view, and I accept that we now must leave.
The debate on the nuts and bolts of our exit deal are for another day, because this Bill is not about the substance. It is not about which laws to keep or abolish, or about our future trading relationships. It is not about how we share our security interests. Today, we are dealing with the mechanism that will enable us to begin having those discussions and debates, not only among ourselves here in this House, but, more importantly, with the other 27 member states. It comes down to the core question that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union posed yesterday in his opening speech:
“do we trust the people or not?”—[Official Report, 31 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 824.]
Although I have been quick to learn that we are often required to take some difficult and unpopular decisions as Members of Parliament, which can be contrary to the views expressed by some constituents, on this issue I choose to trust the people and so will vote accordingly this evening.
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
Let us make no mistake: we are leaving the EU. The referendum seven months ago settled that issue. Today’s vote is not about whether Members have a leave or remain constituency. This Bill is about green-lighting the Prime Minister in her approach to Brexit and to parliamentary scrutiny: a fast-tracked process devoid of any detail for triggering article 50 in March when key European allies will have elections distracting them; and the grudging promise of a White Paper tomorrow for a vote today to replace the blank paper we currently have. Those of us who campaigned for remain know that Brexit is to happen, but how we green-light it is a different matter. All of us have to ask ourselves whether we are confident that, as things stand, this Government are going to get the best deal, or even a good deal, for our country. I cannot answer yes to that question. This Bill is our only opportunity to send the Prime Minister back to the drawing board, both on the process and on the purpose of her negotiation.
In the short time available to me, I wish to deal with three points that Walthamstow residents whom I met on Sunday, both leave and remain voters, wanted to make clear. They understand that there are many different ways in which Brexit could happen, but they get the importance of the single market being part of the negotiations. They understand that when 50% of goods cross borders at least twice before they hit the shop floor, we are now talking about more red tape for British businesses. They understand that a Government who abandon the customs union and the common commercial policy for a form of associate membership that does not even exist put thousands of jobs at risk from the beginning. The Secretary of State himself said that businesses would ensure that trade with Britain continues uninterrupted and under similar circumstances. That is clearly not the case, and the British public deserve better.
Walthamstow wants rights for EU citizens to be confirmed, not to be used as bargaining chips or to upset the new company that we keep, in the shape of President Trump. Finally, Walthamstow wants employment rights to be protected. I just attended a statutory instrument Committee in which the Government were already talking about extending the erosion of employment rights, so it is clear that it is not a done deal.
Yesterday, my constituency neighbour, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who sadly is not present, said that he would vote to trigger article 50 simply because of all the mistakes of the past. Well, I cannot green-light article 50 tonight because of all the opportunities for the future that it puts at stake. I am a proud patriot: I am proud of my country and I want the best for my country. We can and should be doing better. We cannot trigger this process now. We must rethink and go back to the drawing board, for the sake of everybody we represent, whether they were for leave or remain.
Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
It is clear that tonight’s vote is an historic event. I consider it an incredible honour to be in this Parliament at this time, and to be able to cast my vote for the Bill.
People often ask me how long I have been a Eurosceptic, and I often reply, “For as long as I knew what one was.” Growing up in Cornwall, I witnessed the impact of EU bureaucracy and regulation on our communities. I saw how it strangled our fishing communities, and overburdened our agricultural sector with red tape and bureaucracy that meant that businesses could not operate as they felt was best.
I waited for the outcome of the former Prime Minister’s negotiation before I decided how to cast my vote in the referendum. It became clear to me that, despite all the rhetoric, the EU was not willing or prepared to change, and was set on continuing on the course it had been on for some time. That was the final straw that made me decide that casting my vote for leave was the right thing to do. It was a great relief to me when the constituency I represent, St Austell and Newquay, agreed with me, with 62% voting to leave. I am in an easy position: it is not only my personal view but that of the vast majority of my constituents that we should leave the European Union. Since the referendum result, I am even more convinced that it was the right decision and the right thing to do.
I have detected a new confidence in our country: a new, positive, outward-looking approach. Despite all the predicted doom and gloom, business people I have spoken to have said that they are positive about the future. They want the Government to take a clear lead and to set a clear direction, so I welcome the Prime Minister’s approach to doing that, and her setting out where we are taking our country as we negotiate to leave. Clearly, all the “Project Fear” predictions of what would happen if we decided to leave have been proven completely unfounded, but when companies invest in the UK, the media say that they are doing so despite Brexit. Maybe, just maybe, they are investing here because of Brexit, and because they are confident about the future of our country.
Tonight’s historic vote gives us the opportunity to start writing a new chapter for our country, which has a long and great history of standing up positively, and looking at and engaging with the world. I view tonight’s vote as the next step in writing a new chapter for our great nation.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
The European Union is a bureaucratic, cumbersome and imperfect system, but it is also the longest and most successful peace process the world has ever seen, transforming historical enemies into trading partners, allies and friends. It gave hope to those labouring under the yoke of communism, and it has protected the UK’s workers, consumers and environment, supported the Northern Ireland peace process, and driven Britain’s economy, innovation and prosperity.
I did not vote to hold the referendum, and I campaigned to remain, but people in Wakefield voted to leave. The Labour Whip says that we should trigger, but my Labour values—solidarity, internationalism, social justice—say something else. The Prime Minister talks about free trade, yet she is walking out on the largest free trade area in the world to chase an imaginary trade deal with Donald Trump. A trade deal with the USA is a distraction. The most important trade deal is the one that we negotiate with the European Union. That deal determines whether Brotherton Esseco in Wakefield faces tariffs on the sulphites it exports to wine-makers across the EU, and whether Wakefield farmers face tariffs on the lamb that they export to Belgium.
The Prime Minister has a weak negotiating hand, but she has thrown her cards on the table before the other players have even sat down, rejecting staying in the single market, in which 44% of the UK’s exports are tariff-free. This hard Brexit was not what leave campaigners promised people in the referendum. The UK’s access to the largest free trade area in the world will be worse after 2019, and that puts thousands of British jobs at risk.
An open society without discrimination is the founding pillar of our British and European identity. Since the referendum, hate crime and far-right activity in Yorkshire is up. My father, Tom, died in October. The last vote he cast was to remain in the EU. He came to Britain from Ireland in 1962 to earn his living, met his wife, got his degree, raised his family, and worked and paid his taxes here. After Brexit, someone like him without a degree from, say, eastern Europe will face barriers in coming here. I hope that we are better than that.
To the people of Wakefield I say that I have always sought to act in their best interests. My duty is to use my judgment to make their lives better. They did not elect me to make them poorer, destroy their jobs, and weaken their public services. As someone who has lived in Belgium and Italy, who has worked with entrepreneurs for seven years, and who has been an elected Labour public servant for the past 19 years, I judge that this vote will make people in Wakefield poorer, destroy jobs and businesses, remove social, consumer and environmental rights and reduce the tax base that funds our NHS, schools and services. History has its eyes on us today, so here is my answer: I can no more vote for this Bill than I can vote against my conscience. I cannot vote for it because it is against my values, and I can no more vote for it than I can vote against my own DNA.
Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)
My constituency voted to remain by a large margin, and I voted to remain, so coming to the conclusion that I should support this Bill this evening has been very difficult. In 2015, I stood for election on a manifesto that promised a referendum. Soon after, I voted in favour of a Bill to put that referendum before the British people. In December, I voted for a motion calling on the Government to invoke article 50 by the end of March. I did so because the democratic process had been undertaken, and it would be wrong of me to ignore the result.
I was disappointed by the result of the referendum, but this indecision and uncertainty cannot continue indefinitely. Voting against triggering article 50 would prolong the uncertainty. We will leave the European Union; that much is sure. Delaying that process, which is, in effect, all that the vote will achieve, can only have negative implications for our economy. Any attempt to overturn the decision made would damage this country’s reputation for democracy, which all of us in this place prize so highly. It is time for this House and the nation to come together, not only to mitigate the risks of Brexit, but to exploit the opportunities. The best interests of our constituents must be promoted and protected, whether through trade or an industrial strategy.
Warwick and Leamington is home to a thriving local economy, a superb education system and constituents with an outward-looking and inclusive approach. That will not change as a result of our impending exit from the EU. Now is the time to set out a positive vision for the UK and to turn that vision into reality.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
It is an honour to speak in such a historic debate. As a passionate pro-European, a proud Londoner and the MP for a constituency where almost 70% of the electorate voted to remain, and given my background—Britain was a welcoming home to me and my family—it goes without saying that I wish I did not have to vote on this Bill. The decision to trigger article 50 and leave the European Union cannot be stopped once it begins. There is no turning back.
I do not agree with the Prime Minister’s plan to take us out of the single market and the customs union, because the effects will be dangerous and devastating to our economy. That is well understood and well documented where it concerns the City of London and Canary Wharf, which my constituency borders. Some 70,000 to 100,000 jobs—not just financiers at the top end of the institutions, but receptionists, caterers and all the people who serve the City and Canary Wharf—are at risk. The sector contributes more than 2 million jobs to the country and some 12% of taxation revenue for public expenditure, so it is really important that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater, to which the plan to leave the single market will effectively lead.
Our hard-won rights for workers and women, and our protections for human rights, are seen and admired all over the world. We are putting those things and investment in our public services at risk. The decision will cost dearly, and will be deeply problematic and damaging to our economy. Some 44% of our exports are to the EU. The head of the World Trade Organisation even indicated that if we leave and end up on WTO terms, UK consumers will lose some £9 billion.
It is because of the damage that this change and the move away from the single market will do to my constituents, to our country’s economy and to our rights that I cannot support triggering article 50. It is not in our interest as a country that is supposed to be outward-looking and internationalist, nor in the interest of future generations.
David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)
About 20 years ago, my political career was launched on the back of a failed referendum campaign, when I and many others failed to prevent the Welsh Assembly from being set up. I am reminded very much of those days at the moment because the campaign in Wales was also very divisive. All sorts of promises were made that have never actually been kept. It was a huge constitutional change for us. There were divisions, threats and altercations in Wales. When John Prescott, who was Deputy Prime Minister at the time, went to Newport town centre, one of his spin doctors ordered a young campaigner off the streets, saying, “I have the Deputy Prime Minister’s authority for doing this.” The resulting fracas made the third bong on “News at 10”. I will not reveal the identity of the person involved—[Interruption.] Yes, alright then, it was me.
As we looked upon the wreckage of that campaign, a great discussion took place in Cardiff. We said, “Only one in four people have voted for this Welsh Assembly”—it went through on a much narrower margin than the referendum that we have just had. We asked, “What are we going to do?” Some of us—I was probably one of the diehards—said, “Let’s carry on fighting it in Parliament, get back out there in the media and redo the whole campaign.” I did not think about the courts at the time but, then, we did not have any hedge funders behind us, otherwise I probably would have done.
There were wiser voices, such as those of: Lord Bourne, now the Communities and Local Government Minister; the Brexit Minister himself, my right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones), who sits on the Front Bench and does such a good job for us; and the Secretary of State for Wales. They have all done very well. Those wiser people said, “We have to accept it. We don’t have to admit that we were wrong, but we have to admit that, on this occasion, the people have said one thing and we have to go along with it.” They were so right. I was wrong to say that we should have carried on fighting it because, as a result, we got involved with the national assembly advisory group, drew up the Standing Orders and put up candidates. We are now the second party in Wales, and we are close to becoming the first party there as a result of what took place. Look how well the Ministers I mentioned have done as a result. Who knows what might happen one day?
That is the reality of what we have before us now. People are talking about divisions. There were divisions all right during the referendum campaign. Those divisions need to end—we all agree on that. However, they will not end when so many people—they were in a minority—although acting for the best reasons and feeling they are doing the right thing continue to try to fight this campaign. They should stop fighting and become part of what is going to take place now, because the people of this country have spoken.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Is the hon. Gentleman honestly saying that he would have stopped fighting to come out of the European Union if the vote had gone the other way, and with such a poor majority? Let me tell him, I do not believe he would.
David T. C. Davies
The hon. Lady is a peacemaker, I am sure. She has given me a few tellings-off in her time. I think that if tried to do anything like that, she would have a quiet, or even a not so quiet, word with me and put me in my place. We would have had to accept what the people of this country said, and that is what I am saying now—let us end the division.
I say this to Labour Members: look at what has happened in my political party. We were all over the place a few months ago—some fighting for remain, some wanting leave, some wanting this and that—and we have all got behind our Cabinet members and our leader. That is a lesson for this country. We have a first-rate Prime Minister, and tonight our Prime Minister is going to reflect the will of the British people. Yes, this is about bringing power back from Brussels to the people of this country, but it is also about going through the Lobby and recognising that that is what the people of this country want. I say to anyone who is thinking of not coming through the Lobby with us tonight: think about the will of the British people and be part of what is going to take place—this exciting new chapter in the history of this great country. Come with us tonight—come with the British people.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
I will start by putting my cards on the table. I loathe and detest this Tory Brexit. I despair of what this Tory Brexit would do to my beautiful country.
This is, as we know, to be the hardest of hard Brexits, with cuts yet unimaginable and consequences yet unconceived—and for what? If we were doing this for some lofty ideal or grand purpose, like maybe addressing global poverty or some of the huge issues of injustice around the world, that might make it just about palatable, but no—we are doing it because the UK does not like immigration. That is the cold, beating heart of this bad British Brexit, and it underpins absolutely everything concerning our departure from the EU. It takes precedence over everything else, and all other considerations are merely consequential. The fact is that we live in an interconnected, globalised world where the movements of people have never been so profound, sometimes fleeing from persecution, or perhaps exchanging skills and ideas. Yet we are asked to believe the myth that a Brexitised UK will beat back this historic tide like some sort of Farageous Canute. I actually laughed out loud when I heard all the guff about a global UK. A global UK is the last thing the Tories want to create—they are trying to create a drawbridge UK.
Look at the response from the rest of the world: when they are not laughing at us, they are simply taking pity on us. As the Foreign Secretary goes out of his way to insult the very people we have to negotiate with, they are thinking of nothing other than the hardest of conditions to deter anybody else from considering leaving. The negotiating position seems to be to threaten our EU partners by saying that we will indulge in even further economic self-harm if they dare look after their own interests. Apparently we are even considering turning the UK into some sort of offshore deregulated tax haven if the EU actually thinks about looking its own interests. That’ll show them, won’t it?
It is not just the fact of leaving the EU that concerns me, ghastly enough though that is: it is the new ideology—the new world view—that has hastily been designed to accommodate this new splendid isolation. I see a Brexitised Britain as a world of weird, ’50s nostalgia and antipathy to foreigners—a reality that will feel very much like the pages of a Daily Mail editorial. People of Britain: work as if you live in the early days of a UKIP UK, because that is what is coming.
Scotland, of course, did not want any part of this, yet we have to be driven off the cliff edge with the rest of the United Kingdom. What we have now, though, is options. We have presented a plan to stop Scotland indulging in the worst of this madness. If that is not listened to, we have every right to reconsider our membership of this United Kingdom.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
When the results came through on 24 June, I must admit that my emotion was one of great sadness, and it continued for some time. I was sad not just, as the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) has said, because of the economic consequences, potential or not—I believe that in the medium to long term, this country has a stable and prosperous economic future—but because of the divisions created between us and our European partners and allies, as well as the divisions in our own country. It is absolutely vital that we come together and rebuild the social capital that was lost.
We have to do that by building on the decision we will take tonight. Whether we know that a decision is right or wrong, we can ensure that the next decisions we take are the best possible decisions for our country and people. That demands that we involve all the peoples of the United Kingdom, whether they are from Northern Ireland, England, Scotland or Wales. It also demands that we immediately reassure European Union citizens in this country of their rights here, just as we would expect other EU countries to reassure our own citizens. That is a matter of moral decency.
It is important that we fight very hard to retain those institutions that are not, in effect, part of the European Union, which we are leaving, but that are vital, technically and in so many other ways, for our general wellbeing and the health of our economy. I am referring to institutions such as Euratom and the European Medicines Agency.
It is vital that we all work incredibly hard. We—certainly in my party—have put the country in this position; it is our duty to get out there and ensure that we have the best possible arrangements. That does not mean writing newspaper columns saying how wonderful it is; it means getting out there and doing the hard work, treating people with respect and building up those relationships that have been perhaps more than a little bruised over the past few months.
It is also vital that this place—not the Government or the European Parliament alone—have the sovereignty to make a decision about our future relationship with Europe. Finally, I hope that we will conduct the debates with honesty and clarity, not with bombast.
Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab)
It is an honour to speak in this debate. Last Friday, celebrating my first 100 days as an MP, I spoke to a room of 50 dedicated activists and members at my constituency Labour party meeting. I am proud that we were able to talk frankly and honestly about this vote. Many had spent months knocking on doors and delivering leaflets alongside my predecessor, Jo Cox, advocating that people should vote remain, while others in the room had voted another way.
Mary Creagh
I am sure that Jo Cox and her family will be in the thoughts of the whole House when we vote on the outcome of the referendum.
Tracy Brabin
Absolutely. I appreciate my hon. Friend’s comments.
I voted to remain. As I spoke and listened to my friends and colleagues, it was difficult and occasionally emotional as I explained that I felt that it was my duty to respect democracy and vote in favour of triggering article 50. Batley and Spen voted 63% to leave. The people have spoken and I must listen. However painful this is now, we are leaving the European Union. It is my duty to listen to everyone, to move on from the labelling of people as leavers and remainers, and to get the best deal for everyone.
Batley and Spen was once a powerhouse of manufacturing. Men and women left school and went to work in the mills, but things move on and now we are celebrated for beds and biscuits. The mills are now shopping centres, offices and flats; in some cases, they have fallen into disrepair. Jobs for life have been replaced by the gig economy, and far too many of my constituents are on low pay and in insecure work. People have not seen a significant improvement in their standard of living for decades. The have been left behind by globalisation, and I have no doubt that financial insecurity and a sense of abandonment contributed to the leave vote. That said, my constituents did not vote to give this Government a blank cheque. They did not vote to lose jobs, to have their rights at work watered down or to lose maternity and paternity pay, human rights or LGBT rights.
There are lessons to be learned from the creative industries, in which I formerly worked, and their voice must be heard in the upcoming negotiations. In evidence given to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in October 2016, Directors UK told us that the UK is the third largest supplier of films and the second largest producer of television in the world. In the fast-paced area of video games, we are constantly at the cutting edge. The creative economy accounts for one in every 11 jobs. However, it is fair to say that a vote for exiting the EU was not what the industry at large wished for. A survey conducted by the Creative Industries Federation ahead of the referendum found that 96%—
Alison McGovern
Does my hon. Friend agree that the point she is making is that the creative industries are not just about here, but about the places that we represent in the north, which are leaders in this area?
Tracy Brabin
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. It is absolutely true that the creative industries are among our biggest expanding industries locally, and we must support them at every opportunity. If we lose free movement of labour, we could easily lose a pipeline of highly skilled creatives. If that happens, we must develop a domestic training and education system that fills the skills gap in the creative industries.
Of course, the time to debate such details will come later. First we must vote to move the process on, not with angry denial or blind optimism but on a mission to be vigilant about the rights of those who have the least and those who support people in the greatest need.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin). On this Bill, we have both come to a similar decision. In the run-up to the referendum, I believed that the considerable short-term risks of leaving the European Union outweighed the unquantifiable future benefits, but I underestimated the deep mistrust of the European Union. The people have decided to leave. I must respect that decision, and I will support this Bill.
The hard work now begins. For example, how do we access the benefits of free trade and the inspection-free transfer of goods from outside EU structures such as the single market and the customs union? Some believe that nothing is possible, and that the alternative to working for success is to hope that things go badly—even to will it—to be ceaselessly critical and, ultimately, to achieve only an echo of Private Frazer’s lament, “We’re all doomed.” Although none of us has perfect foresight, I am absolutely confident that we will have much greater success in lining up future free trade agreements than some Members have suggested.
The negotiations will begin soon. In my view, we need an agreement in which we are generous to Europeans living here, enthusiastic in our continuation of academic and research co-operation, and resolute in our solidarity with Europe on defence and security. In that agreement, we must be practical about ways of controlling immigration but welcoming to skills, tourists and entrepreneurs; we must be free of the European Court of Justice, but never compromise on standards or the rule of law; and we must be adventurous in pursuing our own trade deals, but never underestimate the importance of free trade and easy customs clearance in all that we do with Europe. That is what I hope the Government’s White Paper will lay out. I hope that it will bring our one nation of diverse parts together. Whatever our concerns about the journey, we should start positively, not cynically.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
I start by paying tribute to Gina Miller, a courageous woman who fought for our constitution, our laws and our values. She found herself and her family subject to a hideous campaign from the media and the public, for the crime of simply being a democrat. She prevented an ill-equipped Government from over-reaching themselves and forcing through their own vision of Brexit without the views of parliamentarians being heard. She has acted fearlessly and without reward, and parliamentarians and democrats across the country all owe her a huge
Hon. Members will know that I introduced a Bill to safeguard in primary legislation all the workers’ rights derived from European Union legislation after the withdrawal of the UK from the EU. Unfortunately, it was blocked, and we had over four hours of discussion about favourite radio programmes in relation to a handout Bill, so I hope that the Government tune in this time.
I realise that days next week have been allocated to discuss amendments in groups, but as I understand it, there is no guarantee that mine will be discussed. I therefore want to highlight them now to demonstrate their importance during the negotiations. People in this country deserve to know that their rights at work will not be thrown away.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
Does not my hon. Friend’s point show, as does the fact that hon. Members are now restricted to just three minutes per speech, how outrageous it is that the Government are allocating just three days for detailed scrutiny of the most important Bill this country has faced in our lifetimes?
Melanie Onn
The Bill is certainly very difficult and there are lots of complex issues. I am sure that many Members on both sides of the House would appreciate having longer to discuss these issues.
New clause 9 would require the Government to produce a plan to ensure that EU workers’ rights will be maintained in United Kingdom law before withdrawal from the EU. I wonder whether we will see such a plan in tomorrow’s White Paper. New clause 10 would make provision for EU workers’ rights to continue in force in the UK on exit day, subject only to changes made by primary legislation. New schedule 1 would place in primary legislation each EU directive on workers’ rights.
The amendments are front and centre of many working people’s concerns about an increasingly unstable labour market. There are protections against discrimination, and for the rights to rest breaks, paid holiday and leave for working parents. These protections have become the accepted minimums for reasonable employers and have been woven into the fabric of the employment relationship. On the steps of Downing Street in July, the Prime Minister referred to those who have a job, but do not always have job security. They are the millions of agency workers in the care sector, the retail industry, the security industry and in our factories. They rely on these protections to enjoy the same wages and holiday entitlements as permanent workers, and in turn they get equal access to facilities, vacancies and amenities.
Some have been reassured by the Government that Brexit will not undermine workers’ rights, but the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) demonstrate that that is not the case. If it is the case, however, I look forward to my amendments being added to this Bill, if only to add just a little more detail.
Despite being on the other side of the debate, I accept that the British public voted for Brexit, but I urge the Government to recognise that they did not vote for more insecure contracts, less safe workplaces or anything less than they currently have by way of protection in their jobs.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
I would like to take this opportunity to send my condolences, and I am sure those of many colleagues, to the family of one of my constituents who has passed away today—a great Yorkshireman, Sir Ken Morrison of Morrison Supermarkets. Our thoughts are with his family.
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn). I absolutely support her call for the protection of workers’ rights, as do many of my Conservative colleagues.
I have listened carefully to many fine speeches during the past two days, and none was finer than that of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who articulated so well the benefits of peace and prosperity that we have secured through our membership of the European Union. I must say, however, that I disagree with his conclusion, because I feel it is incumbent on me to vote to invoke article 50. Quite reasonably, the public believe that we as politicians have not been listening to their fears regarding sovereignty, democratic accountability and, most of all, immigration. I believe it would be disastrous if we did not support the public’s wish to leave the European Union.
In business, people often have to take a certain route, probably against their better judgment. The most important thing that they should always do in such circumstances is not to worry too much about whether they have made the best decision, but make the best of the decision they have made.
I have listened to SNP Members who have spoken about wanting a meaningful vote. By that, I think they mean a veto—as one of my hon. Friends said—over whether we should actually leave the European Union at all. If that is what they mean by a meaningful vote, I cannot think of a more effective device for getting us the worst possible deal from these negotiations.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the British public were told there would be no second-guessing or second bites at the cherry? This was not a bargaining position, but a vote on a decision to be made and taken by the Government.
Kevin Hollinrake
Absolutely. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. It is a shameful device to try to keep us in the European Union via the back door. A no vote by Parliament would lead us to remaining and that is in the interests of the negotiators in the European Union. We need to show confidence.
There is still time for the European Union to listen to the fears of other countries. The United Kingdom has made its decision, but other countries have concerns. In France, Netherlands, Germany and Italy, there is great discontent with many of the EU’s rules, regulations and restrictions. It is so important that we get not only the best possible deal for the United Kingdom, but the right deal for the European Union. The EU needs to see the shifting sands and listen to people’s fears while there still is a European Union. I believe that the fragmentation of the EU would be the biggest economic and national security risk we could possibly face. It is time for Brussels to listen to the people and reform before it is too late.
John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I am often asked by English Members why it is that I support pulling Scotland out of the UK but keeping it in the European Union. It is a good question, because Scotland is no stranger to the idea of sacrificing a degree of independence for interdependence. Indeed, that is the argument that underpins Unionism. When Scotland surrendered its national Parliament in 1707, it was to join a prototype European Union: the United Kingdom. Two countries which had been at war for centuries pooled sovereignty, allowed the free movement of people and created a common trading area, locking our economies together with the aim of ending conflict. The price was complete Scottish independence.
Across the North sea, there is a very similar country: Denmark. Both countries have populations of about 6 million. They are largely urban, but with significant rural populations. Both have large coastlines. However, when Denmark chose to sacrifice some sovereignty upon joining the EU, it retained much that we have lost, or will soon lose, in the UK. Denmark finds itself today in the single market and a member of the customs union, and it is able to enjoy all the benefits they bring. Denmark also remains in control of its own defence policy, its own foreign policy and its own fiscal policy. There, in a nutshell, is the difference. Within the UK, Scotland controls none of those.
James Cartlidge
The hon. Gentleman is making a very good speech. On controlling economic policy, I am intrigued. Given that the SNP advocates independence if it does not get its way on this issue, can he confirm whether the SNP believes his country should then join the euro?
John Nicolson
No, I believe Scotland should hold a referendum whether we get our own way on this or not. I believe in independence whatever the outcome of the vote tonight. [Interruption.] An hon. Member with an incredible degree of prescience announces that we lost the referendum. I am not sure whether that takes our debate very much further, but I am happy to acknowledge, sir, that we did indeed lose the referendum. We will win the next one, however.
During Scotland’s referendum on independence, it looked like some of this might change. The Prime Minister assured Scotland that we were a family of nations. Membership of the EU was sold to the Scottish electorate as one of the defining benefits of remaining within the United Kingdom, which must be a cruel irony on the day that we are debating this.
I am intrigued by what the Prime Minister means when she says that we are equal partners. What kind of equality is it when England, 10 times our size, attempts to compel us against our will? That is not equality as I understand it.
Joanna Cherry
My hon. Friend is putting the Prime Minister right on a couple of matters. Would he also care to put her right on her oft-repeated mistake in seeming to suggest that the SNP wants to take Scotland out of the EU, and then perhaps some of the scribblers on the Government Back Benches could pass it on to her?
John Nicolson
Members will be flabbergasted to learn that I agree with my hon. and learned Friend. We see a key part of our future lying in the EU.
The Prime Minister, mentioned there with such great affection, chose to visit Edinburgh on her first trip to Scotland, and it was a visit full of visual symbolism. She called on the First Minister, and while they did not hold hands, the Prime Minister said all the right things, including that she was willing to listen to options on Scotland’s future relationship with the EU. Well, what is the point of listening if everything said falls on deaf ears? It is not consultation.
My colleagues, my constituents and people throughout our country want to be part of an outward-looking, cosmopolitan Scotland. We want to be part of a union that is a community of nations and which respects diversity and autonomy. Members on the Conservative Benches profess to love the Union that binds Scotland and England, but the union that is dying is not the EU, with its long queue of candidate countries, but the UK. Margaret Thatcher may have begun the dismemberment, but historians will, I suspect, judge that today Conservative Members delivered the coup de grâce—as our continental partners would say.
Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (John Nicolson), who is a passionate advocate of Scottish issues. It is a pleasure also to see that you have recovered from the curried nut incident last night, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I am afraid that this is a speech I never wanted to give and a Bill I never wanted to see, but I feel compelled to speak in this historic debate. Having listened to the debate over the last two days, and harking back in particular to the speech of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and his quote from Edmund Burke, I know that the decision I take must be in the interests of my country—for us to do anything else would lead to unimaginable consequences. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) was also quite right that we have to put country first, constituency second and party last. That is why I have come to the decision I have on the Bill.
Hon. Members will know that I campaigned passionately on behalf of the remain campaign, and the majority of Bath residents—70%—voted, like me, to remain inside the EU. I have not changed my views, and rest assured I will continue to advocate them. Like other hon. Members, I have received thousands of emails and letters, from those on both sides of the debate, on whether I should vote to trigger article 50 and allow the Government to begin the formal negotiations. However, the referendum campaign was fought, the vote was held, the turnout was high and the public gave their verdict. The country voted to leave the EU, and it is the democratic duty of this sovereign Parliament and Government to ensure we do just that.
Had the result been in reverse, I would have hoped that the leave campaign respected the democratic decision of the British people in exactly the same way. It is incumbent on us all to come together as one nation to seek the best possible deal with the EU—a new partnership between an independent, self-governing, global Britain and our friends and allies in the EU. I have called consistently for a White Paper, which I am pleased will be published tomorrow, as I want to ensure that my constituents and, in particular, my businesses, which have been somewhat ignored in our debates, can more systematically feed in their views.
If we are to leave the EU, we must not delay any further. To do so would frustrate our European friends and allies and probably weaken our negotiating hand. I would like clarity soon from the Government about the final vote. Given that the Supreme Court ruled to ensure the introduction of this Bill, I wonder how it would rule if the Government used the prerogative to approve no deal.
I will vote to trigger article 50 tonight, and I implore all Members to do the same.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
Given the time available, I shall restrict my brief remarks to two issues that are impacted by Brexit: EU nationals; and the single market in aviation, which is an important issue in my constituency.
The 3 million EU nationals and their families living in the UK are understandably extremely concerned. Instead of getting straight answers from the UK Government, EU nationals living in the UK have heard only empty rhetoric and weasel words from the Tories. Johanna Kettunen is one of my caseworkers in my constituency office. Born in Finland, she has lived in Scotland for over seven years, studying at Glasgow University, and she has made Scotland her home. She is extremely upset that she is being used as a bargaining chip by this callous Government in a Tory Brexit game that gey few in Scotland wanted to play in the first place.
As with many other Members, a large number of my constituents have been getting in touch with me to allay their fears that Brexit might rip their families apart. This is a clear indication that the ongoing uncertainty about EU immigration and the right to remain are already harming the UK, and it will continue for as long as the Tories refuse to confirm the right of EU nationals to stay in the UK.
Article 50 and exiting the EU will impact not only on EU nationals, but on businesses across these islands. One sector that has not been given the attention it deserves throughout the Brexit debate is the aviation sector. This vital part of the economy contributes £1 billion a week to UK gross domestic product and £9 billion in taxation. The UK has the third largest aviation sector in the world, which is largely the result of the European single aviation market and the open skies agreement between the US and the EU.
By leaving the EU and the EEA, the UK walks away from these hugely important agreements—agreements that account for a clear majority of UK aviation traffic. Regional airports are vital for connectivity within Scotland, but the Tories’ reckless gamble with our EU membership has caused serious uncertainty for these airports, which could cause a serious detrimental impact on the Scottish economy.
In contrast, the SNP Scottish Government are working hard to ensure Scotland’s aviation sector is a success, despite Brexit, committing to halve air passenger duty by the end of 2021. So, not for the first time, we know what the Scottish Government plan to do with the powers within their remit, but what of the UK Government?
Will the Minister tell us in his summing-up whether the UK plans to remain part of the European aviation single market? If not, can he guarantee that transitional arrangements will be agreed to ensure that UK airlines and airports are not put at any competitive disadvantage as regards their European counterparts? Will he further assure us that the UK will remain part of the open skies agreement with the United States? The 5,200 people in Renfrewshire in and around Glasgow airport, and the 1 million across the UK whose jobs rely on a thriving aviation sector are watching and expect an answer.
The Prime Minister needs to act now and give UK businesses and EU citizens living in the UK a cast-iron guarantee that their status and rights will be protected. If she does not, she will leave us no choice but to offer a different path to those living and working in Scotland through “voting yes”—yes to be an outward-facing member of the international family of nations; yes for our children’s future; yes for Scotland; yes to independence.
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
I agreed with the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) when he said that this was a debate he hoped would never happen, and a vote he hoped would never happen. I am a strong remainer, and I campaigned hard for us to stay in the EU. I still think our future would be better within it, but I recognise the result of the British people who voted for Brexit. I also recognise, however, that my Durham constituency, in line with many university cities, voted strongly to remain.
I was worried about the result on 23 June. The north-east has only 1.6% of the population who are foreign-born, and hardly any of them live in Durham, yet in the campaign immigration was the most commonly cited reason for voting leave. It arose because people felt that their views were not being taken into account and that their access to jobs and services was diminishing—not least because of the austerity policies of other parties, which took vital resources out of our most impoverished communities.
I think that we failed to address those concerns in this House. We obviously have to tackle xenophobia and racism, and we have to change our immigration policies. I hope we find a way of doing that without simply withdrawing from the single market, which will create as many problems as it solves. We have also had four decades of negative press about Europe, and it was impossible to overturn it within a few months and make the positive case not only for the EU but for upholding human rights and active participation in global institutions that do so much to maintain peace and to create prosperity in the world. I hope we shall continue to take the international, outward-looking approach that is necessary, and reject the policies of Trump and isolationism.
I was very pleased that my constituents voted to remain, because the impact of Brexit on the north-east will be huge. We have a positive balance of trade, with 58% of our exports going to Europe, but we have no idea whether that will continue if trade barriers arise. We need to hear more from the Government about what will happen to our automotive industries, our universities, our advanced manufacturing, and businesses that are receiving money from the European social fund and the European regional development fund. That would help to create some stability. Our young people, most of whom voted to remain, also need to hear how the Government will deliver a more prosperous country. That is why I think we should adopt Labour’s amendments, and ensure that we have a vote on the final Brexit deal.
I know that my constituents voted to remain, but I recognise that the country voted for Brexit, and I shall abstain in this evening’s vote.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
Last summer I walked through the fields of the Somme and along the beaches of Normandy. Doing that, one cannot but ask oneself, “How did we get here?” History teaches us that it was the result of a failure of institutions, economics and relationships, and the rise of populism and nationalism. Because of that, I was, and still am, inspired by Europe and what it has achieved, for all its faults, many of which were rightly mentioned during the referendum. To the eastern European states during the cold war, it represented an alternative to the ethnic slaughter in the Balkans, and presented opportunities for hope.
I understand and respect the vast majority of those who voted to leave the European Union, many of whom were members of my own family and people in my own constituency. However, my constituents voted overwhelmingly to remain. Because of my constituents, because of my conscience and because of the facts that I see before me, I shall vote against the triggering of article 50, for the amendment, and also against the programme motion. The debate has been far too curtailed. No doubt the Bill will proceed to a Committee stage, and I shall also seek to amend it then. The result will reflect the referendum. I shall do that not out of disrespect, but out of duty: a duty to stand up for my constituents, to stand up for the 48%, and to stand up in this sovereign Parliament and challenge the Government and their approach.
The Government have no plan, unlike the First Minister of Wales, who has set out a cross-party plan. They have provided no guarantees that Wales will not be left worse off, and no guarantees of the unfettered access to the single market that is so crucial to businesses and jobs in my constituency. They have provided no assurances that powers will not be taken away from Wales, or that our rights will not be removed. They have given no reassurances to EU citizens living and working in our public services in my constituency.
We are told to be optimistic. I have no doubt that the British and Welsh people will find their way through, however difficult things become—we have done that so many times before—but I must be honest. I fear that the concerns that people rightly express about immigration are far from being resolved, and will not be resolved by our leaving the European Union. I fear that many who felt left behind will continue to feel left behind while we have a Government who are advocating a bargain basement, tax haven, race to the bottom economy, and are running across to the United States and throwing themselves before President Trump. I fear that the poorest will continue to suffer, and what then? Who will be blamed next?
The Prime Minister said today that she was a leader, but the truth is that she is a follower. She is following the siren calls of a select group on her own Benches to a hard, reckless Brexit. Instead of trying to bring the country together, she is now following the lead of a President whose values she does not share in a desperate scramble to make up for the gambles of her predecessor. We are at a turning point—that is certain—but whatever the result of the referendum, there is not only one route forward. We have a choice when it comes to where we head in the future, and we must think very hard about that choice.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), who is not in the Chamber at the moment, spoke about the future. The Bill will have huge impacts on future generations, affecting the prosperity of our children and our young men and women. That is thrown into particularly sharp focus in the highlands. For generations, young people left the highlands to seek further education and to seek their future, until we had a Scottish Parliament and benefited from the engagement of the European Union.
The University of the Highlands and Islands is celebrating 20 years of EU co-operation, which has allowed us to have that much-needed symbol in the Highlands—a physical university campus in Inverness. Among other things, our co-operation with Europe has helped to reverse the decline that I mentioned. So, too, have EU nationals, and I was struck by the words of the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), because I agree that these people who come to our country to add to it are our friends and neighbours, and they deserve to be treated as such.
However, with the direction that the UK Government are taking, that all changes. The UK is scrabbling about for deals—any deals—with no stone unturned, no matter who is underneath it. Holding hands with Trump, legitimising his symbolic exclusion, his walls and his rising xenophobia, and shaking hands with Erdogan—all this is clearly saying that it is weapons before weans, dogma before doctorates. The alternative to a rock-hard Brexit is a change of course, if not for the UK, then for our universities, for people who will be put in a really difficult position, such as those in Gibraltar, and, of course, for Scotland, where 62% of people and 100% of council areas voted to remain. There is a choice for this Parliament.
Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)
Has my hon. Friend noticed a shiver running along the Labour Front Bench looking for a spine to run up?
Drew Hendry
I thank my hon. Friend for his contribution. I hope Labour Front Benchers and other Labour Members will follow the example of some of those I have referenced tonight and vote against article 50.
If there are exceptions on borders for Ireland, and exceptions for Nissan and the City, this is a matter of choice—it does not have to be a rock-hard Brexit. People in the highlands and elsewhere in Scotland want hope for the future. They want future conditions to reflect our nation: they want a big-hearted, open-minded, co-operative future where all who contribute to a better society, wherever they come from, are valued. They want an enlightened future, not an insular little Britain hand in hand with those who would drag us into the darkness.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
I will vote against triggering article 50 tonight as a patriot who believes in Britain, and as a democrat who believes profoundly in parliamentary democracy. I will do it in the interests of my children, my constituents and my country, and in support of my convictions, because I do not believe that the Brexit course we are set on will make Britain a more prosperous, fairer, more equal and more tolerant country. To the contrary, it will make our politics meaner and our country poorer.
Despite all the optimism and jingoism we have heard from those on the Government Benches in the last two days of debate—there have been many terrific and many difficult speeches—I cannot credit the notion that the best way to make Britain a successful global trading nation is to withdraw from the most sophisticated global market the world has ever created. I cannot believe, standing here in London, in the heart of the most global, cosmopolitan trading city the world has ever seen, that we will enhance our chances of improving our economy by cutting off this city from the other great cities around Europe.
I cannot believe that our economy will improve, and I cannot believe that the constituents I represent will be well served. In fact, if the hard Brexit—the rock-hard Brexit—proposed by the Prime Minister comes to pass, I am convinced that it will be constituents such as mine, in working-class communities in this country, who will be hit hardest. And if the alternative version that she is threatening Europe with comes about, they will be hit harder still.
However, the biggest reason why I will vote against article 50 tonight is not the economy—we have made too much of that—but the values that are in jeopardy in our country and across the world. We are a liberal, plural, tolerant, European enlightenment economy and society, and the great British values that Labour has spoken for for so long are at risk today. This Brexit vote began with immigration. The man in charge of leave said it was their baseball bat, which they simply needed to pick up to win the vote. It has ended with the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) saying that the Tory party is now an anti-immigrant party, and with the Prime Minister hand in hand with a racist President of the United States. Are those my values, or are my values those of Angela Merkel, who had to ring up the President to tell him he was wrong? I know where I think this country stands on that issue, and I know that, unless we think again, we are going down a very, very dangerous path.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I want to make a few brief points about this Bill. Of course, Wales is a net beneficiary of the EU, receiving £245 million, or £79 per person, more than we pay in. In rural constituencies such as mine, that funding makes an impact way beyond what this figure implies. For rural communities, the common agricultural policy is the most important financial contribution that the EU makes, yet the Conservative party stands ready to switch off these vital support mechanisms that are essential to our already struggling isolated communities, with no indication of how it will make good the damage, or even whether it intends to.
I shall spend a few sentences exploring the increasingly divisive and much-misused word “freedom”. It was its antonym, “control”, that dominated the leave campaign’s market-tested propaganda, but it was an almost messianic pursuit of this most emotive of concepts, freedom, that drove us to break free from Brussels. [Interruption.] “Freedom to” and “freedom from” are the opposing and disputed understandings of liberty that have arguably underpinned the political divide for centuries. However, if we strip away much of the leave campaign’s divisive and reprehensible rhetoric, we find that it is its dogmatic belief in a freedom from Brussels that catalyses its distrust of the EU. In its polarised, simplistic view, now that we are free from the Eurocrats, once again the sun will never set on our shores. [Interruption.]
Liz Saville Roberts
I am most grateful for that intervention. We do not have many days to discuss this, and there are many of us who have waited in this Chamber all the while to do so, as we were required to. The least we can do is listen to each other’s contributions.
From what are we truly free? From workers’ rights and employment protections; from greater unity with our friends and neighbours; from free trade; and from progress. In reality, our so-called freedom from the EU will undermine our freedom—our freedom to achieve our potential. Our businesses will no longer have the freedom to export and import the goods we rely on. Our children will face greater challenges if they are to work and live in the countries that we have had the unfettered freedom to enjoy. The freedom to take back control? We have gained nothing but the illusion of control.
My party will always work in the national interest of Wales. My colleagues and I will therefore vote against this Bill on the grounds that this Government have failed to ensure Wales’s national best interests. Our economy and the role of devolved legislation are disregarded in this Bill. I am confident that the people of Wales did not vote for poverty and did not vote for our economy to bear the brunt of Brexit.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
One of the more bizarre aspects of the discussion that has taken place since the referendum is the way in which the people who won the referendum have tried to explain what it means by reference to the arguments of those who lost the referendum. Thus we are told that, even though it was not on the ballot paper, the vote is a vote to leave the single European market because David Cameron suggested that it might be. I did hear David Cameron suggest that, but I also heard the leave campaign accuse him of hyperbole and mendacity every time he did so, and say that it was not true.
There is a real possibility in this country that the political right might hijack that mandate from 23 June last year and use it to reconfigure our society and economy in a way that most right-minded people in this country would find abhorrent. What stands between them and that outcome is this Parliament. That is why it is so important that we should not give this Government a blank cheque—carte blanche to do as they will, as they try to interpret what happens next. That is why we should vote for the reasoned amendment tonight and say that we will not fire the starting pistol until the Government have explained to us the consequences of making that decision.
I very much welcome the support of other parties and of many Labour Members, but I want, in the dying moments of this debate, to implore those on the Labour Front Bench to reconsider their attitude and not to give the Tory Government a blank cheque on this matter. That is not the historical responsibility of the Opposition. It is not the democratic requirement of the Opposition. Please do not do it.
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
As I have been sitting here, I have heard from yet another worried EU national in my constituency. Does my hon. Friend agree that this Government, who seem to be well behind the curve on everything at the moment, really need to sort this out, to treat our European friends and neighbours with dignity and respect, and to listen to the Scottish Government?
Tommy Sheppard
I completely agree. That is another fine example of why we should not get on the bus until we know what the destination is. We on these Benches are determined not to do that, but we are also determined to argue about what the destination should be.
My colleagues have talked about the Scottish Government’s report on Scotland’s place in Europe post-Brexit, and I recommend that colleagues in the Chamber spend 15 or 20 minutes reading it. It might just surprise them. It has been published by a Government who believe in an independent Scotland and in an independent nation within the European Union, yet the document argues for neither of those things. It is a massive compromise, an olive branch, and an attempt to create good will and to say that we must try to find unity and consensus in this post-Brexit world. What that means, however, is that one size does not fit all in a country of this size. It means that there should be differential arrangements in Scotland for what happens next, for two simple reasons. First, the consequences of Brexit will be materially different in Scotland. Secondly, the attitude of the people and the electorate in Scotland is different. This Government can do this; they can accommodate the wishes of the Scottish Government and the Scottish people and achieve a situation in which there is some sort of sense to things, post-Brexit, and in which the views of the people of Scotland are respected.
Colleagues have mentioned the fact that this debate is not without context in Scotland. In 2014, at the time of the Scottish referendum, we were promised two things. First, we were told that the best way to keep our European passports was to vote to stay in the United Kingdom. Secondly, we were promised that a vote to stay in the United Kingdom would mean that the views of Scotland would not be diluted or absorbed into those of our bigger neighbour to the south, but would be respected. The Government say that Brexit means Brexit. Let us see, in the months to come, whether respect means respect.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. I rarely get to do this, so I am going to really enjoy it: I am going to raise the time limit for the last few speeches to four minutes.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—perfect timing.
I hope that I am wrong, but I believe that the decision that the country took on 23 June will result in the biggest self-inflicted wound since our disastrous intervention in Iraq. That wound is festering and it will leave the UK permanently economically weaker, even after it has healed. I believe that, when Members of Parliament believe that a course of action is going to be a catastrophe, they have a duty to harry, assail and oppose the Government, not to acquiesce.
I respect those who voted to leave. They had, and have, genuine grievances about a lack of jobs or education prospects, and concerns about the changes they see in our society, including concerns about immigration. The Brexiteers claimed that leaving the EU would address those concerns by stopping the cancellation of urgent hospital operations—paid for, presumably, by the tsunami of cash that was going to come to the NHS post-Brexit—improving teacher shortages in our schools and boosting housing supply. It will not do any of those things. In fact, it will make them worse. I doubt that even the leave campaign’s most prominent pledge, to reduce immigration substantially, will be achieved. Why would it be? After all, the Prime Minister has spent many years seeking to reduce the level of non-EU immigration, and nothing changed there.
What leaving the EU will do with certainty is diminish us as a nation and reduce our influence and international standing. That has already happened. Brexit has forced our Prime Minister, a born-again hard-line Brexiteer, to line up with Trump—indeed, to walk hand in hand with him. While European leaders and Canada condemned his Muslim ban, our Prime Minister’s initial response was to say, “Not my business.” Worse, she immediately offered him, with indecent haste, a state visit—far quicker than any other US President—which I am sure had absolutely nothing to do with her desperation to secure a trade deal, any deal, with the protectionist Trump.
In “The Art of the Deal”, Trump says:
“The worst of times often create the best opportunities to make good deals.”
To translate that for Conservative Members, the worst of times for the UK create the best opportunity for a good deal for the US.
Jobs are at risk. Six months after the vote, there is still no analysis of how many jobs will be lost after we come out of the single market.
Tom Brake
I will not give way.
The Liberal Democrat position is very clear: the people voted for departure, not the destination. Now the Government must give them a chance to vote on the destination. If that guarantee were forthcoming tonight, I would vote with the Government.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
I really appreciate the extra minute, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The Order Paper says that we will just be voting on the Bill but, actually, we will be voting on consigning the UK to a red, white and blue Brexit. Anyone who thinks that, by reasonable argument, they can influence this Tory Government to do reasonable things is deluded. It has not happened yet, and it is not going to happen in future. Anyone who votes in favour of triggering article 50 will be consigning us to a red, white and blue Brexit and a future shaped by the Conservative party. I could not do that in good conscience, and I cannot believe that other Opposition Members could.
In 20 years’ time, when my children are young adults, young people will not be able to travel easily to EU countries. They will not be able to marry people from EU countries for fear that they will not be allowed to live together in the same country. They will not be able to afford the living standards that we have now. There will be an erosion in food quality, for example, because we will have to compromise on our standards in order to have trade deals with countries like America.
We are going to lose farming in communities, such as those in Wales and Scotland, that currently rely heavily on it, that receive a huge amount of EU common agricultural policy money and that rely on the current high standards and the inability of countries to export cheap foreign produce. We are going to lose that.
In 20 years’ time, when my kids are young adults, we will still be negotiating trade deals. The Government do not have the capacity and the civil service does not have the skills to negotiate in a short period of time all the trade deals that we need—trade deals take a long time. The economy will be scuppered. We will see high levels of inflation. We will see people struggling to maintain living standards.
The Resolution Foundation published a paper today saying that, in 2021, the lowest earning quarter of households will earn 5% to 15% less than today; the highest earning quarter of households will earn 4% more. This is a Tory Brexit, and that is only four years in the future. Things will be even worse in 20 years’ time. Productivity will tank further. Productivity in the UK is rubbish, and there is a clear link between open markets, having links with other countries and increased productivity. My children will therefore have to work more hours than I have had to work in order to earn the same wages.
Dr Paul Monaghan (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that Brexit is an economic catastrophe waiting to happen?
Kirsty Blackman
I absolutely agree with what my colleague says. Too many Members in this House have not done their homework on this, and see the positives for the elite few but do not see the return to the ’80s and to the decimation we saw during the Thatcher years. They do not see that future, but it is what is coming. That is where we are heading. The plans from the Tory Government are for low taxes—for some sort of tax haven—but no country that is a tax haven spends as much on public services as we do; they all spend very small amounts on public services. Are the Tories suggesting that is the way we should go? What is going to happen to our NHS if that is the way we go?
The other thing about this, which the great repeal Bill will show, is that it is a Government power grab. We have been protected from the worst excesses of these right-wing Governments by the European Union. For example, it has protected our workers’ rights, our equality rights and our climate change laws. Now, however, the Tory Government and the unelected Lords are going to be able to dictate to this country all of the law, and we are not even going to get the benefits they said we would. They said we would suddenly be exempt from state aid rules, but we will not. That is not what happens, as the WTO has rules on state aid, and so do any links with European trading partners.
The worst thing of all is that in 20 years’ time, when my children are young adults, we will be a less tolerant and more xenophobic society, because instead of tackling the discrimination and prejudice, this House has pandered to it.
Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)
We have here a referendum that Scotland did not want, a Government that Scotland did not vote for and a result that does not reflect the wishes of the people of Scotland. This Government, whose stated policy was to keep us in the single market, are taking us towards the Brexit door at breakneck speed. Government Members have been waxing lyrical over the past couple of days about this wonderful opportunity we have had to debate this issue—since yesterday—but I remind them that they had to be taken to court to give us this opportunity, they spent an awful lot of money trying to prevent this debate from happening in the first place and they had to be forced into coming up with a White Paper. Suffice it to say, the Government are not handling Brexit very well at all.
As with the disastrous policy to pursue the ideologically driven austerity at all costs, this Government are pursuing Brexit at all costs. As many of my SNP colleagues have said, we were told during our referendum that Scotland should vote to keep Scotland in the EU. The people of Scotland have not forgotten the promises made, and the other side are going to have to come up with some answers. When David Cameron gave his first keynote speech of the campaign some two years ago, he talked of the UK having one of the most stable currencies in the world and said that that stability was “hugely attractive for investors”. He spoke about us having “real clout” in Europe. If David Cameron was right, we have gone from being a country at the centre of Europe to one at its periphery, and from demonstrating solidarity with our great allies in France, Germany and beyond, to begging for scraps from the table of President Trump. That is a distasteful downward spiral if ever there was one.
It is not simply that we are seeking to walk away from the table; many Government Members seem intent on burning our bridges on the way out. They seem to have forgotten the language they have used through this entire debate about the EU nationals; they think those people are a drain on this country, yet they want to do deals with their Governments. For goodness’ sake, what sort of negotiations are they going to enter into on that basis?
Tonight, I will therefore be joining my excellent SNP colleagues and some Labour Members in voting against this Bill. I will do so because that is what the majority of my constituents want, because Scotland was promised continued EU membership if we remained in the UK and because this Government are attempting to leave the EU in a haphazard and reckless way, without regard to the constitutional, social or economic consequences. We are not prepared to let them take Scotland over that cliff with them.
Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)
First, may I offer you my congratulations, Madam Deputy Speaker, on juggling what has been an excessively busy day in this place?
I am proud to follow so many passionate and eloquent speakers from both sides of the House, although I do not necessarily agree with them all. As my constituents from Taunton Deane, in glorious Somerset—home to that famous road, the A358, the Wellington monument and Somerset county cricket club—know, I campaigned to remain, but the majority of my constituents voted to leave, by 52% to 48%. Since then, I have been clear that I will stand by the views of the people and work to make the very best of this brave new opportunity.
Oliver Dowden (Hertsmere) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that we respect the June vote, as she is correctly doing?
Rebecca Pow
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The point I am making is that I respect the vote. It is important that we demonstrate that we are abiding by the wishes of the people. We would be poor parliamentarians indeed if we did not stick to what we promised. To that end, I shall be supporting this historic Bill, which will set in train the triggering of article 50 and our subsequent withdrawal from the EU.
I wish to express my respect for all those who voted remain. I appreciate and acknowledge their concerns, and want to convince them that I will be doing my very best, as will other colleagues in the House, to ensure a good outcome.
Some fine words have been spoken in this debate, not least by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who waxed lyrical about a return to the happy constitutional system that was known in this country until 1972. It is time to put our shoulders to the wheel and make this work.
I have heard with interest the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union single out one or two specific industries—particularly the finance and motor industries—for fair treatment. I urge that the same fair treatment be given to the all-important agricultural and environment sectors. As 25% of all businesses in the UK are in the farming, food and drinks sectors, that is vital.
Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that as well as making sure that agriculture is central to our negotiations, we must acknowledge that food standards are critical too?
Rebecca Pow
A whole raft of standards are critical as we leave Europe. We should embrace and harness the standards that have already been set and, indeed, tailor and improve them for our nation to make them much more suitable for the way we want to operate.
The agriculture and food industries are especially important in the south-west, where farm-related businesses turn over £2.7 billion a year—more than any other area in the country—and agriculture employs 80,000 people. In reformulating our life after the EU, we must consider very carefully how we are going to move forward after leaving the common agricultural policy. There are opportunities to develop a better framework and to develop an agriculture industry that is inextricably linked to the environment in a sustainable way. After all, we all depend on the environment for our air, water and food. We must build that into our industrial strategy and closely link it with our 25-year food and farming plans. Indeed, we have to make it work not only for the economy but for the rural social fabric so that we have a world that works better for everybody.
I urge the Secretary of State to harness the shared environmental legislation we already have from the EU, take it on board and adapt it so that it works better for us. We must keep to our climate change commitments—I am delighted that the Prime Minister has already spoken out on that issue—and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) mentioned, maintain our high standards of food security and welfare, along with our nuclear standards. We must also consider how we deal with seasonal workers so that our industries can continue to move forward.
With understanding, co-operation and consideration, and by demonstrating that we are listening to people—not only in Taunton Deane but throughout the nation—I am optimistic that we can build a better future for generations to come. To that end, I shall be voting with the Government to trigger article 50.
Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
Ours is a representative democracy—in fact I would go so far as to say a great representative democracy. The reason why this place will, and should, support the article 50 Bill is that, before the referendum, we made a contract with the British people that this place would abide by the result. I ask all Members who are thinking of voting against Second Reading to give that due regard. It was a commitment made by the Government, and agreed to by many on the Opposition Benches.
I very much look forward to supporting article 50 tonight, and then, following negotiations of up to two years, the Prime Minister getting as good a deal as possible. If this place says that it is not a good deal, World Trade Organisation rules hold no fear for many of us on these Benches. No deal is better than a bad deal.
May I now focus on a couple of inconvenient truths? To those on the Labour Benches, I suggest that all the talk of parliamentary democracy and scrutiny is fine, but, to those who were here in 2008, I have to say that I do not remember too much scrutiny when the Government of the day passed the Lisbon treaty. It was done very quickly. In fact, the Prime Minister of the day was not even present in the debate. Therefore, for all the talk of parliamentary scrutiny, we sacrificed large chunks of our sovereignty that day, and it is a great shame that Labour Members are now suggesting that they are the guardians of parliamentary democracy, when they were pretty thin on the ground when it came to the Lisbon treaty.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
I pay tribute to all the work that my hon. Friend has done on the campaign. He talks about democracy. Some say that this electoral result was too close, but does he agree that, if Members of Parliament had won their parliamentary seats by one vote, not a single one of them would have turned the seat down? They would have come here and taken their seats. In the same way, they should accept this result because the public has now decided and we should enact this legislation.
Mark Pawsey
On the point about abiding by the result, will my hon. Friend, who has been a strong leaver, recognise the challenges that colleagues on the Opposition Benches face in walking through the Lobby with us today and appreciate the efforts that they have taken to honour the wishes of their constituents?
Mr Baron
Absolutely. I completely agree with my hon. Friend. This will not be an easy decision for Labour, but, at the end of the day, a contract was made and that should be respected.
May I, very gently, point a finger at Scottish National party Members? For all their talk about wishing to remain in the EU, the bottom line is that had they won their independence referendum, they would have left the EU. The EU made that very clear. What is more, there was no automatic right of re-entry, and they would have had to take on the euro in that process. For all the talk about being good Europeans, if it had been left to them, Scotland would have left the EU.
In the time that is allowed, let me point out a few more inconvenient truths. I have heard it said many times on the Opposition Benches that we will become a more intolerant country. Immigration has been raised by several speakers with regard to our leaving the EU. I suggest to them that, by leaving the EU, we will no longer discriminate against the rest of the world, which the present immigration policy does. The SNP in particular may not like it, but it is a fact that we cannot stop anybody coming in from Europe, but that we do stop the rest of the world coming into the UK, because no country in the western world has a non-existent immigration policy. For all the talk on the Opposition Benches, by leaving the EU, whatever criteria we choose to guide our immigration policy, it will be fair to the whole world, not just to a particular region. No region will be discriminated against, and that is the point. Whatever the criteria, there will be fairness. No one will be discriminated against based on where they come from.
There is a further inconvenient truth that has hardly been touched on in the debate. Hon. Members suggest that we will suddenly become an economic backwater by leaving the EU. From looking at growth rates across the western world, I can assure the House that the EU remains in the global economic slow lane, with shamefully high youth unemployment rates to match. There is a world out there growing much faster than the EU. We need to embrace that future.
I very much look forward to our winning the vote tonight. I ask the Prime Minister to do what she can to negotiate as good a deal as she can, but not to be afraid to fall back on World Trade Organisation rules if a bad deal is on the table. There is a very bright future ahead of us.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
This has been an important debate, with MPs from every region and nation, from towns and cities, and from rural, coastal, industrial and agricultural communities having their say. There have been so many contributions of quality that it would be impossible to mention them all. This is how Parliament is meant to work; Members are sent here to speak for their constituents and settle, if not always agree, on a way forward.
We MPs usually listen to the arguments, take account of the impact of a decision on our constituents, apply the values of our party and our hearts, and vote accordingly. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) said in his outstanding speech, this decision is different as it follows a referendum, in which 52% voted to leave the European Union. It was a close vote, but a clear decision. As we accept the outcome of the referendum, we must consent to allow the process of leaving the European Union to begin, and we will hold this Government to account every step of the way.
Our challenge to the Government, through our amendments, is to enable this House to have proper scrutiny, to publish regular reports, to allow British MPs the same oversight as Members of the European Parliament and to secure the position of EU nationals living in this country, as a matter of urgency.
Jenny Chapman
I will in a minute.
Most important of all, our amendments would allow this House a meaningful vote on our withdrawal agreement at the proper time.
Alex Salmond
Given the many points that have been made across the Opposition Benches on the need for the Bill to be amended, will the hon. Lady and her Front Bench friends be voting against the restrictive programme motion?
Jenny Chapman
I want this Bill to proceed. Our amendments, which we will discuss next week, are all reasonable requests. Many Government Members have spoken in support of a parliamentary vote, and I appeal to all those who have spoken in that way, and who share our desire for a constructive and open process, to consider voting in support of our amendments next week.
We are an outward-looking, internationalist, pro-European party, and that will never, ever change. Let our determination to collaborate with, to stand alongside, and to work with our European partners never be in doubt. These are British values. The vote to leave the European Union, as well as leading to a changing mood in other countries, has deepened the sense that the values we hold most dear are under threat: tolerance, openness, co-operation, and solidarity. It is true that the rise of the far right in Europe and the rise of populism in the US have left many of us who believe in those values with an overwhelming sense that the political tide is against us—that xenophobia, fear and isolationism are drowning out our values of inclusion, hope and tolerance. It is more important than ever to stand firm beside those values. Bigotry, fanaticism and narrow-mindedness should have no place in our politics.
Very few Members of this House do not feel any trepidation whatsoever about the future. To deny the complexity—the risks to our manufacturing and service sectors, the disruption and uncertainty—that doubtless lies ahead is to hide from the truth: a truth that, if confronted honestly, can be dealt with and overcome. It is precisely because this process is so complex that we all need to contribute to resolving the issues we now confront. Pretending that these challenges do not exist is negligent.
The Labour party will not neglect its duty to challenge the Government when we think they are getting Brexit wrong. I say this to the Prime Minister: the best Brexit will never come via a cliff edge, however much some of her Back Benchers might wish it. This must be a deal worthy of the consent of this House. If she and her negotiators fail to achieve a deal worthy of our country, they will not achieve our consent. The Prime Minister must deliver the deal that she claims she can, with impediment-free trade, tariff-free trade, and a form of customs union membership allowing British businesses all the benefits they currently enjoy—a deal that delivers for British workers and British industry, and protects our safety and security.
That is a good starting point, but for the Labour party that aspiration is not enough. The Britain that the Labour party wants to build is confident of its place in the world. We want a Britain where, though outside the EU, we can protect British jobs by securing a deep trade deal with the EU. Let us remember that whatever deals we reach with other nations in the future, an agreement with our closest neighbours will always be the most important deal we do, where we protect British citizens by maintaining co-operation on justice and security, and protect British jobs by securing a good transitional deal.
The Labour party will use every means possible to bring about the best Brexit for Britain. We will fight for a future where business and industry thrive—especially, as my hon. Friends the Members for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin), for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods), for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) and for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) said, in our proud regions. We are the country of Brunel, Rosalind Franklin, Alan Turing, Michael Faraday, and Tim Peake. Our engineers, scientists, academics and creatives need to flourish in this workshop of the world. Labour will work to ensure that, after Brexit, our future as an ingenious, innovative, imaginative and inspiring nation grows and is never diminished.
The British people voted to take back control over their lives, and the Labour party understands the anger expressed through the vote to leave. Their reasons include low pay, lack of opportunity, insecure work, uncertain futures and a feeling of being remote from decision making in Brussels. To all who voted for those reasons, I say: we hear you. Labour will stand up throughout the Brexit negotiations for those who may have voted to leave but who did not vote to be poorer.
We will stand up, too, for those who voted to remain: 48% of voters cannot be marginalised or ignored. Many, although they accept the outcome of the referendum, do not see a prosperous future.
Jenny Chapman
Much as the hon. Gentleman would love to rerun the political battle we have just enjoyed, the political battle now centres on the terms on which we leave and the country we aspire to become. Labour is ready to take on those who offer empty reassurance based on nothing but their own dogmatic conviction.
Brexit must work for all our communities, especially the most disadvantaged. My party will step up and make sure that the Government fulfil their duty. As a former President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said to the Democrats:
“Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.”
That is how we must proceed—not for the 52% or the 48%, but for 100% of the people of Britain.
The Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Jones)
May I start by paying tribute to all the right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to what my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson), in her excellent maiden speech, rightly called an historic debate? Members on both sides of the House, supporters of both leave and remain, have spoken with passion and sincerity, and there have been some outstanding contributions. Several times over the past two days we have seen this House at its very best. A wide range of issues have been raised during the debate. I will seek to address them in the time available to me, but I hope that hon. Members will forgive me if I do not address every single point made by every single speaker.
Let me be clear: what we are considering is the most straightforward Bill possible. The Bill is necessary to implement the referendum result and respect the judgment of the Supreme Court; it is positively not a vehicle for determining the terms of the broader negotiations that will follow. The Bill follows one of the largest democratic exercises in this country’s history. As pointed out by many hon. Members, an issue that has been central to political debate in this country for decades was finally put to the people of the United Kingdom, and the people made their decision.
We have heard repeatedly from hon. Members on both sides of this debate, on both sides of the House, that they fully respect and accept the referendum’s outcome. Today is an opportunity for all of us to demonstrate that respect by supporting this small but important Bill.
Mr Jones
Given the time I have available, I will not give way; I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.
A number of themes that I would like to touch on emerged in the debate. The first is the referendum itself. Parliament voted overwhelmingly to put this historic question to the people, and we must trust the people’s decision. There must be no attempt to remain inside the EU, no attempt to rejoin it through the back door and no second referendum, as a few hon. Members have urged. This country has voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the Government and of this House to make sure we do precisely that.
Mr Jones
In the time available, I cannot.
Secondly, I would like to touch on engagement with the devolved Administrations, which has figured strongly in this debate. Before and throughout the referendum campaign, it was clear that the outcome would apply to the whole United Kingdom, and that is what we are committed to delivering. We are committed to securing the best deal for the whole United Kingdom, in the interests of all its constituent nations and regions. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has made clear her determination to uphold and strengthen the Union, and we will continue to engage with the devolved Administrations through the established Joint Ministerial Committees. We understand that there are unique and diverse interests across the UK.
Mr Jones
I do not know why the hon. Gentleman does not understand; I am not taking his intervention.
In particular, we are wholly committed to the Belfast agreement and its successors. We will work with the Irish Government to maintain the common travel area on the island of Ireland and not return to the borders of the past. We have received, and we are grateful for, the submissions from the Scottish and Welsh Governments, which are being considered.
That said, the Supreme Court was clear in its judgment that triggering article 50 is a reserved matter for this Parliament, and that the devolved legislatures do not have a veto. But we have been clear that we will work very carefully to ensure that as powers are repatriated from Brussels back to Britain, the right powers are returned to Westminster and the right powers are passed to the devolved Administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Many hon. Members raised the question of the status of EU citizens living and working in the United Kingdom. Let us be clear: this Government value and appreciate the role that they play in our economy and in our communities, and we are determined to provide as much certainty as we can, as soon as we can. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has been clear that guaranteeing UK citizens’ rights in the EU, and EU citizens’ rights in the UK, is one of our immediate objectives in the upcoming negotiations. Indeed, we stand ready to reach such a deal right now if the other countries of the European Union agree. To the EU citizens who are living, studying and working in the UK I say, “You will still be welcome in this country, as we trust our citizens will continue to be welcome in yours.”
Mr Speaker
I hope it is a point of order, rather than a point of frustration.
Clive Efford
What is the point in the Minister coming here, reading out a pre-written statement to the House and not listening to interventions from hon. Members who have legitimate questions to ask of the Government?
Mr Speaker
These debates will run for a long time to come, but that is not a matter for the Chair.
Mr David Jones
Moving on to the forthcoming negotiations, I want to repeat that although we are leaving the EU, we are not turning our back on Europe. We will be seeking a broad new partnership with the EU outside the single market, including a bold and ambitious free trade agreement. We will maintain strong relationships with our European partners as we work together on issues such as security, justice and migration.
Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. Gentleman is an excitable Zebedee. It has been made abundantly clear to him that the Minister is not giving way.
Mr David Jones
We have made clear commitments to protect workers’ rights, and will ensure that they keep pace with the changing labour market. Let me be as clear as it is possible to be: all the workers’ rights that are enjoyed under EU legislation will be preserved by the great repeal Bill and brought across into UK law. Let me also say that we have no plans to withdraw from the ECHR.
Let me deal with the question of Euratom. Euratom and the EU share a common institutional framework, including the European Court of Justice, a role for the Commission and decision making in the Council, making them uniquely legally joined. Triggering article 50 therefore also entails giving notice to leave Euratom. The nuclear industry is of key strategic importance to the UK, and we have been clear that this does not affect our intention to maintain close and effective arrangements relating to civil nuclear co-operation, safeguards and safety with Europe and the rest of the world.
Let me move on to the role of Parliament. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister set out our plan for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal in her speech at Lancaster House, and she has confirmed that Parliament will have its say on the final deal we achieve with the European Union by putting that deal to a vote of both Houses. There has already been extensive scrutiny in both Houses, and we will publish our White Paper tomorrow, before Committee. The White Paper, however, is entirely separate from this Bill, which simply gives the Government the power to trigger the process of exit from the EU, in accordance with the instructions that we have received from the people of this country.
There has also been much debate over the past two days about the many opportunities that leaving the UK—[Interruption]—that leaving EU affords the UK. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said, we will be an outward-facing, bold and global country, seeking ambitious trade deals, forging new friendships and consolidating existing partnerships, and we will remain a tolerant and open country. The triggering of article 50 will start the process of our withdrawal from the European Union, and during that process, the House will have plenty of opportunities to debate and play a crucial role in scrutinising the great repeal Bill and related Bills to come. My right hon. Friend has set out a detailed plan for building a new partnership between an independent United Kingdom and the European Union in the years to come.
Let me say how much I agree with the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman): the people have made their decision, and now we must strive for an outcome that, as she said, works not just for the 52% or the 48%, but for the 100%. All of us in this House must work together in the national interest, but let me repeat that tonight we are not voting on the outcome, nor on the wider issues, but simply to start the process. It is absolutely essential that Parliament moves quickly, under the timetable that this House voted for in December, to trigger article 50 by the end of March.
In short, this is a straightforward Bill that delivers on the promise made to the people of the United Kingdom to honour the outcome of the referendum. We must trust the people, and I commend this Bill to the House.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Proceedings | Time for conclusion of proceedings |
|---|---|
First day | |
New Clauses and new Schedules Relating to parliamentary scrutiny of the process for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union | Four hours from the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the first day |
New Clauses and new Schedules relating to devolved administrations or legislatures | Seven hours from the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the first day |
Second day | |
New Clauses and new Schedules relating to a vote on the final terms of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union | Four hours from the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the third day |
New Clauses and new Schedules relating to impact assessments | Seven hours from the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the second day |
Third day | |
New Clauses and new Schedules relating to the priorities in negotiations for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union; clauses 1 and 2; remaining new Clauses; remaining new Schedules; remaining proceedings in Committee; any proceedings on Consideration; any proceedings in legislative grand committee | Five hours from the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the third day |
Proceedings on Third Reading | Seven hours from the commencement of proceedings on the Bill on the third day |
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Monday 6th February 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Corrigendum to the Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 6 February 2017 (PDF, 57KB) - (6 Feb 2017)
20:48 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 284 / Noes: 333 - Question accordingly negatived.
23:54 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 276 / Noes: 333 - Question accordingly negatived.
00:07 - divided: - Ayes: 62 / Noes: 333 - Question accordingly negatived.
00:21 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 267 / Noes: 330 - Question accordingly negatived.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 20—Financial services—reports—
“As from the day on which this Act comes into force the Secretary of State shall, at least once in every six months, lay before Parliament a report stating what, if any, steps are being taken by Her Majesty’s Government to defend and promote the access to European markets for the UK financial services sector as a consequence of the exercise of the power in section 1.”
This new clause would seek regular reports from Ministers about the impact of withdrawing from the European Union on the UK financial services sector.
New clause 22—Competition Policy—
“Following the exercise of the power in section 1, Her Majesty’s Government shall make an annual report to Parliament on its policy regarding state aid, government intervention in industry and fair competition arising from the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from European Union competition regulations.”
This new clause seeks the publication of an annual report from Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the competition policy consequences of withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 29—Reporting to Parliament—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake to report to Parliament each quarter on her progress in negotiations on Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union and Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.”
This new clause puts a requirement on the Prime Minister for quarterly reporting during the negotiating process.
New clause 51—Approval of White Paper on withdrawal from EU—
“(1) This Act comes into effect after each House of Parliament has approved by resolution the White Paper on withdrawal from the EU.
(2) The White Paper must, in particular, provide information on—
(a) the nature and extent of any tariffs that will or may be imposed on goods and services from the UK entering the EU and goods and services from the EU entering the UK;
(b) the terms of proposed trade agreements with the EU or EU Member States, and the expected timeframe for the negotiation and ratification of said trade agreements;
(c) the proposed status of rights guaranteed by the law of the European Union, including—
(i) labour rights,
(ii) health and safety at work,
(iii) the Working Time Directive,
(iv) consumer rights, and
(v) environmental standards;
(d) the proposed status of—
(i) EU citizens living in the UK and,
(ii) UK citizens living in the EU,
after the UK has exited the EU;
(e) estimates as to the impact of the UK leaving the EU on—
(i) the balance of trade,
(ii) GDP, and
(iii) unemployment.”
New clause 56—Notification of withdrawal from the EEA—
“The Prime Minister may not give the notification under section 1 until such time as Parliament has determined whether the UK should also seek to withdraw from the European Economic Area in accordance with Article 127 of the EEA Agreement.”
This new clause would allow for proper parliamentary debate and scrutiny of the United Kingdom’s membership of the Single Market and whether the UK should remain as a member of the European Economic Area prior to the Prime Minister triggering Article 50.
New clause 111—European Police Office (Europol)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Police Office (Europol).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Police Office (Europol) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 112—European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) —report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) following the UK‘s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 113—European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK‘s participation in and engagement with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 114—Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) —report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK‘s participation in and engagement with the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) following the UK‘s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 115—European Medicines Agency (EMEA) —report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Medicines Agency (EMEA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 116—European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (EU-OSHA)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (EU-OSHA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (EU-OSHA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 117—European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) —report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 118—European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 119—European Police College (Cepol)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Police College (Cepol).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Police College (Cepol) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 120—European Environment Agency (EEA) —report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Environment Agency (EEA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Environment Agency (EEA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 121—European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) —report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 122—European Investment Bank (EIB)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Investment Bank (EIB).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Investment Bank (EIB) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 123—Eurojust—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with Eurojust.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the Eurojust following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 124—European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 125—European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 126—European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 127—European Satellite Centre (EUSC)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the European Satellite Centre (EUSC).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Satellite Centre (EUSC) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 128—Protected designation of origin (PDO) scheme—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the protected designation of origin (PDO) scheme.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the protected designation of origin (PDO) scheme following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 129—Protected geographical indication (PGI) scheme—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the protected geographical indication (PGI) scheme.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the protected geographical indication (PGI) scheme following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 130—Traditional specialities guaranteed (TSG) scheme—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the United Kingdom’s participation in and engagement with the traditional specialities guaranteed (TSG) scheme.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the traditional specialities guaranteed (TSG) scheme following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 134—Notification of withdrawal from the EEA—
“The Prime Minister may not give the notification at section (1) until such time as a Parliamentary vote has approved the withdrawal of the UK from the European Economic Area in accordance with Article 127 of the EEA Agreement.”
New clause 136—Approval of report on withdrawal from EU—
“(1) This Act comes into effect after each House of Parliament has approved by resolution the report on withdrawal from the EU.
(2) The report must, in particular, provide information on—
(a) EU citizens living in the UK and,
(b) UK citizens living in the EU, after the UK has exited the EU.”
New clause 151—Renewables—reports—
“As from the day on which this Act comes into force the Secretary of State shall, at least once in every six months, lay before Parliament a report stating what, if any, steps are being taken by Her Majesty’s Government to defend and promote the access to European markets for the UK renewables sector as a consequence of the exercise of the power in section 1.”
This new clause would seek regular reports from Ministers about the impact of withdrawing from the European Union on the UK renewables sector.
New clause 169—European Health Insurance Card (EHIC)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty‘s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) scheme.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) scheme following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 171—Erasmus+ Programme—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty‘s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the Erasmus+ Programme.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the Erasmus+ Programme following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 173—European Research Area (ERA)—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty‘s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the European Research Area (ERA).”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Research Area (ERA) following the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 176—Requirement to have regard to Motions passed by Parliament—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to any motions passed by Parliament on the outcome of the negotiations associated with the notification of the UK’s intention to leave the European Union authorised by this Act”.
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to have regard to any motions passed by Parliament on the outcome of the negotiations associated with the notification of the UK’s intention to leave the European Union authorised by this Act.
New clause 177—European Arrest Warrant—report—
“Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a report to both Houses of Parliament setting out the approach to be taken by Her Majesty‘s Government in respect of the United Kingdom‘s participation in and engagement with the European Arrest Warrant.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with the European Arrest Warrant following the UK‘s withdrawal from the European Union.
New clause 8—EU and United Kingdom nationals—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must resolve to guarantee the rights of residence of anyone who is lawfully resident in the United Kingdom on the day on which section 1 comes into force in accordance with or as consequence of any provision of a Treaty to which section 1 relates, and United Kingdom nationals living in the parts of the European Union that are not the United Kingdom before the European Council finalises their initial negotiating guidelines and directives.”
Amendment 83, in clause 1, page 1, line 2, leave out “the Prime Minister” and insert “Parliament”.
Amendment 45, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until she has confirmed that EU nationals living and working in the United Kingdom on the date that the UK withdraws from the United Kingdom will be subject to the same citizenship rights that applied prior to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal.”
Amendment 78, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Foreign Secretary has published a revised programme of work for the UK Permanent Representative to the European Union for the duration of the negotiating period, and laid a copy of the report before Parliament.”
Amendment 84, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The persons authorised to give notification under subsection (1) on behalf of Parliament are—
(a) The Speaker of the House of Commons, on behalf of the House of Commons, and
(b) the Lord Speaker, on behalf of the House of Lords.
(1B) Parliament may only give notification under subsection (1) if—
(a) both Houses of Parliament have passed resolutions approving notification; and
(b) votes in favour of notification have been passed by—
(i) the Scottish Parliament,
(ii) the National Assembly for Wales, and
(iii) the Northern Ireland Assembly.
(1C) A notification under subsection (1) must be given as soon as is practicable after the two Houses of Parliament have passed resolutions approving notification.”
Amendment 12, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“(3) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must lay before both Houses of Parliament a White Paper on the UK Exiting the EU.”
Amendment 17, page 1, line 5, at end insert —
“(3) Before exercising power under subsection (1), the Prime Minister must give undertakings that all EU citizens exercising their Treaty rights in the UK who—
(a) were resident in the UK on 23 June 2016, and
(b) had been resident since at least 23 December 2015
be granted permanent residence in the UK.”
Amendment 36, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“(3) Before the Prime Minister issues a notification under this section, Her Majesty’s Government has a duty to lay before both Houses of Parliament a White Paper setting out its approach to any transitional arrangements with the European Union following the expiry of the two-year period specified in Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union.”
This amendment would require the Government to set out, prior to triggering Article 50, a detailed plan for a transitional arrangement with the EU covering the period between the end of the two-year Article 50 negotiation period and the coming into force of a final Treaty on the UK’s new relationship with the EU.
Amendment 44, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“(3) Before exercising the power under subsection (1), the Prime Minister must lay a report before Parliament on the Government’s proposed negotiation package, including detailed and specific information on—
(a) the proposed terms of the UK’s access to the Single Market (if any) or the negotiating mandate thereof;
(b) the nature and extent of any tariffs that will or may be imposed on goods and services from the UK entering the EU and goods and services from the EU entering the UK or the negotiating mandate thereof;
(c) the terms of proposed trade agreements with the EU or EU Member States, and the expected timeframe for the negotiation and ratification of said trade agreements or the negotiating mandate thereof;
(d) the proposed status of rights guaranteed by the law of the European Union, including—
(i) labour rights,
(ii) health and safety at work,
(iii) the Working Time Directive,
(iv) consumer rights, and
(v) environmental standards;
(e) the proposed status of—
(i) EU citizens living in the UK, and
(ii) UK citizens living in the EU,
after the UK has exited the EU or the negotiating mandate thereof;
(f) details of the Government’s internal estimates as to the impact of the above measures on—
(i) the balance of trade,
(ii) GDP, and
(iii) unemployment,
in the UK after the UK leaves the EU.
(4) The report in subsection (3) must set out the costs and benefits of holding a referendum which asks the public to decide between the proposed negotiation package or remaining a member of the European Union.
(5) The report in subsection (3) must not be laid before the House before 1 December 2017.”
New clause 6—EU citizens resident in the United Kingdom—
“(1) Anyone who is lawfully resident in the United Kingdom—
(a) on the day on which section 1 comes into force, and
(b) in accordance with or as consequence of any provision of a Treaty to which section 1 relates,
shall have no less favourable rights of residence or opportunities to obtain rights of residence than they currently enjoy.”
This new clause guarantees the rights of EU nationals living in the UK at the date when article 50 is triggered.
New clause 14—Rights for EU nationals—
“Her Majesty’s Government shall ensure that those persons who have a right to indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom by virtue of their EU citizenship on the day on which this Act is passed shall continue to have an indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom.”
This new Clause would ensure that those persons who have a right to indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom by virtue of their EU citizenship on the day on which this Act is passed shall continue to have an indefinite leave to remain in the United Kingdom.
New clause 27—EU nationals in the United Kingdom—
“(1) The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under subsection 1(1) unless the Prime Minister is satisfied that arrangements are in place to secure that every individual who is—
(a) not a citizen of the United Kingdom, and
(b) on the date on which this Act comes into force (“the Commencement Date”), is resident in the United Kingdom pursuant to any right derived from the treaties,
shall, when the treaties cease to apply to the United Kingdom, continue to be entitled to reside in the United Kingdom on terms no less favourable than those applicable to that individual on the Commencement Date.”
New clause 33—Immigration—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to how this will give the UK control over its immigration system.”
New clause 57—Effect of notification of withdrawal—
“Nothing in this Act shall affect the continuation of those residence rights enjoyed by EU citizens lawfully resident in the United Kingdom on 23 June 2016, under or by virtue of Directive 2004/38/EC, after the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.”
This savings new clause is designed to protect the residence rights of those EU citizens who were lawfully resident in the United Kingdom on the date of the EU referendum. It would ensure that those rights do not fall away automatically two years after notice of withdrawal has been given, if no agreement is reached with the EU. This new clause would implement a recommendation made in paragraph 53 by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in its report ‘The human rights implications of Brexit’.
New clause 67—Indefinite leave to remain for EU citizens in Wales—
“Before the Prime Minister can exercise the power in section 1, the Prime Minister must commit to automatically granting indefinite leave to remain in the UK for EU citizens already lawfully resident in Wales.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to commit to implementing the Leave Campaign’s pledge to automatically grant indefinite leave to remain in the UK for EU citizens already lawfully resident in Wales before exercising the powers outlined in section 1.
New clause 108—Status of Irish citizens in the United Kingdom—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister shall commit to maintaining the current status, rights and entitlements of Irish citizens in the United Kingdom, inclusive of and in addition to their status, rights and entitlements as EU citizens.”
New clause 135—Effect of notification of withdrawal (No. 2)—
“Nothing in this Act shall affect the continuation of those rights of residence enjoyed by EU citizens lawfully resident in the United Kingdom and UK citizens lawfully resident in the EU on 23 June 2016 after the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.”
New clause 142—EU Students in the UK—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until a Minister of the Crown has confirmed that EU students present in the UK on the date the United Kingdom withdraws from the EU will be granted visas to allow them residency rights for the full duration of their academic courses.”
New clause 146—Rights of EU citizens in the UK—
“Any citizen of an EU Member State lawfully resident in the United Kingdom on the day on which this Act comes into force shall have no less favourable rights of residence than they currently enjoy.”
Matthew Pennycook
New clause 3 concerns the parliamentary oversight of the negotiations that will follow the triggering of article 50. It would require the Government to report back to Parliament at least every two months on the progress of negotiations and to lay reports before both Houses of Parliament on each occasion. Let me be clear that the purpose is to improve the Bill by providing Parliament with the means not only to effectively monitor the Government’s progress throughout the negotiations, but to actively contribute to their success by facilitating substantive scrutiny that can positively influence the outcome.
We are here today debating this new clause and other new clauses and amendments to the Bill only because the Supreme Court upheld the High Court’s November ruling on the triggering of article 50, confirming that only Parliament, not Ministers using the royal prerogative, can initiate the start of the UK’s exit from the EU.
Matthew Pennycook
I will not give way and will make a little progress, if that is okay.
The Supreme Court was right to make it clear that Parliament should exert democratic influence over Brexit. That influence should be felt at the start, throughout and, most importantly, at the end of the formal process of leaving the EU. In practice, the Opposition believe that there must be three distinct pillars of parliamentary scrutiny and accountability: first, the provision of a detailed plan published prior to the start of negotiations that can inform future debates and votes, and that can be used throughout as a point of reference; secondly, a means of ensuring robust parliamentary oversight throughout the formal negotiation period; and thirdly, a meaningful debate and vote in Parliament on the proposed deal before it is signed off with the European Council and Parliament.
Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman really think that in a negotiation that could take many months and which will be extraordinarily complicated it would be in the best interests of the UK to have to reveal its hand every two months?
Matthew Pennycook
I want to make it clear that we are not asking the Government to reveal the minutiae of the negotiations or to micromanage the process, and I will say more about that further on in my remarks.
Under pressure, the Government conceded the first of those requests in the form of the White Paper published on Thursday, and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) will seek to win agreement to the third tomorrow, when he moves new clause 1. The purpose of new clause 3 is to secure the second of those pillars and, in so doing, ensure an enhanced role for hon. Members throughout the process. The Government should welcome an enhanced role for Parliament throughout the negotiations for two reasons.
Matthew Pennycook
I will make some progress, if I may.
First, although Ministers obviously need sufficient room for manoeuvre, and understandably cannot therefore consent to the micromanagement of the process by parliamentarians, active and robust parliamentary scrutiny will aid the negotiations by testing and strengthening the Government’s evolving negotiating position and their hand with the EU. Secondly, facilitating substantive parliamentary scrutiny and accountability would help to bind the wounds of the referendum and forge a genuine consensus in the months and years ahead, by reassuring the public, particularly the 16.1 million people who voted remain, that they will not be marginalised or ignored but that their views will be taken into account and their interests championed by their representatives in Parliament.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
If the House is to pore over the details of the Government’s negotiating position and express its view on them at regular intervals, that will be known to those with whom we are negotiating. How will that not undermine the Government’s position?
Matthew Pennycook
If the hon. Gentleman will allow me to make some progress, he will see that that is not what we are asking for. When it comes to sensitive or confidential matters, we hope that there are mechanisms to allow the House to view and respond to those.
In leaving the EU, we need a deal and a process that work not just for the 52% who voted leave or the 48% who voted remain but for each and every person with a stake in our country’s future. No one can reasonably accuse the Secretary of State of being unwilling to appear before the House—he has responded to every question put to him on this subject, even if, to ape the language of the White Paper, it has not always felt as if we have got an answer—but we require something more throughout the formal negotiations: an opportunity for hon. Members to play an active role in scrutinising and influencing the process, rather than merely to observe and comment on it retrospectively. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) rightly argued on Second Reading, hon. Members are not passive bystanders, but should be active participants in the process.
Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important that Parliament is sovereign throughout the whole process and has a chance to look at the general direction the Government are taking by withdrawing from the EU?
Matthew Pennycook
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. As she will see, we are asking for no more and no less than the European Parliament will get.
Substantive parliamentary scrutiny and accountability are not the same as accountability after the event, and new clause 3 is focused on securing what is needed for the former. The Secretary of State has made it clear on numerous occasions that when it comes to the provision of information during the negotiations it is his intention that hon. Members will enjoy not just the same access to information as their counterparts in the European Parliament, but that the situation here will be an improvement on what the European Parliament sees.
We do not know precisely what the Members of European Parliament will see throughout the negotiations, but it is reasonable to assume that their involvement is likely to be conducted in accordance with the provisions of article 218 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union and that the detailed arrangements are likely to be similar to those set out in the 2010 framework agreement on relations between the European Parliament and the Commission. It is worth stating for the record, therefore, what that involves. Paragraph 23 of the framework agreement makes it clear that the European Parliament shall be
“immediately and fully informed at all stages of the negotiation and conclusion of international agreements”.
In addition, paragraph 24 requires that information shall be provided to the European Parliament
“in sufficient time for it to be able to express its point of view if appropriate, and for the Commission to be able to take Parliament’s views as far as possible into account”.
Lastly, in order to facilitate oversight of any sensitive material, article 24 of the framework agreement states:
“Parliament and the Commission undertake to establish appropriate procedures and safeguards for the forwarding of confidential information from the Commission to Parliament”.
In short, the Commission needs to let the European Parliament know in good time what it is proposing, with provisions made for sensitive or confidential material, and to give sufficient time for the Parliament to provide feedback, and then act upon it if appropriate. That is now the baseline of European parliamentary scrutiny—the baseline that the Secretary of State has assured us this House can expect not only to match, but to surpass.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
I think the hon. Gentleman will find that most European papers are published in English by the House of Commons Library. He has not yet answered the question about where he would draw his line in the sand in respect of what he refers to as micromanagement and material that should be discussed every two months.
Matthew Pennycook
I have been absolutely clear about that, I am afraid, and it is up to the Government to determine what sensitive material would come before Members of Parliament in that process.
Several hon. Members rose—
Matthew Pennycook
Let me make a little more progress, if I may.
In acknowledging the delicate balance between the need for robust parliamentary oversight and the needs of the Executive, it is that baseline of oversight that new clause 3 seeks to secure for this place. As the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) argued on Second Reading, process matters.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
I respect the democratic result of the referendum, but we all owe it to our constituents to get the best deal for them. The east midlands exports 50% of its goods to the European Union, and I would be failing in my duty as an east midlands MP if I did not have a chance to ensure that those jobs are not jeopardised by the Government deal. Is that not why scrutiny is important?
Matthew Pennycook
That is precisely why scrutiny is important, and if the Government were approaching this in a reasonable and sensible manner, they would actively welcome my hon. Friend’s input into the process.
The Government should embrace rather than resist agreeing to a proper process for actively engaging the House in the considerable challenge it now faces. The undertakings sought in new clause 3 would ensure the active and constructive involvement of Parliament in that process and increase the chances of securing the best possible deal for the British people. I hope the Government will consider new clause 3 in the spirit in which it has been moved, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on the matter.
In turning to the important matter of the rights of European Union nationals living in the UK, I shall speak to new clause 8, but principally to new clause 6, which stands in my name and that of my hon. Friends. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) argued so passionately during last week’s Second Reading debate, EU nationals who have put down roots in the UK are part of the fabric of our nations and our communities. They are our neighbours. Many of them sustain the public services we rely on and they deserve to be treated with respect. They should not be used as bargaining chips in the negotiations.
I have no doubt that many hon. Members on both sides of the House have had, as I have, EU nationals attending their constituency advice surgeries to express the sense of trauma and anxiety that they have felt every single day since 23 June last year, and to seek reassurance. While individual hon. Members can and, I am sure, have sought to reassure, we can provide EU nationals living in our constituencies with no guarantees. Only the Government have it within their gift to do so. The purpose of new clause 6 is therefore a simple one. It will ensure that on the day section 1 of the Act comes into force, the rights of residence of EU nationals living in the UK or the opportunities for those nationals to obtain such rights of residence will be guaranteed on the date on which article 50 notice is formally served.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
Even the Prime Minister’s statement today did not provide certainty. What constituents who have lived here for a number of years say to us is that they need certainty, so that they can know how to plan their lives. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that, in any event, someone who has lived here for five years should be able to get permanent settlement and that someone who has lawfully lived here six years should also be eligible for British citizenship? It is vital that the Government state this very clearly.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
May I urge my hon. Friend to look at the report of a commission organised by British Future, which I chaired? The report, which received cross-party support, said that the triggering of article 50 was the point at which rights would come in, but that there should be a transition period of about five years allowing people to normalise their status, and that there should be a special status to allow for our relationship with Ireland. We believed that that would be a way of giving certainty to EU citizens, and would also be perceived as fair throughout the EU.
Matthew Pennycook
I think that that echoes part of a suggestion that we have made. It is touched on in other new clauses, such as new clause 57.
Matthew Pennycook
I shall make a little progress, if I may.
Hon. Members will know that permanent residence is an EU law concept similar to, but not exactly the same as, indefinite leave to remain in the UK for non-EU citizens. It is not guaranteed that the concept itself will continue to exist after we leave the EU. However, we are not debating today the complex legal issues that arise in this area; instead, we are debating a principle. We are debating how the rights associated with permanent residence are to be guaranteed.
Matthew Pennycook
I am happy to give way, but then I am going to make a bit of progress.
Mr Harper
The hon. Gentleman says that we are not debating the detail, but I am afraid that that is what he is proposing. He is proposing a rather wide blanket measure which would give many people an unconditional right to stay in the country. What provision does his new clause make—I cannot see any—for the more than 4,000 EU nationals who are in United Kingdom prisons? What arrangements will there be when we leave the European Union to ensure that we can remove them from the United Kingdom, which we can currently do under the EU prisoner transfer agreement?
Matthew Pennycook
As the right hon. Gentleman will know, it depends on the terms of the sentence. New clause 6 seeks an in-principle guarantee from the Government that they will secure the rights of EU nationals.
Few would question the fact that Brexit has divided the country, but on this issue there is a clear consensus that the Government should act decisively to give certainty to EU nationals. A motion tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) in July last year, which called on the Government to commit themselves with urgency to giving EU nationals currently living in the UK the right to remain, was passed overwhelmingly in the House, and that parliamentary support is mirrored among the public. Polling by British Future shows that 84% of people, including 77% of leave voters, support the ability of existing EU nationals to stay in the UK. The Labour party has called repeatedly for the Government to act to end the uncertainty that those people face. Indeed, such is the level of consensus that even Migration Watch and the UK Independence party have joined those calls.
The only question that remains is whether the rights that flow from permanent residency, and the opportunity for those who are eligible to obtain those rights in the future, will be secured by means of a reciprocal agreement or unilaterally guaranteed by the Government.
Matthew Pennycook
I will not give way, if that is okay, because I know that many other Members wish to speak, and I do not think the Front Bench should take the majority of the time.
We recognise the efforts of the Prime Minister and her Ministers to achieve a reciprocal agreement with our EU partners that would also guarantee the rights of UK nationals in other EU countries. We owe a duty to our nationals in those EU countries, and securing their rights must remain a priority. However, with no reciprocal agreement reached and with just weeks to go until the triggering of article 50, we believe that the uncertainty must be brought to an end by unilateral action on the part of the Government.
Matthew Pennycook
I am not going to give way any further.
There are hard-headed as well as moral reasons for doing this. Guaranteeing the rights of residence of EU nationals unilaterally on the date on which the article 50 notice is given would not only end the uncertainty that millions now face. It would also ensure the best possible start to the negotiations that lie ahead, and would send a clear signal to the small minority who have treated the referendum result as a licence to victimise others that our fellow Europeans are welcome and will remain so.
A number of other new clauses and amendments share the purpose of new clause 6 in seeking to protect the rights of EU nationals living in the UK. Indeed, some add additional safeguards to the basic guarantee that we seek. In particular, new clause 57, tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), would ensure not only that the residence rights of EU citizens were protected, but that those rights did not automatically fall away at the end of the article 50 negotiating period if no agreement had been reached. If my right hon. and learned Friend were minded to push the new clause to a vote, she would have our support.
What matters in the end is that this issue is resolved as a matter of urgency in order to end the anxiety that people are currently feeling, and the distress that will be caused by a prolonged period of uncertainty during the negotiations. I hope that Ministers will be able to give us, and the thousands of EU nationals and their families out there, the reassurances that we seek.
Mr Harper
I note that this group is a fairly hefty one with a large number of amendments, but I wish to make only five points, so I will attempt not to take up too much of the House’s time.
The first point that I wish to address is that of parliamentary scrutiny, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) at the beginning of his remarks. A number of new clauses and amendments talk about producing a raft of reports, including the rather large number of new clauses from the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie). What I want to throw out there is the question of what that really adds to the process. It seems to me—I have also spoken to a number of my constituents about this—that this House has spent a lot of time, as is appropriate, debating Brexit and all the issues that flow from it. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has been here on a number of occasions, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has made a number of statements, and it seems to me that Ministers have furnished the House with a significant amount of information. Moreover, in the White Paper published last week, which I read very carefully, there was a reiteration of the commitment to bring forward the great repeal Bill, which will be very wide in scope and will enable Parliament to debate these matters, and there was also the suggestion that it is very likely that there will be primary legislation on immigration and customs matters, which will, of course, be debated by the House.
John Penrose
I agree with my right hon. Friend that there is a vast amount of information already coming out. Does he agree that even if that co-operative attitude were to change, there are plenty of mechanisms—urgent questions and the like—available to both Government and Opposition Members to bring Ministers to the Dispatch Box to provide the kind of explanation that everybody here is expecting? Does he therefore agree that it is very hard to see how the Opposition’s proposals build on or add to those mechanisms which are already available to all of us?
Mr Harper
I completely agree with my hon. Friend and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, certainly the Opposition Front Bench was desperately looking around for amendments that would not stop the Bill in its tracks, and this was about the best they could come up with. But it does not really add very much and is rather unnecessary, and, as I have said, many of the new clauses are rather repetitive, talking about reports and information about a whole raft of EU institutions, which will, of course, be covered in any event.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the effect, if not the intent, of the Opposition new clause would be to make all these matters justiciable and therefore bring the courts into the question of whether the Government’s reports were sufficient and, indeed, appropriate?
Mr Harper
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. Once we put things into primary legislation and set out the nature and terms of the report, it will, as we have seen, be justiciable, and it will allow people to go to court and argue—they might be successful, they might not—that what the Government have brought forward is not adequate, and we will then have a continuation of the legal arguments that we have seen.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
Should not any Member of this House want as a minimum requirement access to information and opportunities at least equal to those of any Member of the European Parliament—surely no Member of this House can justify arguing for anything less?
Mr Harper
The point I was making—and I think my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) was agreeing—is that there are already well-established mechanisms in this House for ensuring that information is brought before Members. Indeed, if I simply judge my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union by what they have done so far, it seems to me that they have been in this House frequently talking about Brexit. I fear that, by the end of this process, certainly the general public will be willing it to end as might hon. Members.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Is not one of the problems that, in recent years, motions have regularly been carried by the House and then been completely and utterly ignored by the Government? We need more than just a simple yes or no vote at the end of this process. We need to be able to scrutinise whatever deal emerges line by line. That is exactly what the European Parliament will be able to do, so why on earth should not we be able to do it too?
Mr Harper
I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman rose to his feet, because I am about to turn away from my first point about the new clauses tabled by Opposition Front-Bench Members and to talk about the ones that I think could be much more damaging. Those include new clause 51, to which the hon. Gentleman has appended his name, and amendment 44.
In the Government’s amendment to the Opposition motion that was passed by the House on 7 December last year, the House agreed by 448 votes to 75 that the Government should indeed ensure that Parliament had the necessary information to scrutinise these matters properly. The instruction from the House also stated, however,
“that there should be no disclosure of material that could be reasonably judged to damage the UK”.—[Official Report, 7 December 2016; Vol. 618, c. 220.]
This is an arguable matter, but my contention is that the detail called for in new clause 51 on, among other things, the terms of proposed trade agreements and the proposed status of citizens are details that we would not want to disclose during our negotiations. For example, we would not wish to disclose whether tariffs were to be introduced or at what level. To do so would be to reveal our negotiating hand, which would be counter to the strongly expressed view of the House. If new clause 51 or amendment 44 are put to a vote, I strongly urge the House to vote against them.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman has mentioned new clause 51, which has been tabled in my name and those of other Opposition Members. Given that, before the referendum, the Government of which he was a part estimated the damage to the UK’s GDP of our leaving the EU on World Trade Organisation terms at around 7.7% of GDP or perhaps as much as £66 billion, would he not think it sensible for the Government to allay the country’s concerns if they now believe that the effects will be far less serious?
Mr Harper
The hon. Gentleman is picking out one aspect of his new clause. I was drawing out an aspect, to which I object, dealing with the effective disclosure of our hand in the discussion on future trading arrangements. That would not be very sensible while we are carrying out negotiations with our trading partners.
Owen Smith
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for being tempted. Another big area in which the Government were very clear, prior to the referendum, was the impact on trade of our leaving the EU, yet now we have no information on whether there will be more or less trade with the EU or with its constituent countries. Does it not seem sensible to tell the country whether we will have more trade with the EU or less?
Mr Harper
One of the flaws in the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion is that all the matters to which he refers are forecasts, estimates or guesses. A number of estimates and forecasts were made by both sides of the argument—leave and remain—before the referendum. I am not an expert on these matters, but it seems that not all of those forecasts and assessments have panned out exactly as people thought they would, so I really do not know why producing large documents full of equally erroneous forecasts would be helpful.
Sir Hugo Swire
Has not this exchange demonstrated the foolhardiness of revealing our hand at this stage, given the fact that we cannot officially strike any kind of bilateral trade deal until we leave the EU? We must avoid talking our country down when every trade deal and every relationship we have—yes, even with the United States—will be of paramount importance. We should also do everything to resist the temptation to insult anyone from those countries who might be coming here.
Mr Harper
I could not agree more with my right hon. Friend. That demonstrates the expertise that he acquired when he was a Foreign Office Minister.
Moving on to number three of my five points, new clause 56 refers to our withdrawal from the EEA and tries to make that into a separate argument. We are a member of the EEA as a result of being a member of the EU. Given that the EEA agreement talks about the free movement of goods and persons and means that we are susceptible to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, if we were to remain within the EEA, we would in the view of most members of the public effectively not have left the EU at all—the things that they were concerned about would still be in force. Indeed, things would have got worse because we would have no ability to influence—[Interruption.]
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Harper
Let me just finish my point. We would have no ability to influence the rules that we would have to accept. Members who are talking about the EEA are simply trying to avoid the fact that we are going to be leaving the European Union; they are trying to remain in it by the back door.
Mike Gapes
Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that Norway is not in the European Union, that Norway was cited by leading leave campaigners as an option that we could follow and that we could be like Norway and not within the European Union?
Mr Harper
I can confirm to the House that Norway is not a member of the European Union. That is indeed true. Part of the reason why I was on the remain side of the argument was that the Norway deal is not very good at all and not a model to be followed. My view was that—[Interruption.]
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Harper
Let me finish answering the point of the hon. Member for Ilford South and then I will of course take an intervention. I did promise to give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) first, but I will then give way to the hon. Lady.
The two best options are either to be in the EU and accept everything that comes with that, but with the ability to shape the rules, or to leave and not be in the single market, not have free movement of people and not be subject to the European Court of Justice. Norway’s EEA model is poor, because it is subject to the free movement of people, it has to accept the jurisdiction of the Court and it has no right at all to influence any of the rules. It is up to the Norwegians what model they want to adopt, but it is not one that would work for us or that I would recommend to the House.
Julian Knight
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. Constructs such as the EEA are effectively antechambers. They are entry points into the EU. It would be inappropriate, given our size and our economy, for a country such as ours that is exiting the EU to rest in something that is unsuitable.
Heidi Alexander
Will the right hon. Gentleman tell the Committee whether he believes that Parliament should vote on whether we leave the single market and the EEA before that happens—if that is what the Government want to see through?
Mr Harper
I do not. I will put my cards on the table: I was on the remain side, but I am a democrat, so I accept the result. As a participant, I listened closely to the arguments in the referendum campaign and when David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), then Chancellor, were leading the remain campaign, they were clear that if the country voted to leave the European Union, we would leave the single market. Both David Cameron and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton thought, erroneously as it turned out, that that argument would be the slam dunk. They thought that the British people would see that being in the single market was absolutely critical and therefore would vote to remain in the European Union.
Mr Harper
If I can finish my answer, I will of course take an intervention.
However, the British public did not agree with David Cameron and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton. Therefore, it seems clear that the public accepted that we would be leaving the single market. Leading campaigners on the leave side made exactly the same point. I will now give way to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke).
Mr Kenneth Clarke
It is quite right that the then Prime Minister and Chancellor warned that leaving the EU would mean leaving the single market, but my recollection is that some leave campaigners just dismissed that as “Project Fear”. I particularly recollect that the current Foreign Secretary was totally dismissive of that argument and said that we would retain full membership of and full access to the market because Europe needed to sell us its Mercedes and prosecco wine. It is not true that everybody on the leave side acknowledged that we would put ourselves outside tariff and regulatory barriers.
Mr Harper
My right hon. and learned Friend is right that not everybody on the leave side made that argument. The good news for me is that I was not on the leave side of the argument—neither was he—so I feel no obligation to defend any of the arguments made by anybody on that side of the campaign.
I specifically chose the former Prime Minister and the former Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton, because they were on my side of the argument, but I think I am right in saying that my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who led the official leave campaign, made exactly that argument, which is why I referred to it.
Ms Gisela Stuart
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way to the chair of the official leave campaign. Although many voices argued for leave, the official leave campaign, its chair and the co-chairs of its campaign committee made it very clear in public that voting to leave would mean leaving the single market.
Mr Harper
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for that helpful intervention, which rather proves my point. The British people’s decision in the referendum means leaving the EU, which means leaving the single market. That is the conclusion that the Prime Minister has drawn, and it is one that I support.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Harper
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I want to move on to my fourth point, on the important issue of EU nationals. Given my experience as a former Immigration Minister, I have some questions, and I hope the Minister will be able to address them to my satisfaction and to the satisfaction of the House.
First, I completely agree that it would be desirable to be able to put at rest the minds and concerns of EU nationals in the United Kingdom who are here lawfully and who contribute to our country, but it is also important to be able to put at rest the concerns and worries of British citizens living elsewhere in the European Union. After all, the primary duty of the British Government is to look out for British citizens. That comes first, ahead of all else, and I fear that what the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich suggested—when he said that, if we cannot reach an early agreement, we should proceed anyway—might well put to rest the concerns of EU nationals in Britain, but would simply throw overboard the interests and concerns of UK citizens living elsewhere in the European Union. Doing that would not secure their interests, and it would throw away our ability to do so.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
Some 15% of the academic staff, 5% of students and 10% of research students at Cardiff University in my constituency are from the EU. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that there is a significant risk that those EU staff and their spouses will seek employment elsewhere, outside the UK, if they do not have certainty now from the Government? We would then lose all that intellectual capital.
Mr Harper
I completely agree with the hon. Lady, which is why I am pleased that the Prime Minister, in her statement today and on a number of other occasions, has made it clear that she wants to reach an early agreement, and has been seeking to do so, with our European partners. But, in leading our country, the Prime Minister has to look to the interests of British citizens, as well as to the interests of citizens from other EU countries who are here. She does not serve the interests of British citizens by putting the interests of EU nationals ahead of them.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The right hon. Gentleman is courteous in giving way. I am a member of the Exiting the European Union Committee, and a few weeks ago we heard evidence from several British nationals living in Spain, Germany, Italy and France. They were members of representative organisations for British nationals, and every single one of them said that they felt that the other member states would reciprocate if the UK Government made a unilateral guarantee of the rights of EU nationals living here. Has he taken that evidence into account?
Mr Harper
I have, and the hon. and learned Lady has now put it before the House, but the problem is that I have not seen any evidence to support that view. If I listened correctly to what the Prime Minister was saying, it sounds as though a number of European member state Governments are indeed of that view, but clearly more than one are not—or at least they are not now. Therefore, it is sensible to get this right.
There is another thing that Members of this House ought to be doing, and this picks up on the point made by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). There are already several mechanisms through which EU nationals who have lived in the UK for some time can sort out their residency status on a permanent basis. Rather than scaremongering and whipping up concern, hon. Members would do well to put that information in front of their constituents in order to reassure them.
Joanna Cherry
The point that these British nationals living abroad made was that the British Government put this matter on the table—they put the rights of these people at issue—so they should take the lead by guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals living in the UK, and then other member states would follow suit. Those are not my words but the words of British nationals living abroad. What does the right hon. Gentleman have to say to that?
Mr Harper
No, with the greatest respect, it is not the same thing. These issues have arisen and there is a question about the rights of EU nationals and British citizens because the people of the United Kingdom decided that we were going to leave the EU. That is not a decision of the Government—
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Tyrie
My right hon. Friend would agree, however, that other nationals should not be treated as bargaining chips, and I am sure he would also be aware that the Treasury Committee has heard a good deal of evidence to suggest that the failure to guarantee the rights of EU nationals is now beginning to damage the economy. Given that, and the overwhelming ethical case, does he not agree, on reflection, that the time has come just to protect those EU citizens’ rights?
Mr Harper
I completely agree on the value to the economy. I also agree on this being an urgent matter, and I heard the Prime Minister say exactly that this afternoon. If I may conclude my remarks about EU nationals, perhaps my right hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) will see why I do not think precipitate action is very wise. It could open up a range of complexities which, far from putting people’s minds at rest and making things better, could make things worse.
Ms Gisela Stuart
The right hon. Gentleman was a Minister and he has been in negotiations. If we put on the table the kind of deal we would expect the other 27 to offer to UK citizens, we would set the template of what we think the right deal is and set the right tone for the negotiations; this is a different matter from trade.
Mr Harper
I was listening carefully to what the Prime Minister said, and it sounds to me as though she and her Ministers are indeed talking to EU member states and trying to get this issue resolved. There is a two-stage process here: we need an agreement in principle by the UK Government with other EU member states—
Mr Harper
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for trying to intervene, but I need to finish replying to the right hon. Lady before I can take his intervention. I am also conscious of the fact that I have only one more point to make after I have finished my points about EU nationals, and I want to give other Members the chance to contribute to the debate. [Interruption.] I am giving way to take questions. This is a debate, and I cannot both make rapid progress and give way to Members, so let me just answer the point that the right hon. Lady made. It seems to me that the Prime Minister and her Ministers are indeed dealing with other European members and trying to get this issue resolved, but that is clearly not being entirely reciprocated by other members. The approach has two stages: we need an agreement in principle that we want to guarantee those rights; and then there is also an awful lot of detail to be worked out. These matters are very complicated.
I wish to draw the House’s attention to what happened last weekend. As far as I can tell, looking from the outside, it seems to me that part of the reason for the mess the US Administration have got themselves into is that they produced an Executive order that was not very well thought through. They do not seem to have taken proper legal advice, so got themselves into trouble in the courts. There was an impact on British citizens, before the intervention of my right hon. Friends the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary resolved the matter. I do not want us to move precipitately without thinking things through.
I wish to give the House some examples that I think must be sorted out. First, the various amendments and new clauses refer to people who are lawfully resident in the United Kingdom under the existing treaties. People think that is straightforward, but it is actually quite complicated. Any EU national can come to Britain for any reason, for up to three months. If they want to stay here for longer than three months, they have to be either working, looking for work, self-sufficient or a student. If they are self-sufficient or a student, they are here lawfully only if they have comprehensive health insurance. We know from those people who have been trying to regularise their status, following the sensible advice from the right hon. Member for Leicester East, that many do not have that comprehensive health insurance so technically are not here lawfully at all. When we use these phrases, we need to be clear who we are granting the rights to, because people will not be aware of the complexity. If we are to give people clarity and certainty, we have to be clear about what we are doing.
Secondly, the national health service and healthcare are topical issues. We currently have a set of reciprocal arrangements with our European Union partners for people who are in those countries. We do not do the logging, administration and collecting of the money as well as they do. We want to ensure that that will work when we have left the European Union. I do not know where we will end up on that, but it is important.
Thirdly, in an intervention earlier I alluded to a point that must be thought about, because if we act hastily, we will come to regret it. At the end of March last year—these are the latest figures I was able to find—4,222 EU nationals were imprisoned in British jails. Under the EU prisoner transfer framework directive, we have the ability to transfer them when they are in prison, and when they come out we can start to take action to revoke their status in the United Kingdom. I want to make sure that in acting now we do not act hastily and make our ability to remove those people from the United Kingdom more difficult. I fear that the new clauses and amendments we are considering would not adequately deal with that issue, as was reflected in the answer from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich.
Finally, the Bill does one simple thing: it gives the Prime Minister the lawful authority to start the negotiation process. That is all it does. The Government have been generous in making available the time to debate that matter. The Bill does not need to be improved or amended in any way. I do not know which amendments and new clauses will be pressed to a vote, but I hope that I have set out some reasons why several of them should be rejected. If any of them are pressed, I urge the House to reject them.
Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)
I rise to support new clause 57, which was tabled in my name and the names of other members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, with the support of right hon. and hon. Members from both sides of the House.
This is about 3 million people and their families—EU citizens whose future here has been thrown into doubt by the decision in June that the UK should leave the EU. There is nothing about the cloud of uncertainty that they now live under that is their own fault. If we accept the new clause, we can put their minds at rest and let them look to the future.
Members on both sides of the House will know the people whose lives we are talking about. Some, such as those from France and Spain, have been here for decades. They have children and grandchildren living here. They work in and are part of their local community. It is unthinkable that they would be deported and their families divided because we have decided to leave the EU. Let us put their minds at rest and assure them and their families that our decision to leave the EU will not change their right to be here. Their anxiety is palpable. We have all seen it in our advice surgeries. One of my constituents, an Italian woman, has been here for 30 years. She cannot work anymore because she is ill, and her residency rights are now at risk. People from countries that have more recently joined the EU, such as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, are working in sectors that could not manage without them—in agriculture, care homes and our tourism industry. Employers in food production are already reporting more difficulty in getting the workers they need. That is happening now.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
New clause 57 was recommended by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. My constituent who is a consultant paediatric surgeon from Sweden approached me over the new year in a state of distress because he was not sure about his future status —this is someone who performs really valuable services for the people of the west midlands and at Birmingham Children’s Hospital. He had been advised that he should seek the services of an immigration lawyer, and that advice had come from his trust.
Ms Harman
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There was plenty of other such evidence that came before us on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which he is a very valued member. This ongoing uncertainty around the status of EU residents here is allowing greater exploitation of vulnerable EU workers. Last week, appearing before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Margaret Beels, chair of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, said that she is receiving evidence that gangmasters are telling fearful EU workers that they cannot complain about not being paid or about being subjected to unsafe conditions because if they do they will be deported as they no longer have the right to be here. We are not whipping up fears, but understanding fears and seeking to address them. It is no good, I am afraid, issuing warm words; people need certainty. They work in every part of our private sector. They contribute to our creative industries; they are artists and musicians. They work in our public services. Anyone who has been in hospital recently will very likely have awoken to find a Spanish or a Portuguese nurse at their bedside. If anyone has an older relative in a care home, they are likely to see them being cared for by someone from eastern Europe.
Sir Hugo Swire
I have considerable sympathy with the point that the right hon. and learned Lady is making. We disagree on the fundamental point, which is that we should not do something unilateral here in the United Kingdom before we have agreement on our own residents in Spain and France and elsewhere, because we will potentially be undermining their position. No doubt they will be feeling the sense of vulnerability that she has just articulated about those living here.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
Is my right hon. and learned Friend aware that we also heard evidence in the Home Affairs Committee from groups representing the Polish community and other eastern European communities? They said that they had seen an increase in hate crime. They also said that extremists were exploiting the uncertainty and attacking people with phrases such as “Go home” and “Leave the country”. They said that the uncertainty that EU citizens felt made it harder for them to deal with these awful hate crimes.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
I am sure that many MPs in this Chamber have also had constituents from the EU who have tried to seek security by applying for permanent residency, but who have been turned down and received “prepare to leave” letters. The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) mentioned comprehensive health insurance. There is no such thing. A person cannot get 100% comprehensive health insurance. Previously, the NHS was recognised for giving health cover. Why can this House not give these people security at this end, and not threaten to throw them out?
Ms Harman
I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady.
It is not just EU nationals and their families who are worried about the uncertainty hanging over them; so are the employers for whom they work. How will our NHS find the nurses we need if they seek work elsewhere for fear that they will not be allowed to stay? It is not as if we are training them ourselves. With the cuts to bursaries, the number of student nurses has fallen by 23% this year.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I recently had a conversation with the chair and chief executive of the trust in my constituency, who said that Huddersfield Royal infirmary could not operate if it were not for young Spanish nurses. I also spoke to people at the London School of Economics who said that if the Europeans, who are good at maths and science, were to leave, 20% of the workforce of universities would go back home.
Dawn Butler
My right hon. and learned Friend is being very generous with her time. Constituents have come to my surgeries in tears, fretting about what will happen to them and their jobs. Does she agree that it is not a British value to use people as bargaining chips in the negotiations?
John Penrose
The right hon. Lady is sending out a powerful message about British values and—this point is shared across the House—about giving certainty to EU nationals living here. May I press her, though, on the need to be careful not to send a message to British nationals living in the rest of the EU that they are somehow less important? Their concerns are equally valid and severely felt, and we are equally worried about what is happening to them. Are we not going to address or take account of any of those issues today?
Ms Harman
We simply cannot trade one off against the other like that. This is not an economic trade negotiation.
The new clause is quite simple. It would provide that the rights of residence of EU citizens who were lawfully resident here before the referendum decision on 23 June remain unchanged. We need the clause in the Bill because the Government have been sending out mixed messages, and the Prime Minister did so again in her statement today. On the one hand, she says that anyone who is lawfully here has nothing to worry about. On the other hand, she says that she cannot commit to giving them residency rights because their future must be part of the negotiations.
It is in no way right to use the lives of 3 million people and their families as a bargaining chip. They and their families are not pawns in a game of poker with the EU. They cannot be used as a human shield as we battle it out in Europe for our UK citizens in other countries. We must decide what is fair and right for EU citizens here, and then do it. I thought we were supposed to be taking back control. If the Government reject the new clause, EU citizens will be right to draw the conclusion that their rights to continue to live here could be snatched away if our Government do not get what they want for our UK citizens living in each of the other countries in the European Union.
The new clause is not only the right thing to do as a matter of principle; it is legally necessary. The Government cannot bargain away people’s human rights. The right to family life is guaranteed by article 8 of the European convention on human rights. If the Government bargained them away, EU citizens living here would be able to go to our courts and seek to establish their rights to remain under article 8. If even 10% of those here did that, there would be 300,000 court challenges. There is no way that our court system could begin to cope with that. I hope that the Government accept the new clause. If not, I urge hon. Members of all parties to support it in the Lobby.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), who was in the Chamber a short time ago, made an important point about new clause 3. When imposing legal requirements and duties on anybody—let alone the Prime Minister—one has be sure that those requirements are capable of being realised. My right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) and other hon. Members have dealt comprehensively with the difficulties that arise from the part of the new clause that mentions laying
“periodic reports…on the progress of the negotiations”.
I think that case has been made.
Let me move on to the next part. The real problem is subsection (c), which would
“make arrangements for Parliamentary scrutiny of confidential documents.”
As Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee, I have had an enormous amount of trouble, over and over again, about documents that are marked as “LIMITÉ”. Although such documents are distributed, Parliaments other than the European Parliament are not allowed to refer to them because they are of a confidential nature. I have made it quite clear that I think some of this is overdone. However, to try to impose a legal duty on the Prime Minister to undertake to break the rules relating to limité documents is stretching a point to absurdity.
Clive Efford
I ask the hon. Gentleman the same question that I asked the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) earlier: should he not be arguing, as somebody who has spent a great deal of his time in Parliament scrutinising the European Union, for Members of this House to have rights of scrutiny that are at least equal to those held by Members of the European Parliament?
Sir William Cash
I have enormous sympathy with that. In point of fact, the Secretary of State for Brexit gave evidence in the House of Lords, where, as I understand it, he made it abundantly clear that any document that would be made available to the European Parliament and its committees would, indeed, be made available to this House. To that extent, I agree with the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), but I believe such a measure to be unnecessary because an undertaking has already been given by the Secretary of State.
Sir Hugo Swire
New clause 3(c) would
“make arrangements for Parliamentary scrutiny of confidential documents.”
Given my hon. Friend’s wide experience, for how long does he think the contents of those documents would remain confidential if they were made available for wide parliamentary scrutiny?
Sir William Cash
Well, they certainly would not. That is really the purpose of the limité restriction. Although I have reservations about the restriction in certain cases, I can think of a number of instances in which it is absolutely vital that the documents remain confidential. If there were any breach of that confidentiality —there would have to be an undertaking by the Prime Minister that she would release it—it could gum up the works to such an extent on matters of intelligence, security and all sorts of things that we would actually end up not receiving any limité documents at all.
With great respect, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), who led from the Opposition Front Bench, may or may not have been dealing with these matters for some time, and I will not criticise him for that—[Interruption.] No, this is a perfectly fair point. All I am saying is that, in drafting this, if we end up with something that does not work and we have to comply with new clause 3(a), (b) and (c) to make it work, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said, we would end up in the courts—and there would be a judicial review, believe me. It naturally follows that the new clause is simply nonsense, so it cannot be brought into effect. That is all I need to say about it.
Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)
My hon. Friends and I have also tabled some amendments. I am glad that we have the opportunity to discuss and debate the Bill over the coming days, although we have been given very little time in which to do so. It is fair to say that this is not scrutiny that the Government either welcomed or encouraged. It is good to have at least a short opportunity to debate this issue, although that has more to do with the Government’s confidence in their own arguments and their ability to deliver a better deal with our EU partners than the one we have at present than it does with a scrutiny process. The Government were dragged kicking and screaming to this Chamber just to have a vote on article 50 in the first place.
Ian Blackford
My hon. Friend is making some very valid points. Will we not also be judged on the leadership we give and on our humanity? Those EU citizens who are here are our friends, our neighbours and our work colleagues, and we have a duty to stand by their rights. The Prime Minister must send a clear message that those who are here are welcome to stay. We must remove the uncertainty, and do it now.
Stephen Gethins
As usual, my hon. Friend makes a very pertinent point. I pay due respect to the work he has done for the Brain family and others in his constituency in some of the disgraceful immigration cases we have seen. These EU nationals have chosen to make the UK their home and Scotland their home. They make this a better place in which to live and work. It is a no-brainer that we should give them the certainty they deserve.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is making a very cogent and well-structured argument, and I broadly agree with many of the points he is making, but would he not agree that this is really a Mexican stand-off with water pistols? There is no realistic chance that any signatory of the European convention on human rights—the United Kingdom is one; in fact, we drafted much of it—will kick out anybody. We are not going to kick out anybody from the United Kingdom, and nor are UK citizens in other parts of the European Union going to be expelled. Would it not be better for the House to recognise that the position of these EU nationals is not at risk? Would we not be much better off comforting those who are in doubt, rather than spreading fear?
Stephen Gethins
The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me. The ECHR is under threat from this very Government, so does it not make sense to come into the Lobby with us to support the right of EU nationals to live and work here? I look forward to his standing up for what he has just said and joining us in the Lobby.
Stephen Gethins
No, but I will say this to the hon. Gentleman, because he probably has a lot more influence on the Government Benches than I do—that is one thing I will give him. The Government are desperately in need of friends and good will. If we benefit financially from EU nationals being here, and if our society is richer for their being here, we want to keep them regardless—they are not bargaining chips, but that is something the Government seem to ignore. If EU nationals are not bargaining chips, I would encourage him to join us in the Lobby and give them the certainty they need and deserve.
Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)
The situation is even worse. While accepting what the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) said, pitting Elke Weston, an EU national in my constituency, against my friend Tracy de Jong Eglin in the Netherlands does not in any way give them succour; it makes their situations worse.
Stephen Gethins
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and I am not surprised, given the amount of hard work he has done for EU nationals in his constituency.
If Conservative Members are so confident in the ECHR, which they now promise us they are, I look forward to the hon. Gentleman voting against his own Government. I do not trust Conservative Members entirely, but if there is not a problem under the ECHR, he and his colleagues will have absolutely no problem joining us in the Lobby.
We will debate the devolved process in the next tranche of proposals, but let me just say this about scrutiny. All this will have an impact on the devolution process, be it in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. If Ministers respect the devolution process, they should have no problem with the additional scrutiny that comes with it. Right now we are in a situation where the unelected House of Lords will have a greater say on this process than the elected Scottish Parliament and other devolved legislatures. No Government, regardless of their colour, have a monopoly on wisdom. The whole point of having a Parliament is that we scrutinise, with the courage of our convictions, and this place makes a contribution. If this Government are confident in what they are doing—or know what they are doing and have any kind of a plan—they should welcome scrutiny in the Chamber here and then elsewhere in these islands, because fundamentally that scrutiny will provide better legislation. On something of such enormity that we are about to undertake, they have a responsibility for it to be scrutinised as much as possible.
Let us not underestimate the impact of the decision that we are about to make this week. It will impact on our rights, on our economy, and on each and every one of us. We will encourage the strengthening of anything that increases scrutiny of this process. The Government’s record so far has not been good. I am not heartened by what I have seen, with a White Paper that was rushed out and could not even get its facts right. We therefore owe a debt of responsibility to people across the UK—and, indeed, beyond—to have more scrutiny than we are promised and more than we have at present.
Several hon. Members rose—
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Before I call the next colleague, let me say that it will be obvious to the Committee that a great many people wish to speak. There are in excess of 50 new clauses and amendments to be discussed, and we have two hours and 45 minutes left to do so. I hope that Members will be courteous to others and keep their remarks as brief as possible. I appreciate that these are complicated matters, and it is good to have interventions and proper debate and discussion, but let us avoid repetition and rhetoric for its own sake.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
On a point of order, Mrs Laing. It is quite obvious that the programme order will not allow for proper debate by the vast majority of Members. I have never known a debate on any European issue be given such limited time before. Has anyone approached you and asked to re-address the programme order so that we can have the sort of sensible, protracted discussion of these issues that we have had almost to excess on previous occasions such as the debates on the Maastricht treaty?
Mr Harper
Further to that point of order, Mrs Laing. When I considered the Government’s programme motion, it seemed to me that for a two-clause Bill, two days—extraordinarily—on Second Reading and three full days of protected time to allow us to sit late where there are statements was, if anything, an excess of generosity.
The First Deputy Chairman
The former Chief Whip makes a very good point. It is not a point of order for the Chair, but one that I would expect a former Chief Whip to make.
Let me set the mind of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) at rest on two points. First, although there are in excess of 50 amendments and new clauses, some of them address the same points as others, so we are not addressing more than 50 separate points of debate. The other point that I draw to his attention is that the House voted for and supported the programme motion, and that is not a matter for me. I am sure that I can now rely on Sir Hugo Swire to address the Committee briefly and pertinently.
Sir Hugo Swire
I shall seek not to detain the Committee for too long so as not to repeat many of the arguments that hon. Friends and colleagues have made and will no doubt make again and again throughout this evening.
I wish to talk about the two new clauses that have dominated proceedings to date, one rather less emotional than the other. The unemotional one, I would submit, is new clause 3. We have talked about parliamentary oversight of the negotiations and heard the word “scrutiny” bandied around across the Chamber. I sometimes get the impression that some in this Chamber would seek to scrutinise every single line, cross every “t” and dot every “i” of the Government’s negotiating position. It would be interesting to conduct a straw poll as to how many Members in this Committee have ever taken part in a proper negotiation—a commercial negotiation—that requires, at times, one to keep one’s cards close to hand before declaring them. It is impossible, irresponsible and unthinkable to have to negotiate this in public, and particularly so to insert clauses such that anything discussed must be reported back to this House at intervals of
“no more than two months”—
eight weeks—each and every time. The new clause does not say what Parliament might then do if it does not like what the Government are reporting back. Do Members want a vote on it? We have heard about the possibility of legal involvement—judicial review. This is wholly unrealistic and undesirable.
Dr Murrison
I entirely agree that we need to sort this out very early on. Indeed, our right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said precisely that only a short while ago. Does my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) agree that part of the issue is the unwillingness of some of our interlocutors to engage in meaningful discussion prior to the triggering of article 50? This is surely a matter that can be dealt with early on, but that requires them to engage immediately and not to delay until the triggering of article 50.
Sir Hugo Swire
I do agree, because this cuts both ways. It is cheap politicking to talk about bargaining chips—I do not think anyone is considering that—but this does require an early resolution. I was heartened when my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said earlier today that she intended to address it early on, but it has to be a negotiation between the other countries of the EU and us. It is just as important to us, as British parliamentarians—as the British Government—to defend the rights of British citizens living overseas. There are a lot of them, and not all of them are particularly contributing to the society they are in. A lot of them are retired, so they are even more vulnerable, in a sense, than many of the EU workers who are here actively working. It is the first duty of this House to look after British citizens, wherever they may be, while also being aware that we have a duty to EU nationals at the same time.
It would be completely wrong in terms of our negotiating position to declare unilaterally that all EU nationals can, up to a certain date, continue to live here without fear or favour. That would be unwise until such time as we can extract a similar agreement from the other countries of the EU where British nationals have lived, sometimes for very many years.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
I am delighted to hear my right hon. Friend agree in ringing tones with what everybody has said so far, namely that absolutely nobody in this House wishes to cast any doubt on the right of EU nationals to continue living lawfully here if they are lawfully here now. Apparently, the only reason for his holding back—despite the fact that he entirely shares the sentiments of Opposition Members—is that he fears that if we declare that a Pole who has been living here for years can stay here, we will have thrown away our card and British nationals will be expelled by the Government of some unknown country. I have heard nobody suggest that any such country exists.
We have a pedantic problem of whether we can raise the matter before the process has started. If we just cleared the position of our EU nationals now, it would put the utmost pressure on every other country to clarify the thing as well. No one is going to take any reprisals against our British nationals.
Sir Hugo Swire
I hope my right hon. and learned Friend is right. He has not always been right about everything, although he has been right about quite a lot. He and I were on the same side of the debate, and I know that he regrets, as I do, the fact that in all the discussions about migration and immigration during the campaign, some rather irresponsible points were made repeatedly about who would be able to come here from the Commonwealth, when there was absolutely no suggestion that that was behind anyone’s thinking. However, I fundamentally disagree with him in that I do not think that we should do anything unilateral before we get an agreement about the rights of British nationals living in the rest of the EU.
Mr Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend share my view that if the matter is as simple as some make out—if it is just a question of us making a simple declaration—why have the other 27 countries of the European Union not said that our citizens who are living overseas will be fine, and that there will be no repercussions for them? The fact that those countries will not make that commitment says something, does it not?
Sir Hugo Swire
It may do, or it may not. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) has said, there is no evidence to suggest that a single country would not behave in a good way. But there is absolutely no evidence that they will all behave in a good way; we simply do not know, because we have not yet had that conversation. Until we have had that debate and secured an agreement that similar rights will be granted to British citizens living in other EU countries, we should not move to allow every single EU national who lives here to continue doing so.
Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)
If the cynics among us genuinely believe that there could be countries out there that are not prepared to do this, should we not now, more than ever, lead by example?
Sir Hugo Swire
I do not know whether my hon. Friend was here earlier when the Prime Minister was asked about the matter. The Prime Minister gave a very strong suggestion that securing such a deal was at the top of her negotiating priorities. At the end of the day, it is an agreement—it is a deal—and it has to be negotiated. I do not think that we would be right unilaterally to declare anything.
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Gentleman not think that a unilateral declaration would undo some of the damage that was done by the “list of foreign workers” stuff that came out of the Tory conference in Birmingham? That shocked a lot of our European partners and hardened their views against us. Surely a unilateral declaration might help.
Sir Hugo Swire
I agree with the hon. Lady that language and sensitivity are incredibly important. We are dealing with families, and with people who are married to EU citizens. We are dealing with people who live here and who do not know whether they have a future here. That is why we have to resolve the matter very early on. I have considerable sympathy, as I have said, with many people who have spoken about the contribution that EU nationals make. I very much hope that we can reach an agreement that will satisfy all who are here but, equally, I think that our first duty is to look after our citizens abroad.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
The right hon. Gentleman has talked about the issues faced by British citizens whose partners are EU nationals, but does he agree that we are also talking about children? I have seen children in my constituency raise real concerns about whether they will be able to study in the same school, and about where their future will be. They do not know the country that their parents came from, and they are British in every sense of the word. This is causing huge uncertainty. We can tackle this, and we can do it this week.
Sir Hugo Swire
We can all cite examples from our surgeries of individual cases, but I am not sure that to do so contributes to the greater argument. We need to get a policy in place that covers the whole thing. That can only be achieved by the Prime Minister making it a priority, as she has suggested she will, and getting an agreement from the other member states that involves the reciprocity we need for our British people living abroad.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to be concerned about the fate of British citizens living in the European Union, but I agree with others who have said that, surely, a goodwill gesture would be a really positive thing for this Government to make. Two of my constituents are a married couple who have been living together in this country for 30 years, and I consider the wife to be as British as anybody else. We should make it absolutely clear that it is inconceivable that this couple should be separated, and that their children should be left with separated parents.
Sir Hugo Swire
Indeed, and no doubt there are similar examples of British people in not-dissimilar situations in Spain, France and elsewhere. We need to ensure that their rights are recognised as well.
I am not going to continue in this vein, because others wish to contribute. I have made my point. I have sympathy with the view that EU nationals contribute a lot to the economy. I hope that there is an early agreement that allows them to stay and to continue to work here. Equally, any such agreement, to my way of thinking, has to be part of a wider agreement that assures the future of British nationals living in other EU countries.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
I rise to support new clauses 3 and 57. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) for their speeches. The one thing I would add to the forceful case made by my right hon. and learned Friend is this: when the Exiting the European Union Committee took evidence from representatives of Brits living abroad, one might have expected them to make the argument that has just been advanced, but they said the opposite. They said that Britain should give a unilateral commitment now, because they felt that doing so would ease the process of negotiation.
Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)
I was not at that Committee hearing, and I am quite interested to know whether evidence was taken from ambassadors of EU countries about their Governments’ positions as part of the inquiry.
Hilary Benn
No, we have not taken evidence from ambassadors, but we have heard what has been said from the Government Dispatch Box, namely that—from memory—almost all member states are up for this, apart from one or two. We do not yet know who the one or two are, and I hope that they will change their minds so that we can make progress.
I want to address the arguments we have heard thus far in relation to new clause 3. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander)—she is no longer in her place—asked the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) whether we should be able to have a vote on certain aspects of the nature of our withdrawal. He said no, because during the referendum campaign it was made clear by leading participants what would happen if we voted to leave, and therefore it is gospel and we cannot argue with it. That is a very interesting argument. On that basis, the NHS will be getting £350 million a week, because that, it was said, would be the consequence of a leave vote—but I will leave that to one side.
The right hon. Gentleman’s central argument, which he made at the beginning of his speech, was to ask what new clause 3 added. I say to him sincerely that it adds accountability. It has been argued that the new clause is unnecessary because the Government are already doing what it would require. If that is true, I would ask why there is a problem with the Government accepting it.
The argument was made that the Government would be forced to reveal all sorts of stuff. All that the new clause says is that the Prime Minister
“shall give an undertaking to…lay before each House of Parliament periodic reports”.
The content of those reports will be for the Government to determine. There is nothing in the new clause about forcing the Government to reveal their hand. When it comes to getting in English the documents that the European Commission is giving to the European Parliament —probably in English, while we still have MEPs, and in the other languages of the European Union—surely there cannot be any argument about that at all. It is entirely sensible.
On the point about confidential documents, I listened carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) said. I raised the matter with the Secretary of State when I was first elected as the Chair of the Select Committee, and he replied to me in a letter that
“negotiations will be fast moving and will often cover sensitive material, so we will need to find the right ways of engaging Parliament.”
I welcomed that reply. All that new clause 3 says is that the Prime Minister shall
“make arrangements for Parliamentary scrutiny of confidential documents.”
The arrangements are for the Government to propose. Given the extent to which Brussels is a very leaky place and the fact that we will be negotiating with 27 other member states, I cannot help making the point that I suspect we will find out very shortly after the meeting has concluded where the negotiations have got to, so the Government’s arrangements will be to advise us all to buy certain newspapers, in which one will be able to read what was discussed during the course of the afternoon and evening.
Sir William Cash
The main point I was making, and I stand by it, is that new clause 3 imposes a legal obligation, enforceable by judicial review, on the Prime Minister effectively—and not just effectively, but actually and legally—to break the confidentiality imposed by, for example, limité documents. As I have said, I do not always subscribe to such degrees of confidentiality, but that is a personal view. The fact is that there is confidentiality, and it is a legal obligation.
Hilary Benn
I would say to the hon. Gentleman, who has great experience in these matters, that we know the Commission, in respect of trade negotiations, made arrangements with the European Parliament for certain documents to be made available, including in rooms where people could go and read them but could not take them away. The new clause is asking the Government to find a way of making this work in a way that is consistent, as of course it has to be, with any legal obligations, but confidentiality does not seem to me to be a very strong argument.
The argument that the new clause would make it all justiciable does not seem very strong either. Frankly, on that basis we might as well all go home tonight and never come back because Parliament legislates, and when Parliament legislates people can go to the courts and seek to suggest that the way in which the legislation is being implemented is not correct. That is not an argument against new clause 3, but against Parliament doing its job.
Having listened to speeches made by Conservative Members, I would gently say to the Minister of State, who is a reasonable man, that I hope he will not get up and repeat the arguments we have heard on new clause 3. Frankly, it is really simple and sensible stuff to help Parliament to do its job. On the frequency of reporting, as the Minister will know, when my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) suggested every two months, the Secretary of State got up and said that that might be a rather modest objective. If it is a modest objective, I really do not see how the Government can oppose it.
Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)
I do not propose to speak for more than a few minutes. I have been wrestling with this matter for months, and in particular I have wrestled with it over the course of the weekend. This matter affects my constituents in South Leicestershire—and not just them—many of whom have come to see me to explain the problems, for example about children at school, which has been mentioned by other hon. Members.
I was the son of Italian immigrants in Glasgow in the 1970s, and I remember how it felt to be the only son of an immigrant in a classroom full of Scottish people. I do not want any EU national child across the United Kingdom to feel the way that I felt at times in school in the 1970s. However, there is more than simply anecdotal evidence that the situation now caused by Brexit is affecting the wellbeing of families. Such concerns have been raised by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), a fellow east midlands Member for whom I have nothing but the utmost respect. As I have argued with colleagues in the Chamber—we should be saying it far more loudly—EU nationals have contributed an enormous amount to the success and wellbeing of our United Kingdom, as did my parents over 50 years. I want to hear Members say that daily.
It was often said during the EU referendum that there was perhaps a cost consequence to having the 3 million-plus people from every one of the member states who have integrated here. I always believed that that was utter rubbish. We have benefited as a country by having immigrants come into the United Kingdom. The fact is that we will continue to benefit, because when all of this is over, we will still continue to have EU migrants coming into this country. The difference will be that this Parliament and Government—Conservative, Labour or otherwise—will determine the immigration rules. I cannot possibly foresee a situation where a competent British Government would attempt to reduce immigration to levels that would damage our economy. That leads me to a point made in a newspaper recently by an hon. Friend of mine about a promise made in the Conservative manifesto that we have not kept and cannot keep. We cannot get immigration down to the tens of thousands without damaging our economy.
However, I have decided to vote against the amendment on this matter. As I said at the outset, I have wrestled with this decision, because it affects my family personally. I will explain why I have decided to do this. Ultimately, it is because the deal that will be reached with the EU will be not just legal, but also political. It will be about personalities: about how the Prime Minister and her team get on with the other side.
Had I been Prime Minister last July, I might well have taken a different decision. However, I made a comment to the Prime Minister today in which I made it very clear that I am putting my entire trust in her and her Ministers to honour the promise that they are giving to the country about getting an early deal. I said to the leader of my party that it would be “a decisive mark of her negotiating skills and leadership qualities as our Prime Minister.” I believe that she will get a reciprocal deal that benefits citizens from Scotland, Northern Ireland, England and Wales who live in other EU member states, and that protects my own family and friends, my own constituents and other EU nationals across the United Kingdom.
That is why I will vote against the amendment. Ultimately, it is a political matter, and it is for the Prime Minister to demonstrate her leadership and negotiating skills in getting this right, and coming back to the Dispatch Box within months—I repeat, within months—of triggering article 50 with an early deal on which we can all agree and for which we can thank her, that will be to the benefit of all our constituents living abroad and the benefit of EU nationals living in our constituencies.
Heidi Allen
I am just curious. I support the Prime Minister’s intentions and most definitely her sincerity in aiming to achieve such a deal, but does my hon. Friend agree that if that moment does not come as soon as she would like, she should review the idea of unilaterally offering EU citizens their rights and just put everybody out of their misery, because that is the right thing to do?
Alberto Costa
Again, I repeat the comment I made to the Prime Minister that it would be “a decisive mark of her negotiating skills and leadership qualities as our Prime Minister.” She must come back to the Dispatch Box early on with such a deal.
Mr Harper
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the conclusion that he has reached. The other thing the Prime Minister demonstrated when she was Home Secretary is her attention to detail. As I tried to set out for the Committee, this is actually a more complex matter than it at first appears. It is not just that the Prime Minister needs to get the principle right; she and her Ministers and officials need to get the detail right to ensure not only that my hon. Friend’s family and others like them have security now, but that there are no unforeseen consequences for them in the future. I think that he has made the right decision.
Alberto Costa
I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend, but a promise has been made about an early agreement, notwithstanding the complexities of the matter. As a lawyer—I am a former corporate lawyer—I know that when my clients came to me asking for me to negotiate, I had to offer solutions to problems. If I did not get the deals that my clients wanted, I would not have been used frequently by those very clients. It will be a mark of our leader, our Prime Minister, if she gets the early deal that she is promising our country, and that is why I am supporting her this evening.
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)
The hon. Gentleman has obviously made a personal decision on this matter. He uses the analogy of being a lawyer and going to negotiate a deal, but does he not accept that the Prime Minister could just settle and give every EU national in our country right now the right to be here, without any further delay? There is an alternative attitude that would also deliver for his client, is there not?
Alberto Costa
As I mentioned, had I been Prime Minister in July, I might have started the whole process very differently.
I entirely agree with the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) about the consequences of not getting an early deal on this matter. The consequence would be a tsunami of litigation against the Government. Politically, therefore, an early deal must be brought to this House. That is why I trust the Prime Minister to get that early deal.
The role of Parliament is also a political matter to which Ministers should give serious consideration. The European Parliament has a substantive role in the negotiations that we do not have. Some would say that the primary reason for that is that it represents 27 other nations, whereas we represent one sovereign country as the British Parliament. However, if we hear comments from the media, reporting on what European parliamentarians are being told about what our ministerial negotiating team are saying in Europe, it would become farcical if our Government did not report back to us.
Alberto Costa
I do not see a need to force the Government to do that. It would be politically impossible for the Government to function responsibly and appropriately without giving us at least the same information that we will be receiving from the media and the European Parliament. Again, it is a matter of politics and we should not bind the hands of the Government in a statutory manner that could be justiciable. That is why I trust my Government to come back to the House with sensible updates, no different from the updates that the European Parliament receives, so that we can continue to debate and discuss the matter.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
My hon. Friend is on the right side of all these arguments, but he is a very trusting man. Does he not realise that the background to all this is that when the European Commission started negotiating the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, it took exactly the same line that the Government are now taking—that it could not possibly disclose any of these things as it would compromise the negotiations? The fact is that the European Parliament now gets the information because it was less trusting and is made of sterner stuff than this Parliament has so far proved to be. I do not think that that is in accordance with our parliamentary traditions.
Alberto Costa
I respect the judgments and comments of my right hon. and learned Friend. However, I read his recent article about his own thoughts on his first term in Parliament and how he would have dealt with a similar matter. I will leave it at that.
I have listened carefully to the valuable and honourable comments that have been made on this matter, particularly by Opposition Members, but I will support my Government and I will hold my Government to account in a way that I never see Opposition MPs from Scotland holding their Government to account.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
It was touching to hear the hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) talk about his hope and aspiration that EU nationals will be allowed to remain indefinitely, and of course he is right on that, yet he betrayed a little bit of fear of offending his Front Benchers were he to go so far as wanting to enshrine those rights in the Bill.
I commend my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) for new clause 57. It is important and would provide the assurances that many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people residing in this country require. I tabled a similar new clause—new clause 14—which I hope the Committee will support.
The context of this debate, for which more than 50 substantive amendments on distinct and specific issues of great importance have been tabled, is the contrast between the desire of Members to raise these issues and the nonsensical four hours in which they have to be considered. There is something like four minutes for each topic. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly to Members in the House of Lords how important it is that they do the due diligence on this Bill that the House of Commons will clearly not be able to do.
Stella Creasy
Is it not worth noting that when it came to debating the Lisbon treaty and the Maastricht treaty, 30 days were allocated to discuss the issues in the House of Commons alone? Five days is a very poor comparison.
Chris Leslie
My hon. Friend is completely right. This Bill is far more important than all those treaties wrapped together, because it is about withdrawing from the European Union.
What made the situation worse was the White Paper we had from the Government. Let us not forget that it came the day after the vote on Second Reading. That was pretty shocking and quite contemptuous of the rights that the House of Commons should have. It is a lamentable document because of the lack of information it contains on so many of the important issues on which I and other hon. Members have tabled amendments.
We should use the time we have today to talk about what we need to know and to ask the Government what their plan is. That is why I will briefly go through some of the new clauses I have tabled. For the sake of argument, let us take the first one, new clause 20 on financial services. One could say that it is merely a small corner of Britain’s GDP, but it provides £67 billion of revenue for all our schools and hospitals. If we mess around with that sector in the wrong way, we will all be poorer and our public services will be poorer as a result.
New clause 20 suggests that there should be a report twice a year on where we are going on one of those questions that was not contained in the White Paper: “What is our progress towards a smooth transition from the existing open market access, where we have passports, to the new arrangements, whatever they are going to be?” The White Paper merely says, “We’d quite like to have the freest possible trade,” but it says nothing about what will happen on mutual co-operation, regulation and oversight; whether we will be able to have permanent equivalence rights for some trades; or whether UK firms will have time to adjust.
Those issues already pose a clear and present danger to our economy. HSBC says that 1,000 jobs are going to go, Lloyd’s of London is moving some of its activities, UBS is moving 1,000 jobs, and J.P. Morgan has said that potentially 4,000 jobs will go. Firms are voting with their feet already, yet the White Paper hardly touches on this question.
Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his diligence on this Bill and for tabling these important new clauses. If we boil it all down, this is not about passporting and the complicated legal framework around financial services, but about the tens of thousands of my constituents who are in highly skilled, highly paid jobs in the financial services sector and who are worried about their future employment.
Chris Leslie
Absolutely. When hon. Members are asked by their constituents, “What time did you have to debate financial services?”, they will have to say, “There was only a couple of hours or maybe just a few minutes. I didn’t say anything about it because of the ridiculous programme order that we put in place to curtail debate.”
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
Is it right that the hon. Gentleman talks down the City of London in this way? We all know about the threats that have been made, but not one of those jobs has left the City of London. The fact is that, given a choice between London, Frankfurt, Dublin or Paris, those companies will choose London every time.
Chris Leslie
I really hope that that is the case. I absolutely share the hon. Gentleman’s aspiration, but he should look at the press releases from HSBC, Lloyd’s of London, UBS and J.P. Morgan. These are not alternative facts; this is the real truth. These are people’s jobs and this is revenue for our country that we will potentially lose.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
It is not talking down the City of London to highlight the report by TheCityUK emphasising that the best-case scenario, under the Government’s plan, is for 7,000 jobs losses, but that the worst-case scenario could be more than 70,000 job losses. That is not talking the City down but making the economic case for securing the best deal.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
Is it not my hon. Friend’s point that we are now a service economy? The service sector accounts for 88% of London’s economy, and the service sector can move. Prior to our joining the EU, we had things in the ground and we were a great manufacturing nation, but that is not the case today.
Chris Leslie
That is another issue that deserves a massive amount of consideration, but we just do not have the time to go through it today.
I will move on, then, to new clause 22, on competition policy—another small area of policy! The White Paper says absolutely nothing about what the UK will do, upon our exit from the EU, in respect of competition policy. It is totally silent. Will we change our attitude towards state aid for industry? What will our state aid rules be? If we make a change, will our trading partners baulk at the idea that we might be subsidising products in a particular way? Will we be undercutting their production? Would we not wish to do that? Will we take on the WTO disciplines on subsidies? Will we join the EEA scheme on subsidies? What about state aid rules, competition policy and the European Free Trade Association? This a big deal. I think of subjects that have come up recently such as Hinkley Point, the British investment bank and British steel. These are all questions we have to consider and decide upon. All I am saying in new clause 22 is that the Government should publish a report in one month on their attitude to competition policy. It is a pretty simple measure.
I have tabled other amendments that would require Ministers to set out their aspirations, within one month of Royal Assent, on other questions that will arise as we extract ourselves from some of these European partnerships, alliances and agencies. On law enforcement, for example, what will we do about Europol? New clause 111 touches on the benefits we currently enjoy from cross-border co-operation on cybercrime, terrorism, combating trafficking and other important activities. We deserve to know the Government’s approach to cross-border crime, as we do with respect to the European Police College, Eurojust, our co-operation with prosecuting authorities, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and the Agency for Fundamental Rights. The White Paper is totally silent on all those issues. We have no idea what the Government’s plan and negotiating stance will be, and yet we do not have the time to debate these matters properly.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I do not know what the Government are worried about. Anybody who knows anything about negotiations knows that each side can report back from time to time without necessarily giving away their negotiating hand. I do not know what they are scared of.
Chris Leslie
I think the Government might be scared of the debate. It also reflects their lack of awareness of the issues. The Government have not thought this through but instead are confronting issues as they bubble up, at a fairly random level, while giving a veneer of control—“We must not show our cards”, “I cannot give a running commentary”. Ministers use these phrases, but behind the curtain they are panicking and their feet are moving rapidly, because they do not have a clue.
Sir Hugo Swire
By logical extension, the hon. Gentleman wants to unpick almost every single part of EU policy, legislation and co-operation with the UK, bring it to the House and get the Government to set out what they want to do about them. How long does he think it would take to dissociate ourselves from the EU if we were to take that line—two years or 20 years?
Chris Leslie
It would take more than the three days that the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends have given us to debate these questions. We are leaving the EU—that is what the Bill is for. He and his hon. Friends might be happy to trust the Prime Minister entirely, but Parliament is sovereign. The Supreme Court gave us this duty and said that we should do our due diligence, but the time constraints will prevent us from doing so.
I wish to raise a couple of other law enforcement issues. The big one, in new clause 177, concerns the Government’s policy on the European arrest warrant. The EAW, of course, is there to make sure we can transfer criminal suspects or sentenced persons from other countries and put them on trial here, and vice versa. The UK has extradited more than 8,000 individuals accused or convicted of criminal offences to the rest of the EU. I think of the case of Hussain Osman, found guilty of the Shepherd’s Bush tube bombing in July 2005, captured in Rome, extradited under the EAW and sentenced to 40 years. In 2014, the Prime Minister herself said that ditching the EAW would turn Britain into
“a honeypot for all of Europe’s criminals on the run from justice”.
From the Prime Minister’s own mouth! What will be our attitude towards the current level of participation? Will we want to continue with the EAW? There is nothing in the White Paper about it.
Dr Philippa Whitford
Is it not the agencies that will be the biggest problem? The Government describe moving everything over with a great repeal Bill, but what happens where that Bill refers to actions that depend on an EU agency, given that we will not have that agency?
Chris Leslie
That is the fallacy behind the reassurances to hon. Members. We are told, “Don’t worry. We can come to this in later legislation. It will all be fine. The great repeal Bill will deal with these things”.
Of course it will not. These are facilities and levels of co-operation and alliances that exist because of our membership of the EU, and yet we will not even have the time to debate the consequences.
I had better move on rapidly. On public health, what is the plan? What do the Government intend to do? Again, the White Paper said virtually nothing about a range of critical alliances, such as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, as dealt with in new clause 113. During the outbreak of SARS in 2003, when the disease rapidly spread across several countries, we knew what to do because these EU-wide institutions and public health authorities were able to provide research and intelligence. There is nothing in the White Paper about the British Government’s attitude to such pan-European questions.
What will we do about the European Medicines Agency, as dealt with in new clause 115? Currently based in London, the EMA harmonises the work of national medical regulatory bodies across a range of issues including the application for marketing authorisations, support for medicines development, patents, monitoring the safety of medicines, providing medical information to healthcare professionals and so forth. Who will take on those responsibilities? What will happen? The White Paper was totally silent on that question.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
The Health Secretary told the Health Committee the other day that he had already thrown in the towel on the EMA—that we were leaving it and giving up the headquarters in London, along with hundreds of jobs, meaning far slower approval of vital drugs in this country, and the loss of all our influence and all those jobs.
Chris Leslie
Yes, and, again, we have heard no strategic alternatives from the Government and have no idea what their plan will be.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
Given that the Government have said that they will pull out of Euratom, because it is part of the EU, is not the logical extension of their position to pull out of all those agencies? If so, why does my hon. Friend think they do not want to face up to it? Is it because they do not want to face up to the cost of duplicating the work of 30-odd agencies?
Chris Leslie
I do not think Ministers know what to say about some of these questions. They hope that because the issues are fairly low level and very specialist, nobody will spot them, but they will start to affect very many people. Myriad issues will arise.
Mr Sheerman
Is my hon. Friend aware that as a result of our leaving the EMA many jobs in the medical and drugs world will move out of Britain? I met people representing those interests only today, and they are very fearful of what will happen to British jobs.
Chris Leslie
I am afraid to say to my hon. Friend not only that he is right, but that the list goes on—the list of the consequences of withdrawing from the EU without Parliament even having the opportunity properly to debate it. Food safety is covered by the European Food Safety Authority, so we will be throwing in the towel on independent scientific advice on food chain issues and research that is currently in place through our involvement in the EFSA—and there is nothing in the White Paper about it.
Chris Leslie
Oh, the right hon. Gentleman knows what the plan is for the E111.
John Redwood
If the hon. Gentleman had read it, he would understand it perfectly as well as I do. The plan is very simple. All existing laws and requirements will be transferred into good British law. If we need a different adjudicator, that adjudicator can be selected and approved by Parliament. The great news for both of us is that nothing will change legally unless and until this Parliament debates it and wants to change it.
Chris Leslie
I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has actually left these shores and visited other countries: we do not control the sort of health insurance and health service schemes that happen in those other European countries, but we currently have a reciprocal health insurance arrangement that provides him, his family and his constituents with a certain degree of cover. That could well be ripped up because of the consequences of the legislation that we are potentially passing—without a word from the Government and with nothing in the White Paper.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend makes a very important point about the E111 scheme, because that will have a practical impact on our constituents. If my hon. Friend does not get a clear answer on that, I fear that many constituents will be forced into buying very expensive travel insurance policies to make sure that they are covered while the scheme is left in limbo.
Chris Leslie
The consequences of this aspect and many others are myriad. I hope that the House will begin to wake up and realise that we have been sold a pup with this programme order, which does not give us enough time to discuss all this. I have to move on.
The European Chemicals Agency is another example of something that will be ditched. Companies currently have to provide information about hazards, risks and the safe use of chemicals, but we will potentially leave that agency, with nothing in the White Paper about the alternative.
Another health and safety issue is aviation. What will we do about safe skies, and the regulation of aircraft parts, engines and many other aspects? What will we do about maritime safety? What happens if shipping disasters occur on or around our shores? What is the Government’s alternative? There is nothing in the White Paper.
Another minor issue—he said sarcastically—is the environment, and we will potentially leave the European Environment Agency. New clause 120 simply asks that we have a report within a month on what the Government’s plans should be.
Chris Leslie
I want to move on, if I may.
When it comes to education, science and research issues, we will leave the European Research Council, which is very important. Hon. Members may know about the Erasmus scheme, which means that all our constituents who currently want to study abroad for a few months can have that time recognised as part of their degree, but what will happen to that scheme? There is nothing in the White Paper. It does not say anything about students in our constituencies potentially losing out very significantly. What about satellite issues, plant variety issues, locational training and all sorts of issues?
Seema Malhotra
My hon. Friend is indeed making an excellent speech and highlighting the complexity of the challenges we face. He referred to science, and I had a conversation yesterday with my constituent Clare, who is a scientist and was extremely concerned about how our collaboration will work and what projects we will be included in in the future. She was also concerned about the impact on our young people. Their future is ahead of them, and in a sense we are pulling the rug out from under their feet.
Chris Leslie
We should have the time, the space and the opportunity to discuss the consequences for my hon. Friend’s constituent, but we will not. My hon. Friend will have to tell her constituent that we did not have enough time in the House of Commons. Fingers crossed, there might be time for the House of Lords to do some of this work and put their concerns to Ministers in the other place.
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is doing an excellent job of trying to scrutinise the implications of this Bill, yet we have less time on the Floor of the House to debate it than we would have in Committee for much less important Bills. Does my hon. Friend agree that while we want all these issues to be sorted out within two years, that might not happen, which is why we need transitional arrangements as well as a vote on the final deal, so that this House can see whether the Government have done their job properly and truly got the best deal for Britain?
Chris Leslie
Exactly. We need to use the two-year negotiation period wisely. We shall come on in Committee tomorrow to some of those particular issues.
Caroline Lucas
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that as well as having an environment policy, we need to make sure that it is enforceable? It is no good just moving it across, if we cannot bring enforcement to bear. Does he also agree with me that the European Investment Bank is a crucial issue, because it is a massive investor in renewable energy in this country? We need to know where we stand on that.
Chris Leslie
In that case, I will move on to new clause 122, which references the European Investment Bank. It deals with a series of economic and trade co-operation issues, which are again not referenced at all in the White Paper. Can you imagine, Mr Howarth, the Government producing a White Paper about the consequences of withdrawing from the European Union without even mentioning the European Investment Bank, in which, by the way, we currently have a 16% stake? It part-funds Crossrail and the Manchester Metrolink. This is a massively important institution, yet we are simply shrugging it off in a blasé way, saying “Trust the Prime Minister; it will all be fine”.
We should at least ask Ministers about the attitude of the British Government towards it, so I ask the Minister directly: what is the British Government’s attitude to our continued participation in the European Investment Bank? He needs to address that and other issues.
I had better move on and talk about a couple of other new clauses. I know that other hon. Members want to contribute to the debate, and it is frustrating that we do not have enough time properly to debate the issues. I am glad to see in their place a couple of hon. Members who might be interested in these things. New clauses 128 to 130 deal with the issue of the protected designation of the origins of goods and services—specifically, their protected geographical indication.
Hon. Members might well have relevant businesses within their constituencies. This is sometimes known as “the Stilton amendment”, so I am looking at the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara). I understand that Stilton is not necessarily made in North West Cambridgeshire, but the hon. Gentleman has the village of Stilton in his constituency. Similarly, the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) will be well aware of the wonders of Fal oysters, which are protected under the protected geographical indication—PGI—scheme that applies to European trade. Whether they are called “the Stilton amendment” or “the Scotch whisky amendment”, the new clauses simply ask what the Government’s plan is for those protected products—much-cherished and much-valued not just where they are produced, but where they are consumed worldwide—if they lose their protected status? We could end up having knock-off Scotch whisky sold around the world without that protection. The same might apply to Scotch beef, Welsh lamb, Melton Mowbray pork pies, Arbroath smokies, Yorkshire Wensleydale, Newcastle Brown Ale and the Cornish pasty.
Mr Vara
As it happens, the protected status of Stilton cheese prohibits people living in the village of Stilton in my constituency from making it. They researched the cheese and found that it was originally made in the village, but they are prohibited from making it by the protected status to which the hon. Gentleman refers. When we leave the European Union, they will be able to make Stilton cheese in Stilton.
Chris Leslie
Finally, we get some sign of life from Conservative Members. They are finally interested in the consequences of withdrawing from the European Union. This is an issue that the House should have the opportunity to discuss. Many firms, industries and producers, on both sides of this question, will either benefit or—probably—lose out, as a result of our exiting from the European Union in this way.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
Blessed are the cheesemakers, wherever they happen to live, but may I return my hon. Friend to new clause 112, which deals with the European Chemicals Agency, and alert him to the fact that the Environmental Audit Committee is looking into the issue? I have the 200 pages of evidence on what withdrawing from the European chemicals regulations will mean for the motor industry, the defence industry and the pharmaceuticals industry in this country, and it does not make pretty reading.
Chris Leslie
As my hon. Friend says, there are serious questions about hazards that could affect our constituents and substances that pose dangers because, for instance, they may be carcinogenic.
We are disappointed in the Government not only because of their White Paper, but because they are trying to gag Parliament and prevent it from debating these issues. Muzzling Members on both sides of the House on these questions means that we will end up far poorer and far worse off, and it sends a message to the Lords that they will have to do the job of scrutiny and due diligence that we were unable to do. This is our only substantive opportunity to debate the Bill. Parliament deserves more respect than the Government have shown in their insubstantial, inadequate White Paper, which does not touch on many of the questions in our new clauses. We simply want to know what they plan to do, and I sincerely hope that the Minister will answer our questions when he responds to the debate.
Heidi Allen
I want to speak briefly about new clauses 171, 173 and, principally, 57.
I am proud to represent my constituency, which is home to some of the most impressive academic and scientific research in the world. We attract and grow the most innovative brains, and we do that by looking outwards rather than inwards. I know that the Government have confirmed that all EU legislation will simply be transferred to UK law on the day of exit, but I feel that particular attention should be paid to planning our future academic and scientific collaborations.
New clauses 171 and 173 request reports from the Government on the future of the Erasmus+ scheme and participation in the European research area. Given that our academic and research industries are two of our greatest exports and feature heavily in the business, energy and industrial strategy, such reports should be very straightforward. We need to give clarity and reassurance to those sectors, which I know are exceptionally worried about the future. The University of Cambridge, the Babraham Institute, the Wellcome Genome Campus and the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, to mention just a few institutions in my constituency, are extremely important to national prosperity, and they deserve priority in the Government’s thinking.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
The hon. Lady is making a very important speech, but is she aware that it is not necessary to leave behind all those EU agencies? When it comes to research and development, for example, Israel belongs to Horizon 2020. Does the hon. Lady not think that the Government should look into that, and consider the granting of such a status to this country?
Heidi Allen
I entirely agree. I think that what is most important is for Ministers to listen to organisations such as those in my constituency in order to understand what they need. I am pleased that the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has visited Cambridge twice since Christmas, because he is clearly listening, but we in the Chamber are not the experts. Those organisations are, and we should listen to what they say.
Mr Lammy
Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the problems that universities are experiencing is that PhD students and other academics are choosing not to come to Britain now? That means that our global universities are losing out to Harvard, Yale and Berkeley, and universities in other countries.
Heidi Allen
I regularly speak to members of the University of Cambridge, because a couple of its colleges are in my constituency. Although numbers have not fallen so far, I know that they are very worried about what will happen in a couple of years. Universities are a fundamental part of what is great about this country, and they deserve our protection. That is why we need to look fully at the implications for them, and the Government need to listen.
The debate on new clause 57 is probably one of the most important debates that we shall have, because it concerns the continuing rights of EU citizens lawfully residing here before or on 23 June last year. I recognise that the Prime Minister has said that seeking reciprocal rights will be her earliest negotiation priority, and I also recognise that many EU citizens already have an automatic right to remain. However, the issue will continue to keep many of my constituents awake at night until it is resolved.
Mr Jim Cunningham
Like, probably, the hon. Lady, I have been written to by a number of my constituents who are married to British citizens but are EU nationals, and they are very concerned. I should have thought that the Government would give them some sort of comfort, because this is certainly creating problems within families.
Heidi Allen
Absolutely. I speak as a woman with a German mother. I think that on some occasions my father would be quite pleased if my mother were sent back. [Laughter.] He would agree with me about that. However, I do understand the rifts that this is causing in the community, particularly in my constituency, which is bursting with citizens of every nation in the EU who have families and relatives. However, it is not just the EU citizens who are worried; the communities that wrap around them are worried as well.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Is not the issue solved by the Government’s current proposals? When everything is brought into UK law by the great repeal Bill, all EU nationals here will continue to have the right to reside unless Parliament legislates to take it away, which seems to me to be inconceivable.
Heidi Allen
I am sure that my hon. Friend has made an accurate point. I suppose the point I am trying to make is that while there may be legal and administrative realities ensuring that people would never be sent home, the perception and feeling of those people is more important. We should cut through the red tape and give them clarity, because that is what they deserve.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)
Can we put this in context, so that people listening at home will understand and not feel unduly nervous about what is happening? Does my hon. Friend agree that 61% of all EU nationals living in the UK already have a permanent right to reside in this country, and that by the time the UK leaves the EU, that figure will have risen to between 80% and 90%? A very large proportion of EU nationals who are already in this country have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Heidi Allen
That is a valid point, but this should not just be about a piece of paper and whether a form has been completed. We already know of cases in which people’s applications have been turned down. This is not just about citizens who have been here for five years or 10 years. Every day, brains and skills come to my constituency. Should I discriminate against someone who has been here for two years, or for five years? No. Those people have a right to be here, and we should honour that.
Mr Harper
I do not know whether my hon. Friend heard what I said earlier, but I meant it very sincerely. More than 4,000 EU nationals do not fit the description that she has given. They are people who are here and have abused our hospitality by committing crimes for which they have been sent to prison. The problem with a blanket approach is that it will give those people the right to stay here. Having dealt with individual cases, I know that nothing will do more damage to the British people’s wish to welcome EU nationals than our not being able to deport people who came here as EU nationals and then committed serious crimes. Has my hon. Friend given any thought to that?
The Temporary Chairman (Mr George Howarth)
Order. In the brief time for which I have been in the Chair, I have noted that some of the interventions seem to be getting excessively long. I remind Members that interventions should be confined to a single point, and a short one at that.
Heidi Allen
You will be pleased to know that my speech is very short, Mr Howarth, so I do not have much more to get through.
Heidi Allen
If the interventions are long, my speech will be short.
Let me say this to my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper). Nothing is perfect, but should the policy that we make be based on a few bad apples or on the rights of thousands of fabulous citizens who come here and contribute? What we are discussing today is whether we should be offering unilateral rights to them before securing rights for our UK citizens abroad. I have a sense of what is the moral and right thing to do. I believe that we should be leading the way, and offering those rights unilaterally to EU citizens in the UK.
Heidi Allen
I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not. I wish to make a bit of progress, but I will give way again later.
Until we have that resolution, however and whenever it comes, this will prey on the minds of families and our NHS, and will damage the collaboration that is vital to the scientific and academic organisations in my constituency. Many of my constituents have lost all sense of direction, and are struggling to recognise the tolerant, open country of which they are normally so proud. The wounds of the referendum have not yet healed. Although I was grateful for the opportunity to probe the Prime Minister when she made her statement earlier today, I wish to repeat my request for her to keep a unilateral offer to EU citizens in her mind.
As time passes, I fear that the distasteful currency valuation of both our citizens and EU citizens will increase. If an early agreement is not reached—as the Prime Minister hopes it will—I will urge her to step in and halt the trading. We are talking about people. If the Prime Minister were to offer continued rights to EU citizens unilaterally, I believe she would pull the country in behind her. She would strengthen our collective resolve and push forward through the negotiations with the shared will of the 48% and the 52%. At the moment, those in the 48% in my constituency do not feel part of the conversation. Crucially, we would demonstrate that in this global turbulence Britain is, as it always has been, a beacon for humanity and for democracy, a principled and proud nation and—one day soon, I hope—leading the way with compassion and dignity.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
My hon. and right hon. Friends have tabled several new clauses, but we have a remarkable range of amendments before us this evening, so I will confine my remarks to those relating to the position of EU nationals wishing to remain and their rights to remain.
I want to explain why this matters to me as a Liberal and an islander. Those representing island communities understand that things very often have to run to different rules and we have different priorities. One of the most important aspects of keeping an island community viable, prosperous and growing is maintaining a viable level of population, and in recent years and decades the contribution of EU citizens to growing and maintaining the services and businesses within the island communities that it is my privilege to represent has been enormously important. It matters to my communities, therefore, that the position of these EU nationals who live in our communities, and who contribute to our public services and businesses, should be clarified; they should be given the greatest possible reassurance at the earliest possible opportunity.
There is no aspect of island life these days in which we will not find EU nationals living and working. They work in our fish houses, they work in our hotels and bars, they work in our hospitals, our garages and building companies, and they teach in our schools. If we go into the admirable University of the Highlands and Islands, we will find them leading some groundbreaking research there, especially in the development of renewable energy—a future for our whole country. That is why the position of these people in our communities matters to the people I represent, and they matter to me and should matter to us all.
Mr Vara
The right hon. Gentleman, for whom I have a huge amount of respect, is making a very good point as regards EU nationals; indeed, many colleagues have said likewise. Does he not accept, however, that while we talk about securing the position of EU nationals living in Britain, we as British parliamentarians have a duty to British nationals living overseas—we have a duty to make sure that they, too, are looked after—and that if we secure the rights of foreigners living in this country before British nationals overseas are looked after, we are neglecting our duty?
Mr Carmichael
I gently say to the hon. Gentleman, with whom I have worked in the past, and who I hold in some regard, that, bluntly, it is invidious to play the interests of one group of desperate people off against the interests of another group, and there is a danger of that emerging from what he is saying and the terms in which he puts it. As the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the Chairman of the Exiting the European Union Committee, on which I also serve, reminded us, this was the evidence that we heard from British nationals currently living in other parts of the EU; this is what they want us to do, because they see that it is in their interests that we should do this. They see this move as the best, most immediate and speediest way in which their position can be given some degree of certainty.
The real importance of this move is the atmosphere that it would create. We cannot ignore the atmosphere that we have found in many of our communities since 23 June, and the spike we have seen in hate crime; and we must also think about the atmosphere in which the Prime Minister is going to open the negotiations after the triggering of article 50. The atmosphere will be so much better—so much improved—if we are able to say, “We enter this as a negotiation between friends and neighbours, and as such we offer you this important move for your citizens as a mark of our good faith and our good will.”
I also want to deal with one matter that was raised in the Select Committee, and which has been touched on today: the opportunity of EU nationals to secure their position by means of the permanent residence card. I say to the Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union, the right hon. Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones), that he should be talking about this to his colleagues in the Home Office, because there are enormous difficulties with it. [Interruption.] I see the Minister for Immigration is sitting on the Treasury Bench, too, and he will be aware that some 30% of the—expensive—applications that are necessary for permanent residence cards are currently refused. The evidence brought to the Select Committee was that this involves, I think, an 85-page form. The sheer volume of supporting documentation required for these applications is enormous. The level of detail that is asked about the occasions over the past five, 10, 15 or 20 years when people have left the country even on holiday and then returned, and the evidence required to support these dates, is unreasonable and is putting an enormous burden on those seeking this small measure of reassurance in the short to medium term. This needs to be revisited.
The unfairness of the situation came home to me when I saw a constituent on Friday, who brought to my office the letter she received in 1997 from the then Immigration and Nationality Directorate. She was told:
“You can now remain indefinitely in the United Kingdom. You do not need permission from a Government Department to take or change employment and you may engage in business or a profession as long as you comply with any general regulations for the business or professional activity.”
Nobody told my constituent in 1997 that 20 years later she was going to have to produce tickets to show that in 2005 she took a two-week holiday in Ibiza, or whatever, but that is the situation in which she now finds herself if she is going to achieve that small measure of security for her and her family.
The challenge facing our country at this point is how we go forward in a way that allows us to bring the 52% and the 48% back together. Our country faces an enormous challenge, and it is one that we cannot meet with the support of only half our population; we need all our people to be able to pull together. This would be one small measure that would allow the Government to bring the two sides together to get the best possible deal for all our citizens, whether they are British by birth or British by choice.
Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), although he might not entirely share the sentiment once I have finished my contribution. I promise that it will be a short contribution, in the interests of time and the number of Members who wish to have their say. I rise to speak against in particular new clauses 56 and 134.
There are some in the House who have said that the referendum result should not be respected because the people did not know what they were voting for. They are determined to find confusion where none exists. They say that the public voted to leave the European Union, but not the single market or the customs union. Members are arguing through these amendments that we in this House need to debate whether or not we leave the single market. I disagree.
The majority of voters who took part in the referendum said that they wanted to leave the European Union. Many of those who contacted me said that they wanted to restore our parliamentary sovereignty and sovereignty over our courts, to regain control over our immigration policy, and to strike out in the world and forge new deals with countries across the globe. Those aims are incompatible with remaining in the single market or in the customs union.
Caroline Lucas
I do wish that the hon. Gentleman would not rewrite history. I have some lovely quotes here. The present Foreign Secretary said:
“I’d vote to stay in the single market. I’m in favour of the single market.”
The right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) said:
“Only a madman would actually leave the market”.
That one speaks for itself. Arron Banks stated:
“Increasingly the Norway option looks the best for the UK.”
What the hon. Gentleman is saying is simply not the case.
Will Quince
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but those were selective quotes, taken out of context. How could it not have been clear what the public were voting for?
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend honestly saying that the good people of Colchester sat in a variety of places where they might go to enjoy themselves mulling over the finer points of the single market?
Will Quince
I think my right hon. Friend underestimates the intelligence of the people of Colchester.
I would be more sympathetic to those tabling the new clauses if they had not voted in favour of holding the referendum. However, they supported it. They agreed to entrust this question to the British people. I remember when some on the other side of the House, namely the Liberal Democrats—although I question that name in the context of this debate—were calling for a “real referendum”. Well, we had a real referendum—the biggest exercise in democracy in our nation’s history—and we have been given a result. Those hon. Members just do not like what they heard. We should respect the instruction we were given by the British people. We were told that we were going to leave the European Union and the single market, and leave we should.
The Prime Minister has been absolutely clear that we are leaving the single market. Those on the Opposition Benches tabling these new clauses should perhaps listen to the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, the noble Lord Ashdown, who said that
“when the British people have spoken, you do what they command”.
We do not need this debate. It is simply an attempt to obfuscate and delay the process. That is why I cannot support new clauses 56 or 134, and I encourage colleagues to oppose them.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I should like to speak to new clauses 29 and 33, tabled in my name and those of other right hon. and hon. colleagues.
The Secretary of State—who is not here for this debate—said with his usual braggadocio that he would produce a Bill that was unamendable. Today, we have a list of amendments that is 145 pages long. The ratio of lines in the amendments to lines in the Bill 580:1, which must be an all-time record. It is certainly a tribute to the productivity of hon. Members on this side of the House. However, the chutzpah of the Secretary of State was exceeded by the civil servant who wrote paragraph 14 of the Bill’s explanatory notes, which states:
“The impact of the Bill itself will be both clear and limited”.
No. The effect of the Bill is not clear and it is certainly not limited. The fact that hon. Members have tabled so many new clauses and amendments demonstrates why this debate on parliamentary scrutiny is so important.
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), whose constituents voted leave in the referendum. Mine did too, and his speech was the perfect introduction to my own. I want to describe why it is also in the interests of those who voted leave that we should have proper parliamentary scrutiny. The referendum campaign was won on the slogan of taking back control and bringing back parliamentary sovereignty. We cannot do that without having proper parliamentary scrutiny.
New clause 29 is perfectly simple and straightforward: it proposes a quarterly reporting system during the negotiations. That would give the House a structured approach. The right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) complained about new clause 3—which was ably moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook)—saying that it would create problems of justiciability. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will agree that the requirement to produce a report once a quarter is not such a high or complex legal bar, and that it would not lead to extremely long litigation. It is a simple, practical measure.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Does the hon. Lady imagine that there would be no court cases about whether such quarterly reports conformed with the appropriate procedure? Is she aware of the chain of jurisprudence in judicial review that leads to the possibility of that kind of contest? What does she think would happen if the courts started intervening in the matter of whether the reports met the requirements of her new clause?
Helen Goodman
First, it is not clear that such cases would get leave of hearing. Secondly, any such case would be dismissed straight away, so long as the Government had abided by the requirement to produce quarterly reports. There simply would not be a case to answer. This is a simple and straightforward proposal.
Sir Oliver Letwin
So does the hon. Lady think that the Government would satisfy the conditions of her new clause if they simply produced one line saying, “This is our report”? Or does she believe that it would have to be an appropriate report? If that were the case, could not a court decide whether it was appropriate or not?
Helen Goodman
As the Chairman of the Select Committee said earlier, when we got into a discussion about the requests from the Opposition Front Bench, the nature of the report would be a matter for the Government. I am sure that the Government would behave in a reasonable manner if this provision were in the legislation.
As I was saying to the hon. Member for Colchester, my constituency voted leave. I voted for the Bill on Second Reading so that the Prime Minister would have the power to trigger our intention to withdraw from the European Union under article 50. However, the political legitimacy stemming from the result of last summer’s referendum does not extend to giving the Government a blank cheque for their negotiating objectives or for the way in which they conduct the negotiations. Everyone is clear that this will have major constitutional, political, economic and social implications for our relations with other countries and for the domestic framework of our legislation.
Given the lack of clarity, and the fact that there was no plan, I have consulted my constituents on their expectations and hopes, and on how they want these decisions to be taken. I wrote to 5,500 of them, and I held six public meetings. They felt strongly that they wanted Parliament to be involved. In fact, some of them thought that the negotiations should be conducted by a cross-party team. I said that I did not think that was terribly likely—
Helen Goodman
Let me tell the right hon. Lady about the views that were expressed in my constituency, even though they might be different from those being expressed in her own. When we discussed the social chapter and people’s employment rights, my constituents said, in terms, “You can’t trust the Tories.” It is because of that feeling—[Interruption.] Those were their words, not mine. It is because of that feeling that we need to have parliamentary involvement in the way this process is carried forward.
The Government have reluctantly come to the House with this Bill. I first requested that Parliament be involved on 11 July in an urgent question on article 50. The Government resisted, as everybody knows, and only came to the House because they were forced to by the Supreme Court. Some Government Back Benchers say that the negotiations are far too complex to do openly—the right hon. Member for West Dorset talked about 3D chess, for example—but I take the opposite view: it is precisely because the negotiations are complicated and multifaceted that lots of people should be involved.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
The vast majority of the amendments—I think I counted 30—tabled by members of the Opposition basically call for a report within 30 days of the Bill coming into force setting out the Government’s approach in the negotiations. Does the hon. Lady imagine that Europe will publish reports on every one of these issues, setting out its approach in the negotiations? That would surely be giving away too much.
Helen Goodman
Had the hon. Gentleman been in his place to hear the fantastic speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie), he would understand why my hon. Friend was proposing all those reports. I am speaking to new clause 29, which is about quarterly reporting by the Government once the negotiations get under way.
Another slight misconception among Government Members is that there is some best deal, but there is clearly no objective technical standard test. What is best in the constituency of the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) might be different from what is best in my constituency. I am not casting aspersions on the motivations of Government Members; I am being realistic. When the Prime Minister talks about building a better Britain and doing what is best for the country, I am sure that she is being completely sincere, but she stood in a general election in Durham in 1992 and received half as many votes as the Labour candidate. The truth of the matter is that the process is complicated and there are different interests. Parliament, which is the sovereign body of the country, should be able to participate fully in that process, and scrutiny is the basic first brick of it.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
The net effect of the hon. Lady’s new clause is that the High Court, not Parliament, would decide on the adequacy or otherwise of the reporting. She would be ceding authority not to this place but to the independent High Court, which is contrary to what she is trying to achieve.
Helen Goodman
Look, I am sorry that Government Members feel so bad about losing the Supreme Court case last month. It is a shame. The Government were foolish to appeal after the High Court judgment. However, the fact that they have lost one case does not mean that they should become obsessed with the risk. It is as absurd as saying, “Well, we should stop having parliamentary questions for every Department once a month because they somehow undermine the Government.” Take Defence Question Time, for example. It happens every single month, but it does not undermine our security; it holds the Government to account. It is because the negotiations are so important that the Government should report back. I am sorry that the Secretary of State is not here. Unlike some Government Back Benchers, I think he understands that this is not a technical issue; it is a political process. Involving Parliament and having proper parliamentary scrutiny is the right thing to do to build a national consensus, which the Government state is their aim in the White Paper.
New clause 29 is simple and straightforward and would require a quarterly reporting system during the negotiations. While the Select Committees are doing fantastic work in considering particular issues in great detail, it is extremely important that the whole House gets a regular opportunity to see how things are going and to provide the perspective of the different communities we represent. Out of necessity, I drafted new clause 29 without having seen new clause 3, which is obviously tougher than new clause 29, so some people will prefer one over the other.
Stephen Hammond (Wimbledon) (Con)
The hon. Lady refers to guaranteeing the rights of EU citizens, and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who is not in his place, stated the legal position. The Government could make that guarantee tonight, saying that my hon. Friend was correct, by stating that those rights would be grandfathered straight into the Immigration Act 2016. That may not be the preferred method for many in this House, but it would effectively guarantee EU citizens what they want. Does the hon. Lady agree?
Helen Goodman
I have not thought about that in as much detail as the hon. Gentleman, but it will be interesting to see what the Minister says when he responds to the debate from the Dispatch Box tonight.
As I was saying, we should have proper, structured scrutiny, and I am disappointed that we do not have slightly longer to consider all these matters in more detail.
Richard Fuller
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), who expressed her view with her usual forthrightness. She was one of the first Members in the House to raise the complex issue of the customs union, for which I am very grateful.
Last July, the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) moved an Opposition motion on guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals in the UK, and I was one of five Conservative Members to support it. It was an excellent motion to propose at that time, and thanks to that motion tremendous progress has been made in the Government’s thinking and statements. We are debating an issue on which there is unanimity of view about what we want to achieve. It goes almost to the point of parody: everyone is agreeing on a point about which they are then going to disagree. The fundamental question is whether placing such a measure in this Bill is the right approach to continue the pressure and achieve what my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) spoke about so eloquently.
Heidi Allen
My hon. Friend asks whether the Bill is the right place for such a proposal. Should it be that we in this country need legislation to orientate our moral compass?
Richard Fuller
I think my hon. Friend knows my view, so I will not dwell on that.
As I looked through the many amendments, I noted that they fall into three main categories: those that ask for or require scrutiny of the Government’s approach; those that seek to frame a position for the Government in the negotiations; and those that seek answers to an imponderable list of questions—most notably those from the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie). Each of those groups in turn is less worthy of the House’s attention. Scrutiny is relevant to how the House sees things proceeding, and I will listen carefully to what the Front-Bench team says about that. I am concerned, however, by some of the comments made by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) to which he did not receive answers. The idea that we would involve the Government in the negotiations, then involve Parliament in the negotiations and then also involve the courts in the negotiations brings the words “dog’s” and “breakfast” close together very quickly.
On EU nationals here in the UK, many of the contributions to this debate have focused on the easiest side of the argument. My right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) mentioned prisoners in the UK, and under last year’s motion those prisoners who have committed crimes in this country would be guaranteed the right to remain. We may want to do that, but it is a hard case to make that we should do that while not giving any consideration to British nationals in other EU countries. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire might say, we would then seem to be losing our moral compass through legislation.
A number of Members have cited specific examples of where prisoners would already be guaranteed rights in this country. As parliamentarians, we have a responsibility to reduce uncertainty as we go through the process of leaving the EU, and one practical way of doing that is by knowing what the circumstances are for each of our constituents who come to talk to us so that we can explain to them that there is no need for them to be concerned because their rights are secure—the proposal will not cover all of them, and it might not cover as large a proportion as my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) mentioned, but it is a practical example of where we can help to reduce uncertainty.
The third argument on this issue of EU nationals who have the right to remain here, upon which we all agree, is that we have focused all our attention on the Government Front Bench. Hardly anyone has mentioned Angela Merkel. As I understand it, and I get this from two very reputable newspapers—The Sun and the Daily Express—so it must be true, it was Mrs Merkel who said no to a deal. Where are the voices talking about pressing the German Government to make an agreement? I have heard plenty of speeches today about Donald Trump and how terrible we feel about his policies. Well, here is something that affects British citizens in another country and not a word from anyone.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, by triggering article 50, we will simply give the EU27 all the rights to deliver our future? We would then have no negotiation, which is why we should delay article 50 and let the people have the final say on the negotiated package. As full members, we have negotiating rights. We would then have the power of time, and we would give the EU27 the incentive to come to the negotiating table because we might vote to stay in the EU.
Richard Fuller
The hon. Gentleman would not get a top mark in negotiation analysis at Harvard Business School. The last word the British public want to hear when it comes to this Bill is “delay.” Most people think we should get on with it, if they do not think we have done it already.
It is important for the Government to understand that messaging is important. There is uncertainty, and people feel that perhaps they do not have the right to remain here, so the Government must continue their progress in signalling to people not only that we welcome them here but that our intent is that everyone in the United Kingdom as a legal EU resident will be able to stay. We must not avoid, or fail to pursue, communicating that message.
Equally, the Government must avoid measures that give the optics to British citizens in other EU countries that they have been abandoned. One of the worst things of stating this in legislation is not that it is necessarily a bad thing but that the optics for British citizens in other countries would change dramatically. They would say, “Why have we not been protected?” They would feel even more vulnerable because of the inaction of EU Governments if the UK Government were, by statute, to have to take this measure.
I support the Government on this amendment, and I call on them to continue their progress on the issue to end uncertainty. Ending uncertainty is not just about the rights of EU nationals currently living in the UK; it is about wanting people in the European Union to come to the UK. The progressive message of this Government should not just end with the issues contained in the amendment. We should send a positive message that we will continue to welcome people from the European Union after we leave.
Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)
I support the new clauses and amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins), and I will particularly address new clause 51, in the name of the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith).
In particular, I support the argument for a White Paper that includes details of the expected trajectory for the UK’s balance of trade, gross domestic product and unemployment. A number of earlier contributions explained precisely why we need that. My hon. Friend said that Vote Leave failed to provide detailed answers to any of the key economic questions before the referendum and, of course, he is right.
The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), who is no longer in his place, demonstrated incredibly ably the confusion at the heart of Vote Leave and why taking a decision today is incredibly difficult. He effectively said—I have spoken to him, so this will come as no surprise to him—that no one in the leadership of the official leave campaign ever argued that we would join the EEA or have an EFTA-type agreement. It might be that the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), or one of the other senior figures, never quite said that, but to argue that the leave campaign did not suggest it, and suggest it strongly, is simply wrong. The leave campaign Lawyers for Britain said:
“We could apply to re-join with effect from the day after Brexit… EFTA membership would allow us to continue uninterrupted free trade relations”.
That was still on the website only a few weeks ago.
The former ambassador and Brexit supporter Charles Crawford appeared on “Newsnight” to argue that an EEA option may be the first step of Brexit. Roland Smith, the author of “The Liberal Case for ‘Leave’”, wrote an extended paper titled “Evolution Not Revolution: The case for the EEA option”, so I suspect that there were many people who, indeed, voted for Brexit believing that we were not voting for a hard Tory cliff-edge Brexit and that we would maintain membership of the EEA, EFTA or an equivalent. Given that that now no longer appears to be the case, it is absolutely right, as new clause 51 makes clear, that we have details of the expected trajectory of the balance of trade, GDP and unemployment. Those are not abstracts; they are at the heart of the measurement of our economy, of wages, of living standards and of economic growth. They are the platform for tax yield, which pays for our vital public services. All those words and concepts were almost entirely absent from what I will generously call the first White Paper.
I gently observe that it is not good enough for the Government to produce, after a referendum, a White Paper that is little more that the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech dressed up with a few pictures and a couple of graphs. That is not the basis for the economic plan necessary to mitigate the huge potential damage to the economy from a hard Tory Brexit. Make no mistake, that is what we are facing.
Will Quince
Did the Government leaflet, at great cost, not exactly make the point that single market membership was not an option and that access would be the result of a leave vote in the referendum?
Stewart Hosie
Many things were said, which is my point. Some might argue that being in the EEA or a member of EFTA precisely gives one not just access to but membership of the single market—one could call it access if one likes. There was deep, deep confusion in the messaging of the no side, which must be rectified now with proper details on the trajectory of the key economic numbers before more decisions are taken.
I say that we are facing a hard Brexit, and let us understand what has been said. The leaked Treasury document last November suggested that the UK could lose up to £66 billion from a hard Tory Brexit and that GDP could fall by about 9.5% if the UK reverted to WTO rules. I accept that that is a worst-case scenario, but if the circumstances that lead us to that catastrophe occur and we do not have a plan to mitigate it, the guilt would lie with the Government for failing to plan. The final part of that—the “if we revert to WTO rules”—is key, because the Prime Minister has said that a bad deal is worse than no deal. That is very twisted logic, because no deal is the worst deal; it means we revert immediately to WTO rules, with all the tariffs and other regulatory burdens that that implies.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Temporary Chair (Mr George Howarth)
Order. I am anxious to get in as many of the people who have sat throughout the debate as possible. There is no time limit and I am not going to impose one, but if those who remain take five minutes, or preferably fewer, it might be possible to get everyone in.
Dr Wollaston
I wish to start by reading something from a letter I have received from a constituent. He talks about his wife, who was born in the Netherlands. He writes:
“She has lived in this country for over 30 years, brought up three British children and is completely integrated into the life of her local town. She is not part of any ‘immigrant community’. She just lives here and is fully at home here. Until now, she has never seen herself as an outsider and has been able to participate fully in local life, thanks to her rights as an EU citizen. In two years’ time, she will lose those rights and be a foreigner, dependent on the good will of the Government of the day.”
I have written back to and met my constituent, because I think it is inconceivable that our Prime Minister would separate this family. However, many people are not reassured, and he and his wife sought for her to have permanent residency. This involved dealing with an 85-page document, including an English language test and a test about life in Britain, which is insulting to someone who has lived here most of her life and brought up three children here. This process is also very expensive, but the final sting in the tail is that she finds she is not eligible, because she has been self-employed and has not taken out comprehensive sickness insurance. This situation is unacceptable. We need to keep our compassion and keep this simple. It is inconceivable that families such as this would be separated, so we should be absolutely clear in saying so, up front.
Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)
I understand what my hon. Friend is saying about her constituency surgeries. I have had a similar experience and it is deeply upsetting in many respects, but will she join me in reflecting that the EU and Chancellor Merkel could have come to a deal on this earlier? The reality is that they have point-blank refused to discuss it before we trigger article 50.
Dr Wollaston
I agree with that, and I have also heard from constituents of mine who are British citizens now living in the EU. But my point is that, come what may, it is inconceivable that we would seek to separate families such as this one. There is no doubt that many people are sleepless and sick with worry about this, and we have all seen them in our surgeries. [Interruption.] It is true. I am seeing these people in my surgery. We also need to consider the tsunami of paperwork that we will have to deal with in settling the rights of these citizens if we do not get on with this quickly. We need to keep this simple. There is no way that families such as this should be subjected to vast bureaucracy and vast expense. We all know that this needs to be settled, so in negotiating, surely, making a bold, open offer as a gesture of good will can do nothing but good in this situation.
Richard Fuller
I agree with my hon. Friend, but my question to her is: can she cast any thought on why the Chancellor of Germany refused the offer?
Dr Wollaston
I have no idea why this is happening, but I am saying, as an important point to the Chancellor of Germany, that making this clear unilateral offer is the right thing to do, and we should get on and do it. There is no reason not to do so. Even if other countries were to take an obstructive and unreasonable line, it would still be inconceivable that our Prime Minister would separate families such as my constituents. So let us get on with this.
Anna Soubry
Does my hon. Friend not agree that the Prime Minister has given her word that this will be a priority and she clearly hears the compassion that my hon. Friend reflects for her constituent, as we all do for all our constituents? We must, as I certainly do, accept the word of the Prime Minister that this will be her priority and that she will sort it.
Dr Wollaston
I thank my right hon. Friend for that. Like her, I do trust the Prime Minister, and that is why I have taken a very reassuring line with my constituents. However, there is no substitute for a clear statement from our Prime Minister that, come what may, families such as this will not be separated, because that is the reassurance they seek. I hear what my right hon. Friend says, but I think we should get on and make that offer, because it can be nothing but good to do so.
I also hope the Prime Minister will take further action on the issue of those who work in our NHS and social care. One in 10 of the doctors who works in our NHS comes from elsewhere in the EU, and I would like to say thank you, on behalf of the whole House, to all those workers and to all those who are working in social care. It would also be very much a positive move if we could say, up front, that those who are working here will be welcome to stay and make it very clear that we will continue to make it easy to welcome people from across the EU to work in social care and in our NHS.
Owen Smith
I shall make a short, pointed speech, because a lot of other Members have been present throughout the debate and wish to speak. It is extraordinary that we are debating one of the most, if not the most, important economic, social and strategic decisions that this House has had to make—certainly in the six years I have been here and arguably for 70 years—in a few short days and hours.
I shall speak to new clause 51, which I tabled. It is a simple, good-hearted new clause that would get the Government to come clean with the country and explain what they think the effect of Brexit is going to be for our constituents and for the national interest. It refers to labour rights, health and safety legislation, environmental protections and, most importantly, the impact we are likely to see on our GDP and balance of trade—the fundamental metrics that dictate whether we succeed or fail as a nation.
I tabled the new clause before we saw the abject, lamentable piece of work that the Government produced last Thursday: the 70-odd skimpy pages of the White Paper, 10% of which is actually white or blocked out. It is the whitest White Paper I think the House has ever seen. I contrast that with the 200-odd page report that the Treasury produced ahead of the referendum, which detailed the minutiae of all the impacts anticipated as a result of the changes in respect of GDP—[Interruption.] They chunter on the Government Front Bench, but when the Prime Minister was sat on that Bench as Home Secretary, she signed up to every line of that Treasury report, so it is entirely legitimate for the country to ask whether she is now living a lie as to what she thinks the impact of Brexit will be. Is she deceiving the country about whether this is going to turn out well for us, or not?
Let us not forget that the Treasury report suggested that the net impact on GDP of our leaving the European Union was going to be in the order of £45 billion per annum within 15 years. That is a third of the NHS budget. It would require a 10p increase in the basic rate of taxation to fill that black hole. It may well be entirely untrue. Perhaps it was just an estimate by experts in the Treasury that we should no longer believe, but if so, the Government need to come clean and tell us the current estimate.
Now that we know what the Government are planning to do—now that we know that we are gunning for the rock-hard Brexit that they hate to hear about on the Government Benches—what will the impact be? What will be the impact on trade? The Government were very clear about that previously. Under any circumstances, leaving the European Union will reduce trade by this country. It will make us “permanently poorer”, according to the Treasury, as a result of reduced trade, reduced activity and reduced receipts, which will force the Government to increase and prolong austerity. Those are the stakes we are playing for on behalf of our constituents in this debate.
It seems to me entirely right that if this House is to be worthy of the name of the Houses of Parliament, and if it is going to do its job as it is meant to and as it has done for centuries, we need to see the detail. We need to be clear about what this is going to mean for my constituents and for my children. If it is anything like the black picture that was previously painted, we must have a final, meaningful vote in this House on the terms.
We cannot allow this country to drift out of the European Union on a bad deal—on World Trade Organisation terms—which would mean that the £45 billion black hole in our public finances was realised. We cannot allow that to happen for future generations, and we will be held accountable by those future generations if this House sits by, supine and pusillanimous, allowing this legislation to be waved through the House for political purposes—that is, to end the 30-year civil war on the Tory Benches. I cannot stand for that, and we should not stand for that in this House. We should see the detail and hold the Government to account, and I will continue to do that throughout this debate.
Wes Streeting
I rise to speak to new clause 56, which was tabled in my name and the names of right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House. I hope it will pick up cross-party support, because it places the future of our economy and of jobs and trade at the centre of the debate, which is where those matters should be. In leaving the European Union, as people have voted to do, there remains the outstanding question of what happens about our membership of the single market and the customs union. Contrary to what we were told earlier by the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), those were not clear issues during the referendum. There were differences of opinion on the remain side and on the leave side. Given that ambiguity on something so important, it is quite right that Parliament, in taking back control, should at least give the Government a steer about the future trading relationship we would like to see.
As members of the single market and customs union, we are part of the largest free trade area in the world, giving us unfettered access to half a billion consumers throughout the European continent.
Anna Soubry
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is at best unfortunate that his Front-Bench team has not used its Opposition Supply days to have exactly that debate and, indeed, a vote on the single market, the customs union and the free movement of people?
Wes Streeting
I have a lot of respect for how the right hon. Lady has conducted herself during the debate, but her criticisms of our Front-Bench team, particularly the shadow Brexit Ministers, are particularly unfair. In any case, her criticism of our Front-Bench team would carry more weight if she was clearer about which voting Lobby she is going to be walking through on several crucial issues. It is all very well taking to the airways and speaking in the newspapers about the fight she will put up on these issues, but she has to put her vote where her mouth is.
Anna Soubry
I have made it clear that I very much hope the Government will see good sense, as is the case in much of the wording of new clause 110, and that some sort of compromise and sense can be achieved. I make it clear that in the absence of that I will perhaps find myself with no alternative but to go against my Government, which is the last thing I want to do.
Wes Streeting
That is terribly disappointing.
As members of the single market and customs union, we are part of the largest free trade area in the world. We have heard a lot about global trade and our relationship with the rest of the world, but what is often overlooked is that membership of the European single market and customs union facilitates global trade. In fact, the EU has more free trade agreements with the rest of the world than the United States of America, China, Canada, Japan, Russia, India and Brazil. Every single sector of our economy will be affected by the decisions that our Government make and the outcome of the negotiations.
Last week, the cat was let out of the bag—or should I say, with reference to the former Chancellor, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), that the rabbit was let out of Alice’s wonderland? The right hon. and learned Gentleman pointed out that the idea that we will leave the most advanced and sophisticated free trade agreement in the world and countries around the world will be queuing up to give us as favourable terms that are as good for our economy is fanciful.
If that were not bad enough, we should listen to the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne). My jaw dropped when I heard him utter these words. He said that the Prime Minister has chosen
“not to make the economy the priority in this negotiation.”—[Official Report, 1 February 2017; Vol. 620, c. 1034.]
We are leaving the European Union and there is a real risk that the Prime Minister is going to drive a coach and horses through the biggest single trade agreement and free trade area in the world, of which we are part, divorce us from the single market and the customs union, with implications for jobs, trade and investment, as well for the jobs of my constituents and the constituents of every Member of this House, and yet the economy is not the priority in this negotiation. That is an outrageous prospectus. How could any member of the Conservative party support a prospectus that does not place the economy at the forefront of our departure from the European Union? It is reckless and irresponsible. If the Opposition were behaving like that, the Government would attack us and say that we lack economic credibility. It is an absolute outrage that that lot on the Government Benches do not even put the economy on the agenda.
Wes Streeting
I am sorry, but I have given way already, and I am really conscious that others want to contribute. The Government should be seeking to get the best possible trading relationship with the European Union. I cannot fathom why the Prime Minister is not setting out to keep Britain in a reformed single market. Margaret Thatcher was the architect—
Wes Streeting
I will not give way. I want to draw my remarks to a conclusion so that other Members can come in. By the way, Mr Howarth, it is outrageous that we have not had enough time to debate these substantial issues.
Margaret Thatcher was the architect of the single market. The Prime Minister could be the architect of a reformed single market. As for the consequences, the choices and the trade-offs that lie ahead, whether on rules, freedom of movement or our financial contribution, we should not give this Government a blank cheque. They have not earned it. Any Government who enter a process such as this and say that the economy is not the priority do not deserve the trust of this House, and do not deserve the trust of the British people.
Caroline Lucas
I very much support the amendments that are designed to increase parliamentary scrutiny and I have put my name to many of them. I also support those amendments that would give the right to remain to EU nationals now here. That is a moral issue, which should be guaranteed now, not some kind of transactional calculation.
I wish to raise the issue of transitional arrangements, which has not yet been discussed and is covered by my new clause 36. I welcome the White Paper’s recognition that, if a deal can be successfully secured within a two-year period that starts when article 50 is triggered, we will not leave the EU literally overnight. There will be a phased implementation to give businesses the chance to adapt. That is not the same thing as needing a period of transition should two years not be sufficient time to reach an agreement. To have no idea of what that agreement will be is a glaring omission and that is what my new clause seeks to address. It would put in place a transitional arrangement to govern UK-EU trade relations during the period, if necessary, between when the UK leaves the EU and when a longer term agreement is concluded.
Given the short time available—it is expected to be two years, but in reality it will be more like 18 months given the requirement to bring the deal before MPs, the European Parliament and so on—the only option available if a deal has not been secured is to send Britain over a cliff edge. We would face having to leave the EU effectively overnight, crashing out of the EU on WTO-only terms. The Government have stated clearly in their White Paper that they want to avoid cliff edges, but at the moment they have done nothing to stay away from this one—perhaps they have been too busy looking the other way over the Atlantic and have simply not noticed it.
My new clause would provide a safety net. Given that both France and Germany will be preoccupied with national elections for much of this year and that the UK team has limited negotiating capacity and relative inexperience, it seems likely that two years will not be sufficient time to get the best deal for Britain. If we come to the end of the two-year period, we need a plan that is not just the default option of the wild west that is the WTO.
The Prime Minister says that she has unanimous agreement with the other 27 member states, and that getting that unanimous agreement is an option. We need to know that the option of continuing the negotiations has been specifically discussed, and we need to know it before we trigger article 50, otherwise we risk yet more uncertainty for our economy, for the citizens living in the EU and for all of our constituents. It is like jumping out of a plane to escape someone we have fallen out with but failing to double check that there is a parachute in the pack strapped on our back. What possible reason would anyone have for being so complacent or foolhardy?
Exiting the EU is really about two separate processes—
Caroline Lucas
I will not give way, because there is no time.
Many in the EU want us to conclude the divorce element, which comes with a potential bill of €60 billion, before discussing a trade deal. We must not forget that this is a negotiation. Article 50 covers only administrative Brexit, not the legal or trade aspects. If, after two years, we do not even have a basic divorce deal, it is possible that tempers will fray and patience dwindle, and the prospect of starting negotiations on trade deals in such circumstances is unlikely—to put it mildly.
The 27 other countries are likely to want the divorce settlement agreed via the courts, so trade negotiations may not be possible even if the political will is there. For all of those reasons, we need these transitional arrangements in place. I did not give way to Members, because I wished to allow time for others to speak. Let me just reiterate how frustrating it is that, in a debate of this importance, we are having to rattle through it at a ridiculous rate.
The Temporary Chair (Mr George Howarth)
I call Jim Shannon. Before he starts, may I say that there is one more Member to be accommodated in the time available? I realise that time is tight, but if he could be brief that would be helpful.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I must start by thanking the Government for keeping the promise in the referendum. The Government said that they would listen to the will of the people and, in true democratic form, they have adhered to that. People in the referendum said that they wanted article 50 to be triggered by 31 March. That is part of the exceptional circumstances under which we are operating, and that is why we are debating this matter tonight.
My constituency voted 54% to 46% to leave the EU—
Jim Shannon
No, I will not give way.
With that in mind, it is clear that we wish to see the Bill make progress. I hope that we will not face more efforts to derail the process today. The train is en route and is going at a steady pace. Our duty and the duty of Government is to set the tracks in the right way—a strong and safe track—to carry us out of Europe and back to independence.
As a Northern Ireland MP, specific issues relating to our border with the Republic of Ireland, our businesses, our farming community and other communities are unique to us. I have every faith in our Prime Minister and her team and the discussions that she had with the Taoiseach in the Republic of Ireland just last week. The body language and the verbal contact were positive, and we should have every faith in what goes forward.
I just want to refer to new clauses 6 and 14. There is an argument that they do not make it clear to whom the protections apply, and that is to do with their scope. I am proud of the fact that I hail from a constituency that has a massive agri-food industry, which includes businesses that not only supply to the UK, but are globally recognised and trusted. I have manufacturers which ship to the middle east, America and Europe, and are now branching out to the far east. Mash Direct, a major employer in my constituency, employs some 40% of its workforce from eastern Europe. For Willowbrook Foods, the figure is 60%. We also have Lakeland Dairies, which covers Pritchitts Foods and Rich Sauces. All those businesses provide some 2,000 jobs in total.
Some of the workers have met and married locals, so there must be no road blocks to their ability to remain and work in this country and live their lives. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs visited Northern Ireland a couple of months ago and saw some of those factories and spoke to the people. She told me that she was very keen to ensure that the people working in the factories will have security of tenure and I fully support that.
However, I must underline my opening remarks and say that those who are living, working and integrating in our society and local economy deserve our protection. The Prime Minister is well within her rights to ensure that those who live and work here, or who are married to a British person, should have the ability to remain. None the less, there is no doubt that we must curb migration, which does not enhance life in the UK in relation to economic migrants. We must also ensure that our paramount concern is allowing businesses to continue to retain their workforce without fear and to have the ability unequivocally to offer job security to that workforce in order to keep the workers right here in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Julian Knight
I will keep my comments brief as I am aware of the shortage of time. I was for remain in the referendum mainly because of the potential for short and medium-term economic dislocation, particularly within my constituency, which is likely to have among the highest trade surpluses with the EU, mostly off the bonnet of the Jaguar Land Rover cars that we sell into the single market. The debate was lost, and I still think we face difficult times ahead.
I believe in free trade. We have to strike out as best we can, but it will be tough in a world of growing protectionism. When we leave the EU, the key is to make the best possible deal. For me, that does not mean having membership of the single market. During the referendum campaign and for years before, the message on the doorsteps was loud and clear: no freedom of movement. People do not want freedom of movement, but the single market comes with that requirement so that is off the table straightaway, as the Prime Minister has made clear.
The difficulty with being in the customs union is that we would not be able to have our own trade deals with the rest of the world. We would be hamstrung. The European economic area, customs unions and single market membership are antechambers to entering the EU. We are leaving the EU. We are a country of 65 million people with a sophisticated, large economy, so it is completely inappropriate to have that type of model. We need our own model, and any attempts to frustrate that with amendments or to make the Government expose their hand too early, will damage our negotiations.
The Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Jones)
This short Bill has attracted a large number of new clauses that fall into a number of broad categories. I will first deal with the issue of parliamentary scrutiny, which has engaged the attention of a large number of hon. and right hon. Members. From listening to the debate, I am clear that there is actually a considerable amount of common ground across the Chamber. The Government also agree that parliamentary scrutiny is essential as we withdraw from the European Union. Indeed, the whole object of leaving the European Union is to ensure that our Parliament can take back our own laws. For that purpose, scrutiny is essential.
I recognise the thoughtfulness in the wording of many of the amendments that seek to formalise the mode of scrutiny, but it will probably surprise nobody that I will not accept any of them. This is a straightforward Bill that gives us the means to respect the result of the referendum and the judgment of the Supreme Court. As the Court made absolutely clear, this is about not whether we leave or the terms on which we leave, but simply the mechanics under which we trigger the process of leaving. In many cases, the amendments discussed today have virtually nothing to do with the Bill, and I resist them for two principal reasons. First, many are unnecessary in that what they seek to achieve is effectively already being done by the Government. No one can deny that the Secretary of State, as the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) recognised, has been assiduous in his engagement with Parliament. The process has been the source of intense scrutiny over the past seven months.
Stephen Gethins
Will the Minister tell us whether reassuring EU nationals is unnecessary?
Mr Jones
I will come to EU nationals later. As I explained a moment ago, I am currently dealing with the issue of scrutiny, not with the issue of EU nationals.
One can see from the Secretary of State’s record of engagement that he has given an oral statement on an almost monthly basis—far more than the bimonthly or quarterly updates to Parliament requested in the new clauses. Ministers from across Government have been at this Dispatch Box many times to debate our EU exit. The Prime Minister has given a statement after every Council, including one today. That is in addition to holding debates on the EU exit in Government time, and 15 appearances at Select Committees by Ministers and officials from all Departments.
Helen Goodman
I am pleased that the Minister understands that parliamentary scrutiny is essential, but we have heard from Government Back Benchers that everything will have to close down once the negotiations begin. Therefore, what has happened in the past seven months is not, strictly speaking, relevant to what will happen over the next two years. The purpose of new clause 3 and new clause 28 is to provide forward-looking scrutiny.
Mr Jones
I understand the hon. Lady’s point. However, it is not the case that everything will, as she puts it, “close down”. There will certainly be negotiations and it is important that they continue, to a certain extent, with privacy. At the same time, the Government have made it clear, time after time, that we fully appreciate the need for engagement with and scrutiny by Parliament, provided, of course, that it does not adversely affect the negotiations.
Geraint Davies
Does the Minister agree that the final deal should in fact be scrutinised by the British people, who should have the final say on whether it represents their reasonable expectations when they voted to leave? If it does not, they should have the chance to stay in the EU.
Mr Jones
The British people have had their say very clearly: they have instructed this Parliament that they wish to leave the European Union. I know that the hon. Gentleman does not like that result, but that is the hard fact.
We have aimed at all times scrupulously to fulfil Parliament’s legitimate need for information, and we will continue to do so. As well as keeping Parliament informed, we will pay regard to all the motions passed on the outcome of negotiations associated with the Bill—as proposed in new clause 176—just as we have already paid regard to the motions passed on Opposition days on 12 October and 7 December.
On the provisions of new clause 3 concerning information sharing, the Secretary of State has been clear since the very early days following the referendum that he will keep Parliament at least as well informed as the European Parliament as the negotiations progress. The new clause asks us to reaffirm that position so that Parliament receives the same documents that the European Parliament or any of its committees receive from the Council or the Commission.
The Government are absolutely resolute that the House will not be at an information disadvantage compared with the European Parliament, but the new clause is flawed, simply because the United Kingdom Government may not be privy to what information is passed confidentially between the Commission, or the other EU institutions, and the Parliament. In the same way, the House would not expect the Government to pass all our documents relating to a highly sensitive negotiation to the other side.
What I can do, however, is confirm that the Government will keep Parliament well informed, and as soon as we know how the EU institutions will share their information, we will give more information on what Parliament will receive and on the mechanisms for that, including on the provision of arrangements for the scrutiny of confidential documents.
The second category of amendments and new clauses, which, again, I must resist, because they pre-judge the negotiations to follow, ask for formal reporting on myriad subjects or for votes on unilateral commitments. The exact structure of the negotiations has not yet been determined and may very well be a matter for negotiation itself. Therefore, setting an arbitrary reporting framework makes no sense at all. There will be times when there is a great deal to report on, and times when there is very little. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State have already made serious undertakings as to how they will report to the House.
Chris Leslie
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, because I know there are a lot of issues to be covered. However, to take just the example of the European arrest warrant, could he at least give us an indication of what the Government’s objectives are? Does he want us to stay part of it?
Mr Jones
Clearly, we require, and we are looking to achieve, close co-operation with the European Union on security matters, but, again, these will be a matter for negotiation, and as the negotiations progress, we will keep the House informed.
The commitments that the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State have given are important. That is why the Government published the White Paper on our negotiating position last week, with an introduction by the Prime Minister, once again stating our clear aims for the negotiations. That includes, for example, the implementation phases referred to by hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas)—those are part of our objectives.
Mr Jones
No, I will not give way, because I have little time.
The Secretary of State announced in the recent White Paper that there will be a further White Paper published on the great repeal Bill so that Parliament can be fully informed of the provisions of the Bill in good time. After that, the Government will continue upholding their commitment through the primary and secondary legislation that will undoubtedly be required.
New clauses that ask for specific reporting to Parliament after article 50 is invoked, including new clauses 3, 20, 22, 29, 51, 111 to 130, and 151—on our relationship with EU agencies, competition policy, environmental regulations, the UK renewables sector and virtually every other aspect of our relationship with the EU—are dangerous. They would bind us to an inflexible timetable of updates as we try to navigate a complex set of negotiations.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
I am following the Minister’s speech carefully. Does he agree that it is a mistake to put the procedures of this House into primary legislation, giving the courts an unnecessary locus to interfere with our affairs?
Mr Jones
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely important point. If these provisions were put into the Bill, there is no doubt that they would become justiciable, therefore leading to further delay. What this country requires at the moment is certainty and speed, and instead we would have uncertainty and delay.
Caroline Lucas
Would the Minister acknowledge that there is at least a possibility that a new trade agreement will not be agreed in a very tight two-year period? If he does acknowledge that that is a risk, why will he not put in place a transitional arrangement to protect our businesses from crashing out of the EU without such an arrangement?
Mr Jones
I can go no further than what I have already said. Of course, transitional arrangements require bilateral agreement. We have already indicated that that is what we are aiming at, but it takes two to tango in this regard.
Amendment 78 would require the Foreign Secretary to publish a work programme for UKRep for the duration of the negotiating period. This is simply an attempt to delay notification by creating new obligations on and impediments for the Government.
I turn now to a matter that has, quite understandably, exercised a large number of colleagues. I want to refer to these amendments and new clauses in detail. They relate to the status of EU citizens. Providing certainty for this group of people is an important issue for the Government. That is why the Prime Minister, in her speech, made it one of our 12 priority objectives for negotiations.
Mr Jones
I will not give way, I am afraid—I have very little time.
While these amendments call for different cut-off dates and vary in wording and terminology, they all share the same aim—to guarantee the status of EU nationals currently in the UK. The Government wholeheartedly agree with this aim. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said repeatedly, most recently this very afternoon, securing the status of EU nationals is one of the foremost priorities of this Government. We have stood ready to reach an agreement from the beginning, because it is not in anyone’s interest to allow any uncertainty over this issue to continue.
Mr Jones
I will not give way because I have little time.
As the Prime Minister told the House this afternoon, the Government recognise that European citizens who are resident in the UK make a vital contribution both to our economy and to our communities. That contribution was highlighted very personally in the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa). Without them, we would all be poorer, not least our important public services such as the national health service.
Mr Jones
I will not give way any further.
This is less an issue of principle than of timing, with a few EU countries insisting that there can be no negotiation without notification, and that therefore nothing can be settled until article 50 is triggered. We could not be clearer about our determination to resolve this issue at the earliest possible opportunity, ensuring that the status of UK nationals in the EU is similarly protected. Some hon. Members have called for a unilateral guarantee now, but we have a very clear duty to UK citizens living in other EU member states, of whom there are about 1 million, to look after their interests and provide as much certainty as possible for their futures as well. Some hon. Members have suggested that we should, in effect, offer a unilateral guarantee to EU nationals in the UK while at the same time failing to achieve security for our own nationals abroad. That is a course that would carry the risk of a prolonged period of stressful uncertainty for them, which we are not prepared to accept. Only after we have passed this Bill into law can my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister trigger article 50—
Mr Jones
I will take no further interventions; I am sorry. Only after the Bill has become law can my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister trigger article 50 and thus provide certainty not only to EU nationals living within our borders, but to our nationals overseas.
New clause 33 calls on the Prime Minister to set out a draft framework, especially with regard to the new immigration system, prior to notification. We have already set out in our White Paper that we will introduce an immigration Bill, and I reassure colleagues that Parliament will have a clear opportunity to debate and vote on the matter. The great repeal Bill will not change our immigration system; that will be done by a separate immigration Bill and subsequent secondary legislation. Nothing will change for any EU citizen, whether they are already resident in the UK or moving from the UK, without Parliament’s approval.
Sir Gerald Howarth
I am extremely grateful to my right hon. Friend, who is doing a fantastic job in this position on behalf of the British people. We are all concerned about our constituents who are EU citizens and who want certainty on this matter, but I am advising my constituents who express concern to me that they should write to their own Governments, who are standing in the way of sorting out this problem. Will my right hon. Friend ensure that foreign Governments who are standing in the way of a settlement on the matter are left in no doubt that we find that objectionable?
Mr Jones
Bear with me. This will be a matter for negotiation in due course, but ultimately we must all be conscious of the fact that we are dealing with human beings—families, and people who are concerned about their futures and their careers. Not only do we have a duty in that regard, but there is a duty right across the European Union to protect the interests of those individuals.
Mr Jones
I will give way in a moment. I can tell the House that I have discussed the matter on numerous occasions with my EU counterparts. They assure me that they fully understand that it is an issue of simple humanity that must be put at the top of the agenda when the negotiations commence. We must wait until the negotiations commence, and until they do, we must not make any concessions.
Margaret Ferrier
I thank the Minister for finally giving way. I want to talk about my constituent Mr Joerg Nueter, who is from Germany and who came to see me on Friday. He has lived in Scotland for almost four years, and he is understandably concerned about his future and the uncertainty surrounding his residency. There is nothing preventing the Government from providing that certainty to him and to millions tonight. Will the Minister do that now?
Mr Jones
We owe the primary responsibility to our citizens in EU countries, but we also owe a duty to EU nationals in this country to ensure that their interests are protected. Frankly, this is a matter for their Governments, too.
This has been an interesting, lengthy and important debate, but I must resist all the new clauses and amendments.
Matthew Pennycook
I will be very brief. I am pleased that the Minister has recognised the thoughtfulness of new clause 3 and other new clauses and amendments, and I note his intention to keep the House well informed. It is deeply disappointing that he has resisted new clause 3, however, so we seek to test the will of the Committee on the matter.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Chris Leslie
On a point of order, Ms Engel. I seek your guidance on how right hon. and hon. Members can divide on some of these incredibly crucial issues. The knife in proceedings has curtailed not just debate but our opportunity to vote on such incredibly important matters as the European arrest warrant and the single market. What can be done? Why could we not have more votes on these new clauses?
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
Before I answer the hon. Gentleman’s point of order, I should say that any further points of order will bite into the next group of amendments.
The Chairs, the Temporary Chairs and the Clerks spent a long time looking at every amendment in detail over three days, and we decided that we would put the lead new clause to a Division today and then move on to the second group. I also just want to take this opportunity to say that the Committee will vote on the issue of EU nationals on Wednesday. It is not for the Chair to explain why a decision has been taken. It has been taken, and there will be no explanation of it.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Second Deputy Chairman
Order. On that note, unless there are any new points of order, I think that we should move on. It is important that we allow as much time as possible to debate the next group of amendments.
Wes Streeting
Further to that point of order, Ms Engel. I am grateful to you. I do not think that any hon. Member would want to challenge the Chair’s decision. In the previous group, we discussed dozens of amendments, including my new clause 56 on our future relationship with the European economic area. The former Chancellor said that the economy was not the Government’s priority in the EU negotiations. What can we do to make sure the public are aware that we are taking our scrutiny seriously?
The Second Deputy Chairman
That is not a point of order. It is very close to challenging the decision of the Chair.
The Second Deputy Chairman
I am happy to take the right hon. Gentleman’s point of order, but the next group is on devolved legislatures, so he will be eating into the time for the minority parties.
Alex Salmond
There is no challenge to the Chair in any of these points of order. Hon. Members are entitled to point out that this programme order is railroading debate on the biggest constitutional decision facing this country for 50 years. The Chairman’s Panel might have no alternative but to follow the programme order, but hon. Members are entitled to challenge it.
The Second Deputy Chairman
Order. This is not about the programme motion on which the House voted. That was not a decision taken by the Chairs. I think we should move on.
Stephen Doughty
Further to that point of order, Ms Engel. I simply seek clarification of something you said a few moments ago about the selection of the lead amendment to vote on in each case. Is it the case that in respect of all the groups of amendments we are going to debate over the next three days, only the lead amendment will be voted on? If so, I think it would be of great concern to all members of the Committee.
The Second Deputy Chairman
It may be, but it is not necessarily the case. For this group, we decided that only the lead amendment would lead to a Division. Let us move on.
Mr Sheerman
Further to that point of order, Ms Engel. On that last point, we have to answer to our constituents. Many of them will not understand why many of the amendments that have been tabled, in which they are deeply interested, have not been chosen tonight in a very open or democratic manner.
The Second Deputy Chairman
I am going to move on. That is not a point of order. This was a decision taken by the Chair. It was a difficult decision, and I understand Members’ frustrations, but the points have been made and we really need to move on.
New Clause 4
Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations)
“(1) In negotiating and concluding any agreements in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must consult, and take into account the views of, a Joint Ministerial Committee at intervals of no less than two months and before signing any agreements with the European Commission.
(2) In the course of consulting under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must seek to reach a consensus with the devolved administrations on—
(a) the terms of withdrawal from the European Union, and
(b) the framework for the United Kingdom’s future relationship with the European Union.
(3) Subject to subsection (4) The Joint Ministerial Committee shall consist of—
(a) the Prime Minister,
(b) Ministers of the Crown,
(c) the First Minister of Scotland and a further representative of the Scottish Government,
(d) the First Minister of Wales and a further representative of the Welsh Government, and
(e) the First Minister of Northern Ireland, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and a further representative of the Northern Ireland Executive.
(4) The Prime Minister may, for the purposes of this Act, determine that the Joint Ministerial Committee shall consist of representatives of the governing authorities of the United Kingdom, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
(5) The Joint Ministerial Committee shall produce a communique after each meeting.”—(Jenny Chapman.)
This new clause would place the role of the Joint Ministerial Committee during Brexit negotiations on a statutory footing.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 23—Duty to Consult Scottish Government on Article 50 negotiations applying to Scotland—
“(1) In negotiating an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, a Minister of the Crown must consult Scottish Government Ministers before beginning negotiations in any area that would make provisions applying to Scotland.
(2) A provision applies to Scotland if it—
(a) modifies the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament;
(b) modifies the functions of any member of the Scottish Government;
(c) modifies the legal status of EU nationals resident in Scotland, and Scottish nationals resident elsewhere in the EU;
(d) would have the effect of removing the UK from the EU single market.
(3) Where a Minister of the Crown consults Scottish Government Ministers on any of the provisions listed under subsection (2), or on any other matter relating to Article 50 negotiations, the discussions should be collaborative and discuss each government’s requirements of the future relationship with the EU.
(4) Where a Minister of the Crown has consulted Scottish Government Ministers on any of the provisions listed under subsection (2), the Minister of the Crown must lay a full report setting out the details of those consultations before both Houses of Parliament, and must provide a copy to the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.”
New clause 24—Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations)—duty to report—
“(1) The Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations) must publish regular reports on the impact of negotiations in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on the European Union on the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
(2) The reports shall be published at intervals of no less than two months, and a report must be published after every meeting of the Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations).
(3) The reports shall include—
(a) a full minute from the most recent meeting of the Joint Ministerial Committee (EU Negotiations);
(b) oversight of negotiations with the EU, to ensure, as far as possible, that outcomes agreed by all four governments are secured from these negotiations; and
(c) any other information that the members of the Committee, in concord, judge to be non-prejudicial to the progress of the Article 50 negotiations.
(4) The reports must be laid before both Houses of Parliament, and a copy of the reports must be transmitted to the Presiding Officers of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and the Northern Irish Assembly.”
New clause 26—Agreement of the Joint Ministerial Committee on European Negotiation—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1(1) until at least one month after all members of the Joint Ministerial Committee on European Negotiation have agreed a UK wide approach to, and objectives for, the UK’s negotiations for withdrawal from the EU.”
New clause 139—Requirement for debate on process for exiting the EU—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until—
(a) the Speaker of the House of Commons,
(b) the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords,
(c) the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament,
(d) the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly for Wales, and
(e) the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly
have each certified that a debate has been held in their respective legislatures in relation to the First Report of the House of Commons Exiting the European Union Committee, Session 2016-17, HC815.”
New clause 140—Meeting with the First Ministers of Devolved Administrations—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until—
(a) the Prime Minister has met with the First Ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to discuss the formal notification process and;
(b) the Joint Ministerial Committee has unanimously agreed to the Prime Minister making such a notification.”
New clause 144—Representation of devolved administrations in withdrawal negotiations—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until she has committed to ensuring that the devolved administrations will have direct representation in the negotiations relating to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU.”
New clause 147—Scottish Government ministers—
“For the purpose of Article 50(1) of the Treaty on the European Union the words ‘in accordance with its own constitutional requirements’ shall be deemed to require the inclusion of Scottish Government ministers in negotiations between the UK and the European Union on matters which would be reserved to the UK by virtue of any transposition from EU law but on which competence would otherwise be devolved to Scotland under any Act of Parliament.”
New clause 148—Welsh Government ministers—
“For the purpose of Article 50(1) of the Treaty on the European Union the words ‘in accordance with its own constitutional requirements’ shall be deemed to require the inclusion of Welsh Government ministers in negotiations between the UK and the European Union on matters which would be reserved to the UK by virtue of any transposition from EU law but on which competence would otherwise be devolved to Wales under any Act of Parliament.”
New clause 149—Northern Ireland Executive ministers—
“For the purpose of Article 50(1) of the Treaty on the European Union the words ‘in accordance with its own constitutional requirements’ shall be deemed to require the inclusion of Northern Ireland Executive ministers in negotiations between the UK and the European Union on matters which would be reserved to the UK by virtue of any transposition from EU law but on which competence would otherwise be devolved to Northern Ireland under any Act of Parliament.”
New clause 158—Continued levels of EU funding for Wales—
“Before the Prime Minister exercises the power under section 1, the Secretary of State must lay a report before—
(a) Parliament, and
(b) the National Assembly for Wales
outlining the effect of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the National Assembly for Wales’ block grant.”
This new clause would require the UK Government to lay a report before the National Assembly for Wales outlining the effect of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU on Welsh finances, before exercising the power under section 1. This would allow for scrutiny of the Leave Campaign’s promise to maintain current levels of EU funding for Wales.
New clause 159—Differentiated agreement for Wales—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until a Minister of the Crown has confirmed that Her Majesty’s Government will conduct a consultation exploring a differentiated agreement for Wales to remain in the European Economic Area.”
This new clause would require the UK Government to conduct a consultation exploring a differentiated agreement for Wales to remain in the European Economic Area, before exercising the power under section 1.
New clause 160—Endorsement of the final deal for withdrawal from the EU by the devolved assemblies—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must give a commitment that Her Majesty’s Government shall submit the terms of any proposed agreement with the European Union on the UK’s withdrawal to—
(a) the National Assembly for Wales,
(b) the Northern Ireland Assembly, and
(c) the Scottish Parliament
and that the Government will not proceed with any agreement on those terms unless it has been approved by each of the devolved assemblies.”
This new clause would require the Prime Minister to commit to gaining the endorsement of the final deal for withdrawal from the EU by the devolved assemblies, before exercising the power under section 1.
New clause 162—Review into the UK constitution—
“Before the Prime Minister can exercise the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must commit to conducting a review into the constitution of the United Kingdom following the repatriation of powers from the European Union.”
This new clause would require the Prime Minister to commit to conducting a review into the constitution of the United Kingdom when leaving the European Union, before exercising the power under section 1.
New clause 168—National Convention—
“(1) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake to establish a National Convention on Exiting the European Union.
(2) The National Convention shall advise Her Majesty’s Government on its priorities during negotiations with the EU on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
(3) Ministers of the Crown must take into account the views of the National Convention before signing any agreements with the European Commission on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
(4) Membership of the National Convention shall be determined by the Secretary of State and shall include—
(a) elected mayors,
(b) elected representatives of local government,
(c) representatives of universities and higher education,
(d) representatives of universities and higher education,
(e) representatives of business organisations,
(f) members of the Scottish Parliament,
(g) members of the National Assembly of Wales,
(h) members of the Northern Ireland Assembly,
(i) members of the European Parliament,
(j) other representatives considered by the Secretary of State to represent expertise and experience of British civil society.
(5) The National Convention must convene before—
(a) 12 months have elapsed after this Act has received Royal Assent, or
(b) the day on which Her Majesty’s Government declares that agreement has been reached on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, whichever is the sooner.
(6) The National Convention shall meet in public.
(7) The National Convention must, following its convening, lay a report before Parliament before—
(a) 15 months have elapsed after this Act receives Royal Assent, or
(b) the day on which Her Majesty’s Government declares that agreement has been reached on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, whichever is the sooner.”
This new clause would require the Government to establish a National Convention of representatives across of levels of Government, regions and sectors, to meet and produce a report recommending negotiating priorities, to better reflect the needs of the regions of the UK.
New clause 145—Differentiated Agreement for Scotland—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until a Minister of the Crown has confirmed that the United Kingdom will seek a differentiated agreement for Scotland to remain in the European Economic Area.”
New clause 150—Priority in negotiations: Northern Ireland—
“It must be a priority in negotiations for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU for the Prime Minister to seek terms that would not give rise to any external impediment to the people of the island of Ireland exercising their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, to then be treated as a member State of the European Union, if that is their wish, subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland.”
This new clause seeks to preserve the key constitutional precept of the Belfast Agreement, in respect of the principle of consent, applying to future EU membership of a united Ireland agreed by a referendum under the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998.
Amendment 88, in clause 1, page 1, line 3, at end insert
“, provided the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly is obtained prior to such notification regarding alterations to the legislative competence of that Assembly and the executive competence of the Northern Ireland Executive Committee, consistent with constitutional convention.”
This amendment would ensure that the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly to changes in the powers of the Assembly and powers of the Northern Ireland Executive would be obtained prior to triggering Article 50, consistent with constitutional convention.
Amendment 91, page 1, line 3, at end insert “following consultation with—
(a) the First Minister of Scotland,
(b) the First Minister of Wales,
(c) the First Minister of Northern Ireland and the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland,
(d) the Chair of the English Local Government Association the Mayor of London.”
Amendment 46, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) unless the Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and National Assembly for Wales agree motions to consent to the notification.”
Amendment 55, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Northern Ireland Executive has been formed following elections in Northern Ireland on 2 March 2017.”
Amendment 60, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the British-Irish Council has met to discuss the immediate effect of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the United Kingdom’s land border with Ireland.”
Amendment 63, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until she has addressed the Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and National Assembly of Wales on the process of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU.”
Amendment 90, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until she has confirmed that Her Majesty’s Government will publish a report into the powers repatriated from the EU to the United Kingdom and which do not fall within the Reservations listed in Schedule 7A of the Government of Wales Act 2006, outlining their impact on the competencies of the National Assembly for Wales.”
This amendment would require the UK Government to publish a report into the repatriated EU powers which fall under the competencies of the National Assembly for Wales before notifying under subsection (1).
Amendment 92, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until she has laid before both Houses of Parliament an assessment of the powers expected to be repatriated from the EU to the United Kingdom which are within the competences of Northern Ireland Ministers and the Northern Ireland Assembly under the Northern Ireland Act 1998.”
Amendment 18, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“(3) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must publish and lay before the House a report setting out how the devolved nations of the United Kingdom will be consulted with, and involved, in the negotiations in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on the European Union.”
Amendment 86, page 1, line 5, at end insert
“with the exception of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 and section 2 of the Ireland Act 1949, and subject to—
(a) the United Kingdom’s obligations under the Agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of Ireland of 10 April 1998, and
(b) preserving acquired rights in Northern Ireland under European Union law.”
This amendment requires the power to notify withdrawal to be exercised with regard to the constitutional, institutional and rights provisions of the Belfast Agreement.
New clause 109—Provisions of the Good Friday Agreement—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister shall commit to maintaining the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement and subsequent Agreements agreed between the United Kingdom and Ireland since 1998, including—
(a) the free movement of people, goods and services on the island of Ireland;
(b) citizenship rights;
(c) the preservation of institutions set up relating to strands 2 and 3 of the Good Friday Agreement;
(d) human rights and equality;
(e) the principle of consent; and
(f) the status of the Irish language.”
Jenny Chapman
New clause 4, tabled in my name and those of my hon. Friends, requires the Government to consult and take into account the views of a Joint Ministerial Committee at intervals of no less than two months and before signing any agreements with the European Union. The Labour party is trying to be reasonable in this new clause. We do not want to block Brexit, but to make sure that the Government do Brexit well. The new clause is very simple and, I think, very sensible.
Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales must be included and taken into account throughout the process by which the UK Government negotiate our terms of withdrawal from the European Union and, equally importantly, the framework for our future relationship with the EU. New clause 4 would place the Joint Ministerial Committee on a statutory footing. The Committee would include the Prime Minister, Ministers of the Crown, the First Minister of Scotland and an additional representative, the First Minister of Wales and an additional representative, the First Minister of Northern Ireland and their Deputy, and a further representative of Northern Ireland.
The Labour Party is committed to enabling the devolved Administrations to have their voices heard in this debate. Amendment 91, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie), proposes that, in addition, the London Mayor should be consulted—and Labour would, of course, support this position.
Alan Brown
The hon. Lady talked about voices being heard. Her party’s position on Second Reading was to vote for article 50 so that Labour could come forward with amendments. Those amendments in the last round have just been defeated. If all the amendments are defeated, will Labour stick to the line of walking through the Lobby with the Tories on Third Reading?
Jenny Chapman
I have to say that the hon. Gentleman is incredibly defeatist. We intend to win with our amendments; we are not here to anticipate defeat. We have very sensible and very reasonable requests to put to the Government, and we expect them to accept our amendments.
In the Miller case, the Supreme Court decided unanimously that the devolved legislatures did not have a legal power to block the Government from triggering article 50, but that does not mean that devolved legislatures can be ignored. A veto does not exist, but it is only right for the Scottish Parliament and the Assemblies in Northern Ireland and Wales to be respected, and for the different desires, concerns, aspirations and needs of the devolved Administrations to be taken fully into account.
Ian Paisley
As the hon. Lady will know, the White Paper mentions the Northern Ireland First Minister and Deputy First Minister, and clearly states that they will be given the right to be consulted. Why does that need to be included in legislation?
Jenny Chapman
I had anticipated that intervention from the hon. Gentleman, consistent as he is in raising such points. If he will forgive me, I shall deal with it later in my speech.
Sir Oliver Letwin
If the Government wish to proceed with article 50, and if SNP Members do not wish to proceed with it and that is the position of the Scottish Government, how are the United Kingdom Government meant to take this into account? What happens if someone takes into account the opposing view?
Jenny Chapman
I agree that it is difficult. [Laughter.] I do not think it is funny, but it is difficult. Our amendment does not require consensus, and if the right hon. Gentleman reads it closely, he will see that it has been very carefully worded. The fact that consensus is not easy does not mean that we should not at least try.
Chris Bryant
Is there not a bigger issue here? Many of the areas that have heretofore been the responsibility of the European Union are entirely devolved within the United Kingdom—for instance, agriculture and environmental protection. There is no way in which the Government will be able to proceed effectively with a deal on behalf of the United Kingdom unless they have managed to take the devolved Assemblies and Parliaments with them.
Jenny Chapman
Of course that is true. That is the spirit in which we tabled the new clause, and we hope it is the spirit in which the Government will consent to accept it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jenny Chapman
I have given way a few times already. I shall make a bit of progress, and then I will be happy to give way again.
It is true that, as the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) pointed out, consensus may not be possible, but it is deeply desirable, and probably in the national interest. Although competing priorities may ultimately prevent it from being achieved, we really ought to try.
Charlie Elphicke
Is it not the truth that the hon. Lady knows, we know and the whole House knows that the Scottish National party has no interest in reaching consensus on this point, and no desire to do so? She knew that before she put her name to the new clause. Conservative Members will be saying, “Surely this is just a wrecking new clause.”
Jenny Chapman
The hon. Gentleman needs to read the new clause a bit more carefully. It is clearly not a wrecking new clause. Nothing that it desires cannot be achieved. The fact that consensus may not be possible—although we have not even tried—does not mean that the interests of the people of Scotland ought to be ignored.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jenny Chapman
I am spoilt for choice, but I will give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty).
Stephen Doughty
My hon. Friend is making a very strong speech. I support the desire of Labour Front Benchers to put these matters on a statutory footing, but does she agree that, particularly when Governments have come forward with a clear plan—as the First Minister of Wales has—and there are serious questions for the UK Government, the UK Government must come forward with some answers to enable a negotiation to proceed?
Jenny Chapman
My hon. Friend is right. I am in danger of reading out my speech before I reach the part in question, but I can say that Wales has succeeded in reaching something close to a cross-party consensus.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jenny Chapman
I want to say more about the issue of Wales. The Government owe it to the people of Wales, Scotland—[Hon. Members: “Alex is being helpful.”] Alex is being helpful, I am told. I will give way to him.
Alex Salmond
I know that the hon. Lady, unlike Conservative Members, will have read the paper that the Scottish Government released before Christmas—the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) is nodding—but does she not remember that on 15 July last year, the Prime Minister said that she would not invoke article 50 until there was an agreed UK position backed by the devolved Administrations? Are Conservative Members saying that the Prime Minister was being anything less than truthful?
Jenny Chapman
That intervention would probably be better aimed at the Government Front Bench.
The Government owe it to the people of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be as accommodating as possible. For example, the financial support for deprived areas that has benefited communities for decades is now in question. Whether or not the Government deal with this issue as part of the passage of this Bill, they need to know that the Labour party will fight hard for the grants to such areas to be secured into the future.
Several hon. Members rose—
Jenny Chapman
I have given way quite a lot and would like to make a little more progress. Many Members will want to contribute to the debate.
New clauses 23 and 24, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray), which would receive Labour Front-Bench support should he be able to test the will of the House on the matter, strengthen further the role of the Scottish Government in making them a statutory consultee and require the Joint Ministerial Committee to report on negotiations. These are reasonable demands that the Government ought to seek to meet, and the same status should of course be offered to the devolved Administrations in Wales and Northern Ireland.
It is fair to say that the White Paper lacks substance or detail. That is particularly true on Northern Ireland. The land border, changes to competences and, perhaps most significant of all, the importance of ensuring continued adherence to agreements made as part of the Good Friday agreement and subsequent agreements must be maintained by the Government.
New clause 109, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), states that the Prime Minister must recommit to the Good Friday agreement. I can see no reason why the Government should not wish to do so, and hope that the Minister will indicate whether or not he intends to agree to my hon. Friends’ amendments when he responds this evening.
Sammy Wilson
The hon. Lady mentions the Good Friday agreement and the commitments in it, but as it was between the parties in Northern Ireland, the Government at Westminster and the Government in the Irish Republic, how do our discussions about Brexit have any impact on the Good Friday agreement?
Jenny Chapman
What we are asking for, and what new clause 109 asks for, is certainty. I do not think that that is too much to ask.
These amendments do not seek to obstruct the passage of this Bill—not in the least. They are born of a view that Brexit will be better for all the people of Britain if all communities up and down the country are properly involved. The Government should not hide away from this scrutiny; they ought to welcome it. Labour is not arguing for a veto; we are arguing for inclusion. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are not just another stakeholder group to be consulted. The four Governments, although they are not for this purpose equals, must work together.
Mr Vara
The hon. Lady speaks of veto. She will be aware—she mentioned this earlier in her speech—that the Supreme Court was unanimous on the role of the devolved Assemblies and that the decision should be taken by this place. We all agree on consultation, but she cannot possibly be speaking of veto, because if she does so, she is challenging the decision of the Supreme Court.
Jenny Chapman
I am not going to take it personally that the hon. Gentleman was not listening carefully to the beginning of my speech, but if he looks at the record he will find that his worries are unfounded. He also might like to read the amendment that we have tabled and find that he has nothing at all to worry about.
Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)
I understand the gentleness with which my hon. Friend is responding to the various interventions, but may I quietly, politely and in a modest sort of way remind her that if we read the Good Friday agreement in as much detail as many of us in the House have done, we can see that the EU is mentioned throughout, in line after line and paragraph after paragraph? The role of the EU in the peace process was crucial and must continue to be so.
Jenny Chapman
I will give way, but only because I cannot find my place in my speech. This is the last intervention I will take.
Sir Hugo Swire
I am delighted to be able to afford the hon. Lady time to find her place. Should she not think about disaggregating the Administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in these discussions, because they are all different, particularly Scotland? Perhaps it is time, if we are genuinely to trust the Scottish National party Government in Edinburgh, for them to revisit their claim during the Brexit campaign that Scotland could somehow remain part of the EU outside the United Kingdom or have fast-track access to EU membership. That was one of the most shameful myths peddled by any party in the House.
Jenny Chapman
I am afraid that the right hon. Gentleman is going to have to put his misgivings about the Scottish National party to one side and focus on the people of Scotland, because it is their voices that we must ensure are heard in all this. This is going to require genuine commitment and goodwill. I can see that the right hon. Gentleman is going to find that difficult. I only hope that the Minister does not find it quite so difficult. I am sure that he already appreciates where the First Ministers will be coming from, but he needs to commit, through these new clauses and perhaps by bringing forth his own amendments as the Bill progresses, to embedding the role of the devolved Assemblies within the process. This has already been proved by the First Minister of Wales and the leader of the Welsh nationalists, who, writing together, said:
“The challenge we all face now is ensuring that as we prepare to leave the EU we secure the best possible deal for Wales. Together, we intend to rise to that challenge.”
If they can put party political differences aside and work together for the benefit of Wales, surely the Government can step up to the same challenge by accepting these new clauses and amendments. That is the right way to strengthen, and not weaken, our Union, as the Prime Minister herself says she wishes to do.
Mr Harper
I am grateful to you for calling me to speak, Ms Engel. I can see that Members are looking forward to this. There are a number of new clauses and amendments in this group, and Members will be pleased to know that I do not plan on speaking to all of them. I shall group them in a way that I think is sensible. There are some that are unnecessary, some that arguably do very little but run a risk of doing harm, and some that are outright vetoes on the process, which is completely unacceptable. There is one about a national convention, about which I will speak briefly, and a couple of very important ones about Northern Ireland, which I would also like to speak to.
Starting with new clause 4, to which the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) has just spoken, I think my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) put his finger on it when he asked her about consensus. I think we need to explore this point further. The new clause proposes that
“the Secretary of State must seek to reach a consensus”.
My right hon. Friend pointed out that it was unlikely that any such consensus would be reached because the Scottish nationalists fundamentally disagree with our leaving the European Union. Not only that, but unlike the other First Ministers, they also do not wish to see a continuation of the United Kingdom—[Interruption.] They have just confirmed that verbally in the Chamber. So it seems unlikely that consensus would be reached. The problem with putting this new clause in statute is that it would then become justiciable, as my right hon. Friend said earlier. A court could then be asked to adjudicate on whether the Secretary of State had tried hard enough to reach consensus. Even if the court then ruled that everything was fine, this would still be just a way of delaying the process.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Did my right hon. Friend also notice that the Opposition spokesman referred to “embedding” the Scottish Government in the proposals? Does he agree that, roughly speaking, that is like Wellington being asked to embed Napoleon in his strategy for the Napoleonic wars?
Mr Harper
My right hon. Friend has a much greater command of history than I do, but even with my limited reading I think he is probably about right.
My right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) asked the hon. Member for Darlington to distinguish between the First Ministers of the different devolved nations, and I think the distinction is that the First Ministers of Northern Ireland and of Wales wish to see the continuation of the United Kingdom, but the First Minister of Scotland does not. That is material to the sensibleness of proceeding with new clause 4.
Sir Hugo Swire
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for praying me in aid; he is absolutely right. My real point is that neither the First Minister of Northern Ireland nor the First Minister of Wales sought to mislead their own communities by suggesting that they can join the EU outside the UK, which is what the SNP suggested throughout the campaign.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)
On a point of order, Ms Engel. Was what the right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) just said in order? He accused the First Minister of Scotland of misleading the country by stating something that Members of this House in the Scottish National party have also said, so is he by extension accusing me and my hon. Friends of misleading the Chamber?
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
It was not unparliamentary as the First Minister of Scotland is not a Member of this House.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
May I provide an example? Policing in Scotland is devolved to the Scottish Parliament, and policing in Northern Ireland is devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly. The consensus may be that the Government want to withdraw from the European Union and therefore from agencies such as Eurojust and Europol, but there might need to be a view on such issues so that a consensus can be reached to enable Scotland and Northern Ireland, which have devolved issues, to maintain policing at a local level with Ireland and other parts of the European Union.
Mr Harper
I have no issue with the Government seeking to reach a consensus. There are two issues. One, as I think the hon. Member for Darlington accepted, is that reaching a consensus is likely to be difficult, but we should try. I have no problem with Ministers trying to seek a consensus, but the danger of putting that in legislation is that we then hand over to a court the adjudication of whether Ministers have sought that consensus or whether they have tried hard enough. Even if the court ends up reaching what I would consider the right conclusion of not interfering in the process, it seems an obvious route for delay. The Prime Minister has made it clear that she will seek to take into account the views of the devolved Administrations, but I would not want that to be put into the legislation.
Ian Murray
While the right hon. Gentleman is talking about distinctions, I want to make another distinction as a reminder to him and the House: the Scottish National party is not the entirety of Scotland—[Interruption.] It might like to think it is, which is evident from the reaction from the SNP Members just now. New clause 4 is carefully worded and states that the Government should seek a consensus for building the negotiation with the European Union. That is about letting the Scottish people into the process, not the Scottish National party, and the right hon. Gentleman should distinguish between the two.
Mr Harper
While the Scottish nationalists are currently in government in Scotland, I completely agree that they are not the same as the Scottish people. On the new clause, the representatives on the Joint Ministerial Committee are the First Minister of Scotland and a further representative not of the Scottish people but of the Scottish Government, so there will be two members of the Scottish nationalists whose expressed purpose, as confirmed here today, is to destroy the United Kingdom.
Dr Alasdair McDonnell (Belfast South) (SDLP)
Does the right hon. Gentleman not understand how serious this issue is? Does he not understand that he will not have a UK if he keeps going on with arrogance, with intolerance and with insensitivity? We spent 30 years getting a peace process together. We do not want to see any more dead bodies. Quite simply, what is going on here, with the intolerance that some Members are showing, is scaring me. I am asking myself why I am in this place at all.
Mr Harper
I have not been intolerant to anyone. I have taken interventions from both sides of the House, and I said in my opening remarks that I will address new clauses 109 and 150, which specifically refer to Northern Ireland. I simply have not yet had a chance to get to them. I am a great supporter of the Union of the United Kingdom and, when I was Immigration Minister, I worked very closely with the Government of the Republic of Ireland to facilitate the common travel area and the close working together of the peoples of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. I agree with the hon. Gentleman on that, and I wish to proceed on that basis.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Harper
Let me make some progress, because otherwise other Members will not have the opportunity to speak. I am pleased that the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) was able to intervene on me. He is the lead name on new clause 23, on which I have a question. Subsection (2)(c) refers to
“the legal status of EU nationals resident in Scotland”.
It then refers to “Scottish nationals”. I do not quite understand what they are. I understand what UK nationals are, but I was not aware that there is a separate class of nationals of Scotland. Does he wish to explain to the Committee what they are? If for no other reason, not knowing what they are is reason enough to vote against the new clause.
Ian Murray
It is people who were normally resident in Scotland before they moved abroad. It is quite simple.
Mr Harper
But the hon. Gentleman just said that his definition of a Scottish national is someone who resided in Scotland before moving overseas. It seems to me that someone does not need to have any connection with Scotland bar the fact that they lived there for five minutes. This seems a very poorly worded new clause that is not worthy of support.
Ian Murray
I say gently to the right hon. Gentleman that his Government’s pushing through the programme motion means that we cannot have a full debate on these issues. Whether it is a beautifully worded clause or a badly worded clause, EU nationals should be given the right to stay by this Government today, and we should be fighting to make sure that UK nationals living in the EU have their rights, too. The Government could do that now and, if they did, we would not need to press these new clauses.
Mr Harper
I will not address that issue now, as we debated it at length with the previous group of amendments. A number of colleagues spoke, so it has had sufficient debate.
The next grouping contains a number of new clauses proposing various mechanisms for giving different parts of the United Kingdom a veto on the entire process and, for that reason, I do not think they should be accepted. New clause 26, tabled by the Scottish nationalists, would effectively give the Joint Ministerial Committee a veto on the process. That means a single member of the Joint Ministerial Committee could veto the entire process, which would not be welcome.
Ian Blackford
Does the right hon. Gentleman not understand that, in presenting this proposal to the UK Government, the Scottish Government are very much seeking that consensus and compromise. We understand that the people of England have voted to leave the EU, and we do not seek to frustrate that, but what we ask is that this Parliament also recognises that not just the SNP but the Scottish Parliament has empowered the Government to act in our interests to make sure that we remain within the single market. That respect has to work two ways, and it is about the UK Government working with us. If they do not do that, we know what the answer is. Quite frankly, we should not be in this place.
Mr Harper
I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me—I am sure my colleagues on the Government Benches will find this slightly repetitive—but he said that the people of England voted and I must point out that that is not the case. There was a United Kingdom referendum, one of two referendums over the past few years, both of whose outcomes I respect. There was a vote by the people of Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom, so it therefore follows that the referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU was a UK decision. It was a single vote and the UK decided to leave the EU. Scotland did not have a separate decision; it was a UK decision. I respect both referendums and I am going to proceed on that basis.
Joanna Cherry
Perhaps I can help the right hon. Gentleman to understand where Scottish National party Members are coming from. During the Scottish independence referendum, the leader of the Conservative and Unionist party, Ruth Davidson, told Scottish voters that the way to guarantee their EU citizenship was to vote to remain part of the UK. He enjoyed a cosy little exchange a moment ago about the First Minister allegedly misleading people, but it is clear that the leader of his party in Scotland misled voters during the independence referendum. Would he now like to take the opportunity to apologise for that misleading statement?
Mr Harper
I would not. The leader of the Conservatives in Scotland—I am pleased to say that she is the Leader of the Opposition in the Scottish Parliament and the latest opinion polls are showing Conservative support rising and Labour support falling—campaigned strongly both for the maintenance of the UK and for the UK to remain in the EU. I was disappointed by the latter result, as was she, but I do not think she misled anybody and therefore I do not feel the need to apologise.
Michael Gove
My right hon. Friend might not have had the chance to follow the Scottish independence referendum as closely as some of us. During that referendum the current SNP First Minister said that if the UK remained, the NHS in Scotland would be privatised. So if anyone should apologise for misleading the public, Nicola Sturgeon should.
Ian Paisley
When the right hon. Gentleman turns to the issues affecting Northern Ireland, will he take the opportunity to address the spurious point raised by the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), who said that the Belfast agreement is peppered with references to the European Union? There is one such reference on page 16, and there are three references on page 7 to the European convention on human rights, which is nothing to do with the EU. Indeed, the references to the EU refer specifically to the mutual interdependence of the North South Ministerial Council and the Assembly. The hon. Gentleman is wrong to get into a lather over that matter.
Mr Harper
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for elucidating that for the House. Indeed, I detected from the expression on the face of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Darlington, that she had not found that intervention from the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) entirely helpful. Perhaps she shares the view of the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley).
Finally, new clauses 160 and 161, tabled by the Welsh nationalists, talk about “future trade deals” and would also give a veto to the devolved Assemblies in the UK. On that basis, the Committee should not support them.
New clause 168 proposes a “National Convention”. As someone who has been involved in constitutional matters for some time, I could not help but smile at that, because when I was taking a number of constitutional items through the House, national conventions, conventional committees or some other variant were usually a way of delaying matters by involving a whole load of people in things. These were usually people who are already well involved in all those things, as most members of such conventions appear to be elected Members of some body or other. Those conventions seem an extraordinary excuse to make no progress whatever.
Seema Malhotra
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I look forward to discussing this matter further in my remarks later, but perhaps I could raise a point with him. I am sure he will appreciate, as I do, the paucity of quality debate about the referendum, which remains an issue. We need to engage people in the discussion over the next two years. We should not reach the end of the negotiation period with people saying they are as ill-informed at the end as they were at the start.
Mr Harper
That is a helpful intervention, because the hon. Lady has tempted me to say a little more about her new clause, which I had not planned to do. I have looked at the membership of the national convention specified in the new clause, and it does not seem to involve any members of the public at all. It is all people who were very well represented in the referendum campaign: elected mayors; elected representatives of local government; people from universities and higher education; representatives of trade unions and trade bodies; representatives of business organisations; and Members of the Scottish Parliament—
Mr Harper
Yes, them, along with Members of the National Assembly of Wales and of the Northern Ireland Assembly; plus Members of the European Parliament. Finally, it gets to “other representatives”, but not just any representatives of civil society—only those determined by the Secretary of State. Interestingly, the hon. Lady wants to give Ministers the job of deciding who should represent civil society, which seems remarkably generous of her, although rather self-defeating.
Seema Malhotra
Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will agree that it is vital to have the regions of England involved as much as the nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in the national debate. I am sure that, on reflection, he will realise that there is great value in the idea of a greater national conversation in which elected representatives would be able to engage with their communities and represent their views.
Mr Harper
To be honest, I thought there was quite a lot of national conversation last year. When I talked to my constituents, it seemed to me that by the end of that national conversation, they really did want to make a decision and move on. The most important thing that they want us to do is give notice under article 50 and start the negotiating process. The most common refrain I hear is from people who, because we had a referendum last year, wonder why we have not already left.
James Cleverly
My right hon. Friend just ran through that list; does he agree that the people who were told that the referendum was an opportunity for them to express their opinion would find it perplexing, disturbing and not a little bit frustrating that new clause 168 would take that voice away from them and hand it back to people who are already very vocal?
Mr Sheerman
On a point of order, Ms Engel. The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) has been speaking for 22 minutes. Charming as he is, it seems that he has been filibustering the House, as he did in the previous debate, to prevent honest debate and opinion from being expressed this evening. What is going on?
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
As the hon. Gentleman is aware, there are no time limits at this stage of a Bill. There is a limited amount of time available, as the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) knows. He has spoken at great length and he spoke at great length on the previous group. I have been listening very carefully and he has remained in order and spoken to the amendments and new clauses. There is nothing out of order in what he has said, but perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will be aware of the mood of the Committee.
Mr Harper
I have taken interventions from colleagues on both sides of the Chamber, just as I did in the previous group, but I will take your admonition, Ms Engel, and not take so many interventions from now on.
I set out the points that I wished to cover at the beginning of my remarks. Colleagues who have been following carefully will know that I have only one point left, and I will cover it, because it is on the very important matter of Northern Ireland. Colleagues will be pleased to know that that is the last point I will make.
Two new clauses have been put forward on Northern Ireland. New clause 150 is about priority in negotiations, and it would ensure that people in Northern Ireland would have no external impediment to exercising their right of self-determination. Although it talks about bringing about a united Ireland, with which I do not agree, nothing in the process of exiting the European Union would have any impact on that. The legislation that governs the mechanisms available to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to do with border polls and so forth have nothing whatever to do with this process, so there is no need to accept this new clause.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He will recall that, even in his own remarks, he talked about the questions that were raised in the context of the Scottish referendum. I am talking about whether or not an independent Scotland would have easy or ready access to the EU or whether it would have to negotiate, brand new, under article 49. If Northern Ireland were taken out of the EU as part of the UK, no article in the Lisbon treaty allows for part of a former member state entering the EU. Anybody could raise a question mark over whether or not a referendum in that context would admit Northern Ireland into the EU as part of a united Ireland. The question mark could be raised because the German precedent might not apply. The Taoiseach addressed that point last summer, and the British Government need to take it on board.
Mr Harper
The hon. Gentleman may be guilty of jumping quite a lot of steps in advance. There is no evidence that the people of Northern Ireland have any intention, at any time in the foreseeable future, of joining the Republic of Ireland. I think that this is a case of inventing theoretical problems to get in the way of what is a perfectly sensible process.
Mark Durkan
Does the right hon. Gentleman not recognise that the key wording in new clause 150 comes from the Good Friday agreement itself? The paragraph appears in the agreement not just once, but twice. It is in the constitutional issue section of the agreement and it is in the agreement between the British and Irish Governments. If it was good enough and important enough to be in the Good Friday agreement and to be endorsed by a referendum of the Irish people in the north and the south, why should it not be respected now when we are being asked to reflect on how English people voted in a referendum?
Mr Harper
Again, I come back to what the hon. Gentleman just said about how the English people voted. If he looks at the separate parts of the United Kingdom, he will see that both England and Wales voted to leave the European Union. As I said earlier, this was a UK decision. The fact that different parts of the United Kingdom may have voted in different ways is not relevant. It was a United Kingdom decision, and the United Kingdom voted to leave.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Harper
I have one more new clause to talk to and then I will sit down.
New clause 109 talks about the provisions of the Good Friday agreement, and other agreements agreed between the UK and Ireland. It lists a whole load of issues. It seems to me that the free movement of people, goods and services and so forth on the island of Ireland and citizenship rights are not guaranteed by membership of the EU. In previous legislation, such as the Ireland Act 1949, it is clear that citizens of the Republic of Ireland and citizens of the United Kingdom have reciprocal —the word “reciprocal” is important—arrangements to live in each other’s countries and to vote in each other’s countries. Irish nationals in Britain can vote in our elections. If we were to go to live in the Irish Republic, we could vote in theirs. Those arrangements will be preserved when we leave the European Union. The new clause is unnecessary.
Joanna Cherry
I am very disappointed to hear that the right hon. Gentleman is coming to the end of his contribution, because, judging from the communications that I am receiving from constituents and voters in Scotland, every word he says is putting our vote through the roof and greatly increasing the cause of a second independence referendum. I urge him and those around him please to continue in the same vein, as it is doing us the world of good.
Mr Harper
Based on the Twitter trolling that I receive, I suspect that most people contacting the hon. and learned Lady would already have supported the nationalists in the first place. With the successful campaigning efforts of my friend, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, it seems that those of a Unionist disposition in Scotland are very much moving to support the Conservative party in Scotland, which is why she is the Leader of the Opposition there.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
Order. We really must get back to the group of amendments.
Mr Harper
I have been tempted to speak for longer than I had intended.
I hope that, after running through the new clauses and amendments in this group, I have set out reasons why all of them should be opposed by those who wish to trigger article 50. If any of them are pressed to a Division, I hope the Committeee rejects them.
Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)
I will speak to the amendments tabled in my name and in the names of my hon. and right hon. Friends.
I take the House back to the morning of 24 June when the then Prime Minister, the then Chancellor and the current Foreign Secretary were missing in inaction, and the First Minister of Scotland took to the steps of Bute House to address the people of Scotland. Let us be clear: we absolutely respect how the people of England and Wales voted in the EU referendum. In turn, we ask that the way in which the people of Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to be equally respected.
Forty-eight hours after assuming office, the Prime Minister travelled to Scotland to meet the First Minister. Ahead of her visit, the Prime Minister directly addressed the people of Scotland, stating that
“the government I lead will always be on your side. Every decision we take, every policy we take forward, we will stand up for you and your family—not the rich, the mighty or the powerful. That’s because I believe in a union, not just between the nations of the United Kingdom, but between all of our citizens.”
That is what she said then, but I turn the Committee’s attention to page 3 of what can only be described as an executive summary, as opposed to a White Paper, in which she refers to “one nation.” Hon. Members across this House would do well to understand that, as long as the Prime Minister and the Government continue to believe that this is one nation, they will make no progress whatever in their relationships with the rest of the United Kingdom. We are not one nation; we are a Union of nations. The Government need to remember that.
Alex Salmond
I am going to do something that I have never done before—quote an extract from The Daily Telegraph. It reported on 15 July last year:
“Theresa May has indicated that…she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed ‘UK approach’ backed by Scotland.”
What does my hon. Friend think has happened to the Prime Minister’s commitment?
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
Interestingly, if hon. Members turn to page 17 of the so-called White Paper, they will see a change of wording. We have moved from having a “UK approach” to “seeking” to agree a UK approach—another change in the Prime Minister’s position.
Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
On that basis, is my hon. Friend surprised that the UK Government now seem willing to seek separate deals not for Scotland or Northern Ireland, but for the car industry in Sunderland and for the City of London?
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I will come to that issue in a moment.
The Scottish National party’s compromise amendments propose a UK approach for all of “Team UK”, which is what the Prime Minister would like to think we are. I say the amendments are a compromise because that is exactly what they are. We fundamentally believe that the best future for Scotland and, indeed, the whole United Kingdom is to remain in the EU. But in the spirit of reaching a consensus—I object to Members who have suggested that we are not participating in the process—we have tabled 50 amendments, to which my colleagues and I will now speak. That is our involvement in the process. The First Minister of Scotland was clear that she was laying out a number of options. The ball is in the Prime Minister’s court.
Sir Hugo Swire
In retrospect, does the hon. Lady regret the SNP’s peddling of the myth during the Brexit campaign that Scotland alone could somehow remain in the EU without any of the sanctions in the Lisbon treaty—joining the single currency of the euro and so on? Does she regret proposing that to the Scottish people as a fact, rather than as fiction, which is what it was?
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
The only myths in the independence referendum in Scotland were those peddled by the right hon. Gentleman’s friends in the Conservative party and those in the Labour party—that is where the myths came from. I am grateful to him for reminding the Committee, and indeed all those who are watching, that that is precisely the case.
The First Minister of Scotland has laid out a number of options, which are included in the paper my colleagues will refer to. However, I would remind hon. Members that, before the independence referendum, the Scottish Government produced a 670-page document called “Scotland’s Future”. We knew then, and we know now, that we can make a success of an independent Scotland. Hon. Members should compare and contrast that with page 65 of the so-called White Paper, where this Government are already talking about failure and
“passing legislation as necessary to mitigate the effects of failing to reach a deal.”
That does not instil much confidence in anybody.
Specifically on the amendments and new clauses, new clause 26—the teamwork clause—would, if accepted, mean that article 50 was not triggered until the Team UK approach was agreed by each individual member of the team. Is that not what the Prime Minister said? On that basis, I hope we will have support on both sides of the Committee for the new clause.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Could the hon. Lady clarify whether new clause 26 would effectively give the First Minister of Scotland, if she refused to agree, a veto over the exercise of article 50?
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, whose interventions are always astute. I refer him to the wording of the new clause, which refers specifically to
“a UK wide approach to, and objectives for, the UK’s negotiations”.
Those are the Prime Minister’s words.
New clause 139 would require a substantive vote on this matter to be held in each of the devolved Parliaments prior to article 50 being invoked, further strengthening the democratic mandate for that action. New clause 144 sets out a mechanism to ensure that all devolved Administrations will have direct representation in negotiations on leaving the EU, enabling the negotiating team to have expert input from each constituent part of the UK. Given what we have seen so far, this Government are in need of some expert input. Following that, new clause 145 would set in legislation what we already understand to be possible and deliverable—the negotiation of a differentiated agreement for Scotland, so that it can retain its vital access to the single market by remaining part of the European economic area.
Amendment 46 further strengthens the role of the devolved Parliaments in this process, while amendment 55 would specifically ensure that the people of Northern Ireland are represented in this process by the newly elected Northern Ireland Executive following the upcoming election. Amendment 60 would ensure formal cross-border discussion of the Government’s proposal to maintain a frictionless land border with Ireland. Lastly, amendment 63 would give Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and Welsh Assembly Members the same opportunity to hear the Prime Minister address them on Brexit as she afforded members of the US Congress who attended the Republican party awayday in Philadelphia last month. That is only fair.
We know from last week’s brief White Paper that the Government still believe there should be a special deal for Northern Ireland in our negotiations with the EU. A frictionless border between the UK and Ireland remains their priority. We also know that the UK car industry and the City of London, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) alluded, have also been singled out for special attention in the negotiations. It is becoming clearer with each passing day that the Government will be willing to pay through the nose to secure a special arrangement where that is in their political or economic interests.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
I hope my hon. Friend will press all these provisions to a vote, because everyone here loves trooping through the Lobby and exercising their parliamentary sovereignty. However, does she agree that a differentiated deal for Scotland, with Scotland retaining its access to the single market, would benefit the rest of the United Kingdom? The Government are very keen to retain a land border with the EU on the island of Ireland, so why would they not want a land border on the actual island of Great Britain so that England could trade over that border into the single market in Scotland?
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
As usual, my hon. Friend makes very salient comments, although I suspect they will fall on deaf ears, and we know what the result of that might well be.
The Scottish Government have been clear that they are willing to make fundamental compromises to ensure that we can agree a UK-wide approach. The Scottish Government’s White Paper, “Scotland’s Place in Europe”, sets out a series of options that could be taken, if this House so wished, to protect the precious Union that Members talk about so often—to protect Scotland’s political, social and economic interests in Europe while also remaining part of the United Kingdom. It is now time for this Whitehall Government to start to treat Scotland seriously and with respect. We know that such a differentiated deal is possible. Only yesterday, the Secretary of State for Scotland, who I am delighted to see in his place, said during a BBC interview—well, not much about anything in particular, but we did get this from it—that it is “not impossible” to have a differentiated deal for the constituent parts of the UK. The amendments tabled by the SNP set out a framework for us to work together in the interests of Scotland to deliver this.
We welcome the UK Government’s White Paper, which acknowledges the role of the Joint Ministerial Committee and states that it is in place to
“Seek to agree a UK approach to, and objectives for… negotiations”.
I refer the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), in relation to new clause 26, to those words of the Prime Minister. However, it simply was not acceptable for the Prime Minister to seem to dismiss the Scottish Government’s plan out of hand in her speech at Lancaster House before the JMC had even met to discuss it. The SNP does not believe that “involving” the devolved Administrations ends with the JMC. We want to see real, tangible efforts to develop a proposal acceptable to all the UK, not a toothless talking shop. That is why we have tabled an amendment calling for the devolved Administrations to have direct representation in the negotiations as we come to an agreed UK-wide deal.
Tomorrow the Scottish Parliament will vote on the triggering of article 50. The Prime Minister should respect that outcome. We also believe that the Prime Minister—
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
The hon. Gentleman has already made that intervention and was given an answer. Is it his position that the Scotland Act 2016 has no meaning—no value? Is it his position that notwithstanding the terms of the Scotland Act he is going to ignore the wishes of the Scottish Parliament and the other devolved legislatures?
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I am not taking any more interventions. I have answered the hon. Gentleman’s question.
We also believe that the Prime Minister should not trigger article 50 before the Northern Irish Assembly election on 2 March has taken place, and that there must be a meeting of the British-Irish Council to discuss urgently the immediate effect of the UK’s exit from the EU on the Irish border. That is because such a deal is not just possible but absolutely essential to Scotland, in a number of ways. It is essential for Scottish business. The British Chambers of Commerce’s “International Trade Survey” is further evidence of the damaging impact that the threat of a Tory hard Brexit is already having on Scottish and UK businesses. [Interruption.] It is not rubbish, as the hon. Gentleman says, unless he wants to rubbish the results of that survey, and with it the British Chambers of Commerce. I suspect not, hence he is still in a sedentary position. Published today, it reveals that of the 1,500 businesses surveyed, nearly half, or 44%, said that the devaluation of sterling since the EU referendum was having a negative impact on domestic sales margins, while over two thirds, or 68%, expect the fall in the pound to increase their cost base in the coming year, with more than half of companies—54%—expecting to have to increase the prices of their products as a result.
Such a deal is also essential for Scottish exports.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
The hon. Lady is making a very passionate speech, but clearly if the pound devalues, that is very good for exporters, including exporters in Scotland. There are two sides to that coin.
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, as ever, for his recognition of a passionate speech, although I wish he would pay more attention to the words that I am using while I am delivering it. Is it the Tory Government’s policy to continue with a devalued pound? Is that their vision for the economy of the United Kingdom? That is my answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question.
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I am not going to give way just now, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind.
In relation to Scottish exports, new figures published by the think-tank Centre for Cities last weekend show just how vital the EU single market is for Scotland’s four largest cities. Exports to the EU from Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow alone total nearly £7 billion. The report also stated that 61% of Aberdeen’s exports go to the EU, which shows the importance of that export market to Scotland. It is also essential to maintain Scotland’s skilled workforce.
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I am not going to give way just now; allow me a few minutes to make some progress.
This morning, Holyrood’s cross-party Europe Committee published its latest report on Brexit, in which it recommended a bespoke Scottish immigration system—almost on cue; I believe, from memory, that that was something propagated by someone on the Government Benches during the campaign. We now know that those who campaigned to leave the EU, like those who campaigned against Scottish independence, were prepared to say anything to win the day and leave the rest of us to pick up the consequences. The findings of the report were based on extensive evidence heard by the Committee, which detailed the demographic crisis that Scotland would face without its EU citizens.
Ian Paisley
I have been listening very carefully to the points that the hon. Lady made with regard to Northern Ireland. If I heard her right, she indicated that until a new Northern Ireland Executive is established, the Government should not trigger article 50. Northern Ireland is at a difficult crossroads at the present time. If no Executive is ultimately established after 3 March, does she seriously believe that the whole United Kingdom should be held to ransom until that conundrum is resolved?
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, which I understand. However, I would also ask: why is the whole United Kingdom being held to ransom by the Prime Minister’s selection of some random date, with no view to the consequences for the whole of the country? We are required to work to that date, but it came about on a whim.
A deal such as I have described is essential for the fishing industry. I mention the fishing industry because for too long it has been ignored by this Government, who have not stood up for it in Europe. The White Paper seems to confirm the worst fears of our fishermen, who now believe that without a specific Scottish deal, their interests will be negotiated away once again, as they have been before.
It is clear that a differentiated deal for the constituent parts of the UK is optimal, deliverable and essential to protecting our interests. Now is the time for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to keep her promises to Scotland—as she said, a “UK approach” for all of “Team UK”. Be under no illusions; my colleagues and I were elected by our constituents to stand up for Scotland, and that is exactly what we will do. One way or another, Scotland’s interests will be protected.
The amendments and new clauses that we have tabled would strengthen the UK’s future negotiating position with the EU and provide a framework to serve the best interests of its constituent parts. Our proposals crystallise in legislative specifics the grand platitudes that the Prime Minister and others have spouted about Scotland’s place in the UK and our role in the process.
Michael Gove
The hon. Lady referred earlier to the impact of the pound being devalued. Could she tell us which currency an independent Scotland would have? Would it be the pound, the euro or some other currency of her invention, or of the invention of the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond)? [Interruption.]
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
As my colleagues are saying from a sedentary position, the right hon. Gentleman does not believe in expert opinion anyway. Perhaps he will agree—his mention of another independence referendum speaks to this fact—that the question that was posed to the people of Scotland in 2014 was about a United Kingdom different from the one that exists now. Of course, it is in the gift of the Government and Members from across the House to agree to our proposals. They offer a compromise position, if the right hon. Gentleman does not want another independence referendum. But if we do have one, the arguments will be put forward to the people of Scotland for them to make that decision. The proposals give the Government an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to respecting Scotland and the devolution process.
Quite simply, the UK is either a country that respects all its constituent parts or it is not—the question is as simple as that—and this Government need to decide today one way or another. We are waiting for our answer and, indeed, we are ready to respond, but if the UK Government decide to turn their back on the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament, voters in Scotland will be left under no illusion about how this Government intend to deal with Scottish interests in future negotiations. If the Scottish people can no longer trust the UK Government to act in their interests, it will be for the people of Scotland to decide the best way to rectify this unsatisfactory situation of an increasingly disunited kingdom.
John Redwood
I support the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper). I thought he took the Committee patiently through a number of important amendments tabled by Opposition parties, and he explained why some of them are needless because the Government are perfectly well intentioned in relation to the other parts of the United Kingdom and wish to consult very widely, and how some of them would be positively damaging because they are designed as wrecking amendments to impede, delay or even prevent the implementation of the wishes of the people of the United Kingdom.
My disappointment about both the Labour and the Scottish National party amendments is that there is absolutely no mention of England in any of them. To have a happy Union—I am sure the Scottish nationalists can grasp this point—it is very important that the process and solution are fair to England as well as to Scotland. I of course understand why the Scottish nationalists, who want to break up the Union, would deliberately leave England out of their considerations of their model for consulting all parts of the United Kingdom. That is deliberate politics, as part of their cause to try to find another battering ram against the Union.
In the case of Labour, however, I find that extraordinarily insouciant and careless. The Labour party is now just an England and Wales party, with only one representative left in Scotland and none in Northern Ireland. Yet it seems to be ignoring the main source of its parliamentary power and authority because it does not say anything in its amendments that would give a special status to England alongside Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and provide proper consultation throughout all parts of the UK. The Labour spokesman, the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman)—she spoke very eloquently, and in a very friendly way—did not mention the word “England”, and she had no suggestion about how England should be properly represented and England’s views properly taken into account in the process that is about to unfold.
Joanna Cherry
May I assure the right hon. Gentleman that if he were minded to bring forward any amendments dealing with his concerns about England, we would give them serious consideration?
John Redwood
I have not done so, because I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean and Government Front Benchers that the Government will, of course, do a perfectly good job in consulting and making sure that all parts of the UK are represented, and I am quite sure that Ministers who represent English constituencies will want to guarantee that the view of England is properly considered.
John Redwood
If we take the referendum as a national, UK-wide referendum, we will of course take into account the views of everybody because we are following the mandate of the United Kingdom referendum, in which a very large number of English votes are rather important—
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman. The conventions are absolutely clear: the right hon. Gentleman will give way as and when he wishes, and hon. Members seeking to intervene should not remain standing.
John Redwood
I am very grateful to you, Sir Roger. I was trying to deal with the previous intervention. As a courtesy to the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), I thought other Members should listen to my answer to her before I took another intervention. I am now happy to take another intervention.
Mark Durkan
The right hon. Gentleman has indicted the Labour party and the SNP for not, in this group of amendments, addressing questions in relation to England. Does he recognise that the grouping is headed, “Devolved administrations or legislatures”?
John Redwood
I am well aware of that, and I am well aware that we have different arrangements around the country, but it is still an injustice to England that under the model proposed by Opposition Members, the biggest part of the Union by far would not be consulted on the same basis as the rest of the United Kingdom. I quietly remind them that to have the happy Union that I want, that all Government Members want and that, I think, a lot of Labour Members want, when we change the arrangements and have special arrangements for some parts, we have to make sure that they are fair to England as well.
Ian Blackford
We must reflect on what we were told in 2014, and that is that we were asked to lead the Union. If we are to have respect for this place, which we do, this House has to respect that the people of Scotland have given a particular judgment. This is about the House reaching a compromise not with us as SNP MPs, but with the people of Scotland. I cannot see why the Government and Conservative Back Benchers see that as so difficult. Quite frankly, if they cannot reach that accommodation with the people of Scotland, the people of Scotland will make their own conclusion.
John Redwood
Some of the SNP Members do protest too much. I seem to remember that they actively fought two referendums in recent years and managed to lose both of them. For my part, I am very happy with the result of both referendums; I managed to find myself on the winning side in both cases. I believe in respecting the views of the Scottish people, who decided that they wished to remain part of the Union of the United Kingdom, and in respecting the views of voters in the United Kingdom, who said they did not wish to remain part of the European Union. That is a very clear set of messages.
This Union Parliament, in the interests of the special Scottish considerations, said that only Scottish voters would decide whether Scotland stayed in the Union or not. Although many of us had strong views and were pleased that they decided to stay, we deliberately decided that it was appropriate to let Scotland decide, because in a democracy, a country cannot be in a union that does not volunteer freely to belong to that union. The Scottish nationalists, by the same logic, must see that people like myself—the 52%—have exactly the same view on the European Union that they have on the Union of the United Kingdom. There has to be voluntary consent. When the point is reached where the majority of a country no longer wishes to belong to the European Union, it has to leave.
I would have been the first to have said, had the Scottish nationalists won the Scottish referendum, that I wanted the United Kingdom to make all due speed with a sensible solution so that Scotland could have her wishes. I think I would have wanted rather more independence for Scotland than the Scottish nationalists, because I think that if a country is going to be a properly independent—
Patrick Grady
On a point of order, Sir Roger. I keep hearing the right hon. Gentleman talking about the “Scottish nationalist party”. I do not know what party that is, but the Members on these Benches belong to the Scottish National party.
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
The hon. Gentleman will understand that that is not a point of order for the Chair.
John Redwood
I am delighted that another advert has been given for the Scottish National party. We understand the point that its Members are making: they are not happy with the result of either referendum. However, in a democracy, when we have trusted the Scottish people to decide whether they wish to leave our Union and we have trusted United Kingdom voters to decide whether they wish to leave the European Union, it is my view and the view of practically all my right hon. and hon. Friends, and many Labour MPs, that we need to respect both results.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
The memory of the right hon. Gentleman serving as the governor-general of Wales is treasured because of his memorable attempt to sing the Welsh national anthem, but he did that job without the legitimacy of a single Welsh vote. Does he not recall that this House can now act as an English Parliament under the EVEL rules? However, that is a path to the break-up of the United Kingdom.
John Redwood
Yes, the United Kingdom, through this Parliament, has decided that there will be differential arrangements for different parts of the United Kingdom. To Scotland we have given a Parliament; to Wales and Northern Ireland we have given an Assembly; and to England we have given absolutely nothing. That, so far, is our constitutional settlement. We have accepted exactly what the SNP spokeswoman was seeking: special treatment for Scotland through a more powerful Parliament.
One of the disappointments about this debate on devolution is that the myriad amendments do not, as I understand them, deliver more devolved powers to the Scottish Parliament or to the Welsh or Northern Ireland Assemblies, yet that opportunity will be there for the taking as we proceed with the process of leaving the European Union.
I despair at the pessimism of so many people about this very exciting process of recreating an independent, democratic country. The SNP should understand that an area such as agriculture, which the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) wrongly told us was fully devolved —of course, it is not fully devolved but almost completely centralised in Brussels, which makes all the crucial decisions and budgetary dispositions, which we then have to execute—
John Redwood
The hon. Gentleman says it is now, but we are still in the EU, and that is the position we are about to change. This gives us a huge opportunity to devolve that power from Brussels. Some of it might go to the Union Parliament, some to the Welsh Assembly and some to the Scottish Parliament. That is to be decided, but would it not be a good idea if the SNP joined in positively the discussion about the appropriate areas to take those powers?
Sir Hugo Swire
Does my right hon. Friend believe, like me, that the SNP will join in the discussion if, on exiting the EU, more money becomes available to spend in the UK? If more is spent in England, it will want a dividend for Scotland as well, through Barnett.
John Redwood
I suspect that that is exactly right. I look forward to the day when the SNP accepts the verdict of the Union and the wisdom of the majority of Union voters, and sees that there is more power in it for devolved Parliaments and Assemblies—and potentially more money, once we no longer have to send the net contributions—and that we have a great opportunity to develop the devolved version of Scotland that the Scottish people voted for, if not always the one that the SNP would like.
Ian Blackford
Will the right hon. Gentleman therefore join me and my colleagues in demanding that powers that might come back to this Parliament, in respect of agriculture and fisheries, be handed over to Scotland and that we get the money that should be coming to us? As part of that process, why do the UK Government not start by handing over the convergence uplift money from the EU that is supposed to come to Scottish farmers and crofters but which the UK has kept its filthy hands on?
John Redwood
It is not my job as an English MP to make that case, but I am glad that at last the SNP is making the case for an opportunity that would present, were it to allow us to get on with Brexit and create exactly that opportunity of more money for Scottish farmers.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend share my puzzlement that the SNP is not welcoming back control over things such as fishing, or at least the possibility of getting it, but would prefer to leave it in Brussels? It would prefer to leave fisheries policy in Brussels, rather than grabbing the opportunity coming our way to sort out our own fishing resources.
John Redwood
Fishing is a prime example of a deeply damaging policy pursued over 45 years during our term in the EU. It has done a lot of damage to the Scottish industry, as well as to the English industry. Is there not a case for common cause here, to work on a Union-wide fishing policy, with appropriate devolution, so that we might all be better off and protect our fisheries better, ensure that more of the fish taken is landed and sold, ensure proper conservation, ensure a bigger Scottish, English and British component in the catch taken, and ensure proper and sensible national limits on our waters, which we have not been allowed to have in the EU?
Alex Salmond
The right hon. Gentleman will remember the famous civil service memo when Britain was negotiating entry into the Common Market that said that in the light of Britain’s wider European interests, “they”—the Scottish fishermen—were “expendable”. If that was the attitude on the way in, why will it not be the attitude of the British Government on the way out?
John Redwood
Because the British people have advised the British Government to be much more sensible on the way out than they were on the way in. As someone who opposed the way in and voted against it as a young man at the time, I am certainly not to blame for the enormous damage visited on the Scottish industry, which the right hon. Gentleman and his party have acquiesced in over many years by always saying that we should stay in the EU, which delivered that very bad policy for Scottish fisherman. I found, going around the country and making the case for our fishing industry, that this was an extremely potent issue, inland as well as in our coastal ports. It was a great sadness to me that so many stalwart defenders of the EU were prepared to sacrifice the Scottish and the British fishing industry.
Michael Gove
I speak as the son and grandson of fish merchants, and I should point out that it was the Scottish nationalist party—[Interruption]—that wanted to keep us in the EU and to maintain the common fisheries policy, which has destroyed jobs and industries, and which is why 54% of people in the parliamentary constituency of Banff and Buchan voted to leave. [Interruption.]
John Redwood
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for making a powerful point and for making the Committee even noisier than I was able to make it by my modest remarks.
My final point—I am conscious of the time and I have taken a lot of interventions—is that a big confusion about single markets underlies the SNP amendments. We have this strange contradiction in their logic whereby staying in the single market of the European Union is crucial to the health of the Scottish economy, whereas leaving the single market with England, Wales and Northern Ireland would be fine as part of the process of independence. Far more of Scotland’s business, of course, is done with the single market of the United Kingdom than is done with the single market of the EU. Some SNP Members try to justify it by saying, “Well, of course we would be allowed to stay fully in the single market with the rest of the UK, so we would want to do exactly the same thing with the EU.” That would be a matter for discussion and negotiation, if there were to be a second referendum and if SNP Members were ever to get to the point where they could win one—two things that look extremely unlikely today.
SNP Members need to look very carefully at their contradictory position. My view in both cases is that what matters is access to the market, not membership of the market, because membership comes with budget contributions, acceptance of law making, acceptance of court powers and all the rest of it, which is true of our single market in the UK just as it is of the single market as designed in the EU. Successful independent trading countries just need very good access to markets, which is what can be got under most favoured nation rules under the WTO and probably even better access through the negotiation of a special free trade agreement. It should be much easier to negotiate a free trade agreement where there is already one de facto, because it is not necessary to remove tariffs that are difficult to remove. They have already been removed; we are just trying to protect them.
I thus urge the Scottish nationalists to think again about this issue and to understand that we are all on the same side: we want maximum access for Scottish whisky as well as for English beef or whatever the product. There is every possibility that we can achieve a good deal, and we are much more likely to achieve it without the amendments tabled by SNP Members, and with a concerted view from this place that we are going to get on with implementing the wishes of the United Kingdom voters. Their message to us is, “Just do it.” That should be the message from this week’s debate in this Chamber.
Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)
I rise to speak to new clause 109, tabled in my name and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends. I shall also speak to amendment 86 and new clause 150, tabled in the names of my hon. Friends the Members for Belfast South (Dr McDonnell), for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for South Down (Ms Ritchie). I will be brief, because I want to allow Members from Scotland, Wales and, of course, Northern Ireland to speak on these matters.
Before I come on to my substantive point about my new clause, I want to say that as a Member of Parliament representing an English constituency, I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) gets a chance to speak to her new clause 168. In Merseyside and Greater Manchester, directly elected Mayors will be in place by the end of this May. My constituents in St Helens North, people in Greater Manchester, in the Liverpool city region and indeed people across the north-west of England will expect their views and those of their elected representatives to be taken into account as part of this process.
The Good Friday agreement is, for me, at the heart of progress made in Northern Ireland and with respect to relations between Britain and Ireland. The progress made over the last number of decades has been forged by and through our common membership of the European Union. In speaking to my new clause, I am of course cognisant of the fact that this debate is taking place in the context of the implications of the referendum held last May. I voted in this Parliament to hold a referendum; I took part in that campaign; and I lost. Those who argued for a remain vote lost. I respect that fact, and I voted accordingly last week. I want to be constructive about working with the Government to get the best possible Brexit that we can for my constituents and for the United Kingdom.
However, I am also cognisant of the need for respect to be shown to a different referendum, the one that took place in Northern Ireland in 1998 on support for the Good Friday agreement. On the same day, there was another referendum which resulted in Ireland’s withdrawal of its territorial claim over Northern Ireland. That goes to the heart of the amendments tabled by my hon. Friends in the Social Democratic and Labour party. So the people of Northern Ireland, through a referendum, endorsed the Good Friday agreement. Subsequent agreements have been made between the Governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland, supported by the efforts of my hon. Friends in all the Northern Ireland parties—and I call them my hon. Friends deliberately.
Ian Paisley
May I ask the hon. Gentleman a question about new clause 109? He is asking Her Majesty’s Government to commit themselves to the principles that are enshrined in the various agreements, but given that he accepts that they have committed themselves to all those principles—as, indeed, have Her Majesty’s Opposition—why is the new clause necessary?
Conor McGinn
I think it important to bear in mind the uncertainty that has been caused by the vote to leave the European Union, and the fact that the drafting and signing of the Good Friday agreement, and all the architecture surrounding it, were in the context of both the United Kingdom and Ireland being members of the European Union. Let me also say gently to my hon. Friend that people in Northern Ireland, like people in Scotland, voted to remain in the European Union. The vote that I cast in the House on article 50 was based on the vote in the United Kingdom as a whole, but I think that that is worth bearing in mind as well.
I hope that the Government will commit themselves to ensuring that some of the provisions of the Good Friday agreement will remain in place when the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, and to upholding them in both letter and spirit. The first, which is the most practical and obvious, is the free movement of people, goods and services on the island of Ireland. Trade and tourism have increased. People in the United Kingdom, in Ireland and, indeed, in the world as a whole do not lead their lives, or inhabit their communities, on the basis of boundaries. I see very little difference between crossing the boundary between my local authority in St Helens and the local authority in Knowsley and crossing the border between Derry and Letterkenny, or between Newry and Dundalk.
My second point concerns citizenship rights, specifically in relation to Northern Ireland, although my new clause 108, which was included in the previous group, refers to the status, rights and privileges of the Irish community in Great Britain. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Ireland and the Irish in Britain, I would welcome an assurance from the Government. Migration from Ireland was taking place before we simultaneously joined the European Union. Although Irish citizens will still be EU citizens after the UK leaves the EU, it would be good to know that the rights, status and entitlements that they have enjoyed through legislation and through custom and practice over the last century—and for many centuries—will be maintained.
This is also about the rights of people who were born in Northern Ireland to choose to be Irish or British, or to choose to be both. I choose to exercise both those rights; some people choose to exercise, exclusively, one of them; but I think it important for those who wish to be Irish citizens, and will be EU citizens, who reside in and were born in Northern Ireland to be very much in the Government’s thoughts as they negotiate our withdrawal.
The third point is about the preservation of institutions relating to strands 2 and 3 of the Good Friday agreement, namely the North South Ministerial Council and the north-south bodies. The north-south bodies deal with, for instance, food safety, trade and business, inland waterways, the Ulster Scots and the Irish language. One would imagine that when the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, the Special EU Programmes Body, which was set up to distribute European Union funds, will cease to exist. It was set up under strand 2 of the Good Friday agreement, which was passed by a referendum, and which is enshrined in legislation passed by the House of Commons.
In the context of strand 3, I think it crucially important for east-west relations between the United Kingdom and Ireland to continue. There is a new dynamic following devolution and the creation of the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish and Welsh Governments, who play a role in the British-Irish Council and in forums such as the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly. It is absolutely critical that this engagement continues. Taking on board the point of the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), these engagements are taking place in the context of our joint European union, which has made all of this just so much easier. That is an indisputable fact.
One area that concerns me greatly in terms of the UK leaving the EU is the Good Friday agreement’s provisions on human rights and equality, given the Government mood music around the European convention on human rights. That is of course separate from and outside membership of the EU, but it is worrying that the Government have intimated that they would seek to roll back or reverse some of the commitments given on human rights in terms of both Northern Ireland in relation to this new clause and people across the UK as a whole.
Dame Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be very appropriate if the Minister tonight confirmed that the Government are not going to leave the European convention on human rights and the Council of Europe, because there are strong feelings on both sides of the House about that and about leaving our place in the world somewhat exposed? It is important that the Minister gives an undertaking on that tonight.
Conor McGinn
I agree entirely and pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for the valuable and important work she does in representing this place on the Council of Europe; we are very lucky to have her in that position.
On the principle of consent, having previously alluded to the Irish Government withdrawing their territorial claim, there is now no dispute—the Good Friday agreement makes this clear—by any parties in the Northern Ireland Executive or any parties in this House about the fact that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom until such time as the majority of people there decide otherwise. That is what is enshrined in the principle of consent, but it is for people in Northern Ireland and the island of Ireland as a whole to exercise that. My slight concern is that Northern Ireland leaving the European Union is a constitutional change that has been done without the consent of people in Northern Ireland, because they voted to remain. That again unsettles what has been a very delicate political balance that both Labour and Conservative Governments have sought to protect.
The new clause tabled by my hon. Friends the Members for Foyle, for South Down and for Belfast South goes to the heart of this as well. There is no provision for a part of a country that leaves the EU to re-join the EU. We must be explicitly clear on that, in respecting the principle of consent. If the wishes of people in Northern Ireland change and they wish to join a united Ireland, provision should be made for them to immediately become members of the EU, having expressed their wish to join the rest of the island of Ireland in a union.
Finally, it is very important to maintain the status of the Irish language. It is a full EU recognised language, and particular reference is made to it in the Good Friday agreement in terms of its being a regional and minority language.
I have tried to be constructive in my amendment, and I hope that what I have said tonight is constructive. I have huge respect for hon. and right hon. Friends from Northern Ireland. I understand that on this we will have different views, but in doing so I seek to protect the Good Friday agreement and the peace process, which I believe has given me and many others like me opportunities that we would not otherwise have had.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn) for his considered and well-made speech; it was a pleasure to listen to it. I know that time is of the essence and I will therefore speak briefly to Plaid Cymru’s amendments in this group; they are new clauses 158, 159, 160 and 162 and amendment 90. With your permission, Sir Roger, we hope to press new clause 158 to a vote.
The Bill as it stands will be the biggest job-killing Act in Welsh economic history. It may be short, but it is loaded—loaded with a Brexit that pays no regard to the promises made during the Vote Leave campaign. This is not a Bill that ratifies the referendum result; it is a Bill that endorses the UK Government’s Brexit plan. We do not accept that the Prime Minister’s extreme Brexit is what drove people to vote leave. They were swayed by a torrent of false promises, and new clause 158 is designed to hold the Brexiteers’ feet to the fire. It would allow for proper scrutiny of the Government’s plans to uphold their pledge of continued levels of funding for Wales before triggering article 50.
Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman represents a rural constituency, as do I. Would he like to remind the House of the promises that were made to our rural communities, especially bearing in mind the fact that 90% of our exports go to the single market?
Jonathan Edwards
The hon. Gentleman has made a point that I shall make later in my speech. We were promised absolutely no detriment; that pledge was made to the people of Wales.
Stephen Doughty
I wholeheartedly support new clause 158. It is a shame that my new clause 157 was not selected; it had a similar intent. Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that, despite repeated questions to the Government, they have refused to guarantee that Wales will not be left a penny worse off as a result of leaving the European Union?
Jonathan Edwards
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and for his new clause, which we would have been delighted to support. That is exactly the point that I shall be making during my contribution on new clause 158.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
Further to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) has just made, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government have failed to guarantee EU funding post-2020, which is what was promised in the referendum?
Jonathan Edwards
That is a pertinent point, and I am happy that colleagues will support us in the Lobby if we get the opportunity to vote on my new clause later.
The UK Government’s White Paper, which was published only last Thursday, was a complete whitewash in relation to those pledges. Unsurprisingly, it made no commitment to uphold the funding pledges, which were no doubt very persuasive in Wales during the referendum. Let us remember that the estimated net benefit—I emphasise “net benefit”—to Wales from the EU in 2014 was around £245 million, or £79 per head. We will not accept a penny less from the UK Government, because that was the specific pledge by the leave campaign in our country. Not one single penny less.
Just over a week before the vote, amid huge publicity, the leader of the Conservatives in Wales said that
“funding for each and every part of the UK, including Wales, would be safe if we vote to leave.”
That statement was made following an open letter written by Tory Front Benchers, some of whom have now been promoted to the Cabinet and hold Brexit portfolios. They made the same promise.
Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)
I, too, will be supporting the hon. Gentleman’s new clause 158 in the Lobby this evening if a vote is called. I would also have supported new clause 157. He is making an important point. Does he agree that the Joint Ministerial Committee would be a vehicle for the Welsh First Minister, on behalf of the Welsh Assembly, to make that case and hold the Government to account?
Jonathan Edwards
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, and I will be supporting the new clause tabled by the Labour Front Bench if it is pushed to a vote. He is completely right. At the moment, UK Government Ministers might as well go into those Joint Ministerial Committee meetings with their iPods on and their headphones in. They are not going to listen to a word that the Welsh or Scottish Governments say, or to the representatives from Northern Ireland. There is no leverage to what is discussed in those JMC meetings. We need to firm up those processes.
The extreme Brexit favoured by the UK Government takes no account of the geographical economic divergence that exists within the British state. The Welsh economy is heavily driven by exports, and two thirds of our goods go to Europe. To willingly block those vital economic arteries would be an act of calamitous self-harm, given that 200,000 jobs in Wales are sustained by our trade with Europe. As someone whose job it is to represent the interests of my constituents and compatriots, I have a responsibility to do all I can to mitigate this Bill’s intentions.
That brings me to new clause 159, which would require the Government to explore a differentiated deal for Wales within the European economic area. The unprecedented task that lies ahead for the UK will inevitably require flexibility and, indeed, imagination. We have made it clear on a number of occasions that if the UK Government give us the assurance that Wales will keep its membership of the single market and the customs union, we will support the Bill. The Government have already conceded, rightly, that flexibility will be required to avoid a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The joint Welsh Government-Plaid Cymru White Paper makes the case for the continuation of full participation—that is, membership—for Wales in the single market and the customs union.
Paul Flynn
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the extraordinary attitude taken by the Government and the Prime Minister today on the status of the United Kingdom is entirely false? The United Kingdom does not exist as far as agriculture is concerned. The powers are exercised by the Welsh Government and the EU. If this goes through, it will be an attempt by the Government to take back powers that have already been devolved to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Jonathan Edwards
The hon. Gentleman is correct, as always, and I will come to that point later in my speech when I talk about shared competence and some of the constitutional reforms that will have to be made following Brexit.
In a similar manner, concessions have reportedly been made in certain sectors of the economy. We have already heard about Nissan in Sunderland and, as we would expect, the City of London. New clause 159 calls on the Government to show Wales a similar level of consideration by committing to consult on a territorial exemption when the Prime Minister drags the UK out of the single market.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
Last week, I asked about guarantees about tariffs, specifically that there be no tariffs on Ford engines built in my constituency and exported out of Wales. I was told that there was no guarantee but that there was a commitment. Is a commitment good enough for Wales? Is it good enough for the United Kingdom given that we are now £1.8 trillion in debt—a national debt that is growing by more than £5,000 a second?
Jonathan Edwards
The hon. Lady is right to mention the fears about Ford because it is a major employer. I pay tribute to her for having the courage of her convictions when she voted against the Labour Whip last week.
Vote Leave campaigned on a platform of sovereignty, claiming that it wanted decisions made as closely to the people as possible. New clause 160 would allow precisely that by requiring the National Assembly for Wales to endorse any final agreement on the terms of exiting the European Union, thereby ensuring that Wales is fully involved in the process and that its needs are met. The Supreme Court ruling, which concluded that the Sewel convention holds no legal weight, confirms our long-held suspicion that devolution, and the principles it champions, is built on sand. Indeed, the UK Government went out of their way in their submission to the Court to emphasise the supremacy of this Westminster Parliament over the devolved Parliaments. Within the UK, it seems as though some Parliaments are more equal than others. Indeed, the Supreme Court ruling is why new clause 160 is necessary. If the British state is a partnership of equals, this is an opportunity for the UK Government to prove it.
The Prime Minister obviously recognises her political duty to consult the devolved Administrations—if only to save her own reputation. After all, she does not want to go down in history for breaking up two unions. Without the leverage of a vote on the final terms, Wales’ input holds no weight. The Brexiteers are ploughing ahead with the hardest of brutal Brexits. The Prime Minister’s “plan” speech on 17 January came before Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Government had an opportunity to submit their White Paper for consideration.
New clause 162 and amendment 90 deal with repatriated powers and the constitutional future of the British state. On the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, powers will be repatriated to the UK, as mentioned by the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), and a determination will need to be made about powers in devolved areas. At the moment, there is little experience within the British state of shared competence. Serious thought and consideration must be given to the future of the UK’s constitutional structures. If not, we are in danger of constitutional turmoil.
Stephen Doughty
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Does he agree that the problem with some speeches from Government Members is that they simply do not get that this is not a unity constitutional state anymore? We have separate Administrations, for example. How will the UK’s internal single market work? Have the Government given any thought to such matters? I do not think they have. Does he agree?
Jonathan Edwards
I completely agree. That is why new clause 162 is important in that wider debate. Government Members are riding roughshod over the views of Members of Parliament representing Wales and Scotland and setting a dangerous precedent.
Charlie Elphicke
In all the hon. Gentleman’s remarks, he skates over the fact that it was a referendum of the United Kingdom. The people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. What is more, the people of Wales voted to leave the European Union. He ought to respect the people of Wales, who made that decision as much as did the people of the United Kingdom.
Jonathan Edwards
I am not questioning the referendum result. I am trying to work out what happens next in the interests of all the people I represent in Carmarthenshire and the people of my country, Wales.
Powers repatriated that straddle both devolved and reserved subject areas must be dealt with effectively, and the National Assembly must retain its autonomy. By “taking back control” the Prime Minister must not mean rolling back on devolution. New clause 162 would provide an avenue for that by committing the UK Government to conduct a review of the UK’s constitution.
Tommy Sheppard
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the likely rejection of his amendment by Government Members, along with their put-down of every attempt to get some meaningful consultation with Ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, belies a deep arrogance? They actually think that this process means that British Ministers can override Ministers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on matters that pertain to those countries.
Jonathan Edwards
I agree exactly with the hon. Gentleman, but I would go further. My great fear is that Brexit will be used by the UK Government and by the Conservative party to derail and undermine devolution in its entirety.
In a similar manner to new clause 162, amendment 90 seeks clarity on laws repatriated from the EU.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
I hear what the hon. Gentleman is saying, but does he agree that what we need more than anything else at this moment is mutual respect of the devolution settlements and that we should do our best to achieve consensus wherever possible?
Jonathan Edwards
I fully agree with the hon. Gentleman. The amendments tabled by the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Labour endeavour to achieve that, and it is a source of great regret tonight that they have been taken so badly by Government Members.
I do not usually make a habit of quoting the leader of the Conservatives in Wales, but in this instance he has made another fitting statement, and I will hold his party to account on it. He said in an LBC interview last month:
“No, this won’t be the last Wales Bill…. Brexit will require devolution changes to realign those responsibilities.”
There we have it. A devolution settlement meant to last a generation, and which received Royal Assent only last week, is already redundant.
I finish by reiterating that on 23 June nobody voted to lose their job or to become poorer. My colleagues and I will be doing everything possible to avoid that and to ensure that the interests of the people of Wales are protected.
Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)
I have listened to the debate with interest, but I had not intended to contribute, so I will be brief because other Members want to speak.
I say to the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), the ex-leader of the SNP, that 17.4 million people voted to leave. The majority of the amendments that we are faced with this evening are wholly vexatious and are intended to frustrate the will of the people. What aspect of these three simple English words do the SNP not understand: “You lost twice”?
Alex Salmond
My hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) just predicted exactly what the right hon. Gentleman was about to say, because apparently he said it a day or so ago. Does he remember the result of the general election in Scotland? Fifty-six out of 59 seats. Does he remember the result of the Scottish election? Nicola Sturgeon was resoundingly returned as First Minister of Scotland.
Mr Paterson
I like having a helpful intervention, which gives me another chance to remind the Committee that 17.4 million people across the UK voted for this result. The one thing that would be bad this evening is if we were to accept any of these amendments, because that would lead to uncertainty. What we need is clarity. After the vote last week, businesses, investors and those in jobs across the land need clarity and certainty, so I suggest that the SNP gets back to the day job. Look at the primary schools where literacy rates are declining. Look at the universities where the number of people from less well-off backgrounds is declining. Look at the great hospitals that are not performing. Look at the mess the SNP made of its police reforms. Go back and work on the day job.
Another narrative is creeping into this evening’s debates. It concerns Northern Ireland and is rather more serious than the pantomime of the SNP. I refer to some comments that have been made about the potential threat to the peace process, and I wish to put another point of view. The people who should be given the most credit are the incredibly brave professional people in our security forces who, under the most extraordinary provocation and in difficult circumstances, held the line and held the peace, which allowed the peace process to take place. I also pay tribute to all those in all parties in Northern Ireland who worked on the peace process; to the two leading parties in the UK, the Conservative party and the Labour party, which took a bipartisan approach; to the two main parties in the Dáil, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil; and to the two main parties in Washington, the Democrats and the Republicans. That extraordinary unity of purpose, over many years, has brought Northern Ireland to the better place it is in.
When I was shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, I went to Northern Ireland every week for three years, and when I was Secretary of State I went every week for two years. In five years, I do not recall having a single meeting with any EU official; I do not recall any visit to Brussels on any issue. Obviously, the two years I spent at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs were a complete contrast, as about 90% of what DEFRA does is implement EU law. So I wish to correct the idea about what would happen should the UK bring back powers and the money to this place. Obviously, there were significant EU funds, so we will have shedloads of money coming back, which we will continue to spend.
I wish to put on the record again the fact that in five years neither I, nor my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire), my stalwart Minister of State, can remember a single meeting with an EU official. That just puts into perspective the importance of the EU. I recall having the German ambassador to a successful dinner at Hillsborough where we talked about investors, but I honestly cannot recall a meeting with the EU. I did come in after the settlement had gone through and perhaps Labour Members who were involved remember interventions, but for me the key players in this were the UK security forces, the two main parties here, the two main parties in Dublin and the two main parties in Washington.
Ian Murray
The right hon. Gentleman used the term “shedloads”. Will he tell the House how much “shedloads” is? Is it more or less than the £350 million for the NHS that was plastered on that now infamous bus?
Mr Paterson
The latest figure I saw was about £10 billion, so significant funds from the EU pass through the UK Government and those funds could be either spent at the same level or increased should we wish to do so. I therefore do not see that the money side will destabilise the peace process. We have heard talk that the process is unhelpful for Northern Ireland, but it has moved on to a completely different position. The main thing to concentrate on in Northern Ireland is getting the economy moving, and that is where the real efforts should be. It is also worth thinking about the position of the Republic—
Ms Ritchie
Does the right hon. Gentleman understand or accept that direct negotiations would have taken place between EU officials, and the Northern Ireland Executive and the Ministers therein, rather than the Secretary of State or his deputy, because those EU matters were devolved matters?
Mr Paterson
Yes, I am perfectly happy to accept that. That was in the negotiation before I arrived. I worked closely with the former Member for St Helens South when he was Secretary of State and I was his shadow. As shadow, I spent a lot of time going to Dublin, talking to both parties, and to Washington, and that continued when I became Secretary of State. The point I am making is that in the time I have been around, the EU has not played a key negotiating role. Money has been going in that we can easily replicate and the peace process has moved on. I want to correct the narrative that the EU played a key role in the whole process.
Danny Kinahan (South Antrim) (UUP)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that a lot of the changes and things that must happen in future will have to come from the EU? We need article 50 to go through quickly so we can get on with it, but we need the EU to start looking after Ireland and fighting its corner so that we can all work together to find the best solution.
Mr Paterson
I am not sure that the words “looking after Ireland” will be that welcome in a proud independent state, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He has taken the point I made: uncertainty is not good for Northern Ireland, and I shall happily vote against all the amendments, because they would lead to uncertainty. If EU funds have been provided, we can pick them up. The key players are the two main parties in this House, the two main parties in the Dáil, and the two main parties in Washington. Those are the real guarantors of the peace process. With that, I look forward to voting against the amendments.
Mark Durkan
The real guarantors of the peace process were the people of Ireland when they voted by referendum in May 1998 to choose and underpin the agreement. Neither of the two main parties in this House had a vote in that referendum, and nor did the two parties in Washington, so let us be clear on who the real guarantors are. In the context of a debate in which we are told we have to go by the imperative of the referendum that took place on 23 June last year, let people recognise that there is still an imperative that goes back to the joint referendum—that articulated act of self-determination by the Irish people, who chose to underpin and agree to the Good Friday agreement.
The right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) says he does not want uncertainty, but as far as the Good Friday agreement is concerned, the uncertainty is being created by Brexit. Neither he nor anyone else in this House should be surprised when they start to hear that the negotiations that take place after the Assembly elections will not just deal with the questions of scandal, the lack of accountability and transparency, and the smugness and arrogance displayed by the parties in government, but will go to the core of the implications for the agreement as a result of Brexit.
The fact is that although the Good Friday agreement has been wrongly dismissed by others, the EU is mentioned in it. It is there in strands 1 and 2—one of the most expansive references is in relation to the competence of the North South Ministerial Council; it is there in strand 3; and, of course, it is there in the key preamble of the agreement between the Government of the UK and the Government of Ireland, which refers to their common membership of the EU. As John Hume always predicted, that provided both the model and the context for our peace process.
It is no accident that when John Hume, who drove so much of the principles and method into the Good Friday agreement, was awarded the Nobel peace prize—well, just look at that speech and how many references there were to the signal role of Europe and the special contribution it had made and would make, and to the role that the experience of common membership of the EU would play. That is why he said:
“I want to see Ireland—North and South—the wounds of violence healed, play its rightful role in a Europe that will, for all Irish people, be a shared bond of patriotism and new endeavour.”
When he enunciated those words in 1998, he was not talking about a new concept. We can look across the Chamber and see the plaque commemorating Tom Kettle, a former Member of this House who gave his life in the first world war. Before that war, he said that his programme for Ireland consisted in equal parts of home rule and the 10 commandments. He said:
“My only counsel to Ireland is, that to become deeply Irish, she must become European.”
Before he gave his life in the war, he said:
“Used with the wisdom that is sewn in tears and blood, this tragedy of Europe may be and must be the prologue to the two reconciliations of which all statesmen have dreamed, the reconciliation of Protestant Ulster with Ireland, and the reconciliation of Ireland with Great Britain.”
That reconciliation was best achieved and best expressed when we had the Good Friday agreement, which was so overwhelmingly endorsed in this House and in the referendum of the Irish people, north and south of the border. We know that some people did not endorse it, and that some have held back their endorsement and refused to recognise that referendum result. Some of them are the same people who are telling us now that we have to abide by the referendum result in respect of Brexit and that we have to ignore the wishes of the people of Northern Ireland in respect of remaining in the EU. It is the same as when they said that we had to ignore the wishes of the people in Northern Ireland in respect of the Good Friday agreement.
No one should be under any misapprehension that there are implications for the Good Friday agreement. When we hear this lip service that we get from the Government, the rest of us are meant to lip synch along with it and talk about frictionless borders and the common travel area. All those things about the border experience and the common travel area predate the agreement itself, so if we address those issues and those concerns, we must understand that the terms in which they are addressed are not reliable and that they are not relevant to protecting some of the aspects of the agreement itself, which is why the amendments in this group that we have tabled are so important.
The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) has already referred to new clause 150, which appears on page 74 of the amendment paper. We have also tabled a key amendment, amendment 86, to which the hon. Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn) referred when he addressed new clause 109. There are also amendments 88 and 92, which deal with questions around the competence of the devolved Assembly, and the need for consent in respect of any changes to the competence of that Assembly or of devolved Ministers. Those amendments are not about the question of the Assembly giving consent to the triggering of article 50, so it is not about the same question that went to the Supreme Court—but it is about issues and principles that were addressed and are expressed in the judgment of the Supreme Court that too many people have sought to ignore.
As a supposed co-guarantor of the Good Friday agreement, the UK Government are meant to have a duty to protect and develop that agreement. Indeed, various Ministers have told us that they have no intention of allowing Brexit to undermine the agreement. If that is so, there should be no difficulty in having that commitment in the Bill. Politically, we all have to conclude from the Supreme Court judgment that no matter what principles have been agreed or established, none of us can have recourse to their legal adherence without their explicit inclusion in legislation and/or a treaty. We therefore have a duty to be vigilant against any legislative terms that could be used to relegate the crucial importance of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 and/or the Belfast agreement more widely.
Those sponsoring and supporting this Bill do so arguing the need to respect the outcome of the referendum on 23 June. We make no apologies for highlighting the primacy that has to be accorded to the overwhelming endorsement in our referendum, when, on 22 May 1998, nearly 72% of people in Northern Ireland and 96% in the south of Ireland voted in favour of the Good Friday agreement.
Sir Hugo Swire
The hon. Gentleman is talking about some extraordinarily challenging and difficult issues, which could have very serious implications in Northern Ireland. It seems to me that it is our duty—all of us who want to see Northern Ireland prosper and go forward—to recognise the fact that the UK is exiting the EU and that we have to make the most of it. Will he commit to the House that he will not make divisions over Brexit part of the SDLP campaign during the Northern Ireland elections?
Mark Durkan
The right hon. Gentleman has some neck to ask the Social Democratic and Labour party not to make divisions over Brexit an issue in the election. The wishes of the people of Northern Ireland, which were clearly expressed in the referendum last year, are being ignored. Are we now also to tell the people, “Ignore your own wishes”? The right hon. Gentleman obviously expects a party like the SDLP, which honourably fought a campaign to remain, to say, “Ignore your wishes. Set them aside. You have to be slaves to the impulses of a vote in England in response to some crazy argument.”
Clause 1(2) denies any regard whatever to protecting the constitutional, institutional or rights provisions of the Good Friday agreement or their due reflection in the Northern Ireland Act 1998, which is why we tabled amendment 86. Clause 1(2) seeks to ensure that the Bill is not restricted by any other legislation whatever. Amendment 86 would create an exception for the Northern Ireland Act 1998. Crucially, it would uphold the collateral principles in the other part of the Good Friday agreement, which is between the Governments of the UK and Ireland, and is not fully reflected in the 1998 Act. The amendment would also exempt section 2 of the Ireland Act 1949 from the override power in the Bill or its outworkings. I admit that the amendment would act as a boundary to the powers provided to the Prime Minister by clause 1(1) and would galvanise the protection for the agreement but, given that the Prime Minister is trying to tell us that she would observe those boundaries, why should she fear that being on the face of the Bill?
New clause 150 draws on key language from the Good Friday agreement, as I made clear to the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean. It is intended to ensure that any future UK-EU treaty—we are told that the Government want to negotiate a new UK-EU treaty—will make explicit reference to upholding the fundamental constitutional precept of the Good Friday agreement, which is the principle of consent that affords a democratic route to a united Ireland if that ever becomes the wish of a majority of people in Northern Ireland. In the case of any such future referendum, no uncertainty whatever must hang over Northern Ireland’s direct admission to the EU as a consequence of a vote for a united Ireland. Nor, indeed, must there be any uncertainty over Ireland’s terms of membership of the European Union.
Such uncertainty was deployed during the Scottish independence referendum, when people said, “Don’t make assumptions about Scotland having an automatic place in the EU or that the process will be easy. Article 49 will make it very difficult.” The difference for Northern Ireland is that it does not have the choice of becoming a new state. Under the Good Friday agreement, its only choice is membership of the United Kingdom or membership of a united Ireland. That agreement was made at a time when both countries had common membership of the EU. Any future referendum will not take place in that situation. Lots of people can place question marks over whether Northern Ireland would have straightforward entry to the EU in that context. Under the terms of the Good Friday agreement, that could constitute an external impediment to the exercise of that choice or even to the choice of having a referendum.
The Taoiseach identified this issue at the MacGill Summer School last year. It will be an issue for the Irish Government, as one of the 27 member states, when they negotiate their side of the treaty. It would be an odd position for the Irish Government as a co-guarantor of the Good Friday agreement to want this to be reflected in a new UK-EU treaty. This is not just an issue for the British Government as a co-guarantor of the Good Friday agreement; it should be something that they are equally and comfortably committed to.
Let us remember that the key precept of the principle of consent and the democratic choice for a united Ireland, as reflected in a referendum in 1998, was the key point that turned it for those people who had locked themselves on to the nonsense idea that they supported violence sourced from a mandate from the 1918 election. That was the key for quite a number of people to say, “Physical force has no more place in the course of Irish politics.” Physical force is now parked because the Irish people as a whole have, in this generation, by articulated self-determination, upheld this agreement, and that gives them the right, by further articulated self-determination, to achieve unity in the future. Anything that diminishes or qualifies or damages that key precept will damage the agreement. People need to know the difference between a stud wall and a supporting wall: just knocking something through because it is convenient and gives a bit more space might be grand and might do, but if at some future point, when other pressures arise, things start coming down around us, people should not complain. We have to be diligent and vigilant on these matters.
Sir Hugo Swire
Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that before there are any new bodies or any more reviews, the priority for the people of Northern Ireland should be to get a working Assembly and re-elect a working Executive to get on with running Northern Ireland, so that all these things can then be dealt with? Without that, there will be no more devolution of anything it seems.
Mark Durkan
Yes, and my party and I are fully pledged to doing that. Nobody worked harder to create the principles and the precepts of the agreement and to get those institutions established and up and running—and we did so, I have to tell the right hon. Member for North Shropshire, with very good assistance from the EU. As someone who was a Minister in Northern Ireland—both a Finance Minister and a Deputy First Minister—I had many negotiations with many people in the EU, including Michel Barnier, who was very constructive and helpful in relation to a number of funding issues. Yes, he had his particularisms about which one had to be careful and understand where he was coming from, and certainly his officials had to understand where he was coming from, but it was a useful and constructive contribution—one of many—from the EU.
Tom Elliott (Fermanagh and South Tyrone) (UUP)
Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that if article 50 is triggered we will no longer have InterTradeIreland, Waterways Ireland, Tourism Ireland, and the six bodies that were set up by the Belfast agreement? I do not see any threat to them from triggering article 50.
Mark Durkan
I point out to the hon. Gentleman that it was his party that said, “If we are going to go ahead and agree these implementation bodies, the cover has to be that the way in which we can show that they meet our test of mutual benefit is that they deal with matters that largely transpose EU business and involve questions of common compliance.” There is the Food Standards Agency, and Waterways Ireland and the Loughs Agency have some environmental compliance issues—and of course there is also the question of EU funding. As the hon. Member for St Helens North said, the role of the Special EU Programmes Body is not going to exist if no common EU funding is to be available any more.
If the rationale and justification for the existing bodies is wounded and weakened, those of us who negotiated and supported the agreement have the right to say, “We’ve already had nearly 20 years of this limited area of implementation co-operation. It now needs to be developed and expanded as the agreement promised it could be.” If the existing bodies are wounded and winged by the fact of Brexit, and if they limp along and struggle for relevance, clearly there must be—in the context of a review at least of strand 2, if not the wider agreement—negotiations on new bodies. Those negotiations, as we know, will not find themselves unlinked to other issues and factors as well. Some hon. Members have hummed to themselves that Brexit has no implications for the Good Friday agreement, and that as long as they say that they will consult Ministers and that they do not want border posts, no other damage has been done. They do not understand the politics that went into the agreement, and they do not understand the politics that will upset the workings of that agreement because of the implications of Brexit.
That is why if people have a care for the Good Friday agreement, they should have no problem with amendment 86. If people vote against amendment 86 on Wednesday, they will be voting against the idea that we can have the Good Friday agreement at the same time as pursuing Brexit.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I have no power to impose time limits on Committee stage debates. A lot of Members wish to speak. Back-Bench contributions to this debate will have to end at 11.45 pm to allow the Front Benchers any time at all to wind up. It is patently obvious that not all Members are going to get in. I urge extreme brevity, please.
Charlie Elphicke
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to follow the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). Whenever he speaks, he gives us an interesting perspective on how politics is going in Northern Ireland. It seems to me that Sinn Féin might be doing slightly well at the moment.
We are talking about a matter that is important not just for Northern Ireland but for the whole United Kingdom, and I particularly want to address new clause 4. My right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) set out cogently the lack of consensus in respect of the devolved Administrations. The drafters and presenters of the new clause know very well that consensus is almost impossible to achieve, as the shadow Minister admitted.
Less focus has been given to subsection (1). The new clause would operate after article 50 has been triggered. The risk is that having triggered article 50, negotiated with the European Union and thought that we had a deal, the machinery might prevent us from closing that deal. The new clause might have the unintended consequence of making any deal hard to achieve, because it contains a whole mechanism for having two months before signing any agreements and needing to seek to achieve consensus before entering any agreements.
The best way forward is to have a clean Brexit with a clean Bill that simply puts article 50 through and lets the Government get on with it. The Government have already said that they are going to involve the House in what is happening and in the negotiations. It is a United Kingdom reserved matter and a United Kingdom decision, and it would be wrong, as a matter of principle, for this important negotiation and decision to be hamstrung by the risk that consensus could not be achieved.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
We have already spoken about the validity of the devolved Administrations in issues relating to the European Union. Does the hon. Gentleman not respect the existence of the devolved Administrations, elected as they were by referendum? Does he not recognise that new clause 4 is a very moderate clause, and that consensus should be sought? Why are the Government seeking to oppose it?
Charlie Elphicke
Of course I respect the devolved Administrations. I respect the constituent nations of this country, I respect my constituents and I respect the fact that the people of Wales voted to leave the European Union. It is important that referendums that take place in this nation are respected. That goes for the Scottish nationalist party as well, which disrespects every single referendum.
Charlie Elphicke
I say to the hon. Gentleman before I give way to him that he should calm himself. He jumps up and down with such vigour that he will do himself harm.
Ian Blackford
Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that 62% of people in Scotland voted to remain in Europe? If he respects the nation and the people of Scotland, why do the Government that he supports not compromise with the Scottish people and the Scottish Government and allow us to achieve what we voted for, which is to remain in the single market?
Charlie Elphicke
The hon. Gentleman should know that the biggest single market that Scotland is part of is the United Kingdom; that is its biggest single market. [Interruption.] Some Members are telling me to answer the question, so let us look at the record of the Scottish nationalists when it comes to referendums. In No. 1, the alternative vote referendum, they backed a yes vote and they lost. They will not respect that. In No. 2, they backed an independence referendum—they lost. They will not respect that either. In No. 3, they fought on the United Kingdom-wide referendum we have just had—it covered the United Kingdom that the people of Scotland voted to remain a part of—and they will not respect its outcome. Now, they are blustering that they will have another independence referendum, even though over half the people of Scotland say they do not want one, and although they know they will lose it by the same margin as they lost it last time.
Alex Salmond
May I tell the hon. Gentleman that I think his memory is faulty on the AV referendum? It was on the same day as the Scottish parliamentary elections in 2011—understandably, we were concentrating on them—when the SNP won an overall majority under a proportional system.
Charlie Elphicke
The right hon. Gentleman likes to talk about the elections to the Scottish Parliament, but we are discussing the referendums of this country.
Michael Gove
On a point of order, Sir Roger. Immediately preceding the intervention by the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), his neighbour the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) sought to intervene, but he moved to tell her to sit down so that he might intervene instead. Is such sexist behaviour in order in this Committee?
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Happily, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, that is not a matter for the Chair.
Charlie Elphicke
I want to conclude my remarks by saying that it is high time the Labour party respected the fact that the people of Wales and the people of England voted to leave the European Union, it is high time that the Scottish National party respected a referendum—it has, despite the interesting explanation given by its former leader, disrespected three referendums—and it is high time that we have a clean Brexit with a clean Bill and that we send the Bill to the House of Lords unamended.
Seema Malhotra
I am grateful for the chance to speak in this important debate about how we can engage more with the devolved Administrations and legislatures in relation to our future discussions and negotiations.
I want to speak to my new clause 168, which calls on the Government to establish a new national convention to advise Her Majesty’s Government on their priorities during negotiations with the EU on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. It calls on Ministers of the Crown to take into account the views of the national convention before signing any agreements with the European Commission on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. I propose that the national convention should convene representatives from across different levels of government, the regions—including, in case anybody has missed this, all the English regions—and various sectors to meet and produce a report recommending negotiating priorities that would better reflect the needs of the regions of the UK.
Dame Rosie Winterton
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Secretary of State for Brexit said there would be some kind of meeting in York, where the Government would bring together representatives of the regions. That was some time ago, and since then we have heard nothing about it. That would fit in completely with her idea of a national convention, so it would be helpful if the Minister put some flesh on the bones of what the Secretary of State was talking about.
Seema Malhotra
My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. Indeed, the lack of engagement with the regions has been highlighted in the work of the Exiting the European Union Committee.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State actually said that he would get
“the mayors of the north to come and have a meeting in York”.—[Official Report, 17 January 2017; Vol. 619, c. 802.]
That was a very vague statement. My concern is that it does not seem to provide any clarity about how the Government are going to engage with regions that will not have elected Mayors by May, such as the north-east. Indeed, such Mayors will be elected only in May, which will be far too late for these negotiations.
Seema Malhotra
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. It comes down to how much the Government are really committed to and interested in hearing from differing voices across the country as we move forward. That is why I want the convention to include elected Mayors, representatives of civil society and local government, and MEPs—they have great expertise and experience—as well as representatives of the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Seema Malhotra
I will make some progress first.
The national convention would include a wider set of voices, each with an important contribution to make to the debate, including universities and higher education representatives, business organisations, trade unions, trade bodies and other representatives of different sectors.
The referendum demonstrated the alienation that many people feel from politics as a whole. The result showed a nation split down the middle. Seven out of 10 18 to 24-year-olds voted remain, while two thirds of over-65s voted leave. Cities tended to vote remain, while small towns and rural areas tended to vote leave. England and Wales voted leave, while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain.
Anna Soubry
The hon. Lady says that Members of the European Parliament would sit in the national convention. Does that include Mr Nigel Farage?
Seema Malhotra
We need to have a way in which the expertise of our many long-standing Members of the European Parliament can be shared with the nation. I am not saying that I would have one or the other. What is important is that there is a continuing dialogue and that we engage the nations and the regions across the country in a far more diverse debate than we are currently having.
Seema Malhotra
I will make some progress, because we have only a few moments left and other Members wish to speak.
Yesterday in my constituency, I held a roundtable with people who voted leave and those who voted remain, from people in their 20s to those in their 80s. It was a useful discussion that engaged people in the choices and dilemmas ahead. They said why they voted leave or remain. Their reasons included the commitment of £350 million for the NHS, housing and immigration, particularly opening up immigration from non-EU countries, including Commonwealth countries. Many felt that they did not understand the implications of Brexit, nor what the risks might be.
Seema Malhotra
I am afraid that we are running short of time.
People wanted more information and more debate. One person even asked me what article 50 was. The level of understanding is very low and it is vital that we continue to engage people. People had a vote in a referendum, but going forward there is no forum for people to understand and engage in the journey we are on.
The national convention that I propose would fill an important gap. It would give English cities and regions a voice alongside Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in a strong national conversation about where we go next. It would recognise and harness the expertise of our councillors and the vast experience and expertise of many other sectors and, yes, our MEPs.
Brexit will have different effects on different communities, sectors, regions and nations. The needs of farmers in Cornwall will be different from those of the nuclear industry in Cumbria, the media and tech sectors in Manchester, the financial services in Scotland and London, and car manufacturing in the north-east. Those differences should be shared and those needs should be understood in a public forum. In evidence to the Exiting the European Union Committee, on which I sit, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union admitted that not enough had yet been done on regional engagement.
Many of us were deeply disappointed with the quality of the referendum debate. The setting up of the national convention would inform and shape a mature national debate during the negotiation period and help to unite the country. New clause 168 is an opportunity and a test for the Government. If they are serious about a Brexit that works for everyone, they should welcome this opportunity to take the discussion out of Whitehall and engage the country.
Sammy Wilson
Can the hon. Lady clear something up for me? She is proposing a national assembly, the purpose of which is to advise Her Majesty’s Government on their priorities, and its report would not be received, according to proposed subsection (7), for 15 months. Is she saying that we wait 15 months—in which case she wants simply to delay—or is she saying that the report would come after the negotiations are over?
Seema Malhotra
Perhaps I can clear this up. The maximum time is to encourage engagement over the period of the negotiations, assuming that they last for two years. This is a process to engage the regions and nations far more effectively in a national conversation. If there is one thing that this debate and the referendum outcome have taught us, it is that people want to be listened to.
Joanna Cherry
I rise to speak in support of amendment 46, which stands in my name and that of my hon. Friends, but before that I would like to take the opportunity to thank Conservative Members who have spoken this evening for their quite extraordinary display of hubris and contempt towards amendments, laid by several different parties, that simply seek to make sure that the reality of the modern British constitution and devolved settlement is respected. Those of us who believe that Scotland would be better off managing its own affairs as an independent member of the EU will have received a huge boost this evening from their behaviour. It was a pleasure to listen to the speech of the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). I am sure he will forgive me if I say that I suspect that the cause of a united Ireland has also received a boost this evening. I very much hope so.
I will be brief so that others from my party might have a chance to speak. The purpose of amendment 46 is to require the Prime Minister to obtain the legislative consent of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Irish Assembly before she triggers article 50. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to correct the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) and his woeful misunderstanding of what the Supreme Court did and did not say in relation to legislative consent motions. It said that, as currently framed in the Scotland Act, they are not legally enforceable. It did not say that they had no meaning whatsoever. The hon. Member for Foyle quoted paragraph 151 of the judgment, and I very much suggest that Conservative Members read the judgment, rather than simply taking from it what they want. It said:
“The Sewel Convention has an important role in facilitating harmonious relationships between the UK parliament and the devolved legislatures. But the policing of its scope and the manner of its operation does not lie within the constitutional remit of the judiciary”.
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I ask the hon. and learned Lady to take her seat. I have been very kind in bringing in the SNP, and I ask that she not take advantage of the time—[Interruption.] Order. I wanted to share the time, so I hope that she is coming to an end, so that we can get one more speaker in, as I promised I would do by allowing her to speak.
Joanna Cherry
The purpose of the amendment is to require the Government to do what they said they would do when they introduced the Scotland Act, which was to make the Scottish Parliament the most powerful devolved Parliament in the world, and give it a say in a process that will fundamentally affect the rights of Scottish citizens and Scottish business. [Interruption.] I noted that Government Members were given as much time as they wanted to make their points, and I intend to take as much time, as is my right, to make my points.
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I think that the hon. and learned Lady’s speech has come to an end. Let us now please hear from the Minister.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr Robin Walker)
Thank you, Mr Hoyle. [Interruption.]
The Chairman
Mr Salmond, you should know better. [Interruption.] Order. One second.
Alex Salmond
On a point of order, Mr Hoyle. It is clear that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) had not resumed her seat, Sir. Being in the Chair accords you many privileges, but you cannot reinterpret the wishes of an hon. Member who is on her feet.
The Chairman
As the occupant of the Chair, I have the right to make decisions in this Committee. [Interruption.] Just a moment. I rightly wanted to bring in the hon. and learned Lady, which I did. When the SNP Whip comes and asks me to give a couple of minutes to ensure that the SNP has another voice, which I did, I certainly do not expect advantages to be taken of the Chair on the agreement that I met. That is the issue. Sit down.
The Chairman
Order. Calm down, Mr Wishart. This is a very serious matter. It is so serious that I want to hear what the Minister has to say in response to the debate. It is very serious and I want to hear it.
Alex Salmond
Other Members have been making their contributions without any admonition from the Chair.
The Chairman
Order. Tempers are running quite high. We need to calm it down. In fairness, I have been very generous in coming into the Chair—[Interruption.] Mr Wishart, we do not need any extra help for the moment. Let me say that I want to hear, and Mr Salmond would expect to hear, what the Minister has to say in response to the opening speeches. I believe Mr Salmond would have wanted answers. The fact is that this Committee wants to hear what the Minister has to say. The last thing I wanted to do was to take up time dealing with points of order. In the end, if we do that, we will not hear from the Minister. I understand that you, Mr Salmond, may have used some unparliamentary language to me, but I am sure that you are not that kind of person and I am sure you did not do so.
The Chairman
I am saying that I am sure that was not the case. I did not accuse you; far from it. Let us now get the Minister on his feet.
Mr Walker
Thank you, Mr Hoyle.
We have heard from all four corners of the United Kingdom. [Interruption.] Everyone who has spoken in the debate agrees on the importance of engaging closely with the devolved Administrations and legislatures as we embark on the forthcoming negotiations.
Ian Blackford
On a point of order, Mr Hoyle. I have to say that I have great respect for you as the Chairman, but I hope you can understand the frustration that we all feel that only two SNP Members have been called to speak in this debate, which is important for the future of Scotland and our position within Europe. I am asking what you can do, Mr Hoyle, to make sure that the voice of the people of Scotland is heard correctly in this debate. It has not been heard this evening.
The Chairman
I assumed my place in the Chair, and I have tried to ensure that a second SNP voice was heard, and we were listening to that. That is what I agreed to, and that is what I have done. In fairness, I think the SNP has done better than it was going to otherwise, in which case, let us hear what the Minister has to say.
Mr Walker
Engaging with the devolved Administrations and discussing their priorities is exactly what the Joint Ministerial Council on EU Negotiations was set up for. It brings together the constituent parts of the United Kingdom to discuss each Government’s requirement for the future relationship with the EU, and to seek a UK approach to and objectives for article 50 negotiations.
I recognise the spirit in which the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) presented her new clause, and I recognise her and her party’s dedication to the Union. However, the JMC is not a legislative or statutory body, and it would not be appropriate to change that in the way new clause 4 proposes. I say that not only for the reasons given by my right hon. Friends the Members for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) and for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), but because it provides a neutral forum for confidential discussions, which this new clause would undermine.
When it comes to the new clauses and amendments, we take very seriously our responsibility to ensure that we get the best deal for every part of the United Kingdom—Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and indeed, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) said, England—as well as for the UK as a whole.
Ian Murray
I am delighted that the Minister has been able to give way. I wonder whether he and other Ministers will take it on board that Members who tabled amendments in all good faith have not even been able to speak to them because of the programme motion tabled by the Government. The Government have been forced kicking and screaming by the Supreme Court to the Chamber to present the Bill. It is about time that they thought again, and gave us more time for debate
Mr Walker
The House voted for a programme Order, and that programme Order has been followed by the Chair.
We have not yet made final decisions about the format for direct negotiations with the European Union. That is a matter for the Prime Minister, representing the interests of the whole United Kingdom. Moreover, it is important to recognise that there are two sides to the negotiation, and we cannot say for certain how our side will progress until we know how the EU side will approach it. In the context of amendments 46, 55 and 88 and new clause 140, it is important to note that Supreme Court ruled—I quote from the summary—
“Relations with the EU and other foreign affairs matters are reserved to UK Government and parliament, not to the devolved institutions.”
The summary went on to state:
“The devolved legislatures do not have a veto on the UK’s decision to withdraw from the EU”.
While that provides welcome legal clarity, it in no way diminishes our commitment to working closely with the people and the devolved Administrations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as we move towards our withdrawal from the European Union.
I have made it clear that the Government will negotiate on the right approach for the whole United Kingdom. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn), who made a passionate speech, and to the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan). They made important points about the significance of the Belfast agreement and its successors. I must emphasise to them that the position of the UK Government remains unchanged. Our absolute commitment to those matters is reflected in our White Paper, which mentions the Ireland Act 1949, as well as a commitment to the common travel area and our bilateral relations with the Republic of Ireland. While I accept all the points that the hon. Member for St Helens North made so well about the importance of respecting those agreements, I can assure him that the Government respect them, and I do not think that his new clauses are necessary.
We have heard a range of suggestions from Members on both sides of the House about how to engage the devolved Administrations and, indeed, every part of our United Kingdom. The Government will continue to do that through the JMC process, which is firmly established and which functions on the basis of agreement between the UK Government and the devolved Assemblies. We have also heard suggestions for huge constitutional reforms which are beyond the scope of the Bill. New clause 168 proposes that the Government establish a national convention on exiting the European Union. Amendment 91 requires a duty to consult representatives at every level of government, regions and the sectors.
I have already spoken about the role of the JMC, and Ministers throughout the Government are organising hundreds of meetings, visits and events involving businesses in more than 50 sectors across the United Kingdom. They are consulting a number of representatives, including the Mayor of London, who is mentioned in some of the amendments. New clause 168 would get in the way of those established processes, and the idea of a national convention would cause unacceptable delay to a timetable that the House has clearly supported.
We are committed to engaging closely with the devolved Administrations and all parts of the country to secure a deal that is in the best interests of the whole United Kingdom. However, as the Supreme Court ruled, relations with the EU are not a devolved matter, and no part of the UK is entitled to a veto. I urge Members not to press their new clauses and amendments, so that the Bill can make progress in the interests of the United Kingdom as a whole.
Jenny Chapman
The Minister opened his remarks by saying that the JMC was not on a statutory footing. That is precisely the point of our new clause. He has given us warm words and platitudes about his respect for the devolved Administrations, but I am afraid they are not enough, and we will press the new clause to a Division.
Ian Murray
Given that we have not reached the moment of interruption, Mr Hoyle, may I move new clauses 23 and 24 and amendment 8, which stand in my name?
The Chairman
Unfortunately not.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Tuesday 7th February 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 7 February 2017 - (7 Feb 2017)
18:14 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 293 / Noes: 326 - Question accordingly negatived.
18:29 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 88 / Noes: 336 - Question accordingly negatived.
21:13 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 281 / Noes: 337 - Question accordingly negatived.
21:28 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 79 / Noes: 333 - Question accordingly negatived.
Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
On a point of order, Ms Engel, I would be grateful if you explained not only to the Committee, but to the country that, of all the amendments grouped for debate, the Committee will only vote on new clause 1 today.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
I think the hon. Gentleman knows the answer to his question. This is very early for points of order, as we have not even started. As he knows, the grouping of amendments was the subject of the programme motion that was voted on last week. As he says, there will be a Division on the lead amendment. As for subsequent amendments, it depends on what happens in the rest of the debate.
New Clause 1
Parliamentary approval for agreements with the Union
“(1) Where a Minister of the Crown proposes to conclude an agreement with the European Union setting out the arrangements for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union—
(a) the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a statement of the proposed terms of the agreement, and
(b) no Minister of the Crown may conclude any such agreement unless the proposed terms have been approved by resolution of both Houses.
(2) The requirements of subsection (1) also apply where a Minister of the Crown proposes to conclude an agreement with the European Union for the future relationship of the United Kingdom with the European Union.
(3) In the case of a proposed agreement setting out the arrangements for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, the statement under subsection (1)(a) must be laid before the proposed terms are agreed with the Commission with a view to their approval by the European Parliament or the Council.”—(Keir Starmer.)
This new clause requires Ministers to seek the approval of Parliament of any proposed Withdrawal Agreement before final terms are agreed with the Commission and prior to endorsement by the European Parliament and Council.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 18—New Treaties with the European Union—
“So far as any of the provisions of any new treaty with the European Union may depend for ratification solely upon the exercise of prerogative, they shall not be ratified except with the express approval of Parliament.”
This new clause would ensure that any future treaties made with the European Union must be ratified with the express approval of Parliament.
New clause 19—Future relationship with the European Union—
“(1) Following the exercise of the power in section 1, any new treaty or relationship with the European Union must be subject to the express approval of Parliament.
(2) It shall be the policy of Her Majesty’s Government that, in the event of Parliament declining to approve such a new treaty or relationship, further time to continue negotiations with the European Union shall be sought.”
This new clause seeks to ensure that, if Parliament declines to give approval to any new deal or treaty following the negotiations in respect of the triggering of Article 50(2), that Her Majesty’s Government shall endeavour to seek further time to continue negotiations for an alternative relationship with the European Union.
New clause 28—Parliamentary sovereignty—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that a vote on the proposed agreement setting out—
(a) the arrangements for withdrawal, and
(b) the future relationship with the European Union
will take place in the House of Commons before any vote in the European Parliament.”
This new clause puts a requirement on the Prime Minister to ensure a vote on final terms takes place in the House of Commons before the European Parliament votes on the deal.
New clause 54—Negotiating timeframe—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that if Parliament does not approve the terms for withdrawal and the future relationship within 24 months of notifying the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU, she will request that the European Council extends the time period for negotiations.”
This new clause makes provision for a situation in which negotiations have not been concluded or in which Parliament has not approved the deal either because of time constraints or because it has declined to give approval. In any of these situations the Prime Minister would seek extra time to continue negotiations with the EU.
New clause 99—Parliamentary approval of the final terms of withdrawal from the EU—
“The United Kingdom shall withdraw from the EU once either—
(a) Royal Assent is granted to an Act of Parliament that approves—
(i) the arrangements for withdrawal, and
(ii) the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the EU
as agreed to between the United Kingdom and EU, or
(b) Royal Assent is granted to an Act of Parliament that approves the United Kingdom’s withdrawal without an agreement being reached between the United Kingdom and the EU.”
This new clause aims to embed parliamentary sovereignty throughout the process and requires primary legislation to give effect to any agreement on withdrawal or for withdrawal without such an agreement.
New clause 110—Future relationship with the European Union—
“(1) Following the exercise of the power in section 1, any new Treaty or relationship with the European Union must not be concluded unless the proposed terms have been subject to approval by resolution of each House of Parliament.
(2) In the case of any new Treaty or relationship with the European Union, the proposed terms must be approved by resolution of each House of Parliament before they are agreed with the European Commission, with a view to their approval by the European Parliament or the European Council.”
This new clause seeks to ensure that Parliament must give approval to any new deal or Treaty following the negotiations in respect of the triggering of Article 50(2), and that any new Treaty or relationship must be approved by Parliament in advance of final agreement with the European Commission, European Parliament or European Council.
New clause 137—Future relationship with the European Union—
“(1) Following the exercise of the power in Section 1, any new treaty or relationship with the European Union must be subject to the express approval of Parliament.
(2) In the event of Parliament declining to approve the new treaty or relationship set out in subsection (1), Her Majesty’s Government shall seek to negotiate an alternative new agreement with the European Union.”
The Prime Minister has guaranteed that Parliament will have a vote on the final deal between the UK and the EU. This new clause is intended to make that vote meaningful by ensuring that if Parliament votes against the terms of such a deal, the Government shall try to negotiate an alternative future trading agreement and shall not default without agreement to the World Trade Organisation rules.
New clause 175—Request for Suspension of Authorisation—
“If Parliament has not approved terms on which the UK will leave the European Union within the two years specified in Clause 3 of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, or any extension of the negotiation period agreed in accordance with that clause, then the Government must request the European Council to consider the notification authorised by this Act as suspended.”
This new clause would require that Her Majesty’s Government request the European Council to suspend the notification of the United Kingdom’s intention to leave the European Union if Parliament does not approve the terms of departure.
New clause 180—UK—EU membership: reset (No.2)—
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1(1) until she has sought an undertaking from the European Council that failure by the Parliament of the United Kingdom to approve the terms of exit for the UK will result in the maintenance of UK membership on existing terms.”
New clause 182—Parliamentary approval for agreements with the Union—
“(1) Where a Minister of the Crown proposes to conclude an agreement with the European Union setting out the arrangements for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union—
(a) the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a statement of the proposed terms of the agreement, and
(b) no Minister of the Crown may conclude any such agreement unless the proposed terms have been approved by resolution of both Houses.
(2) The requirements of subsection (1) also apply where a Minister of the Crown proposes to conclude an agreement with the European Union for the future relationship of the United Kingdom with the European Union.
(3) In the case of a proposed agreement setting out the arrangements for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, the statement under subsection (1)(a) must be laid before the proposed terms are agreed with the Commission with a view to their approval by the European Parliament or the Council.
(4) In laying a statement before Parliament under subsection (1)(a), Her Majesty’s Government shall have regard to the requirements of Parliament for adequate time to consider the statement before the proposed terms are put to each House for approval under subsection (1)(b).”
This new clause is an alternative version of NC1 which provides for additional time being allowed for consideration by Parliament of the proposed terms of the agreement before the vote.
Amendment 50, in clause 1, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until a Minister of the Crown has published an assessment on whether such a notification can later be revoked, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 20, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“(3) If the power is exercised under subsection (1), the Prime Minister’s commitment to hold a vote in both Houses of Parliament on the outcome of the negotiations with the European Union shall include the option to retain membership of the EU.”
Recognising that the Government wishes to begin negotiations on a deal to leave the EU, and recognising the Supreme Court ruling on the sovereignty of Parliament, this amendment provides a safety net, ensuring that there is a real vote on the outcome deal that provides the option of the UK staying in a reformed EU should the final terms of the deal be detrimental to the UK’s national interest.
Amendment 43, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“(3) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must prepare and publish a report on the process for ratifying the United Kingdom’s new relationship with the European Union through a public referendum.”
Keir Starmer
In speaking to new clause 1, I will touch on other new clauses in the bucket. As we go through the debate on these amendments, which is probably the most important debate that we have had thus far and are going to have, it is important that we remind ourselves of the context. The negotiations that will take place under article 50 will be the most difficult, complex and important for decades—arguably, since the second world war. Among other things, it is important that we ensure the best outcome for our economy and jobs, and the trading agreements. As I have said on a number of occasions, what that entails is very clear; we must have tariff-free and barrier-free access to the single market, regulatory alignment, and full access for services and goods. In the White Paper published last Thursday, the Government accept the strength of those arguments about the trading agreements.
It is important that we have the right ongoing future relationship with our EU partners. Labour has been forceful in arguing for maintaining close collaboration with our partners in the fields of medicine, science, research, education, culture, security, policing and counter-terrorism. Although the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State maintain the idea that all this can be agreed within two years, leaving just an implementation stage, the reality is that we will have two deals: the article 50 agreement and a new UK-EU treaty setting out the new arrangements, along with transitional arrangements.
To be clear, we all have a vested interest, on behalf of all our constituents, in getting the right outcome, and that raises the proper role of Parliament in this process. That is why I have consistently argued for three elements of scrutiny and accountability, and this is a debate that, in a sense, has been going on for the last three months. The first element, which I started the argument for last October, was that, at the start, we should have a plan or White Paper—a formal document setting out the negotiating objectives. We should then have a system for reporting back during the negotiations, and we should have a vote at the end of the exercise. Those are the three elements of scrutiny and accountability that I have argued for.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
Is it the case that if all the hon. and learned Gentleman’s proposals are rejected by the Government, the Labour party will simply endorse Third Reading and support the Government? What is the point, therefore, of making all this case for these proposals if he is just supinely going to cave in to what the Government want on article 50?
Keir Starmer
I am not sure how helpful interventions like that are to a debate, which is actually really important, about scrutiny and accountability. Just to be clear, nagging away, pushing votes and making the argument over three months, we have got a White Paper, and it is important. Nagging away and making the arguments, we have got commitments about reporting back. Nagging away and making the arguments, we have got a commitment to the vote at the end of the exercise. So when the charge is levelled at the Opposition that they have not made the case, and are not succeeding on the case, for scrutiny and accountability, that simply does not match what has happened over the last three months.
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
My hon. and learned Friend is right to point out that progress has been made, but does he agree that to make a vote at the end of the process meaningful, we have to have meaningful scrutiny as the process goes on, and as a Parliament we have to have the chance to say to the Government, “You must go back and try to do better”? Having an all-or-nothing vote at the end, when all the discussions and negotiations are over, is not, in my definition, meaningful scrutiny. Does he agree?
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention, and I will come to that, but the central theme of the case I will seek to make this afternoon is that a vote in this House must be before the deal is concluded; that is the dividing line that makes the real difference here.
The Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Jones)
I am grateful to the Secretary of State, and I think that this may be helpful—[Interruption.] Forgive me, the shadow Secretary of State. I hope that this will be helpful to him. He has mentioned the fact that the Government have made a commitment to a vote at the end of the procedure. Later, when I address the House, I will be outlining what I intend that vote shall be, but it may be of assistance to him now to know what is proposed. First of all, we intend that the vote will cover not only the withdrawal arrangements but also the future relationship with the European Union. Furthermore, I can confirm that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement, to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement. I hope that is of assistance.
Keir Starmer
Minister, I am very grateful for that intervention. That is a huge and very important concession about the process that we are to embark on. The argument I have made about a vote over the last three months is that the vote must cover both the article 50 deal and any future relationship—I know that, for my colleagues, that is very important—and that that vote must take place before the deal is concluded, and I take that from what has just been said.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)
Would the hon. and learned Gentleman—I nearly said “Friend”; I will have to be careful—agree that it is really important that, as a nation and a House, we now come together, putting aside all the party political differences, to do the right thing by our country? But most importantly perhaps, on the very point he makes, does he share my concern that, in the event of no deal being reached, this House must also decide what happens next?
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention, and I do agree that we all have a responsibility to bring this country back together—we are deeply divided. [Interruption.] The United Kingdom.
Several hon. Members rose—
Keir Starmer
I am dealing with this intervention, if you don’t mind.
What is significant about what has just been said is that it covers the article 50 agreement and it covers any future relationship. That is the first time we have heard this. It is a very significant position by the Government, and I am grateful that it has been made. It is very important that it has been made, because, on both sides of the House, there has been real anxiety that it should cover both bases.
Whether it goes far enough for the fall-back position, I will reflect on. Ideally, of course, one would want that covered, but I do not want to underplay the significance of what has just been said about the two deals, because this is the first time that clarity has been given; it is the first time the point has been conceded. It is an argument I have been making for three months, and it is very important that it has now been conceded: it is important for my colleagues, and I am sure it is important for people across the House.
Equally important is the timing—that the vote should be before the deal is concluded. The great fear was that there would be a concluded deal, which would make any vote in this House meaningless.
What I hope can now happen on the back of that concession is what I anticipate will happen in the European Parliament: by regularly reporting, updating the House and setting out the direction of travel, there can be agreement about progress, and what happens at the end will not come as a surprise to any of us in this House. But what has been said by the Minister is a very significant statement of the position, which meets in large part everything I have been driving at in new clause 1.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
I welcome, as my hon. and learned Friend does, the concession from the Government Benches, but does he agree that, as well as the timing, it is the scope of that vote that will be absolutely vital? As the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) says, if we are faced with a choice between a hard Brexit and World Trade Organisation rules, that is no choice—the Government will have to go back and renegotiate.
Keir Starmer
At the moment, I agree that we should have as big a say as possible on all of this, but I do not want to understate what has been conceded in the last 10 minutes. I do take the point, but where we have made significant progress on scrutiny and accountability, we should recognise where we have got to.
Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)
While I echo what the hon. and learned Gentleman has said, would he agree that instantly leaping on a concession may be a little unwise until we are quite clear what it amounts to? I recall that a concession on a plan led to a speech in Lancaster House, which did not take us very much further. I would like to be persuaded that a major concession has been made. Does he agree that it would be helpful, as we will not know quite what we are debating if we continue now, if the Minister tried to catch the Chairman’s eye after the hon. and learned Gentleman has sat down, so that he can explain in more detail what he is proposing? The substance of the debate on this group of proposals will then be altogether better informed.
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for the intervention, and I accept that point. Far be it from me to say what the procedure should be, but that would be helpful because some of what has been said has been heard for the first time today, and we need to reflect on it.
Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)
If this is indeed a significant concession, should it not be added to the Bill so that it can be properly examined and analysed and so that by Report every Member has been able to look at it?
Keir Starmer
I recognise the strength of that point. There are of course other opportunities to examine what has been conceded, and to ensure that it might find its way into the Bill. I think it would be sensible to recognise the significance of what has been said, hear a little more detail if we can, and reflect on that during the course of the afternoon. Of course, the Bill does not complete its passage today, or in this House.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
The hon. and learned Gentleman is making a fair point. I think he and I would accept, as advocates, that if somebody says something to us in good faith, we take it on board, bank it, and sometimes do not push too hard—we take a valuable concession and recognise it for what it is.
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention. When an assurance is given in a debate such as this, it is a significant assurance. That said, of course having something in statute at some later point would be even better.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
I came into the Chamber with the full intention of supporting new clause 1, and I still feel that we need to press it to a vote. I hear what my hon. and learned Friend is saying—that he wants to trust and believe the Government. However, if we saw a manuscript amendment before the end of the afternoon, I would find it much easier not to have a vote on new clause 1. Does he agree that a manuscript amendment would be helpful?
Keir Starmer
That is in the hands of the Minister, but I certainly take the point.
Let me make some progress, because we have not got very far. [Interruption.] Well, I have not got very far. Looking again at the big picture, there is a commitment in paragraph 7.1 of the White Paper—this is important for trade unions, for working people and for constituents who have repeatedly raised these points—to convert all EU-derived rights, including workers’ rights, into domestic law. I do not think that commitment has been heard loudly enough. We certainly intend to hold the Government to that at every step of the way, along with other EU rights such as environmental and consumer rights.
I have consistently argued that the Prime Minister cannot, in the article 50 negotiations, negotiate to change domestic law or policy—that will require primary legislation. Paragraph 1.8 of the White Paper makes it clear that the Government do not accept that the Prime Minister would have that authority, and expressly refers to separate Bills on immigration and on customs. I highlight that because there is huge concern among my colleagues about the threat made by the Prime Minister to alter our social and economic model and turn the UK into a tax haven. That cannot happen without primary legislation. It is important that we note that.
Paul Farrelly
I rather agree with the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw). Given the Government’s position, which has just been outlined, does my hon. and learned Friend agree that the only substantive reason now for the Government not to agree to our new clause 1 is to deny the other House a vote on a resolution, and that the Minister should explain why that is the position?
Keir Starmer
I hear what my hon. Friend says. I think we will have to wait to hear from the Minister.
So far as the vote is concerned, there has been a change of position, and it is important that I set that out. Initially, the Secretary of State for Brexit said back in October that he would observe the requirements of treaty ratification. Then in December, at the Dispatch Box, he almost said that we would get a vote—he said that it was “inconceivable” that we would not. Then, just before Christmas at the Liaison Committee, the Prime Minister appeared to back away from that altogether under questioning from the Chairman of the Brexit Committee, and the fact of a vote was only conceded after Christmas. Then in paragraph 1.12 of the White Paper, there was a commitment to a vote on the final deal. Today has taken us a lot further forward. That demonstrates how, by chipping away and arguing away, we are making progress on accountability and scrutiny.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
My hon. and learned Friend may have heard what the Minister said in more detail than I did. Was it clear whether we would get a vote in this House if there was no deal? If the Government failed to get a deal with the EU—none of us wants that to happen, but if it did—was it clear to him from what the Minister said whether we would still get a vote in Parliament?
Keir Starmer
No, and we need to press the Minister on that when he rises to speak.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
The hon. and learned Gentleman has ably outlined the Government’s position to date. He has ably shown all of us that the Government have made quite a major change in their position today. That change in position appears to have taken place when we are debating many differently nuanced amendments about the circumstances surrounding a final vote, so does he agree that it is important for the Government to commit to exactly what their concession is in writing, and to do so in the appropriate way, which would be by way of a manuscript amendment?
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
Order. Could I ask that interventions be a bit more brief, because we have only four hours for this debate and a lot of people to get through?
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for the intervention by the hon. and learned Lady. It would be helpful if we had both clarification and, if possible, a written form of the concession that has been made so that we can all see what it is.
Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)
On a point of order, Ms Engel. Given that, as the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) said, we require some sort of information as to what the Government are putting forward, is there any way in which you can require the Government to put before us a manuscript amendment so that we actually know what we are debating for the rest of the afternoon?
The Second Deputy Chairman
The Minister will be speaking later, and I am sure that he will explain then.
Keir Starmer
I am sure that the Minister hears what is being said. What has been said, today is significant—there has been a concession, and it now needs to be put in writing. A great deal of this debate should now be spent probing the concession that has been made.
Keir Starmer
I am going to make some progress, because I barely got through two or three sentences before taking interventions. I do not think anybody could accuse me of not giving way.
In the end, there is stark choice for the House. If we are to have a vote, it will be either before the deal is concluded, or afterwards, in which case it will be a fait accompli. This concession appears to suggest that it will be before it is concluded. I recognise that there are other issues that flow off the back of that timing, but that is critical, because the sequence of events at the end of the exercise is extremely important to what the House can meaningfully say or do about the agreement that is put to us for a vote.
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that we must consider not just the timing of the vote but what happens if the House declines to accept the deal that the Government have put forward? The Prime Minister said on 25 January:
“If this Parliament is not willing to accept a deal that has been decided on…with the European Union, then, as I have said, we will have to fall back on other arrangements.”—[Official Report, 25 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 295.]
That does not guarantee that this House will have the final decision on our future relationship with the EU.
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention. I think the exchange that my hon. Friend has referred to is the cause of the concern about the vote being held before the deal is concluded. We will need greater clarification about the extent of the vote.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Keir Starmer
I am going to press on, because I am not sure that my trying to explain what the Minister is going to tell us is working particularly well.
Mr David Jones
If it is of any assistance to the shadow Secretary of State and to the Committee, may I say that with your leave, Ms Engel, I hope to be able to speak immediately after him?
Keir Starmer
I have made the case for accountability and scrutiny, I have made the case for a White Paper, I have made the case for reporting back and I have made the case for a vote. We have got this concession, and I think the most helpful thing, in the circumstances, would be for hon. Members to be given the opportunity to test what the Minister has said.
Mr Jones
I had hoped to speak at the end of the debate, but it may be of assistance to the Committee if I deal with some of the matters that the shadow Secretary of State touched on. However, I do not want to go into the details of the various amendments that other hon. Members will no doubt wish to speak to. With your consent, Ms Engel, I will address them briefly at the end of the debate.
May I first repeat what I said to the shadow Secretary of State when I intervened on him a few moments ago? The Government have repeatedly committed from the Dispatch Box to a vote in both Houses on the final deal before it comes into force. That, I repeat and confirm, will cover not only the withdrawal agreement but the future arrangement that we propose with the European Union. I confirm again that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement—
Mr Jones
I will just finish the sentence, because it is rather important. The Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded, and we expect and intend that that will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement.
Mr Clegg
Will the Minister stress to the Committee again that that applies to both the withdrawal agreement and a final agreement on the future relationship between the UK and the EU? It is my view, which is shared by many others, that the former is feasible within two years but the latter is highly unlikely. What will happen if a withdrawal agreement is reached but not a new agreement between the UK and the EU?
Mr Jones
I must preface what I am about to say by saying that we do not expect that we will not achieve such an agreement, but my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has already made it clear that if we cannot come to an agreement, we will have to fall back on other arrangements. The Government have consistently been clear about that.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
This point goes back to the conversation we had yesterday about the importance of transitional arrangements. The Minister cannot guarantee that the new trade agreement will be concluded within two years. If we do not have a transitional agreement, it will be like jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute. Why will he not agree to negotiate that transitional arrangement now in case we need it?
Mr Jones
What the hon. Lady says is, of course, true. An agreement has to be negotiated by two sides, and it is always possible that we will not be able to achieve such an agreement, but I believe that we will. We have also made it clear that we see it as important that during the negotiations for the new arrangements, whatever they are, we consider what implementation period may be necessary following the agreements.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
I am grateful to the Minister for speaking at this stage and enabling us to have the process that he is talking about, and I congratulate him on that. He says that Parliament will have a vote before the agreement is concluded. Does that mean before agreement has been reached with the other 27 countries, or after agreement has been reached but before it has been put into effect?
I believe that parliamentary sovereignty requires that Parliament should have the ability to influence the Government’s position before they conclude the deal, so that those with whom the Government are dealing—the other parties to the negotiations—know that the British Government have to produce an agreement that will get the support of Parliament. If the Government wait until hands have been shaken with all the other Europeans before coming here, Parliament will be told, “If you reject the agreement, you will have nothing and it will be a WTO disaster.” That would give the Government a majority, but not a very satisfactory conclusion.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Jones
May I first deal with the point that my right hon. and learned Friend has made? After I have done so, I will come back to the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies).
This will be a difficult and complex agreement, and the negotiation will, from time to time, be subject to reports to the House, to the Exiting the European Union Committee and so on. What we are proposing, and what I am committing to from the Dispatch Box, is that before the final agreement is concluded—the final draft agreement, if you like—it will be put to a vote of this House and a vote of the other place. That, we intend, will be before it is put to the European Parliament. That is as clear as I can make it.
Geraint Davies
After we trigger article 50, the EU27 will decide a deal in their interests. If that deal comes to this House and we vote it down, and subsequently the Commission and the European Parliament agree it and say, “Like it or lump it,” what will we do then?
Keir Starmer
Just for clarification, I think the Minister said that there would be a vote on, as it were, the final draft agreement. I just wanted to check that I had heard him correctly.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
I want to come back to the point made by the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) about the timing of the two deals that are being negotiated in parallel: the exit deal and the framework for our future relationship. I think we can be a little more optimistic than he is. In article 50, it is envisaged that the negotiation for the exit agreement can only be done taking into account the framework for the future relationship. Article 50 envisages those two agreements being negotiated in parallel, so I think that what the Minister has set out has every prospect of coming to fruition.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
I implore Members to keep interventions shorter. They are very, very long—they are little speeches—and we have got very little time. I implore Members to keep them a bit briefer.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister raised our hopes for a second, and then I felt myself deflate as he said that if things did not work out, we would
“fall back on other arrangements.”—[Official Report, 25 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 295.]
Can he be absolutely clear about what he meant by falling back on other arrangements?
Mr Jones
It would depend on precisely what was agreed, but if there were no agreement at all, which I think is an extremely unlikely scenario, ultimately we would be falling back on World Trade Organisation arrangements. That is nothing new. It has been made very clear previously, including by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister.
Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
Can the Minister clarify a point that was raised by the shadow Secretary of State and that is important to us all? An agreement at the end of the process might be an agreement that there is no agreement at all, and that we will go to the default position. I believe that what the Minister has announced will give the House a vote if there is a deal, or indeed if there is no deal. Can he confirm that the House would get a vote in those circumstances, which is what I understand the assurance to be?
Alex Salmond
The Minister is inflating and deflating people as he goes along. May we get back to the manuscript amendment? If the concession is as significant as the Minister is leading us to believe, it is really important that it comes forward as an amendment. If the Government are not prepared to make that happen, surely the message to the other place is that what the Minister has said should be encapsulated in an amendment that can be properly re-debated here.
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)
Is not the problem that the Government and the House have the fact that we do not know at what stage the negotiations will be concluded? They could be concluded, with months to go, within the two-year timeframe. In those circumstances, I would expect the House to be able to consider the agreement—even, perhaps, before it was provisionally agreed with the Commission, because there would be no time pressure.
Equally, however, we could end up in a situation where the agreement is made at one minute to midnight at the end of the two-year period. If the Government do not then conclude an agreement to bring it to the House after that, but before it goes to the European Parliament, we could end up with no deal at all. The Minister may agree that the Government have a real dilemma. It is important that the House should understand those limitations, because they go fundamentally to the question of whether an amendment can be reasonably crafted to meet that situation.
Mr Jones
My right hon. and learned Friend makes a very fair point. As we proceed, we have to keep reminding ourselves that we are where we are because the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union. What we are seeking to achieve is a departure from the European Union on the best possible terms. I strongly believe that what the Government are proposing is as much as possible in terms of a meaningful vote at the end of the process.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
Timing is significant only if it further empowers Parliament to have a meaningful say on the negotiations. Can I ask the Minister again: what will happen if the House declines to approve the draft agreement that he intends to bring before us?
Mr Jones
I think that I have already answered that extremely clearly. There will be a meaningful vote. The vote will be either to accept the deal that the Government will have achieved—I repeat that the process of negotiation will not be without frequent reports to the House—or for there to be no deal. Frankly, that is the choice that the House will have to make. That will be the most meaningful vote that one could imagine.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
The point is that if this is to be a meaningful concession, the House needs the opportunity to send the Government back to our EU partners to negotiate a deal if one has not been reached. Going to World Trade Organisation rules will be deeply damaging for our economy and wholly unacceptable.
Mr Jones
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but frankly I cannot think of a greater signal of weakness than for the House to send the Government back to the European Union saying that we want to negotiate further. That would be seized on as a sign of weakness and therefore I cannot agree with it at all.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Jones
I would like to make further progress. I have taken a large number of interventions and I am sure that other hon. Members wish to speak.
Let me say this. It will be a meaningful vote. As I have said, it will be the choice between leaving the European Union with a negotiated deal or not. To send the Government back to the negotiating table would be the surest way of undermining our negotiating position and delivering a worse deal. In any case, we cannot unilaterally extend—
Several hon. Members rose—
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
When the Minister first revealed his concession to the shadow Secretary of State, there was a bit, which he has not read out in the speech that he has just been giving, that referred to timing, intention and the position of the European Parliament. Will he please repeat what he said the first time round? I think it important that the House should be able to hear that.
Mr Jones
I will, if that will be of assistance to the right hon. Gentleman, although I did, in fact, read out the same words twice. I will read them again so that he fully understands the commitment that the Government have made. The Government have committed to a vote on the final deal in both Houses before it comes into force. This will cover both the withdrawal agreement and our future relationship with the European Union. I can confirm that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement, to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that that will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Jones
I will not take any further interventions; I have already been more than generous.
I turn to the amendments. The shadow Secretary of State has referred to his new clauses 1, 18, 19, 28, 54, 110, 137, 175 and 182, which all seek, in one way or another, to ensure that Parliament will have a vote on the final deal that we agree with the European Union. Let me assure Members again, as I have said in answer to interventions, that the House will be involved throughout the entire process of withdrawal. Again, I remind the House of the extent of the Secretary of State’s engagement.
Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)
I have a very brief question for the Minister. If the European Parliament votes down the deal, Europe will carry on negotiating. He is saying that if the British Parliament votes down the deal, that will be the end of the negotiations. We pride ourselves on our sovereignty in this House; the Minister’s position seems to be a denial of that sovereignty.
Mr Jones
With huge respect, I am not entirely sure that the right hon. Gentleman understands the process. At the end of the day, the role of the European Parliament will be to grant or withhold consent to the deal agreed by the European Council, and there can be no assurance that there would be further negotiations. May I say that we are some considerable way away from that position. As I have said, as the negotiations proceed, there will be very many more opportunities—many, many more—for this House and the other place to consider the negotiations.
Mr Jones
I am afraid not; I have already been very generous.
I was reminding the House of what the Secretary of State has already done in terms of engagement. He has made six oral statements and there have been more than 10 debates—four in Government time. More than 30 Select Committee inquiries are going on at the moment. Furthermore, there will be many more votes on primary legislation between now and departure from the European Union.
I suggest that the amendments that I have referred to are unnecessary. I reiterate that both Houses will get a vote on the final deal before it comes into force and I can confirm, once again, that it will cover both the withdrawal agreement and our future relationship. However, we are confident that we will bring back a deal that Parliament will want to support. The choice will be meaningful: whether to accept that deal or to move ahead without a deal.
Alex Salmond
I rise to speak to new clause 180 and amendment 50, in my name and those of my hon. Friends. I also want to speak very favourably about new clause 110, which is in the name of the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie). It is the strongest of the other amendments, although I should say that any amendments from this group that are put to the vote will have our support as they are all trying to increase parliamentary supervision of the process.
Before the Minister led us through the dance of the seven veils, I was going to question him on the irrevocability or revocability of article 50. I still think that that goes to the heart of what we are debating. However, I say directly to the Minister, with regard to what he described as a “serious announcement”, that if one makes a serious announcement in the course of the Committee stage of a Bill of this importance, it should be followed by an amendment. If we were here debating the Dangerous Dogs Bill, which I remember debating some time ago, and a serious announcement was made, that serious announcement would be followed by an amendment to the Bill. If that is good enough for a Bill of that description, how much more important is it to have such an amendment when we are debating the biggest constitutional change facing this country for half a century.
Alex Salmond
Not just now.
We thank the Minister for his announcement and the apparent concession. We do not doubt for a second the seriousness with which he makes his serious announcement, but I think that most of us—including the Minister himself—would think that such an announcement should be followed by an amendment to the Bill so that it could go through the proper processes, with hon. Members being able and willing properly to debate an announcement of such seriousness.
I give way to the former Chief Whip, who seems through these proceedings so anxious to regain his previous elevated position.
Mr Harper
I assure the right hon. Gentleman that I am very content being able to speak in the House on these important matters. The reason it might not be sensible to have a detailed amendment is that, as is clear from the range of interventions from colleagues, a large number of scenarios may arise, which will have to be dealt with politically. I do not want detailed legislation that means that this matter goes back to the courts. I want it to be debated in this House, not by a judge.
Alex Salmond
At least the right hon. Gentleman is consistent: when he was Chief Whip he did not want detailed amendments either, in case democracy prevailed in these matters. Most people, on hearing a serious announcement from the Front Bench, would expect it to be followed by an amendment, so that it could be properly debated and tested.
Ms Angela Eagle
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about a manuscript amendment—it would make things a lot clearer for all of us. Does he agree that the announcement that we may have a Hobson’s choice at the end of the process means that there will not really be a proper choice?
Alex Salmond
I very much agree with the hon. Lady, and she conveniently leads me right on to my next point.
Alex Salmond
In a minute or two.
The hon. Lady’s point goes to the heart of the dilemma the House will find itself in, unless we take action to the contrary. It strikes at the question of whether article 50, once invoked, is irrevocable or not. In my point of order earlier, I tried to give a flavour of the Government’s confusion, but it was a brief point of order and I want to give the full flavour of the Government’s confusion.
The Brexit Secretary said in the Exiting the European Union Committee, when asked about this specific point, that
“one of the virtues of the article 50 process is that it sets you on way. It is very difficult to see it being revoked. We do not intend to revoke it. It may not be revocable—I don’t know.”
That is the basis on which we are being asked to take this fundamental decision that will affect the future of this country. We have to know these things, because they will determine the position the House finds itself in.
If article 50 is irrevocable—if after the two years, unless there is a unanimous agreement from the other 27 members of the European Union, the negotiations stop, the guillotine comes down and we are left with a bad deal or no deal—any vote in the House against that sword of Damocles hanging over the House will not be a proper, informed judgment.
Geraint Davies
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that triggering article 50 on the basis of its possible revocability is like walking down the M4 in the middle of the night and hoping you will not get killed—you might not, but it is better not to walk down there in the first place?
Alex Salmond
The hon. Gentleman promised me that he would change the motorway when he next made that point, but the analogy is there.
Of course, the noble Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, who drafted article 50, believes it to be revocable. Presumably, he had that in mind when he drafted the article in the first place.
Alex Salmond
I promised the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), who entered the House on the same day as I did, if I remember correctly, that I would give way to him.
John Redwood
I am very grateful. Perhaps I can clarify the matter by saying that the Attorney General was very clear in his submission to the Supreme Court, as was the lawyer on the other side of the case, that article 50 is irrevocable, and the judgment was based on that proposition. Does the right hon. Gentleman therefore agree that it is irrevocable?
Mr Grieve
The concession of the Government in the Supreme Court was merely for the purpose of those proceedings. I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) that we can derive nothing from that as to whether article 50 is revocable or not. Indeed, there is powerful legal argument that it is capable of being revoked.
Alex Salmond
The two Members should talk among themselves before they come to the House with an agreed position. However, both those amazingly talented people are on the Back Benches, so it does not really matter if they have an informed and learned debate after proceeding to agreement. What matters is the confusion on the Front Bench. Whatever they think, the Brexit Secretary did not know whether it was revocable or not.
Sir William Cash
The right hon. Gentleman is pursuing this matter relentlessly. Will he explain why he is doing so? I suggest that it is because he knows that the answer to the question he is putting depends on whether the European Court of Justice gets its hands on this matter. That is what it is about, as I am sure he will accept.
Alex Salmond
To be told I am pursuing something relentlessly by the hon. Gentleman is a compliment that I shall treasure. This is not about the European Court of Justice; it is about this House having a genuine choice at some stage. It must be able to look at what the Government have negotiated and say yes or no, without the sword of Damocles of a bad deal or no deal, which was the threat from the Prime Minister, hanging over it.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
Is not one of the problems with the concession that has just been made that it tacks together in one votable motion the withdrawal agreement and the potential trade agreement? If Members do not like the trade agreement, they will face the unpalatable option of voting down the withdrawal agreement, thereby bringing us back to where we are now with the outcome of the referendum.
Alex Salmond
The hon. Lady makes a very astute point, but I think the issue is even more fundamental: we have to know what happens when we say no before we go ahead at the present moment.
Alex Salmond
Not just now.
We make an effort to solve the problem in new clause 180, which we call the reset amendment. It asks the Prime Minister to seek from the European Council an agreement that if this House and the other place refuse to agree the terms negotiated, we will reset to our existing membership of the European Union on the current terms and try again. We would then approve a deal only once we believed its terms were in the interests of this country. The Prime Minister should be prepared to present us not with a bad deal or no deal—not a bad deal or World Trade Organisation terms—but a deal that we know is in the interests of our constituents and the country. That is fundamental to this debate.
I know and understand the exigencies of political leadership, but the date of the end of March came about at the Tory conference because Brexiteers were beginning to get a bit flappy about whether the Prime Minister was a born-again Brexiteer or still a secret submarine remainer. I cannot understand why people think—even on the Brexiteer side, because presumably the Brexiteers want success for this country and its economy—that it is a good idea to invoke article 50 before we know what the destination will be. Similarly, I cannot believe that it is a good idea to leave the European economic area, which is governed by different agreements and instruments, until we know what the alternative is. Instead of giving these points away and putting all the negotiating power in the hands of those we are negotiating with—they are our partners now, but in any negotiation there is a tension between two parties—any negotiation depends on the cards in your hand. If the other side know that after two years the sword of Damocles comes down, it puts them in a much more powerful position in the negotiation.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I agree with most of what the right hon. Gentleman is saying. It is very important to have an amendment, so that the House and the Government know exactly where we are going. Why do we not put those on the Government Front Bench on a TUC course to learn how to negotiate?
Alex Salmond
The hon. Gentleman makes an astute point. There is a lot to be learned about a negotiating position. The prime point is not to put yourself in a position of weakness with the European Union. On the whole, they are honourable people who want what is in the interests of the continent of Europe. Certainly, it is not a good idea for the Government to put themselves in a position of weakness with the new President of the United States, who will take every possible advantage from an opponent he senses—as he will sense—is negotiating from a position of weakness.
I argue strongly for the new clause and the amendments we have tabled, which aim to secure the position at the end of the negotiations before we embark on something that will leave this House not just with a bad deal or no deal, but with a metaphorical gun pointed at our head when we address these serious questions. We have to know the end position before we embark on that fundamentally dangerous course.
John Redwood
I agree fully with the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) that we should not wish to do anything that weakens or undermines the British bargaining position. All the efforts of this House, as we try to knit together remain and leave voters, should be designed to maximise our leverage, as a newly independent nation, in securing the best possible future relationship with our partners in the European Union. That is why I find myself in disagreement with many of the well-intentioned amendments before us today. I think they are all, perhaps inadvertently, trying to undermine or damage the UK’s negotiation—[Interruption.] One of my hon. Friends says, “Nonsense,” but let me explain why it would be dangerous to adopt the amendments.
We are being invited to believe that if the House of Commons decided that it did not like the deal the Government negotiated for our future relationship with the EU and voted it down, the rest of the EU would immediately say sorry and offer us a better deal. I just do not think that that is practical politics. I do not understand how Members believe that that is going to happen. What could happen, however, is that those in the rest of the EU who want to keep the UK and our contributions in the EU might think that it would be a rather good idea to offer a very poor deal to try to tempt Parliament into voting the deal down, meaning that there would then be no deal at all. That might suit their particular agenda.
Robert Neill
Why is my right hon. Friend so worried about the House of Commons having a vote? His analysis might be right, but is it not right and proper that we have a choice, informed or otherwise? What is wrong with that? Why is he scared?
John Redwood
I support the Government offering this House a vote. They cannot deny the House a vote—if the House wants to vote, the House will vote—but it is very important that those who want to go further and press the Government even more should understand that this approach could be deeply damaging to the United Kingdom’s negotiating position. It is based on a completely unreal view of how multinational negotiations go when a country is leaving the European Union. I find it very disappointing that passionate advocates of the European Union in this House, who have many fine contacts and networks across our continent, as well as access to the counsel and the wisdom of our European partners, give no explanation in these debates of the attitudes of the other member states, the weaknesses of their negotiating position and what their aims might be. If they did so, they could better inform the Government’s position, meaning that we could do better for them and for us.
Mr Clegg
The right hon. Gentleman is, as ever, making an articulate case from his point of view about the dangers of a vote at the end of the process. Can he explain why, on 20 November 2012, in a very interesting blogpost entitled, “The double referendum on the EU”, he advocated a second referendum with the following question:
“Do you want to accept the new negotiated relationship with the EU or not?”?
How on earth and why on earth has he changed his mind since then?
John Redwood
I do not disagree with that at all. I am very happy for the House to have a vote on whether the new deal is worth accepting, but that would be in the context of leaving the EU. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that no deal is better than a bad deal. If the best the Government can do is a bad deal, I might well want to vote against that deal in favour of leaving without a deal. That is exactly the choice that Government Ministers are offering this House. It is a realistic choice and a democratic choice. It is no choice to pretend that the House can re-run the referendum in this cockpit and vote to stay in the EU. We will have sent the article 50 letter. The public have voted to leave. If this House then votes to stay in, what significance would that have and why should the other member states suddenly turn around and agree?
Geraint Davies
If the right hon. Gentleman wants to maximise negotiating leverage, would it not be better to delay article 50 until after the elections of the new German Government in October and the new French Government in May? We will have only two years, so that would give us the power of having more time to negotiate while we are member, instead of giving that up. If we were to offer a referendum to the people before we trigger article 50, European countries might think that we could stay in, so they might come to the table before article 50 was triggered.
John Redwood
I do not think we should have two referendums on whether or not we leave. The issue is our future relationship. The House is perfectly capable of dealing with whether we accept the future relationship that the Government negotiate.
The point that Opposition Members and their amendments miss is that once we send the article 50 letter, we have notified our intention to leave. If there is no agreement after two years, we are out of the European Union. The right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) rightly asked whether the notification is irrevocable, but he did not give his own answer to that. I found it very disappointing that the SNP, which takes such a strong interest in these proceedings, has no party view on whether it is irrevocable. Personally, I accept the testimony of both the Attorney General and the noble Lord who was the advocate for the remain side in the Supreme Court case that it is irrevocable. The House has to make its decision in light of that.
As far as I am concerned, this is irrevocable for another democratic reason: the public were told they were making the decision about whether we stayed in or left the EU. Some 52% of the public, if not the others, expect this House to deliver their wishes. That was what the Minister told this House when we passed the European Referendum Act 2015. Every voter in the country was told by a leaflet sent at our expense by the Government: “You, the people, are making the decision”. Rightly, this House, when under the Supreme Court’s guidance it was given the opportunity to have a specific vote on whether to send the letter to leave the European Union, voted to do so by a majority of 384, with just the SNP and a few others in disagreement. It fully understood that the British people had taken the decision and fully understood that it has to do their bidding.
Paul Farrelly
Is the right hon. Gentleman not assuming that, as we walk into the room, all the people we are negotiating with are our adversaries? Is that perhaps not the wrong standpoint to take? Is it not the case that a meaningful vote on the substance of any deal might equally focus the Government’s mind on what they can sell to this House to unite it, as well as the people we represent, in a very divided country?
John Redwood
The hon. Gentleman has won that argument. We will have a vote in this House on whether we accept the deal and I hope that that works out well. My criticism is not of the Government’s decision to make that offer. I think it was a very good offer to make in the circumstances. My criticism was and is of those Members who do not understand that constantly seeking to undermine and expose alleged weaknesses damages the United Kingdom’s case. It is not at all helpful. As many of them have talent and expertise through their many links with the EU, it would be helpful if they did rather more talking about how we can meet the reasonable objectives of the EU and deal with the unreasonable objectives held by some in the Commission and a number of member states.
Alex Salmond
Despite the right hon. Gentleman’s certainty about irrevocability, the person who drafted the clause, Lord Kerr, thinks that notification is revocable. The right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the former Attorney General, who is sitting to the right hon. Gentleman’s right, is not absolutely sure but does not agree with him, and the Brexit Minister does not know. Does this not remind us of a certain question in European history, where of those who knew the answer one was mad, one was dead and the other had forgotten? Is this the basis on which he wants to take us over the cliff edge?
John Redwood
I have attempted to give the House a clear definition and to show that there is good legal precedent for my argument, based on senior lawyers and the Supreme Court. I note that the SNP does not have a clue and does not want to specify whether the notification is irrevocable.
Joanna Cherry
I remind the right hon. Gentleman that the Supreme Court did not rule on the matter.
John Redwood
It clearly did rule on the matter. It found against the Government because it deemed article 50 to be irrevocable. It would not have found against the Government if it had thought it revocable.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way on this supreme red herring. It does not matter whether the ECJ thinks article 50 is irrevocable; the British people have determined that it is an irrevocable decision.
John Redwood
I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention, although there is this legal wrangle. It is fascinating how those who wish to resist, delay or cancel our departure from the EU are now flipping their legal arguments from three or four weeks ago, when they were quite clear that this was irrevocable.
Anna Soubry
My right hon. Friend is a man of courage with a long, fine history of supporting the sovereignty of this place. He says that the Government will give us a vote in the event of a deal, but why does he not agree with those of us, on both sides of the House, who want the same vote, so that we ensure the sovereignty of this place, in the event that the Government cannot strike a deal, despite their finest efforts?
John Redwood
That is exactly the vote we had on Second Reading. If Members are at all worried about leaving the EU, they should clearly not have voted for the Bill on Second Reading. That is the point of the debate about irrevocability.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
May I take the right hon. Gentleman back to his comments on his blogpost in November 2012, when he argued in favour of a referendum at the beginning and at the end of the process? He has just said that he does not think that there should be a referendum on whether we leave the EU—we can disagree on that—but he did not exclude a referendum on the terms of the deal. Will he clarify whether he thinks that the people should have the final say on the terms of the deal?
John Redwood
No, not on this occasion, because 2012 was 2012, and we were trying all sorts of things to get us out of the EU—we found one that worked, and I am grateful for that. However, now is now, and we have to speak to the current conditions and the state of the argument.
Mr Harper
On a referendum, it depends what the options are. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) is clear that his two choices are that we accept the deal or we stay in the EU. I was on the remain side of the argument, but the question on the ballot paper was unconditional: leave or remain. I accept that my side lost and we are leaving. He wants to rerun the referendum all over again, but that is not acceptable.
John Redwood
I agree with that.
People are trying to make these negotiations far more complicated and longwinded than they need be. Because of the Prime Minister’s admirable clarity in her 12 points, we do not need to negotiate borders, money, taking back control, sorting out our own laws, getting rid of ECJ jurisdiction and so on. Those are matters of Government policy mandated by the British people—they are things we will just do. We will be negotiating just two things. First, will we have a bill to pay when we leave? My answer is simply: no, of course not. There is no legal power in the treaties to charge Britain any bill, and there is no legal power for any Minister to make an ex gratia payment to the EU over and above the legal payments in our contributions up to the date of our exit.
Secondly, the Government need, primarily, to sort out our future trading relationship with the EU. We will make the generous offer of carrying on as we are at the moment and registering it as a free trade agreement. If the EU does not like that, “most favoured nation” terms under WTO rules will be fine. That is how we trade with the rest of the world—very successfully and at a profit.
Members should relax and understand that things can be much easier. There will be no economic damage. The Government have taken an admirable position and made wonderful concessions to the other side, so I hope that those on the other side will accept them gratefully and gracefully, in the knowledge that they have had an impact on this debate.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
I rise to speak to new clauses 28, 54 and 99, standing in my name and those of other right hon. and hon. Members. New clause 28 deals with the sequencing of votes on the final terms—the issue on which we have had a concession this afternoon from the Minister; new clause 54 is about how to secure extra time if we need it in our negotiations with the EU; and new clause 99 embeds parliamentary sovereignty in the process.
I am pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), but I am disappointed that he has not come clean to the Committee on the fact that he has identified an alternative process he hopes to use to secure the kind of Brexit he wants. He did not refer to another blog he wrote recently, in which he said:
“Being in the EU is a bit like being a student in a College. All the time you belong to the College you have to pay fees... When you depart you have no further financial obligations”.
This is a somewhat outmoded view of the way student finances work, but putting that to one side, he evidently has not read the excellent paper by Alex Barker of the Financial Times pointing out that the obligations on us will fall into three categories: legally binding budget commitments; pension promises to EU officials; and contingent liabilities, which indeed are arguable.
Helen Goodman
I will make a little more progress, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind.
The right hon. Member for Wokingham has also pointed out that Ministers can only authorise spending and sign cheques with parliamentary approval. He is right about that, and it is right that we have that say, but he is hoping to use that moment to veto the withdrawal arrangements and scupper the chances of a more constructive and productive future relationship. On Second Reading, the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) said—this was astute if somewhat tasteless—that it
“will be a trade-off, as all divorces are, between access and money.”—[Official Report, 1 February 2017; Vol. 620, c. 1035.]
For the right hon. Member for Wokingham and his friends, there is no trade-off—he does not want access or money.
New clause 54 calls for extra time. Hon. Members have already raised the need for extra time if Parliament declines to approve the final terms. The new clause adds a scenario in which the Government have not managed to complete the negotiations within the 24 months specified in article 50. This is more likely than not. Almost everyone who has looked at the matter in detail is incredulous that we can complete these negotiations in 24 months. The record on completing trade deals is not good, and there are many more strands to this negotiation. It would be patently absurd to flip to a damaging situation without an agreement, if we can see, once we are in the negotiations and have the detailed work schedule, that a further six or 12 months would bring us to a successful conclusion. Similarly, it is possible that the Minister’s optimism is well founded but that, while the negotiations have been completed, the parliamentary process has not. In that instance, too, we ought to have extra time.
New clause 99 addresses a different matter. It would embed parliamentary sovereignty in the process of approving the final terms of withdrawal and ensure that the UK withdrew on terms approved by Parliament. Bringing back control and restoring parliamentary sovereignty were a major plank of the Brexit campaign. The new clause is the fulfilment of that promise—the working out in practice of what was promised. The Prime Minister has already said that Parliament should have a vote at the end of the process, and new clause 99 strengthens that promise by requiring primary legislation to give effect to any agreement on arrangements for withdrawal and, even more importantly, on the future relationship. This is important, so that Parliament does not have to give only a metaphorical thumbs-up, which could, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) has said, be meaningless. Instead, Parliament can undertake line-by-line scrutiny. Brexit has major constitutional, political, economic and social consequences. It is right for Parliament to approve the way in which it is done. This new clause will improve the dynamic of the negotiations and strengthen the Prime Minister’s hands. She can say to the EU, “Parliament won’t agree to that.”
Mr Bradshaw
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for tabling and speaking to this new clause, which I think is important in view of the concerns expressed on all sides of the Committee about the so-called concession offered earlier by the Government Front-Bench team. Will my hon. Friend confirm that she will press her new clause to a vote?
Helen Goodman
I may wish to test the will of the Committee on this new clause when we reach the end of the debate.
I think most rational people would say that the new relationship is more important than the terms of withdrawal.
Sir Oliver Letwin
The hon. Lady said a moment ago that new clause 99 did not seek to delay or derail the leaving process. In the event of paragraph (b) of the new clause coming about—namely, no deal—if Parliament voted against it, would the effect not clearly be that we would stop the process of leaving, thereby denying the effect of the referendum?
Helen Goodman
I do not think it does mean that. It would depend on whether or not extra time had been agreed with the European Union. If the right hon. Gentleman referred back to article 50, he would see that we might get an extension if the other member states agree to provide us with it unanimously. They may; they may not. As we stand here today, it is quite difficult to project ourselves forward into the situation we will find in two years’ time.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I am doubly grateful to the hon. Lady. Does she not agree that in the event that we are not given extra time by mutual agreement, and in the event that Parliament has rejected withdrawal without an agreement, the effect of paragraph (b) of the new clause would clearly be the negation of the result of the referendum by Parliament? Does that not go against what she has voted for?
Helen Goodman
I do not think it does, because it leaves open the possibility of the Government’s going back to the drawing board and making a further new arrangement. As I say, for us now, when we have not yet embarked on the process and we do not know what the deals will be and what is going to be offered, it is extremely difficult for us to foresee.
Ms Angela Eagle
Does my hon. Friend agree that many of the other 27 countries will be going to their Parliaments for approval with respect to their approach to these negotiations, so that it would surely strengthen our Government’s hands if they involved themselves in a process that could through this Parliament maximise the support coming on all sides for our Government’s approach? Why is that not seen as a strength?
Helen Goodman
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. We know that Angela Merkel has to get a parliamentary mandate for how she conducts herself in all her negotiations in the European Union. Some of us have tried over the years to improve the quality of our European scrutiny, but it seems that we are focusing it now only on the moment when we are about to leave.
Geraint Davies
Assuming that the Committee agrees to this amendment, that we trigger article 50 on 31 March and that we vote against the deal, what could we do about it if the Commission and the European Parliament said, “Sorry, but that’s the deal you’re going to get, like it or lump it”? They do not care; we do not have the sort of power necessary to stop them imposing the deal they want once article 50 has been triggered.
Helen Goodman
My hon. Friend is arguing along the same lines as the right hon. Member for Wokingham—that article 50 is irrevocable. It is the same point as was raised by the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) as well. As I have said, paragraph 3 of article 50 includes the words
“unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.”
That can happen, and it will depend on how the negotiations are undertaken, on where we have got to, and on their tone.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
The treaty of Lisbon clearly sets out the two-year term. Whether or not article 50 is irrevocable comes down to the weakness of the treaty of Lisbon itself, not the legal interpretation. Does the hon. Lady not agree that some of the best deals reached with the EU have been at the 11th hour, and that the one thing that will concentrate the minds of all involved in these negotiations is the fact that they have to happen by March 2019—otherwise, it will go on and on and on?
Helen Goodman
I do not think that the threat of the cliff edge is a positive in these negotiations. I note that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has described this as a second-best option and that the White Paper also says that crashing out is a second-best option. Actually, I think it is the worst option, and new clause 99 levels the playing field so that as well as having the vote on the terms of withdrawal and the money, this House will be able to have detailed scrutiny of the future relationship.
I have consulted my constituents on the kind of Brexit they want: they do not want the cliff-edge option, and there are all sorts of things about Europe that they like, even though the majority voted to leave. They like the customs union; they like the social chapter; they like co-operation and collaboration; and they particularly like the European arrest warrant.
John Redwood
The hon. Lady says that she would like collaboration to support the Government’s negotiations. Does she think that in a negotiating situation it is a good idea to say, “We think we owe you lot some money; tell us how much?”; or does she think it would be better to say, “I do not think that we owe you anything”?
Helen Goodman
In my experience of negotiation, one of the most important things is to understand what the people on the other side of the table think, and I believe that that is fundamental to our success in this negotiation. It is not to say that we are going to give the people on the other side of the table everything they want, but we need to be willing to listen to what they want as the negotiation proceeds.
Mr Harper
May I return the hon. Lady to what she said about the different approaches that European states adopt to negotiation? I am not a lawyer, and I hesitate to express an opinion in the face of such eminent legal presence in the Chamber, but my understanding is that treaties made in countries such as Germany, which has a monist legal culture, are directly applicable without further legislation, whereas because ours is a dualist system, we have to legislate to put them into effect. Do not those countries take a tougher approach to their negotiation before authorising it because once their Governments are signed up to a treaty, it becomes law automatically?
Helen Goodman
I do not see this as an opportunity for a seminar on the political institutions of the Federal Republic. New clause 99 is about embedding what is basic to the British constitution, as found by the Supreme Court, which is parliamentary sovereignty throughout the process. In the end, the referendum was about trust. It was about the kind of settlement that most voters wanted. I know what kind of Brexit deal my voters want, and I think that new clause 99 provides the best way of giving it to them.
Sir William Cash
I hope the Committee will allow me to mention that today, 7 February, is 25 years to the day since the signing of that fateful Maastricht treaty. I see that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) is looking at me with a wry smile on his face. I do not doubt for a minute that he will recall that he once said—I hope I am not mistaken—that he had not read the treaty. Perhaps he never said anything of the kind, and I should be more than happy to accept his assurance to that effect from a sedentary position.
At the time, I tabled some 150 amendments, and I voted against the treaty 47 or 50 times. I have to say that I will not vote against this Bill in any circumstances whatsoever. Indeed, this will be the first occasion on which I shall not have voted against European legislation since 1986. The legislation passed during that year included the Single European Act. When I tabled the sovereignty amendment to that legislation, I was not even allowed to speak to it because it was not selected for debate, which I found difficult to accept at the time. However, we have now moved well ahead. We have had a referendum, the proposal for which was accepted by six to one in the House. We have also had a vote on the principle of this very Bill, which was passed by 498— 500 if we include the tellers—to 114.
In deference to the other Members who wish to speak, I shall not go through the intricacies of this vast number of new clauses. I do not think that that would help us much, for a very simple reason—the bottom line is that they would effectively provide for a veto to override the result of the referendum. It is as simple as that.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
My hon. Friend said that he had tabled 150 amendments off his own bat. Surely he is contradicting his own argument. The whole point of this place is to challenge what we do not believe in, on the basis of principle. That is what we are trying to do, and my hon. Friend should be supporting us.
Sir William Cash
I am so glad that my hon. Friend has made that point. The difference between what I was doing in those days and what is happening now is that we were arguing against the Government’s policy of implementing European government, which is what the Maastricht treaty was about—incidentally, the electorate made it clear in the referendum that they now accept that. Moreover, we were arguing in favour of a referendum, which we have now had. My amendments were moving in the right direction, in line with what the Government have now agreed following the referendum and in line with what the people themselves agreed.
Paul Farrelly
The hon. Gentleman—my next-door neighbour from Stone—is clearly enjoying his days in the sun. Like the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), I did not vote for the referendum legislation. Will the hon. Gentleman tell us what regard he has had, over his 40 years of campaigning, for the two thirds of people who, at the time when he started his campaign, voted for the UK to remain in the European Union?
Sir William Cash
I can only say that, in our democratic system, six Members to one in the House of Commons, and indeed the House of Lords, voted in favour of a referendum, by means of a sovereign Act of Parliament, to give the people a say in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency as well as mine next door to it—not to mention in Stoke-on-Trent Central, where quite an interesting test will take place in a few days’ time. The fact is that the decision was given to the people by an Act of Parliament, and they made the decision to leave. That is definitive. I see no purpose in wasting time on the intricate arguments we have heard so far, many of which go around in circles. The real question is: do we implement the decision of the United Kingdom or not? The answer is that we do, and we must. That was conceded by this House, and by almost everybody—I say, with great respect, to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe that he did not, but the bottom line is that we are giving effect to the decision of the United Kingdom electorate.
Alex Salmond
Unless my memory betrays me, the hon. Gentleman himself was one of the two thirds back in 1975 when he voted for the European Community, so all these years he was campaigning against the sovereignty of that decision; indeed, he was campaigning against his own sovereignty and his own decision.
Sir William Cash
That is politics, as the right hon. Gentleman knows only too well, because he has a similar experience in his position with regard to Scotland.
The bottom line is that we are faced with a simple decision, which is going to be decided in a vote later today, I imagine—it might be in part tomorrow as well, and then there will be Third Reading. I hope that all these attempts to, in my judgment, produce different versions of delay will effectively be overridden by the vote taken by the House as a whole, in line with the decision taken by the British people. That is the right way to proceed.
I would like to add one further point, with respect to the Bill itself. I am in no way criticising the selection of amendments, because I think it is entirely right that we should have an opportunity to look at a variety of permutations before the main vote is cast. But I have to remind the Committee that the Bill, which was passed by 498 to 114, simply says that it will
“confer power on the Prime Minister to notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention”,
as expressed by the referendum itself,
“to withdraw from the EU.”
Clause 1 simply says this, and no more:
“The Prime Minister may notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU.”
I am glad to see that it goes on to say—just to put this matter to bed, in case anybody tries to argue that, somehow or other, this could be overridden by some other European Union gambit— that “This section”, which we have already passed in principle,
“has effect despite any provision made by or under the European Communities Act 1972 or any other enactment.”
In other words, nothing that emanates from the European Union is to stand in its way. That is a very simple proposition. The Bill is short because it should be short.
I would just like to make one last point, looking back at what the Supreme Court said. The Supreme Court made a judgment on one simple question: should we express the intention to withdraw and notify under article 50 by prerogative or by Bill? There was a big battle, and many people took differing views. We respect the Supreme Court decision, and that is why we have this Bill. The fact is that that is final.
In paragraphs 2 and 3 of the judgment, the court itself made it clear what the judgment was meant to be about, which was whether this should be done by Bill or prerogative. The court said it should be done by Bill. It added—these are my last words on the subject for the moment—that it was about one particular issue, which was the one I have mentioned. The court then said the judgment had nothing to do with the terms of withdrawal, nothing to do with the method, nothing to do with the timing and nothing to do with the relationship between ourselves and the European Union. Yet new clause 1 spends its entire verbiage going into the very questions that the Supreme Court said the decision was not about. So that new clause and the others are all inconsistent both with the Supreme Court decision and with the decisions taken on Second Reading.
Ms Angela Eagle
On a point of order, Ms Engel. Surely new clause 1 is in order; otherwise, we would not be debating it.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
I do not think that that is a point of order; it is not a matter for the Chair.
Sir William Cash
I am sure that it is in order. The problem is whether we vote for it, and there are extremely good reasons for not doing so. New clause 1 and the other amendments have been tabled by honourable people—hon. Members on both sides of the House, and some right hon. Members—but they know perfectly well what they are doing. They are trying to delay, to obstruct and to prevent the Bill from going through, and I say, “Shame on you!”
Tim Farron
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has fought his corner for 40-odd years. I intend to fight mine, but hopefully not for as long as that. I rise to speak to amendment 43, which is in my name and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends. It concerns the issue of democracy at the end of this process as well as at the beginning, and it would require the Prime Minister to look at the overwhelming case for a people’s vote on the final exit package that the Government negotiate with Brussels after triggering article 50.
On 23 June last year, a narrow majority voted to leave the European Union. I deeply regret that outcome, but I am a democrat and I accept it. However, voting for departure is not the same as voting for the destination. The Government should now give the British people a decision referendum, to be held when the EU negotiations are concluded. I admit that “mandate referendum” and “decision referendum” are not terms that I have used before in this context. They are not really my words; they are the words that were used by the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union when he eloquently made the case in 2012 for holding a referendum on the deal at the end of the process, which is Liberal Democrat policy today.
James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)
When the hon. Gentleman said on 11 May last year that this was a “once-in-a-generation decision”, was he being straightforward with the voters?
Tim Farron
As it stands, the Government intend it to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity. As the hon. Member for Stone has proved, however, we sometimes have to fight for two generations for the thing that we believe in. If we have the courage of our convictions, we keep going.
I want to quote the Brexit Secretary directly. I do not want to paraphrase him or risk misquoting him in any way. Describing the strategy of having two referendums—a mandate referendum and a decision referendum—he said:
“The aim of this strategy is to give the British people the final say, but it is also to massively reinforce the legitimacy and negotiating power of the British negotiating team.”
I shall not say this often during this process, but I completely and utterly agree with the Brexit Secretary on that. As we have learned, his words were endorsed the following day by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) on his blog, although we have now discovered that he did not really mean it; he was just saying that as a ruse.
Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman and I were on the same side in the referendum, but I want to tell him why he is completely wrong on this matter. If we were to place a second referendum in the Bill at this stage, it would tie the hands of our negotiators. We could only be offered a bad deal, and it would be in the hands of the people we were negotiating with to drive the British people to reject it. It would be a failed policy from the start.
Tim Farron
If we follow the logic of the hon. Gentleman’s argument, the Minister should not have made his offer for the House to have a say at the end of the deal. If someone is about to go over a cliff, not giving themselves the opportunity to do otherwise is the ultimate negotiating weakness, as the Brexit Secretary rightly pointed out four and a bit years ago.
John Redwood
The hon. Gentleman really must correct the record. I did not make the offer in 2012 flippantly or without intending to see it through; it was a fair offer that was not taken up. My colleagues and I then made a different offer in 2015, which was accepted and we are pursuing it.
Tim Farron
In no way do I wish to impugn the right hon. Gentleman’s integrity—I am sure that he meant that offer. What I think he said earlier on when I intervened on him was that that was effectively a ruse, plot, method or attempt at that point to try to get a certain outcome. I suppose he is therefore the hard Brexit equivalent of Malcolm X—“by any means necessary.”
Several hon. Members rose—
Tim Farron
If I can make a little progress, I will be grateful.
It is true that this argument began with democracy, but it cannot now end with a stitch-up. That is especially true given that the leave campaign offered no plan, no instructions, no prospectus and no vision of what “out” would look like. At no point did it produce any credible or unified position on what the UK would look like outside the European Union.
Several hon. Members rose—
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
I was also a remainer and I regret the result, but does the hon. Gentleman agree with the view of Vince Cable, the former Business Secretary, that a second referendum raises “a lot of fundamental problems”?
Tim Farron
We are dealing with many fundamental problems in any event.
Forgive me if I am being pedantic, but the reality is that we are not talking about a second referendum. One could argue that the referendum on 23 June was the second referendum. We are arguing for a referendum on the terms of the deal, which has not been put to the British people.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman says that we would reach a cliff edge, but his offer of a referendum involves no choice. People would either have to vote for it or against it. If they vote against it, what would that leave? There would be that cliff edge that people are trying to avoid.
Tim Farron
We are offering the British people an opportunity not only to have the final say on the terms of the deal, but to say, having looked over the cliff edge, “No thanks,” and to remain in the European Union. That is a perfectly legitimate democratic offer for a party to make. While it is thoroughly legitimate to have an alternative point of view, that is fully democratic.
Several hon. Members rose—
Tim Farron
I want to make a clear point and a little progress.
A few of them are here now, so I want to give a little credit to our SNP colleagues. During the Scottish independence referendum, they were able to produce a 670-page White Paper on exactly what leaving the United Kingdom would look like. Of course, I did not agree with them, but at least the people of Scotland knew what they were voting for or what they would be rejecting. If that vote in 2014 had gone the other way, there would have been no need for a second vote on the independence deal.
This Government are going to take some monumental decisions over the next two years. I still believe that it will be impossible for them to negotiate a deal that is better than the one we currently have inside the European Union, but the negotiations will happen and a deal will be reached. When all is said and done, someone will have to decide whether the deal is good enough for the people of Britain. Surely the only right and logical step is to allow the people—not politicians in Whitehall, Brussels or even this House—to decide whether it is the right deal for them, their families, their jobs and our country. No one in this Government, House or country has any idea of what deal the Prime Minister will negotiate with Europe. It is completely unknown.
Caroline Lucas
Does the hon. Gentleman share my surprise at the resistance to his perfectly sensible suggestion of a ratification referendum? The hallmark of the leave campaign was “taking back control” but surely that means control for the British people, not just for the MPs in charge.
Tim Farron
Once again, the hon. Lady makes an excellent point. It seems utterly bizarre that having claimed that we were “taking back control”—that effective slogan—they now want to cede control to those occupying the smoke-filled rooms of Brussels and Whitehall in the 21st century and to have a stitch-up imposed upon the British people. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) has been very persistent, so I will give way to him.
Tim Loughton
The hon. Gentleman will remember that his predecessor produced a leaflet that said only the Liberal Democrats would offer a “real referendum.” I presume that the Liberal Democrats had absolutely no idea of the implications if the people had actually voted to come out at that stage. The hon. Gentleman said that this is a once-in-a-generation vote, and he is now saying that we should have a mandate referendum and a terms referendum. If those two referendums go through, when will he be asking for an “Are you really sure about that?” referendum?
Tim Farron
The hon. Gentleman seems to be under the impression that democracy is a one-hit game and that, somehow, a person who believes passionately in what they believe in has to give in. He and I both sat on the Opposition Benches during the last five years of the Labour Administration. When the Labour party won its big majorities in 1997, 2001 and 2005, did he give in and say that, somehow, it would be frustrating the will of the people to carry on fighting the Conservative cause? No, he did not. The reality is simply this: it is right to respect the will of the people, but it is to disrespect democracy to cave in and give up when we passionately believe in something.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
I have said before that the hon. Gentleman’s approach is like Hotel California: you can check out but you can never leave. He is like the SNP, because he just wants people to vote, vote and vote again until he gets the result he agrees with. The British people have voted. We have to leave the European Union and implement the will of the British people.
Tim Farron
I will come on to that in a moment, but it is not in any way enacting the will of the British people consistently to refuse the British people the right to have a say on a deal that will affect generations to come and that none of us here knows what it will look like.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
I support the position that the hon. Gentleman articulates with amendment 43 but, in light of the concession we heard from the Government today, does he share my concern that, at the end of the negotiation, the choice that this Parliament will have will be between accepting the deal that the Government offer—possibly a bad deal—or falling out of the European Union on WTO terms at a cost of £45 billion to our gross domestic product? Does he not think the British people might be worried about that and might want to have a say?
Tim Farron
The hon. Gentleman continues to make a strong case, and he is bold in putting it across, and not just today. There is no doubt that, whatever the British people voted for on 23 June, they certainly did not vote to make themselves poorer. It would be absolutely wrong for that game of poker to end with our dropping off a cliff edge without the British people having the right to have their say.
Mr Harper
The hon. Gentleman’s argument would have force if the question on 23 June had been to give the Government a mandate to negotiate and bring back a deal, but it was not a conditional question. The question asked, “Do you want to leave, or do you want to remain?” People listened to all the arguments about all the risks, and they decided to leave. He cannot accept that, and a democrat should be able to accept it.
Tim Farron
The right hon. Gentleman is quite wrong, because undoubtedly—I have said this very clearly—the majority of people voted on 23 June to leave the European Union. That is the direction of travel that the Government have a mandate to follow at this point. What the British people did not do, because they were not asked, is decide on the destination. As the Brexit Secretary rightly said in his speech just over four years ago, destination and departure are different things. It is right for democrats to make the case that the British people should not have their will taken from them and should not have a stitch-up imposed upon them.
Mr Kevan Jones
What would happen if we did have a second referendum and the British people rejected the offer? Where would that leave us?
Tim Farron
The wording on the ballot paper would be up for discussion, but our vision is that the United Kingdom would either accept the terms negotiated by the Government or remain in the European Union.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Jonathan Edwards
Plaid Cymru has no problem supporting the hon. Gentleman’s new clause. If the UK Government have 65 million people behind their negotiating position, as they state in their White Paper, what are they afraid of?
Tim Farron
The hon. Gentleman makes a strong point. It troubles me that those who argued for the sovereignty of Parliament, for the sovereignty of this country and for the enforcement of the will of the people, and all of that, are now so scared of the people. It makes me worry that they do not have the courage of their convictions.
Several hon. Members rose—
Tim Farron
I will make some progress because other Members need to get in. The deal must be put to the British people so that they can have their say, because that is the only way to hold the Government to account. We already know that, in all likelihood, 48% of the British people will not like the outcome of the deal. We now know the kind of Brexit that this Prime Minister intends to pursue, and we can pretty much bet that perhaps half of the 52% will not like it, either. They will feel betrayed and ignored, and the only way to achieve democracy and closure for both leave and remain voters is for there to be a vote at the end.
The Government claim to be enforcing the will of the people, but that is nonsense. If I was being very generous, the best I could say is that the Government are interpreting the will of the people; some would say they are taking the result and twisting it to mean something quite different. The Conservatives won a mandate in the May 2015 general election, having made two promises on this in their manifesto. The first was to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. The second was to keep Britain in the European single market. That second pledge was not caveated, time-limited or contingent on the outcome of any referendum. It was a clear pledge and the Government are now breaking it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Tim Farron
I have given way an awful lot.
The Government are making a choice, one that the British people have not given them permission to make. This choice is not just damaging to our country, but divisive. The Prime Minister had the opportunity to pursue a form of Brexit that united our country, achieved consensus, reflected the closeness of the vote, and sought to deal with and heal the divisions between leave and remain. Instead, she chose to pursue the hardest, and most divisive and destructive form of Brexit. She is tearing us out of the single market and leaving us isolated against the might of world superpowers.
I passionately believe that ending our membership of the world’s biggest free market will do untold damage to this country and to prospects and opportunities, especially for young people, who voted so heavily to remain. This market is vital for our economy, which is why my party refuses to stop making the case that this deal must include membership of the single market. Those who settle for access to the single market rather than membership are, I respectfully suggest, waving the white flag to this assault on British business and on the cost of living for every family in the country.
Given that the Government are making a set of extreme and arbitrary choices that were not on the ballot paper last June, the only thing a democrat can do is to give the people the final say. If the Prime Minister is so confident that what she is planning is what people voted for, why would she not give them a vote on the final deal?
Tim Farron
I am not going to give way, as I have given way many times and I want to bring my remarks to an end, for everybody else’s sake. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] I thought Members would like that.
The final deal will not be legitimate, it will not be consented to and our country will not achieve closure if it is imposed on the British people through a stitch-up in the corridors of power in Brussels and Whitehall. Democracy means accepting the will of the people at the beginning of the process and at the end of the process. Democracy means respecting the majority and it also means not giving up on one’s beliefs, rolling over and conceding when the going gets tough. You keep fighting for what you believe to be right and that is what Liberal Democrats will do. So we agree with the Brexit Secretary: let us let the people have their say. Let us let them take back control.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Let me start by correcting the record. I had something to do with the production of our manifesto, which clearly the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) was unable to read in the time available to him. It made no assertion such as he suggests. It was perfectly clear that what it said about the single market would be superseded were there a referendum with the unanticipated result of the British people taking us out of the EU as a whole. I regret that decision—I voted and campaigned to remain—but the British people voted to leave.
The interesting thing about this interesting debate is that it is one of those moments when the cloak of obscurity is lifted from an issue and the dynamic that is actually going on becomes clear. We have reached the crunch issue. We have reached the point at which we are discussing whether the effect of the Supreme Court judgment should be that Parliament has the option at some future date of overruling the British people and cancelling the leaving of the EU, or whether it should not have that ability.
My right hon. Friend the Minister made it perfectly clear that there will be a vote, but he also made it perfectly clear that that vote will be between the option of accepting a particular set of arrangements that have been negotiated by Her Majesty’s Government, and not accepting those arrangements and thereby leaving the EU without either a withdrawal agreement or an arrangement for the future. He is right to be optimistic that we can reach such agreements, but neither of us can possibly know whether we will. It is therefore right, if one is trying to follow the logic of the referendum decision, that the judgment of this House should simply be about whether the deal is good enough to warrant doing or, on the contrary, we should leave without a deal.
That is a completely different proposition from the one which, in various guises, some on the Opposition Benches—I exempt entirely from this the Opposition Front-Bench team—are putting, which is that Parliament should instead be given, by one means or another, the ability to countermand the British people’s decision to leave the EU by having a vote either on whether we should or should not leave or, in the proposition of the leader of the Liberal Democrats, on whether the people should have a second referendum on whether we should leave. In both of those propositions is a clear determination to undo the effect of the referendum, and we have now reached the point at which that has come out into the open.
Alex Salmond
The alternative is just to instruct the Government to negotiate a better deal. The phrase in the Conservative manifesto, which the right hon. Gentleman did not write, was:
“We say: yes to the Single Market.”
That sounds pretty unequivocal.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Not at all; at that moment we were a member of the EU and we said yes to the single market. I campaigned for the single market and I campaigned to remain part of the EU. That was the Government’s position in the referendum. But we also committed to a referendum, and the point of committing to a referendum, which we made perfectly clear not only in the manifesto but in a range of speeches around it, was that if the British people voted to leave, we would leave. It seems to me perfectly clear that the word leave means leave. It does not mean remain. The right hon. Gentleman is an expert parliamentarian, and he has been arguing in many ways, over a long time—the leader of the Liberal Democrats has been arguing it more explicitly—that leave ought to be translated as remain. I deny that that is a translation to which the English language is susceptible.
It seems to me to be perfectly clear that those of us who campaigned to leave and those of us who campaigned to remain have a choice: we can either accept the referendum result or reject it. I accept it, and some Opposition Members also take that view. It may be that some take the view that we should reject the referendum result, and that is a perfectly honourable view. The leader of the Liberal Democrats was effectively arguing, more openly, that we should reject the referendum result. I do not in any way decry his ability to argue that, but everybody who is arguing that should come out openly to that effect, as he did, and not pretend that they are trying to invent some method of parliamentary scrutiny. They are doing nothing of the kind; they are trying to invent a means of undoing the result of the referendum. This House has voted conclusively not to undo the result of the referendum. I think the House was right to do that, but whether it was right or not, it should do that with its eyes open and should not be gulled by anybody into passing amendments that have an effect that it has not signed up to openly.
Tim Farron
I want to clarify that from my point of view it is absolutely clear that this place, Parliament as a whole and, indeed, the courts have no right whatsoever to bar the will of the people. It would be absolutely wrong to overturn the outcome of the referendum last June. I am merely asking for the British people to have the final say on the deal, and that if they reject it, we should stay in the EU. I should also point out that voting to say we leave the EU means leaving the EU; it does not mean leaving the single market—it does not mean that for Norway and Switzerland.
Sir Oliver Letwin
There are two points at issue. First is the question of whether leaving the EU means leaving the single market. As I argued throughout the referendum to those I was seeking to persuade to remain, it does inevitably mean leaving the single market. I have always taken and continue to take the view that leaving the EU does entail leaving the single market. I regret that, but that is what it entails, in my view.
Leaving that aside, however, I accept that the Liberal Democrat proposition is that it should be not this House directly that countermands the referendum, but a second referendum. The proposition of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), which is perfectly decent and honourable, is that however many times it takes, the British people should go on being asked to reverse their original decision, and that one should never give up trying to do so because the right answer is to remain. That is a perfectly respectable proposition, but it is not the proposition of a democrat. It is the proposition of a clerisy that knows the answer and believes that people who vote otherwise are misguided and need to be led, time after time, to revise their opinion by whatever means until at last they give the answer that is required.
Unfortunately, that is the very dynamic that has given rise to this whole problem. We are at this juncture today, because our Government passed the Maastricht treaty against the will of the British people and without consulting them, and took us into a form of the European Union to which the people had never consented. That eventually produced the democratic result that the hon. Gentleman and I both dislike. His answer to that is to go on with that logic until at last the British people totally lose faith in any semblance of democracy in this country. Personally, I cannot accept that proposition. In the end, much as I would have preferred to remain, I would rather be in a country that is run as a democracy and that has faith in its governance. We can only achieve that today by fulfilling the terms of the referendum.
I want to turn briefly to the new clauses; by comparison it is a minor point. New clause 1 is fairly innocuous. I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Minister has indicated that we will not accept it, because there is a scintilla of doubt about whether it is itself justiciable. It says that the statement of the proposed terms of the agreement must be accepted. If that is written into the law, a very clever lawyer—Lord Pannick and others are very clever lawyers—might be able to mount some kind of judicial review of the question of whether the Government had in fact brought forward a statement of the proposed terms of the agreement that was adequate to the intent of the Bill, or the Act. I doubt that that would occur, so, personally, I do not have any very strong feelings about the new clause.
New clauses 99 and 110, about which some Opposition Members have spoken, are entirely different in character. Each of them makes it clear in two different ways that the House of Commons would be called on to make a set of decisions that are justiciable and potentially undermine the leaving of the EU.
In the case of new clause 99, notwithstanding my exchange with the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), it is perfectly clear in paragraph (b) that if Parliament found itself in a position in which it had not approved the withdrawal without agreement then it would have created an appalling conflict of laws. Article 50 is very explicit. It says:
“The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification”.
If the EU had agreed unanimously not to extend the period, the treaties would cease to apply, but Parliament would have, prospectively, voted not to leave. If Parliament has voted not to leave and the treaties do not apply, who in this House could possibly say which of these two laws is superior to the other? We would be in a position of intolerable legal conflict. Clearly, new clause 99 is deficient as a piece of legislation. I hope therefore that those who propose it will take that point and not press it.
New clause 110 is not as bad as new clause 99, although it is very odd because it says:
“any new Treaty or relationship with the European Union must not be concluded unless the proposed terms have been subject to approval by resolution of each House of Parliament.”
Now, it is possible to be subject to approval without being approved, and it is entirely unclear whether new clause 110 refers to approval or to the process that might have led to approval. That, itself, would be justiciable.
Quite apart from that bad drafting, the new clause creates a legal minefield, because it makes it clear that
“any new Treaty or relationship with the European Union must not be concluded”.
Now, one possible relationship that “must not be concluded” without parliamentary approval would be the relationship of not being in the EU, so the new clause, arguably at least—this could be contested in court—would be an opportunity for Parliament to reverse the intent of the referendum and deny leaving.
New clauses 99 and 110 look as innocuous as new clause 1. In fact, they are neither innocuous nor well drafted, but poorly drafted and highly noxious. They fulfil the purposes to which I referred in the earlier part of my remarks: to gull Parliament, if it were to accept either new clause, into putting itself in the position of potentially reversing the decision of the British people. I very much hope that even if the Minister is at any time remotely tempted to accept new clause 1, he will never accept new clauses 99 or 110 at any rate, and that we will steadfastly resist such amendments should they appear here or in the other place.
Charlie Elphicke
I have two concerns about new clause 1. The first is that it is already clear that the Government mean to involve Parliament throughout the whole process, with frequent statements, updates and discussions. The second is that we cannot know all the permutations around which the agreement and exit may be affected. To legislate for that now, before we know how it will all end up, is premature and would risk us binding the hands of the Government and negotiators.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I share my hon. Friend’s preference for not legislating in that respect. In fact, one can go wider. There are good reasons why, over a very long historical evolution, the House of Commons has always resisted legislation that governs its own proceedings. A number of authorities on our constitution have written that the nearest approximation to the constitution of the United Kingdom are the Standing Orders of the House of Commons. That is not a frivolous remark by those authorities; it is true.
Such a situation has arisen because we have resisted having legislation that governs the House of Commons in order to avoid the judges becoming the judges of what should happen in the House of Commons. We have invented, over a very long period, the principle of comity—that the judges do not intervene in the legislature, and the legislature does not intervene in the decisions of the judiciary. To legislate for how the House of Commons proceeds would move over a dangerous line. I am therefore with my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) in hoping that we will not accept new clause 1. I am just saying that if we were tempted at all to introduce any piece of new legislation at any stage, it should certainly look like new clause 1, not new clauses 99 and 110. Those new clauses would subvert the referendum, and we cannot allow that.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
I have some respect for the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), but I have been in enough Bill Committees over my short time in Parliament to have heard some of those arguments. When I hear hon. Members resorting to mentioning the drafting of a particular phrase—particularly when the right hon. Gentleman came to the phrase “subject to approval” of both Houses, as if it were somehow an alien concept to be resisted in all circumstances—I hear the last refuge of the parliamentary barrel scraper. If he has substantive arguments against new clause 110, which I advocate as it is in my name, it is better to engage with those, rather than dancing around trying to find second or third order arguments against.
It has been an interesting debate so far. There was a moment of frisson and excitement—well, excitement in parliamentary terms—at the beginning when the Brexit Minister, the right hon. Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones), who is still in his place, stood up and breathlessly said, “Let me give you a concession. I’ll indicate that something here is substantively different.” At the Dispatch Box, he clarified a little further—not much further—than the Prime Minister did in her speech at Lancaster House the timing of the vote that Parliament will have, but the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) quickly spotted that, in the definitions of when a negotiation is concluded and when it is signed off, there is still a grey area as to what the timing would be.
I suppose it is some small mercy that many hon. Members might say that this is some level of progress, but having been marched up to the top of the hill in the expectation that this was a great concession, I am afraid that, as the minutes have ticked by, we have marched back down the hill again. Through the probing of many hon. Members on both sides of the House, we have discovered a number of things about the vote, and we should not forget that we are trying in this section of the debate to secure a properly meaningful vote at the end so that parliamentary sovereignty can come first, as the Supreme Court emphasised in its judgment.
When pressed, the Minister had to admit that if we ended up with no deal, the House would not get a vote on that circumstance. That is deeply regrettable because new clause 110 deliberately talks about a “new Treaty or relationship”. A relationship, of course, involves the connection between two entities. That connection can be a positive new one, but it can also be one with a disjoint within it. We should have a vote if that relationship includes no deal.
The Minister said we would not be having a vote if there was no deal. That is extremely disappointing; it is not in the spirit of the concession being sought. We were looking for a concession on not just the timing of the parliamentary vote but the scope—in other words, the circumstances in which, having gone through the negotiations, we would be able to vote.
It is a little like travelling for two years down that road of negotiation, getting to the edge of the canyon and having a point of decision: are we going to have that bridge across the chasm—that might be the new treaty, which might take us to that new future—or are we going to decide to jump off into the unknown and into the abyss? Parliament should have the right to decide that. That is the concession I think many hon. Members were seeking, and it is not the concession we received.
Sir Oliver Letwin
The hon. Gentleman has given an extraordinarily important clarification of his new clause. As I suspected and speculated, “relationship” includes the potential for no relationship. Therefore, he is advancing the proposition that Parliament should be able to reverse the effect of the referendum and prevent the United Kingdom from being able to leave the EU.
Chris Leslie
No. As we saw on Second Reading, it is quite clear to all concerned that we will be leaving the European Union. That was the judgment in the referendum, that was the question on the ballot paper and the House came to that point of view. But it is important that Parliament reserves the right, as the Prime Minister has sort of indicated, to have a say on the final deal. This is our opportunity—potentially our final opportunity— to set out on the face of the Bill precisely what the circumstances would be.
Chris Leslie
No, I will not give way, because a lot of hon. Members want to get in.
What was particularly disappointing and deflating in the Minister’s so-called concession, which now feels quite hollow, was that he went on to say that if Parliament did decide to vote against a draft deal, he would not go back into negotiations—that the Government would feel that this was somehow “a sign of weakness”. I think that is entirely wrong; if Parliament says, “With respect to the Government, this is not quite good enough. Please go back and seek further points of clarification and further concessions in the negotiation,” that should be a source of strength for the Government. Quite frankly, I believe it strengthens the arm of the Government for them to be able to say, “You know, we would like to do this, but Parliament is really keen for a better deal.” It is quite useful for the Prime Minister to have that. New clause 110 is helpful to the Prime Minister. It is disappointing that the Minister did not just say this in response to pressure from hon. Members but had it in his script. He had pre-prepared the circumstances where he was going to say that he was not prepared to go back into negotiations if Parliament declined to give support to the new arrangements. We can see that the concession is not quite all that it was meant to be.
Claire Perry
One of the things that is troubling me is the principle of equivalence. As I understand it, the European Parliament has the opportunity to vote on the deal before it is presented to the European Council, and so, in effect, has a right of veto. I interpret that to mean that the deal is therefore then sent back to the negotiating team for further negotiation. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the strong points that we have to ensure is that those who voted to leave the EU, whose decisions we respect, have at least equivalence in terms of what their Parliament can do as compared with the European Parliament?
Chris Leslie
I commend the hon. Lady for making an incredibly important point in defence of the sovereignty of our Parliament. This is about putting Britain first, making sure that we defend and safeguard the rights of our constituents, and ensuring that the European Parliament does not have an advantage that we would not. If the European Parliament has the opportunity to reject the new arrangements, then so should we: it is a very simple point.
The Minister could make that verbal concession. He is a very able Minister, but Ministers can be here today and gone tomorrow; they come and they go. Having such clarity enshrined in the Bill is really important for hon. Members. This is a question that transcends party political issues. The Minister should hear the voice of Members in all parts of the Committee. We recognise that we are going to be leaving the European Union, but we want the best possible deal for Britain, and Parliament is sovereign here. Yes, we have Ministers who lead on the negotiations, but they cannot cut Parliament out of this altogether. That should be a source of strength for them.
Mr Harper
There is something I do not understand— I have been thinking about it since it was raised by the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). The hon. Gentleman asks whether we could have a vote in a situation of not having a deal. The leader of the Liberal Democrats has been clear in his view that if we said no to the deal, we would remain in the European Union. In a vote in a no deal situation, what are the two choices? Would one of them be remaining in the European Union?
Chris Leslie
My understanding is that we remain in the European Union until such time as the article 50 two-year period expires, after which, potentially, there is the famous cliff edge.
Now that we have had partial acceptance from the Government that the vote needs to take place in Parliament sufficiently early on the draft arrangements, I hope that Parliament would then have a sufficient period of time to say to Ministers, for example, “We like 90% of the deal that you’ve done, but we’d like you to go back again, within the time that remains, to get a slightly better deal.” This is simply the role that Parliament should have. Taking Parliament out of that process altogether would be a great shame.
Chris Leslie
I would like to move on because other hon. Members want to get into this discussion.
The wording of new clause 110 is very deliberate in talking about the new relationship as well as a new treaty. It is important that we take the opportunity that the Supreme Court has given us. Not only that, but we should listen to the entreaties of the Prime Minister herself in her own White Paper, where the 12th of her 12 points said that we would not aspire to a cliff edge—that we would try to get a deal. This new clause simply seeks to facilitate, in many ways, the role that Parliament could have in achieving the very thing that the Prime Minister has said that she wants.
I am afraid to say to the Minister that Hobson’s choice, take-it-or-leave-it style votes are not acceptable and not good enough for Parliament. We must have a continued say in this. I urge members of the Committee, across the parties, to consider the role that new clause 110 could play in making the vote meaningful.
Mr Grieve
It is a pleasure to participate in the debate. I agree with one comment that the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) made when he spoke to new clause 110: the problem that bedevils this debate is that we are in a grey and murky environment when it comes to ascertaining how the process will or should unfold. As somebody who campaigned to remain, that was one of the things that worried me at the time, but I have to accept that the electorate have spoken. For me, the key issue is how I can help the Government to navigate some of the reefs that seem to be present so that we can achieve a satisfactory outcome and try to give effect to the expressed will of the electorate.
Our problem is that we cannot predict what the situation will be in two years’ time. We have no idea what the political landscape will be in this country. We do not know what the economic conditions will be, and we do not know whether we will be doing very well in the run-up to Brexit or very badly. We cannot predict the political landscape on the European continent or the state of the European Union, and how that might affect the negotiations. Nor can we predict the wider security situation on our continent.
That is why the idea that the House in some way forgoes its responsibility to safeguard the electorate’s interests because a referendum has taken place is simply not a view to which I am prepared to subscribe. In such circumstances, we need to have regard to the situation and to the difficulties that the Government face because of its unpredictability, but we must rule nothing out.
To pick up a point that has been made—I repeat it, because it is my position and I shall hold to it until the end—public opinion on this matter may change radically, and the House would be entitled to take that into account. Equally, I accept that at the moment there is no such evidence, and it is our duty to get on with the business of trying to operate Brexit.
How do we introduce safeguards into the process? Of course there is an ultimate safeguard, as the House has the power to stop the Government in their tracks, but that tends to be a rather chaotic process that leads, usually, to Governments falling from office. It is an option that one can never entirely rule out in one’s career in politics, but it is not one that I particularly want to visit on my Front-Bench colleagues. However, this is an important matter, and one of the risks that they undoubtedly run in this process is that it could happen to them. We cannot exclude that possibility.
It is very much better that we should have some process by which Parliament can provide input and influence the matter in such a way as to facilitate debate and enable us collectively to reach outcomes that we can, at least, accept and that may be in the national interest.
Alex Chalk
On a point of clarification, will my right hon. and learned Friend indicate whether he perceives new clause 110 to be a potential vehicle for blocking Brexit and keeping us in the European Union? At the moment, that is not clear to me.
Mr Grieve
New clause 110 is certainly very well meaning, but I happen to think that there are some problems with it, and I will explain what they are in a moment.
One point that should be made is that it is usual for Government to bring important treaties to the House for approval before signing them. That is a common phenomenon; it is not unusual. There is a long history of doing that with important treaties, so we cannot simply say, “Normally, we ratify them after they are signed.” The obvious course of action, sequentially, is for the Government to publish the White Paper—I am delighted that we succeeded in securing one, because it sets out a plan—and then to get on with the treaty negotiations. In an ideal world, I would like the Government to come back before anything is concluded to ask the House for its approval and to indicate what they have succeeded in achieving. The House will have to make judgments at that time in relation to the overall situation.
Mr McFadden
I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way while he is taking us through this sequence. The Minister indicated at the beginning of the debate that the Government were bringing forward a concession that would make the process more meaningful. I do not expect him to comment, but it appears that No. 10 is now briefing that it is exactly the same as what the Prime Minister offered in her Lancaster House speech, meaning that nothing has changed.
Mr Grieve
I do not think I agree with that. I do not know what No. 10 may or may not be doing, but I had a role in trying to secure the concession read out by the Minister. It is by no means a perfect concession as far as I am concerned, and in a moment I shall come to some of the difficulties that I think the House has.
Angela Smith
The Daily Mirror is reporting that No. 10 has said that all the concession does is give clarity around the timing of the vote and nothing else.
Mr Grieve
It is absolutely right that the Government have indicated on a number of previous occasions that they would allow the House to have a say. Looking at the matter logically, I have to say that depriving us of a say would be a “light blue touchpaper and retire” moment, frankly. If a Government do not wish to bring themselves down, denying Parliament a say on a really important issue is just not feasible.
I had a role in trying to see how the Government could provide some assurance about the process. It is not perfect—the Minister has read out what he has—but I say to the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) that, as the shadow Secretary of State said, it is a very significant step forward from what had been said previously. To my mind, it has provided helpful clarification.
Angela Smith
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is being generous. No.10 is briefing that there is no real change and that the concession is not a concession. That is No.10 itself.
Alex Salmond
The House will have its say; the question is about the circumstances in which it has that say and the default position if it does not agree. May we adjudicate between the Daily Mirror, No.10, the Minister and the interpretation of the right hon. and learned Gentleman by having something on paper in the Bill? In that way, all our interpretations can be crystallised around an essential truth.
Mr Grieve
With characteristic sagacity, the right hon. Gentleman goes to the heart and nub of the problem. Is it readily possible to put into the Bill the intention read out at the Dispatch Box by the Minister? In fairness to the Minister and the Government, there are, I am afraid, some really good reasons why that presents difficulties.
The most obvious difficulty is the finite nature of the negotiating period under article 50. One of the things I was interested in was whether we could secure from the Government an undertaking that we would have a vote at the end of the process—before, in fact, the signing of the deal with the Commission. Contrary to what is set out in new clause 110, the Council of Ministers and the Commission are not two separate processes. The Commission will sign the initial agreement when the Council of Ministers gives it the authority to do so, and it then goes to the European Parliament for ratification or approval—call it what you will. Those are not two separate things.
Our problem is that if the negotiation follows the pattern that we have often come across in the course of EU negotiations—running to the 11th hour, 59th minute and 59th second—and we are about to drop off the edge, I confess that I do not particularly wish to fetter the Government’s discretion by insisting that at that precise moment they have to say, “We’re terribly sorry, but we can’t give you a decision until 48 hours after we have dropped off because we have to go back and get approval from both Houses of Parliament.” That is a real problem inherent in what to my point of view is the ghastly labyrinth into which, I am afraid, we have been plunged. We have to try to work our way through it with common sense.
Yvette Cooper
Was it the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s understanding that the Minister said that the deal would be presented to Parliament after it had been agreed by the Commission and the Council, but before it had been agreed by the European Parliament? If so, that sounds like a really late stage in the process. Does he think it is a problem if the European Parliament can send the deal back for negotiation, but the UK Parliament cannot?
Mr Grieve
There are bound to be difficulties because the whole process of negotiations under article 50, as the right hon. Lady will be aware, is rather one-sided. That is an inherent difficulty. Let us suppose for a moment that the negotiations are concluded in 18 months. I would rather hope in those circumstances that the Minister would say, “Thank you very much, but we will not even make the first agreement. We want to go back to the both Houses of Parliament even before we agree with the Commission because we have time to do so.” However, if it is the 11th hour, 59th minute and 59th second, I accept that the Government have a problem that is not taken into account by new clause 110.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
My right hon. and learned Friend’s preference is obviously for Parliament to be asked its opinion before any agreement has been signed with the Commission, on the authority of the Council. Does he accept that the 11th hour problem can easily be got around? In the tortuous process of European negotiations, stopping the clock is hardly unknown. If all the member states agreed that the British Government had to be given time to get the approval of Parliament, they would allow two or three weeks to elapse.
Does my right hon. and learned Friend also agree that we need something on paper to clarify these highly important points? Does he join me in inviting the Minister to table an amendment in the House of Lords to give precise effect to whatever the concession is meant to mean? If we pass either new clause 99 or new clause 110, it could be replaced by that Government amendment, if Ministers were to come up with a better clarification. What we cannot do is leave the debate to continue for the next two years on what the Minister did or did not mean when he made his statement to the Committee today.
The Temporary Chair (Mr George Howarth)
I say for the benefit of other Members that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has had a very long career—so long, in fact, that he is capable of recognising the difference between an intervention and a speech.
Mr Grieve
I am delighted to hear from my right hon. and learned Friend. I do not think it would necessarily be unhelpful—in fact, it would be very helpful—if the Government were in a position to amplify the Minister’s brief statement. However, I acknowledge—I think my right hon. and learned Friend knows this—that doing that by means of an amendment would be rather difficult. I know that Government draftsmen have extreme ingenuity and, indeed, that this issue might be taken up in the other place, but there are difficulties because there is a whole series of conditionalities. I certainly do not wish to fetter the Government in their ability to carry out the negotiation. It has always seemed to me that it would be a great error to do that, because we might undermine the ultimate outcome, to our own detriment. That has worried me throughout the process.
I do not want to take up more of the Committee’s time. Although I have had great difficulty over this matter today and in the days leading up to this debate, my inclination, for the reasons I have given, is to accept the assurance given by my right hon. Friend the Minister, which seems to me to be a constructive step forward. However, he has to face up to the fact that this issue will not go away. Even when we have enacted this Bill and triggered article 50, this will be a recurrent theme throughout the negotiating process that will come back much, much harder as we get closer to the outcome and as it becomes clearer, from all the leaks that will come from Brussels, what sort of deal or non-deal we will have, so the Government had better have a strategy. If their strategy is to avoid this House, I have to say to the Minister that they will fail miserably. I do not want that to happen. I want to guide this process as best I can, as a former Law Officer, towards a satisfactory conclusion.
Alistair Burt
My right hon. and learned Friend has played a considerable part in this process. Does he agree that the remarks of the Minister put the onus on the Government to ensure that the reporting process for the negotiations is meaningful? We cannot have a vote at the end of the process after 18 months of radio silence. The reporting process must be sensible and relevant. It must give the House a feel of what will happen because, if that is not the case, the vote at the end will mean very little.
Mr Grieve
I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend. I hope that the Government will listen because, as I say, this issue will not go away. It will keep coming back to dominate our politics until we have resolved it satisfactorily. That said, I would be being curmudgeonly towards the Minister if I did not thank him for having listened on this issue, for which I am grateful.
Sir Oliver Letwin
My right hon. and learned Friend has thanked the Minister, but I think that the Committee ought to thank my right hon. and learned Friend. He has set out the responsible version, which we did not hear from Opposition Members, of how to deal with this issue.
Geraint Davies
The right hon. and learned Gentleman’s whole speech seems to be predicated on the idea that the Government can go to and fro, and somehow finesse and negotiate something that Parliament might be happy with. Is it not the case, however, that it will be the EU27 that decide what we get? They will say, “You’ve triggered article 50, so here’s what you’re getting,” so is not this whole discussion cloud cuckoo land?
Mr Grieve
I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that I do not know. I actually think that none of us knows. We can make some broad assumptions that there appears to be some goodwill to try to reach a sensible agreement, and we can see how that could be easily derailed by political pressures and considerations within other EU states. We can also see that the United Kingdom is at a disadvantage in the negotiations for reasons that are plainly obvious. Having embarked on this course, however, we have to try collectively to apply common sense. I regret to say that I often do not hear common sense on this issue. Frequently, I do not hear it from some Conservative Members who seem fixated on ideological considerations that will reduce this country to beggary if we continue with them. We have to be rational in trying to respond to the clearly stated wishes of the electorate until such time as they show—they might, just as they showed between 1975 and last year—that they have changed their mind on the subject. Even then, the view might be of a completely different future and not a return to the past.
I will do my best to support the Government and I welcome the Minister’s comments. In the circumstances, having looked at the amendments, those comments are the best solution we have this evening. However, that does not mean that the Government will not have to continue thinking about how they involve the House. Otherwise, this House will simply involve itself.
Owen Smith
It is a genuine pleasure to follow the excellent and characteristically shrewd speech by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve). I agree wholeheartedly with one point he made towards the beginning of his speech: we cannot allow the fact that there has been a referendum to absolve this House of its duty to scrutinise the Government’s progress in the negotiations, and to act in the national interest. I wholeheartedly agree with him on that. That view is conditioning my entire approach to this debate.
I disagreed with the right hon. and learned Gentleman, however, on the substantive point he made in respect of the concession made by the Brexit Minister. I disagree that the Government have made a substantive concession today. I confess that I am far less sanguine than some of my right hon. and hon. Friends about that. It does not feel to me that we have moved much beyond where we were in the Lancaster House speech. What is being offered to the House is a debate right at the end of the process, at a point—we do not know when exactly—seemingly in the dog days of the process. A choice at that point will be between the deal on offer, which in my view is likely to be a bad deal—one predicated on our leaving the single market and the customs union; the rock hard Brexit we all feared—and no deal. If there is no deal, the Minister confirmed today that the country will face exiting the European Union on WTO terms. What does that mean for the country? According to the director general of the WTO, it would mean a reduction in trade of around £9 billion per annum to the UK. Before the referendum, the Treasury thought it would mean an annual reduction in receipts of £45 billion per year. That was the reduction in GDP it foresaw. It is an eye-watering sum, equivalent to putting 10p on the basic rate of income tax. That is why, above all else, we have to consider where we are going incredibly carefully. If we end up there, it will be a disaster for Britain.
I said earlier that I wanted to speak in favour of amendment 43, tabled in the name of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), but I would have liked to speak to my new clause 52, or even new clause 131, tabled by the Liberal Democrats, which would both have gone further and insisted on there being a second referendum. Apparently we cannot consider those amendments, however, because they would require a money commitment that the Bill does not have. That is ironic, given that the potential cost of falling out of the EU is £45 billion. Spending £100 million to make sure we do not do that seems like a pretty good deal.
Geraint Davies
Amendment 44, to be voted on tomorrow, makes provision for a referendum and valuation that does not need to be costed and therefore is in order, so those who want a second referendum on the final deal can vote for that amendment.
Owen Smith
I am pleased with that, and I hope that we will vote on it tomorrow.
I am insisting that we consider a second referendum—a confirmatory or ratificatory referendum, or whatever we want to call it—because I sincerely believe that Brexit will be a disaster for our country, and one that will cost us and future generations in lost trade, revenues and opportunities. I equally believe that it is a disaster for us to be dividing the country on this issue, as we have been, in respect of our values and the other crucial things we hold in concert.
Owen Smith
I will not. The right hon. Gentleman has spoken a lot already.
It was deeply destructive for us to have engaged in Brexit and unleashed a catalytic force of destructive politics, not just in this country but across the west. It is to my eternal regret that Parliament launched down this route without being sufficiently vigilant or diligent with regard to the risks we faced in the referendum or the nature of the referendum we were offering to the country. It was a profoundly flawed referendum in many ways, and one that many across the House feel could have been dramatically improved with greater scrutiny and care. Why did we not offer that scrutiny? I do not think that many Members on either side of the debate seriously thought we would lose. There was a widespread view that the referendum was agreed for ideological reasons—to solve the culture wars that have raged in the Tory party for 30-odd years—and it was not considered carefully enough.
The House has an opportunity to make amends for the mistake that we—not the people—made. The people voted on the terms and the question we offered them, with the information we provided and on the basis of the 50%-plus-1 margin we put into statute. We have an opportunity to rectify some of those mistakes, and I feel that we should. We should follow the view of the Brexit Secretary when he was on the Back Benches, and, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale said, we should have a final confirmatory referendum.
We had a mandate referendum, the result of which was that we should leave the EU, but we do not know what the terms of that leaving will be. It is perfectly legitimate for us to consider what they might be. It would not be to deny democracy to do that; it would be to double down on it. The problem with simply pushing for a vote in this place on the terms of the deal is that we run the risk of leaving the people doubly dissatisfied. It is perfectly possible for this House to reject the prospect of our falling out of the European Union on WTO terms, because of the costs that will become apparent when we see the extra costs for our car production, for chemicals, for financial services and for all the other things that would see their tariff price rise for export out of this country. It is perfectly possible, as the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield said, that we start to see a change in the country’s views in respect of Brexit when those things happen.
Anna Soubry
Let me say from the outset that it is really important that we all step back from the way we have done politics arguably for too long and to the detriment of British politics. I mean the idea that there are “concessions” to be made, that the people have bottled things, that briefings from No. 10 say that no concessions have been made, that concessions have been given and that they are this or that, that it is wonderful that one viewpoint has been triumphant over another or that the hard-line Brexiteers or the remoaners have been seen off. I find that not only tedious and inaccurate but something that does none of us any favours. Most of all, it does not do our constituents any favours, either. I, for one, am sick and tired of it.
I think it was back in September or October when a number of people on these Benches said that what now happens, as we leave the EU—for the referendum result has been accepted—transcends normal party political divides because it is so important. It is important, frankly, not for my generation but for my children and the grandchildren to come. As others have said—possibly on the Opposition side; I do not care, and I will give credit to whoever said it—this is the most important set of negotiations that we have entered for decades, and it is critical that we get them right because of the consequences for generations to come.
Can we, in effect, stop the sort of—I nearly said willy-waving, Mr Howarth, but that might not be a parliamentary term. However, that is actually what it is, and it is not acceptable any more. Let us try to come together to heal the divide. This needs to be said. Let me extrapolate from the vote, not just in my constituency but in Nottingham and with a look to Ashfield. The borough is bigger than my constituency and excludes Eastwood and Brinsley—wonderful places well worth a visit, but I will not go into the demography. In short, I think that the vote for leave in my constituency was about the national average—perhaps 51%, possibly as much as 52%. Some of my constituents voted to leave the European Union, as indeed did people across the country, because they wanted, and were adamant about this place having true sovereignty, or true parliamentary sovereignty.
The awful irony is that, since the vote—I am going to be very honest about this—many people feel that Parliament has been completely excluded. The Government had to be brought here. This Bill is before us because some brave citizens—and they were brave—went to court to say that parliamentary sovereignty must mean that: it must be sovereign and it must exceed the powers of the Government and the Executive. It has felt, as I say, as though this place has been excluded at all stages. And so it has come about that we are leaving the single market, and we have abandoned free movement. We have abandoned long-held beliefs in all parts of the House, with no cross-party divide. In some instances, we have voted against everything that we have believed in for decades.
Last week, when we voted to translate the result of the referendum into action, we did not vote according to our consciences or our long-held beliefs. I did not vote with my conscience, and if I am truthful about it, I am not sure that I voted in the best interests of my constituents. That upsets me, because I did not come here for the sake of a career; I came here because I wanted to represent my constituents and do the very best for them. I genuinely do not know whether I did that last week. However, I was true to the promise that I had made to my constituents. I had promised them that if they voted leave, they would get leave, and that is what drove me through the Lobbies last week with a heavy heart and against my conscience.
I do believe that I did the right thing, and I can look myself in the mirror every morning believing that I have been true to the promise that I made to my constituents; but I am jiggered if I am not now going to be true to my belief in parliamentary sovereignty. I do not want to vote against my Government. I have never been disloyal to my Government, even though at times—well, we won’t go into that. I have always been true and loyal to them. In this instance, however, I think that new clause 110 embodies admirable objectives. Goodness me, anyone would think that the new clause was revolutionary. All it would do is ensure that whatever happens—be it a deal or something else—Parliament must approve it, and I certainly support my Government and my Prime Minister in all their efforts to secure that deal.
I thank the Minister for the concession that he has made. If Members do not like the word “concession”, I will abandon it, but what the Minister has said has been the right thing to say. I completely agreed with the excellent speech made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve). This is progress, and it is the right thing to do. What concerns me is what will happen if, despite their best efforts, the Government fail, through no fault of their own, and we have no deal. How revolutionary is it to say, in the event of no deal, and at the right and meaningful time as we proceed to that new relationship, “Please could we have a say—not on behalf of Parliament, but on behalf of all our constituents?” That is why we come to this place.
Stephen Doughty
The right hon. Lady has got to the nub of the issue. I, too, would like new clause 110 to be pushed to a vote. Throughout this process, my constituents have seen Parliament sidelined and presented with a “deal or no deal” option. We face the horror of ending up on WTO terms, or, even worse, in some sort of limbo. Given the difficulties of negotiating even WTO terms, our country would be in a bigger mess than the one it is in already. That is what my constituents fear, and that is why they want Parliament to have a say.
Anna Soubry
I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman says, but I am also reminded of what was said by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield. As he rightly asked, who knows where we may be in two years’ time? No one seems to have thought about the issue in those terms. God forbid, but we may not have our Prime Minister then: we may have another Prime Minister, for whatever reasons. We may not have the same Secretary of State, or, indeed, the same Minister of State. Those circumstances could change, and other circumstances could change, such as the economy or the mood in Europe.
There may indeed be circumstances—and the hardline Brexiteers have surely missed this point—from which they may want to protect themselves. They may then want that debate. It is also possible that WTO tariffs and the other developments that the hon. Gentleman and I fear would be in our best interests. That is the whole point: we do not know where we shall be in two years’ time. It is right for us to keep our options open, and it is right for us to have a debate and a vote.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
The right hon. Lady is making her points with her usual eloquence. Does she agree that another context that has clearly changed since 23 June is the geopolitics of the world? We have a new leader in the United States, and some very serious concerns have been raised about Putin in Russia. We certainly do not know where we might be in two years’ time.
Anna Soubry
I absolutely agree, and that is exactly the point that many Members across this House are now making.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
The right hon. Lady is making a very honest speech, and I commend her for her honesty and decency.
We have just heard three excellent, calm, rational speeches explaining the things that are tearing this country apart. Is it not now time for us all to understand that not only are we talking to our own constituents, but that this House is being listened to across the world, that the people who will be deciding on Brexit are also listening, and that those who are ever more triumphalist, aggressive and bellicose will be the worst enemies when it comes to our getting to where we will need to be?
Anna Soubry
I completely agree with the hon. Lady, and this is part of the bringing together, the forming and building of a consensus not just in this place—I do not know why we should be so frightened of that here—but across the country at large. Families, friends and communities remain divided and we must now come together.
People have put their trust, as I have, in my Prime Minister and my Government. I have said to them, as somebody who has always believed in our continuing membership of the EU, that we lost that debate, and I now trust the Prime Minister and the Government when it comes to the abandoning of the single market and freedom of movement, and even, goodness forbid that this happens, leaving the customs union. I will continue to fight for all those things, because I believe in them, but I trust my Prime Minister and Government to get the best deal for our country. I think this Bill is a good vehicle to deliver the result and in many ways should not be amended, but all we are asking is that this place, in the event of no deal, actually has a voice and a vote.
If the Government cannot see the profound logic and sense of that, it will leave people like me with no alternative but to make my voice clear and heard on behalf of all my constituents and to support the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) in this amendment. It is reasonable and fair, and it encompasses, in what it seeks to achieve, the right thing.
Mr Harper
In the case of there being a deal, the Minister has given a clear commitment that the House will vote on it. In the case of there not being a deal, I do not know whether my right hon. Friend can answer the question as to what exactly the House will be voting on any better than the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) did, but my reading of new clause 110 is that it only deals with cases where a new treaty or relationship is being proposed; it does not deal with the case of there not being a deal.
Anna Soubry
I am grateful for that intervention as it gives me the opportunity to make it clear—I am sure the hon. Member for Nottingham East could explain this if it needs any further clarity—that I take the term “relationship” to be describing exactly that. If we do not have a deal, we then accordingly have a new deal— a new relationship, in other words—with the EU. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on putting the word “relationship” into that new clause, because it perfectly encompasses the eventuality of there being no deal—it encompasses all eventualities. It is not rocket science; it is not revolutionary; it is the right thing to do.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
I want to take the right hon. Lady back to her earlier remarks about a bad deal, no deal or failure. She said several things about the WTO. Just for clarity, how does she see the WTO? If the UK does not get a deal and ends up on WTO terms, will she see that as a failure by the UK Government?
Anna Soubry
I want to abandon this language of failure and success, and I say, with great respect to the hon. Gentleman, that I am not going to be playing that game.
I want us to come together and to get the best deal, and in the even that we do not get a deal, I want to make sure that this place absolutely gets that say and that vote. On that basis, I will continue to listen to the debate, but I have to say that I am minded to vote in favour of this amendment and make that clear not for any design to cause trouble or anything else, but to stand up for what is right for all my constituents.
Yvette Cooper
I commend the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) for her speech, much of which I agreed with. Like her, I voted to trigger article 50 on Second Reading because I think we should respect the referendum result, but like her, I campaigned for us to remain. I also agree that we have a responsibility across Parliament to get the best possible Brexit deal, and that we should all be involved in the process because so much has yet to be decided about the kind of deal we will get and the terms on which we will leave the EU. That is why I support new clauses 1, 99 and 110.
Mr Harper
To be fair to the right hon. Lady, I think she has gone some way towards answering this question. I think she said that if the Government judged that the best available terms were not good—if it was, by the Government’s definition, a “bad deal”—she would like them to put that in front of Parliament and ask us to decide whether it was indeed a bad deal. Can she confirm that that is what she is saying?
Yvette Cooper
That would indeed be one way of doing it, with the Government giving Parliament a substantive vote rather than simply heading directly for the WTO alternative without giving us an option.
The second challenge in the Government’s approach is that, if there were a deal, the timing of any vote would still make it difficult for Parliament. A vote would take place after the deal had been agreed with the 27 countries and with the Commission, but before it went to the European Parliament. Again, this Parliament would only get a choice between the Executive’s deal and the WTO terms, even if we knew that a better or fairer deal was on offer.
I hope that there will be agreement across the House on this point. I hope that the Government will come up with the best possible Brexit deal and that such a deal will have Parliament’s strong support and endorsement. If that does not happen, however, and if things unravel along the way, what opportunity will there be for Parliament to have its say and to try to bring things back together? That brings me back to the timing of the vote. Leaving it to the very end of the process would make that very hard to do.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government could request an extension to the article 50 process if we have not been able to conclude a positive deal? Does she also agree that a request for such an extension would be greatly enhanced and strengthened if it had a mandate from Parliament behind it? That should involve a partnership, with the legislature and the Executive working together to strengthen the national interest vis-à-vis our European partners.
Yvette Cooper
Again, that would certainly be one option. My understanding is that if the European Parliament voted down the deal, it would get the opportunity to say that the negotiations should be extended, but the UK Parliament would currently not get that opportunity. The purpose of the new clause is not to extend the negotiations—we should be trying implement the referendum decision—but if Parliament judges that there is a better offer on the table that would give us a better Brexit deal, we need safeguards to prevent the Government from running hell for leather towards an option that is bad for Britain.
Charlie Elphicke
The right hon. Lady is passionate on this subject. If at the end of the article 50 process—the two-year, winding-down clock—Parliament rejected the deal and nothing happened, we would leave. That would be an undesirable result, so my concern is that binding the Government’s hands with these new clauses is not in the country’s interests.
Yvette Cooper
I do not think that the new clauses would bind the Government’s hands. I agree that there is a concern that we could end up toppling off the edge of the negotiations without having a deal in place, which means that there is an incentive for all of us in Parliament to want a deal to be in place for Brexit, for future trade arrangements and for the transitional arrangements. Given how the Government have set out the arrangements, however, my concern is that there is no incentive for the Executive to try to get a deal that Parliament can support. If the Executive can simply go down the WTO route and reject alternatives without Parliament having any say, they will not have the right incentives to get the best possible deal.
John Redwood
Does the right hon. Lady agree that practically everyone in the House and in the Government would like tariff-free trade on the same basis as we have today? We entirely agree on that. The only issue is with what we can do individually and together to make it more likely that the other 27 member states will agree, because they will make that decision.
Yvette Cooper
I actually do agree with the right hon. Gentleman. We do want tariff-free trade, but he and I will probably differ on the customs union, for example. There would be huge advantages in staying in the customs union, but that does not affect the decisions that we might make on free movement or other aspects of the single market. I know that he would like us to be outside the customs union, but that may be a crunch question for the deal. The Executive might reject alternative options or better deals on matters such as the customs union on their own rather than give Parliament the opportunity to have its say.
Some of this comes down to timing. I accept that there is an article 50 timescale of two years and that it will be for the EU to decide what happens at the end if no deal is in place, but that also matters for the timing of the vote. At the moment, based on what the Minister said earlier, the vote will come at the very end of the process and could end up being at the end of the two years. The strength of new clause 110 is that it would require the vote to be held before the deal went to the European Commission, the European Council or the European Parliament. The advantage of that is that we would have a parliamentary debate and a vote earlier in the process, and that if there were no agreement, there would still be the opportunity for further negotiations and debates before we reached the article 50 cliff edge.
Mr Grieve
I hesitate to say this, but the House sometimes fails to realise its own powers. If it becomes clear during the course of the two years of negotiations that the Government are rejecting a negotiating opportunity that the House thinks is better than the one they are pursuing, there is nothing to prevent the House from asserting its authority in order to make the Government change direction; it is a question of whether we have the will to do it. The problem with the right hon. Lady’s point is that if we were right up against the wire, it could tip the Government into losing an agreement and there would be nothing to replace it.
Yvette Cooper
Were that the case, it would be Parliament’s responsibility to behave with the common sense that the right hon. and learned Gentleman advocated earlier. I would trust Parliament to have common sense and not push Britain towards an unnecessary cliff edge in those circumstances. That is not what Parliament wants to do. It has already shown that it wants to respect the decision that was made in the referendum, which is important, but it also wants to get the best deal for Britain and will be pragmatic about the options at that time.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman suggests that there might be an alternative way for Parliament to exercise its sovereignty, but what might that be in practice? We could have a Backbench Business Committee motion or an Opposition day motion that the Government could then ignore. We could have a no confidence motion, but that would not be the appropriate response when we should be considering the alternatives in order to get a better deal out of the negotiations.
If the right hon. and learned Gentleman were to come up with an alternative way for Parliament to exercise its sovereignty that I have not thought of, there might be an alternative to a vote today. If we want legislation that ensures that there is recourse to Parliament on these important issues, which will affect us for so many years to come, the right thing to do is to get something in the Bill.
Yvette Cooper
I will make some progress, because other Members want to speak.
There are many ways in which the Government could provide recourse to Parliament. They could table a manuscript amendment that simply puts into practice what they have said today, which would be immensely helpful and might provide the reassurance that many hon. Members need.
New clause 99 would mean that withdrawal would have to be through an Act of Parliament. On such a serious matter, there is a strong case for decisions to be made through Acts of Parliament—that would happen on other similarly weighty matters. To be honest, much of what new clause 110 would do would simply be to include in the Bill what the Minister has already said he will do. However, it would provide reassurance, with the added benefit of clarity that there will be a vote if there is no deal and we go down the WTO route. Also, the vote would be earlier in the process, which would give Parliament the opportunity to have a say before we get to the final crunch at the end of the negotiations.
The honest truth is that new clause 110 is not that radical. It would simply put into practice and embed in legislation the things that some Government Members have said they would like to achieve, so why do we not simply include it in the Bill so that we have that reassurance? Ultimately, there is a reason why all of this is important. Both sides in the referendum debate talked about parliamentary sovereignty, and with that comes parliamentary responsibility. We have already shown that responsibility by deciding to respect the result of the referendum on Second Reading, but with that comes the responsibility to recognise that we have to get the best possible Brexit deal for our whole country, rather than just walking away from the process of debating the deal. If we end up walking away, power will be concentrated in the hands of the Executive. I have never supported such concentrations of power, and every one of us should be part of making sure that we get the best possible Brexit deal.
Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve).
I agree with the principle that Parliament should vote on the final deal. I argued for that during the referendum, and I certainly have not changed my mind. On top of that, as people talk about Parliament being stripped of its role, it is worth pointing out that any domestic implementing legislation as a result of any deals reached at international level will, of course, require parliamentary approval in the usual way. The legal effects of Brexit at home will be dealt with through enactment of legislation in advance of the ratification of the international treaties.
On the international element, it is useful to distinguish between two key components of the diplomacy: the terms of exit and the terms of any new relationship agreement on trade, security and the other areas of co-operation that we all agree we want to preserve. With that in mind, I welcome again the White Paper and the Lancaster House speech that, as we talk about all the process and procedure, set out a positive vision for Britain, post-Brexit, as a self-governing democracy, a strong European neighbour and a global leader on free trade.
Mr Raab
I will make a little progress because other Members want to speak and we are quite far advanced in this debate.
I confess that, as a former Foreign Office lawyer who spent six years advising on both EU law and treaty interpretation, I find article 50 palpably clear on the surface. It disapplies the EU treaties two years after article 50 is triggered. The language is mandatory as a matter of treaty law, so if Parliament refuses to approve the terms of any exit agreement, the UK drops out without one.
Before there is general hysteria across the House, including among Government Members, let me say that there is a general principle of customary international law, which is also true of common law, that where there is a general rule, there can be exceptions, but those must be interpreted narrowly. There are exceptions on this. There is an exception if the EU unanimously agrees to extend the period under article 50(3). If we look at the clear language used, we can see that it is conceivable to imagine that happening only in very exceptional circumstances—if at all—for a limited period and in relation to the exit terms. That is what the provision says. The agreement on our post-Brexit relationship with the EU could be prolonged as long as both sides wish, but that will not delay the exit, and it is extremely doubtful that article 50(3) could be used to delay departure on those grounds. That means many of the amendments we are considering are, in practice, unlawful, as well as unwise.
Robert Neill
My hon. Friend is providing a careful and interesting analysis, but is not the crux of the matter this: if at the end of the day there is no deal and we are forced to leave, perhaps on WTO terms, which many of us believe will be deeply damaging, it will be a scandal if this House does not have the chance to have a say on it? It will be a betrayal. Those who might not support new clause 110 today hope that perhaps the Lords will look more carefully at this, as, for many of us, the Government are on very borrowed time.
Mr Raab
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Chair of the Justice Committee and I agree that there should be a vote. The challenge is that I have not really heard anyone explain an alternative negotiation strategy to the one advanced by the Government, other than staying indefinitely in some limbo within the EU. That would create more uncertainty for business and greater frustration for the public, and it would devastate, paralyse and eviscerate our negotiating hand.
Mr Raab
I am going to make a little progress, to be fair to other hon. Members.
There is a second exception, and it is not true to say that triggering article 50 is irreversible. It can be reversed but, as I explained earlier, we would have to follow the specific exception envisaged in article 50(5), which offers a means to reverse the process of departure: we leave and then apply to rejoin. That is the clear language in article 50, which of course is binding as a matter of UK law. It was a previous Labour Government, with Liberal Democrat support, who signed us up not only to the Lisbon treaty, but explicitly to the fetters we now face. That is why I suffer a little when I hear some of the railing against the difficult legal confines the Government find themselves in not just as a matter of their own policy, but as a matter of law.
Mr Raab
I will not give way, as I am going to make some progress.
The choice on the final deal is clear: the British Parliament can veto the exit agreement and/or the terms of the new relationship agreement, but in that case Britain would leave the EU without agreeing terms. On the new relationship agreement, the UK Government would of course be free to revert for further negotiations, but that could not delay or stop Brexit from happening under the terms of article 50. Those facts will rightly and understandably focus our minds, as they are doing here today, and with a sense of trepidation. They will also focus minds—this is why it was crafted in the way it was—on the other side of the channel, among our European friends. So, on the assumption that it would take at least 18 months to agree all the terms of any new relationship agreement, the idea that Parliament voting down any deal would send the UK back to a further round of meaningful negotiations, before Britain formally leaves, is at odds with the procedure in the Lisbon treaty, and I find it neither feasible nor credible.
Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)
My hon. Friend mentioned article 50(3), which does provide for transitional arrangements. It provides for a country to negotiate for the same arrangements to continue indefinitely until a subsequent date is provided at the end of the negotiating process for their implementation. Does he not agree that that should create a window for exactly the circumstances that he is so concerned about?
Mr Raab
My right hon. Friend is right in what he says, but if he reads article 50(3), he will see that it is explicitly referring to the withdrawal component of the diplomacy. But he is also right to say that there is scope for transitional arrangements or phased implementation to deal with some of the so-called “cliff edge” concerns that hon. Members are rightly worried about.
Mr Raab
I am going to make a bit of progress, to be fair to other Members.
In fairness to the previous Government, the ostensible aim of article 50 was to facilitate certainty, to focus the minds of the negotiating parties and to avoid withdrawal leaving a lingering shadow over not only the EU—although that was probably foremost in its consideration—but the departing nation. Many of the amendments and new clauses we are considering are counterproductive precisely because in seeking to fetter the Government in the negotiations they would weaken our flexibility and negotiating position and, critically, make the risk of no deal more likely. Members who support the amendments and new clauses must face up to the fact that they are courting the very scenario that they and we say we so dearly seek to avoid.
For my part, I could not countenance voting for attempts to put the negotiating aims in binding legislation and give them statutory force, because that would set the Government up to face a blizzard of legal challenges on the final deal. That would be deeply irresponsible because, whether unintentionally or otherwise, it would seem to me to amount to poison-pill tactics.
Paul Farrelly
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Prime Minister’s approach so far, in pandering not to those who want immigration reduced to the tens of thousands but to the nones-of-thousands lobby, risks our approaching the scenario he just outlined? That approach is nonsensical, because we need immigration, whether the people are crop-pickers or gene splicers. There are deals to be done and the Prime Minister needs to admit it.
Mr Raab
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but say gently to him that between open-door immigration and closed-door immigration there seems to me to be quite wide scope for sensible reciprocal arrangements that allow us to retain control over the volume of immigration and things such as residency and welfare requirements, and to make sure that the people who come here are self-sufficient and that we have the security checks and deportation powers we need. I am not sure that he and I disagree on that. Between cutting off all immigration and having open-door immigration, there is enormous scope for some sensible diplomacy.
I turn specifically to the amendments and new clauses. The Government’s assurances ought to be enough to satisfy those who might be tempted by new clauses 1, 18 or 99. The Government have rightly promised to give Parliament a vote on the final deal, and I pay tribute to the shadow Minister, the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), who approached that matter in a sensible, sober and responsible way.
The other cluster of new clauses that have attracted attention are new clauses 19, 54 and 137, which would require that a parliamentary vote against the deal would send the UK Government back to renegotiate with the EU. As someone who has negotiated treaties—mainly bilateral treaties, but some multilateral—I can entirely understand why that is attractive. The truth is that if Parliament does not agree the exit terms, it is theoretically possible that the UK Government could revert to meaningful negotiations with the EU, if the draft agreement is concluded within around a year or, exceptionally, if the EU agreed a short extension. In practice, that is utterly inconceivable. It is total fantasy. Why would the EU give us better divorce terms just because Parliament did not like them? In reality, we would not even get the extension or better terms, and would leave without an agreement.
If Parliament does not approve the agreement on the new relationship, there is no express provision for the extension of negotiations and no clear basis for withdrawal to be delayed. We would exit on two years, but could revert back to revived negotiations on the future relationship. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) pointed out, the question of whether implementation would be phased and of transitional arrangements would become far more salient. Besides those legal considerations, any delay to the timetable would inject an additional dose of uncertainty into the entire process, which would be bad for business and frustrating for the public, and which would harm rather than reinforce our negotiating position.
New clause 28, which deals with parliamentary approval before the European Parliament has its say, has been dealt with by the reassurances given by the Minister, which I certainly welcome. I am not convinced by new clauses 110 or 182, on parliamentary approval happening before the Commission concludes the new relationship agreement, because we would not know the date on which it would approve such an agreement and could not know the terms of the deal until it had done so. That reinforces in my mind the concern that exists about Members who, in good faith, are trying to dictate what will inevitably be a fluid diplomatic process through the entirely inappropriate vehicle of binding legislation. That cannot hope to cater for all the potential eventualities that we need to be ready to adapt to as a matter of multilateral diplomacy.
Finally, let me turn to amendment 43, which has been tabled by the Liberal Democrats and the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) in particular. In a competitive field, this is certainly the clear winner for the worst amendment that has been tabled. It is probably illegal because there is no scope for a departing member, which has triggered article 50, to reverse its decision. That is clear from article 50(5).
The amendment is clearly designed to reverse Brexit, despite Members passing the 2015 referendum legislation by six to one on the very clear understanding that we would respect the result. The amendment is probably beyond undemocratic and illegal; it is just plain tricksy. It was open to any Member to table amendments and then to stipulate that there would be a second referendum —why not have the best of three?—to give the British people a chance to do the hokey cokey. However, there is a very clear reason why no one tabled such an amendment: the public would have shuddered at the prospect. No one proposed such an amendment and we did not hold the referendum on that basis.
I support a final vote on the deal, and welcome the fact that the Government are striving to reassure all Members about the Bill, but this House should be under no illusion that such a vote cannot and would not frustrate the verdict of the people. In fairness, I think that most Members from all parts of the House recognise that. Many amendments on which we are deliberating in this group are legally flawed. Above all, these new clauses would attempt to tie up the Government in procedural knots at the crucial moment in the two years of Brexit negotiations. The public expect all of us to be focused on securing the very best deal for the whole country and not, either intentionally or inadvertently, to be laying elephant traps that can only make striving for that deal harder. For that reason, I hope that the Committee will vote down all the amendments and new clauses this evening.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Temporary Chair (Mr George Howarth)
Order. There are four hon. Members who still want to contribute and who have given their names to amendments. However, the Government are likely to come back at 6 o’clock. If everyone takes less than five minutes, I might be able to squeeze in at least four more speakers. It is a gentle reminder; there is no time limit. I call David Lammy.
Mr Lammy
I will try to be brief.
I am now entering my 17th year in the House. In that time, it is usual to strike up relationships across the House. I want to make a confession: I have a relationship with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith)—I am sorry that he is not in his place—who has the unusual honour of also being a fan of Tottenham Hotspur. There have been occasions when we have been at White Hart Lane together, talking about his favourite subject: the sovereignty of this Parliament and the European Union. There have been occasions when my eyes have glazed over, because I do not see the issue in the same way.
In the past few months, as I have grown increasingly depressed about the direction of travel on which we are now set, I have looked for a silver lining. The silver lining is, of course that, in the 17 years that I have been an MP, we have been in the European Union—effectively, we had decided to pool some of our sovereignty with Europe, which meant that I had less power. Well, the power is now coming back, and, as a result of all the work of the right hon. Gentleman, the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and others, I will be a powerful Member of Parliament. Yet we are now in a situation, in this important time, in which we need that sovereignty, and the very same people who were asking for it now stand up to argue that we should put that power somewhere else.
Many hon. Members who have been Back Benchers for some years argue that we should put the power with the Executive, and that the Prime Minister and her Cabinet should make all the huge decisions about our economy and direction of travel. They argue, perversely, that the power should solely be with the 27 other countries of the European Union, and that they should determine our direction alongside the European Commission, the Council and, ultimately, the European Parliament—power everywhere else except here. And who will suffer as a consequence of this Parliament not acting? Our constituents. That is why this is not the time to play party politics and why I was happy to vote against my party last week. This is absolutely the time to stand up for our constituents.
Claire Perry
I find myself in rather a strange place because it is very difficult for somebody in my position to countenance voting for an Opposition amendment. I have always respected the pragmatism and politics behind most decisions, but I have always had a sneaking admiration for colleagues who flouted the Government Whip with impunity, which was not, of course, what I told them when I was in the Whips Office. I heard in so many cases that their decision was a point of principle. Indeed, the Secretary of State for Brexit was among the most principled politicians in the last Parliament, rebelling dozens of times.
To me, this is very much a point of principle, and three principles have exercised me and many colleagues. The first is the thorny question of what parliamentary sovereignty means. Far be it from me to take exception with that very learned gentleman, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), but my understanding is that article 50 was effectively drafted on the back of a fag packet by negotiators, specifically at the request of UK participants in the treaty, on the expectation that it would never be triggered; such a situation was inconceivable. Therefore, it seems not inconceivable to set out what we believe our sovereign parliamentary process should be against that rather poorly drafted aspect of the treaty.
So many leave campaigners told me that they were campaigning to restore our sovereignty. That sovereignty has now been confirmed by the Supreme Court. It is absolutely right that we have had confirmation today that Parliament will have a vote on the terms of the deal. The timing of that vote is crucial. It will not be a done deal that is then brought back to us. There will be an opportunity to influence, shape, negotiate and do what we have done so well over the past four days—days, by the way, that we were not intended to have. We have had the opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty of what it means to trigger article 50, and what a vote would look like. I, for one, feel far better informed than I did at the start of the process. This is exactly what we are sent here to do.
Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)
I agree with my hon. Friend about Parliament’s vital role in scrutinising the Bill. For me, it is about the only way that we will bring the 48% with us, because they are feeling very left behind at the moment. In practical terms, how can we achieve that scrutiny? If the deal is not good enough, what can we actually do to change it?
Claire Perry
We can probe, we can ask questions, and we can bring our collective knowledge and wisdom, of which there is an enormous amount on these Benches, and our understanding of what alternatives there might be. If there is no alternative, or there is no process, then at least we know that, but we have bought today, with the concession given by the Minister, an option that was not on the table at the start of this process and. when you are negotiating in an uncertain environment, optionality is hugely valuable.
My second point of principle, which I referenced earlier, relates to equivalence. If we look at the negotiation for exit, it is bizarre that while the European Parliament has a number of go/no-go decision points where it effectively has a right of veto, we have been scared to give the same to this Parliament. That does not sit well with me as somebody who wants to stand up for this sovereign Parliament; it is a very perverse thing, and I am glad we are trying to correct it.
The third point of principle relates to representation. I am still mystified that there are those who think they should be scared of Parliament. How many more votes do we need to have to demonstrate the overwhelming support in this place for executing the will of the British people? They gave us a mandate, and we are not going to replay the arguments. We have a mandate, and we know we need to get on with this. We have now had two votes suggesting that right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House—possibly with the exception of those from north of the border—accept the view of the Union. We should not be scared of bringing these things to Parliament.
Ultimately, are we not here to represent our constituents? We do not want a second referendum, and I completely agree with my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), that it would be absurd to go back. However, we are the next best thing: we are the opportunity to bring up what our constituents are saying, and many of them still have lots of questions about what this process looks like. We can put those questions to each other and to Ministers, and we can represent our constituents. The principle of representation is absolutely vital.
I have to say that the tone of these debates—we have heard a little of this today, although things are starting to calm down—sometimes borders on the hysterical. I feel sometimes that I am sitting with colleagues who are like jihadis in their support for a hard Brexit. No Brexit is hard enough—“Begone you evil Europeans. We never want you to darken our doors again!”[Interruption.] People say, “Steady on, Claire,” but I am afraid I heard speeches last week making exactly that point. The point is that the more we get these things out in the open, the more we will not be led by some of the more hysterical tabloid newspapers out there, but actually have an open and frank conversation with each other about what we want to do better.
On the issues of scrutiny, representation and parliamentary sovereignty, I am very interested in the proposals made by the Opposition. I am pleased to say I have heard some very substantial concessions today on the timing and the detail, although there is an equivocality about the ending, which still does not sit well with me. While it might not be the Government’s and the Prime Minister’s intention to bring forward a bad deal, we still have not allowed ourselves to put that to the test. So before I decide which way to vote, I am going to listen very carefully to what the Minister has to say. I am hoping to get his assurance that, if there is no deal, that can be put within the bounds of what I think should happen, which is a parliamentary decision on this vital step for our country.
Mr McFadden
There are two issues at the heart of today’s debate, which is about the role of Parliament in judging the final deal. The first issue is the timing of any such vote, and the second is how to make that vote meaningful. I want to speak to new clause 137, which is in my name and those of my hon. and right hon. Friends.
A significant part of the argument for leaving the European Union was about restoring parliamentary sovereignty so that this House could take decisions about the country’s future, yet attempts to assert that sovereignty have been constantly dismissed as undermining the Government, if not the country. The cry over and over again has been, “Blank cheque, blank cheque, blank cheque.” We should not give a blank cheque; there is a legitimate role for us.
The new clause seeks to do two things: first, to enshrine in the legislation the Prime Minister’s promise of a parliamentary vote on a final deal; and, secondly, to assert what can happen if Parliament declines to approve the final deal.
The Government have set out their aims in the White Paper and in other statements. The White Paper defines the Government’s aim as
“the freest possible trade in goods and services between the UK and the EU.”
The Secretary of State for Brexit said that this would be
“a comprehensive free trade agreement and a comprehensive customs agreement that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have”.—[Official Report, 24 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 169.]
That is the test the Government have set themselves. I wish them well in ensuring that we do get the exact same benefits as we have.
This new clause does not seek to tie the Government’s hands in the negotiations. It does not seek to influence the content; it focuses on what happens if Parliament declines to approve the final deal. The choice that we do not want to be presented with, I am afraid, is the one that the Minister set out at the beginning, which is defining as success whatever the Government negotiate or falling back on the WTO. I do not want to go through the WTO rules in detail, but let me give just one example: a 10% tariff on car exports. Take the Nissan Qashqai, proudly made in the north-east of England. That tariff would mean a surcharge of over £2,000 on each car made in the north-east, compared with a competitor vehicle made in a plant in the European Union, or even another Nissan model made in the EU. On food and drink, the tariffs are 20%, and on some agricultural products they are even higher. That is before one even gets to the weakness of enforcement mechanisms within the WTO, where businesses cannot even take enforcement cases and only Governments can do so.
The Government themselves say that they do not want this option. They set out 12 points in their White Paper, the 12th of which says that they want
“a smooth, mutually beneficial exit”.
Paragraph 12.2 says:
“It is…in no one’s interests for there to be a cliff-edge for business or a threat to stability…Instead, we want to have reached an agreement about our future partnership by the time the two year Article 50 process has concluded.”
This new clause empowers Parliament to avoid the very outcome that the Government themselves say in the White Paper that they want to avoid. For that reason, it is not, as too many Members have asserted, some attempt to undermine the Government. We should be using the power of Parliament to influence these negotiations.
Let me deal with the “five minutes to midnight” point made by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve). It is hardly unknown for the European Union to schedule another round of talks—it happens very frequently. In these circumstances, we would be entirely within our rights to strengthen our Government’s hand by saying, “Go back and renegotiate on this point or that point.”
Mr Grieve
I do not disagree with the right hon. Gentleman, but I want to emphasise this point. All sorts of things are possible—the Commission and the Council may decide to extend the period of negotiation—but we have to look at the legal implications of what we pass into law by amendments. If the new clause is prescriptive in a way that could allow the problem to occur that has been identified—dropping off because one has lost time and cannot come back to this House—we cannot just ignore that. We have to find a way round it or accept the assurances that the Government give.
Mr McFadden
The new clause is very simple on this point. It asks that in those circumstances the Government will seek to negotiate an alternative agreement. That is perfectly reasonable.
Mr McFadden
I do not have much time so I am going to conclude.
The point of all of this is to avoid the choice between being told that we have to define as success, on the first account of it, whatever the Government have managed to negotiate, or default to the WTO. To be honest, a concession on timing that does not allow us to ask the Government to go back and negotiate a better agreement is simply holding a gun to Parliament’s head a few months earlier than would otherwise have been the case. This new clause is about taking all the claims made for decades about parliamentary sovereignty and making them real, rather than giving us a choice between deal or no deal, take it or leave it, my way or the highway. Frankly, Parliament and the country deserve better than that.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
Order. I am happy to call the right hon. Gentleman if he can speak for only two or three minutes.
Mr Tyrie
I will limit my contribution to a couple of minutes and confine it to a few questions for the Minister. The concession that he gave at the start is significant; the question is: how significant? What did he mean when he said that the Government “will bring forward a motion on the final agreement”? He must mean the proposed agreement. I noticed that he changed the wording to “final draft agreement”. Is he talking about the draft agreement, or a final agreement, at a point at which it is too late to change it?
Secondly, the Minister says that he expects and intends that this place will get a say before the European Parliament. In what circumstances is it practically possible for us not to have that if the Government want us to have it? Thirdly, will he answer the equivalence point that has been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry)? We must be able to have at least as much say as the European Parliament.
Fourthly, will the Minister clarify that the WTO cliff-edge issue needs to be subsumed into the issue of transitional arrangements? If the Government put the need to negotiate transitional arrangements as their No. 1 priority and they succeed at least in getting a deal on that, that deal can trigger article 50(3) to enable an extended period of further discussion, should all other aspects of the deal fail. Does he accept that that is a reasonable and sensible approach to take the debate forward? If he does, I might consider not voting against the Government, as I am minded, uncharacteristically, to do. I will listen carefully to what he has to say.
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
I call Mr David Jones.
Mr David Jones
Thank you very much indeed, Ms Engel, for giving me a second bite of the cherry.
May I deal first with the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), the Chair of the Treasury Committee? He asked direct questions that had been raised during the debate. I thought that I had answered them with some clarity, but I am happy to clarify further. First, he asked what this honourable House would be asked to approve. It would be the final agreed draft of the agreement before it was submitted to the European Parliament. He mentioned that we had indicated that we expected and intended that that would happen before the European Parliament debated the agreement. The reason why that formulation is used is that what the Commission does with the information it sends to the European Parliament is out of our hands. Although we would do our very best to ensure that the House voted first, we cannot control what the Commission does.
My right hon. Friend raised the issue of equivalence. Of course, the difference is that the European Parliament has a role prescribed for it in article 50, but this House does not. In practical terms, I suggest that a vote of this House would be a matter of significance. Finally, he raised transitional arrangements, which have been mentioned by a number of hon. Members. As the Prime Minister has already made clear, it is our intention, if necessary, to look to a period of implementation for whatever arrangement we arrive at with the European Union.
Mr Clarke
I will be brief, for a change. My right hon. Friend has confirmed that the vote will be put to Parliament after the deal has been done with the Commission and the Council. It is therefore a done deal, and the European Parliament and this House can either take it or leave it. The alternative is the WTO. Will he confirm that that is exactly what was offered in the White Paper a few days ago?
Mr Jones
What we have sought to do today is to provide clarity, and I hope that, through my previous contribution and now, I am providing that clarity. It would indeed be the final draft agreement that we would contemplate being put before the House.
As I was saying, this has been an important debate and the quality of the contributions has been extremely high. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) said, we have to remember that this will be the most important negotiation that this country has entered into for at least half a century. It is therefore entirely right that the House should play an important part in the process of the negotiation of the agreement.
I have heard the words “rubber stamp” being used, but that is far from what the Government have in mind. We have every intention that, throughout the process of negotiation, the House will be kept fully informed, consistent with the need to ensure that confidentiality is maintained. I do not think that anyone would regard that as an unreasonable way forward. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) highlighted the need for reporting, and the Government intend to do that.
I should like to speak about a number of other measures that I have not dealt with previously, but which have attracted attention in the debate. New clause 18 would specify that any new treaty with the EU should not be ratified except with the express approval of Parliament. I can only repeat the commitment that I have made several times this afternoon at the Dispatch Box: there will be a vote on the final deal.
John Redwood
Many of us welcome the progress that has been made and my right hon. Friend’s assurances. It is clear from what he has said that there will be every opportunity for debate, discussion, questions and votes, as is proper in this House.
Mr Jones
That is absolutely right. The suggestion that the Government would not keep the House informed is really unworthy, given that we have been scrupulous in doing so thus far.
New clause 110 is similar to new clause 18, but it also specifies that any new relationship would be subject to approval by a resolution of Parliament. I believe that the measure is unnecessary. It asks for a vote of each House on a new treaty or any new agreement reached with the EU, but I repeat again that there will be a vote on the final draft treaty and any other agreement. In any event, as my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) pointed out, it calls for a vote before terms are agreed, leaving it open to the Commission to change its mind or position without any apparent recourse for this place.
Mr Jones
I will not give way as I have very little time.
New clause 137 would require the Government to seek to negotiate a new agreement with the EU if Parliament rejects a deal. Again, I reject the measure. Although we are confident that we will achieve a deal acceptable to Parliament, if Parliament were to reject that deal, it would be a sure sign of weakness, as I have said, to return to the EU and ask for other terms. We would be likely to achieve only a worse deal. Furthermore, there is no obligation on the EU to continue negotiating with us beyond the two-year period specified in article 50.
New clause 175 would effectively require the Government to request that we remain a member of the EU if the terms were not approved by Parliament. Frankly, to do so would be to betray the outcome of the referendum, and the Government are not prepared to accept that. I must make it absolutely clear that the Government want Parliament to be engaged throughout this process.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
Will the Minister confirm that the Government’s position is to diminish the status of this House compared with that of the European Parliament in respect of having oversight of this process?
Mr Jones
That is absolutely ludicrous. The European Parliament’s role comes at the end of the process; it has oversight to the extent that it rubber-stamps the agreement or not.
New clauses 18 and 19 would require any new treaties agreed with the EU to be subject to the ratification of Parliament. We have always said that we will observe the constitutional and legal obligations that apply to the final deal, and that remains the case. As we have confirmed, the final agreement will be subject to a vote of this House before it is concluded.
Seema Malhotra
Will the Minister abide by the recommendation in the report of the Exiting the European Union Committee that when the Government bring the deal to Parliament, they should have regard to the requirement that Parliament has adequate time to consider any statement before the proposed terms are put to each House for approval?
Mr Jones
We will, of course, consider all the recommendations of the Select Committee and respond formally to its report in due course.
We approach the negotiations not expecting failure, but anticipating success. Let me remind Members that we are seeking in the Bill to do one simple, straightforward thing: to follow the instructions we received from the British people in the referendum. Remaining a member of the European Union is not an option. The process for leaving the EU is set out in article 50, and it is not within our power unilaterally to extend the negotiations.
New clause 99 envisages yet another Act of Parliament to approve the arrangements for our withdrawal and our future relationship with the EU. It would require yet another Act of Parliament for us to withdraw from the EU in the absence of a negotiated deal. The new clause is wholly otiose. While we are ready for any outcome, an exit without a trade agreement is emphatically not what we seek. However, let me be clear that keeping open the prospect of staying in the EU, as is envisaged by new clause 99, would only encourage the EU to give us the worst possible deal in the hope that we would change our mind.
Amendment 43 calls for a referendum on our membership of the European Union after we have negotiated a final deal. That was tabled by the Liberal Democrats.
This has been an important debate. We have considered the new clauses and amendments very carefully but, for all the reasons I have given, we reject them and invite Members not to press them to a Division.
Keir Starmer
I have listened carefully to the debate. There are inevitable problems with an 11th-hour concession, and there have been claims and counter-claims about the nature of the concession made. Whatever No. 10 may or may not be briefing, until today there was never a commitment to a vote on both the article 50 deal and the future agreement with the EU; there was never a commitment to a vote, before the agreement was concluded, on a final agreed draft—it is simply rewriting history to suggest that there was—and there was never a commitment to a vote in this House that is intended and expected to take place before the vote of the European Parliament. Those three things have never been said before, and I have gone through all the records before making that assertion. For anybody to suggest that this is not a significant concession is to be blind to these developments.
I recognise that that leaves a number of unanswered questions, most importantly about the consequences and precise timing of the vote. As the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) says, to some extent we just do not know. From the various work I have done in Brussels, it is quite clear that the plan there is to have a deal that is capable of being put to the European Parliament in October 2018. That should be the ambition, because if a deal were put to this House in October 2018, there would be a number of consequences for the House to consider. I accept that there are questions. It is important that others reflect on the concessions that have been made and consider what kind of amendment might capture them.
In the circumstances, I will not press new clause 1 to a Division in the hope—although this is not my decision—that it will allow space for other new clauses to be put to the vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
Clause, by leave, withdrawn.
New Clause 110
Future relationship with the European Union
“(1) Following the exercise of the power in section 1, any new Treaty or relationship with the European Union must not be concluded unless the proposed terms have been subject to approval by resolution of each House of Parliament.
(2) In the case of any new Treaty or relationship with the European Union, the proposed terms must be approved by resolution of each House of Parliament before they are agreed with the European Commission, with a view to their approval by the European Parliament or the European Council.”—(Chris Leslie.)
This new clause seeks to ensure that Parliament must give approval to any new deal or Treaty following the negotiations in respect of the triggering of Article 50(2), and that any new Treaty or relationship must be approved by Parliament in advance of final agreement with the European Commission, European Parliament or European Council.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 42—Equality—impact assessment—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that she will publish an equality impact assessment, 18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or prior to a vote on the negotiations in the European Parliament, whichever is sooner.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to publish an equality impact assessment in good time before Parliament votes on the final agreement.
New clause 43—Customs Union—impact assessment—
‘(1) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that she will publish an impact assessment of the effect of leaving the Customs Union on the United Kingdom.
(2) The impact assessment in subsection (1) shall be laid before Parliament 18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or prior to a vote on the negotiations in the European Parliament, whichever is sooner.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to publish an impact assessment of leaving the Customs Union (independently of decisions on the Single Market) in good time before Parliament votes on the final agreement.
New clause 44—Supply Chains—impact assessment—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that she will publish an impact assessment of the risks to supply chains presented by the introduction of non-tariff custom barriers, 18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or prior to a vote on the negotiations in the European Parliament, whichever is the sooner.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to publish an impact assessment on the risk to supply chains from any new non-tariff barriers in good time before Parliament votes on the final agreement.
New clause 45—Environmental protection—impact assessment—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that she will publish an impact assessment of the effect on—
(a) environmental protection standards,
(b) farm business viability,
(c) animal welfare standards,
(d) food security, and
(e) food safety
18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or prior to a vote on the negotiations in the European Parliament, whichever is the sooner.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to publish an impact assessment on environmental standards, farm viability and food safety in good time before Parliament votes on the final agreement.
New clause 46—Climate change—impact assessment—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that she will publish an impact assessment of the value of participation in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the Single Energy Market in achieving our climate change commitments, 18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or prior to a vote on the negotiations in the European Parliament, whichever is the sooner.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to publish an impact assessment on climate change objectives and the contribution of the Emissions Trading System and the energy market to meeting these in good time before Parliament votes on the final agreement.
New clause 47—Research and Development collaboration —impact assessment—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that she will publish an impact assessment of the effect of—
(a) leaving Horizon 2020, and
(b) setting up alternative arrangements for international collaboration on research and development by universities and other institutions
18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or prior to a vote on the negotiations in the European Parliament, whichever is the sooner.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to publish an impact assessment on leaving Horizon 2020 and alternative Research and Development collaborations in good time before Parliament votes on the final agreement.
New clause 48—Agencies—impact assessment—
‘(1) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake that she will publish impact assessments of—
(a) rescinding membership of the agencies listed in subsection (2), and
(b) setting up national arrangements in place of the agencies listed in subsection (2).
(2) Subsection (1) applies to the—
(a) Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER),
(b) Office of the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC Office),
(c) Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO),
(d) European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex),
(e) European Agency for the operational management of large-scale IT systems in the area of freedom, security and justice (eu-LISA),
(f) European Asylum Support Office (EASO),
(g) European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA),
(h) European Banking Authority (EBA),
(i) European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC),
(j) European Chemicals Agency (ECHA),
(k) European Environment Agency (EEA),
(l) European Fisheries Control Agency (EFCA),
(m) European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA),
(n) European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA),
(o) European Medicines Agency (EMA),
(p) European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA),
(q) European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA),
(r) European Police Office (Europol),
(s) European Union Agency for Railways (ERA),
(t) European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), and
(u) European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
(3) The impact assessments in subsection (1) shall be laid before Parliament 18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or prior to a vote on the negotiations in the European Parliament, whichever is the sooner.”
The effect of this would be to require the Government to publish impact assessments for each agency to determine whether value for money for consumers, businesses and taxpayers would be achieved by leaving each one and setting up national arrangements.
New clause 49—Impact assessment: withdrawal from single market and Customs Union—
Before giving notice under section 1(1), of her intention to notify under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU, the Prime Minster shall lay before both Houses of Parliament a detailed assessment of the anticipated impact of the decision to withdraw from the Single Market and Customs Union of the EU on—
(a) the nature and extent of any tariffs that will or may be imposed on goods and services from the UK entering the EU and goods and services from the EU entering the UK;
(b) the terms of proposed trade agreements with the EU or EU Member states and the expected timeframe for the negotiation and ratification of said trade agreements;
(c) the proposed status of rights guaranteed by the law of the European Union, including—
(i) labour rights,
(ii) health and safety at work,
(iii) the Working Time Directive,
(iv) consumer rights, and
(v) environmental standards;
(d) the proposed status of—
(i) EU citizens living in the UK and,
(ii) UK citizens living in the EU, after the EU has exited the EU;
(e) estimates as to the impact of the UK leaving the EU on—
(i) the balance of trade,
(ii) GDP, and
(iii) unemployment.”
New clause 98—Protected characteristics—Equality Impact Assessments—
‘(1) In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the impact of any new relationship with the European Union on protected characteristics, as set out in the Equality Act 2010.
(2) Any report the Government lays before Parliament on the progress of the withdrawal negotiation must be accompanied by an Equality Impact Assessment.
(3) Neither House of Parliament may approve by resolution any new relationship with the European Union unless an Equality Impact Assessment has been laid before both Houses of Parliament.”
This new clause would place specific duties on the Government to demonstrate compliance with the 2010 Equality Act, ensuring that the impact of decisions on women and those with protected characteristics are considered and debated at every stage of the process.
New clause 101—Environment—Environmental Impact Assessment—
Before issuing any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to lay before each House of Parliament a full Environmental Impact Statement on the terms of the agreement reached with the European Union on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.”
New clause 102—Economic Divergence—Impact Assessment—
Before issuing any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to lay before each House of Parliament an impact assessment of the costs to businesses and the environment as a result of divergence in regulations between the UK and countries in the EU single market, once the UK has withdrawn from the EU.”
New clause 103—EU Customs Union and the European single market—Impact Assessment—
‘(1) Before issuing any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to lay before each House of Parliament an impact assessment on the UK of leaving the EU Customs Union and the European single market.
(2) The impact assessment shall include the following information for each sector of the economy—
(a) the nature and extent of any tariffs that will or may be imposed on goods and services from the UK entering the EU and goods and services from the EU entering the UK;
(b) the effect of non-tariff custom barriers that will or may be imposed on goods and services from the UK entering the EU and goods and services from the EU entering the UK;
(c) changes in the rules of origin regulations and the administrative burdens for business.”
New clause 106—Withdrawal from Free Movement of persons—Impact Assessment—
‘(1) Before issuing any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to lay before each House of Parliament an impact assessment of withdrawal from Directive 2004/38/EC (free movement of persons).
(2) The impact assessment shall include the impact on withdrawal for each sector of the economy and include effects of—
(a) labour shortages,
(b) changes in costs of labour,
(c) administrative burdens for employers,
(d) effects on the cost base for companies; and
(e) effect on consumers.”
New clause 107—Employment Training needs—Impact Assessment—
‘(1) Before issuing any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to lay before each House of Parliament an impact assessment of the skills training needed to supply the necessary skills needed for the UK economy after the UK leaves the European Union.
(2) The impact assessment should detail—
(a) the resources needed to meet the needs of training needs of the UK post commencement of leaving the European Union; and
(b) how government will work with UK companies to train future employees and upskill employees post commencement of leaving the European Union in the context of changes in UK immigration policy.”
New clause 143—Financial liability of the UK towards the EU—
The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until the Chancellor of the Exchequer has—
(a) published an assessment of the financial liability of the UK towards the EU following the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, and
(b) made a statement to the House of Commons on the economic impact of the United Kingdom leaving the single market.”
New clause 152—Natural Environment—impact assessment—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must lay before both Houses of Parliament an impact assessment covering the impact of leaving—
(a) the European Union, and
(b) the Single Market
on the natural environment, including the marine environment, until 2042.”
This new clause would require the Government to set out the impact on the natural environment of leaving the European Union and leaving the Single Market on the natural environment covering the expected duration of the Government’s 25-year plan for the environment.
New clause 153—Chemicals Regulation—impact assessment—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must lay before both Houses of Parliament an impact assessment covering the impact of leaving—
(a) the European Union, and
(b) the Single Market
on the assessment and regulation of chemicals for safety and environmental protection.”
New clause 154—Rural Economy and Environment—impact assessment—
‘(1) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must lay before both Houses of Parliament an impact assessment covering the impact of leaving—
(a) the European Union,
(b) the Single Market, and
(c) the Customs Union
on the rural economy and environment.
(2) An impact assessment laid under subsection (1) shall in particular cover the impact on—
(a) tariff and non-tariff barriers to export,
(b) farm incomes and viability,
(c) environmental, food safety and animal welfare standards, and
(d) international competitiveness of UK farms.”
New clause 155—Land Management Payments—impact assessment—
‘(1) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must lay before both Houses of Parliament an impact assessment covering the impact of leaving—
(a) the European Union,
(b) the Common Agricultural Policy, and
(c) the Single Market
on land management and rural development payments.
(2) An impact assessment laid under subsection (1) shall in particular cover the impact on—
(a) funding for environmental protection,
(b) funding for rural development, and
(c) farm incomes and viability.”
New clause 167—Rights and opportunities of young people—impact assessment—
‘(1) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must undertake to publish an assessment of the effect of leaving the European Union on the rights and opportunities of people aged under 25 in the United Kingdom, including—
(a) the effect on the ability to work and travel visa-free in the EU,
(b) the effect on the ability to study in other EU member states on the same terms as on the day on which Royal Assent is given to this Act, and
(c) the effect on the ability to participate in EU programmes designed to provide opportunities to young people, including programmes to facilitate studying in other EU member states.
(2) The impact assessment in subsection (1) shall be laid before Parliament before—
(a) 12 months have elapsed after this Act receives Royal Assent, or
(b) the day on which Her Majesty’s Government declares that agreement has been reached on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, whichever is the sooner.”
This new clause would require the Government to undertake an impact assessment of the effect of leaving the EU on the rights and opportunities of young UK nationals and how they will differ from their European counterparts.
New clause 187—Euratom—impact assessment—
‘(1) Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must commit to publish an impact assessment of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) on the nuclear industry within the United Kingdom.
(2) The impact assessment should include, but not be limited to, the impact on—
(a) nuclear research;
(b) health and safety in the nuclear industry; and
(c) employment in the nuclear industry.
(3) The impact assessment shall be published either 18 months after this Act receives Royal Assent or before a vote in the European Parliament on the withdrawal deal agreed between the European Union and the United Kingdom, whichever is the sooner.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to publish an impact assessment on the effect on the UK’s nuclear industry should the UK withdraw from Euratom.
Amendment 3, in clause 1, page 1, line 2, at beginning insert—
“If a report has been laid before both Houses of Parliament setting out the estimated impact on the public finances of the UK withdrawing from the European Single Market,”
This amendment ensures that prior to any notification of the Prime Minister‘s intention to notify the United Kingdom‘s withdrawal from the EU, a report shall be published setting out the anticipated implications of exiting from the Single Market
Amendment 24, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“after Her Majesty’s Government has published a report on the implications, costs and benefits for Gibraltar.”
Amendment 25, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“after Her Majesty’s Government has published a report on the implications of and costs and benefits for the British Overseas Territories.”
Amendment 26, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“after Her Majesty’s Government has published a report on the implications of and costs and benefits for the Crown Dependencies.”
Amendment 27, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“after Her Majesty’s Government has published a report on the implications of and costs and benefits for the Commonwealth.”
Amendment 28, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“after Her Majesty’s Government has published a report on the implications of and costs and benefits for European Foreign and Defence Policy Co-operation.”
Amendment 47, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chancellor of the Exchequer has published an assessment on the financial liability of the United Kingdom towards the EU on completion of the Article 50 withdrawal process, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 48, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chancellor of Exchequer has published a revised Treasury forecast on the state of the economy, and laid a copy of the report before Parliament.”
Amendment 49, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published an assessment of the level of agricultural maintenance support grants beyond 2020, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 51, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) unless a Minister of the Crown has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on Scottish sea ports, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 52, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chancellor of the Exchequer has published an assessment of the financial implications of leaving the European Union for charities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 53, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until a Minister of the Crown has published a report on the relationship between the Channel Islands and the European Union with regard to the 1972 Act of Accession Protocol No 3, and laid a copy of the report before Parliament.”
Amendment 57, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until a Minister of the Crown has published a revised Strategic Defence and Security Review, and laid a copy of the review before Parliament.”
Amendment 58, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until a Minister of the Crown has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Development Fund, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 59, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chancellor of the Exchequer has published a report giving a medium-term economic forecast in the event of the United Kingdom leaving the single market, and laid a copy of the report before Parliament.”
Amendment 61, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until a Minister of the Crown has published a revised National Security Strategy, and laid a copy of the review before Parliament.”
Amendment 62, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chancellor of the Exchequer has published an assessment of future payments to the EU after the Prime Minister makes the notification.”
Amendment 64, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Education has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 65, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Health has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 66, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 67, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Justice has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 68, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Home Secretary has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 69, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Defence has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 70, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chancellor of the Exchequer has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the responsibilities of Her Majesty’s Treasury, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 71, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Foreign Secretary has published an assessment on the impact of the UK withdrawing from the EU on the responsibilities of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 72, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 73, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for International Trade has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 74, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 75, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 76, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for International Development has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 77, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has published an assessment on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on the department’s responsibilities, and laid a copy of the assessment before Parliament.”
Amendment 79, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chancellor of the Exchequer has published a report on matters relating to the pensions of UK nationals living and working in the European Union on the date that the United Kingdom withdraws from the EU.”
Amendment 80, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until a Minister of the Crown has published an equality impact assessment on the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU, and laid a copy of the report before Parliament.”
Amendment 82, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until a Minister of the Crown has published regional and national economic impact assessments on the impact of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU.”
Amendment 11, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
‘(3) Before exercising the power under subsection (1), the Prime Minister must prepare and publish a report on the effect of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on national finances, including the impact on health spending.
This amendment calls for the Government to publish a report on the effect of EU withdrawal on the national finances, particularly health spending following claims in the referendum campaign that EU withdrawal would allow an additional £350 million per week to be spent on the National Health Service.
Amendment 39, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
‘(3) Before the Prime Minister issues a notification under this section, Her Majesty’s Government has a duty to lay before both Houses of Parliament a review of the independence and effectiveness of the current environmental regulators, including a detailed assessment of their capacity to effectively implement and enforce EU-derived environmental legislation upon withdrawal from the European Union.”
This amendment would ensure that UK environmental regulators and enforcement agencies —namely the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs — are adequately funded and authorised to effectively perform the regulatory functions currently undertaken by institutions of the European Union.
New clause 17—EU Assets and Liabilities—
Within 30 days of the coming into force of this Act the Secretary of State shall publish a full account of the assets and liabilities held by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of the UK’s relationship with the European Union.”
This new clause would ensure that the Government publishes an account of the assets and liabilities held by Her Majesty’s Government in respect of our relationship with the European Union.
New clause 31—Regions of England—draft framework—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes particular reference to the impacts on the regions of England.”
New clause 41—Public spending implications—
Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the impact on public spending.”
New clause 138—Trade Agreements—
The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1 until a Minister of the Crown has published a report on the number and terms of trade agreements outlined with countries outside of the European Union, and laid a copy of the report before Parliament.”
Matthew Pennycook
In addition to speaking to new clause 5, I intend to speak briefly to amendment 11 and new clause 98. The Bill is straightforward, but, as many hon. Members have said, it will set in train a process that will have profound implications for our country and for each of our constituents. Despite the Government’s resisting new clause 3 yesterday and, in so doing, setting their face against giving Parliament an active role in scrutinising and influencing the negotiation process, the House will still need to hold the Government to account in the months and years ahead. If we are to discharge that duty effectively, we will require adequate information and robust analysis. As things stand, we do not have that.
When it comes to the crucial issue of the impact of different trading models on our economy, the Government’s White Paper falls far short of what is required to ensure that we are able to have informed discussions and debates in this place. Indeed, it offers little beyond assurances that the Government will prioritise securing the freest and most frictionless trade possible in goods and services. The House and, more importantly, businesses across the country that stand to be affected deserve to be made aware of the Government’s evaluation of the likely impact of different future trading relations. The Government can provide them with that evaluation without revealing their negotiating hand by publishing any impact assessments that have been undertaken by Her Majesty’s Treasury. That is the purpose of new clause 5.
Jonathan Edwards
Does the hon. Gentleman expect any Treasury modelling to concur with that of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which says that EEA membership is far preferable for the economic growth of the British state than a free trade agreement?
Matthew Pennycook
The honest answer is that we do not know. As I will come on to mention, other organisations are doing this analysis. There is not a vacuum out there, and the Government could quite easily publish their analysis to help inform the debate.
I hope that the Minister does not simply echo those who have argued and will argue that publishing any information would undermine the Government’s negotiating strategy. We heard that argument prior to the Government conceding a speech and a White Paper, and we will no doubt hear it in the months ahead. I say to hon. Members who take that view, whether out of genuine concern or simply because they in effect want the legislature to shut up shop for the next 18 months, that the detailed analysis of the kind that we are asking to be published is out there. Other organisations are doing it—not just the Government.
Charlie Elphicke
I am listening to the hon. Gentleman with care. As I understand it, new clause 5 seeks to make the triggering of article 50 conditional on an impact assessment being laid before the House. However, the triggering of article 50 should be conditional on a vote of the British people, which took place last year. This is simply an attempt to delay.
Matthew Pennycook
To be fair, I dealt with that earlier in my remarks when I said that the new clause is not an attempt to delay because we know that the Government have already carried out impact assessments. The idea that no impact assessments will be published throughout the course of the negotiations is farcical. We could have them up front, which would help to inform debate.
Ms Angela Eagle
Does my hon. Friend agree that if we had official Treasury impact assessments, rather than those done by people who are guessing, we would be able to have a proper debate about the kind of Brexit that is best for our country in difficult and rapidly changing times?
Matthew Pennycook
My hon. Friend expresses the new clause’s intent perfectly, and I agree with her 100%.
Reputable and well-regarded organisations such as the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the IFS have published detailed analysis of the cost and benefits of future trading relations with the EU, as have other less reputable organisations. The quality of analysis that the Government and the Treasury are able to produce will match, if not surpass, that analysis, and hon. Members should be able to access it. More importantly, businesses across the country need to be able to see it, so that they can adequately plan for their futures.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman has just asserted that the analysis he wants to see will be superior in quality to some of the others that may be available. On what does he base that assertion, given that the people he wants to report on the situation have given us the most extraordinary information? Before the referendum they told us that we were going to be attended by plagues of frogs and locusts and that the sky was going to fall in.
Matthew Pennycook
If the hon. Gentleman is right, I would not like to be one of the Ministers negotiating the agreement with the EU. They will be relying on this information when they come to decide their negotiating priorities.
Matthew Pennycook
I will make a little progress.
Labour Members look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts. The purpose of new clause 98, in the name of my hon. Friends, is simple. It would ensure that the impact of decisions on women and those with protected characteristics was considered and debated at every stage of the negotiation process. It may have escaped the attention of some hon. Members, but the word “equality” does not appear once in the White Paper. Indeed, the White Paper contains no mention of race, disability, sexuality or gender identity, which is astonishing. How can we secure a Brexit that works for everyone, as hon. Members on both sides of the Committee have repeated ad nauseam, if black, Asian and minority ethnic people, disabled people and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities are not given due consideration when the different negotiating positions are being weighed up?
The process and the final deal must have regard to equalities and the protection and extension of rights for those with protected characteristics. New clause 98 would ensure that equalities considerations were at the forefront of Government thinking throughout the withdrawal process and inform the final deal. Doing so would help to ensure that we got the best deal for everyone, wherever they were and, crucially, whoever they were. It would ensure that any negative impact on women or those with protected characteristics must be transparently presented and considered, and that if there was a risk of a disproportionate impact, the Government took steps to mitigate it.
New clause 98 is in line with recommendations from the cross-party Women and Equalities Committee, which has called for greater transparency on the impact of Government decisions on women and those with protected characteristics. It would help to improve scrutiny and accountability, and I look forward to the Minister giving it due consideration in his response.
Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
I do not intend to delay the Committee, as most of these amendments are narrow and address the very specific point that the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) raised.
I have a simple concern as to why there is such a peculiar sense of the vital importance of these particular forecasts, which give huge credit to the Treasury’s ability to forecast where we may be going in almost every sector. As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) said, many of the forecasts have been fundamentally wrong in the past, so I asked the Library how accurate the Treasury forecast of May 2016 turned out to be. It is worth relating exactly how accurate it turned out to be, even when the Treasury had such a huge array of figures and possibilities before it:
“In May 2016, the Treasury published forecasts for the immediate economic impact of voting to leave the EU. It forecast for a recession to occur in the second half of 2016, with quarterly GDP growth of -0.1% in both Q3 2016 and Q4 2016 forecast (a second ‘severe shock’ scenario was also shown with a deep recession occurring; under this scenario growth of -1.0% in Q3 2016 and -0.4% in Q4 2016 was forecast). In reality, the economy continued to grow at its pre-referendum pace, with quarterly growth of +0.6%”.
Now the figure has been adjusted again by the Governor of the Bank of England to close to 2%, with the prospect of further adjustments.
Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)
On the quarterly growth statistics, I understand that even knowing what is happening right now is often very difficult for the predicting entities. In fact, I believe they have had the correct numbers four times in 270 quarters.
Mr Duncan Smith
The range of prediction from the Office for Budget Responsibility had nearly a £90 billion margin for error over the previous seven years; that £90 billion went from £50 billion on the plus side to £40 billion on the minus side. The problem we face is the sense that these forecasts give us any strong, real indication of what may happen in the economy. I raise this issue because the new clause and other amendments relevant to it make triggering article 50 contingent; it cannot be done officially until these forecasts are laid. This is not about consulting on them or their being made as a matter of the Government providing information. In other words, the article 50 letter cannot go until these are laid. All they do is inform the debate depending on what the forecasts are. From talking to economists, I am of the general opinion that we have had seven years of growth, and normally within the cycle we would expect to have a flattening at some point after this long period of growth. That would be the normal prospect, but economists will tell us that we are defying the normal prospects. Whether or not we have a natural process of slightly lower growth directly as a result of this longer period of growth, and what happens to the world economy and what is happening in the EU, is almost impossible to forecast with any great accuracy.
My point is that new clause 5 states:
“The Prime Minister may not give notice under section 1 until either HM Treasury has published any impact assessment…HM Treasury has laid a statement before both Houses of Parliament”.
With respect, I say to the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich that this is not just a helpful attempt to get information to the House; it is exactly what he said it was not. It is clearly a back-door attempt to make it almost impossible for the Government to get on and trigger article 50. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) said, the referendum verdict was to trigger article 50. The people were not asked, “Shall we trigger article 50 only after we have laid various reports of notables who believe the economy is good, bad or indifferent?” They were asked, “Do you want to leave or do you want to stay?” They chose to leave and we have to get on with it. The idea that the Government are going to go into a negotiation without any idea about what they favour and what they think will, by and large, on the margins, be better for us is ridiculous.
The House must recognise that it is going to be swamped with information of this sort; every forecasting agency is going to be in the game of telling us where we are, and none will be the wiser. Everybody in the House will take the worst or best one, depending on what they want. If the OBR has a margin for error of £90 billion, people can take whatever position they want. But it does not change anything, because we are leaving. The nature of the agreement that we get with the EU, if we get one, is not going to be based on a bunch of forecasts. It will be based on what those negotiating for the EU think is in their general best interest and what we from the UK manage to persuade them is in our mutual best interest. That is what a negotiation is about.
Anybody who has been engaged in negotiation in business will know that you start with your base, bottom line, worst case for you and try to improve upon that, and the other side does the same. This is not going to be about one side saying, “I tell you what my forecast comes to. It tells me we are going to be better off. What does your forecast tell?” and the other side saying, “Ours says we are going to be better off and you will be better off, so which forecast are we going to take?” The battle of forecasts is a ludicrous and pointless exercise.
Helen Goodman
Of course this is not, as the right hon. Gentleman characterises it, going to be a battle of forecasts. But the forecasts are based on the same thing as the assessments people make when they are judging what will or will not be in their interests. They have a mental model, and sometimes those models can be put into mathematical form, and sometimes that is useful. Surely that is precisely what the City of London is doing when it says to the French, Germans and Italians, “You need us more than we need you.”
Mr Duncan Smith
Yes, but the point is that we will be none the wiser. Members might think that a set of forecasts would somehow really inform their view, but after 25 years in the House, I would be astonished if they were right. Debates in this House are rarely really informed; they are mostly based on the judgment of individuals.
Michael Gove (Surrey Heath) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making a very impressive case. [Interruption.] Given the reaction from the Opposition, I am tempted to quote from “Carry On Up the Khyber”—they don’t like it up ’em! I am sure that, like me, my right hon. Friend was impressed by the candour and honesty of the chief economist of the Bank of England, Mr Andy Haldane, when he pointed out that the economics had had its Michael Fish moment last year, when so many predictions about the dire consequences of Brexit were proven to be wrong within weeks and months. Given the candour of one of the most distinguished economists in this country, should not those who call for impact assessments, attributing certainty to them, show similar humility?
Mr Duncan Smith
I agree, and I am tempted to refer to my predecessor, Lord Tebbit, who said, “When they’re screaming, shouting and laughing, carry on, because you must be in the right place.”
The head of the Office for Budget Responsibility is on the record as saying that in the end, almost all forecasts are wrong—
Mr Duncan Smith
Exactly; he was wrong most of the time, so he has a little knowledge of being wrong, as do many in this House. The point is that the new clause is not really about being informed; it is about delay. It is an attempt to be able to say later, “We’re not satisfied with that. It doesn’t quite comply with what we passed in the new clause, so you’re not able to trigger article 50.” The honest truth is that the Government have to go away with their best will and best endeavour and try to arrange to get the best deal they can.
We should look around us and listen to what various politicians in Europe are saying. We keep forgetting that their position is really what will end up setting the kind of arrangement we get. I was interested to read 24 hours ago that the German Finance Minister has changed his position. He has now said that there is no way on earth that the Germans should have any concept of trying to punish the United Kingdom; quite the contrary, he said that they need the City of London to succeed and thrive, because without it they will be poorer. He went on to say that they will therefore absolutely have to come to an arrangement with the United Kingdom, because it is in all of our interests. That is the best forecast we can get, because it is about what people believe is in their mutual best interests.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
Further to that point, has my right hon. Friend seen the comments from the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, which is the German equivalent of the CBI? It, too, makes the point that there should be no attempt whatsoever to punish the UK for Brexit, because it is aware of the adverse consequences that that would have for German industry.
Mr Duncan Smith
Exactly. It is interesting that it is only since my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made her excellent speech in which she set out the 12 points that were subsequently fleshed out into a White Paper, and made it clear what the British Government were not going to be asking for—any special pleading about the single market and so on—that we have begun to see engagement from some of those throughout the European Union who have a vested interest in seeing the best deal.
The other day, I had the privilege of engaging with a company in the pre-packaged potato industry that turns over €400 million a year. Although it sells all over the world, 39% of its product is sold to the United Kingdom, and it does very well out of that. Even as we speak, it is grouping together to cajole the relevant Governments and persuade them that the very last thing it wants is to have its business wrecked by some artificial attempt to put up a block to the United Kingdom. These things are already in train, and they are nothing to do with forecasts and all to do with people caring about their futures and jobs.
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend, but these new clauses come before any such rational intervention by reasonable business people across Europe. They are based on the fact that Opposition Members genuinely believe in their doomsday forecast, and they are just waiting for it to play out. That is the whole point of delaying the process—it is in the hope that when the sky falls in, the British people will change their minds.
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I am the most mild-mannered and tolerant of men, but interventions are becoming slightly overlong. Interventions, even in Committee, are interventions, not speeches.
Mr Duncan Smith
Thank you, Sir Roger, for that explanatory intervention. May I say to my colleagues that I am still prepared to take interventions should they wish to keep them short?
Julian Knight
We have just spoken about the power and the necessity of the City of London. Does my right hon. Friend realise that the other major capitals, Paris and Frankfurt, do not have the same infrastructure? Frankfurt, for example, has only one foreign language school, and Paris has restricted labour laws.
Mr Duncan Smith
That is an important point, and it plays hugely into the Government’s hands. It was the head of financial services in Frankfurt who was over here just before Christmas. When he was interviewed by the BBC, he was asked whether he was over here trying to get people to take up jobs in Frankfurt’s financial sector. To the journalist’s utter horror, he said yes. The journalist then said, “Therefore that means, presumably, that you think that after Britain leaves the European Union, the City will be finished, and that Frankfurt is looking to take its business.” He almost laughed and said, “Oh, no, no, no. We absolutely need the City of London to thrive and prosper, because it is the way that we keep our capital cheap. We cannot replace it, as its business will go somewhere outside Europe.” He said that London is the only global city in Europe. The point that he was making was that, although we move around and trade jobs, the expertise and ability to make capital deals lies here in London, and Frankfurt wants to make sure that the United Kingdom Government, the European Commission and the European Council reach an agreement that is beneficial to both sides, with access to the marketplace.
I make no bones about this: I am an optimist. There is nothing in the new clause that would in any way help the Government. Even more importantly, it would not enable the House to reach any kind of measured conclusion, such as letting the Government trigger article 50. I will conclude now unless somebody wants to intervene.
Charlie Elphicke
My right hon. Friend is making a passionate speech. When it comes to forecasts, there is another real-life example that has not yet been mentioned, which is that the independence referendum in Scotland was predicated on the oil price remaining high. Shortly afterwards, the oil price dropped dramatically, which would have left Scotland in dire straits had it voted for independence.
Mr Duncan Smith
I agree. The head of the OBR has said that, in the end, most forecasts are wrong. On that basis, it would not really help the House in any way suddenly to have a Treasury forecast, any more than if we had a multitude of forecasters here saying where they think the economy will go. I do not blame them for being wrong, because there are far too many moveable parts in economies as complex as the United Kingdom or, for that matter, the European Union or even the global economy.
Ultimately, if the Opposition are really honest, these new clauses and amendments are really about making sure that the Government’s hands are tied, and slowing down the process in the vague hope that, somehow, people’s opinions will change and it will all look too difficult. These forecasts will then allow everyone to go out and say, “Oh my God, this is so terrible. Look what will happen if we do not get this arrangement or that arrangement.”
Julian Knight
My right hon. Friend is being generous in accepting interventions. He has just talked about a sort of buyer’s regret. As I understand it from my experience on the doorstep, most people just want us to get on with the job. In fact, polling shows that Brexit is slightly more popular now than it was at the time of the referendum.
Mr Duncan Smith
I will not carry on for much longer, but that is exactly the point. All that will happen if we amend the Bill and tie the Government’s hands so that they are slow in triggering article 50 is that the British people will get frustrated and angry.
Ms Angela Eagle
What if actually everyone in the House—whether they are Brexiteers or remainers—wants the best deal for the country, and in order to make good decisions and have a good debate, they want to know what analysis the Government are doing of the implications of making particular decisions? Surely that, and not delay, is what this is about.
Mr Duncan Smith
I say to the hon. Lady, for whom I have a huge degree of respect, that if that were the explicit purpose of new clause 5, I would agree with her. The difference is in the line that restricts the Government from invoking article 50 until the matter is laid before the House. That line alone makes it very clear that informing good decisions is not the full intention behind the new clause. If the new clause just said, “We will invoke article 50 and it would be good for the Government to put forward their various predictions and forecasts”, I would probably have said, “I don’t think the Government would have a problem with that.” But that is not what the new clause says. If the hon. Lady reads it, she will realise that it is about delay and prevarication.
Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way right at the end of his speech, to which I have listened intensely. Despite decrying some forecasters, would he like to make a forecast that, at the end of the process, the vast majority of the people in Scotland will welcome Brexit?
Mr Duncan Smith
As I have just condemned pretty much every forecast, I will not make that forecast. I will say that once Scotland gets back to domestic policy, it is almost certain that the Scottish nationalists will be seen for what they are doing: running down education, health and the economy. Let us get back to the real forecast.
I do not wish to sow the seeds of dissention, so I simply say that the new clause and the related amendments, which would put another set of shackles around the Government’s hands and stop them getting on with what the British people voted for on 23 June last year, must be rejected, because the Government must seek the best deal they can in line with what is good for the EU and for the United Kingdom.
Mr Umunna
I am pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). Before I speak to the amendment in my name, which is on a subject that was totally absent from the right hon. Gentleman’s contribution, I have to say that I am bemused by what can only be described as a 15-minute diatribe against forecasters and economists—the experts. That is why I was not surprised to see the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) join in with the diatribe. The Opposition have spent the past five or six years listening to these two now former Cabinet Ministers telling us about the importance of listening to independent economic forecasters. They told us how important it was that they set up the Office for Budget Responsibility, which the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green has just spent the past 15 minutes slagging off.
Mr Umunna
I will just make a bit of progress. I will come to the hon. Gentleman in a bit, but I do not want to speak for too long because I know a lot of people wish to speak.
I am bound to say that I wish we were not here. As the right hon. Members for Chingford and Woodford Green and for Surrey Heath know well, because I debated with them a lot during the campaign, I campaigned strongly for us to stay in the European Union. I led the Labour “In for Britain” campaign in Greater London, and played a role in the “Britain Stronger In Europe” campaign nationally. But we lost. As a democrat, I accept that result, which is why I supported the Bill’s Second Reading. Of course, I respect people who interpreted the referendum result differently. Although we all have different views on whether to trigger article 50, we can all agree that while various promises were made by both sides in the referendum campaign, the key pledge of the winning side was that if we leave the European Union, £350 million extra a week will go to the NHS, which is why I tabled amendment 11.
Dominic Cummings, who worked, of course, for the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath and who ran the Vote Leave campaign, said on his blog last month that the £350 million NHS argument was “necessary to win”. He said:
“Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests No.”
Hon. Members can go and read that on his blog. So the importance of that pledge cannot be overestimated. It cannot be detached from the triggering of article 50. It is inextricably linked to why millions of people voted to leave, to our withdrawal from the European Union and, therefore, to this Bill.
Helen Goodman
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was at a public meeting in one village where people said, “It’s fantastic that we are leaving the European Union, because we are going to get £350 million a week for the NHS, and the Government will be able to reopen the A&E in Bishop Auckland hospital.”
Mr Umunna
That is right, and there are lots of examples of that throughout the country. That is not surprising, because prominent members of this Government—the Foreign, Environment, International Development, International Trade and Transport Secretaries, who are all members of the current Cabinet—went around the country in that big red bus that said:
“We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.”
None of them disowned that pledge during the campaign. They also stood by a big sign saying:
“Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week.”
Ms Angela Eagle
Does my hon. Friend agree that that kind of cynical campaigning gives politics and politicians a really bad name? The people who saw the pledge on that big red bus now expect this Government to deliver on that pledge.
Mr Umunna
That is absolutely right. Those Members seek to hide behind the wording and to claim that it was conditional, but they knew exactly what they were doing when they stood in front of that big red bus and that sign: the clear message they intended to convey was that if we leave the European Union, £350 million a week will go to the NHS.
Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)
I have a huge amount of time for the hon. Gentleman, and I like him very much, but seeing as we are swapping stories about town hall meetings, I had a number of people come up to me in town hall meetings, saying, “Mr Walker, we’d love to vote to leave the EU, but the Chancellor has told us that if we do, we’ll lose £4,400, and there will be an emergency Budget.” I do not think it helps this country or this House to rehash the campaign from seven months ago.
Mr Umunna
I am glad the hon. Gentleman raised that point, and I also have a lot of respect for him. However, the point is that I am not trying to re-litigate the referendum campaign but to make sure that the promises these people made are delivered.
We know the NHS needs the extra cash, so it was not unreasonable for people to believe those promises. The Health Committee—people on both sides of the House sit on it—pointed out recently that the deficit in NHS trusts and foundation trusts in 2015-16 was £3.45 billion. We know that Ministers’ claimed increases in NHS funding are being funded by reductions in other areas of health spending that fall outside NHS England’s budgets. We know that reductions in spending on social care are having a serious impact, which is translating into increased A&E attendances, emergency admissions and delays in people leaving hospital. The NHS needs that extra cash, so it was not unreasonable for people who voted to leave the European Union to think that that pledge would be delivered on.
Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is complaining about a slogan on the side of a bus about giving extra money to the NHS and implying that his amendment gives money to the NHS, but it does not—it merely suggests that there should be a report on the effect of the withdrawal from the EU on national finances, including health service expenditure. He therefore seems to be falling into exactly the same trap as he is accusing others of. Motes and beams come to mind.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
Is my hon. Friend aware of Change Britain’s latest press release where the £350 million a week has gone up to £450 million a week through its exhortations to scrap such onerous regulations as the motor vehicles regulations, the greenhouse gas emissions reporting regulations, the welfare of animals in transport regulations, and the welfare of farmed animal regulations?
Mr Umunna
That is very interesting. I note that the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath is still in his place. I saw in The Sun, no less, in November that he was demanding—demanding!—that the Prime Minister spend a £32 billion Brexit dividend on the NHS, so I hope that he will be supporting our amendment as well.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is making some very important points. It is interesting to hear Conservative Members scoffing and laughing at this. This was not just one of many pledges—it was the key pledge. I am looking at a collection of photographs of all the key proponents of the Vote Leave campaign. It was their No. 1 commitment to this country if it voted to leave the European Union. On that basis, does not this Chamber have a responsibility to honour the pledge on which people voted to leave the EU?
Mr Umunna
I completely agree with my hon. Friend.
For all these reasons I have tabled amendment 11, which, as the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) stated, is very reasonable. It requires the Prime Minister to set out how the UK’s withdrawal from the EU will impact on the national finances, particularly on health spending. In short, she needs to set out how she is going to make good on that Vote Leave pledge to spend £350 million extra per week on the NHS.
Seema Malhotra
I am very pleased to support my hon. Friend’s amendment. Does he agree that this will also be a vital part of the keeping the public’s confidence in the process as we go forward over the next two years, not least given the conversations in a focus group I held in my constituency on Sunday where people said that this issue remains topmost in their minds as the reason they voted to leave?
Mr Umunna
I will very shortly.
I hope that we will have the opportunity not only to debate this amendment but to vote on it too. It has been signed by more Members than any other amendment. It is supported across parties and of course has the support of the Opposition Front Bench. In the end, in our democracy, it is in this House that Members are held to account for the promises they make and the things they say to the people. What better way to test the resolve of people such as the right hon. Members for Chingford and Woodford Green and for Surrey Heath than for there to be a vote on this issue so that people can see whether they meant what they said?
Mr Jim Cunningham
Another commitment was that they wanted to make Parliament sovereign again, but Government Members are saying today that when we exercise that sovereignty we are being obstructive and using delaying tactics. They cannot have it both ways.
Mr Umunna
My hon. Friend is absolutely right.
These people will never be forgiven if they betray the trust of the people by breaking their promise to do all they can to ensure that the £350 million extra per week for the NHS is delivered. They all know that only too well. Mr Cummings, who, as I have said, worked for the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath, discloses in the blog I mentioned that the Foreign Secretary and the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath planned to deliver, in part, on that pledge as part of the Foreign Secretary’s leadership campaign. Mr Cummings writes that when he told the Foreign Secretary
“‘you should start off by being unusual, a politician who actually delivers what they promise’”,
the reply was
“‘Absolutely. ABSOLUTELY. We MUST do this, no question, we’ll park our tanks EVERYWHERE’”.
Apparently, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath strongly agreed. Mr Cummings goes on to say:
“If they had not blown up this would have happened.”
No doubt the Minister will say to us that there are a number of reasons why the Government cannot support the amendment. I am going to pre-empt him and deal with each in turn. First, there are those who claim that it was not a pledge at all. The Transport Secretary has said:
“The specific proposal by the Vote Leave campaign was in fact to spend £100 million a week”—
of the £350 million—
“on the NHS. I hope that aspiration will be met.”
I say to the Transport Secretary, who of course is not here, that the poster, which the Vote Leave campaigners all stood by, did not indicate that that was an aspiration or use the £100 million figure. It was a pledge, pure and simple. The poster did not read, “Let’s aspire to spend £100 million extra.”
Mr Umunna
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman shortly. The poster gave the clear impression that the money would be spent. It is true that the Office for National Statistics said that the £350 million figure was misleading, but the Vote Leave campaign, which the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath chaired, kept on using that figure regardless. Now they will be held to account for it.
Karl MᶜCartney
I thank the hon. Gentleman for eventually giving way. He really should listen to the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), who talked about forecasting. The hon. Gentleman has forecast—I think he will be wrong—that the £350 million will be an issue at the next general election. Does he agree that the Conservative party was not Vote Leave, and that the £350 million was the slogan of Vote Leave, not the Conservative party? As he is giving us a grand tour de force of the Brexit campaign, would he like to comment on “Project Fear”?
Mr Umunna
I think the hon. Gentleman was involved in Vote Leave—perhaps he was not—but I am not going to take any lectures about peddling fear and all the rest of it, in any campaign, from anyone associated with Vote Leave. I will come on to the point that he made about the Conservative party shortly.
Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)
I entirely agree with the points that the hon. Gentleman is making. Having made that complaint to the UK Statistics Authority, the response that I received was that the claim was potentially misleading. As he has said, Vote Leave campaigners kept using it. Surely, they kept using it because they knew they needed to do so in order to win the referendum. Now that they have done that, we need to hold them to account.
Mr Umunna
That is absolutely right, and I completely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I come to the point that the hon. Member for Lincoln (Karl MᶜCartney) made about the Conservative party—[Interruption.] Admittedly, it could also apply to some people from the Labour party. Some say that the pledges were made primarily by people who may have been members of a Conservative Government, but who did not speak with the authority of that Government. Of the five Cabinet Members I have mentioned who took leading roles in the campaign, three were members of the Government at the time and one, the Foreign Secretary, attended the political Cabinet. Part of the reason why those key campaigners were put up to do media and to campaign for Vote Leave was that they carried the authority of being Ministers. We cannot detach one from the other.
The other, and connected, argument that is made is that the commitment was given by one side in a referendum campaign, not by a Government, so we should leave the matter alone and get on with things—we should all shut up. I am sorry, but I do not think that that will wash. Whether they were Ministers or not, all the key Vote Leave campaigners were Members of this House. As I have said, if our democracy is to mean anything, it is that Members of this House answer and are held to account in this House for the promises that they make to the people. After all, as has been said, they campaigned in the name of parliamentary sovereignty. If Parliament is sovereign, they should be held to account here.
Mr Umunna
I will not give way; I am going to finish.
Either those people made the pledge in the expectation of delivering on it, in which case they must now show us the money and vote for this very reasonable amendment, or they made it in the knowledge that it would never be met, in which case they will never be forgiven for their betrayal of those who, in good faith, relied on that promise.
Mr Duncan Smith
I am wholly in favour of spending £350 million or £375 million or whatever the figure is. But I want to ask the hon. Gentleman a specific question, as this is his amendment and he has stopped short of saying what he really thinks: the amendment says only that a report should be published. What is his and his party’s position on the spending on the NHS that will come only as and when we leave the European Union and get back the money that we give at the moment, which is £350 million or £375 million? Does he want to spend that all on the health service or does he not?
Mr Umunna
The right hon. Gentleman seems to have accepted—I hear the word “melting” behind me—the premise behind the amendment. I very much look forward to his joining us in the Division Lobby.
My party established the national health service in the face of opposition from the right hon. Gentleman’s party. We have a far better record of providing the funding and support to our NHS. We need no lectures or demands from his party, which is in government and throwing it all into chaos.
I finish by saying this to the right hon. Gentleman. His Prime Minister goes around saying, “Brexit means Brexit”. If Brexit means anything, it is that he and all his colleagues who campaigned for Vote Leave need to deliver on their promise to put £350 million extra per week into the NHS. I look forward to seeing the right hon. Gentleman in the Division Lobby tomorrow.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. If we are not careful, we will face the situation we faced last night. There are a large number of amendments and a large number of Members wish to speak. I understand entirely why Members are being generous in taking interventions; of course, that eats up time. I urge colleagues to shorten their speeches, if possible, to enable the maximum number of Members to take part in what is, after all, a very important debate.
Michael Gove
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to follow the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), who made a characteristically authoritative and penetrating speech. I also congratulate him on his leadership of the Labour In campaign in London. The whole United Kingdom, of course, voted to leave, but some of the strongest resistance to the arguments was in London and I am sure that that was in no small part due to the hon. Gentleman’s eloquence and organisational ability.
Mr MacNeil
The right hon. Gentleman has just mentioned the whole of the United Kingdom. The UK is a union, so I hope he will acknowledge that not all the United Kingdom voted to leave. He will remember that we were told in 2014 that the constituent parts were equal partners in the United Kingdom. The whole may have voted leave, but not all of it did.
Michael Gove
I entirely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point, but it is striking that the northernmost part of his constituency voted to leave—BBC research, I may say. We heard at length last night from the Scottish National party about how Scotland voted; all I would say is that a million people in Scotland voted to leave the European Union, and overall within the United Kingdom so many people voted to leave. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) admirably pointed out, people want that vote to be expedited. I am speaking tonight because I oppose every single one of the new clauses and amendments in front of us because they seek to frustrate the democratic will of the people.
The hon. Member for Streatham is right: people do want us to take back control of the money currently spent on our behalf by the European Union. But if we accept his amendment and the other amendments and new clauses before us, we will be seeking only to delay and, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, to procrastinate, to put off the day when we eventually leave the European Union and can then spend that additional money on our NHS or, indeed, any other priority. If any Member of this House wants to see taxpayers’ money that is currently controlled by the European Union spent on our NHS, on reducing VAT on fuel or, say, on improving infrastructure in the Western Isles, they have a duty to vote down these new clauses and amendments, which seek to frustrate the honouring of the sovereign will of the British people.
Michael Gove
I give way to the hon. Gentleman on the Front Bench, who was first.
Stephen Gethins
The right hon. Gentleman is very kind. He bears some responsibility for the mess that we are in, in not knowing what leaving the European Union means. One area that he was clear on was that Scotland should have more control over immigration. Will he join us in campaigning for that?
Michael Gove
It is striking that the hon. Gentleman talks about the mess that we are in. Of course, the “we” refers to the Scottish National party, because it is in a significant mess at the moment. It has found that support for independence has fallen as a result of leaving the European Union and that support for a second referendum is falling. Psychological displacement theory explains why it wants to talk about anything other than its own political failure.
Michael Gove
I will make a little progress, then I will give way to the hon. Lady.
The reason I oppose all the new clauses and amendments is that, as was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green, every single one of them, if implemented, would delay and potentially frustrate the legislation. They would require a huge list of impact assessments to be published and other work to be undertaken before we could trigger article 50.
I know that the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) said that it was not the mission of the Labour party to delay, but he is rather in the position of what guerrilla organisations call a cleanskin—an innocent who has been put in the way of gunfire by other wilier figures, such as the shadow Chief Whip who is in his place. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is entirely sincere in his belief that the new clauses and amendments would not delay or complicate the legislation, nor frustrate the will of the British people, but I have to say that he is wrong. He is in the position of the Roman general, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator, “the delayer”: everything that he is doing—every single one of these new clauses and amendments—seeks to delay.
Let me draw attention briefly, for example, to new clause 48, which stands in the name of the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). Subsection (1), as clarified by subsection (2)(s), would require us to have an impact assessment on leaving the European Union Agency for Railways. It may have escaped her notice, but Britain is an island.
Michael Gove
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point, but the idea that we should spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to determine whether this country will suffer or benefit by being freed from the bureaucracy of that particular agency would seem to be a massive misdirection of effort. More than that—
Michael Gove
I will give way to the hon. Lady in just a second.
More than that, if we were to publish impact assessments on every single one of these areas, we would be falling prey to a fallacy that politicians and other officials often fall prey to, which is imagining that the diligent work of our excellent civil servants can somehow predict the future—a future in which there are so many branching histories, so many contingent events and so many unknowns. If we produce an impact assessment on leaving the European Union Agency for Railways, how do we know how leaving that agency might be impacted by the enlightened proposals being brought forward by my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary for the more effective unification and cohesion of our transport network? We cannot know, unless we have that fact in play, but we do not yet know—quite rightly, because he is taking time to consult and deliberate—what that policy will be. What we would be doing is commissioning the policy equivalent of a pig in a poke. With that, I am very happy to give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Mr MacNeil
I am surprised to hear the right hon. Gentleman saying he does not know, because I thought everything was known after the 23 June vote. I know he will tell us that the vote on 23 June meant leaving the single market. Does is it mean the WTO or does it mean a deal from Europe? He says he knows. Which will it be? Tell us.
Michael Gove
My argument throughout has been that in seeking to find the certainty the hon. Gentleman wants from the publication—
Michael Gove
I am a humble seeker after truth, but I recognise that in a world where there are contending versions—the Scottish nationalist version, the Green version, the independent Unionist version and the Labour party version—there is for all of us a responsibility to use reason in the face of so many attractive and contending versions of the truth.
Michael Gove
I will, in the spirit of inclusion, seek to give way seriatim to the four Members seeking to catch my eye.
Lady Hermon
May I say, ever so gently to the right hon. Gentleman, that I am deeply offended by being accused, wrongly, of trying to frustrate the will of the people of the United Kingdom? I am a Unionist. I would like him to address a very serious issue. Sinn Féin, a republican party, will use a hard Brexit to trigger a border poll in Northern Ireland. We may be seeing the break-up of the United Kingdom because of the rhetoric of the right hon. Gentleman and others. Will he address this serious point?
Michael Gove
That is a very serious and important point. I do not know if, strictly speaking—I defer to the Chair—it is relevant to the new clauses we are debating. What I would say to the hon. Lady is that, in this House and elsewhere, I will do everything I can to work with her to ensure that we honour the vote of the whole of the United Kingdom, and, at the same time, work on the progress she has helped to secure in making sure we have peace on the island of Ireland.
Caroline Lucas
What we do know is that the people on 23 June did not vote to deliberately reduce environmental protection. What we do know is that Brexit, as currently planned, will massively reduce environmental protections, because we suddenly will not be part of the European Environment Agency, the European Investment Bank and so on. Does the right hon. Gentleman not think it reckless to be quite so contemptuous of the Opposition amendments tabled to try to ensure we have in place adequate safeguards for our environment before we trigger article 50?
Michael Gove
I may not agree with the hon. Lady on everything, but I agree that effective environmental protection is really important. I would make two points in particular in response to her important intervention. First, it is entirely open to us, as we leave the European Union, to maintain the current standards of environmental protection, but it is also open to us, once we leave, to enhance them. We can, if we wish, have higher standards of environmental protection, for example for moving livestock. Secondly, we can reform the common agricultural policy, against which her party has campaigned for many years, and against which her hon. Friend in the other place campaigned so brilliantly by arguing to vote leave. We can replace the CAP with an approach to subsidising land use that is both more environmentally sensitive and more productive.
Michael Gove
To be fair to the hon. Gentleman, for whom I have a great deal of respect, the next Member kind enough to ask to intervene was the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra).
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. Just before we proceed, it is customary and courteous to allow the right hon. Gentleman to respond to one intervention before trying to make another one. I find the debate progresses better that way.
Seema Malhotra
The right hon. Gentleman describes himself as a humble seeker of truth. That strikes me as interesting, given that he campaigned so hard to leave on the basis of an extra £350 million a week to be spent on the health service. Why will he not support amendment 11, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), which states:
“the Prime Minister must prepare and publish a report on the effect of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU on national finances, including the impact on health spending.”?
Surely, as a humble seeker of truth, he might want to know the answer to that?
Michael Gove
That is a very important point very well made, but the point I sought to make earlier—the hon. Lady’s intervention gives me a chance to underline and further clarify it—is that if we want more money to be spent on the NHS, or, for that matter, anything else, and we want to take back control of the money the EU currently controls or spends on our behalf, then we should seek to expedite the will of the British people and leave the EU as quickly as possible. We will then have that money back and we can invest it in the NHS more quickly.
Michael Gove
The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland sought to intervene earlier, but I suspect the point made by the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) was very much hers and that it was an example of sisterly collaboration. In the spirit of fraternal humility, I hand over to the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle).
Peter Kyle
I am grateful. Many members of the public are also humble seekers of truth. If we do not pass these new clauses and get these impact assessments, how will they be able to judge how Brexit is going? How will they be able to judge the impact on health, education, transport, environment and their communities if they have no information at all?
Michael Gove
This gets me back to the heart of my argument, which is that if one believes that the only authoritative evidence, the only view that matters, is that produced by the Government, one is turning one’s back on 400 years of Enlightenment thinking. There is not one single canonical view that is right in every respect. As was made clear earlier, there is a proliferation of views about what the impact of leaving the EU might be in different areas.
Further, if we were to have published the Government’s policy advice in every area, which is the inference behind the hon. Gentleman’s question, it would make the business of Government impossible. He might remember, as I certainly do, reading the words of the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in his autobiography, “A Journey”, in which he said that the Freedom of Information Act was his biggest mistake—I think there were some bigger. [Laughter.] That is one view that commands a consensus around the House. He thought he had handed a weapon to his enemies and made impossible the business of Government, which requires confidential advice to be prepared by civil servants and accepted by Ministers.
When I was a Minister, I received excellent advice—my mistakes were all my own, all the good ideas were civil servants’. Nevertheless, however good the civil service advice that a Minister receives, it is only one source of wisdom, and every Minister worth his or her salt will want to consult widely. Any Minister who sought to steer only by civil service advice would rightly be held by the House to be a timid mouse constrained by their brief, incapable of ranging more widely and of making a judgment in the national interest.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
On finance, does the right hon. Gentleman agree with the Secretary of State for Brexit, who is prepared to consider our paying the EU for access to the single market?
Michael Gove
To be fair to both the hon. Gentleman and my right hon. Friend, I think that that is a mischaracterisation of what he said. [Interruption.] It is. It is a mischaracterisation that was sedulously reported in some sections of the media. I make no criticism of the hon. Gentleman, but my interpretation was different, and in a way the fact that two such fair-minded—I hope—figures as he and I can, from the plain words in Hansard, reach two different conclusions rather proves my point, which is that we can ask for evidence but we cannot have a single definitive view. The argument, as made in the new clauses, that we cannot proceed until we have that so-called single, definitive, canonical view represents a profound misunderstanding.
Mr Charles Walker
The most important word used in this debate is “accountability”. We are accountable not to the House but to our constituents, and it will be they at future general elections who hold us to account for the success or failure of Brexit.
Michael Gove
My hon. Friend makes a characteristically acute point, and it goes to the heart of my argument, which is that if, come the next election, we have not left the EU, the British people will feel that, having asked a decisive question and been given a clear answer, we have dishonoured the mandate they have given us and not respected the result. That leads directly to my concern about the amount of work required by the new clauses and about the tools that these assessments would give to others outside the House who might wish to frustrate the will of the people further.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
As most of us found out during the campaign, people wanted us to get on with it, whatever the result. Nowhere on the ballot paper did it say that we should get tied down in knots forever and a day, which is in effect what Opposition Members are seeking to ensure.
Michael Gove
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. New clause 40, tabled by the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland, states that the Prime Minister must, before even
“exercising the power under section 1”
and before triggering article 50, publish an impact assessment of the effect on the United Kingdom of leaving the customs union. How can we know that?
I am sanguine about leaving. I take the lead from Shanker Singham and other distinguished trade negotiators that leaving the United Kingdom—[Interruption.] A Freudian slip: I mean leaving the customs union—will lead not just to GDP growth in the United Kingdom, but across the world. I take that view, but it is entirely open to others to take a different view, and it is entirely open to Her Majesty’s Government to choose to follow policies that, once we have left the customs union, will either maximise or minimise our GDP. Once again, by insisting on a narrow focus on what is believed to be one truth and holding up the advance of this legislation as a result, the promoters of this new clause are, I am afraid, once again seeking to frustrate democracy.
Nigel Huddleston
I certainly welcome my right hon. Friend’s conversion to listening to experts. Does he agree with me, though, that no good will come to British business or to our constituents if all we do for the next two years is rehash the results of or indeed the debate about the referendum? I respectfully disagreed with my right hon. Friend during the referendum, and I am sure we will respectfully disagree for many times to come, but this is not going to help the outcome of the Brexit decision.
Michael Gove
I entirely agree, and my hon. Friend makes two important points. Of course, we had the referendum and some people on the remain side feel sore because they think the result was not just a betrayal of their hopes, but was won by means that, to put it mildly, they do not entirely endorse. I absolutely understand that, and there is a responsibility on those of us who argued for leave to listen carefully and to seek to include in the type of new relationship we have with the European Union the very best ambitions and aspirations that were put forward as reasons for staying. I think that can be done and that this House has a critical role in bringing it about, but it can be done only once article 50 has been triggered and the British people have had the confidence that we are leaving.
Julian Knight
I thought that the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) spoke powerfully about breaches of promise, but is there any bigger breach of promise than blocking Brexit by supporting these wrecking amendments?
Michael Gove
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and there is a particular element to it, as well. One of the important principles of our constitution, which as a former Justice Secretary I wholeheartedly believe in, is the principle of judicial review. It is absolutely right that Executive action should be subject to judicial review. It is the only way, apart from the exercise of power in this House, that we can be certain that the Executive is following the rule of law. I am one of those people, albeit that I campaigned for and voted for us to leave the European Union, who was pleased that the Supreme Court held this Government to account so that we have this legislation before us now.
Having said all that, and having placed on the record my support for both this legislation and the principle of judicial review, if we accept any of these new clauses or amendments, we will subject the operation of article 50 to judicial review. That would mean that if any single one of these impact assessments were not prepared in exactly the right way, at the right time, with appropriate care, the whole process and the democratic will of the British people could be upended. Different people have different views about experts—I shall come on to them in a few moments—but I know whereof I speak.
As I have said, I made a number of mistakes during my ministerial career—too much for us to be able to run over now, given that our debate has to close at 9 o’clock. One thing I remember is that judicial review on the basis of a relatively small infraction, as admitted by the judge, of an equality impact assessment—one I deeply regret—nevertheless resulted in the paralysis of this Government’s school capital building programme. Now, if we want to create a feast for lawyers and a festival for litigators, we should accept these new clauses and bring in these amendments. In so doing, we will see the tills ching in the Middle and Inner Temples and hands wring up and down the country, as we once again frustrate the will of the people.
Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
My right hon. Friend makes a very powerful argument. Does he remember that during the campaign, an assessment of the economy was given by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer? Does he remember whether it was accepted by the Opposition, or whether the Leader of the Opposition said that he did not accept the assessment and would not implement it?
Michael Gove
Again, my hon. and learned Friend, who is a silk and who took with forbearance my comments about lawyers before making her own very acute point about economics, is absolutely on the button.
Are we to accept that for the first time ever, once the impact assessments have been published, an official Government document will be taken by my friends in the Scottish National party or the Labour party as holy writ? Are they going to say, “Thank heavens, this document bears the name of the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, so it absolutely must be right, because this is the only way in which I can form a judgment on whether or not leaving the European Union will be a success”? Can I expect the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) to say, “Oh look, the impact assessment from the Department for Exiting the European Union said X, and now, six months later, X has been satisfied, so I am going to give up and accept that the Secretary of State is right, because everything that he has done is in accordance with what he has previously said he would do”?
Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)
The right hon. Gentleman has said that members of the Government have made mistakes in the past. This is about the House holding the Government to account. We must recognise the reality of what has happened. He talks about the estimates that are out there, but the reality is that the currency has already fallen substantially against the dollar, and we are aware of the impact of an increase in inflation. The impact assessments must be informed by the reality. Let us also not forget that we have heard nothing from the Government—no plan—about how we are going to effect trade with Europe. Of course we need impact assessments if we are do our job properly as Members of Parliament.
The Temporary Chairman (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. Before the right hon. Gentleman continues his speech, may I again gently say that a great many Members wish to speak? He has been extremely generous in giving way, but I trust that he is nearing his peroration.
Michael Gove
I am grateful for the intervention from the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, who combines the roles of crofter and former investment banker with rare skill. He is right—the pound has indeed fallen—but one of the reasons why many people in our shared country of birth rejected the Scottish National party’s referendum promise in 2014 is that at least we know what currency we have in this country, the pound. If Scotland were to become independent, it would not have the pound and it could not have the euro, so we do not know what it would be left with. A hole in the air? The groat? There is no answer to that question.
Michael Gove
No.
Let me now deal with the substantive point made by the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, because it is critical. He argues that the only way in which we as Back Benchers and Opposition spokesmen can effectively scrutinise the Government is through impact assessments. That is a grotesque misunderstanding of the opportunities that are available to us in the House through freedom of information requests, parliamentary questions—written or oral—and the diligent use of all the other tools that enable us to scrutinise the Executive. The idea that we are mute and blind until an impact assessment has been published, the idea that there is no relevant tool available to us and no relevant source of information that we can quarry other than an impact assessment—
Michael Gove
No.
That idea is a misunderestimation—if I may borrow a phrase from George W. Bush—of what all of us, as Members of Parliament, are capable of.
That brings me to my final point—
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is expounding entirely on the principle of the House, which is the principle of democracy under the rule of law. He is not arguing, as others have done, for the rule of lawyers.
Michael Gove
I could not agree more, and my hon. Friend’s intervention gives me an opportunity to commend him for the work that he has done to draw attention to the way in which some lawyers have used some legislation to enrich themselves at the expense of those who wear the Queen’s uniform and defend our liberties every day. His work is commendable, and it is an example of what a Back Bencher can do. He did that work without any impact assessments having been published, and without waiting for the Ministry of Defence to act. He did it because he believed in holding the Executive to account, as we all do—and the one thing for which we all want to hold the Executive to account is the triggering of article 50. So if anyone wants to have the opportunity for perennial judicial review, they should vote for these amendments. If they want to earn the scorn of the public by putting pettifogging delay ahead of mandate—
Michael Gove
Yes, it is one of my favourite polysyllabic synonyms for prevarication, procrastination or delay.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
I, on behalf of the Scottish National party, would like to speak to new clause 143, on which I hope we will test the will of the Committee later on, to amendment 58, which I tabled, which relates to the European development fund, and the 27 other amendments in the names of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) and other hon. Friends. The SNP tabled a total of 50 new clauses and amendments to this Bill, and I hope that we get a chance to debate as many of those in this group as possible—amendments 47 to 53, 57 to 62, 64 to 77, 79, 80 and 82, as well as new clause 138.
Government Members who have spoken were quite exercised about the possibility of the amendments causing some delay to the triggering of article 50, but I am not entirely sure what that delay might be. I have read the Bill—all 137 words of it—and nowhere in it is there a date for the triggering of article 50. The Bill gives the power to the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister alone—as I said last week, it is a very presidential power, not a parliamentary power—to choose the date on which article 50 is triggered.
Stephen Gethins
My hon. Friend makes a very good point about the new clauses we are arguing for this evening. Is he aware that the Scottish Parliament this evening voted by three to one against triggering article 50, which comes on top of the two to one of Scots who voted against triggering article 50 as well?
Patrick Grady
I am fully aware of that. It reflects the consensus across Scottish society that Scotland should retain its membership of the single market and the fact that it did not vote to leave the EU. The Scottish Conservatives have run a mile from that.
Several hon. Members rose—
Patrick Grady
No, I will not give way yet; we are just getting started.
I might add that in the time that the Scottish Parliament took that vote, as well as votes on several amendments, barely one Member had spoken in this debate. Voting in the Scottish Parliament is far quicker than here; its Members can vote on far more amendments than we ever can, because they do not have the archaic procedures that we have to put up with down here.
Yesterday’s amendment paper had more pages—142—than there are words in the Bill, but today we are down to just 121 pages. The number of amendments that have been tabled highlights the dreadful inadequacies of both the Bill and this scrutiny process. There is nowhere near enough time to consider the massive implications of what Brexit will actually mean and how the Government intend to achieve it, and of course there is still no kind of meaningful information on what they think those implications might be.
Mr MacNeil
A theme is emerging of what Brexit might mean: a plea—I noticed this in the speech of the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove)—for the EU not to punish the UK. Yet from the same lips all the time comes the threat of a punishment to Scotland if we become independent. These acts and words will not be missed in the 27 member states of the EU—the hypocrisy, the double-edged sword and the brass neck and bare-faced cheek in the UK.
Patrick Grady
I have not responded to my hon. Friend yet.
The Scottish National party—for the record, that is its name, as I think Hansard is probably fed up with hearing—has always understood that our kind of independence is defined by our interdependence and by the role that we want to play in the world, whereas it is increasingly clear that the hard right, Tory Brexit that is being foisted upon us against our will is an isolationist independence—[Interruption.] It is Trumpist, triumphant and narrow nationalism, as I hear my colleagues saying from the Back Benches.
Patrick Grady
No, I still have not even begun to talk about our new clauses and amendments, and I am sure that Members want to hear why it is so important that the Government should publish impact assessments on the machinery of government, which will be profoundly affected by our leaving the European Union.
The Government must give us a benchmark. They must give us their own assessment against which we can measure and test these things so that we can hold them to account. The Chair of the Procedure Committee, the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), under whom I am proud to serve but who is not in the Chamber, has said that we are accountable to our voters—that is absolutely correct. However, the Government are accountable to us, and they have to provide us with the necessary information so that we can hold them to account.
Kwasi Kwarteng
It seems to have taken the Scottish nationalist party six months to realise that a third of those who voted yes in 2014 actually wanted to leave the EU. SNP Members seem completely oblivious to that fact, but I would like to hear what the hon. Gentleman has to say about it.
Patrick Grady
I think that that counts as a minority.
The First Minister herself said on 24 June that we would respect, listen to and understand the people in Scotland who voted to leave the European Union. We never heard anything like that from the Prime Minister about those on the other side. The First Minister’s words were reflected in the compromise position that was published by the Scottish Government. They have moved heaven and earth to try to reach a compromise arrangement with this Government, but their words are still falling on deaf ears.
Patrick Grady
No.
I want to address some of the new clauses and amendments that have been tabled by various factions on the Labour Benches, and I shall focus particularly on the ones relating to Euratom. The exchanges on this subject on Second Reading demonstrated the utter chaos that has gripped this Administration and their predecessor. Euratom’s role is to provide a framework for nuclear energy safety and development. I would have thought that, no matter how much some of the Brexiteers hate the European Union institutions, this one would have been among the least controversial. Surely there must be consensus on protecting us from nuclear meltdowns. Do they not think that that is a good idea? No.
The Command Paper that the UK Government published in February last year on the impact of Brexit made no mention of coming out of Euratom. Nevertheless, we are being taken out of it without any warning and, if the Government will not accept the Labour new clause on this matter, there will be no further discussion about it. I do not remember the subject featuring on the side of buses or in showpiece debates, yet here we are with another ill-thought-out unintended consequence of a Brexit vote that started as an internal ideological battle among Conservative Members and that is going to leave decades of uncertainty in its wake for us all. That is just one example. Each new clause and amendment, from whatever party, that calls for an impact assessment shows the Government’s lack of preparation across the whole suite of policy.
Tom Tugendhat
I should like to ask the hon. Gentleman a small question, if I may. Has he given his constituents an impact assessment of any change that might take place at the next election? Has he prepared them fully and properly for the impact that a change of Member of Parliament might have on them? Or does he trust them to make their own impact assessment—does he trust the people to decide?
Patrick Grady
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman was here for my Second Reading speech last week, so he will know that 78% of my constituents voted to remain in the European Union. I am therefore reasonably confident that their voice is at last being heard. They will make their judgment at the next election, whenever it comes, and I will be happy to live with their decision.
We want to test the will of the House on new clause 143. It tests the Government not only on the practical costs of Brexit but on the hard money, because we know that the financial costs will be high. It is simply not in the interests of the remaining member states for the UK to be better off as a result of Brexit. We have already seen the shocks to the currency market described by my hon. Friend the Member for Badenoch and so on—[Laughter.] I am not quite as good at this as the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove). We have seen the shocks to the currency market and the revisions that have already happened in the economic forecasts. Withdrawing from the European Union and exiting the single market will lead to an enormous hit on our economy, and new clause 143 calls on the Chancellor to bring forward further revised forecasts and an assessment of the UK’s financial liability to the EU on the completion of the triggering of article 50.
Ian Blackford
We are talking about financial considerations, but this is about the impact on people and we have to think about UK citizens who are living in Europe. At the moment, they are entitled to healthcare cover and to a UK state pension that will be uprated, but there is no certainty that that will continue post-Brexit—the UK does not pay pension increases in countries with which it does not have a reciprocal arrangement. This is also about the EU citizens who may return to France, Germany, Spain or wherever and be caught up in the same trap, because while they paid national insurance here, the UK might not have a commitment to uprating pensions. Those are the sorts of issues that the Government must provide certainty on.
Patrick Grady
Indeed. That is covered in amendment 72, in which we ask the Department for Work and Pensions to provide an assessment. I hope that there will be time for the House to discuss that measure in more detail later on.
Patrick Grady
No, I want to make a little progress.
We have seen the leaked reports of the Government’s assessment that a hard Brexit could cost the UK economy up to £66 billion a year—9.5% of GDP—if we revert to WTO terms. The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), with whom I serve on the Procedure Committee, said earlier that analysis in the Financial Times shows that the cost of simply leaving is up to €20 billion due to the shared assets that we are a part of, and that there are up to €300 billion of payment liabilities that need to be settled in the negotiations. Even after all that, there will be ongoing costs, as well as funds that we might wish to continue to contribute to. That is covered in amendment 58, which is about the European development fund. The European development fund is the main method for providing European community aid for development co-operation in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries and the overseas countries and territories of EU member states.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Patrick Grady
I am happy to give way to my hon. Friend, who sits on the International Development Committee.
Dr Cameron
Does my hon. Friend agree that the European development fund is crucial not only to achieving our commitment to the sustainable development goals, but to providing long-term sustainable funding for projects, rather than letting them fall at the first hurdle?
Patrick Grady
Absolutely. The European development fund saves and changes lives in developing countries. I would have thought that there would be a little consensus—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) wants to talk to me about the EDF, I am happy to take an intervention.
Dr Murrison
Would the hon. Gentleman’s constituents rather that development aid from this country was spent by the UK and overseen by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, or spent by the EDF, which has none of that oversight?
Patrick Grady
The EDF is highly respected around the world for its effective use of international development aid. Indeed, I have pursued that with Ministers. I have received equivocal answers, but they have recognised from time to time that the EDF is actually quite an important part of the suite of European institutions and that we do make important contributions. If those contributions were ripped away, that would have a devastating effect on the EDF, so we must explore this area and understand it.
Over the years, the UK has contributed around £10 billion to the EDF, which has been a crucial component, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) says, of our meeting the 0.7% aid commitment. According to the Government’s timetable, Brexit will happen before the end of the current 2020 commitment period, so what will happen after Brexit? The other important thing about the EDF is that it is one of the main instruments for providing development capacity to British overseas territories, so how will they be affected? What plans are being made for them? We are trying to test such things through the amendments.
The Government have indicated from time to time that they ought to continue funding the EDF, so perhaps there are European institutions that they will have to continue to fund and support, and to have some kind of retained membership of. That makes me wonder. We hear about hard Brexit and soft Brexit, but perhaps this is some sort of hokey-cokey Brexit whereby we leave everything and then have to start joining things again: “You put your left wing in; Your right wing out; In, out, in, out”—I do not want to think about anything being shaken all about.
Amendment 49 calls for a report from the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the level of agricultural maintenance support grants beyond 2020.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Scotland is already losing out on more than £230 million of EU funding that was supposed to go to Scottish farmers. The UK Government promised a review in 2016, but they have not carried it out. It is critical that we have an impact assessment that tells Scottish farmers what will happen so that they can plan for their future.
Patrick Grady
There is absolutely no certainty for Scotland’s farmers, or indeed for farmers across the whole United Kingdom. During the EU referendum campaign, the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), made it clear that there would be a guarantee of capital and funding beyond 2020. Then, at the Oxford farming conference last month, the current Secretary of State completely changed her tune. Such confusing and contradictory comments about the long-term future show precisely why we need the Government to spell it out in far more detail than they have in the White Paper. Of course, we particularly want to know whether the agriculture powers currently exercised by the European Union will come to the Scottish Parliament. The principle is clear in the Scotland Act 1998: if something is not reserved, it is devolved. Therefore, everything that the EU is currently doing on this should go to the Scottish Parliament.
Patrick Grady
If the hon. Lady agrees with that, I am happy to hear from her.
Mrs Main
I will make my own point, thanks very much. Can the hon. Gentleman give the Committee some idea of how long all these impact assessments will take? How much time does he expect the House to devote to debating them and the statements? What other business will not happen because we are debating all the spurious impact assessments that he thinks should occupy the House 100%?
Patrick Grady
With the greatest of respect, we voted against the referendum Bill. We did not think the referendum should happen. When it became clear that the referendum would happen, we said that the debate should last longer. In Scotland we had two full years to debate the consequences of independence, and the voters heard both sides of the debate and made up their mind. We had less than six short months between the announcement of the date and the referendum—[Interruption.] I am hearing that the Secretary of State for Brexit backed a longer debate. There should have been time before the referendum. As I said at the start of my speech, the White Paper says that article 50 will be invoked at the end of March, but the Bill does not say that. It is entirely in the gift of the Prime Minister, and she might change her mind. There is no mechanism to hold her to account for that.
Stephen Gethins
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The SNP obviously backed a longer debate, and I am delighted that the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union did, too. A little more scrutiny might not have gone amiss.
Patrick Grady
Precisely. The Brexiteers’ whole point was about parliamentary sovereignty and how this House would take back for itself the opportunity to make decisions, so why are they now afraid of our having those opportunities?
Mr MacNeil
May I provide an answer to the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main)? The impact assessment would take slightly longer than jumping off a cliff.
Patrick Grady
That is a good point, well made. As I said at the start of my speech, we need the facts in front of us.
Patrick Grady
I will make a little progress because, as I said, we have a number of important amendments to discuss, but my hon. Friend can try to intervene later.
Amendment 51 calls for a report on the impact of UK withdrawal on Scottish seaports. The problems caused by Brexit that are facing Scottish seaports are expensive and complex. Concerns for the maritime industry surround general policy areas such as employment law, immigration, border controls and contract law, as well as transport-specific areas such as freedom to trade, safety, the environment, tonnage tax and security. The White Paper offers only more uncertainty.
The UK Government’s stated approach to immigration post-Brexit may create an increased need for border activity at Scottish seaports, and the Government’s preferred arrangements for trading post-Brexit—out of the EU customs arrangements—will necessitate additional customs checks on exports and imports at seaports, and will affect trade volume at seaports, so the Government have to mitigate that uncertainty by publishing a full impact assessment of those complex issues for Scottish seaports before triggering article 50.
Amendment 52 calls for an assessment of financial implications for charities, on which I have a certain amount of experience from my international development portfolio. International development charities across the United Kingdom are already feeling the impact of Brexit and the currency fluctuations. Money that they had raised—money that the UK public had voluntarily donated—is now worth less as a direct result of the Brexit decision, which is having an impact on the day-to-day lives of people in developing countries to whom charities had pledged money that is now not worth what it was when the pledges were made. I hear nothing from the UK Government saying that they want to make up the difference or give the charities any kind of support. UK charities generally receive some £200 million a year from the social fund, through EU structural funds and from the regional development fund.
Dr Cameron
Is it not extremely concerning that the chief executive of the UK-based international charity World Child Cancer stated that the fall in the pound had resulted in a 9% to 13% cut in its programme funding?
Patrick Grady
I agree entirely. All of us who deal with stakeholders in the third sector will hear stories such as that time and time again. It probably explains why research published by the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, which represents more than 3,000 employees and 15,000 volunteers, revealed that its charity chief executives were increasingly worried about the future. Half of those surveyed receive funding from the EU and 30% confirmed that indirect funding was at risk. As I have said, in the immediate case we have seen the devaluation of currency being spent by those charities.
Amendment 53 calls for a report on the relationship between the Channel Islands and the EU. The Channel Islands are not a member of the EU, but they have access to the single market and now face being denied that by a hard Tory Brexit. That is why our amendment seeks a report that sets out the full implication of the relationship between the Channel Islands and the EU, and the impact that Brexit will have. That is vital because there will be a serious impact on many key Channel Islands industries, including finance and fisheries. Again, that is an example of why we need these impact assessments.
Amendment 57 calls for a revised strategic defence and security review. The last SDSR was based on the 2015 national security risk assessment, which took place before the European referendum and did not consider any post-Brexit scenarios. As such, it is no longer fit for purpose. The SDSR makes no mention of the EU’s common security and defence policy, whereas the White Paper outlines existing UK participation in the CSDP and expresses the intention to continue that co-operation post-Brexit. Again, we see the in and out of the Tories’ Brexit.
Ian Blackford
My hon. Friend is giving a damning indictment of the UK Government’s lack of preparedness for Brexit, but this is also about what will change. We have heard about agriculture and fisheries, but the fact remains that Europe has delivered for Scottish crofters and Scottish farmers, and one institution that we have not been able to depend on is the UK. The EU has given the UK €233 million of convergence uplift funding, which was primarily to go to Scottish crofters and farmers, yet we have only got 16% of it. Who should we be trusting? Should we be trusting Europe or should we be trusting the UK Government to deliver for our crofters and farmers
Patrick Grady
That is a fair point. We hear Government Members saying, “Where did that money come from? It came from UK taxpayers”, but my hon. Friend is exactly right in what he says. The road I cycled up to school every day, in Inverness and in the country—this was when I was slightly younger than I am now—was built and paid for with EU money. There is no way on God’s earth that Thatcher’s Government would have spent that money on that road, which shows why people in Scotland voted to remain in the EU.
Alan Brown
My hon. Friend is highlighting some issues, but I wish to get back to the SDSR. The National Audit Office has identified that a key risk to the strategic plan is fluctuations in the pound because of pricing against the dollar. If the NAO is highlighting that as an issue, should the Government not be looking at it, rather than having a Secretary of State who stands at the Dispatch Box and tells us, “Everything is okay; we made contingency plans”? We need to know what the contingency plans are and what the impact will be.
Patrick Grady
Of course we do, which is why we tabled all these amendments. We were asked why we were doing that and what we were trying to achieve, but my hon. Friend is making the case on that very clearly.
I have already spoken about amendment 58, so I shall move on to amendment 59, which calls for a report on the medium-term economic forecast in the event of the UK leaving the single market. Again, Scottish National party Members have made points about the dangerous long-term and medium-term economic realities of a hard Tory Brexit. We know that the OBR forecast said:
“we asked the Government in September for ‘a formal statement of Government policy as regards its desired trade regime and system of migration control, as a basis for our projections’. The Government directed us to two public statements by the Prime Minister that it stated were relevant”.
Given the far-reaching and devastating consequences that leaving the single market would have on the economy, teamed with the lack of detail given to the OBR, it has to be the Treasury’s responsibility to publish a medium-term forecast.
George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)
It is clear that even in the short term the fall in the value of the pound is triggering significant inflationary pressure across the British economy, which will hurt ordinary people in their wage packets, with an impact on industrial costs, in a way that was wholly avoidable.
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We see no action from the Government whatsoever, other than to pretend that everything is bright and breezy. We are witnessing a bit of a false dawn.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
In the longer term we have other issues, because many of the key shortages in science, technology, engineering and maths skills are filled by EU nationals, who simply are not getting the guarantees they need either to stay in the UK or to come here in the first place.
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. She and I share a boundary with the University of Glasgow and we know the vital contribution it makes, not only to the city but to Scotland’s economy as a whole. Higher education institutes throughout the country are expressing those concerns.
Pete Wishart
My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech, exposing the real difficulties at the heart of this bad Tory Brexit. I am trying to figure out exactly what is going on with Conservative Members. Perhaps they are opposing the economic impact assessments because they know the true nature of Brexit and the damage it will deliver. Does he agree that that seems to be the underlying reason why they are so opposed to having just a short glimpse of what Brexit will do to this country?
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have every right to continue to question them; after all, as I said earlier, this is what they wanted. They wanted Parliament to regain its sovereign status.
Michael Gove
As ever, the hon. Gentleman is making an impressive speech, but I should say one thing—
Michael Gove
I should, actually—just the one. Why is it that Scotland now has to import scientists and engineers when in the 19th and early 20th century we used to export them? Is it anything to do with the drop in international league table rankings for science and mathematics that has occurred under the Scottish National party’s stewardship of the education system?
Patrick Grady
First, I am not convinced that the words “import” and “export” are the right ones to use when we are talking about human beings—some of the most capable and talented human beings in the world. [Interruption.] Secondly, I hear my hon. Friend the Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), who is on the Education Committee, saying, “So is the rest of the United Kingdom.” Finally, we want to welcome people to Scotland. If the Government want to devolve immigration policy to us as part of the Brexit process, they should feel free to. As has been pointed out many times in these debates, the right hon. Gentleman himself has said that immigration policy should come to Scotland so that we can attract the brightest and the best, and we are not afraid to do so.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
Having grown up in Inverness, my hon. Friend will remember the Kessock bridge well. When people come over it now, they can see the shining example of the new University of the Highlands and Islands campus there. Thanks to £200 million-worth of EU structural funds over the past 20 years, we have been growing our own scientists and academics in the area. Does he agree that it is absolutely scandalous that up to 2022 an estimated £19 million will be lost, with no impact assessment?
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This is exactly what we are trying to achieve.
Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)
In response to the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), I would say that it was because of the failure of UK economic policy that after my brother graduated as a scientist he was forced to emigrate to Canada. He eventually became the chairman of the OECD science and technology committee and helped to write the science and technology policy for the free South Africa, yet the failure over here forced him to emigrate.
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend makes an absolutely valid point.
Amendment 61 calls for a revised national security strategy. The existing national security strategy is based on a 2015 assessment that took no account of Brexit—[Interruption.] I am not sure what Government Members are so concerned about. It is completely legitimate for Opposition Members to table amendments to the Bill and it is perfectly right and proper that we have the opportunity to debate them.
Philip Boswell (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)
My hon. Friend has mentioned a long list of issues that are not being properly scrutinised in this rush to Brexit. The Government’s White Paper was hastily prepared, and in haste, we make mistakes, as conceded by the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove). Does my hon. and most European Friend know how to spell Liechtenstein?
Patrick Grady
I will give way to the hon. Lady in just one second. [Interruption.] Right, okay.
Helen Goodman
Does the hon. Gentleman think that perhaps the Procedure Committee should have a look at the practice of filibustering, as there are many hon. Members who want to make important speeches?
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The hon. Gentleman is speaking. I know that there has been some latitude, but I also know that he wants to get back on the subject of impacts, and that is where we are going now. Let me just say that there are seven other speakers.
Patrick Grady
The short answer to the hon. Lady regarding the Procedure Committee is, yes, I do believe that this House should introduce rules against filibustering, and, as soon as that happens, we will be happy to abide by them.
On the point about Liechtenstein, I do know how to spell it, but I will not find it by looking at page 54, chart 9.3 of the Brexit White Paper. Amendment 62 calls on the Chancellor to publish an assessment of future payments to the European Union. It is similar to new clause 143, which we want to push to a vote later on this evening, so some of the points should have been covered already.
Amendment 64 calls on the Secretary of State for Education to publish an impact assessment on her Department’s responsibility in this area. We have already heard from some Members about the serious implications regarding the ability of our universities to attract talented researchers and students in the event of the UK leaving the European Union. Figures for 2014-15 show that there were 13,450 full-time equivalent EU students studying for undergraduate degrees at Scottish universities. Frankly, almost every single one of them will have been shocked and saddened by the result on 23 June. None the less, they have appreciated the warm welcome and reassurances that have been provided to them by academic institutions up and down Scotland, by the Scottish Government and by the friends, neighbours and families who live in their cities.
Carol Monaghan
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way once again. One of the uncertainties faced by EU nationals wanting to come and study in the UK post- Brexit is what fee structure will be imposed on them, and absolutely no answers have been given on that.
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Again, we will continue to push the Government on that. I hope that the Minister will have some time to respond to some of these important points. I have spent a lot of time in exchanges with him in Westminster Hall, which perhaps should be renamed “Brexit Minister Hall” in due course once the Brexit process has been completed.
Michael Gove
Will the hon. Gentleman enlighten us? Has any impact assessment ever been undertaken by the Scottish Government of the impact of their education policies on participation in higher education, particularly given that the most recent statistics demonstrate that the Scottish Government’s policies—
The Chairman
Order. The problem might have come from somewhere else in the Chamber, but I do not want it to be from the right hon. Gentleman. You have been around this Chamber for far too long and you know that you are way outside scope. I think that I preferred you on the Front Bench than on the Back Bench.
Patrick Grady
I think the Prime Minister might disagree with you on that, Mr Hoyle.
I want to talk more about education and health before I start to wind up. There are elements of education that are shared with the European Union. Will they also be devolved fully to the Scottish Parliament? That also applies to some aspects of health. Leaving the EU will have serious implications for the workforce of our health service. According to the Trade Union Congress, just under 50,000 citizens from the European economic area work in the NHS—9,000 doctors, 18,000 nurses, and the list goes on. Those people are a vital source of skills and experience, plugging gaps left by the underfunding of training places, especially in England and Wales, in recent years. This again is where the failure of the UK Government to guarantee the rights of EU nationals to remain and to live and work in the UK after we leave the EU is causing uncertainty and disappointment.
The UK Government have also yet to set out how they will deal with cross-border health issues after leaving the European Union.
Stuart Blair Donaldson (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (SNP)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way on that point. Many people have received medical treatment abroad under the European health insurance card. That includes me, and I have the scars to prove it. Does he share my concern that we may no longer have access to the card after Brexit?
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend makes a crucial point, which he was right to raise eloquently in the House in the run-up to the European Union referendum—[Interruption.] I hear dissent from Labour Members, but the reality is that these are the uncertainties and confusions. Nobody seems to know exactly the right answer, which is why we continue to press our amendments.
Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
One impact assessment that has been researched is by End Child Poverty. Its report “Feeling the Pinch” has assessed that prices are due to rise by 35% between 2010 and 2020, which will have a massive impact on the exponential rise in child poverty. Does my hon. Friend agree that impact assessments like that—of the impact on families and children—are so important, and that is why we table our amendments?
Patrick Grady
Absolutely. As I said at the beginning of my speech on these important amendments that we want the Committee to debate in full, the Brexit debate was for too long an ideological debating society game being played on the Government Benches. As the reality hits home, we are now beginning to realise the kind of consequences my hon. Friend mentions. It is important that as many of the powers and as much of the budget that are relevant and appropriate come to the Scottish Parliament as part of the Brexit process so that we can protect and defend the rights that people have enjoyed under the European Union and that are now at risk. That is why we continue to press for impact assessments.
Amendment 66 is important because it calls for the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to publish an impact assessment on her Department’s responsibilities, which, of course, include the common fisheries policy.
Patrick Grady
Yes. It was decided in 1972 that the policy was somehow expendable, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) is saying.
Patrick Grady
I will give way to my hon. Friend, who has a lot of experience.
Mr MacNeil
I represent probably the only constituency to reach 200 miles of the exclusive economic zone. Is there not a case not just for putting Scotland in control of fisheries, but for giving the Hebrides and island groups some power over them? We should certainly not leave them in charge of the guys in Westminster who sold them down the river once and, given this White Paper, are looking to sell them down the river yet again?
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is why the fishermen and women of Scotland will be particularly concerned when the Government talk about a UK-wide approach. When the Prime Minister makes passing references to Spanish fishermen, everyone knows what she is signalling. Fishermen should not be on the table as some kind of bargaining chip. The UK Government must not sell out our fishermen as they did in 1972. They must tell us now what access arrangements they will seek to negotiate, and conduct a full impact assessment for our fishing sector.
Leaving the EU will create significant uncertainty within the agricultural sector, and the UK Government have to produce an assessment of that. It is particularly true in the case of the food and drink industry, as I am sure that hon. Members who were at the briefing from people in the food and drink industry earlier today would want to know. Some 69% of Scotland’s overseas food exports go to the European Union.
Calum Kerr (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (SNP)
I share my hon. Friend’s passion for the rural economy. Would he be surprised to learn that when an audience of 800 mainly English farmers at the Oxford farming conference were asked how many had confidence that DEFRA could deliver in the Brexit environment, the only hand that went up was that of the Farming Minister?
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
If we kept that rule going, nobody would speak on either side.
Patrick Grady
The reality is that my hon. Friends have a very important role in representing the interests of their constituents. There is a reason we tabled this many amendments and why we want to partake in the procedures of this House. We have been sent down here to do a job: to scrutinise this Government and hold them to account, as the official Opposition have been almost singularly unable to do so.
Alan Brown
Is it not the case that when the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) was on his feet, he was begging for interventions? He did it at least five times, and his hon. Friends were all laughing at the time.
The Chairman
Order. We are not getting into a debate about that. I think Mr Grady wants to come to the end of his speech, because he recognises that seven other people are waiting.
Patrick Grady
You are absolutely right, Mr Hoyle. As we know, six of my hon. Friends were waiting to be called last night, and they were unable to be called, because some people chose to vote for the programme motion and not to allow sufficient time. So I think it is important that I remain within order and that I speak to the SNP provisions in my name and those of my—
The Chairman
Order. If I was keeping everybody in order, your speech would have finished 15 minutes ago. We have latitude for all sides here tonight, so let us see how we go, but I do hope that you will recognise that others are waiting.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that an impact assessment on the justice system is crucial because our membership of Europol, Eurojust, the European arrest warrant and other key areas of co-operation on security matters remains at risk following a hard Tory Brexit?
Patrick Grady
That is exactly what amendment 67 calls for. Members can see that my hon. Friend has read all our amendments and is prepared to debate them on the Floor of the House. Justice issues are particularly important. Where will the Government be on the European convention on human rights? Where will their Bill of Rights be? How will all of that interact with the instruments of justice in the European Union that my hon. Friend speaks of?
Amendment 68 calls for the Home Secretary to publish an impact assessment on her Department’s responsibilities. We heard about immigration earlier. Is that responsibility going to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament, as the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath called for during the campaign? Our membership of Europol, our participation in the European arrest warrant and other key areas of co-operation on security remain at serious risk following Brexit, and that is why we need an impact assessment on the role of the Home Office.
Likewise, amendment 69 calls for the Secretary of State for Defence to publish an impact assessment on his Department’s responsibilities. As I said on Second Reading, we are at risk of being left with Trump, Trident and a transatlantic tax treaty. At this rate, Trump and Trident will be the beginning and end of the UK’s security policy.
Lucy Frazer
Does the hon. Gentleman have a timetable for how long it would take to conduct all these impact assessments?
Patrick Grady
I am absolutely certain that these impact assessments can run in parallel, but the hon. and learned Lady touches on an important point, which goes to the heart of all these points about impact assessments and the capacity of the UK Government to deal with all of this. There is an impact on the whole machinery of government—
Patrick Grady
If the hon. Lady wants to talk to me about the machinery of government, I will be happy to take her intervention.
Nadine Dorries
Does the hon. Gentleman know exactly how much these impact assessments would cost the taxpayer?
Patrick Grady
That is exactly the point. The whole machinery of government is going to be tied up for years and years—this was supposed to be about taking back control. The reality is that, if the Government do not accept these amendments and do not do these things before article 50 is triggered, they will have to do them afterwards. They are simply going to have to figure out how Brexit impacts on every single Government Department. The whole machinery of government will have to be reformed—it stands to reason. So they can do what we propose before triggering article 50 and have some kind of certainty, or they can do it afterwards and the complete chaos can continue.
Patrick Grady
I think we need to continue looking at the various proposals.
Patrick Grady
I think we have heard enough from the former Justice Secretary for now.
The point made by the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) is exactly what amendment 70 touches on. It calls on the Chancellor to publish an impact assessment on his Department’s responsibilities. The responsibility of the Treasury will change quite significantly. As we heard from the Brexiteers throughout the campaign, the Treasury currently channels all this money into the European Union. It is going to have to reabsorb that money and have the structures to apportion it back out to lots of different Government Departments.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is doing a fantastic job of outlining a series of important areas that are likely to be greatly impacted on financially by the UK leaving the EU. Does he agree that the assessments we are calling for are the very least one should expect from any responsible Chancellor of the Exchequer?
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. An impact assessment, by definition, is more than simply something printed on the side of a bus.
Mr MacNeil
The argument put forward by the hon. Lady from England somewhere—the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries)—is quite strange. It is akin to the person who says, “Given the cost of buying a map, isn’t it far better that we stumble around in the dark?” That is the argument against impact assessments: do not buy a map, stumble in the dark.
Patrick Grady
Exactly.
Talking of maps, my hon. Friend brings me to amendment 71, which calls for the Foreign Secretary to publish an impact assessment on his Department’s responsibilities. We need clarity on the working relationships and the division of labour between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for Exiting the European Union, especially as regards the UK’s permanent representation at the European Union, which we have to assume will continue in some form.
Patrick Grady
Does the hon. Gentleman welcome the fact that UKRep will probably have to get bigger? Does he welcome more UK bureaucrats in Brussels?
Mr Rees-Mogg
I hope that UKRep will be very slim. The hon. Gentleman is surely now suggesting the most pointless of all his impact assessments, because the Department for Exiting the European Union will cease to exist at the end of the process, and therefore having an impact assessment on what it might do before the process has ended is otiose beyond measure.
Patrick Grady
I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman has clearly not read the amendment. The amendment calls for the Foreign Secretary to publish an impact assessment that will include, but not exclusively, his relationships with the Department for Exiting the European Union.
Amendment 72—perhaps the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) will want to intervene on this—calls on the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to publish an impact assessment on his responsibilities. The Scottish Government are seeking to give people in Scotland reassurances that they are allowed live and work here.
Patrick Grady
No, I am not giving way.
One of the key agreements of the UK’s renegotiation in earlier years was that the UK would be able to establish a four-year period before non-UK EU nationals have access to in-work benefits such as tax credits, child benefit and housing benefit. It is unclear whether the new deal that is done with the EU will enable the UK to impose such restrictions. The Scottish Government did not approve of the proposal and would want to seek different arrangements if they could. Again, there is a question about whether these powers will be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. There were only two pages—
Patrick Grady
No, I am not giving way to the right hon. Gentleman.
The token total of two pages on securing rights for EU nationals is telling about the UK Government’s real priorities.
Amendment 73 calls for the Secretary of State for International Trade to publish an impact assessment on his Department’s responsibilities. Trade policy is currently under EU competence, and leaving the EU single market and customs union would mean that it fell under the responsibility of the UK Government. The Secretary of State therefore needs to outline how his Department is going to make use of its new competence over trade policy.
Patrick Grady
If the hon. Gentleman can tell me that, I will be happy to hear from him.
Kevin Foster
The hon. Gentleman is certainly giving a speech that is great in length. On amendment 73, would he suggest that the assessment by the Department for International Trade should include the potential impact of having to deal with Scotland outside the UK single market as an international trade partner?
Patrick Grady
Conveniently, we have heard from the Prime Minister in recent days about her support for friction-free travel and friction-free trade across the islands of the United Kingdom, so I have every confidence that when Scotland becomes an independent country—
Mary Creagh
On a point of order, Mr Hoyle. I wonder whether you can advise me. There are seven other hon. Members waiting to speak in this debate, including me, as a Select Committee Chair wanting to share with Members the scrutiny of our cross-party Committee. Does the time limit for this debate not indicate that important assessments on areas such as the environment and agriculture will not be heard by the Committee tonight? Can you send a message to the Lords to make sure that they do the job that this House is incapable of doing?
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
We can enter into an argument about it, but the House decided on a programme motion, and unfortunately some people are a victim of that.
Mr MacNeil
Yes. I seek your guidance, Mr Hoyle. Is it in order for Members who abstained on the programme motion to complain about the programme, when they have taken no part in it?
The Chairman
I knew that my instinct was correct, and that that was not a point of order.
Patrick Grady
I take the point that the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) is making, and I believe she is indicating that she joined us in the Lobby to vote against the programme motion. I agreed with the point made by my friend from the Procedure Committee. We are all in favour of reform of this House. As it is, we will use the procedures of the House to hold the Government to account.
Amendment 74 calls for the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to publish an impact assessment on his Department’s responsibilities. The vote to leave the European Union has plunged our business and energy sector into further uncertainty.
Nadine Dorries
On a point of order, Mr Hoyle. The Scottish National party has now been here for almost two years. That is sufficient time to have learned some of the manners and the protocol of the Chamber, which includes referring to Members by their—
The Chairman
Order. As a member of the Panel of Chairs, you know that you are not making a point of order.
Patrick Grady
That is an interesting point. The hon. Lady is sitting where a couple of other Members are accustomed to sit on Friday afternoons, and we have watched them rise and talk out private Member’s Bill after private Member’s Bill. So I will not hear Members of the Conservative party complaining about the legitimate use of the procedures of the House. We have tabled amendments. We went up to the Table Office and lodged amendments in precise accordance with the rules of the House, and we have every right to stand here and explain to the House the importance of our amendments.
Patrick Grady
If the hon. Gentleman wants to talk to me about my amendments, I will be happy to listen to him.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is completely right to use the procedures of the House as they allow, and, if he carries on like this, he will reach the heights attained by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). [Interruption.]
Patrick Grady
I hope I am not hearing applause from Conservative Members, because that would be a breach of order.
It is important that we consider our amendment about BEIS, because the vote to leave the EU has plunged the business and energy sectors into further uncertainty.
Alan Brown
I reiterate that we are speaking to the amendments that we have tabled. One of the better productions from the UK Government is the Green Paper “Building our Industrial Strategy”, published by BEIS. The Green Paper highlights the challenges in skills gaps, in productivity and in research and development. It does not mention the challenge of leaving Europe, and it does not mention that leaving Europe is even an opportunity. That proves the need for an impact assessment from BEIS—
The Chairman
Order. Let us be a little bit fair. We understand what is going on. In the end, interventions have got to be shorter for Mr Grady to get towards the end of his speech.
Patrick Grady
I outlined at the start of my speech the amendments that we tabled. My hon. Friend makes a good point. We have spoken about the uncertainty caused by Euratom, which was, I accept, covered in important detail by Labour Members.
Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
Is not amendment 74 the most important one, because it includes workers’ rights? Many of us view the Government’s attitude to workers’ rights with great suspicion.
Patrick Grady
Absolutely; indeed, an entire new schedule on workers’ rights has been tabled.
Amendment 75 calls on the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to publish an impact assessment on his Department’s responsibilities. Local government throughout the UK receives a host of funding from the European Union, not least the structural funds that we have heard about many times.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that with so many regulations being implemented by local government in areas such as food protection and waste disposal, local government needs to know what form those will take once we leave the EU?
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is why we have tabled amendments calling for impact assessments.
Amendment 76 calls on the Secretary of State for International Development to publish an impact assessment on her Department’s responsibilities. Again, we need clarity and a full commitment to 0.7% of gross national income going to overseas development. That is similar to the amendment in my name, amendment 58, which I have already spoken about.
Amendment 77 calls on the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to publish an impact assessment.
Patrick Grady
No—which is exactly what the right hon. Gentleman said to me on Second Reading.
The UK Government need to clarify what involvement the EU’s digital single market, which is vital for supporting highly paid jobs in an exciting growth sector, will have. They have been completely silent on the digital single market, which will be one of the most important sectors of our economy—like tourism, which also comes under the remit of the DCMS. Approximately 20,000 EU nationals work in Scotland’s hospitality sector—12% of the total. What will be the impact on them?
Amendment 79 calls for the Chancellor to publish a report on matters relating to the pensions of UK nationals living and working in the European Union. Again, that is an area of great uncertainty, and I have heard about it from my own constituents. Some 400,000 UK nationals living in the EU receive a pension from the United Kingdom Government, and they are incredibly concerned about the impact of Brexit. The Government have done nothing to reassure them.
Amendment 80, one of the most important, calls on the Government to publish an equality impact assessment. We heard earlier from the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) about the whole range of minority and interest groups in our society—faith groups, LGBT groups and so on—that are completely absent from the UK Government’s White Paper. That is why it is important that we hear about them in an impact assessment.
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s failure to include an equality impact assessment is very distressing? It is completely contrary to their words of support for equality, which are so often let down by their actions.
Patrick Grady
Of course. Equalities are at the heart of the European project, which the Brexiteers have wanted to rip us away from.
Amendment 82 calls for a regional and national economic impact assessment.
John Mc Nally (Falkirk) (SNP)
Why do we need an impact assessment? Well, right now chemical manufacturers and importers from non-EU countries are using the UK as a base from which they can guide chemicals through the REACH programme through the appointment of a UK-based only representative. When the UK leaves the EU, only representatives will no longer be able to be based here. Does my hon. Friend agree that that will incentivise—
Patrick Grady
It will not surprise the House to hear that I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. The single market has allowed Scotland’s economy to flourish over all these years, and that is now at stake in a hard Tory Brexit.
Finally, new clause 138 addresses trade agreements. We have heard the FCO and the Department for International Trade boasting in public about new trade agreements that the UK will sign after it leaves the EU. Of course, it cannot sign them until it has left. That is why the Government have to be transparent and report on which trade agreements they are working on and give details on the nature and terms of those deals. It is crucial that the UK Government inform and consult Parliament in their ongoing trade talks and allow scrutiny throughout the process.
Mr MacNeil
Of nearly 200 members of the United Nations, only six states are outwith a regional trade agreement. The UK is to become the seventh, joining the likes of Mauritania and East Timor. Does my hon. Friend share my concerns and those of the chemical industry about where that leaves us and everybody else involved? The UK is going headlong towards a cliff in joining countries as small as those.
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I hope that by examining in detail these vital new clauses and amendments tabled by Scottish National party Members, the Government will begin to understand how seriously we are taking this issue.
Stephen Gethins
My hon. Friend has made excellent points about the amendments and about how many there are. Does that not underline the woeful lack of time given to this entire process in respect of article 50?
Patrick Grady
Absolutely. As has been pointed out, we had more time to discuss the Scotland Bill. That will now probably not be the last legislation on Scotland; I see that the Secretary of State for Scotland has taken his place. He will probably have to steer through another Scotland Bill during this Parliament as a result of Brexit, to give us all the powers he promised he would.
This is only the beginning. The Government want to bring forward the great repeal Bill, increasingly known as “the great power grab”. They must be willing to stand up to the scrutiny of the House. We have been sent here to do a job, and that is what we have done this evening with our amendments. That is what we will continue to do during the passage of this Bill and all the future legislation that comes with Brexit. [Interruption.]
The Chairman
Order. Let us move on, and let us keep going. I call the Minister.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr Robin Walker)
What a remarkable debate this has been. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) on speaking for 58 minutes and for the ingenuity with which he made sure that the Committee heard so many Scottish voices. It will be clear to those who read the record that the voice of Scotland has been heard loud and clear in scrutinising this Bill.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) on making a clear and concise speech. Indeed, other hon. Gentlemen in the Chamber could have learned from his conciseness.
Mr Walker
I will come back to the hon. Lady later, because I suspect she wants to address environmental issues and I will come to those in my speech.
Our programme of analysis is important in enabling us to seize the opportunities and in ensuring that our EU exit is a smooth and orderly process. As we discussed yesterday, the Joint Ministerial Committee on exit negotiations was set up to develop a UK-wide approach to the forthcoming negotiations. I know that analysis has been and can be exchanged confidentially through that forum. The Committee should be in no doubt that policy relating to EU exit is underpinned by rigorous and extensive analytical and assessment work. As with all internal analytical work in government, it is not the standard practice to give a public commentary as the analysis develops.
We have said all along that we will lay out as much detail as possible on EU exit, provided that doing so does not risk damaging our negotiating position. The House voted on a motion that confirmed that there should be no disclosure of material that could damage the UK in negotiations. In any negotiation, information on potential economic or financial considerations is very important to the negotiating capital and position of all parties.
Most of the new clauses and amendments would require the Government to publish analysis or assessment work before the process of negotiating with our European Union partners begins and, indeed, before the Prime Minister provides a notification under article 50, as Government Members have pointed out repeatedly. Those include new clause 5, which stands in the names of the Leader of the Opposition and many other Members; new clause 49, which stands in the names of the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) and many other Members; and new clause 143, which stands in the name of the hon. Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) and many other SNP Members; as well as more than 40 other proposals that I do not intend to list. The common requirement is that we publish information at a time when it could either delay the triggering of article 50 or jeopardise the UK’s negotiating position. That runs contrary to the approach that has already been accepted by this House. For that reason, I cannot accept those new clauses and amendments.
I want to touch briefly on amendments 24 to 26, which were tabled by the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) to ensure that the Government take account of our responsibilities to represent the interests of Gibraltar, the Crown dependencies and the overseas territories. I assure him that we are doing exactly that. The amendments are not necessary. I met the members of the Joint Ministerial Council for the overseas territories this morning to take their views on board in this process.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
Given that I was not able to make a speech, I am very grateful to be able to intervene. Is it not the case that we need more than a personal consultation with the Minister? This House and this Parliament should be aware of the implications for the overseas territories, the Crown dependencies and Gibraltar.
Mr Walker
The hon. Gentleman makes a very fair point. I am very pleased to say to him that the very first debate I replied to as a Minister—the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) was kind enough to name Westminster Hall “Brexit Minister Hall”, because of the number of debates we have had there on this issue—was on Gibraltar and the impact of leaving the European Union. Colleagues across the House represent the interests of Gibraltar extremely well. I have had regular and productive meetings with the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, who has made sure that its voice is heard very clearly by the UK Government. All the Chief Ministers of the overseas territories are being consulted, as are the Crown dependencies.
As a former Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, I welcome the interest in new clause 98, which makes reference to the Equality Act 2010 and protected characteristics. We are, of course, assessing a wide range of impacts as we develop our negotiating position, and we will continue to do so throughout the negotiation period. The Equality Act already provides a strong framework to ensure that the UK is well placed to continue driving equality forward. I assure the Committee that all the protections covered in the Equality Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2010 will continue to apply once the UK has left the European Union.
The Prime Minister has been clear: we want the UK to emerge from this period of change stronger, fairer, and more united and outward-looking than ever before. We want to get the right deal abroad, but ensure we get a better deal for ordinary working people at home. In the White Paper, we set out our ambition to use this moment of change to build a stronger economy and a fairer society by embracing genuine economic and social reform.
New clauses 42 to 48 and new clause 187 were tabled by the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) who, sadly, is no longer in her place. What they have in common is a requirement for the Government to publish impact assessments no later than 18 months after Royal Assent. We cannot know, however, that 18 months after Royal Assent we will not still be engaged in negotiations with the European Union. If we were, those negotiations might be at an important and decisive stage. The new clauses could significantly jeopardise our negotiating position, so I hope the hon. Lady will not press them.
Similarly, new clause 167, in the name of the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra), requires publication no later than 12 months after Royal Assent, and new clause 17, in the name of the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie), specifies publication 30 days after the Act comes into force. In each case, I reiterate and amplify my previous objection that the United Kingdom might well be in the middle of negotiations with the European Union.
I turn now to the new clauses tabled by the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) and others, including new clauses 101, 102, 103, 106 and 107. I would be happy to give way to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on the matter of the environment at this point.
Caroline Lucas
Will the Minister acknowledge that moving environmental policy from the EU to domestic policy through the repeal Bill will not be enough on its own? We need to make it enforceable and monitorable. What legal measures will he put in place to ensure we can enforce environmental legislation? While I have his attention, and at the risk of challenging his stereotype, how does he plan to replace the nuclear safety function if we recklessly leave Euratom?
Mr Walker
The hon. Lady raises very important points, which we will debate in detail when we come to the great repeal Bill. On Euratom, we absolutely want to continue to collaborate internationally to achieve the best and highest standards of nuclear safety, as well as to continue to work on nuclear research, where our country has been a global leader.
On the environment, the Prime Minister made very clear in her speech that Parliament will have the opportunity to debate and scrutinise any policy changes that result from our exit and the forthcoming negotiations. I have given evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee and have appeared before the House on a number of occasions. I have been clear that the UK will still seek to be an international leader on environmental co-operation. As part of the great repeal Bill, as the hon. Lady says, we will bring current EU law, including the current framework of environmental regulation, into domestic British law. We will ensure that that law has practical effect. This will preserve protections, and any future changes in the law will be subject to full parliamentary scrutiny. This House will therefore have the opportunity to debate this and other topics throughout the process.
That and future debates will no doubt draw on many assessments of what leaving the EU will mean for a wide variety of issues. The Government will also shortly be launching two closely linked Green Papers on food, farming and fisheries, and on the environment. They will be the next important stage in our dialogue on future policy with industry, environmental non-governmental organisations and the wider public.
No one can say what the final elements of the new agreement with the EU will be, and we do not know exactly how the timetable will work after negotiations are concluded. Parliament will have its say, but so too will others. Greater certainty will emerge as we go through the process, but for now there remain unknowns. For these reasons, we do not consider it wise or prudent to fix now in statute what the Government must publish at the end of a process that has not even begun or been timetabled. Doing so would constrain the flexibility of the UK Government at the end of the process and therefore potentially during negotiations. I come back to the simple purpose of the Bill—to allow the process of negotiation to begin and, in so doing, to respect the decision of the people of the UK in the referendum.
New clause 167, on young people, was also tabled by the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston, who unfortunately has had to leave us. I recently participated in a roundtable, along with colleagues from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with a wide range of young people from all over the country—from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England—to talk about their views on Brexit. It was interesting to hear from groups such as Undivided, bringing people together from both sides of the campaign to talk about the future. Every Member wants to focus on delivering a bright future for the young people of the UK, so I welcome the intention behind the new clause, but we can do that by coming together to represent the 100%, focusing on the future, getting the right deal for the UK in a new partnership with the EU and working together to deliver the opportunities those young people want.
Unfortunately, the new clause would require us to produce an economic analysis and so put us in the position of potentially giving information to the other side in the negotiations that could prejudice our position. The new clause also mentions the importance of Erasmus. The Government recognise the value of international exchange for students and are considering all the options for collaboration in education and training post-Brexit. In the spirit of looking to the future, however, we should not use the Bill to publish information that could undermine our negotiating position.
For all the reasons I have set out, I hope that hon. Members concerned will not press their amendments. We will produce careful assessments of the vast majority of these factors as we prepare for and take part in the negotiations, and we will use them as evidence to protect the national interests of the United Kingdom, but we cannot and should not commit to putting that information into the hands of the other side. Well intentioned as the amendments are, I urge the Committee to reject them so that we can get on with the Bill in the interests of the whole United Kingdom.
Matthew Pennycook
In responding, I shall be as concise as I was earlier and simply say that although the Minister has said that the Government are internally carrying out rigorous analytical assessments, he has not given us the guarantees we sought on the publication of Her Majesty’s Treasury’s impact assessments of our future trading relations with the EU. For that reason, we will be pushing new clause 5 to a vote.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Wednesday 8th February 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 8 February 2017 - (8 Feb 2017)
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Wednesday 8th February 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 8 February 2017 - (8 Feb 2017)
17:52 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 291 / Noes: 336 - Question accordingly negatived.
18:06 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 289 / Noes: 336 - Question accordingly negatived.
18:19 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 288 / Noes: 338 - Question accordingly negatived.
18:32 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 288 / Noes: 337 - Question accordingly negatived.
18:44 - The Committee divided: - Ayes: 33 / Noes: 340 - Question accordingly negatived.
18:56 - The Committee having divided: - Ayes: 288 / Noes: 327 - Question accordingly negatived.
19:14 - The Committee having divided: - Ayes: 496 / Noes: 111 - Question accordingly agreed to.
19:33 - divided: - Ayes: 290 / Noes: 332 - Question accordingly negatived.
19:45 - divided: - Ayes: 287 / Noes: 336 - Question accordingly negatived.
20:01 - The House divided: - Ayes: 494 / Noes: 122 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
On a point of order, Mrs Laing. I spent a lot of time last night studying the large number of amendments that have been tabled for today, and I have to confess that I am concerned as to the admissibility of a large number of them. It is my understanding that amendments are not admissible—out of order—if they are vague or unintelligible without further amendment. As an example, I would like to bring to your attention some of the terms in new clause 2, the lead new clause in the debate. It appears to be very vague, implying that
“the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to have regard to the public interest”
in a list of various—
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but the matter that he is raising is a matter for debate. Some of the new clauses and amendments that were tabled were considered to be in order and have therefore been selected for debate. Some were not in order, and were therefore ineligible for selection for debate. That is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact. I can assure the hon. Gentleman, although I have no obligation so to do, that the matter has been very carefully considered. New clause 2 is perfectly in order. He might well disagree with the points raised in it—indeed, I would expect him to—and I would expect him to make his disagreement known to the House in due course. For the moment, however, I can assure him and the House that new clause 2 is perfectly in order and that it will be debated.
The First Deputy Chairman
Further to that point of order? I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not wish to question the judgment of the Chair.
The First Deputy Chairman
No; the hon. Gentleman will resume his seat, please. [Interruption.] I thank hon. Members, but I am perfectly capable of dealing with this matter. It is not in order for the hon. Gentleman to ask for an explanation. That would be to question the judgment of the Chair, which is—I should carefully say—a matter up with which I will not put. We will debate new clause 2, which will be moved by Mr Paul Blomfield.
New Clause 2
Conduct of negotiations
“Before giving any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to have regard to the public interest during negotiations in—
(a) maintaining a stable and sustainable economy,
(b) preserving peace in Northern Ireland,
(c) having trading arrangements with the European Union for goods and services that are free of tariff and non-tariff barriers and further regulatory burdens,
(d) co-operation with the European Union in education, research and science, environment protection, and preventing and detecting serious and organised crime and terrorist activity,
(e) maintaining all existing social, economic, consumer and workers’ rights.”—(Paul Blomfield.)
This new clause sets out statutory objectives that the Government must have regard to whilst carrying out negotiations under article 50.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 7—Conduct of negotiations—anti-tax haven—
“(1) In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the public interest in maintaining all existing EU tax avoidance and evasion legislation.
(2) In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of Crown must comply with the European Union Code of Conduct on Business Taxation.”
This new clause sets out the government’s commitment to observe the Code of Conduct on business taxation to prevent excessive tax competition and lays out the statutory objectives that the Government must have regard to EU tax avoidance and evasion whilst carrying out negotiations under article 50.
New clause 11—Tariff-free trade in goods and services—
“In the event of the exercise of the power in Section 1, Her Majesty’s Government shall seek a new Treaty between the United Kingdom and the European Union on tariff-free trade in goods and services.”
This new clause would ensure that, in the event of the exercise of the power in Section 1, Her Majesty’s Government shall seek a new Treaty between the United Kingdom and the European Union on tariff-free trade in goods and services rather than withdraw from the European Union with no alternative objective.
New clause 13—Transitional arrangements—
“Her Majesty’s Government shall seek a transitional trading agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union as part of the negotiations following notification under section 1.”
This new clause would make it an objective for HM Government to secure a transitional approach towards new trading relationships with the EU Member States following the end of the Article 50 notification and negotiation period.
New clause 15—Visa-free travel—
“On the exercise of the power in section 1, Her Majesty’s Government shall endeavour to maintain the visa policy in operation at the date of the coming into force of this Act in relation to citizens of member states of the European Union and the United Kingdom.”
This new clause would seek to ensure that HM Government has the objective of maintaining the visa policy in operation at the date of the coming into force of this Act in relation to citizens of member states of the European Union and the United Kingdom.
New clause 21—Trading rights—financial services—
“On the exercise of the power in section 1, Her Majesty’s Government shall make it an objective to secure the trading rights for UK-based financial services companies that exist by virtue of the UK’s membership of the European Union as of the day on which this Act comes into force.”
This new clause would seek to ensure that Her Majesty’s Government endeavours to preserve the existing trading rights for UK-based financial services companies as currently exist.
New clause 55—Conduct of negotiations—
“Before giving any notification under Article 50(2) of the treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister must undertake to have regard to the public interest during negotiations in—
(a) maintaining and advancing manufacturing industry,
(b) securing the interests of all the regions in England,
(c) delivering existing climate change commitments,
(d) maintaining the common travel area with the Republic of Ireland.”
This new clause sets out statutory objectives to which the Government must have regard whilst carrying out negotiations under Article 50.
New clause 70—Relationship with Europe—
“Before the Prime Minister can exercise the power in section 1, the Prime Minister must commit to negotiating a deal that allows free trade and cooperation between Wales and all European countries.”
This new clause requires the Prime Minister to commit to implementing the Leave Campaign’s pledge to negotiate deal that allows free trade and cooperation between Wales and all European countries before exercising the powers outlined in section 1.
New clause 76—Framework for transfer of data—
“In the event of exercise of the power in section 1, Her Majesty‘s Government shall promote a framework for the transfer of data between the UK and the EU to underpin continued trade in services.”
This new clause would make it the policy of Her Majesty’s Government to promote a framework for cross-border data flows to safeguard the UK services economy and its trade with European markets.
New clause 77—Trade in goods and services—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of retaining full participation in the making of all rules affecting trade in goods and services in the European Union.”
This new clause would require HM Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation on agreeing all rules affecting trade in goods and services in the European Union.
New clause 78—Europol—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Police Office (Europol) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Police Office (Europol).
New clause 79—European Chemicals Agency—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).
New clause 80—European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
New clause 81—Community Plant Variety Office—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO).
New clause 82—European Medicines Agency—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Medicines Agency (EMEA).
New clause 83—European Agency for Health and Safety at Work—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (EU-OSHA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (EU-OSHA).
New clause 84—European Aviation Safety Agency—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
New clause 85—European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop).
New clause 86—European Police College—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Police College (Cepol) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Police College (Cepol).
New clause 87—European Environment Agency—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Environment Agency (EEA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty‘s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Environment Agency (EEA).
New clause 88—European Food Safety Authority—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
New clause 89—European Investment Bank—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Investment Bank (EIB) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Investment Bank (EIB).
New clause 90—Eurojust—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in Eurojust on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in Eurojust.
New clause 91—European Maritime Safety Agency—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA).
New clause 92—European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).
New clause 93—European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA).
New clause 94—European Satellite Centre—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Satellite Centre (EUSC) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Satellite Centre (EUSC).
New clause 95—Protected designation of origin scheme—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the protected designation of origin (PDO) scheme on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the protected designation of origin (PDO) scheme.
New clause 96—Protected geographical indication scheme—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the protected geographical indication (PGI) scheme on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the protected geographical indication (PGI) scheme.
New clause 97—Traditional specialities guaranteed scheme—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the traditional specialities guaranteed (TSG) scheme on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the traditional specialities guaranteed (TSG) scheme.
New clause 100—Equality and women’s rights—
“Before issuing any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to have regard to the public interest during negotiations for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union in—
(a) maintaining employment rights and protections derived from EU legislation,
(b) ensuring that EU co-operation to end violence against women and girls, to tackle female genital mutilation and to end human trafficking will continue unaffected,
(c) the desirability of continuing to recognise restraining orders placed on abusive partners in EU Member States in the UK and restraining orders placed on abusive partners in the UK across the EU, and
(d) establishing a cross-departmental working group to assess and make recommendations for developing legislation on equality and access to justice.”
New clause 104—Agricultural Sector—Trade Deals—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to, and shall include, the agricultural sector in any new trade settlement with the European Union.”
New clause 163—Consultation with representatives of English regions—
“(1) Before the Prime Minister issues any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Secretary of State shall set out a strategy for consultation with representatives of the English regions, including those without directly elected Mayors, on the UK’s priorities in negotiations for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.
(2) The Secretary of State shall nominate representatives for the purposes of subsection (1).”
This new clause would require the Government to designate representatives from English regions and set out a strategy for consulting them on the UK’s priorities in negotiations on withdrawal from the EU.
New clause 166—Rights and opportunities of young people—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must seek to ensure that the rights and opportunities of people aged under 25 in the United Kingdom are maintained on the same terms as on the day on which Royal Assent is given to this Act, including—
(a) retaining the ability to work and travel visa-free in the EU,
(b) retaining the ability to study in other EU member states on the same terms as on the day on which Royal Assent is given to this Act, and
(c) retaining the ability to participate in EU programmes designed to provide opportunities to young people, including programmes to facilitate studying in other EU member states.”
This new clause would ensure that the Government must seek to protect the rights and opportunities currently enjoyed by young UK nationals so that they should not become worse off than their European counterparts.
New clause 170—EHIC scheme—
“(1) In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) scheme on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union”.
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) scheme.
New clause 172—Erasmus+ Programme—report
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the Erasmus+ Programme on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union”.
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the Erasmus+ Programme.
New clause 174—European Research Area (ERA)—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Research Area (ERA) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union”.
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate continue to the UK’s participation in the European Research Area (ERA).
New clause 178—European Arrest Warrant—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Arrest Warrant on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union”.
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in the European Arrest Warrant.
New clause 181—Trade agreements—
“(1) In the course of negotiations with the European Union on the UK’s withdrawal from the Union, Her Majesty’s Government must have regard to the value of UK membership of the EU Customs Union in maintaining tariff and barrier-free trade with the EU.
(2) Before exercising the power to notify under section 1 of this Act, the Prime Minister should lay before Parliament an assessment of the value of UK membership of the EU Customs Union in maintaining ongoing tariff and barrier-free trade with the EU.”
New clause 183—Membership of the single market including EU-wide reform of freedom of movement—
“(1) In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must seek to—
(a) secure reforms of provisions governing the free movement of persons between EU member states in such a way as to allow for greater controls over movement of people for member states and to enable the UK to retain full membership of the European single market, or
(b) maintain the highest possible level of integration with the European single market.”
This new clause would ensure that the Government must seek to negotiate EU-wide reforms to freedom of movement in the single market to enable the Government to seek to retain membership of the single market or as close to membership as possible.
New clause 185—Euratom—
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of continuing to participate in the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) on the same basis as any other member state of the European Union.”
This new clause would require Her Majesty’s Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation in Euratom.
New clause 193—Conduct of negotiations—
“( ) Before giving any notification under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking to have regard to public interest during negotiations in maintaining the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights.”
Amendment 22, in clause 1, page 1, line 2, leave out “may” and insert “shall”
Amendment 23, page 1, line 2, after “notify” insert “by 31 March 2017”
Amendment 7, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“if it is the intention of Her Majesty’s Government to continue to participate in EU Common Foreign and Security Policy”
This amendment would ensure that the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union would not affect the intention of Her Majesty’s Government to continue to participate in EU Common Foreign and Security Policy.
Amendment 8, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“but not before 1st November 2017”
This amendment would ensure that any notification of intention to withdraw from the EU cannot be made before 1st November 2017.
Amendment 9, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“and shall make it an objective for the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Single Market.”
This amendment would ensure that the policy of HM Government shall be to negotiate the United Kingdom‘s continued membership of the European Single Market.
Amendment 29, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“after consultation with the Government of Gibraltar.”
Amendment 30, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“and its institutions with the exception of the European Defence Agency.”
Amendment 31, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“and its institutions with the exception of Euratom.”
Amendment 32, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“and its institutions with the exception of Europol.”
Amendment 33, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“and its institutions with the exception of the European Space Agency.”
Amendment 34, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“with the exception of the Common Foreign and Security Policy.”
Amendment 42, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“The power to make this notification shall not include an intention to withdraw the United Kingdom from membership or participation of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).”
Amendment 54, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) until the Chief Minister of Gibraltar has notified Her Majesty’s Government that Gibraltar consents to the process for the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union.”
Amendment 89, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
‘(1A) The Prime Minister may not notify under subsection (1) the intention to withdraw the United Kingdom from membership of, and participation in, the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), until replacement treaties with other EU Member States and relevant third countries have been agreed.”
Amendment 35, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
‘(3) This section does not apply to Gibraltar.”
Amendment 38, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
‘(3) Before the Prime Minister issues a notification under this section, Her Majesty’s Government has a duty to lay before both Houses of Parliament a White Paper identifying new oversight, accountability and enforcement mechanisms replacing the role of the European Commission and the European Court of Justice to ensure an equivalent level of compliance with EU-derived environmental regulation upon withdrawal from the European Union.”
This amendment would ensure that the UK judicial system is prepared and ready to effectively perform the enforcement duties currently undertaken by institutions of the EU with regards to environmental regulation.
Clause 1 stand part.
Clause 2 stand part.
New clause 12—International trade—
“Her Majesty’s Government shall endeavour to incorporate into UK regulation the international trade policies that apply to the UK as a consequence of its membership of the European Union and European Customs Union on the date of the exercise of the power in section l.”
This new clause would make it the policy of HM Government to endeavour to “grandfather” existing trade policies currently applicable to the UK by virtue of UK membership of the EU Customs Union.
New clause 32—Social Chapter rights—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the maintenance of Social Chapter rights.”
New clause 34—Free trade—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the maintenance of tariff and barrier-free trade with EU member states.”
New clause 35—Environmental standards—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the maintenance of environmental standards.”
New clause 36—Climate change—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to how this will deliver UK and EU climate change commitments.”
New clause 37—Research and Development—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the maintenance of international collaboration on research and development by universities and other institutions.”
New clause 38—Common travel area—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the maintenance of the common travel area with the Republic of Ireland.”
New clause 39—Crime and security—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the maintenance of international collaboration on tackling crime and strengthening security.”
New clause 40—Economic and financial stability—draft framework—
“Before exercising the power under section 1, the Prime Minister must set out a draft framework for the future relationship with the European Union which includes reference to the maintenance of economic and financial stability.”
New clause 50—Commencement—
“This Act shall not come into effect before Parliament has sat for one month following the first General Election that takes place after 31 March. 2017.”
New clause 133—Commencement—
“This Act does not come into force until the Prime Minister has certified that it is the policy of Her Majesty’s Government that on leaving the European Union the United Kingdom should as soon as possible accede to the European Economic Area Agreement as a non-EU party.”
New clause 141—Extent—
“This Act extends to the whole of the United Kingdom and to Gibraltar.”
New clause 186—Report on future participation in Euratom—
“Within 30 days of the Prime Minister exercising the power under section (1), a Minister of State shall publish a report on the United Kingdom’s intended future participation in and engagement with the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), and shall lay a copy of the report before each House of Parliament.”
This new clause would seek a report from Her Majesty’s Government on the UK’s participation in and engagement with Euratom, following the withdrawal of the UK from the EU.
New clause 192—Nuclear Collaboration—
“(1) Nothing in this Act shall affect the UK’s membership of the European Atomic Agency Community (Euratom).
(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of any other Act, Her Majesty’s Government shall treat the process of leaving Euratom as separate to that of leaving the European Union.”
Paul Blomfield
I rise to speak to new clause 2 and the other new clauses that stand in my name and those of my hon. and right hon. Friends, which have been judged to be in order. Over the past two days, we have had a series of important debates, primarily on the process that we face over the long period ahead. Today, we move on to new clauses and amendments on the substance of the Government’s negotiations. The debate on process was important precisely because it is about enabling the people of this country, through this elected Parliament, to hold the Government to account on the issues that matter to them: their jobs; the conditions under which our businesses operate; how we keep our country safe and secure; how we protect our environment for future generations; and how we ensure that we remain at the cutting edge of science and research and that we have an economy that is able to fund our NHS and all the services that are vital for our social fabric.
In the foreword to the White Paper, the Prime Minister claims that
“the country is coming together”,
but we are not there yet, and those portraying anyone with a different approach to Brexit as attempting to frustrate the will of the people—as some have done over recent days—does not help. Today, however, we can take an important step, because new clause 2 addresses many of the concerns not only of the 48% but of many of the 52%—those who voted to come out but did not vote to lose out. It is, in fact, a manifesto for the 100%. It puts at the front of the Government’s objectives a duty to maintain a stable and sustainable economy through having trading arrangements with the European Union for goods and services that are free of tariff and with non-tariff barriers. We on this side of the House have been clear that, in the negotiations, it is the economy and jobs that should come first, but the Government have decided otherwise. They are taking a reckless gamble with people’s jobs and living standards by walking away from the single market and the customs union.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
The shadow Minister is making his case very clearly. As I understand it, Labour’s position is that the economy should be at the heart of the negotiations and that if, for instance, we could not get rid of free movement, so be it, because the economy is more important.
Paul Blomfield
No, that is not what I said. I said that the economy should be at the heart of our negotiations, that the advantages of the single market are significant, as the then Prime Minister pointed out before 23 June, and that we should have reasonable management of migration through the application of fair rules.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that both sides of the House completely agree that we want the maximum possible access to the single market for our exporters and that we will offer the single market the maximum possible access to our market? Does he further accept that we therefore do not need to argue about that? The answer to whether we get that or get most favoured nation status through the WTO lies not here in Parliament, but the hands of the other 27 EU member states.
Paul Blomfield
I am sorry, but the right hon. Gentleman is wrong—and not for the first time. We have made it clear that the economy comes first, but the Prime Minister has said that her red lines are the European Court of Justice and immigration.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
My hon. Friend takes a big interest in science and technology and universities, so does he agree that it is important for Coventry and the west midlands economy that we get a proper agreement in relation to the single market? Does he also agree that the Government have guaranteed resources only up to 2020 should we pull out?
Paul Blomfield
That is an important point, and my hon. Friend will note that it is highlighted in new clause 2.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Duncan Smith
I do not want to delay the hon. Gentleman, but I listened carefully to what he said about his new clause. He said, when pressed, that the Labour party’s view was that control of migration—sustainable through whatever arrangements—was important. However, I note that new clause 2 is missing any reference whatsoever to that being an important matter. Whether it is as important as the economy or of secondary importance, it will remain an important issue when the balance of negotiation comes down. What is his position? Why has he left migration control out of the new clause, which is currently unbalanced and makes no sense?
Paul Blomfield
The right hon. Gentleman misrepresents my observations, but then I know that the leave campaign strongly supported alternative facts. Moving on to his specific point—[Interruption.]
Anna Soubry
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. This point is rather important: will he confirm whether the Labour party no longer supports the principle of free movement—yes or no?
Paul Blomfield
We have said time and again that we believe in the reasonable management of migration through the application of fair rules, and I will talk about that specific issue if hon. and right hon. Members will give me the opportunity.
Paul Blomfield
I have probably been a little unbalanced, so I should give way to somebody on my side of the House.
Mike Gapes
I am grateful. Will my hon. Friend confirm that the easiest way to cut migration would be to crash the economy?
Paul Blomfield
My hon. Friend should wait and hear what I am about to say on migration.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way to someone from my part of the House?
Paul Blomfield
Not just yet. I should make some progress because I am conscious of the many amendments and the many people who want to speak.
The Opposition accept that concerns about migration were a significant factor in the referendum—probably a critical factor. The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) is not paying attention at the moment, but leave campaigners talked it up relentlessly—[Interruption.] He is still not listening. The Prime Minister has also talked up migration, both as Prime Minister and in her previous job. That created huge expectations, which the White Paper then begins to talk down. The Home Secretary told the Home Affairs Committee last week that she had not been consulted on that part of the White Paper. This is one of the main red lines defining the Government’s approach and the Minister responsible was not consulted—it is absolutely extraordinary.
For months, echoing the leave campaign, the Government have talked about control, but they have had control over non-EEA migration for six years and the White Paper reveals the facts: no significant change since 2010.
Caroline Lucas
Will the hon. Gentleman accept that free movement has massively benefited our economy, both economically and socially? While Governments may have failed to ensure that those benefits have been shared equally, we should not sacrifice our economy to anti-immigration ideology. Securing the continued free movement of people should therefore be a priority in the UK negotiations.
Paul Blomfield
Indeed, the White Paper points out the benefits of migration.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way on non-EEA migration?
Paul Blomfield
I think the right hon. Gentleman has had more than his fair share of speaking time.
Several hon. Members rose—
Paul Blomfield
Let me continue. There has been no real change to non-EEA migration since 2010, for good reasons. When the Government start to disaggregate the EEA numbers, what will they find? Doctors, nurses, academics, care workers, students, and those bringing key skills to business and industry. On lower-skill jobs, Ministers have already made it clear to employers that agricultural workers will still be free to come.
Several hon. Members rose—
Paul Blomfield
I will make some progress. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) pointed out, the only real way to reduce numbers substantially is to crash the economy; that may be the effect of the Government’s negotiations, but assuming that that is not their plan, they need to come clean to the British people. As the right hon. Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman) argued last week, and as the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) argued over the weekend, they need to come clean about this red line. What is their plan? If taking control of immigration defines this Government’s approach to Brexit, the Minister needs to make the Government’s intentions clear in his closing remarks.
Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend agree that UK trade delegations to China and India have made it clear that any trade deal with those countries will almost certainly involve a relaxation of the visa regime, so all we are doing is displacing migration, not cutting it?
Paul Blomfield
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I think the Prime Minister was quite shocked to discover, when she went to India seeking a trade deal, that one of the first things that the Indian Government wanted to put on the table was access to our labour markets and for students. My hon. Friend was right to cite other countries, but he missed Australia off his list. Australia is much heralded as a future trading partner, but it also wants to make the movement of people part of any settlement.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about the value of migrant workers and others who come here. Does he recognise that local jobs, particularly in rural areas, are anchored by people’s ability to move here? Our public services and local businesses, and the jobs of the indigenous population, also depend on the freedom of movement, which is such an important part of our single market membership.
Paul Blomfield
I thank the hon. Lady; she is absolutely right. That is one reason why the Government’s White Paper is so much more nuanced, caveated and realistic than some of the rhetoric that we have heard.
Paul Blomfield
As I said, the right hon. Gentleman has had lots of time during Committee of the whole House. I want to move on to a different topic, and I am sure that he will want to get in later. [Interruption.]
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Mr Blomfield rightly wishes to speed up his introduction of the new clause; Members will be pleased about that when we come to the end of this debate and they find that they have had a chance to speak.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
On that point, will my hon. Friend give way?
Paul Blomfield
Probably not, after Mrs Laing’s words.
Our approach is different: it is to put the economy and the jobs of British people first, and to get the right trading relationship with the EU. There may be lots of graphs in the White Paper, but there is little clarity about the Government’s ambitions. However, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union was much clearer when he told the House a couple of weeks ago:
“What we have come up with…is the idea of a comprehensive free trade agreement and a comprehensive customs agreement that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have”—[Official Report, 24 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 169.]
I am delighted that the Secretary of State has just joined us. He is promising us the exact same benefits that we have inside the single market. That is a benchmark that he has set for the negotiations—a benchmark against which we will measure his success. To help him, in a positive and collaborative spirit, we have tried to embed that in new clause 2, because livelihoods depend on it.
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that trying to get exactly the same access to the single market without paying any of the costs is like disappearing down the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland? It is important that we have an assessment of what World Trade Organisation rules would cost, if we had to fall back on them.
Paul Blomfield
My hon. Friend makes an important point, and that is precisely why we have been pushing for proper economic assessments.
I acknowledge that that negotiation target is ambitious, but it is the one the Secretary of State has set, and against which his performance will be measured. It is all very well to speculate on trade deals that might or might not come to pass. The White Paper may tell us that the United States is
“interested in an early trade agreement with the UK”,
but there is no indication of how “America first” protectionism will give better market access for UK-manufactured goods. Given the uncertainty, the Government need to do all they can to secure the jobs that depend on trade with our biggest and closet partner: the European Union.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman. Why does he think that the European Union would not seek a free trade arrangement with the United Kingdom, given our balance of trade with the EU?
Paul Blomfield
I am sure that the European Union will be interested in securing the trade agreement that we seek, but the question is whether the Government can secure it on the ambitious terms that the Secretary of State has himself set.
Paul Blomfield
No. I have made it clear that the right hon. Gentleman has had plenty of floor time. I shall press on.
On the trade deal, it really did not help for the Prime Minister to threaten our friends and neighbours with turning this country into an offshore tax haven if she did not get her way. [Interruption.] Government Members may not like it, but that was the clear threat. It was not a threat against the European Union; it was a threat against the British people. Those voting to leave the EU did so on the understanding that the NHS would receive more money, but that will not be possible if we slash taxes, and this House should not allow that. That is the purpose of new clause 7.
Paul Blomfield
I will make progress, because I am mindful of Mrs Laing’s comments.
New clause 7 should command support across the House. The Government have been working with our partners in the OECD on efforts to avoid a race to the bottom on corporation tax, and new clause 7 endorses that work, while new clause 2 would commit the Government to
“maintaining all existing social, economic, consumer and workers’ rights”,
as well as to continuing to collaborate on environmental protection. The Government have paid lip service to those things, but they should understand people’s scepticism about their intentions, because although the White Paper boasts of increasing enforcement budgets for compliance with the national minimum wage, it fails to mention the appallingly low numbers of prosecutions for non-payment of the national minimum wage, or the rife abuse in the care sector, of which the Government are perfectly aware, but on which they have failed to act.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)
I have been listening to the hon. Gentleman with great interest for around 20 minutes. What does what he is saying have to do with article 50?
Paul Blomfield
I guess the right hon. Gentleman has spotted that triggering article 50 will signal our departure from the European Union; he can intervene if I have got that wrong. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) is not going to get a chance. Our departure puts at risk the many benefits—
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The former Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean, knows better than anyone how business is conducted in this Chamber, and he knows what happens to people who do not do what they are meant to.
The First Deputy Chairman
Mr Bone asks me to tell the House; there is no need.
Paul Blomfield
Thank you, Mrs Laing. To continue my point, our departure will clearly have implications for the many environmental, employment and consumer rights that have been won over the past 43 years.
Rachael Maskell
Does my hon. Friend agree that the fact that the Government have been dragged to court on three occasions for failing on the air quality targets set by the EU, and have been negotiating behind the scenes to drop the European standards, means that it is really important that we discuss environmental protections as part of the negotiations?
Paul Blomfield
I do indeed, which is why environmental protection is embedded in new clause 2, which also—
Paul Blomfield
No; I shall try to make progress. I think Members will acknowledge that I have been fairly generous with my time.
New clause 2 would also make co-operation with the European Union on education, research and science, environmental protection, and the prevention and detection of serious and organised crime and terrorist activity, guiding negotiating principles in the negotiations. The Prime Minister talks the talk on research and science, but will she really commit? There is lots to talk about, but I shall take just one example, which is the basis of new clause 192. Tucked away in the explanatory notes is the revelation that the Bill will trigger our exit from Euratom—the European Atomic Energy Community. Whatever else can be claimed of their intentions, and much has been, I am pretty confident that on 23 June the British people did not vote against our leading role on nuclear energy, safety and research. It certainly was not on the ballot paper.
Euratom was established by a distinct treaty, and it would fly in the face of common sense to throw away membership of an organisation that brings such unequivocal benefit, yet the White Paper is as ambiguous on the Government’s intention as the Secretary of State was last week; it talks simply of “leaving Euratom”.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
My hon. Friend makes a compelling argument about that aspect of scientific research. I do not know whether he attended yesterday’s event held by the all-party group on medical research, which is looking at the impact of Brexit on life sciences. If he did, he will know that it was made absolutely clear that we need to maintain the closest possible ties with the EU in relation to Horizon 2020 funding, collaboration and the free movement of people. Does he not agree that the Government need to listen if we are to preserve our wonderful scientific research base in this country?
Paul Blomfield
I absolutely do. I was not at that meeting yesterday, but I was at a meeting of medical research charities and other stakeholders in the field of medical research on Monday, at which they made precisely that point. Indeed, they mentioned that we needed to ensure that we had the right relationship, starting, ideally, with membership of the European Medicines Agency.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
I thank the shadow Minister for so generously giving way. He probably knows that the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy is in my constituency. People there told me how concerned they were about this issue, but they decided that the amendments to the Bill were not helpful. They said that it was much better to deal with Ministers directly, and to put pressure on the Treasury to achieve their objectives.
Paul Blomfield
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point. A very effective way of applying pressure to save that Joint European Torus centre, which is a hugely important facility, is by agreeing to new clause 192.
Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)
The shadow Minister makes a very important point. These hugely important research projects in nuclear and nuclear build have long lead-in times. My concern is that if we trigger notice to leave Euratom, no agreement will be put in place at the end of the two-year period. That could seriously delay those projects and impact on future investment in this country. Does he agree that, at the very least, we need a transitional arrangement, if not continuing membership?
Paul Blomfield
Yes, I do agree; my hon. Friend makes a very important point. I press Ministers to give greater clarity on their intentions, because the Secretary of State has so far been ambiguous.
Paul Blomfield
No, I will not. I should respond to Mrs Laing’s appeal for us to make progress.
It has been suggested that the Government’s reservations about Euratom stem from the fact that the European Court of Justice is the regulatory body for the treaty. If that is so, their obsessional opposition to the Court of Justice leads them to want to rip up our membership of an organisation on which 21% of UK electricity generation relies and that supports a critical industry providing 78,000 jobs; that number is projected to rise to 110,000 by 2021. That membership led to us hosting the biggest nuclear fusion programme in the world in Culham.
Paul Blomfield
I will not give way, because I wish to make progress.
The organisation also helps to ensure nuclear safety. Before the Secretary of State leaves the Chamber, let me tell him that it would be helpful for the Government to explain their intentions. I will give way to him or to the Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union, because the people in this country deserve to know what is happening in relation to Euratom; people voting in Copeland in a couple of weeks’ time want to know, as their jobs are on the line. I give the Secretary of State or indeed the Minister the opportunity to intervene on me to make an unambiguous statement that it is the Government’s intention to remain in Euratom.
Paul Blomfield
I was providing the opportunity to those who can make a useful commitment. Their silence says everything.
Paul Blomfield
No, I will not.
Clearly, there is much more to be said about our future relationship. There are many more people who wish to speak and many more amendments to be moved. I will draw my remarks to a close—[Interruption.] It is disappointing for me, too.
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The Committee must allow the shadow Minister to draw his remarks to a close, or no one else will have an opportunity to speak, and it will not be my fault.
Paul Blomfield
Thank you, Mrs Laing. I draw my remarks to a close with the simple point that our new clauses provide a basis for bringing people together around plans that address the concerns of the 100%; supporting them would be a good first step.
John Redwood
I find myself in agreement with new clause 2, which makes perfectly sensible statements about what our negotiating aims should be. I have even better news for the Opposition Front-Bench team: it is a statement of the White Paper policy. Of course we wish to maintain a stable, sustainable, profitable and growing economy, which we have done ever since the Brexit vote. Of course we wish to preserve the peace in Northern Ireland, to have excellent trading arrangements with the European Union for goods and services free of tariff, to have lots of co-operative activities with EU member states and institutions in education, research and science and so forth, and to maintain the important rights and legal protections enshrined in European law. As I understand it, the Government have made it crystal clear in the White Paper and in many statements and answers to questions and responses to debates from the Front Bench that all those things are fundamental to the negotiating aims of the Government.
Having excited the Opposition with my agreement, I need to explain why I will not vote for this new clause. I have two main reasons, which I briefly wish to develop. First, I am happy to accept the promise and the statement of our Front-Bench team, and I advise the Opposition to do the same. Secondly, although the words do not explicitly say, “This is what has to be delivered”, the fact that it is embedded in legislation implies that all these things must be delivered, and some of them are not in the gift of this Government or this Parliament. I return to the point that the Opposition never seem to grasp: we are all united in the aim of ensuring tariff-free trade, but it will be decided by the other 27 members, not by this Parliament or by Ministers.
John Redwood
That is a very powerful point. I could add others. It is a great pity that it does not mention the opportunity to have a decent fishing policy. It certainly does not talk about having a sensible immigration policy. The Opposition still do not understand that we have to remove the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice if this Parliament is to be free to have a fishing policy that helps to restore the fishing grounds of Scotland and England, and to have a policy that makes sensible provision for people of skills, talent and interest to come into our country, but that ensures that we can have some limit on the numbers.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
I heard the right hon. Gentleman’s wish list at the beginning of his speech. Has he grasped the fact that that wish list is actually encapsulated in two words: single market?
John Redwood
No, it clearly is not. The hon. Gentleman has not been listening to what I have been saying. The whole point about the single market is that it does not allow us to have a sensible fishing policy or a sensible borders policy, which are two notable omissions from the list, which, fortunately, were not absent from the White Paper or from the Government’s thinking.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would like to reconsider what he just said. He said the whole point about the single market is that it does not allow us to have a sensible fishing policy, but Norway is in the single market in the European economic area, but not in the common fisheries policy. It controls its own fisheries policy, which he would know if he had read this excellent document, “Scotland’s Place in Europe”.
John Redwood
Well, why have we not had a sensible fishing policy for the past 40 years? It is because we have been a full member of the EU and its single market. What is agreed across this House—even by some members of the Scottish National party—is that we want maximum tariff-free, barrier-free access to the internal market. However, what is not on offer from the other 27 members is for us to stay in the single market, but not to comply with all the other things with which we have to comply as a member of the EU. There is no separate thing called the single market; it is a series of laws that go over all sorts of boundaries and barriers. If we withdraw from the EU, we withdraw from the single market.
Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)
The right hon. Gentleman’s example was of fishing policy, so does he agree as a point of fact that Norway is in the single market but pursues its own independent fishing policy? Yes or no?
John Redwood
I agree that Norway decided to sacrifice control of her borders to get certain other things from a different kind of relationship with the EU, but we do not wish to join the EEA because we do not wish to sacrifice control over our borders. That is straightforward.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely wrong. Norway was part of the Nordic free movement area with Sweden, Finland and Denmark way before the European Union was even invented.
John Redwood
Norway is now part of a freedom of movement area far bigger than that, and that was part of its deal. It also has to pay in a lot of money that British voters clearly do not wish to pay, so why would we want to do that?
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that if Opposition Members are serious about the flourishing of our economy, 80% of which is services, they should accept that we need to be able to do trade deals on services, which means that we have to leave the EEA so that we can negotiate about regulation?
John Redwood
That is quite right, and they also ignore the whole of the rest of the world. It so happens that we have a profitable, balanced trade with the rest of the world. We are often in surplus with the rest of the world overall and we are in massive deficit in goods with the EU alone. There is much more scope for growth in our trade with the rest of the world than there is with the EU, partly because the rest of the world is growing much faster overall than the EU and partly because we have the chance to have a much bigger proportion of the market there than we have, whereas we obviously have quite an advanced trade with the EU that is probably in decline because of the obvious economic problems in the euro area.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
Does the right hon. Gentleman note that although the shadow Minister made no mention of the importance of controlling immigration, his new clause 2 mentions “preserving peace in Northern Ireland”, although he never mentioned one word of it? Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that the shadow Minister perhaps understands that Brexit has no implications for peace in Northern Ireland? It is not a cause of increased terrorism. Indeed, the terrorists never fought to stay in the EU; they fought to get out of Britain.
John Redwood
The hon. Gentleman has made his own point, and we all wish Northern Ireland well.
Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)
First, let me congratulate my right hon. Friend on recognising that there is nothing in new clause 2 that is remotely objectionable to either leavers or remainers as an objective for the country in the forthcoming negotiations. If tariff-free access to the single market is desirable, does he accept that access to any market is not possible without accepting obedience of that market’s regulations? Otherwise, there are regulatory barriers. We need some sort of dispute procedure. If we start to reject the European Court of Justice and say that all the regulations must be British and that we are free to alter them when we feel like it, we are not pursuing the objectives in new clause 2 with which my right hon. Friend expresses complete agreement.
John Redwood
Of course there is a dispute resolution procedure when we enter a free trade agreement or any other trade arrangement. There is a very clear one in the WTO. We will register the best deal we can get with the EU under our WTO membership and it will be governed by normal WTO resolution procedures, with which we have no problem. The problem with the ECJ is that it presumes to strike down the wishes of the British people and good statute law made by this House of Commons on a wide range of issues, which means that we are no longer sovereign all the time we are in it.
Mr Bailey
The right hon. Gentleman argues that our membership of the EU inhibits our ability to trade with the expanding economies of the rest of the world. If so, will he explain why Germany exports nearly four times as much as we do to China and exceeds our exports to both India and Brazil, the other fast-growing economies, and why France also exports more to China and Brazil than we do? What is it that they do in the EU that we will do when we come out?
John Redwood
It is quite obvious that Germany will export more at the early stages of development in an emerging market economy, because it tends to export capital equipment of the kind that is needed to industrialise, which is what China bought in the last decade. Now that China is a much richer country, she is going to have a massive expansion of services and that is where we have a strong relative advantage, in that if we have the right kind of arrangement with China we will accelerate the growth of our exports, which China will now want, more rapidly. The hon. Gentleman must understand that the EU imposes massive and, I think, dangerous barriers against the emerging market world for their agricultural produce. The kind of deals we can offer to an emerging market country, saying that we will buy their much cheaper food by taking the tariff barriers off their food products in return for much better access to their service and industrial goods markets where we have products that they might like to buy—[Interruption.] I hear my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) express a worry about British farmers, and British farmers, would, of course, have a subsidy regime based on environmental factors, in the main, which we would want to continue.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
What impact does the right hon. Gentleman think that that would have on Welsh agriculture and the rural economy in Wales?
John Redwood
I just explained that it should boost it. I am sure that more market opportunities will open up for Welsh farmers, but we will also debate in this House how to have a proper support regime. I hope that it will be a support regime that not only rewards environmental objectives but is friendly to promoting the greater efficiencies that can come from more farm mechanisation and enlargement, which will be an important part of our journey to try to eliminate some of the massive deficit we run in food with the rest of the EU, while being more decent to the emerging world—the poor countries of the world to which we deliberately deny access to our markets.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
May I take it from what the right hon. Gentleman has just said that in any free trade deal with New Zealand he will continue to ensure that sheep farmers in this country are not sacrificed in the interests of getting good access to the New Zealand market for our financial services?
John Redwood
I am sure that that would be a very appropriate part of the discussions our country holds with New Zealand and Australia. I broadly take the view—I thought Labour was now of this view—that getting rid of tariffs was a good idea. Labour has spent all of the past six months saying how we must not have tariffs on our trade with Europe, but now I discover it wants tariffs on trade with everywhere else in the world. It is arguing a large contradiction.
Dr Murrison
My right hon. Friend is making a very powerful case. Does he not agree that it is truly remarkable that Germany makes three times as much money on coffee as developing countries because of tariffs and that we are noticing a problem with out-of-season fruit and vegetables in our supermarkets, in part because of the pressures applied to producers in north Africa? It is no good colleagues on the Opposition Benches having a go at those who are concerned about international development assistance if they are prepared to tolerate such tariff barriers, which act against the interests of developing countries.
John Redwood
I think that we have teased out something very important in this debate. The Opposition want no barriers against ferocious competition from agriculture on the continent, which has undoubtedly damaged an awful lot of Welsh, Scottish and English farms, but they want maximum tariff barriers to trade with the rest of the world so that we still have to buy dear food. That does not seem to be an appealing package.
Kit Malthouse
My right hon. Friend might be interested to know that just last week I visited Randall Parker Foods in my constituency, a company that slaughters and processes several hundred thousand Welsh lambs every year and that is salivating at the chance of opening up the US market, in particular, where Welsh lamb is under-represented and where there is huge potential for us to export more than we do.
John Redwood
Like my hon. Friend, I think that there are some great English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish agricultural products, and that with the right tariff system with the rest of the world we could do considerably better with our quality products.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his great speech, but I want to ask him one question that goes to the merits of the new clause. It says that the Prime Minister “shall give an undertaking”, which is clearly a mandatory requirement under statute, and which itself calls for judicial review if somebody decides to do that. However, in all my time in this place, I have never seen a clause proposing the preserving of peace in Northern Ireland as a matter of public interest and of judicial review. It is unbelievably unworkable and completely contrary to all the assumptions that one might rely on for a decent provision.
John Redwood
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing me back to my central point. He kindly said that I have made a good speech, but I have just responded to everybody else making their own speeches and riding their own hobby horses. I hope they have enjoyed giving those hobby horses a good ride.
To summarise my brief case, the aims of the new clause are fine. They happen to be agreed by the Government. However, it is disappointing that the Opposition have left out some important aims that matter to the British people: taking back control of our borders and laws, and dealing with the problem of the Court immediately spring to mind, but there are many others. They leave out, as they always do, the huge opportunities to have so many policies in areas such fishing and farming that would be better for the industry and for consumers. They have now revealed a fundamental contradiction in wanting completely tariff-free trade in Europe, but massive tariff barriers everywhere else, and do not really seem to think through the logic.
My conclusion is that there is nothing wrong with the aims. We need the extra aims that the Government have rightly spelled out. It would be quite silly to incorporate negotiating aims in legislation. I believe in the Government’s good faith. We are mercifully united in wanting tariff-free, barrier-free trade with the rest of Europe. It is not in the gift of this House, let alone the gift of Ministers, to deliver that, but if people on the continent are sensible they will want that because they get a lot more out of this trade than we do. They must understand that the most favoured nation tariffs are low or non-existent on the things we sell to them, but can be quite penal on the things they have been particularly successful at selling to us. The aims are a great idea, but it is silly to put them into law.
Joanna Cherry
This group of amendments is about the UK’s priorities for the negotiations on withdrawal from the European Union. I will talk about Scotland’s priorities. The Scottish National party has tabled amendment 54 and new clause 141 on the situation of Gibraltar, in which we deal with the fact that the Bill has omitted to include Gibraltar in its remit, which is rather curious given the great love and affection that Government Members have for Gibraltar.
Those of us who are members of the Exiting the European Union Committee were very impressed by the evidence given to us a couple of weeks ago by the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo. He emphasised that Gibraltar’s main concern is to preserve its sovereignty and connection with the United Kingdom. Unlike some of us, he is very happy to be part of the red, white and blue Brexit that the Prime Minister talks about. It is important to take Gibraltar’s concerns into account.
Joanna Cherry
The hon. Gentleman, to whom I will give way in a moment, has a long and admirable commitment to the people of Gibraltar and their interests. He has also tabled amendments on the matter, including amendment 29, which I am sure he will tell us about in detail in due course. It would put upon the British Government a requirement to consult Gibraltar before triggering article 50.
Mike Gapes
I will not make a speech now, as I hope to be called later. I just want to emphasise that there is an important need to protect the interests of Gibraltar. As the hon. and learned Lady said, the Bill does not refer to Gibraltar, but it was specifically mentioned in an amendment when the legislation to hold the referendum was agreed. The people of Gibraltar voted in the referendum. Surely the Bill should be amended to reflect the need for Gibraltar’s interests also to be considered.
Joanna Cherry
Absolutely. I have with me a letter from the Deputy Chief Minister of Gibraltar, who says that he
“can confirm that the clause on the application of the Article 50 Bill to Gibraltar would be politically useful to us here. It would also follow on logically from the original consent that we already gave to the extension of the actual UK referendum Act to Gibraltar.”
I will come back to that in more detail in a moment.
Mr MacNeil
Before my hon. and learned Friend moves on, I think it is important to back up the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes). Gibraltar’s connection to the United Kingdom and being British should be reflected in this House. I have visited Gibraltar, and hon. Members should think seriously about supporting his amendment because it would send a signal to Gibraltar that it is respected here, and by Members on both sides of the House. Please listen to the hon. Gentleman.
Joanna Cherry
Indeed. I totally agree with my hon. Friend. The Deputy Chief Minister of Gibraltar also said in his letter:
“I understand that this amendment mirrors a number of others which have also been tabled seeking to make clear its application”—
that is the application of the Act—
“to Gibraltar in the same way. This would strengthen Gibraltar’s case to be mentioned in the Article 50 letter.”
Of course, Scotland shares with Gibraltar a desire to be mentioned in the article 50 letter.
The big priority for Scotland is that the British Government take into account the Scottish Government’s request for a differentiated deal for Scotland. We tabled new clause 145, which would require the British Government to commit to such a differentiated deal before triggering article 50. That amendment has been held over until today, but we will not push it to a vote because we are prepared to give the UK Government one last chance to respond to the document “Scotland’s Place in Europe”, which was laid before the British Government before Christmas, some seven weeks ago.
Joanna Cherry
I will when I have finished my point. No formal response to “Scotland’s Place in Europe” has yet been received. The hon. Member for Lincoln (Karl MᶜCartney) is a member of the Exiting the European Union Committee, as I am. We heard detailed evidence about the document this morning from the Scottish Government Minister responsible for negotiations with the United Kingdom. It is a far more detailed document in its proposals than anything the British Government have been prepared to produce so far.
Karl MᶜCartney
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for giving way; as a fellow member of the Brexit Select Committee, I hope that she would treat me as a friend, rather than as just an hon. Member sitting on the opposite side of the House. I do not disagree with her when it comes to Gibraltar and maybe even Scotland, but we are acting on behalf of the whole UK. If there were to be a list in the article 50 letter, are there any other places, such as the Isle of Man or Jersey, that she would like to see included on it? Would she like to see a long list of places?
Joanna Cherry
The hon. Gentleman is obviously not aware that the arrangements that apply to the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are rather different than those that apply to Scotland, because they are not in the European Union. Perhaps he would like to read “Scotland’s Place in Europe”, which would explain that to him. Some differentiated agreements do, in fact, exist within the wider UK and Crown dependencies. Gibraltar is in the European Union, but not in the customs union. I will return to the matter of Gibraltar in due course.
Alex Salmond
My hon. and learned Friend will remember this direct quotation from The Daily Telegraph:
“Theresa May has indicated that…she said she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed ‘UK approach’ backed by Scotland.”
Surely Government Members do not intend the Prime Minister to break her word of 15 July last year.
Joanna Cherry
I am sure that Government Members would be loth to encourage the Prime Minister to break her word—[Interruption.] Conservative Members are shouting, “No veto.” We are not asking for a veto. This document is a compromise whereby Scotland could remain in the single market while the rest of the UK exits it. Perhaps hon. Gentlemen on the Government Benches who are shaking their heads and mumbling about vetoes would like to get their iPads out and look up the difference between a veto and a compromise; it is rather a radical difference.
Several hon. Members rose—
Joanna Cherry
I will make some progress and then I will take some more interventions, perhaps from people who have not yet spoken.
The Scottish Government have made a proposal, and we are waiting for it to be taken seriously. The signs that the compromise put forward by Scotland will be taken seriously by the Government and, indeed, by this House have not been promising so far this week. Not a single amendment to the Bill has been accepted, despite the numerous amendments tabled by all sorts of different groups of Members, many with significant cross-party support. Even yesterday, when the Government were forced into announcing a significant concession, they were extraordinarily reluctant to commit that concession to writing. We all know that it is because they do not want to amend the Act: they have fought tooth and nail through the courts and in this House to avoid the sort of scrutiny that those of them who seek to leave the European Union have been trumpeting for years. They tell us how fantastic this wonderful, sovereign mother of Parliaments is, but we are berated for having the effrontery to attempt to amend a Bill. It is preposterous.
Joanna Cherry
No, I will not give way. We heard ample from the right hon. Gentleman the other day.
This Bill is being railroaded through this House with scant regard for democratic process. Here is an example: on Monday, when we were debating the proposals that concerned the devolved Administrations, including Scotland, only one of my hon. Friends got to speak. When I attempted to double that tally, I was told to sit down, shut up and know my place. I do not mind being insulted and affronted in this House, but what people need to remember is that it is not just me; it is the people who elected me who are being insulted and affronted when I am prevented from speaking about proposals on which my name appears.
Government Members are extraordinarily relaxed about the effect this sort of thing has on Scottish public opinion. I do not know whether they take the Herald newspaper—it is rather difficult to get hold of in the House of Commons—but if they do, they will see that today’s headline is “Support for independence surges on hard Brexit vow” .
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
Will the hon. and learned Lady give way?
Joanna Cherry
No, I will not.
Backing for a yes vote in another independence referendum has risen to 49% on the back of the hard Brexit vow, and that is when no referendum is even on the table and we are still seeking our reasonable compromise. Hon. Members should make no mistake—it gives me great pleasure to say this—that the barracking by Government Members and the preventing of SNP MPs from speaking in this House play right into our hands and result in headlines saying that support for independence is surging.
Mr Harper
On a point of order, Mrs Laing. On Monday, I spoke about the amendments on devolution arrangements. I seem to remember that I took many interventions, including from the hon. and learned Lady. She was not, therefore, prevented from speaking; indeed, I seem to remember that the person in the Chair at the time—[Interruption.]
Mr Harper
Opposition Members should let me finish making my point of order to the Chair. The person who was in the Chair made great efforts to facilitate the hon. and learned Lady’s speech, but there was then a kerfuffle when she objected to the amount of time she got. How can we put the record straight about the fact that she had a fair opportunity on Monday?
The First Deputy Chairman
The right hon. Gentleman does not need to put the record straight, because it is a matter of record. I have myself looked in Hansard, and by the simple use of my arithmetical powers, I have worked out how many people managed to speak, for how long they spoke and what contributions they made. Now, the hon. and learned Lady is asserting that she was prevented from speaking. Because there was a time limit on the debate and the hon. and learned Lady came quite late in the debate, there was not an awful lot of time left in which she could speak. But I think that, in saying that she was prevented from speaking, the hon. and learned Lady is making a rhetorical point rather than an arithmetical point, because her contribution to the debate has been considerable. She will note that she has been given the opportunity very early in today’s proceedings to speak, and I look forward to hearing her speak to the amendments to which she has put her name, and that is what we should stick to.
Joanna Cherry
I am very grateful, Mrs Laing, for your clarification. Indeed, I am speaking early today, because I am leading for the third party in this House, and it is my right to speak early in the debate.
Joanna Cherry
The right hon. Gentleman is terribly anxious to make an intervention. In order to put him out of his misery, I would very much like to hear what he has to say now.
Mr Harper
I am very grateful to the hon. and learned Lady. She was waxing lyrical about the importance her party places on Gibraltar, but when I was listening to the evidence from the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, he was rather more committed to the continuance of the United Kingdom than the Scottish National party, which does not seem to be committed to it.
Joanna Cherry
That is called democracy. The people of Gibraltar vote for parties that wish to remain part of the United Kingdom; the people of Scotland vote for parties that wish to be independent—that is a statement of fact. I am very happy to endorse Gibraltar’s right to self-determination—just as I am happy to endorse Scotland’s, or indeed any nation’s, right to self-determination.
Mr MacNeil
Just on a point of clarity, it should be understood by both sides that Gibraltar is not in the United Kingdom. Gibraltar does not want to be in the United Kingdom. It wants an association with Britain, which is very different. The United Kingdom dates only from December 1922. Britain is little bitty older than that. Gibraltar does not have a Member in this Parliament because it is not in the United Kingdom. It has an association with the United Kingdom. It is independent of the United Kingdom. That is something I would quite like for Scotland: British, but not in the UK.
Joanna Cherry
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, who, like the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), has a long association with Gibraltar, for clarifying the situation for those who appeared not to be aware of it.
Joanna Cherry
I will not at the moment, thank you.
I will come back to Gibraltar in a moment, but I want to continue on the subject of Scotland’s priority in these negotiations. The document I am holding—“Scotland’s Place in Europe”—puts forward a highly considered and detailed case to the British Government. As I said, we are still waiting for any kind of considered or detailed response. This morning, the Exiting the European Union Committee heard evidence from a number of Scottish legal experts, in addition to the Minister, Mike Russell. We were told by Professor Nicola McEwen that the proposals in this document are credible and merit examination.
What the Scottish Government are asking for from the British Government is no more than the British Government are asking for from the other 27 member states of the European Union, and that is for there to be consideration in negotiations of our position, and our position is somewhat less substantial than the position the British Government want to put forward in Europe.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the hon. and learned Lady give way?
Joanna Cherry
I am going to make a little progress, and then I will give way.
The Scottish Government are looking for a response to this document, and that is why we are not going to push new clause 145, which has been held over to today for a vote. A meeting is taking place this afternoon of the Joint Ministerial Committee, and we are still prepared for the time being to put faith in the promise the Prime Minister made, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) has just reminded us of, about Scotland’s wishes being taken into account. However, Members of this House should make no mistake: we will expect the Prime Minister to deliver on that promise. We will expect—just as Gibraltar does—to have our position put forward in the article 50 letter. If that does not happen, and the Prime Minister breaks her promise, we will hold another independence referendum, and on the back of the Herald headline, things are looking pretty good for that at the moment—we are at nearly 50%, and not a single word has been uttered yet in the campaign for a second independence referendum.
Joanna Cherry
I will not give way to the right hon. Gentleman for the time being, but the hon. Lady was going to raise a point.
Seema Malhotra
The hon. and learned Lady referenced the evidence session we had this morning with her colleague from the Scottish Parliament. Does she agree, however, that there were a number of unanswered questions in the Committee, including on what regulations Scotland may be subject to if it were in the European economic area; what the impact might be on the trade relationship with the rest of the UK; what the controls at the border might be, and what they might need to look like if Scotland had free movement but the rest of the UK did not; and what payment might need to be made by Scotland, including how much that would be and where it would come from? There was some confusion over those points.
Joanna Cherry
I do not agree with the hon. Lady. The transcript will be available shortly, and when hon. Members read it they will see that my colleague who is a Minister in the Scottish Government repeatedly told Members that the answers to the questions they were asking were in this document. It was rather surprising that one member of the Committee admitted that he had not read the document but berated the Scottish Minister for not having answered questions that are answered in the document he has not read. I hope that the British Government are studying this document, as there is perhaps quite a lot to learn from it.
John Redwood
The hon. and learned Lady very touchingly says that her document is a compromise document. Do not she and her party understand that a compromise document is one on which she and I agree, and I do not agree with it?
Joanna Cherry
I have got some news for the right hon. Gentleman: when the United Kingdom Government go to negotiate with EU’s 27 member states about exiting the EU, they will be looking for a compromise. At the moment, the UK Government are looking for things that the EU member states are not willing to give, but that is not preventing them from going into a negotiation—that is how negotiations work.
I urge the right hon. Gentleman to read this document. If he had read it, he would know—I had to correct him on this earlier—that although Norway is in the single market, it is not in the common fisheries policy. What Scotland is looking for in this compromise document is an arrangement similar to that of Norway. I visited Oslo recently. The Norwegians seem to be doing pretty well on the back of that arrangement—it looks as though they have a prosperous and successful economy.
Alex Salmond
If the right hon. Gentleman had made the same pledge as the Prime Minister made, I would expect him, as a right hon. Member, to have kept to it. I saw the evidence this morning, and I heard the Scottish Parliament Minister, Mr Russell, give the example of Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Liechtenstein is in the European economic area; Switzerland is not. They have a frictionless border—let us put it that way—just like the border the Prime Minister promises for Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Joanna Cherry
Indeed.
Many of the questions that hon. Members in this House raise with the Scottish Government and with the Scottish National party about how these matters might be managed are answered in this document, which is the product of research and consultation that has been going on in the many months since the Brexit vote. While the British Government have been going round in circles trying to decide whether they want to be in the single market or in the customs union, the Scottish Government have been looking at a considered compromise and answer to the dilemma in which we find ourselves whereby the majority of the people of Scotland wish to remain part of the EU but the rest of the UK wishes to exit.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford
A few minutes ago, my hon. and learned Friend made a really important point about Norway and the benefits that could accrue particularly to my constituency from a Norwegian-style deal that would help our fishing interests, but also protect the interests of our fish processors and all the people who depend on export markets, most of which are in the EU at the present time.
Joanna Cherry
Indeed. It is no secret that of the minority of people in Scotland who voted to leave the EU, a significant proportion was made up of people working in the fishing industry, including fishermen, because, as we heard earlier, they have received such a bad deal over the years as a result of inept negotiations by the British Government on the common fisheries policy—negotiations that Scottish Government Ministers have been kept out of. The great advantage of this compromise proposal for fishermen is that, while coming out of the common fisheries policy, they would still have access to the single market. When I was in Norway, I saw a presentation about how the Norwegian fishing industry is progressing on the back of such an arrangement, and, believe you me, it is doing significantly better than the Scottish fishing industry.
Several hon. Members rose—
Joanna Cherry
I give way to the Chairman of the Committee on Exiting the European Union.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
Is not the fundamental difficulty with the document’s proposal about the possibility of Scotland remaining in the single market the fact that there is absolutely no evidence that I have seen thus far—perhaps the hon. and learned Lady has—that any one of the other 27 member states, never mind the British Government’s view, has indicated that it would consent to such an arrangement, given that all the other parallels, the Faroes aside, relate to countries, which is not the case in relation to this proposal?
Joanna Cherry
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising this issue, because it highlights the reason I am labouring this point. For Scotland to get the compromise deal that we are proposing, the United Kingdom Government first need to accept it as something they would then put forward to the other 27 member states. The other 27 member states are waiting for the United Kingdom to put its money where its mouth is and come to the table and negotiate. They need us to put our own house in order before we do that. [Interruption.] Government Members may not like it, but the Prime Minister made a promise to involve Scotland in the negotiations and to look at all the options for Scotland. We are withholding our right to force our amendment to a vote today in the hope that the Prime Minister will be as good as her word. People in Scotland are watching and waiting.
This document has widespread support. It has the merit of uniting leavers and remainers because it has a compromise that appeals to both sides.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the hon. and learned Lady agree that in the event that Scotland was in the single market and England, Wales and Northern Ireland were not, industry would move from England and Wales to Scotland to have tariff-free access to the single market? Similarly, industry would move from Northern Ireland to southern Ireland, ripping open the peace process, which, although it was denied earlier, will indeed be ripped open.
Joanna Cherry
The SNP’s position on the peace process has been made very clear in this House: we would wish to do everything to support it.
Moreover, we do not wish the rest of the UK to suffer as a result of coming out of the single market. That is why the principal suggestion in this document is that the whole United Kingdom should remain in the single market. I am terribly sorry on behalf of Members representing English and Welsh constituencies that the Prime Minister has now ruled that off the table, but I am sure those Members will understand why we, representing Scotland, must try to see whether we can get a compromise deal for Scotland.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
Does the hon. and learned Lady recognise that if the Government did accept that they could negotiate a separate place for Scotland within the single market, that could equally read across in respect of Northern Ireland, and would be particularly compatible in terms of the strand 2 arrangements and upholding the Good Friday agreement? In many important ways, it would go to the heart of upholding the peace, not upsetting any basis for it.
Joanna Cherry
Indeed. As usual, the hon. Gentleman makes his point with great force and great clarity. The difficulty is that in the Committee on Exiting the European Union this morning we heard from experts who have been observing the process of so-called negotiations between the British Government and the devolved nations in the Joint Ministerial Committee that these negotiations lack transparency and have not really made any significant progress. That is a matter of regret not just for Scotland, but for Northern Ireland and for Wales.
Dr Whiteford
Is my hon. and learned Friend as surprised as I am, given the apparent suggestion that it would be to Scotland’s economic advantage to be in the single market, that we are debating leaving the EU in the first place? Surely what is good for Scotland would be good for the whole UK in this respect.
Joanna Cherry
Indeed. We made it clear in this document that we felt it would be to the advantage of the whole United Kingdom to remain in the single market. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister, in what my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon has described as a very foolish negotiating tactic, has ruled that out from the outset.
Joanna Cherry
I am going to make a bit of progress because I am conscious that a lot of other people are wishing to speak, and, as I said, I want to move on to deal with our amendments on the topic of Gibraltar.
As the hon. Member for Ilford South pointed out, Gibraltar was covered by the European Union Referendum Act 2015. Section 12(1) of the Act extended to the United Kingdom and Gibraltar. There was an over-whelming vote in Gibraltar to remain. When Fabian Picardo, the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, gave evidence to the Committee on Exiting the European Union, he explained that Gibraltar already has a differential agreement whereby it is in the EU but not in the customs union. This has been working well for the people of Gibraltar. They would like to be involved in a Brexit deal that guaranteed continued access to the single market. They do not want to be forgotten. In the letter I quoted earlier, the Gibraltarian Government support these amendments to get Gibraltar brought within the ambit of the Bill so that Gibraltar’s interests can be taken into account in the triggering of article 50.
Will the Minister tell us why Gibraltar was omitted from the Bill? Was it, God forbid, an oversight—if so, the Government now have the opportunity to correct that, with the assistance of the SNP—or was it a deliberate omission of Gibraltar from the ambit of the Bill? If it was a deliberate omission, how does that sit with assurances that the British Government have been giving to Gibraltar that its interests will be protected?
The hon. Member for Ilford South will speak with greater knowledge than I can about Gibraltar. The purpose of the amendments is to ensure that Gibraltar is not forgotten. We feel that there may have been an oversight, so we are attempting to provide assistance. However, if there has not been an oversight and the omission is deliberate, we need to know why and hon. Members need to consider whether it is appropriate to rectify the situation.
A number of other amendments would ameliorate the Bill. The hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) spoke ably from the Front Bench about new clause 2 and other amendments. I find new clause 2 to be slightly disappointing, because it does not enumerate the interests of Scotland as a particular consideration to be taken into account. We are not going to push new clause 145 to a vote, because we are hopeful that today’s Joint Ministerial Committee might have a fruitful outcome.
Mr MacNeil
I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for taking Scotland into account. I hope that the promise made by the Prime Minister on 15 July will have greater gravity than that made by the previous Prime Minister on 10 September 2014, when David Cameron said on “Channel 4 News” that if Scotland voted to remain in the UK, all forms of devolution were there and all were possible. Yet when it came to the Scotland Bill—by this time, my hon. and learned Friend was a Member of Parliament—none of the amendments were taken, showing that none of the forms of devolution were there and none were possible. We have had one broken promise by the previous Prime Minister; let us hope that this Prime Minister can keep her word.
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. I give the hon. Gentleman a lot of leeway, but it is this Bill that we are discussing right now. We cannot go on to previous Prime Ministers and previous Bills. I am sure that the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), whose legal expertise is among the best in the House, will find a way of saying what she wants to say.
Joanna Cherry
I am bringing my remarks to a conclusion, Mrs Laing, because I am conscious that others wish to speak. I want to make it clear that the SNP broadly welcomes many of the amendments, including new clause 100, which would secure women’s rights and equality. We believe that the EU is about more than just a single trading market; it is also about the social ties that bind us and the social protections that it guarantees.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
On equality and protection, does my hon. and learned Friend agree that what we have seen since we were elected to this place does not fill us with any hope that this Government, when they have their great power grab, will uphold the protections that the EU has brought? We will fight for our citizens’ rights.
Joanna Cherry
I agree with my hon. Friend. That concern is shared by Members of many parties in this House. We support any amendments that would underline the social aspects of the EU. For example, new clause 166 centres on the rights of young people, who benefit so much from the important ability to live, work, travel and study across Europe. Of course, the SNP fought for 16 and 17-year-olds to get the vote in the referendum, but that was not to be. Perhaps the result would have been different if it had been allowed.
Later today, we will vote on amendments carried over from earlier in the week, including the SNP’s new clause 27, which would protect the rights of EU nationals. I think that the widely shared view in the House is that we ought not to trigger article 50 until we have given EU nationals living in the United Kingdom some assurance on their rights. Furthermore, the Exiting the European Union Committee has received evidence from representatives not only of EU nationals in the UK, but, perhaps more importantly for some Members, of UK nationals living abroad. The witnesses felt that a unilateral declaration of good will from the British Government—who, after all, caused the problem by holding the referendum and allowing the leave vote to happen—to guarantee the rights of EU nationals in the United Kingdom would be met by a reciprocal undertaking from other member states, as opposed to using individual human beings as bargaining chips. [Interruption.] If the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) wants to intervene I will be happy to take that intervention, but he obviously does not; he just wants to shout at me from a sedentary position.
Finally, before Second Reading, I raised a point of order about the Secretary of State’s statement on section 19(1)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998. He said that, in his view,
“the provisions of the… Bill are compatible with the Convention rights”.
I am not usually in the habit of giving out free legal advice, but I am happy to do so on this occasion. If the Bill proceeds and we trigger article 50 without taking any steps to protect the rights of EU nationals living in the UK, the British Government could find themselves facing a challenge—and possibly claims—under the Human Rights Act on the Bill’s compatibility with articles 8 and 14 of the European convention on human rights. I know that many Government Members do not have any great affection for the ECHR, but when we exit the EU we will still be signatories to the convention and the British courts will still be bound by it. I offer the Government a helpful word of warning: if they want to save taxpayers’ money, they might want to think carefully about addressing that issue before they are met with a slew of legal claims.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
EU-national workers in science and research are key to research and industry in our society. We should be begging those world-class researchers to stay. We should be bending over backwards instead of using them as bargaining chips, because we are damaging good will and how they feel valued in our society.
Joanna Cherry
Indeed. My hon. Friend takes great interest in teaching, research and science, which was her own field before she came to Parliament. Many Scottish universities, including Herriot-Watt and Napier in my constituency, are extremely concerned about the brain drain that could occur as a result of the failure to reassure EU nationals living in the UK about their rights. With that, I repeat my support for the SNP’s amendment 54 and new clause 141 in relation to Gibraltar.
Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)
I am grateful for the chance to speak briefly. It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), whom I gather felt that she had not previously had the opportunity to put her points. She has taken about 10% of the time allocated to debate this group of amendments, so I hope that she feels that she has now had the opportunity to make her case, and she did so extremely eloquently.
I want to cover a few bases. [Interruption.] There is a lot of noise coming from the Opposition Benches; it is quite hard to think or speak, but I will plough on. I feel extremely strongly about the rights of EU citizens living in the United Kingdom. I had a meeting in my constituency on Friday, in which I discussed Brexit with about 150 people, including a lot of people from different EU countries, because there are a great many scientific research and high-tech international companies based in my constituency.
These are people who contribute. I note that people love to talk about the economic contribution made by citizens from Europe, but I also deeply value their social contribution. They are incredible people who not only provide world-class expertise to many businesses and science, but make a huge contribution to the communities in my constituency. They are obviously devastated by what has happened and they seek reassurance from the Government.
I am not going to support any particular amendments, because I think that would mess up the Bill and that they would not necessarily achieve what they seek to achieve. I am also deeply reassured by the Home Secretary’s letter, which was circulated earlier, and by the Prime Minister’s repeated comments about how she is going to make it an absolute priority to get clarity on the rights of EU citizens.
Helen Goodman
The right hon. Gentleman said that there was a letter from the Home Secretary. Was it a letter for Conservative Members only? Now that he has referred to it in the House, is it not appropriate to put it on the Table or in the Library for all hon. Members to see?
Mr Vaizey
I may have made a faux pas. It was addressed “Dear Colleague”, and may have just been sent to me. It might be private correspondence between me and the Home Secretary, for me to circulate to my European constituents, who are among the most talented Europeans living in this country.
Helen Goodman
On a point of order, Mrs Laing. Is it appropriate for an hon. Member to refer to a document that is not available to the whole House?
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
I believe it is appropriate for an hon. Member to refer to whichever document he or she might care to quote. It would be a matter for the right hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) whether he makes any more of the immediate quotation he wishes to use from any particular correspondence. We all have private correspondence.
Alex Salmond
Further to that point of order, Mrs Laing. Would I be in order to say that the custom and practice is that a ministerial letter about a debate should be circulated to Members and placed in the Library?
The First Deputy Chairman
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, as ever—[Interruption]—or as often. If a letter or any document was produced by a Government Minister in his or her capacity as a Government Minister that was intended for the information of the whole House, it would indeed have to be placed in the Library or the Vote Office, or distributed on the Benches. Hypothetically, if there is a letter—I do not know whether there is or not—addressed privately to an hon. Member, it is a matter for the hon. Member.
Mr Harper
My right hon. Friend has been here only as long as I have, so we are clearly both still learning the ropes. I wanted to assist him. The Prime Minister has been clear on the record that she intends to take a very generous approach. To go back to the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), part of the roadblock is that some EU member states will not negotiate with us until we have triggered article 50. In fact, the quicker we get the Bill on the statute book and get article 50 triggered, the quicker we can get that arrangement in place and reassure EU nationals in Britain and British citizens overseas.
Mr Vaizey
That is an excellent point. A difficult road lies ahead and we will have to make some pretty unsavoury compromises. They are understandable compromises, but we should make no mistake that the mood of the House among many colleagues who supported Brexit is to move as quickly as possible to provide reassurance to European citizens in this country. I wanted to use this opportunity, before I got mired in a procedural quagmire and moved closer to the Chief Whip’s tarantula, to make it as clear as possible that I stand four-square behind European Union citizens living in this country and their contribution.
Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)
We have heard much talk in the House, particularly from the Prime Minister, about the idea of global leadership. Will the right hon. Gentleman explain precisely his definition of global leadership if it does not mean being a leader and standing up for EU nationals living in this country?
Mr Vaizey
The hon. Lady makes an interesting point and allows me to segue to the next issue, which is Britain’s global leadership in free trade.
Hon. Members who were lucky enough to hear me speak on Second Reading know that the constant talk of free trade treaties is driving me round the bend. As a Minister, I took part in the state visit from President Xi, and as a Member of Parliament I was in Westminster Hall to hear the address from President Obama—I know I should not stray on to the subject of presidential addresses in Westminster Hall, which is a dangerous road to go down—and I fail to understand those who cite the lack of British influence that has existed while we have been members of the European Union. Heads of State and Presidents from countries all over the world are only too happy to come and visit.
I am a loyal Conservative Member, but the point made about Germany’s trade with China was well made. People refer constantly to free trade treaties. I hope we will be able to negotiate them within a matter of days of leaving the European Union, but it strikes me that people are unaware of what happens in the real world if they think that our farmers, who are the best example, will simply sign up without a murmur to free trade treaties with countries such as the United States, which has very different welfare standards from ours. I understand the arguments of those who support free trade with, for example, developing nations, and I understand people who say that we should open our markets to them and support our farmers in different ways, but our farmers will have severe concerns. We also have to wonder whether developing nations have the same welfare standards as us.
Sir Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)
I entirely agree and support my right hon. Friend on his first point. On his second point, does he agree that many hon. Members, while wishing the very best, worry that those deals and transactions will take a long time to fulfil, particularly in the case of the farmers, and that there is therefore the great danger of being in limbo-land?
Mr Vaizey
That worries me, and I thank my right hon. Friend for making the point.
This is obviously a remoan. I know it is a remoan. I am a remainer just getting things off my chest. It is probably not very constructive, but it strikes me as bizarre that we have given up extraordinary influence over a market of 500 million people to sail off to negotiate free trade deals that will not be without controversy.
Mr Lilley
I would not dream of correcting my right hon. Friend, but I would ask him this question. When it appeared that we were going to stay in the EU, was he concerned about the terms of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and what that would have done to British farmers? Was he concerned about the trade agreement with the Canadians, of which we have today voted to take note? Was he concerned about those things, or is he concerned only when it feeds his remaining remoan tendencies?
Mr Vaizey
I did not accept the argument that TTIP would undermine our NHS, and I did not receive any representations from my farmers about its impact on them. I was concerned about the French introducing cultural protections, but felt that we were getting close to a free trade agreement thanks to the negotiating power of the European Union.
Kit Malthouse
Further to the intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), I wonder whether the logical extension of the argument of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) is that we should withdraw from the World Trade Organisation. For example, is it fair that the textile workers of Leicester were exposed through our WTO membership to the textile industry in China, which has largely meant a transfer of that industry to that country?
Mr Vaizey
My argument is simply that it will be very difficult to negotiate the free trade agreements that people talk about. It is a very unconstructive and unhelpful argument and will not take us very far. It is more therapy on my part because I feel so frustrated that the tone of the debate since the referendum has been so awful and unpleasant; that we forget that 48% of the country voted to stay in the European Union; and that we are unable to build a consensus on the way forward. The remain part of the House and the country has, by and large, accepted that the referendum result is clear and decisive, and that it will take us out of the EU. We want to work extremely constructively to make that happen, despite my earlier remarks. We are urging all sides to have a realistic assessment of how difficult it will be so that we can work together in the national interest.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman is being generous with his time. I agree with his point about trying to reach consensus for the sake of the country. Is he as concerned as I am about the protectionism of other countries and the dangers it presents in international trade? After a change of leadership in Nigeria, the Nigerians, on a whim, wrote a list of imports that they would no longer accept, which cut off all existing trade with UK companies, including one in my constituency that exported to Nigeria.
Mr Vaizey
I agree with the hon. Lady and that example reinforces my belief that free trade deals will not be easy to negotiate.
What I am really saying, I suppose, is that my constituents who voted to remain—especially those who come from other European countries—have a great deal of anxiety and want a realisation that we cannot wave a magic wand but that this will need hard pounding. I stand foursquare with the Government on ensuring that we get the best deal possible.
Mr Baker
I want to cheer my right hon. Friend up a little and apologise to him as I may have inadvertently failed to invite him to meet the Legatum Institute special trade commissioners who visited Parliament on Monday. The Mexican trade commissioner, who was one of the original North American Free Trade Agreement negotiators, explained to us the danger that NAFTA may need a major renegotiation under President Trump. With talk of the need to get the substance right and then get it through three Parliaments, it sounded as if it would take a terribly long time, but they think it can be concluded by October 2018. The experience of actual trade negotiators who have negotiated such agreements is that they can be done quickly.
Mr Vaizey
I will visit my hon. Friend’s constituency in April, so we can discuss the matter at length as I turn his leave association into a remain one. I know the Legatum Institute well because the chap who has become flavour of the month for his knowledge of trade deals, Shanker Singham, was at school with me, which automatically makes him a dangerous member of the liberal metropolitan elite. It is important that we are aware that one of the Brexiteers’ great champions is a member of the dangerous liberal metropolitan elite—
John Nicolson
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the danger is that we will be caught between a rock and a hard place? If our farmers lower their standards to compete with American imports under free trade, those standards may then be too low for the foodstuffs to be admitted to the European Union. It would be a difficult place to be.
Mr Vaizey
That is just one of many factors we must take into account.
I have tested the patience of the Committee with my wisecracks, and I now want to talk about my main, very serious issue—the withdrawal from Euratom, which will directly affect my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell), who is no longer in his place, represents the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, where the main research into nuclear fusion—the holy grail of sustainable energy—takes place. In 2014 we signed an almost €300 million contract to run the Joint European Torus on that site until 2018. We are now negotiating to take the programme forward. The JET, based in Oxfordshire, accounts for a quarter of the European fusion programme budget. Other money comes from ITER, the global fusion project. It will take place in France but still provides financial support for British projects including, for example, €40 million of remote handling equipment awarded to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority—based in Oxfordshire—as part of a wider consortium.
Coming out of Euratom would present some difficult issues, including a requirement to conclude new bilateral co-operation agreements with the United States and approximately 20 other countries to maintain our access to intellectual property and nuclear technologies; removing the requirement for the UK to comply with Euratom’s safety regimes, which would prevent other countries from collaborating with us; and further potential delays and cost increases to the nuclear new build programme. I am extremely unhappy that the Bill will take us out of Euratom—and I was also unhappy that I had no warning of that—but I am grateful to Ministers, some of whom are in their places, for their reactions on this issue. I have been able to have discussions with Ministers from the Departments for Exiting the European Union and for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. I am grateful to the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson), who has personally met the Culham chief executive, and to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy who has also spoken to the chief executive. I am also delighted that the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman), is due to visit Culham. Every effort is being made to ensure that at its all-staff meeting tomorrow proper reassurances can be given.
Mr MacNeil
Does the right hon. Gentleman think that all the conversations he has had are equal to the €300 million subsidy for Oxfordshire?
Mr Vaizey
As far as I understand it, that subsidy is not going away, and certainly shortly after the referendum the Science Minister guaranteed science funding up to 2020. I am sure that we will find some way to be a member of Euratom and to benefit, because British—and European—scientists working in Culham are vital to that project.
Charlie Elphicke
It is welcome to hear that Ministers have been so heavily engaged with my right hon. Friend following the concerns he raised on Second Reading. Does he agree that Euratom is so closely linked with the European Union that it would be difficult for the United Kingdom to continue to be a member of Euratom while leaving the European Union?
Mr Vaizey
I will answer by saying that I agree that that is the Government’s position. I also understand that the Government will act to minimise any further legal challenge to the Bill. I reiterate that I cannot fault Ministers for their response since I raised the issue on Second Reading, in terms of engaging personally with me and with Culham.
I do not know whether I am walking into a point of order quagmire, but I hope that Ministers will publish a document that will explain their strategy for taking forward Euratom as soon as they are able to do so. The key point is that the Government have no intention of walking away from Euratom because they somehow disagree with the principle of Euratom’s existence or the work that it does. It may sound trite when talking about people’s futures, but this is a technical withdrawal and I have been impressed by the energy of Ministers in engaging on this issue.
Sue Hayman (Workington) (Lab)
A constituent of mine who is an employee of the National Nuclear Laboratory has told me he is concerned that an exit from Euratom would impair his ability to collaborate with leading scientists and engineers across Europe, to the detriment of science and technology in this country. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree with that point?
Mr Vaizey
The hon. Lady makes exactly the point about why people are concerned. As I hope I have made clear, Ministers are putting in a great deal of energy—I am full of terrible puns today—to ensuring that the implications of our technical withdrawal from Euratom are minimised, and that we can restore our de facto membership in the coming months.
Alex Salmond
The right hon. Gentleman is making a considered speech, as I would expect, but has he considered the possibility that if the Bill passes unamended, his position and point of influence will pass with it? It might be better to have something in writing in the Bill, rather than all these warm words, cups of tea and assurances.
Mr Vaizey
I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says, but I have known the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy for many years and shared many warm cups of tea with him, so I accept his warm words. I fully expect him to be in his post for several years to take this forward.
Kit Malthouse
My right hon. Friend is concerned about Euratom. Has he considered the alternative? Given that in the last funding round Euratom had to fight very hard to try to maintain its funding, a position it is unlikely to be able to maintain in future, and the fact that the largest single contributors to Horizon 2020, the Germans, have taken the decision to phase out their civil nuclear programme all together, is he not concerned that over the next couple of decades continued membership of Euratom might expose us to diminishing research funding? Exit from the EU could provide us with the opportunity to partner bilaterally with other countries, as we do already with India and South Korea, and therefore expose ourselves to a wider pool of research.
Mr Vaizey
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. In fact, in answering him I may slightly contradict my earlier rant. I have significant concerns that our exit from the EU could potentially damage British science because of our close collaboration with the EU, but some scientists in my constituency have pointed out that there is a danger of our becoming too inward-looking in only seeking European scientific collaboration. Whatever one thinks of other issues, China is certainly becoming a much more important player in scientific research. There may be a silver lining to the withdrawal from Euratom.
My hon. Friend is also right to point out that securing funding for nuclear fusion is no easy task. In some respects, nuclear fusion is always the gold at the end of the rainbow. Nevertheless, it is extremely important research and I support it 100%, both in general and for the impact it has on my constituency.
I have taken so long that Mrs Laing has turned into Mr Howarth. Having made a gentle jibe earlier at the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West, I see that I have taken up an inordinate amount of the Committee’s time, so I will sit down. I simply reiterate that I stand foursquare behind EU citizens living in our country. Please do not keep banging on about how easy free trade is going to be and please secure our nuclear relationships as far as possible.
The Temporary Chair (Mr George Howarth)
I now have to announce the results of today’s seven deferred Divisions. On the motion relating to trade unions and education, the Ayes were 327 and the Noes were 264, so the Question was agreed to.
On the motion relating to trade unions and transport, the Ayes were 328 and the Noes were 263, so the Question was agreed to.
On the motion relating to trade unions and health, the Ayes were 323 and the Noes were 263, so the Question was agreed to.
On the motion relating to trade unions and border security, the Ayes were 323 and the Noes were 263, so the Question was agreed to.
On the motion relating to trade unions and fire, the Ayes were 323 and the Noes were 262, so the Question was agreed to.
On the motion relating to trade union political funds, the Ayes were 322 and the Noes were 254, so the Question was agreed to.
On the motion relating to the comprehensive economic trade agreement between the EU and Canada, the Ayes were 409 and the Noes were 126, so the Question was agreed to.
[The Division lists are published at the end of today’s debates.]
Mike Gapes
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I do not want to go on for too long, but nine amendments in my name have been selected, though I will not speak to all of them. Amendment 31 relates to the implications of leaving Euratom. I agree very strongly with the concerns expressed by the right hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey). He also talked about the implications of the decision to leave the European Union for British citizens overseas. I declare an interest as the honorary president of Labour International, which represents the interests of Labour party members who live in other countries, many of whom were able to vote in the referendum. However, those living in the EU for longer than 15 years did not have a vote in the referendum, even though many still have very close connections to this country.
Mike Gapes
It was a disgrace. We are not dealing with that issue in this debate, but I wish to place on the record the messages of concern I have been sent by people living in other EU countries. They remain very worried about their access to healthcare, education services and support in the communities they live in, whether they are in Spain, France, Bulgaria, Greece or one of many other countries. This issue should have been resolved already, but the Government have chosen to use these people as a bargaining chip, to use the Government’s own words. Frankly, that is unacceptable.
Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mike Gapes
Yes, I am happy to give way to my colleague on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Mr Baron
I thank the hon. Gentleman. I have raised the issue of the importance of guaranteeing the rights of EU citizens living here, perhaps unilaterally, and I have received assurances from the Prime Minister that this will be top of her list in the negotiations. Also, does the hon. Gentleman not accept in good faith that the issue could be resolved very easily if the EU reciprocated our intention of guaranteeing those rights? The issue could be put aside very quickly if the EU guaranteed the rights of British citizens living in the EU.
Mike Gapes
The hon. Gentleman has been around long enough to know that the negotiation will start after article 50 has been triggered. The reality is that the British Government could have provided reassurance to families in this country—perhaps families with one British and one French parent, whose children are born in this country—who are uncertain about their long-term future if a family member has retained citizenship of another EU country. Frankly, in the interests of those families in this country, the issue should be resolved today, not delayed until the negotiation. That is in our own interests as a country of values, high morals, justice and fairness.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Temporary Chairman (Mr George Howarth)
Order. The hon. Gentleman is indicating that he does not intend to give way—certainly not at this stage. I do not think it is conducive to the good order of the business of the Committee if people keep pressing. I am sure that he will signal if, at some point, he wants to give way.
Mike Gapes
Thank you, Mr Howarth. I referred to my nine amendments, two of which are minor and drafting amendments. Amendment 23 states that we should, “by 31 March 2017”, notify the country’s intention to leave the EU. I was surprised at the lack of a date in the Bill, given the Prime Minister’s commitment to triggering article 50 by 31 March. I would have thought all Government Members would be prepared to support the amendment, given that it is entirely in line with what the Prime Minister said. For some reason, however, it does not seem to be acceptable to them; I do not know why. Perhaps a Minister could explain that later.
I mentioned amendment 31, on Euratom. Amendment 30 refers to the European Defence Agency. Defence co-operation within the European Union is vital. There is a large number of major defence projects with a components arrangement, whereby parts from one country are assembled in another. For many years, there have been such collaborative arrangements. Frankly, the British defence industry is unable to compete without international involvement. Some companies have moved offshore, in the sense that they have moved across the Atlantic, while others in this country are joint collaborative arrangements. Thales, originally a French company, is now very much a British defence manufacturer. For many reasons, if our defence industry is to be competitive and provide jobs for tens of thousands of highly skilled people in this country, we have to keep that defence industrial base, but that will be possible only through joint collaboration; otherwise, European manufacturers will be swept aside by the United States or other parts of the world. We have seen that already in the way that industries have shifted to Asia.
Anybody who wants to see the whole manufacturing process of a motor vehicle has to go to South Korea, where they press the steel, have the paint shops and engine plants, and fit out the vehicles. When I was a young man in the 1960s, I went on a school visit to Ford Dagenham. I was struck by the noise and the smell of paint. I was 17 years old. I had never been in a place like it. At that point, I realised that making cars was a massive, complex process. The only time I have seen a place like it subsequently was when I went to Hyundai motors in Korea, where I saw the sheets of steel to be pressed. When I more recently visited the Ford Dagenham plant, which is not far from my constituency, all I saw were men in white coats walking around, adjusting things in a complex process, with lots of robots and diesel engines. That is the contrast. We need to think about this. When we leave the EU, we have to make sure that our manufacturing industry, and within that, the defence sector, is maintained and strengthened.
Mike Gapes
I will give way briefly. I will not take too many interventions, though, because I am conscious that other people wish to speak.
Kit Malthouse
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but will he accept that our membership of the EU has seen a transfer of industries and factories from the UK to eastern Europe and others parts of the EU? Not least of those is Cadbury, which transferred manufacturing to other parts of the EU.
Mike Gapes
The hon. Gentleman will find that globalisation and the expansion of the wealth of the world, led by regional trading blocs such as the EU, have led to a significant change in the types of industries located in particular countries. Hundreds of millions of people have been taken out of poverty because of industrialisation in China. The same thing is happening in Vietnam, the Philippines and India. Globalisation is affecting everyone. He refers to eastern Europe. Yes, the days when the polluting Trabi cars were being made in the German Democratic Republic, and when Škoda vehicles were regarded as a joke, have gone.
There is now high-quality manufacturing in many countries throughout Europe, but they often have integrated supply chains, which is why Ford Dagenham makes diesel engines for cars also manufactured in Belgium, Spain and other European countries. That is the nature of modern capitalism and the global world. The danger in our leaving the EU is that we could make those industries in this country less successful and put tens of thousands of jobs at risk.
Mr Baron
I have good news for the hon. Gentleman: courtesy of our leaving the EU, sterling has fallen and manufacturing in this country is having a field day, as he can see from the export orders and factory output orders. Does he agree that that has been a boon to the manufacturing industry, particularly in the north?
Mike Gapes
Sterling has indeed fallen. As a result, foreign holidays and Marmite are more expensive and chocolate bars are getting smaller. There are all kinds of consequences coming through.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mike Gapes
I want to make some progress. I referred to my nine amendments. Amendment 34 relates to the common foreign and security policy. The EU does not do enough on defence. It needs to do far more, particularly, as President Donald Tusk pointed out, given the dangers from outside the EU—from Daesh terrorism, Russia and its territorial grabs in eastern Europe, and the uncertainties surrounding the other Donald, President Donald Trump, and the future of NATO. We all need to recognise that Britain, with France, is the backbone of the European pillar of NATO. The co-operation on the common foreign, security and defence policy that we have established so far needs to be sustained, whether or not we are in the EU.
It would be very foolish if, on leaving the EU, we weaken defence co-operation arrangements that date back to the Saint-Malo agreement with France, or the co-operation with our EU partners, which is limited but nevertheless important, on common peacekeeping, security and policing missions; we make a big contribution there. Some people have said that that could be used as an asset in the bargaining process, but that is the wrong approach. Regardless of what happens to agriculture or on financial contributions, it is in our national defence and security interest to have excellent relations with our neighbours—our French, Dutch and German neighbours—on the defence and security of this country. If we do the opposite, we will cut off our nose to spite our face, and that is not very sensible.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that we should go further? Now that we are leaving the federal project, we have an opportunity to create a confederal project, in which we strengthen co-operation on defence, social rights, science, international development and climate change. The Prime Minister says that we might be leaving the EU, but we are not leaving Europe. In that case, let us see the plan for strengthening our relationships across a host of areas of work across the continent.
Mike Gapes
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point, and I hope that he gets a chance to enlarge on it when he makes his contribution.
I wish to highlight two of my other amendments. Amendment 29, to which the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) referred, and amendment 35 both relate to Gibraltar. Anybody who, like me, has seen the occasional attempts by the authorities in Madrid to cause trouble in Gibraltar will know that there might suddenly be hundreds of vehicles and dozens of people queueing at the border between Gibraltar and Spain, the special police sent down from Madrid at a moment’s notice having imposed a rigorous check on everyone going to Gibraltar. A few hours later, there will be no queue—and then it can come back again.
Between 10,000 and 14,000 people living in southern Spain, in Andalusia, travel across the border each day to work in Gibraltar. Gibraltar has a population of about 32,000 people, many of whom are children. There is an economic base there now that cannot be sustained simply by employing residents of Gibraltar. Also, there is not enough land to house the number of workers it needs, so it is dependent on 10,000 or more workers crossing daily to work in Gibraltar—about 40% of the total workforce in the Gibraltar economy.
Mr MacNeil
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point about Gibraltar, which I understand. I want to take him back to the words of the right hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey), who spoke just before him and said that he was afraid that an amendment would mess up the Bill. I fail to see how the addition, at the end of clause 1, page 1, line 3, of the words
“after consultation with the Government of Gibraltar”
could possibly mess up the Bill. Amendment 29 is a sensible amendment that the whole House should support, and that Gibraltar wants us to agree to.
Mike Gapes
The hon. Gentleman must be a mind reader, because I was just coming to that point. When the Government proposed the European Union Referendum Bill in 2015, after the general election, they did not initially include any wording relating to Gibraltar. That came in only because of the strenuous efforts of a number of Conservative Back Benchers, including my parliamentary neighbour the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), who is very active on the British overseas territories all-party group, and of Labour and other MPs who were concerned to ensure that Gibraltar was referred to in the Bill, and that Gibraltar’s citizens, even though they are not part of the United Kingdom but are part of the European Union and can vote in elections to the European Parliament, had a vote in the referendum. It is therefore strange, is it not, that although the Bill to set up the referendum, which triggered this process of leaving the European Union, explicitly mentions Gibraltar and the right of Gibraltarians to vote, there is no reference to Gibraltar at all in the Bill to trigger article 50?
I understand that one day after the referendum on 24 June 2015, the then Foreign Minister of Spain, who is fortunately no longer that Minister, as a result of which I gather things are a little bit smoother, made very inflammatory remarks about how Spain would “have Gibraltar” because of the referendum result. As the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West said, when the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, spoke before the Brexit Committee, which looked into this issue on 25 January, he made it absolutely clear that Gibraltar had not just voted overwhelmingly to remain, but had voted by an even bigger margin—by 98%, as opposed to 93%—to be British.
The self-determination of Gibraltar is important. Culturally, the people of Gibraltar include people with Spanish, Italian, Moroccan, Genoese, British and many other roots. These people were British; they are British; they will remain British. That is not in question. As I said earlier, however, the day-to-day relationship between Gibraltar and Spain can, at the whim of some official or politician in Madrid, be made difficult. The people who suffer most from that are trade unionists, and workers in the Andalusia region who are working in Gibraltar. I have met them here in the House of Commons.
Interestingly, the socialist-led local authorities in the south of Spain want excellent relations between Andalusia and Gibraltar. While we are in the EU, our Government can ensure that there is no funny business and that no silly things emerge from some draft document produced somewhere about territorial waters, environmental issues, flights and trade matters. As soon as we leave the EU, however, we no longer have the ability to argue that case and block it if a particular Government in Madrid decide to up the ante to make life more difficult for Gibraltar.
Given the importance of this issue, it is surely necessary that the people of Gibraltar are, through their elected government in Gibraltar, made aware of these matters as we leave the EU. Surely, then, to be consistent with what the Bill said when we voted here to have a referendum, Gibraltar should also be mentioned in the current Bill. That is why I shall press my amendment 29 to the vote. I hope that Members of all parties, particularly those who have an interest in the British overseas territories and who believe strongly and firmly that Gibraltar should remain British, will consult their consciences and their own voting history and beliefs, and support this amendment.
Finally, I must say that it is unfortunate that so many Members wish to speak and that there is so little time for them. This whole process has been a disgrace; setting aside just three days for the Committee stage is an absolute disgrace. Clearly, we have seen complicity and collusion—
Mike Gapes
A stitch-up, as my right hon. Friend says, which John Smith certainly did not agree to. When I first entered this House in 1992, I had many happy hours and late nights debating the Maastricht treaty. I can recall—some of the faces on the other side of the Chamber are still there—taking interventions from seven or eight Conservative Members late at night on that issue. For that Bill, we had five, six or seven—[Interruption.]—eight times as much time as we have today.
Mr Bradshaw
Does that not make it even more important for the House of Lords to take its time to consider everything that we have not been able to discuss here, and indeed much of what we have?
Mike Gapes
I do not wish to give advice to the other place, because it is possible to get into trouble if we do that. I simply say that it is fortunate for democracy and accountability that there is an opportunity for the other place to give more consideration and time to these matters, without being subjected to programme motions in the same way as we are.
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to these amendments. I shall support new clause 2 and a number of other amendments, but particularly my amendment 29.
Kit Malthouse
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), and more particularly to hear the intervention from the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne). That is the spirit; that is what we want to see; that is what we want for the future.
May I first offer an apology, Mr Howarth, to the previous incumbent of the Chair for having the temerity to challenge the opening of the debate. The infallibility of the Chair has been on display in this House over the last three or four days, and I was mistaken to think that I should join the chorus of doubts about the Chair’s decisions.
I have listened very carefully to the debate over the last two and a half days, both within the Chamber and while sitting in my office watching the television. Sadly, what I have heard is, broadly speaking, a three-day ululation by those who voted to remain about what is to come. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that, as far as I can see, we are trying to make the law in this Chamber, rather than debating the merits or otherwise of the decision that was made by the people on 23 June. That has resulted in some very poor drafting of amendments and new clauses, a huge number of which have been tabled to this very simple Bill.
I want to expand on my earlier point of order, and to explain why I cannot support the vast majority of the new clauses and amendments. Let me deal first with those tabled in the name of the Leader of the Opposition and various other Labour Members, including the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie). They constitute a large shopping list of things that Members would like the Prime Minister to take into account, but there are a number of omissions. Other Members have included some of the missing provisions, but they have also missed one or two. For instance, they seem to have forgotten to compel the Prime Minister to breathe or keep her eyes open.
When we add up the list of things that Members are demanding that the Prime Minister take into account during her negotiations and discussions with our European friends, we see that her scope would become extremely limited if we were to pass any of these new clauses. My main objection to them relates to their vagueness. New clause 2, for instance, contains plenty of material that gave me reason for thought. It states that
“the Prime Minister shall give an undertaking”.
To whom should she give that undertaking? Should she give it to her husband, or to the House? It is very imprecise. It also does not specify the form of the undertaking. Should it be written on the back of an envelope? We are writing legislation in this House, and it is incumbent on us to be precise. I raised the point of order about the new clauses being vague and therefore out of order because that is exactly what they are.
Geraint Davies
On a point of order, Mr Howarth. The hon. Gentleman made a point of order saying that the new clauses were out of order, and was ruled out of order. Now he is saying that his point of order was in order, so I suggest that he is out of order.
The Temporary Chairman (Mr George Howarth)
The hon. Gentleman’s point of order, although very entertaining, was not a point of order.
Kit Malthouse
Thank you, Mr Howarth. The previous occupant of the Chair corrected me, and said that my point of order was a matter for debate in the Chamber and not, in fact, a point of order. Debating it is therefore exactly what I am attempting to do.
Mr MacNeil
The hon. Gentleman said that he could not support the “vast majority” of the new clauses and amendments, which presumably means that he can support some of them. I wonder whether he is able to support amendment 29, which was tabled by Labour Members but is backed by the SNP, and which would insert the words
“after consultation with the Government of Gibraltar”.
It is quite simple. Will the hon. Gentleman stand with the people of Gibraltar, or will he not?
Kit Malthouse
The hon. Gentleman is quite right. I did say “the vast majority”. I should not have said that until I had managed to read them all, but I must confess that even my enormous stamina started to wane at one in the morning when I was two-thirds of the way through them. I have not read them all, which is why I am sitting here listening, so I shall have to mull over that decision over the next few hours.
As I was saying, we do not know what the form of the undertaking is to be, we do not know to whom it is to be made, and, critically, we do not know what the sanction is. If the Prime Minister says “Do you know what? No”, what are we to do? Are we to send her to the Tower? Is she not to participate in the elections?
Mr Harper
According to my reading of the new clause, the sanction is that until the Prime Minister has given the undertaking, she cannot proceed with giving notice under article 50, which I suspect is the intention of those who tabled the new clause. These new clauses are festooned with mechanisms for not giving notice under article 50, which is the entire purpose of the Bill.
Kit Malthouse
I think that my right hon. Friend is being quite generous. As far as I can see, the huge number of new clauses and amendments is designed purely to waste time and to delay, and to send political signals rather than trying to achieve anything. The hon. Member for Ilford South complained about the programme motion. If the opponents of the Bill, or those who wish to amend it, had collaborated and focused on three or four critical changes that they wanted to see, rather than throwing a lot of flak in the air and causing all these problems, they might have made some progress.
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend is making a number of extremely good points, but is not vagueness the virtue as far as the drafters of the new clauses and amendments are concerned? If passed, they would turn a simple one-page Bill into an absolute monster that would be subject to a lawyers’ beanfeast and would be judiciable at every turn, thus kicking the Bill into the long grass.
Kit Malthouse
I agree, although the word I would use is “simplicity”. With simplicity comes clarity, and we need clarity from the Prime Minister, as she enters the negotiations, about the motivations of the House and its support for her.
My other reason for objecting to new clause 2 is that it abrogates to the Prime Minister decisions that will rightly become the decisions of the House in the future. Paragraph (e) states that the Prime Minister should have regard to
“maintaining all existing social, economic, consumer and workers’ rights.”
Apart from anything else, I am not sure what my social or economic rights are. They are undefined in the Bill. But, in future, those decisions will presumably become decisions of the House. If there are to be any changes in those rights, undefined as they are, they will have to be the subject of primary legislation.
Caroline Lucas
I do wish that the hon. Gentleman would inform himself before making his points. We already know from the White Paper that the Government have said that it will be possible for plenty of these measures to be reformed in secondary legislation. In other words, it will not be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. The hon. Gentleman may not care about his own economic, social and environmental rights, but Opposition Members have constituents who do care. We are trying to do our job properly; it is a pity that the hon. Gentleman is not.
Kit Malthouse
Perhaps she did. I admit that I am a relative newcomer to the House, but, as I understand it, even secondary legislation can be forced into debate on the Floor of the House by the Opposition parties. They can table motions, and there can be Back-Bench debates. All sorts of scrutiny of secondary legislation is possible. Indeed, there are ways in which the Opposition can strike down such legislation once it is before the House, if they wish to do so. It is not as if we were without powers in such circumstances.
Mr Harper
May I help my hon. Friend and, in particular, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas)? It is made clear in the White Paper—an undertaking that the Prime Minister has already given to the House—that any significant policy changes will be underpinned by primary legislation, which means that the House can be given a full opportunity to debate them. It is also clear that secondary legislation, under the great repeal Bill, will be used only to address deficiencies in the preserved law, which will relate to the fact that we will not, for example, be able to use EU institutions. I think that that is very clear, and preserves the rights and privileges of the House to protect our constituents.
Mr Lilley
Is my hon. Friend not puzzled about why the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and others now want to be able to vote on and control legislation on whole swathes of which, for the last 40 years, they have been content to have no vote—no vote before negotiations, no vote during negotiations, no vote at the end of negotiations—and no power to destroy an EU regulation even if every Member voted against it.
Kit Malthouse
My right hon. Friend has neatly drawn attention to the fundamental paradox that sits at the base of all remainer arguments.
When we come to new clause 77, I think we have reached what I would call peak nonsense. The new clause, tabled by the hon. Member for Nottingham East, states:
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of retaining full participation in the making of all rules affecting trade in goods and services in the European Union.”
That effectively means remaining members of the Commission, members of the Parliament, and members of the Council of Ministers, or else not leaving the EU. As far as I can see, that is indeed peak nonsense. Yet again, we see bad legislation and bad law.
Chris Leslie
The hon. Gentleman should perhaps take another look at new clause 77. It makes the point about the need for the UK to retain its role around the table as a rule maker in our tariff arrangements for trade. There are some serious issues to do with our position in the customs union and so forth, and I suggest that Britain should retain its role around the table. Does the hon. Gentleman disagree?
Kit Malthouse
No, that is not what it says. If the hon. Member reads the Member’s explanatory statement to the amendment he will see that it says:
“This new clause would require HM Government to negotiate to continue the UK’s participation on agreeing all rules affecting trade in goods and services in the European Union.”
My understanding is that those rules are made by the Commission and agreed by the Council of Ministers and the Parliament, so we would have to stay around all those tables.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
Should we pass this new clause, will the Act of Parliament therefore be binding on the other 27 members, who will therefore, because we willed it, be forced to accept our presence at their table, despite our having left all the organisations that we have left? Does my hon. Friend think that this is in any way enforceable? If not, is it not slightly fallacious even to debate it?
Kit Malthouse
My hon. Friend rightly points out that, as with all of these amendments, even if this does not happen, there is nothing to be done. There is no sanction; there would just be a shrug of the shoulders, and we would have to turn our back and ask the hon. Member for Nottingham East what we are supposed to do next if we cannot manage to comply with his amendment. It really is nonsense. I know the hon. Gentleman has ambitions within his party, but he will have to do a little bit better than produce stuff like this.
Again, new clause 179 on protecting current levels of funding states:
“In negotiating and concluding an agreement in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, Ministers of the Crown must have regard to the desirability of protecting current funding from the European Union.”
Funding to whom? Which funding? All funding? The funding that we send? The funding that comes back? Defence spend? Funding to us, or funding to other countries? The vagueness of these new clauses is extraordinary.
Again, new clause 183 on membership of the single market including EU-wide reform of freedom of movement states:
“secure reforms of provisions governing the free movement of persons between EU member states in such a way as to allow for greater controls over movement of people for member states”.
That is all very vague, as is
“maintain the highest possible level of integration with the European single market.”
What does that mean? What is the highest possible level of integration? Perhaps that means membership.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I think my hon. Friend is being a little uncharitable. He seems to be assuming that these new clauses are without purpose, but, as was recently pointed out, they have a very definite purpose: were they to be passed, it would be impossible for the Government to proceed with article 50. It would be in the courts certainly for years, possibly for decades, and maybe even for centuries. A very conscious policy of great intelligence is being followed here. My hon. Friend is underestimating the ingenuity of the Opposition.
The Temporary Chair (Mr George Howarth)
Order. While the hon. Gentleman is perfectly entitled to debate the quality or otherwise of any amendments or new clauses, he needs to acknowledge that the Chair has deemed all of them to be within scope. So whatever the purpose or otherwise behind them, they are within the scope of the Bill.
Kit Malthouse
I am grateful to you for that direction, Mr Howarth, but the previous incumbent of the Chair told me that that was a matter for debate on the Floor of the House, and that we were allowed to debate the merit—
Kit Malthouse
Anyway, I have come to the end of my peroration on that particular point and I have a couple of other points.
Quite a lot of these amendments are unenforceable and nonsensical and cannot be supported. I will listen to the rest of the debate and discover whether there are any substantive ones in this potpourri that has been thrown up in the air, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) says, to try to fog the issue or create legal difficulties in the future. But for the moment I am afraid I am not able to support the vast majority of them, although I have not read every single one yet.
I wish to make two further points. First, I want to reiterate what I said earlier about Euratom and the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry is of course incredibly important not just to the UK, but to the rest of the world. The UK is a serious nuclear power; there is serious, deep research going on here into the future of nuclear fission and fusion. But we have to recognise that things are changing in the EU nuclear research landscape, and be aware of those decisions, and take them into account when we consider our future association with Euratom.
There is now only one serious nuclear power in the EU, which is France. Germany has taken the decision to withdraw completely from the civil nuclear programme. Belgium is the only other country with a significant number of reactors, but France, with 58 reactors, is the only country truly putting effort into nuclear research, and of course we are fortunate in this country in having a bilateral nuclear collaboration agreement with France.
Angela Smith
Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre is the heart of nuclear technology research in this country. The hon. Gentleman ought to think again about his statement.
Kit Malthouse
I am not quite sure what the hon. Lady thinks I said. I said there were broadly two serious nuclear powers in the EU at the moment, the UK and France, and that we are fortunate in having a bilateral agreement signed in 2010 with the French to deepen and widen our collaboration on nuclear research. Our exit from Euratom, which looks like it is going to happen, will not affect that at all. Those bilateral relations and that research will continue. In particular, our participation in the Jules Horowitz Reactor project in southern France can continue, not least because there are a number of non-EU members in that fantastic materials testing programme at the moment.
Mrs Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)
I wonder whether my hon. Friend shares my concern. I think that the threat to the UK nuclear industry is not this Bill but the fact that the Leader of the Opposition wants to shut down the nuclear industry in this country, including, of course, Sellafield.
Kit Malthouse
That is a very good point, which will no doubt be taken into account by the good voters of Copeland in the next couple of weeks.
Albert Owen
I am glad the hon. Gentleman mentioned the good voters of Copeland, because they will be looking after the nuclear workers whose pensions are under threat from his Government.
The agreement between France and Britain comes under the umbrella of Euratom, and the people who know—the academics and the industry—are lobbying us to maintain that link.
Kit Malthouse
I am not sure the hon. Gentleman is right legally; my understanding is that it is an intergovernmental treaty between the two countries and will not necessarily be affected.
We have bilateral treaties with lots of other countries. Just before Christmas, we signed yet another agreement with the Japanese to deepen our research into the civil nuclear programmes. We also have bilateral arrangements with India and South Korea. These are really where the innovations are happening in nuclear research, so the idea that somehow by coming out of Euratom we are going to close ourselves off from the rest of the world is totally untrue. If anything, it might free us to do more work across the rest of the globe in developing what I think is going to be the future of British energy.
Finally, I want to say a few words on EU nationals. As Front Benchers will know, I have expressed my doubts about the Government’s approach to this matter over the past few months, and I am firmly of the belief that we should give those people some reassurance. However, I am willing to give the Prime Minister the space she needs in the negotiations to ensure that she can secure the fate of British nationals overseas. On the basis that the question of EU nationals will come back to the House—as will so many other things—and require primary legislation if their status is to change, I will be voting with the Government on this new clause, as I know many others will for the same reason.
Kit Malthouse
No, I must finish now.
I therefore encourage Members to look at these new clauses and amendments and decide whether we would be putting good, enforceable law on to the statute book by accepting them. I suggest that, in most cases, we would not, so I urge Members to vote with the Government.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your stewardship, Mr Howarth. I listened carefully to the contribution from the hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse). I believe that it is part of our job in the House of Commons to raise questions about important decisions that affect all our lives and, through the use of amendments and other means, to open up the discussion and seek answers from the Government of the day. That is important in the debates that we will have today and in the future. The Government have refused on numerous occasions to accept contributions from those on my own Front Bench and others, but they have then gone away and thought about the issues and decided, “Maybe there’s something in that.” We seem to be pushing at the Government, although they do not want to accept some of the amendments, some of which I have put my name to. Part of the purpose of having these debates in the public arena is to hold the Government to account and make them look again at the important subjects that are being raised at the moment and that will, I have no doubt, be raised in the next two years and beyond.
Caroline Flint
I will make a bit of progress, then I might take a few interventions.
In the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech, she pledged that the UK would keep workers’ rights after Brexit. She also pledged to avoid a cliff edge by seeking a period of stability after we leave, while our trading arrangements with the EU single market are sorted out. She pledged to seek good access to the single market with no extra tariffs or bureaucracy. There might be some disagreements on my own side of the House about what all that should look like, but none of us should be in any doubt about the importance of our trading arrangements—not only for exports, but for imports.
This is not just about our cities; it is about places such as Doncaster and the other towns and communities around the country in which these arrangements are vital for jobs. When I did a survey of my constituents after the referendum campaign, I asked them what my three priorities should be. Jobs and investment came first. Tackling immigration came second. The £350 million a week that was apparently going to come back to the NHS came third. We heard about that in yesterday’s debate. I am not sure what I can do about that last one, but the first two are certainly going to get my full attention.
I believe that we have to look at freedom of movement. I have been saying for many years that immigration has not been attended to, by my party or by others, in the way that it should have been. The Prime Minister has said that she wants the negotiations to guarantee that EU workers currently living here can stay. I agree with that. Many of my constituents have particular issues about freedom of movement and they want them to receive attention in a way that they have not done before. However, the Prime Minister could lead her MPs through the Lobby today and vote to guarantee the rights of EU nationals here. As others have said, she could make it clear that they will not be used as a bargaining chip and could end their uncertainty. Likewise, we also want to safeguard the rights of Brits living in Europe, and by adopting a positive approach today we would make it more likely that Brits living in the EU were treated fairly.
Mr MacNeil
The right hon. Lady touches on EU nationals. It has been misunderstood several times in this House, not just today, that Europe should make the first step. Which European state did those people mean? Should it be Bulgaria, Sweden, Portugal or wherever? The reality is that the UK is making a move with Brexit, so the UK should be leading and showing good will to the citizens of all European countries. We are talking not about two places—the UK and the EU—but about the UK and 27 other places.
Caroline Flint
The tone of the debate as we move forward is crucial not only to how we in this country work together for the best deal, but to how we are perceived in the other 27 member states. Something will have to be done about EU nationals living here and Brits living in the other member states. That is a fact. There will have to be a deal. There are those on the Government Benches—remain voters and leave voters—who cannot understand why the Prime Minister is not stepping up and a making a decision to make that clear.
Several hon. Members rose—
Caroline Flint
I am going to make progress.
I also want us to be open to EU students. I understand the concern in parts of our country—maybe not so much in London, but certainly in Scotland and the north of England—about the continuing brain drain from our communities that is hindering our ability to grow our economy. My constituents do not have much of a problem with that, just like they do not have much of a problem with having the ability to travel for their two weeks in the sun maybe once a year, which will be important for Doncaster Sheffield airport in my constituency. However, they do know that we have to think about some rules to manage migration, because the net benefits of migration, of which there are many, have not been shared equally across the country. In some communities in some towns, the rate of change with people coming in, particularly from eastern Europe, has had economic and social effects—with no blame accorded to those individuals. When a factory finds, perhaps over a matter of weeks or even overnight, that the number of people from eastern Europe outweighs the number of people from the local community, it cannot be denied that that creates worries, problems and pressure on services.
The debate over the next few years cannot be just about migration from the EU. Over the past seven years, the Tory Government’s policies on migration and immigration have failed. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union is not here, but I remember when he caused a by-election on the basis of getting rid of ID cards. I supported ID cards then and I support them today. In the world in which we live, and given identity fraud, crime and needing to know who should have access to what, they could have been part of the solution to some of the problems we have seen since he caused that by-election.
Dr Murrison
I have been following the right hon. Lady’s remarks with great interest. She has reiterated the shadow Minister’s abandonment of her party’s long-standing principled commitment to free movement. Given that she wants the House to control migration in the future, how would that be possible without leaving the EU?
Caroline Flint
We have failed to raise that issue under successive Governments and influence how the change should happen, and I believe that discussions are happening across the other 27 member states about what freedom of movement has meant for them. Unfortunately, we have not attended to that issue for too long. As a result of not doing so, when David Cameron tried to negotiate a deal, he did not leave enough time to broaden the scope for some real reform, so we hurtled into a referendum of his choosing on the date that he set and the consequences are there for all to see.
Liam Byrne
Mr right hon. Friend is making a brilliant and honest speech. When I was the Immigration Minister in 2007, it was clear to me that there could have been a consensus throughout Europe on the reform of free movement. If only the Labour party had pursued it then, when we were in government—indeed, if only the Conservative party had pursued it with care and forensic detail when they came to office in 2010—the Government would not have been forced to offer a bargain-basement deal to the British people when the Prime Minister’s back was against the wall.
The Temporary Chair (Mr George Howarth)
Order. I do not want to stifle interventions, but it occurs to me that some people who are intervening and are still hoping to speak will have nothing left to say by the time they get to speak.
Caroline Flint
I absolutely agree with that statement by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne). We should be having a more grown-up discussion about the mistakes that have been made and how we navigate what is for us all uncharted territory. A little humbleness in all that would not go amiss.
Caroline Flint
I will be two seconds. [Interruption.] Okay, I give way to the right hon. Gentleman.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I am most grateful to the right hon. Lady, who is making a very serious speech. Does she agree that as part of the grown-up discussion to which she refers, Members on both sides of the House need to have the courage to explain that migration of many kinds is beneficial to our economy and our society, in a way that we have not done so far?
Caroline Flint
I totally agree with that, but perhaps part of the problem is that often we talked about that a lot, to the exclusion of sometimes talking about the ways in which communities were feeling that it was not working for them. That is part of the problem. We in politics all know that we create white noise, but how much of it actually gets through to the public? Let us remember that every single region in England, outside of London, voted to leave. If we avoid these important issues, we do so at our peril. For me, the biggest danger is that we let the extremes of the far right occupy ground that allows them to influence the debate, and I hope none of us would want that.
I wish to make some progress and address briefly some of the amendments and new clauses that are important for both sides of the House to consider. Whether or not they are passed tonight, we will see, but I hope that their content and some of the contributions that are made will be taken seriously by Ministers and given some attention when they respond.
It is important, and in the UK’s interest, that we present ourselves not as a nation retreating from a successful international union, but as a nation that remains determined to uphold that union’s best values. New clause 7 speaks to that aim, as it would commit the Government, in advance of any negotiations, to having regard to the legislation shared throughout the EU on preventing and tackling tax avoidance and evasion—a matter to which I have given considerable time over the past few years.
In September last year, the UK put itself at the forefront of the international debate on public country-by-country reporting. Our stance should be, as it was then, that the best and biggest international companies with any substantial presence in the UK should have no fear of openness, and no fear of publishing where they do business and pay taxes. In that spirit, the UK should pledge, ahead of the negotiations, to comply with the EU code of conduct on business taxation. We should do so not because we are required to, but because we want to uphold the standards on which, in many ways, the UK has been leading. It is unfortunate that some of the Prime Minister’s comments seem to rail against some of the positive efforts that have been made to tackle tax evasion and avoidance and some of the issues relating to tax havens. It would be a huge step backwards if we were seen to step away from something important and on which we could be leading the world.
New clause 100 is a modest provision on equality and women’s rights, yet its values reach to the core of what modern Britain should be about. It is modest because it simply asks that during negotiations the Government have regard to the public interest in maintaining employment rights and co-operation against trafficking, domestic violence and female genital mutilation. It suggests a cross-departmental—it could be cross-party, if we want—working group to recommend appropriate legislation on equality and access to justice. The values are clear: it asks only for what we already have, but it also asks the House to embrace the things we value and to make it clear that none of them will be sacrificed during our departure from EU membership.
New clause 163 is about consultation with the English regions. We have heard much in this Chamber about the importance of a meaningful dialogue with the devolved Administrations, and I endorse that approach. I have argued publicly that the best way forward is for the Government to acknowledge that we are in uncharted waters, and that the Prime Minister should be seeking cross-party agreement and having regular meetings with other party leaders. I should not need to remind her that, like me, her Government argued to remain. The decision of the British people on 23 June was an instruction not just to the Prime Minister and a handful of Ministers, but to all of us in this House.
Albert Owen
My right hon. Friend is right to press the Minister, because we have had some very thin talk on this important matter. The industry wants this working party, and it wants Government to give some clear assurances. I make my appeal to the Minister, through my right hon. Friend, to do that tonight. I am sure that he is listening.
The Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Jones)
indicated assent.
Caroline Flint
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend.
As a remain campaigner, I saw many positive benefits from our membership of the European Union. I am determined that this House will respect the referendum outcome and seek the best for my constituents from our new relationship.
Some in the Prime Minister’s Cabinet talk as though Brexit will be nothing but boundless prosperity. Some remainers talk as though Britain is hurtling off a cliff and they are all doom and gloom. The reality is likely to be something in between. After a long and sometimes difficult marriage, we are getting a divorce. During that process, we need to leave behind some of the false promises and distortions of the referendum campaign. Dramatic false claims only damage trust. We need to replace the rhetoric with honest discussion and honest endeavour to achieve the best outcomes from the path that our country has chosen. That is how we rebuild trust and secure a deal that most leave and most remain voters can accept. That is the way I will be approaching the discussions in the months ahead.
Mr Baker
In rising to support the Government, I wish to consider new clause 2, and amendments 5 and 42 and new clause 185 relating to Euratom.
I am enormously encouraged by today’s debate not least because I take new clause 2, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) explained, as an endorsement of the Government’s position. I look forward to a very full aye Lobby on Third Reading. Paragraph (e) talks about
“maintaining all existing social, economic, consumer and workers’ rights”.
That is something to which the Prime Minister is committed. Along with other Members, I look forward to seeing her succeed in guaranteeing reciprocal rights as soon as possible. I think we know from the press why that has not been done already. It is because the German Chancellor and various figures within the EU institutions have stood in the Prime Minister’s way. We know, from what we have read in the press, that the Prime Minister has a clear framework for guaranteeing reciprocal rights and she has sought to deliver it, but, because our negotiating partners have insisted on no negotiation before notification, she has not made progress on it. None the less, I have full confidence in her intent and in the solidity of her work, and I will certainly vote with the Government tonight.
Of course, looking at the character of this sheaf of amendments, I think many right hon. and hon. Members have indicated why they have been tabled. They are undoubtedly meant to draw within the jurisdiction of the courts a wide range of issues that would keep us mired in the courts for ever, putting off the inevitable day of leaving. I think it is far better to be strong, confident and committed and to act with a constructive and positive spirit to take us out of the EU successfully.
With that in mind, having dramatically curtailed my remarks on the new clause in the light of what colleagues have said, I want to turn to Euratom. What is it? It is a legal framework for civil nuclear power generation, radioactive waste management, arrangements for nuclear safeguards and movement of and trade in nuclear materials.
The first point I want to address is the suggestion that this issue was not on the ballot paper. I suppose that if we had put all the issues that are of concern to hon. Members on the ballot paper, it would have been very long indeed. The question on the ballot paper was perfectly adequate and if the fault can be laid at anyone’s door for Euratom’s not being discussed in the course of the campaign, it lies with the pro-EU Britain Stronger in Europe campaign.
The Euratom treaty is a separate treaty, signed in 1957 by the founding members of the EU. The UK joined it at the same time as it entered the EEC, and the European Communities Act 1972 gives effect to that treaty as well as to the EEC treaty. Section 3(2) of the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008 makes it clear that any Act that refers to the European Union includes a reference to the European Atomic Energy Community. It is absolutely clear that conferring on my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister the power to notify that we are leaving the European Union gives her the power to take us out of Euratom.
That leaves a couple of questions. The first is whether the Government are seized of the importance of nuclear safeguards, which are an extremely important issue for the House. My experience of working with nuclear systems is, I admit, distant and limited. I joined the Royal Air Force at a time when we still had tactical nuclear weapons and I was trained to certify aircraft nuclear weapons electrical installations. I must say that it was neither rocket science nor magic; it was about using the finest components to the highest quality standards. From my experience of that work, I would say that I have complete confidence in British scientists and engineers to do everything necessary to ensure that safeguards continue.
I particularly observe that we will continue to be part of Euratom throughout the negotiation period. Since Euratom brings into effect in Europe the provisions made by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and since we will continue to be members of that agency, we can expect not only to continue to comply with Euratom but to continue as members and put in place appropriate arrangements as we move forward.
In addition to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) about the French bilateral, I point out that the Trident system is evidence that we can collaborate on nuclear issues outside the framework of Euratom. I know from experience that anything to do with a nuclear system focuses the mind like nothing else, and I know that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench are seized of the issues and will prioritise this point.
Albert Owen
The hon. Gentleman says that Euratom was not on the ballot paper, and he is right, but it was not even mentioned by the Government until they produced the Bill. If it was such a big and obvious issue, why did the Government not raise this important point while the European Union Referendum Bill was going through this House, or at another opportunity? Secondly, and finally, he talks about the two years. Is he suggesting that if there is no agreement after two years, there should be a transitional period, or we will lose our place in the world?
Mr Baker
I thought that I had explained that carefully, but I will say it again. Section 3(2) of the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008 makes it clear that any Act that refers to the European Union includes a reference to the European Atomic Agency Community. It is very clear that Euratom was included in the scope of the referendum. On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the transition, the Government will make it a priority, as I have just explained at some length, and I have absolute confidence that those on my Front Bench are apprised of the importance of the issue and will take it extremely seriously. We will continue as a member of the agency. In the highly unlikely situation that no deal were reached, I expect that we would continue to maintain nuclear safety under the auspices of the international agency.
James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that Euratom, much like Europol, is one of those organisations from which the other EU member states would have absolutely no interest in excluding the UK and that, therefore, a quick agreement is likely?
Mr Baker
That is an important point. About half of Business for Britain’s 1,000-page “Change, or go” report went through, section by section, all the areas on which we currently co-operate with other nation states through the European Union and its agencies. In each case, it explained that there were bases on which we could co-operate internationally. During the Prüm debate, I made a point particularly in relation to Europol: in a globalised world of cheap, fast air travel, and the internet making just about everywhere milliseconds away, we need global co-operation on police, judicial and security matters. We need to escape the mindset that the only way to do that is through the hierarchical arrangements of the European Union. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry) will not mind if I dilate slightly on his point.
I remember being told back in 2010 by Members across the House, particularly by the then leader of the Liberal Democrats, that politics was changing and that we were seeing a realignment of politics. I thought of Ronald Reagan’s words on choice:
“Up to the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism”.
That reorientation of politics is happening.
The availability of the internet and air travel means that the old hierarchical structures that were necessary for communication in the absence of the internet are no longer appropriate for the world in which we live. It is quite right that we should seek, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton suggests, to co-operate on a global basis on all these issues under new arrangements that allow us to act with far greater agility.
Sue Hayman
The hon. Gentleman talks about international and global relations. If it is so straightforward, why is the Nuclear Industry Association saying,
“Given the international nature of the nuclear industry the biggest risk in leaving Euratom is an interruption to normal trade both in the European Union and overseas.”?
Mr Baker
On that point, I am grateful that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) is back in his place. He devastated all those arguments in a straightforward intervention by making the point that the Joint European Torus project over at Culham does not want these amendments. That is not to say that people do not want collaboration; of course we all want that. However, the question today is whether these amendments should be made. The clear answer coming from Culham—I am grateful that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley is indicating assent—is that the amendments should not be made.
John Howell
My hon. Friend’s point is absolutely clear. The management at Culham do want to co-operate, and they want a much larger project. We should do that not by making amendments, but by having discussions with Ministers.
Mr Baker
Indeed. In emphasising how committed the Government are to the issue, it might well assist the Committee to return to the Secretary of State’s comments on Second Reading, where he pointed out:
“The Bill also gives the Prime Minister the power to start the process to leave Euratom…This is because, although Euratom was established in a treaty separate from the EU agreements and treaties, it uses the same institutions as the European Union, including the European Court of Justice.”
He went on, in response to an intervention, to say
“Euratom passes to its constituent countries the regulations, rules and supervision that it inherits, as it were, from the International Atomic Energy Agency, of which we are still a member. When we come to negotiate with the European Union on this matter, if it is not possible to come to a conclusion involving some sort of relationship with Euratom, we will no doubt be able to reach one with the International Atomic Energy Agency”.—[Official Report, 31 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 819-20.]
The point I am making is that this is a crucial issue and the Government understand that. We are fully committed to making progress on nuclear matters in research, development, implementation, safety and global collaboration, but we need to leave Euratom as we leave the European Union. The Government are entitled to do so, and it is quite right that the Bill stands as it is as the Government move forward. I will certainly be voting for the Bill as it stands. The amendments are unnecessary and counterproductive. I commend all the Ministers’ work on Euratom.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
I feel the need to say that I will be brief and then just talk for as long as possible, just because I would not like to revert to type. I wish to speak specifically to new clause 100, which is principally in the name of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman). I would like to start by saying how grateful she and I are to the 64 colleagues who have added their names in support of it. That shows the real strength of feeling and concern in the House on this issue. It has already been mentioned by some of my hon. Friends, and I shall go into it in more detail.
Caroline Lucas
I certainly pay tribute to the role that Labour has played in those rights. Does the hon. Lady agree, though, that the EU does actually take us further in some respects—for example, on equal pay for work of equal value? Would she also agree that the real risk here is that when that EU legislation becomes UK domestic legislation, it can be unpicked through secondary legislation, and what we have heard is absolutely no reassurance on that?
Jess Phillips
Absolutely. I agree entirely, and I will talk a little about what the EU has done that goes beyond UK legislation.
Jess Phillips
I will give way—perhaps—shortly.
The rise of pregnancy discrimination in the past few years because of changes in UK legislation means that women’s rights definitely need to be protected and considered, and I would be very happy if we had external protection.
The rights of part-time workers are crucial for women. That includes pension rights and equal treatment at work for part-time workers. Some 75% of part-time workers are women, and 42% of women work part time. Equal pay for work of equal value is crucial for women. The issue derives from the speech therapist case brought to the European Court of Justice in 1993. It is a very live issue, because low-paid women in the UK are today fighting equal value pay cases against Asda and Reading Council—this is still going on today.
The Government’s White Paper touches on this. I am just going to make a minor segue: because my favourite moment in the White Paper was the bit where it said that Britain does have sovereignty but it has not always felt like it. That reminded me of my children saying, “I know you love him more than me. I know you love me too, but it hasn’t always felt like it.” We really made Britain look like a petulant teen. Anyway, back to women’s rights.
The White Paper says:
“The Government is committed to strengthening rights when it is the right choice for UK workers and will continue to seek out opportunities to enhance protections.”
What exactly does “the right choice” mean? When do the Ministers in front of me think that strengthening workers’ rights is not the right choice?
I remind the Committee that it is not long since we had the red tape challenge. The Equality Act 2010 was included in the red tape challenge in 2012, so the very rights to which the Government now say they are committed they have previously considered to be red tape. The Prime Minister herself was the then Minister who led that review. When Ministers wonder why we doubt the sincerity of their commitment, I say to them that I have read the White Paper very carefully. Much like the Government Front-Benchers going out to the European Union as part of the Brexit team, there is not a single mention of a woman, nor equality, anywhere in the White Paper.
Jess Phillips
I think it is time for a woman’s voice to fill this Chamber for now. I believe that the right hon. Gentleman has had his say.
Seema Malhotra
My hon. Friend is making a characteristically powerful and passionate, and humorous, speech. Would it not be fair to approach the wording in the White Paper with some caution, bearing in mind that prominent leave campaigners argued that leaving the EU would be an opportunity to cut EU social and employment protections?
Jess Phillips
Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes a very good point, unfortunately. The thing that we might get, as the leave campaign said, is a squashing of workers’ rights; the thing that we will not get is £350 million going into the NHS. If only there was a level of consistency in what we have been promised.
Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)
I have always enjoyed working on the Women and Equalities Committee, which has been incredibly harmonious, listening to both men’s and women’s voices. I understand the spirit of new clause 100, but I find it faintly objectionable—I know who I am addressing this to in using that phraseology—to criticise our Prime Minister in talking about women’s rights and equalities, because she has led the way on tackling female genital mutilation, making sure that workers in particular areas have better life chances, and tackling coercive control. May I implore the hon. Lady to believe that Conservative Members, particularly our Prime Minister, do believe in the rights of those both male and female?
Jess Phillips
I have absolutely no doubt that some Conservative Members care about women’s rights, but I have lots of evidence to suggest that some absolutely do not, and need, frankly, a good, strong talking to by our Prime Minister. It is because I know how committed the Prime Minister has been to dealing with issues of violence against women like FGM, and cross-border issues to do with FGM, that I cannot understand why she would whip her party not to vote for this.
When Ministers are at the negotiating table thinking about the competitiveness of the UK economy, what will be high on their list? Will it be how to ensure that we protect and enhance workers’ rights or women’s rights—I think we can see the answer on the Government Front Bench—or will it be to undercut our EU neighbours by becoming a low-regulation, low-tax economy? The esteemed High Court justice Dame Laura Cox has said:
“Some of the basic rights that we now take for granted—pregnancy and maternity rights, part-time workers’ rights, equal pay for work of equal value—are all at risk if the UK becomes a low regulation economy.”
Is that the true destination of these negotiations? Can the Minister give us an assurance that powers in the great—or otherwise—repeal Bill will not be used to remove any equality and employment rights at a later date? Will the rights of part-time workers, pregnant women at work and women fighting for equal pay really be safe with them, whatever happens?
Charlie Elphicke
The hon. Lady is making a passionate case, but it is not really for this Bill; rather, it is for the great repeal Bill, which will come in due course.
Jess Phillips
I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s assertion, but I am being asked to vote on something tonight and I want to be certain that people like me and people who live in my constituency are going to be protected. At the moment, I do not feel confident about that.
Jess Phillips
No. To clarify, a lot of Members are waiting to speak. The right hon. Gentleman has been on his feet for many minutes during this debate, and I think it is time for someone else to have a chance to speak.
My second concern, which has been touched on, is the issue of violence against women and girls. The new clause would not only defend women’s rights at work, but protect those women escaping domestic violence and FGM and those trafficked across the EU and the UK. In 2010, up to 900 schoolgirls across the city of Birmingham were at risk of FGM, with the key risk ages being at birth, four to six years old and during puberty. One in five children in Birmingham will have experienced or seen domestic violence before they reach adulthood. At least 300 forced marriages of women take place in the west midlands every year. When Ministers are at the negotiating table, who will be in their minds? Will it be the women in my constituency experiencing FGM and those fleeing their violent partners and using services such as Birmingham and Solihull Women’s Aid?
In Birmingham, four women have been murdered in the past year, with another woman found dead in my constituency only last week. The European protection order ensures that women who have suffered domestic violence are protected from the perpetrators if they travel or move anywhere in the EU. Predictions about the consequences of Brexit for policing measures will depend on the outcome of the negotiations.
On 4 February 2016, history was made in the Hammersmith specialist domestic abuse court when the first European protection order in England and Wales was imposed. In this case the survivor had returned to Sweden. A restraining order and an EPO were granted so that she is protected in the UK as well as in Sweden. It is generally accepted that the UK will want to continue with certain parts of EU policing, justice and co-operation, and it is essential that the UK is able to opt into the EPO agreement following Brexit. The White Paper notably neglects to mention any of this. It does not mention FGM, domestic violence or, indeed, any areas in which the Government will continue to work with European partners on the issue of violence against women.
In the area of crime, only organised crime and terrorism are mentioned. Although they are incredibly serious things, no Member will be able to find as many constituents who are as affected by those two crimes as are affected by what I am talking about. Will ending violence against women and girls and, in particular, the UK’s continued use of the EPO be a priority for the Government during and after the Brexit negotiations?
Finally—this is not a penultimate “finally”—the new clause would achieve what the Prime Minister says she wants to achieve, which is to make the UK a fairer place and to not only protect workers’ rights but build on them. Those were her words.
There are many gaps in our equalities legislation, and there is a need to make our legislative framework fit for the 21st century. Sections 14 and 106 have been there since the Act was passed but have not been commenced. Will the Minister undertake to establish a cross-departmental and cross-party—I put myself on the line by saying that I will come and help—working group to assess and make recommendations on developing legislation on equality and access to justice? My challenge to the Government is this: will they take the opportunity that Brexit gives us and make the UK the best place to be a woman, or will it be one of the worst?
Suella Fernandes
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who speaks with passion about her cause and argues for women with much persuasion. I gently point out that only when the Labour party can claim to have elected its second lady Prime Minister can it preach to Conservatives on how to support women. I rise to speak against the entirety of the proposals tabled by Opposition Members, but particularly against the references to trade with the European Union and the rest of the world in new clauses 2, 11, 77 and 181.
I have two key points, the first of which is on trade. I am struck by the premise in the wording of, for example, new clause 181 on trade agreements, which calls on the Government to
“have regard to the value of UK membership of the EU Customs Union in maintaining tariff and barrier-free trade with the EU.”
The new clause is wrong for several reasons. It is totally misguided, and a misreading of what the British people voted for on 23 June. If we
“have regard to the value”
of the customs union, we are missing the point. Where is the call to have regard to the costs of UK membership of the EU customs union? Why does the new clause not refer to the reasons why Britain must leave the customs union, and what we stand to gain? There is simply no point to Brexit and no meaning to the result of the referendum if we do not leave the EU customs union.
Where is the acknowledgment of the restrictions and costs of the common commercial policy inherent in our membership of the EU customs union? The new clause and all those containing that reference to trade are one-sided, prejudge, and lack any objectivity or impartiality. Where is the reference to, or acknowledgment of, the simple fact that Britain can set her own rules on trade policy, and forge new and dynamic agreements with the rest of the world, only if she leaves the EU customs union? Where is the reference to the gains we stand to make by striking new trade deals with the rest of the world? The Legatum Institute special trade commission estimates a 50% increase in global world products over 15 years.
I am concerned that there is no impact assessment of the damaging effect of the EU’s trade agreements on developing countries, or of the common external tariff, which binds members of the customs union.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
The hon. Lady is commenting on a proposal that is in my name and the name of three other Select Committee Chairs. Is she aware of the evidence given to the Home Affairs Committee by a series of hauliers, ports and so on? They said that if their goods from the EU were subject to the type of customs checks to which goods from outside the EU are subject, there could be delays of between one and three days.
Suella Fernandes
The right hon. Lady needs to do her research before she makes points like that. If she had attended the meeting I had with experienced trade negotiators just two days ago—they are part of the special trade commission and have led trade deals on behalf of other countries—she would know that they say that the rules to which she refers are already part of free trade agreements around the world. The problems she highlights are being blown out of all proportion, given the reality of what we stand to gain from leaving the customs union.
Mr Baker
My hon. Friend makes her point with typical force. At our last Treasury Committee meeting, we heard from the director of customs at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, who pointed out repeatedly that 96% of customs clearance, where required, takes place electronically within a few seconds and requires no intervention.
Suella Fernandes
That is exactly the point that needs to be made. Where is the amendment making that point?
Charlie Elphicke
My hon. Friend is making a typically powerful case. As the Member of Parliament who represents Dover and Deal, where this issue will have the greatest impact, I have put together a group to look at it. It is perfectly possible to build a frictionless border, using the latest technology. The Opposition want it to fail; we will make it succeed.
Suella Fernandes
I could not agree more with the point that my hon. Friend makes.
Helen Goodman
The hon. Lady says that we are not interested in an unbiased assessment. Had she been here yesterday, she would have seen new clause 43, which sought an even-handed impact assessment. Why cannot she read the amendment paper before making her wild assertions?
Suella Fernandes
We can all see that the amendments are an attempt to pull the wool over the British people’s eyes and fob us all off, and I will have nothing whatever to do with them.
EU protectionism has placed farmers and workers in developing countries at a disadvantage when exporting to the EU, because of the common external tariff. Why should British consumers be denied cheaper sugar, wheat or tomatoes from developing nations to protect less efficient farmers in northern Europe? That is the effect of the common external tariff, and the effect on our consumers of our membership of the EU customs union.
Chris Green
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that it is perverse that the external tariffs impoverish third-world nations, and that we then hand money over through the Department for International Development to try to raise their standards?
Suella Fernandes
The absurdity of the current position is astonishing. We will be able to remedy that injustice only by leaving the customs union, taking control of our trade policy, having trade deals on a fairer basis and being real promoters of fair trade for those countries.
Suella Fernandes
I will not, because I have taken quite a few interventions and I want to make progress.
Business for Britain has estimated the cost to British consumers of the damage done by the common commercial policy and the customs union at some £500 per household. The amendments do not reflect the absurdity of the current position. British companies such as JCB are no more able to sell their machinery tariff-free from India to the UK than Tata can from the UK to India. Since 1973, Britain’s trade has pivoted from being global to being European, and that has all been negotiated on our behalf by the European Trade Commissioner. Why is there no amendment recognising the influence to be regained by Britain resuming its own seat at the World Trade Organisation? Why is there no reference to the fact that EU trade policy has wrecked the ports of Glasgow and Liverpool, which are on the “wrong” side of the country, and denied us any chance of determining our own trade policy? That is a reflection of the one-sided prejudice in, and misguided nature of, the amendments.
The amendments fail to point out that in 2015, the UK’s deficit in trade in goods and services with the EU was £69 billion, while the surplus with non-EU countries was £30 billion. Why is there no amendment asking for an impact assessment on the gains from trading more widely and more freely with the rest of the world, building on our surplus with countries outside the EU? The amendments do not reflect the fact that Britain is losing out now because of our membership of the customs union, and they miss the fact that we have more to gain by leaving. They omit those salient features because Opposition Members do not want to be honest about the fact that the EU still does not have any agreements with major nations such as Brazil, the USA or China, and that we have more to gain from increasing our exports to the rest of the world than by remaining a member of the customs union.
My second-to-last point is on EU nationals. I consider the Prime Minister’s position appropriate in the circumstances: she will guarantee the position of approximately 3.5 million EU nationals as soon as possible once the negotiations have started. I want to ensure that this issue is put in perspective. Of the 3.5 million EU nationals currently residing in the UK, approximately 64% already have the right to stay here, 8% are children with an EU national parent and therefore have a right to reside here, and 12% will have accrued their five years permanent residency by 2018. This means that 84% already have a secure immigration status in this country. We are talking about a minority of people.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Let us be practical. We cannot even deport convicted criminals. The truth is that not a single EU national will ever be deported.
Suella Fernandes
I agree wholeheartedly. That course of action would go against any idea of natural justice, legitimate expectation and the rule of law.
Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)
If that is the case and we have certainty for EU nationals, will the hon. Lady join us in voting for new clause 27 tonight?
Suella Fernandes
I will not be voting with the Opposition. I am very content with the Government’s position on EU nationals.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend share my concern and disappointment that while EU Governments could have sorted this out already, some have put the brakes on and have refused to do so? We should be putting pressure on them to sort out this very important issue much, much earlier, and outside the renegotiation process.
Suella Fernandes
I could not agree more. I see my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson) is in his place; I recall the letter he sent to Donald Tusk on this very issue.
Michael Tomlinson
Was my hon. Friend not as disappointed as I was by the response to that letter, which signally failed to grasp the nettle? This could all have been resolved before Christmas, on 15 December. The answer then was no; it should have been yes.
Suella Fernandes
That reflects the wisdom of the current position. We must safeguard the rights of UK nationals abroad before making any move on this issue.
I was involved, with the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) and the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), in a cross-party study with the think-tank British Future. We made suggestions to the Government on how to regularise and deal practically with the legal position of the 3.5 million EU nationals in this country. There will be issues for the Government to deal with. For example, what should the cut-off date be? Our report recommended that the date after which the new rules should apply be the date when article 50 is triggered, at which point a legitimate expectation will have arisen in respect of new arrivals to the country. We felt that that struck the right balance between fairness and pragmatism.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I am holding in my hand a list of Members who wish to speak; it stretches from here to Brussels. There are 21 Members who wish to participate, so a degree of self-restraint in terms of the length of speeches and interventions would be helpful. Several hon. Members on both sides of the House have spoken already in the course of these three days. It is only fair, therefore, that I try to give some preference to those who have not been able to contribute at all.
Caroline Lucas
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes), not least because I would like to disagree with several of the points she made—I am sure she will not find that surprising. She says that she finds the Prime Minister’s attitude to EU nationals “appropriate”. I find it deeply inappropriate, and so do the EU nationals themselves, who simply want certainty about their future in this country. The Prime Minister’s refusal to guarantee that now, when she has the ability to do so, is cruel and, frankly, immoral. We are talking about people’s lives, which are not commodities to be traded in some wider bargain. The Prime Minister could and should guarantee to people who have made their lives here in good faith that of course they can stay. The idea that it is appropriate to do otherwise is out of order.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
Is the hon. Lady aware, as I am, of EU nationals holding senior positions in UK institutions already leaving the country and of EU nationals being interviewed for senior positions but asking searching questions about what Brexit means for them and their families?
Caroline Lucas
I completely agree. I was talking to the vice-chancellor of one of the universities in my constituency the other day and hearing that already staff were wondering about their future and whether it was worth leaving. Some of them feel unwanted, despite having made a massive contribution to our society and communities. That is why, again, I think that the Government’s attitude is incredibly irresponsible.
I want to talk in particular about my amendment 38 on the environment. I am so pleased that we have at least a few moments to talk about the impact of Brexit on our wider environment and on sustainability. So many of us have been trying to raise these issues for a long time, because they are massively significant, and I know that the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee was waiting hopefully yesterday to make some interventions, based on some of the evidence that we heard in that Committee about the environmental impacts of Brexit. They are deeply worrying, and I would particularly like to focus on the issue of the monitoring and enforcement of environmental legislation once we leave the EU.
Caroline Lucas
I am happy to give way to the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee.
Mary Creagh
Does the hon. Lady share my disappointment that, as a result of last night’s filibuster by the Scottish National party, it has not been possible to share in this Committee debate the work done by the Environmental Audit Committee on both the benefits and the potential risks to the natural environment of leaving the EU and on our new inquiry into chemicals regulation, which affects every single aspect of our manufactured and exported goods?
Caroline Lucas
I am not going to pick out any one particular party for filibustering. I am afraid that it is an epidemic that affects this whole place, and I would love to see it end. I do, however, want to talk about precisely that kind of evidence that the Environmental Audit Committee heard.
One almost believes that it is precisely the complexity demonstrated when evidence is given about the environmental impacts of Brexit that explains why Conservative Members do not want to hear about it. Such complexity underlines to them the fact that this Brexit process is not going to be done and dusted in two years. The idea that we will have a whole new trade agreement in two years is cloud cuckoo land; anybody with any knowledge of this issue would certainly say that now.
Caroline Lucas
No, not at the moment; I want to make a bit more progress.
As many Members have noted over the last few days, the protections currently guaranteed by our membership of the EU—whether it be on the environment, workers’ rights or food safety—rely on an established and robust system of monitoring and enforcement provided by EU institutions and agencies. Perhaps the most important part of this system has been precisely the strong pressure to implement the law within a specified timescale.
The incentive to adhere to the law arises from the monitoring and enforcement role of the EU agencies. The Commission acts as the guardian of the law and responds to legitimate complaints; serious breaches are referred to the European Court of Justice; and sanctions can follow, including fines of many hundreds of millions of pounds. It is exactly that enforcement mechanism that we are going to lose as a result of Brexit. Although the Government talk about moving across lots of this legislation in the great repeal Bill, the enforcement processes and the agencies that make sure that this stuff gets done do not get automatically transferred.
James Heappey
The hon. Lady and I share an enthusiasm for the greater deployment of renewables within our energy mix, so does she agree with me that one of the protections that the EU also affords is the protection of the German solar photovoltaic manufacturing sector, which is inflating prices for PV cells in the UK because the EU has put in place the minimum import price on those cells from China?
Caroline Lucas
I do not support that decision, but the idea that we should go down the road of leaving the EU, with all the problems that are going to arise, which would cause much greater damage to the environment, simply because we do not agree with one or two key decisions really is the definition of someone throwing their toys out of the pram. That is not a sensible way forward.
Mary Creagh
Is the hon. Lady as concerned as I am that when we leave the single market and the customs union, the birds and habitats directive, which protects migratory species and Britain’s special places for special wildlife, will cease to apply in this country, affecting all environmental impact assessments? Is she also concerned that air pollution standards that are currently set and enforced by the European Union could be downgraded?
Caroline Lucas
I absolutely share the hon. Lady’s concerns. On the air pollution issue, we have seen very recently that it was precisely the threat of EU sanctions that eventually got this Government moving when it came to dealing with the problem. Without the extra sanction at the EU level, they simply would not have taken the necessary action. I think that absolutely makes the point.
John Mc Nally (Falkirk) (SNP)
Since its establishment, the European Chemicals Agency has built up a staff of over 600. Together with the EU Directorate-General for the environment in the UK, it has become the natural home of chemical risk assessment in Europe. Does the hon. Lady agree and share my concern that the UK does not have the resources—financial or human—to create its own regulatory agency in chemicals?
Caroline Lucas
The hon. Gentleman is a fellow member of the Environmental Audit Committee, and just this week he and I heard experts give evidence about the impact on our chemicals industry of leaving the EU, and, in particular, of losing membership of the REACH directive. This country has not the capacity or the resource simply to step in and take that over.
Mary Creagh
Our Committee heard yesterday from industry representatives that British chemical manufacturers could pay up to €300 million, and have already paid about €130 million, to register chemicals with the REACH database and the European Chemicals Agency. Those sunk costs, which must be incurred by 2018, could be lost to UK industry as a result of the duplication of setting up a UK-based chemicals agency. Does the hon. Lady share my concern about that?
The Temporary Chairman (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I do not know what more I have to say. I gave an indication that I wanted to enable as many Members possible to speak. A significant number of Members have not spoken at all during the three days of this debate, and that is hard on some Members who have tabled new clauses or amendments and wish to speak. I want to try to give a fair crack of the whip to those who have not spoken at all, but long interventions and long speeches do not help that process.
Caroline Lucas
I apologise, Sir Roger. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh)—who chairs the Environmental Audit Committee—tried to make some of these points for hours yesterday, but I will confine myself to saying that I agree with what she has said. I think that the impact on our chemical industry has been massively underestimated. Given that it is our second largest manufacturing export and given that at least 50% of those exports go to the EU, the impact on the sector will be massive.
If the Government are serious in their ambition to be the first Government to leave the environment in a better condition than they found it in, Ministers must now explain to us in detail how the legislative system for monitoring and enforcement will be replaced. I find it astonishing that they expect us to vote for the Bill without being given any idea of what the present complex, robust and unique system of legal enforcement might look like when we leave.
In evidence given to the Environment Audit Committee, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds made the important point that the European Court of Justice operates on a slightly broader basis than the Supreme Court in the UK, which must follow narrower due process. It is therefore possible that great swathes of environmental protections, once transferred to UK statute, will in effect become redundant owing to the absence of monitoring and enforcement by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. That loss of an effective judicial system will come at a time when UK regulators, tasked with monitoring compliance with environmental legislation, have had their own budgets slashed. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has a third of the staff that it had 10 years ago. Furthermore, because the great repeal Bill will not carry over the jurisprudence from the European Court of Justice, we seem to be set to lose the important case law which, for the past 40 years, has proved so effective in protecting the UK environment.
Rachael Maskell
We are also in danger of losing access to the European Environment Agency, which brings such expertise to the advancing of environmental legislation.
Caroline Lucas
I agree, and the same applies to the European Food Safety Agency. Some of the new clauses draw attention to the fact that we still need to have access to those bodies. It strikes me as completely baffling that the hon. Member for Fareham can somehow think it insulting to her constituents for us to be talking about such vitally important new clauses.
This is not only an issue of law relating directly to wildlife and nature. As it stands, the Government’s push for an extreme Brexit opens the way for changes in key environmental policies relating to air, water, waste, food and much more, all of which will have an impact, direct or indirect, on UK biodiversity and our natural environment. For all those reasons, I think that new clauses which are intended to protect our environment, and which ask for that protection to be guaranteed before article 50 is triggered, make good sense.
I will end my speech in just 30 seconds, Sir Roger. Let me simply say that I particularly support new clause 100, about which the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) spoke so passionately and eloquently. In recent weeks we have heard repeated and welcome assurances from Ministers that workers’ and women’s rights will be protected. If that is the case, let us get the new clause into the Bill. Let us ensure that this will not be rolled back through secondary legislation.
Several hon. Members rose—
The Temporary Chair (Sir Roger Gale)
Order. I have no power whatsoever to impose a time limit, but six minutes per person will allow nine more Members to speak.
Charlie Elphicke
I propose to sit down at 4.50 pm, because it is important that we get as many Members in as possible, and it is also important to give an example to the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who, sadly, is not in his seat today, so he can understand that courtesy to the House and to other speakers—and to the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who waited so patiently yesterday—is actually quite important. Good manners are something we should never forget in this place, even if the Scottish National party is not always acquainted with those manners.
Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his graciousness in allowing me to intervene. He and many of his colleagues have claimed that the decision to leave the EU will mean we can take back control of our borders. Can he gently and slowly explain to those of us in Northern Ireland how he is going to take back control of the border, which stretches for about 300 miles, between the Republic of Ireland, which remains within the EU, and Northern Ireland, part of the UK and which therefore will be coming out of the EU? How do we retain control of that?
Charlie Elphicke
I thank the hon. Lady for making a very important point. The common travel area must be maintained. We have a strong history of that between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and the Prime Minister has set it out as a key priority for her. [Interruption.] The hon. Lady’s intervention brings me neatly to the next issue: the customs union. [Interruption.] I am answering the hon. Lady’s question.
Mr Harper
There are sedentary interventions asking my hon. Friend how we might do that. Let me give a constructive suggestion. Because of the common travel area and the rights of Irish citizens in the United Kingdom, which are also reciprocal, it seems to me that there is no need to have checks on people movements across the border, and from the conversations we had earlier about the fact that most customs checks can be done electronically, it seems to me that we can perfectly well maintain a soft border and the prosperity of both parts of the island of Ireland when we leave the EU.
Charlie Elphicke
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention.
I want briefly in the last minute available to me—
Charlie Elphicke
I cannot take an intervention as I need to let others get in.
In the last minute, I want to touch on the issue of the customs union. It is clear in the decision that we want to enter trade agreements elsewhere in the world that we must leave the customs union. Opposition parties say that will all be a terrible disaster; in fact, as always, they hope it will be a complete disaster. But, on this side of the House, Members like me have been putting together industry groups to look at how it can be done, listening to what HMRC says, listening to how checks can be put in place, and listening to how we can construct a frictionless border that will work for Britain and work for Europe. It is in the interests of both—
Charlie Elphicke
No, not at the moment.
It is in the interests of Britain and the European Union that we construct a frictionless border, and that is why I am also in discussions with the authorities in Calais. It is in the interests of Britain and France, of Dover and Calais, and of the United Kingdom and the European Union that we ensure that this works. We need to embrace electronic bills of lading, risk-based checking and audits in workplaces. We need to treat the border as a tax point rather than as a hard place with border posts. That is a further answer to the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon). That is how we can ensure that we continue to have frictionless trade even if we have to leave the customs union. On that note, and given your injunction, Sir Roger, I shall conclude my remarks so that others may speak.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
I rise to speak to new clause 163, which stands in my name and would require the Government to publish a strategy for properly consulting the English regions, including those without directly elected mayors. We are getting ever closer to the Prime Minister’s self-imposed 31 March deadline for invoking article 50, but a question that I put to the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union on 17 January remains unanswered.
To remind the House—and the Secretary of State, who is in his place—I asked him what discussions he had held with key stakeholders in the north-east about the effects of leaving the single market, given that 58% of our region’s exports go to the EU. I received an entirely unsatisfactory response to that question, and I remain concerned that the Government have ruled out membership of the single market before negotiations have even begun and without properly consulting those parts of the country likely to be most affected by this move.
Even more worrying is the fact that, despite the publication of the Government’s White Paper last week, we are still no closer to knowing what role representatives from all the regions of England, including the north-east, will play in informing the Government’s negotiating strategy and objectives. Instead, we have been provided with this entirely meaningless statement:
“In seeking such a future, we will look to secure the specific interests of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as those of all parts of England.”
Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that comments from Members such as the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes) about the port of Liverpool, which is in my constituency, having been in some decline are complete nonsense? The port is doing more tonnage than it has ever done, and it has recently had £350 million of investment. Conservative Members do not realise the good that the regions do for the economy.
Catherine McKinnell
I am pleased that I took that intervention. My hon. Friend makes a strong case for why the Government’s “we know best” approach to the Brexit negotiations just will not wash with the British public. Furthermore, the word “region” appears just four times in the White Paper, and three of those references are in the footnotes.
The Government claim that around 150 stakeholder engagement events have taken place to help to inform the Government’s understanding of the key issues ahead of the negotiations, but I would be interested to know when, where and with whom those meetings were held. We know that the Secretary of State made a vague commitment in the House to
“get all the mayors of the north to come and have a meeting in York”—[Official Report, 17 January 2017; Vol. 619, c. 802.]
but of course that cannot happen until after the mayoral elections have been held in May. I appreciate the sentiment behind the offer, but it is wholly inadequate. What will happen to those regions, including the north-east, that will not have an elected mayor after May and will therefore be excluded from that meeting? Surely, if the English regions are to have a truly meaningful input to this process, those discussions must start before May, given that the UK’s negotiations with the EU will already have commenced, and given the incredibly tight two-year timescale for achieving a deal that does not damage jobs and our economy.
We are repeatedly told that Brexit was about taking back control. We now know that that means an unelected Prime Minister who has sought every means possible to avoid scrutiny of her approach ploughing ahead with a hard Brexit, regardless of the consequences for different parts of the country. I am not convinced that people voted for that. I am not convinced that this Whitehall-knows-best approach will get the best deal for everybody up and down the country.
The only way for the Government to secure the best possible deal for all the regions—the north-east in particular—which have so much to lose from a bad deal, is to engage properly with those on the ground about what we need. That is why I am supporting new clause 163, which would compel the Government to ensure that that proper consultation took place.
Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
Sir Roger, you will be pleased to know that I have never spoken for more than four minutes in the Chamber—I have never had the opportunity—and I do not intend to start now.
I agree with the intention and emotion behind many of the amendments tabled by hon. Members from across the House, but I do not support them simply because I do not want the Prime Minister’s hands to be tied throughout the negotiations. I campaigned fiercely to stay in the EU as I passionately believed that it was in Britain’s interests to do so, and I have not changed my mind. I agree with everything my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) said last week and that, in addition to the economic implications, we will lose a tremendous amount of influence. However, there is one difference between me and him: I voted for the referendum and I have to accept the result. It may have been advisory, but the public, including those in Portsmouth South, voted to come out of the EU, and I respect that. I will be monitoring the negotiations closely, and I am pleased with yesterday’s reassurance that there will be a vote in good time on the final deal. It may be that we will get a very good deal, and that is why I cannot support new clause 2, which is too limiting.
I understand new clause 100, which was eloquently introduced by my hon. Friend—I will call her that—the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), but I hope that those who added their name to it will agree that the matter is already being addressed through the Women and Equalities Committee; the Modern Slavery Act 2015, brought in by this Prime Minister; and the Government’s work on domestic violence. We can be assured that what new clause 100 would address will be included in those things. I assure the Opposition that there are enough strong women on the Government Benches, led by a female Prime Minister—[Interruption.] There are strong women in the Opposition, too. Equality and women’s rights are well understood by the Government, and I am sure that there will be cross-party collaboration.
We have already received many assurances from the Prime Minister about EU and UK nationals, so I hope that we will get a firm agreement shortly. The sooner we get on with the negotiations, the better it will be for everyone. This could be a great opportunity for this country, but I will not support any deal that is not better for the UK. That would be a dereliction of duty. However, I have every confidence in the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union—that they will have taken into account the views of people such as me and the intentions behind many of the amendments tabled for debate today. I am confident that the deal will be great for us and for our European friends and neighbours.
Dame Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I add my support to new clauses 163 and 193, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne). My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North made an excellent speech about why the Government should accept the new clauses, but I want to add something else.
At a meeting of the Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire all-party parliamentary group yesterday, we heard from representatives from the four LEPs, from industry, from the creative industries and from universities, and we agreed to analyse what Brexit means for Yorkshire and the Humber. We agreed on a cross-party basis to submit that analysis to Ministers so that we can analyse not only what leaving the European Union would mean, but what we want to see from the negotiations. As my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North said, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union talked about a meeting with mayors in York; that is a very vague promise, and we need to put some meat on its bones.
James Heappey
I, too, will try to be brief. Like many colleagues, I voted to remain, but I was clear at the time that I would be bound by the result in both my constituency and the country. The result in the Wells constituency was that we should leave, as it was in the country at large, so that is what we must do.
I am baffled by the number of amendments that have been tabled to the Bill, not because they lack value or do not make good points about our extraction from the EU—they obviously do—but because, as the shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), rightly said on Second Reading, primary legislation will follow the triggering of article 50, and both Houses of Parliament will have an important role in scrutinising that legislation and what we do in the negotiations. I certainly intend to play a full part in that scrutiny, as I know will Opposition Members.
Earlier, we were discussing the impact of free trade agreements, particularly on our farmers. It stands to reason that when free trade agreements are introduced, they, too, will be scrutinised by the House, so the interests of the farmers and food producers in our constituencies can be brought to bear then to ensure that the deals are in their interests.
I associate myself with the comments made by so many colleagues about the rights of EU nationals to remain in the UK. In Somerset, people from elsewhere in the EU play a huge part in our local economy, particularly in our tourism, farming, and food and drink manufacturing industries. It is inconceivable to me that they would ever have their right to be here taken away.
On Euratom, Hinkley Points A and B are in the neighbouring constituency to mine, and we will soon be the neighbour of Hinkley Point C, too. It is clear to me that the UK nuclear industry has a world-class reputation for having the very highest regulatory standards. Those standards have been developed within the Euratom framework, but we should be clear that the United States, Japan and China also operate within that framework, without being members of the European Union. I fully expect that we will do the same when we have left Euratom by virtue of our leaving the European Union.
Those who have expressed any doubt that the Government will seek to continue to maintain the highest safety standards in our nuclear industry are perhaps not giving them the credit that they deserve. We have always set those standards, and we will always do so whether or not we are in the EU and Euratom. As for the willingness of other nations in Euratom to want to continue to co-operate with us, I am certain that they will. The French Government are very heavily invested in EDF, and it is inconceivable that they will not want their operations here in the UK to remain a part of the common regulatory framework across the European continent.
The Government have rightly committed to working with the industry and with all the nuclear research bodies in the country to make sure that they fully understand what the priorities of that sector are within the UK, so that those needs can be met with whatever it is that we put in place once we have left Euratom.
The UK’s nuclear industry is the gold standard globally. Many countries want their technologies to be employed here so that they can have the tick to say that their technologies have been approved for operation in the UK. It is apparent to me, therefore, that, as we put in place regulatory standards in the future, we will want to maintain that high standard and our great reputation around the world. Crucially, this House of Commons will have an important role in that.
My final point on energy policy generally is to encourage the Government to clarify that they see a clear distinction between the EU single market and the EU single internal energy market. From the perspective of security of supply, of cost and of decarbonisation, it is in our interests—
Helen Goodman
The hon. Gentleman is making a very good point now. In fact, it is exactly the point that I would have made had I been called. He is absolutely right. Does he agree that, if we leave the single energy market and lose the interconnectors, we will need higher baseload capacity, which will cost more, and electricity prices will shoot up?
James Heappey
I absolutely agree that, from an energy perspective, the interconnection of the UK and the European mainland is hugely important, but my point is that that is not a part of the EU single market. The EU’s internal energy market is a separate entity. I invite the Government to clarify that they recognise that and that their commitment to leaving the European single market, which I fully understand, is distinct from a continued enthusiasm for the internal energy market, which is an entirely separate thing and hugely to our benefit.
The will of my constituents and our country is clear: we have been instructed to leave. It is not what I voted for, but it is what we will do now. The process starts with this binary decision of whether or not to trigger article 50. The Bill, without amendment, does exactly that. As we go forward, the role of this House and our responsibilities to our constituents are clear: we must engage fully in scrutinising all the legislation that comes forward as a result of the negotiations. Those who have suggested that to not amend the Bill now is somehow an abdication of our responsibility to our constituents are just wrong. Our responsibility as a House is to be bound by the result of the referendum to trigger article 50 and then to bring all of our expertise together in scrutinising the legislation that follows, as we do on all other legislation.
Liam Byrne
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I want to speak to new clause 193, which is in my name and the names of my hon. and right hon. Friends. I tabled it in the hope that the Minister would take it on board. I want to give the Government a chance this afternoon to set out their pro-European credentials.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster Central (Dame Rosie Winterton) so eloquently put it, the Prime Minister has said that, yes, we may be leaving the European Union, but that we intend to be good European neighbours. New clause 193 is an opportunity for the Government to set out how we, in this country, will remain determined to stay a member of one of the most important European clubs, the European club that we helped to found—the Council of Europe, the European convention on human rights and the European Court of Human Rights.
We moved the new clause because one of the most significant consequences of this divorce from Europe is that we will leave the European Court of Justice. Indeed, an important part of the leave campaign’s argument was that we must escape from the tutelage of these terrible European judges and that only British judges are good enough for us—unless, of course, they happen to want to give this Parliament a chance to debate this Bill, in which case they instantly become enemies of the people.
This idea that foreign judges are anathema to this place is, of course, complete fiction. This very afternoon, the Government have solicited our support for CETA—the comprehensive economic trade agreement—replete with the new investor state dispute mechanism, a new court populated not with British judges but with foreign judges. The idea that foreign judges are about to be removed or extracted from the body politic in this country is nonsense, and that is why I think we must argue that one of the most important tribunals that oversees the law in this country should remain in place. That court is the European Court of Human Rights.
Tom Tugendhat
The right hon. Gentleman makes a fundamental point about our sympathy not only with our European partners but with our common European heritage, stemming straight out of Judeo-Christian theology through the Enlightenment and various schools at Paris and the Sorbonne, into the concept of rights that has emerged. Those rights were not simply created by the Council of Europe, as he seems to be claiming, but rather by British judges over several hundred years—admittedly taken from French and other traditions—and were re-imposed on Europe in the aftermath of the second world war. Although that heritage is important, as he rightly claims, would it not also be appropriate to recognise that some of those judges today are Moldovan and Russian and have been rather more prone to look for dictatorial abuse than to guarantee rights?
Liam Byrne
There is a reason why Russia has had its credentials suspended by the Council of Europe, and that is that it is not prepared to honour the great European Magna Carta that British civil servants helped to draw up under Churchill’s inspiration in the years after the second world war.
The Conservative manifesto—
Liam Byrne
I will give way in a moment, as I want to put a specific question to the Minister.
The Conservative manifesto is not well read on the Government Benches; we study it forensically and in detail. In 2010, the manifesto said that the Conservatives would introduce a British Bill of Rights, replace the Human Rights Act and ensure that the European Court of Human Rights was no longer binding over the UK Supreme Court, ensuring that the European Court of Human Rights could no longer change British laws. That position was repeated in the 2015 manifesto. I hope that the Minister can say that that plan is now in the bin.
Mr Jones
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I have resisted intervening throughout the course of the debate, but I think I can help him to this extent: I do not know whether he was present during the wind-ups on Second Reading, but I informed the House that the Government have no plans to withdraw from the European convention on human rights.
Liam Byrne
The Minister is good to put that on the record, but the fact is that there are plans—plans were set out in the Conservative manifesto in 2010 and in 2015, and the draft British Bill of Rights that is circulating in the Ministry of Justice contains similar plans. That is why in August 2016 the Justice Secretary told the House that a British Bill of Rights would be introduced, and the House wants categorically to know whether that British Bill of Rights will have the implication and result of taking us out of the European Court of Human Rights. That is the point that I want the Minister to put beyond doubt by accepting new clause 193.
Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)
May I give the right hon. Gentleman some reassurance on two points? First, having served as the Minister responsible for human rights, I can say that it was never in the Conservative plans for a Bill of Rights to pull out of the European convention on human rights. I made that clear monthly at Justice questions. Secondly, precisely because the Council of Europe is completely independent of the EU, this is an entirely meaningless amendment.
Liam Byrne
It is absolutely not. It is essential if the Prime Minister is to be good to her word that we will remain committed to the European club that we helped to create.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
Let me help to set the right hon. Gentleman’s mind at rest. I am sure that I have heard the Prime Minister say publicly—I think, during her leadership campaign—that she was abandoning plans to leave the European convention on human rights because she accepted that she could not win a parliamentary majority for such a proposal.
Liam Byrne
I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for that point, but I would like the question put beyond doubt by asking the Minister to accept new clause 193, which would give us a degree of assurance. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) is perfectly prepared to vote against his own Whip in order to seek cast-iron reassurances, and I seek the same level of reassurance this afternoon.
It was back in September 1946 that Winston Churchill went to Zurich and proposed the Council of Europe as a first step towards recreating the European family whose breakdown led to the tragedy of the second world war. In the face of rising risks and threats, those old words are still wise words to guide us.
Mims Davies
It is a great pleasure to speak in this Committee of the whole House on the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill. I fully support the Government as they enact the will of the people shown in the European Union referendum, and welcome the White Paper.
Taking them at face value, I agree with some of the new clauses; they look benign and fairly honourable. The problem is that it is illogical to try to muddle the negotiations into the middle of this withdrawal Bill as if it were a Christmas tree Bill. I shall speak briefly about some of my constituents’ concerns, and set out my own view on new clause 2. I will not be supporting it because although it seems agreeable and benign, it does not mention migration. The Prime Minister spoke today about the priority she will place on the UK’s need for highly skilled workers from the EU throughout the negotiation process. The new clause fails to deal with that.
Anyone who has been part of any negotiation, particularly in the private sector, will be only too aware of the importance of not having our hands tied behind our back as we go into the process. Revealing our complete negotiation strategy at the start seems somewhat absurd. The aim of the Opposition’s new clause is simply to fudge the issues by suggesting that they care more about the negotiating principles than the Government do. The Prime Minister laid out guiding principles in her Lancaster House speech. My constituents on both sides of the referendum debate appreciated that speech and welcomed those principles. Many people are simply asking us politicians to get on with it.
I welcome all the contributions from speakers across the Committee over the past few days. The debate has been fascinating, and it has been important to be a part of it. Inevitably, the fine details will be part of the key negotiations to enact the will of the people in the coming months and years. Local businesses have spoken to me about the need to move forward. They are having to make key decisions about their staffing and arrangements, and wish that politicians would do exactly the same.
One of the issues I have found most surprising during the Committee stage is the attempt by some to suggest that various leave campaigns’ proposals were some kind of direct manifesto that the Government ought to follow to the letter. The Government are seeking to enact the will of the people, and to negotiate a strong and appropriate deal. We are in a post-referendum phase, but despite having been in Committee over the past few days—it feels like weeks—it appears that that is something the Liberal Democrats are gleefully unaware of. These are likely to be the most complex negotiations that the country will ever enter into, and the effects will be far ranging. Free trade treaties have been referred to a great deal, with separate sectors needing separate discussions and focus points. It is absolutely right that they should be separate from the Bill.
Taking anything but the smartest approach to this issue would be letting down our constituents, so I will not be supporting these weak attempts to dilute the Bill. Instead, I will be putting my trust in the Prime Minister and the work she will do in the national interest. As I said earlier, I find it objectionable that new clause 100 suggests that the Prime Minister and Government Members would somehow put women’s rights back because of this Bill—our Prime Minister, who did so much on this issue as Home Secretary, when she was committed to working against FGM, dealing with coercive control and fighting the gender pay gap. It is absolutely wrong to say that, in areas such as women trafficking, the Government and the Prime Minister will somehow just roll over and that these issues will not be a highlight of what we seek to achieve in leaving the EU.
Many of my constituents have rightly asked me about the rights of EU citizens working in this country. I totally agree with the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) about the tone of the debate on this: it is very frightening and nerve-racking for constituents, and we are keen to protect all our constituents. No one in this Chamber is in any doubt about the huge contribution that EU citizens make to our economy, our society, our culture, our tourism industry and our national life, but in planning for free movement, issues around homes, doctors and pressures on NHS services have been very difficult to manage.
I was reminded at the recent local enterprise partnership conference that EU students make a positive contribution to my area, and particularly in Eastleigh as they come and go through Southampton airport. However, I would expect this House to have the same view of the contribution that our citizens make in other EU countries, so we need to make sure that we take a balanced approach.
All Members of this House do great casework in their constituencies. Often, we are dealing with international and EU citizens with immigration and homelessness issues, which are complicated and difficult. I therefore do not understand why there is a feeling that Conservative Members are somehow going to forget the work they do for people who may be married intercontinentally and who may have issues we need to resolve. In some cases, I have helped to get passports so that members of families can go to funerals, and I have helped with other issues that people needed help with. Ultimately, these people have complicated and difficult lives too.
In terms of the Bill, I believe we all understand that we need a mutual recognition of the work UK citizens do abroad and the work EU citizens do here. We also need recognition of all that Members of Parliament do to help to resolve the issues that affect all our communities. I do not believe that that will somehow change because of this Bill and that we will forget what we have to do for our constituents.
The Prime Minister was very clear today at Prime Minister’s questions about her intention at a priority first stage to look after all our citizens at home and abroad. I fully support her in the work she does, and I believe we will eventually get a deal that is right for the UK—a UK that is open and strong and that looks to the future. I will support the Bill, and I go back to my previous point: it is a notification of withdrawal—it is not about negotiations.
Sue Hayman
I would like to speak to new clause 192, to which I have added my name, about Euratom. A number of Conservative Members have spoken with great knowledge about the nuclear industry today, and as chair of the all-party group on nuclear energy I invite them all to join us and to come to our meetings to share their knowledge.
The nuclear industry is critical to my constituency in west Cumbria. Because of that, I have probably had an unusual inbox compared with most hon. Members, in that I have had a large number of direct emails from concerned constituents about the proposed withdrawal from the Euratom treaty. Those constituents are particularly concerned because of the significant negative impact that withdrawal could have on the nuclear industry in the UK. They believe it unnecessary and ill-considered, and are concerned that it will create great disruption in the nuclear industry at a time when we really need to be pressing forward with our nuclear new build programme.
Euratom has had a significant role in establishing its members’ credibility and acceptability in the wider global nuclear community. A constituent has contacted me to say that he believes that exiting will have a significant impact on the cost and the duration of decommissioning, which is of course very important in west Cumbria because of Sellafield. They also believe that the nuclear new build programme at Moorside will be impacted. EDF Energy, which is building the Hinkley Point C project, has said that it believes that ideally the UK should stay in the treaty, as it provides a framework for complying with international standards for handling nuclear materials.
On the issue of safety and materials, another constituent, who worked for very many years as a radiation protection adviser, has been in touch to share his concerns. He has wide experience of applying regulatory controls in workplaces including hospitals, the oil and gas industry, paper and plastics manufacturing, radiography, and the nuclear industry. He says that every one of these is considerably safer today as a result of Euratom—so this is not just about the nuclear industry directly. He goes on to say that he believes it is extremely short-sighted to remove the wealth of information and expertise that has resulted from our membership of Euratom.
James Heappey
The hon. Lady and I share a real enthusiasm for the nuclear industry and host it in or near our constituencies. How, specifically, will our withdrawal from Euratom lead to a diminishment of our expertise in how to regulate the nuclear industry?
Sue Hayman
I am talking about what constituents who actually work in the industry are telling me. To be honest, I would trust the judgment of my own constituents. In an intervention, I mentioned a constituent who works at the National Nuclear Laboratory, who says that leaving will impair his ability to collaborate with leading scientists and engineers across Europe, to the detriment of science and technology in this country. This is what my constituents are telling me. The hon. Gentleman can choose to disbelieve them—I do not. I trust my constituents.
I do not understand why, when we have conflicting legal opinion on why we have to leave, the Government are insisting so much that we have to. We need to make sure that a rapid exit does not do serious harm to our nuclear industry. We have so much to lose, with so little to gain. I therefore ask Members to support new clause 192.
Mr Lilley
For the sake of brevity, I will focus, if I may, on new clause 11, which is entitled “Tariff-free trade in goods and services”. Of course, there are no tariffs on services worldwide, so that should be fairly easy to achieve. I take it to mean tariff-free trade in goods and the minimum of barriers to services.
With regard to trade, there are only two realistic outcomes to the negotiations we will have: first, that we negotiate a free-trade agreement continuing tariff-free trade—more or less what we have at present—and secondly, that we move to trading on the basis of most favoured nation tariffs under WTO rules, which is basically what America, China, Japan and Russia, the four most successful countries exporting to the EU, do.
From what I have heard in this House and what I know of the Government’s position, everybody would like us to negotiate continuing tariff-free trade with our European partners. We do not particularly need any clause in this Bill to try to achieve that. Moreover, it is very simple to negotiate. It is very easy to go from zero tariffs to zero tariffs—it can be done in an afternoon. It is not like negotiating the removal of tariffs, as the EU has had to do with Canada. Canada had 5,000 different tariffs, the EU had 12,500 different tariffs, and they had to trade off one against the other.
Tariff-free trade is very simple to negotiate. As far as barriers and services are concerned, if our regulatory systems began to diverge, all we would have to negotiate—after assessing whether or not the matter was serious—is the normal dispute resolution procedure, because after the great repeal Bill we will start with identical regulatory arrangements.
Mr Lilley
The 7% is after taking account of everything we get back. If the hon. Gentleman wants to know, he should look up table 4.27 on page 159 of the Office for Budget Responsibility report, which spells out how much we will get back net when we leave, which is £13 billion—£250 million a week.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that if a 4% tariff is imposed, it is possible that the pound will depreciate by the same amount, because we have our own currency?
Mr Lilley
It is already 15% more competitive than it was a year ago, which dwarfs the average of 4%. We can, of course, give processing relief—that is, remit tariffs—on components that are part of processing and manufacturing chains and that will be re-exported. We will get £12.3 billion of revenues, if we apply the common external tariff to imports from the EU, but our exporters will pay some £6.5 billion of tariffs on their exports to the EU, so we would have ample money to compensate any exporters who were not sufficiently advantaged by a 15% devaluation, and still have billions of pounds to reduce general taxation. We can also, of course, negotiate free trade agreements with the rest of the world and slash unilaterally the tariffs that we currently charge on food, clothing and other things that we do not produce but that mean that our consumers have to pay higher prices to subsidise inefficient producers elsewhere in the EU, instead of importing from, say, the less-developed countries from which we should naturally be importing.
There are many other advantages, but as you have urged brevity, Ms Engel, I will not tell the Committee what they are but hold them back for a future occasion.
Albert Owen
It is always interesting to follow the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley). I will concentrate my brief remarks on Euratom. As the Minister and the Committee will know, its principal goals are the promotion of research and the dissemination of information; the establishment of safety standards; and facilitating investment. It also governs the supply of ore and nuclear fuels.
Euratom establishes a nuclear common market. The Eurosceptics always used to say, “We want to be in the common market,” yet their decision is to pull out of it. I believe that the Government want to retain the principal goals, and they stated on the publication of the Bill that we are leaving Euratom only because of legally binding arrangements, but that is debatable—I have seen conflicting legal advice—and cynics suggest that it is more to do with the European Court of Justice.
The Government say that they support Euratom and want us to continue both to co-operate and to have the highest standards. The hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey) is absolutely right that we are world leaders on nuclear standards, but in co-operation with other countries, which is why it is so important to keep Euratom, the umbrella body.
The purpose of new clause 192, which is supported by the industry and industry bodies, is to continue co-operation and have greater certainty. I have raised this matter with the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, who was very courteous. He said he had met the industry and was sure that we will be able to continue outside Euratom, but that is not what the industry in general believes. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) said that the management of the JET energy research programme in Oxfordshire did not want the proposal, but the workforce have lobbied me in great numbers through the union, saying that there are risks if we pull out.
Access to information and data sharing are important. We will be way behind if we pull out. Companies in the industry need to plan in advance; they need that certainty. Euratom deals with nuclear co-operation with the United States. It is ironic that although we are talking about coming out of Europe and trading with the United States, we need to be part of Euratom to get agreements to move fuels to the US, Japan, Canada and other countries. Renegotiating will take an awful long time.
Ideally, the Minister would retain the UK’s membership of Euratom even if we left the European Union. If the Government proceed to give notice to withdraw, we must have an agreement on transitional arrangements. We must also have sufficient time to negotiate and complete new arrangements with EU states and third countries such as the US, Japan and Canada. If in two years an agreement cannot be reached, the UK should remain a member. Our standing in the nuclear industry is at stake, as are jobs and our reputation as a major country in nuclear research. I hope that the Minister takes that on board.
Mr David Jones
I have listened to a large number of very important contributions this afternoon from right hon. and hon. Members, and a large number of proposals have been considered. I hope that the Committee will forgive me if I say that I prefer—
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the Minister give way before he says that he would prefer not to give way to anybody?
Chris Leslie
Does the Minister agree that it is totally farcical that I have tabled 35 proposals but have been unable to speak to any of them? Does that not prove that the curtailing of the debate leaves Parliament unable to scrutinise withdrawal from the EU?
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
The public watching need to know that this is not the right place for many of the amendments and new clauses to be debated. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) has said, this is not the right Bill.
Mr Jones
That is what I was about to say. I would like to address all the amendments if I can, so I hope that the House will forgive me if I take no further interventions.
The amendments serve as a valuable reminder of the numerous important matters that will need to be considered and discussed throughout the process of negotiation. They seek to ensure that specific aspects of our future relationship with the European Union are prioritised by the Government. Let me take this opportunity to tell the House once again that we are committed to delivering the best possible deal for the whole of the United Kingdom. However, we can only set about delivering that deal after we have triggered article 50. It is not appropriate, therefore, to seek to tie the hands of the Government on individual policy areas at this stage; that could only serve to jeopardise our negotiating position.
I will do my best to respond to each of the amendments, given their broad scope, but for the avoidance of doubt, there is a common response to them all: elementally, this is a straightforward procedural Bill that serves only to give the Prime Minister the power to trigger article 50 and thereby respect the result of the referendum. As a consequence, these amendments are not for this Bill. Instead, they are for the many future debates that will take place in this House and the other place—
Chris Leslie
On a point of order, Ms Engel. The Minister said that the amendments were not for this Bill. Will you remind the House that the Chair has ruled that all the amendments are within the scope of the Bill?
The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Natascha Engel)
The Chair’s ruling has been mentioned time and again. The Content of amendments is a matter for debate.
Mr David Jones
Thank you, Ms Engel. The amendments will be debated at a later stage.
New clauses 2, 7, 100, 163 and 193, as well as amendments 32, 34, 40 and 55, would require the Prime Minister either to have regard to, or to set out in a report, a number of matters prior to triggering article 50. Those include, but are not limited to, the common travel area with the Republic of Ireland and the preservation of peace in Northern Ireland; tariff-free trade with the European Union; workers’, women’s, human, civil, social and political rights; climate change and environmental standards; and the British economy and economic model. The White Paper published last week sets out our strategic aims for the negotiations and covers many of the topics that hon. Members have addressed in these and other amendments.
With regard to the common travel area, for instance, we have already stressed that we are committed to working with both the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to recognise the unique economic, social and political context of the land border between the UK and Ireland. We have also made it clear that we are seeking a bold and comprehensive free trade agreement with the European Union that is as tariff-free and frictionless as possible.
On new clause 7, which concerns the preservation of EU tax avoidance measures, the Prime Minister has made it very clear that we will convert the acquis into British law, and that it will then be for the British Parliament to decide on any changes to that law, with appropriate scrutiny. Similarly, amendments 7, 9 and 38 to clause 1 and new clauses 16, 70 and 133 seek to require the Government to commit to a position on specific issues before triggering article 50. Amendment 7, for example, seeks to ensure that the UK continues to participate in EU common foreign and security policy after withdrawal from the European Union. A matter such as that cannot be resolved through unilateral action and, instead, must be clearly addressed through discussion with the other 27 member states of the EU. We have been clear that we want to see continued close co-operation on foreign and security policy with European partners, but those discussions can begin only after article 50 has been triggered.
New clause 16 is designed to ensure that the employment rights of those living or working in the UK will be unaffected by the Bill. The Government have made it clear that not only will there be no change to employment protections as a result of triggering article 50, but we will protect and enhance the rights people have at work.
Mr Jones
No, I will not give way.
I am grateful for the contributions of Members to this Committee stage. The Bill respects the judgment of the Supreme Court. I urge right hon. and hon. Members to support both clauses of the Bill. Clause 1 gives the Prime Minister Parliament’s authority to notify the European Council of the UK’s intention to withdraw from the EU. It also makes it clear that this power applies notwithstanding the European Communities Act 1972; this is to address the Supreme Court’s conclusions on the status of the 1972 Act. I urge all right hon. and hon. Members who have tabled amendments not to press them to a Division, so that we can make progress with the Bill, start the process of withdrawal and work to deliver a deal that respects the vote of the British people in the referendum.
Paul Blomfield
In the few seconds left to me, I want to say that we will not withdraw the new clause and we will hold the Government to account in respect of the Secretary of State’s commitment to achieve a deal that provides for the exact same benefits as we enjoy from our current membership of the single market.
The issue of our membership of Euratom has caused concern among Members on both sides of the House, which the Minister failed to allay in his closing remarks. To clear up any doubts, such as those that the hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey) expressed, I remind the House that the Nuclear Industry Association has made it clear that we should not leave Euratom. It is not in the interests of the industry or people’s jobs. They will watch how the House votes on new clause 192, and will judge the Government accordingly. I hope that Members will recognise that and vote for the new clause, and for all the other helpful amendments we have tabled.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I ask the Assistant Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the Aye Lobby—there seems to a be a slight blockage that she might be able to relieve.
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delays in the Aye and No Lobbies.
Alex Salmond
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. The Government’s refusal to accept a single amendment means there will be no Report stage. The programme motion means there is no debate on Third Reading. I am informed by the Library that the last time that combination happened was the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, which was about the first world war. For this to happen on any Bill would be an abuse; for it to happen on this Bill is an outrage. What is it about the procedures of this place that allows a Bill of this constitutional significance to be railroaded through in this disgraceful fashion?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
The House agreed to a programme motion, and that is what has been adhered to. What I would say is that the point is on the record; you have certainly pointed out the last time this happened. There are other channels where I think that conversation ought to go and to be taken up, but I thank you for that.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. This House has nobly represented the will of the British people in a referendum, and that is why the Bill has passed as it has.
Mr Deputy Speaker
May I just say to the hon. Gentleman, who is a constitutional expert, that he will recognise that that is also definitely not a point of order?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Ms Gibson, it is very good to hear the choir. I personally do not mind singing, but I certainly cannot allow it in the Chamber, because before we know it we could hear other tunes, and I do not want to get into that—and some of those on that side of the Chamber have not quite got the voice that they might have on the other. I do not want a sing-off within the Chamber. It is very good of you, and much appreciated, but if we could just leave it for a little while: it has been a very tense week already, and I do not need any extra. Thank you.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Tuesday 21st February 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 103(h) Amendment for Committee (PDF, 52KB) - (21 Feb 2017)
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
My Lords, I made my maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1972, during the Third Reading of the European Communities Bill, in favour of our membership of the European Union. I little dreamt that 45 years later I would be standing up to advocate the reverse procedure—namely, that we should withdraw from the organisation that I advocated joining. However, it is not me who has changed but Europe, as was symbolised by its change of name from the European Economic Community to the European Community and finally to the European Union. Increasingly, I became concerned about the incompatibility of the growing integration and our national democracy and accountability. I also became more sceptical about the advantages of the single market.
I voted in the referendum to leave but I fully accept that we have to take account of the 48% who voted to remain. Many of us understand and share the concerns about links for universities and the status of foreign nationals in this country. That is, I think, common ground and those are objectives in the negotiations. Equally, I believe that those who voted to remain have a duty not to undermine the Government’s negotiating position.
I admired very much the speech made yesterday by the noble Baroness. I also admired very much the speech made by Keir Starmer when he led for the Opposition. He did not attempt to conceal the divisions in the ranks of the Labour Party. I assure noble Lords opposite that there is no temptation to gloat, because it was like looking in a mirror at the Conservative Party in the 1990s. Mr Starmer made it very clear that the idea that the referendum was, as he put it, consultative simply did not hold water.
I admired Mr Starmer’s speech but I did not admire the speech of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has an extraordinary ability to say two completely contradictory things simultaneously. He said that he did not dispute the result; at the same time, he called on people to rise up. He said that people might change their minds. What he meant was that he might be able to change their minds. All this from a man who promised a referendum on the EU constitution and even published a Bill, but then ensured that the constitution was written in a different order to avoid a referendum.
The former Prime Minister said that people were not given the full facts—that the decision was made on imperfect knowledge. Of course, in a negotiation no one has full knowledge of where we will end up. As for not being given the full facts, people have had more than 40 years in which to make up their minds. He said that Brexit was driven by ideology. I am not sure what ideology he had in mind. If anything, the opposite appears to be the case—European unification as a movement has been almost a religion.
Noble Lords have mentioned endlessly in this debate “membership of the single market” as though that in itself is simply an argument. They have made no attempt to calculate the costs, as my noble friend Lord Lawson referred to yesterday, of the rules of the single market, and they have not bothered to confront the fact that many countries that are not members of the single market have increased their exports to the single market more than members, and certainly more than we, have done. They never bother to comment on the fact that the three largest trading partners of the European Union have no special trading arrangements with the EU, while six of its 10 top trading partners have no special trading relationship or agreement. As my noble friend Lord Lawson said yesterday, there is no reason why there should be a cliff edge.
If noble Lords are sincere in saying that they accept the result of the referendum, it should be possible for them to do all they can to support the Government in their negotiations in the national interest. The amendments being talked about seem more like additions to the Bill, in that they attempt to lay down conditions on the Government’s negotiating position.
On EU nationals, I have great sympathy with what has been said. But the Prime Minister has made it clear that so does she and that this is an objective of the Government. There is, however, no response from other countries in Europe and it would make no sense to make a unilateral gesture that would simply leave the 800,000 British nationals in Europe subject to the leverage of other people in the negotiations.
Equally, when it comes to a parliamentary vote on the deal, the Prime Minister has again said that there will be a vote, so it seems naive to say that Parliament should have the right both to reject whatever deal may be negotiated and simultaneously to decide to stay in the European Union. There are two objections to that argument. First, it would be a denial of the result of the referendum and, secondly, as surely as night follows day, it would make it perfectly inevitable that the EU would offer the worst possible deal in order to have it rejected by Parliament.
I recognise and acknowledge the anxieties of the 48% that should be taken into account. Surely we all want the best possible deal and the best possible access for our exports. But as the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, said on referendum night, I suspect before the result was announced:
“In. Out. When the British people have spoken you do what they command. Either you believe in democracy or you don’t. Any people who retreat into ‘we’re coming back for a second one’—they don’t believe in democracy”.
I believe in democracy and I believe that we should proceed rapidly with the Bill without amendment.
Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)
My Lords, much has been said already in what was an extensive and intensive debate yesterday, and like many of those who spoke in that debate I was and remain profoundly saddened by the outcome of the referendum. We are unpicking some 40 years of history, which by and large has fostered prosperity, developed co-operation on vital matters such as climate change, and inculcated the concepts of a social charter and structural funds to help poorer countries and regions to grow more prosperous. It has kept us safer through co-operation on law enforcement and counterterrorism and has fostered peace in Europe throughout my lifetime.
We are now being asked to withdraw from all this and to step away from the single market and the customs union with no certainty about what arrangements will replace them. It is not an inviting prospect for us in Luton at a time when General Motors’ proposed disposal of its European operations could leave the Vauxhall operation outside arrangements that allow goods to move freely within its main market without tariffs, quotas or routine customs control. The uncertainty about whether the UK will have continued membership of the European common aviation area is also not helpful to an airport-based economy, and it is certainly not helped by a slowdown in growth.
Of course, responsibility for this mess, which is what I believe it is, rests squarely with David Cameron. He gambled that a referendum would heal the split in his party but has ended up splitting the country. History will rightly judge him harshly.
As the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution set out,
“neither the question put to the electorate, nor the provisions of the Act under which the referendum took place, set out how or when withdrawal should take place in the event of a vote to leave”.
What Parliament enacted may have been a clear proposition—yes or no, in or out—but it was deficient in setting down how any mandate arising from the referendum would be taken forward; what, if any, feedback, decision-making or further endorsement should follow.
There are myriad consequences and issues arising from leaving the EU, including the need to incorporate some 5,000 pieces of directly applicable legislation into UK law. Many of the options are mutually exclusive. If Parliament did not originally spell out a process for dealing with the mandate, it is right for Parliament and the Government to take up the reins now. But I would argue that we need to be cautious about suggesting that this is all down to the choice of the people rather than down to the consequences of the clear choice that they made to leave the EU. We are dealing here with choices of government, and these should not be sacrosanct.
One of the most profound choices that the Government are seeking to make is to eschew membership of the single market and the customs union. They are prepared to sacrifice these at the altar of reducing immigration, notwithstanding research, most recently from the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE, again showing the benefits to national income, taxes and the budget deficit from immigration, and notwithstanding a report from the think tank Global Future that suggests that the Government’s approach could mean a fall in current net levels of immigration of no more than 15%, and that might be reduced further by the terms of new free trade agreements, which typically come with a demand for liberalisation on free movement.
I join others—and will vote with them—on insisting that the Government settle immediately the legal rights of EU nationals living in the UK, although I note the press reports that highlight potential practical difficulties with systems in administering a cut-off point. Is this right? The Government’s prevarication over this is cruel, given the substantial contribution that these communities have made to the UK. From local experience, I know the value of that contribution.
The alternative on offer to the single market is some vague prospect of,
“the freest and most frictionless trade possible”.
The OBR’s judgment, we heard yesterday, is consistent, it says, with most external studies that say that any likely Brexit outcome will lead to lower trade flows, lower investment, lower net inward migration and lower potential output. All this has adverse implications for the public finances and our social security system and will add some £60 billion of additional borrowing over the next five years. We know who bears the brunt of worsening economic outcomes under this Government.
As others have said, the White Paper sets out a framework for a deal that hardly amounts to a blueprint. Even if it did, these matters have to be agreed with our European partners. Article 50, once triggered, does not put us in the driving seat; for all practical purposes, it means that we leave the EU whether or not we have agreement. Transitional arrangements may well be in point, but these will presumably be subject to the ongoing jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.
Complying with this Bill means an uncertain destination but no way back. That is the magnitude of the decision that we are making over the next few weeks. For me this is therefore a difficult choice between supporting what I believe is right for our country and the collision with the limits of our constitutional duty. I have to accept that the combination of the referendum result and the decision of the other place should prevail. However, we should push our authority to the limit in challenging the Government on their proposed deal. Seeking to ensure protection of workers’ rights, justice for EU nationals living in the UK, maximising free access to the market, sustaining our historic ties with Ireland and much more is one way in which we can salvage something from this process.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said that he is very sympathetic to EU nationals in this country. However, he is perfectly happy for them to be used as a bargaining chip. Frankly, I do not think that is consistent with the view of this House or with British values.
Given the pressure of time, I will focus on the importance of giving people a second vote—that is, not a second vote on the original deal but a second vote that is a first vote on the final terms of exit from the European Union. I concur with those who have said that the June referendum gave the Government a mandate for Brexit but did not give them a mandate to choose the most extreme form of economic separation from the EU. It has been Theresa May’s choice and that of her Ministers to opt for a hard Brexit, leaving both the single market and the customs union.
I want to look at the impact of that decision by the May Government on just one sector of our economy—the financial services sector. This sector makes up 7% of the UK’s GDP, pays more than £75 billion a year to the Treasury and provides over 2 million jobs, most of them outside London. It is one of the few industries in which we are a global leader, clearing over 95% of the world’s $600 trillion a day in interest rate swaps, leading not just in traditional areas such as foreign exchange and specialist insurance, but also at the cutting edge of fintech. We damage financial services at our peril.
However, Theresa May and this Government have decided to walk out of the structures that underpin this sector. In reality, this industry is as enmeshed across the EU as a piece of crochet work. Under the May agenda, the UK will leave not only MiFID with its passporting freedoms, impacting Barclays, the American banks and many of the small players which want to grow, but also a whole raft of enabling arrangements from e-commerce used by crowdfunders across the EU and delegation powers that are essential to locating asset management in the UK, to access to skills, entrepreneurs and investment. That is why, salami slice by salami slice, financial institutions, big and small, are quietly rethinking their business models, negotiating leases, applying for licences and working on staff flexibility. They are making sure that they can operate outside the UK the businesses they have previously based wholly or overwhelmingly inside the UK. They are looking at front offices first—I hope the Treasury notes that that is where the big deals are booked and where the big tax revenue pay-off occurs—but where a front office moves, a back office is always at risk of following.
I commend the financial institutions that have chosen to speak out, such as the London Clearing House, which has been quite open that its clients are demanding that it moves transactions to New York, taking its ecosystem and over 100,000 jobs with it. The insurer Lloyd’s has been regretful but clear that it must have a major EU hub. Even little fintechs are considering second headquarters. For many in the industry, decision time is approaching. Given how long it takes to set up new operations, they need answers on what the UK-EU relationship will be—indeed, they need to know what the UK relationship with global regulators will be—not in two years’ time but in six months or less. I fear that by that point negotiations with the EU will barely have started, never mind finished.
The Government dismiss all these concerns by saying that the EU needs us more than we need it. However, I point out that where Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Dublin are unable to take business from the UK, New York will. Once out of the EU, the only advantage that the UK has over the US in European terms is a time difference. The specialist skills of London are already being transferred to New York. That is well under way.
The Government’s answer is that they will replace MiFID and the other regulatory structures that we have with the EU with forms of mutual recognition or joint supervision through equivalency agreements—bespoke, untried, long-term equivalency agreements, dozens of them of extraordinary complexity. Unfortunately, what once looked like a possible solution, though hard to achieve in the timeframe, now seems likely to founder on the Government’s insistence that they will not in any way engage with the European Court of Justice to adjudicate, even on a joint basis, the rules of agreements.
At this point, when we are being asked to consider triggering Article 50, the Government can tell us for certain only that a large part of one of our key industries, a major contributor to jobs, taxes and exports, is at risk. It has been put at risk not by Brexit but by the Government’s hard Brexit decisions and red lines. No one in this House or in the other place knows where in the range of outcomes the actual, final negotiated deal will fall. Will we remain one of the two great global financial centres of the world? Will we lose major activities such as clearing? Will we be reduced to just a substantial financial centre? If we do not know the answers for this sector, we do not know what the outcome will be for the economy as a whole.
I fully understand that for the Government the economy is low on the EU agenda compared to reducing immigration and removing any jurisdiction from the ECJ. I am pretty sure, however, that those are not the priorities of the British people. So let the people see the final Brexit deal, consider its consequences and decide on it. In two years we will have facts and reasonable clarity, not just speculation. Surely then is the time for the British people to have the final word.
Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, but it is a pleasure also to disagree profoundly with her suggestion of having a second referendum.
I would like to begin by congratulating the Prime Minister on her excellent Lancaster House speech; it had vision and clarity, and was exactly what we have been hoping to hear for many, many years. She was quite clear that she accepted the result of the referendum and that the result was “out”—no ifs, no buts, no EEA, no one foot in and one foot out, but a clear and clean Brexit. That was what the referendum called for and that is what this Government are going to deliver; I am very pleased with her for doing that. It was, as the noble Lord, Lord Lang, called it yesterday, a transformative speech—it was actually a UKIP speech, and I am very pleased with her for delivering that, too.
Some of us in this House have been waiting for very many years—it has been more than 23 years since we debated the Maastricht treaty in this House—to hear a British Prime Minister at last saying what Mrs May said at Lancaster House. We asked for a referendum during the debate on the Maastricht treaty but were sadly defeated in the Lobbies due to the very effective whipping of the hereditary Peers by Lord Hesketh, who later saw the light and joined UKIP. I am only sorry that many of the Peers who took part in those debates with us are not here today to see history made. I think in particular of Lord Bruce of Donington, Lord Shore, Lord Moran and Lord Harris of High Cross, who were effective speakers against our membership of the EU long ago, and they should be remembered for that. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, who for the whole of his political life has been an opponent of our membership of the European Union. He was taken ill two weeks ago in the House. I later saw him in hospital and he said he wanted to be here today but sadly his doctors have told him that he should not travel to come and speak today—I think it may be something to do with Mr Blair crawling out from under his wallet and telling us to rise up.
I should remind your Lordships that this House already voted to leave the EU during the passage of my noble friend Lord Pearson’s European Communities (Amendment) Bill of 1997; here it is. This House—the House of Lords—voted to leave the European Union. In spite of the attempt to torpedo the Bill by the Lib Dems—for whom no surrender to Brussels is ever enough—we won that debate. I say to noble Lords today that they have already swallowed the camel; they should not now strain at the gnat in passing this Bill.
Reading this debate now, it seems to me striking how the arguments we made then are still relevant today—we have been making them for 20 years. The problem we then had was that we were making such arguments to Governments who, for whatever reason, were committed to what they laughably called our European destiny. So we did not get anywhere making those arguments to Governments, but, last summer, we were finally able to take those arguments directly to the electorate, with the result we saw in the referendum: an out vote.
Thankfully, we are coming to the end of the days when we had to ratify every EU measure that was put before us in this House or in the other place—we could oppose them; we could debate them; we could even occasionally convince, although perhaps only ourselves—but, at the end of the debate, we had to listen to the noble Lord or the noble Baroness the Minister telling us that it was “the Government’s treaty obligation” and that was the end of the story.
From a historical perspective, when we look back and think that it was only in 1926 that women were given the vote in this country, we should be rather surprised and perhaps shocked at that. I was equally shocked, and still am—I did a little research—to find that it was only in 1965 that President Johnson gave African Americans the vote in America. In 50 or 100 years, when people come to look at this debate here, they will be equally shocked and surprised that, until 2016, this country of Britain was still contracting out its laws to be made by people whom we did not elect, we did not know and we could not sack. The time of “pay and obey” is done, and not before time.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
My Lords, we have a well-prepared speakers list giving everybody an opportunity to speak in turn. It is right and proper that we proceed with the order of business as it is before us.
Viscount Trenchard (Con)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to be able to take part in this debate, which is of such enormous historical importance. In 1975, believing that we had joined a trading bloc, I voted in favour of remaining a member of the EEC. However, it has been clear for many years now that we have been somewhat reluctant passengers on the European train, and our partners have been irritated by the brake that we have sought to apply to the political and federalist aspects of the project. As Sir Winston Churchill said in 1953 in relation to the embryonic European institutions,
“we are with them, but not of them”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/5/53; col. 891.]
I have spent a large part of my working life overseas, especially in Japan. I was always clear in my mind that the firm I represented, Kleinwort Benson, derived its standing and the trust of its clients in no small part from the fact that it was a British firm headquartered in the City of London. It was nothing to do with the fact that the UK was a member of the EU.
I have also worked in Brussels as director-general of EFAMA, the trade association for the investment management industry in Europe. By 2006, it was already clear that the European regulators, the predecessors of EBA, ESMA and EIOPA, were intent on harmonising regulation across Europe. The diminution of the UK’s influence over European regulation accelerated after the financial crisis and the eurozone crisis, but it is increasingly at the global level that the interconnected major financial markets will develop the optimum regulatory framework and the influence of our own national regulators will surely be restored and enhanced after their subordination to EU regulators comes to an end.
Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, I believe that the City’s success owes nothing to the EU and its future prospects are brighter and more secure freed from the European yoke and its somewhat dirigiste ways. My experience in Brussels increased my doubts that the UK could ever commit to the vision of Europe to which the European institutions aspire. However, I believed that the UK could and should reform the EU and our relationship with it from within. David Cameron tried to do this, but what he was offered as a new settlement was too far away from what I believe would have been in the UK’s interest. With some reluctance, I abandoned hope that we could reform the EU and our relationship with it from within, and decided to support the campaign to leave.
It was very clear from debates in your Lordships’ House and in another place that the European Union Referendum Act was not intended to ask the people to advise. It was clear that Parliament agreed to ask the people to decide this question. I agree with what Charles Moore wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Saturday:
“The judges in the Supreme Court and the Divisional Court had the greatest difficulty in understanding the point—plain to the most ordinary voter—that a government decision to invite the people to decide something by referendum is of great constitutional significance, not a sort of footnote”.
It seems clear that Tony Blair suffers from a similar difficulty. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, was wise in his drafting of Article 50, in so far as it provides that the Union shall negotiate the arrangements for a member state’s withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. This clearly means that the UK’s future trading relationship with the Union, in both goods and services, should be agreed alongside the terms of withdrawal. One idea which may well have merit is that we should enter into a treaty of collaboration with the EU which would govern our future bilateral relationship and would contain a number of pillars within which we would commit to collaborate as closely as our mutual interest will allow.
I would ask the Minister if he thinks that proposing such a treaty has merit in that it could help create a more positive background for the negotiations that lie ahead, helping to facilitate the best possible agreement on free and unencumbered trade between our markets in both goods and services. It goes without saying that the rights of EU citizens who have made their homes and lives in this country must not be altered in any way, but I shall oppose any attempt to amend this Bill because I believe that would restrict the Government’s flexibility in negotiating the best possible agreement for our future relationship. Furthermore, the Government have made a commitment that both Houses will be asked to approve both the terms of withdrawal and the agreement before they are put to the European Parliament.
I do not underestimate the challenges that lie ahead, but I am confident that the Government will find the right way forward and that the opportunities that this historic decision will unlock outweigh the disadvantages of being shackled to a regional trading bloc with a different outlook on the world to our own.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to be in this House; we all know it. Many have expressed misgivings about the unelected nature of this part of the legislature, but the rationale is one I want to remind us about. The rational for our being here—appointed—is that we bring expertise from so many different walks of life. Expertise is an idea that is now derided. The strength of this House is that we have people from many walks of life and with great diversity. We have seen holes being plugged in recent times, with people coming from our different communities. That abundance of experience is to be brought to bear on the legislation that comes before us. I ask this question quite pointedly: are we supposed to abandon that experience when it really matters and when we are dealing with the most important issue of our lifetime?
We in this House have a higher duty. We are more than fine-tuners of legislation. The idea is that this House takes the long view, and that we have to consider the well-being of our kingdom—of our nations within this kingdom. We are the guardians, too, of hard-won rights and liberties. In the modern world that has included the ones that have come from our collaboration with our European neighbours. They are important ones—the rights to live, work, study and love across Europe, our rights around employment, our maternity rights, and our rights on the environment and on many other areas that enhance our lives.
We do not have to look over our shoulder in the way that our elected House does. We are also stewards of the constitution. We also do not have to worry about the threats that are made by the hectoring media, and we can ignore trolls on the internet because most of us are at an age when those things do not count. We in this House should be able to exercise independent judgment, and I believe that we have a duty to do so in this historic decision. The consequences may be dire for these islands. They may be dire for future generations. I say as a Scot that I am worried for Scotland. I say as someone of Irish heritage that I am worried about peace in Ireland. I am worried for our economy. As a person from a working-class background, I think that the ordinary folk of this country are going to suffer greatly. I am worried for a vast array of good law that has come from this alliance. I say that as a lawyer and as the chair of the EU Justice Sub-Committee.
While there is a myth that we are the victims of a wash of law that comes from Europe, in fact we have contributed greatly to the creation of that law: harmonising standards, ensuring that the judgments in our courts are enforced easily and speedily throughout the European Union and protecting small businesses doing business with other countries. We have created consumer rights, and the quality of goods that are being sold has to meet our standards. It means that we can easily sue through our courts and have the judgments made effective.
We have to think very seriously about our role. Membership of this trading bloc has protected us against the downsides of globalisation. I ask us to ask ourselves: “Do you think that this conjunction of Brexit with Trump is not perilous for the United Kingdom? Is it not dangerous to become more reliant on a nation led by a man who is temperamentally unsuited to high office and so unstable and irrational? Should we not be thinking about how that affects foreign affairs and why we are not better placed by being part of this Union?”
I want us to think about this business of, “The people have spoken”. I am tired of hearing this distortion. It is a degrading of our public discourse. It is a poisoning of honest debate, as 48% of our nation who voted, voted against leaving. It would be incredibly divisive if we ignored them. I want us to think very seriously about the implications of this process. Like others, I reject the triggering of Article 50 in the way that the Government have laid it out, telling us that the single market is already off the table. We heard the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby, telling us that the Prime Minister made a UKIP speech. What a shame.
The Government have now agreed that the final deal will come before both Houses, but I will ask a question. A statement like that has political force but does not have legal force. What does the promise mean if it is not in the Bill? I am concerned about what happens if our negotiators do not reach an agreement, or part of Parliament votes against the agreement. We have been told by Ministers such as David Jones that, if a deal is agreed and Parliament rejects it, we simply go off to the World Trade Organization’s trading rules. That should be a matter of serious concern, so I want to see that in the Bill so that we might have a proper opportunity to vote on those matters.
I am also concerned, as many are, about the position of people who have lived in this country for a number of years and whose rights are going to be trampled on. I hope that an amendment to protect them will be forthcoming and will be voted on by this House. This House has gained increasing public respect in recent years. The reason is that we protect the common good. We are expected by the public to bring the weight of our experience to bear and to say that, basically, that experience is worth something. If our consciences are telling us that Brexit is a folly, with potentially disastrous consequences for the country, we have to listen to that voice of conscience and instinct. History will record what each of us does and our children and grandchildren, and theirs in turn, will ask, “What did you do when this was decided? What did you do at this crucial juncture? Were you shackled by convention, fearful that the House was going to be abolished? Did you dance to the tune of the Daily Mail, or did you stand up for principle and posterity, for the values of tolerance and inclusion, for the interests of our young and for the neglected communities in our midst?”. I will support vital amendments and, if they are not accepted, I am going to vote against the Bill. This House should be urging a rethink on this whole project. This House should be saying, “Not in our name”.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)
My Lords, I need to make a few declarations. The first is that I have the privilege in this House of chairing the EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee. I would say this, but in my opinion it is the most significant committee at this point in terms of the angles that it is looking at, such as financial services and the EU budget. My other declaration is more personal. I am married to a German, I have lived and worked in France, and I have a house in Italy. So I have a big dog in this fight, not a little whippet.
However, I have to tell the House that on the passage of this Bill I will be voting with the Labour Opposition and the Government Benches. Why do I take the position I do? It is not because I am any less a remainer today than I was on 23 June—I am every bit a remainer; as I explained, I have a deep and personal motivation to wish that the result of last June had not happened. But I believe that a second referendum entails risks for which the price is too high: too high for the country overall and too high for the other European countries. It has been stated that the people voted for a departure but not a destination. In my view, people had a very clear idea of the destination: the destination was a break from the EU. I agree that they did not know exactly what the terrain would look like, but they knew they were taking a risk.
A vote is always conducted on imperfect information. There is an inherent risk in any decision about the future, whether it is intervention in Syria or, as on this occasion, the EU. Take as an analogy the Scottish devolution referendum in 1998. At the time, Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem unionists in Scotland were told that the electoral system was such that no single party could take power alone and so the nats would not be able to take power and re-open the independence question again. We all know how that turned out. Take the euro. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, voters in several EU states had a referendum on joining the currency. In their nightmares they could not have imagined the financial crisis and the banks too big to fail nearly bringing down the sovereigns. In Greece, Italy and indeed even in Germany, people could not have known what was to hit the euro in less than a decade. People always act on imperfect information.
The other reason why I believe that we now have to implement the result is the referendum Act of 2011. Let me remind the House that that Act commits us to a referendum if further powers or competencies are passed to the EU that entail treaty change. That is the current situation. There are people across this House who wished to try to defeat the Act—I was one of them—but we failed. We now have a situation where treaty change, driven by the exigencies of European integration, is inevitable. This House knows that the eurozone crisis, the security issue, the need for joint co-operation on immigration and a host of other things will bring the Europeans to the point at which they will need treaty change, if not in the next five years then in the next 10. We would have had to take this issue to the British people anyway, if not in 2016 then perhaps in 2026.
Let me turn now to the central purpose of the Bill, which is in effect to trigger Article 50. While it may be theoretically possible to revoke Brexit while the talks on the question are still going on over the next two years, politically we cannot revert to the status quo ante. It is contrary to what the other 27 countries of the EU envisage in terms of their understanding of Article 50: that in effect it is politically irrevocable.
Once we have passed this Bill, there is no longer any possibility of a negotiation where the UK could go into the talks again with a set of demands on the proviso that if they are not good enough we will have another referendum. I say “again” and “another”, because we have already done that. From 2013 a referendum was promised if the Conservatives won the election. After 2015 the Government spent a year renegotiating a new settlement with the EU, securing what I think was a very good settlement. However, we were not able to sell that to the people, and here we are.
The EU has seen the latest bout of UK-inspired disruption for six years now, since 2011, with at least a further two years to go. The idea that we can try the same thing again and again shows a profound misunderstanding of how the EU works and ignorance of our partners’ patience and preoccupations. They will not go into an Article 50 negotiation or give us any serious terms if they believe that we will prolong the agony, theirs and ours, with the risk that we might have the same result after another vote. In fact, the contrary is likely to happen, as there is already a view across the Channel that what we were offered last year was too generous. So to stop others from using the same ploy we are likely to lose some of our opt-outs and special exemptions. To keep united, the EU needs us to move on so that it can resolve the myriad problems confronting both the Union and us.
Janan Ganesh writing in the Financial Times today lays out a future for Britain’s relationship with the EU where we, the remainers, will have to mobilise, to make our case, and to wait for new relations to evolve. Bit by bit, the UK will have to renew its engagement with the EU if it is to thrive and not just survive. Pragmatism will be driven on that occasion by the voters themselves, again. He says:
“Brexit is an idea whose only effective rebuttal is its own implementation”.
It will take time and it will take patience. I hope to play my small role in the passage of this Bill.
Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)
My Lords, I have been very impressed by the wide-ranging scope of so many of the speeches. In contrast, I want to concentrate on a narrower subject that has been touched on only lightly so far in the opening Front-Bench speeches and in a few words from the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, my noble friend Lord Hannay of Chiswick and the noble Baroness, Lady Henig: that of police security and intelligence co-operation in Europe. In that, I wish to draw the attention of the House once again to the excellent report by the European Union Committee on Home Affairs entitled Brexit: Future UK-EU Security and Police Cooperation, debated by noble Lords on 7 February, and in doing so I declare my interest in policing matters. I also wish to pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, who chaired the relevant sub-committee that produced the report.
I will not repeat what is set out in the report or what was said in the debate other than to say that reading either brings into focus the striking unanimity of view by witnesses from the police and the intelligence agencies about exactly how significant were the agreements with Europol, the Schengen information system and the European Criminal Records Information System, which is described as,
“an absolute game-changer for the United Kingdom”,
by the National Crime Agency, together with the European arrest warrant. Noble Lords and the Minister will have read the report.
The point I want to make, however, is that this subject is unique amid the many areas of negotiation that lie ahead, in that co-operation on the way forward for the UK and the 27 on this subject is unequivocally in the interests of all 28 national Governments. This will not be an argument; it will be about how far we can do things together. It is not about a sector of government or an industry, but all the Governments of Europe in their own national interests.
My point today is to urge the Government to deal separately and at speed with this section of the negotiation in order to resolve the vexed issue of what future relationships on these issues the UK will have with the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which has already struck down most of the early abuses of the European arrest warrant which the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, identified early in the debate. Speed in starting this process separately from everything else is at a premium.
I am pleased to quote from the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, to the debate of the EU Select Committee’s report on 7 February, who said:
“there is a cliff edge in this sector if the two-year period provided for under Article 50 expires without any agreement on either a temporary or lasting solution. This cliff edge is far more real than it is in the trade field, where … we can always fall back on … WTO membership … But there is no plan B for justice and home affairs … we shall simply drop out”,—[Official Report, 7/2/17; col. 1697.]
of these arrangements. The terrorists, the paedophiles and the drug barons will breathe a sigh of relief. The British ones will return for business as usual to the costa del crime. We once opted out of all these arrangements and this Prime Minister, as Home Secretary, opted back into the most important of the security, law enforcement, justice and intelligence-sharing arrangements. We need a kind of reverse grandfathering now to accept and acknowledge the judgments of the CJEU in this narrow sphere. Otherwise we shall, as in the excellent joke told late last night in this debate by the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, be half way down the cliff holding on to the branch when it breaks. In that event, all the peoples of Europe will be at greater risk.
Baroness Altmann (Con)
My Lords, I rise with trepidation to speak in this historic debate. We live in troubling times. As the Prime Minister has rightly said, we must all respect the result of the referendum. That is why we are here today. Having spent many years trying to help ordinary people who have been affected by economic or pension policy changes to achieve better outcomes, I have often warned Governments when I believe that policy is damaging or unjust. I have always relied on economic or social rationale for such policy analysis, rather than political logic. Indeed, I have seen many times how short-term political considerations have led to long-term problems. I fear that this is happening now as politics is being put above economics.
For the first time in my life, I have been afraid of saying publicly what I believe is right. I fear the personal attacks, social media threats and hated-filled letters to which those of us counselling caution in interpreting the results of the referendum are subjected. I have listened to politicians admitting that they believe that leaving the EU in the manner apparently planned will be economically damaging and could undermine peace and prosperity for the future, but then saying that they will vote for it anyway. In all good conscience, and despite the consequences I may personally face, I cannot follow that example. I have been proud to sit on these Benches and to work with so many marvellous colleagues and with noble Members on other sides of this House. However, even though it will upset many, I have to say that the Bill could do as yet untold, unquantified damage to our economy and to the future of our great nation. In their hearts, many noble Lords believe this too.
Of course, the easiest thing to do is to keep quiet and just go along with what is happening. Believe me, I have felt the pressure to do so. However, my judgment is that the Bill needs amendment. It seeks to bypass proper parliamentary scrutiny and assumes that the will of the people expressed at just one moment in time has given carte blanche for any course of action, even the most extreme. That is not right. On an issue of such magnitude, it is irresponsible to plough ahead without proper preparation, as we seem to be doing at the moment. Of course, I accept that the elected Chamber has the final say, but what is the role of this House? Is it to just trot through the Lobby regardless of our considered views? No, I believe that the role of this unelected Chamber is to point out where legislation needs amending and to ask the other place to reconsider when we believe that mistakes have been made. If we do not do so on this issue, then, when?
Having studied UK and European economies and policies since the 1980s, I have seen that many of the EU’s problems stem from putting politics above economics. The euro, which I never supported, is a classic example of a political construct with damaging long-term economic consequences, but politicians who could have foreseen this ploughed on regardless. More focus on the longer-term economic and social consequences of pension policy, with better planning and safety nets, could have averted many problems too. I absolutely respect the result of the referendum. The people have spoken; they made a decision. However, MPs have interpreted this as a mandate to rush headlong into lighting the fuse of a two- year time bomb. Once lit, we probably have around 18 months to work out a way forward for our country of 65 million people. Should we not be as best prepared as possible for the coming crucial period? My question is: are we ready?
Clearly, there is deep dissatisfaction with the EU among millions of British people. Indeed, worldwide there is deep disquiet with conventional politicians and political discourse. But the way to rebuild trust and confidence in politics is not to lead the country over a cliff edge without taking care to put in strong safety nets. Yes, the people have spoken and, yes, we must listen. They now trust us to do our best for them. Some of my leave friends have covered themselves with the mantle of patriotism, as if they alone are acting in the national interest and protecting its sovereignty. I respectfully say to them, “You do not have a monopoly on patriotism. We do not question your love for this country. Please do not question ours”.
We should not be hurried into this without far better preparation for such a potentially irreversible journey, and without a careful and credible plan. The White Paper is not such a plan. It is not a considered assessment of the consequences of triggering Article 50 or leaving the single market and the customs union. It is a wish list. The White Paper does not quantify the costs. It is a cost-benefit analysis itemising only the benefits and none of the costs. Where is the risk assessment? It is full of hype and hope detailing great possible outcomes. As a marketing document, this would fail the “treating customers fairly” test that is applied to all financial firms. You could not sell someone a washing machine, let alone a pension, on the basis of this type of analysis. Yet for the most important financial decision that our country may make and this House is being asked to consider, there is not one estimate of the costs.
And what about immigration? From a demographic and economic point of view, immigration is absolutely essential. The NHS, social care, agriculture, academia and construction rely on immigration. Our ageing population is moving into retirement with fewer younger people to support it. Immigration has helped power our growth for the past few years. The conclusion that the British people voted to stop immigration regardless of the impact on the economy, and to leave the single market regardless of the impact on our living standards, is unsafe. Some did, but most were led to believe that somehow leaving the EU would mean no more immigration and a better economy. That is, quite frankly, fantasy.
Finally, all parliamentarians were freed from party-political shackles during the referendum. Why is that not the case now? If we are going to get a great deal on leaving the EU, why the fear of putting it to Parliament or the people? I ask all noble Lords to act in accordance with their conscience and to exercise their judgment of what they truly believe is in the best interest of all the people of the United Kingdom, and of our children and grandchildren who were not given a vote. If that means sending the Bill back to the other place with amendments, so be it. Is that not what we are here for?
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I will address my remarks primarily to my own Benches. Whatever our differences in response to the referendum last year, we are all now, with very few honourable exceptions, strong pro-Europeans—including the many Members on my Front Bench whom I am proud to call my friends.
Internationalism has always been a core socialist and social democratic belief. Interdependence in our globalised world today makes what was always a moral value an economic and security imperative as well. Today, we are debating this miserable measure to trigger the process of detaching the UK from the most successful peace project in world history. I hang my head in shame that the leaders of this country and my party were not able to win a majority for remain last June. It will live with me to my dying day.
There are many guilty men and a few women, too. There has been the failure of successive Governments, including, I regret to say, our own, to present a consistent case for our EU membership; a collective weakness in going along with the idea of a referendum—“a device of dictators”, as Clem Attlee once so accurately quipped; and of course David Cameron’s miscalculated opportunism. But let us be frank, I say with terrible sadness that the debilitation of our own party contributed to Brexit. We have a leader who, unlike the vast majority of Labour members, including many of those who joined up to support him, has never been a European true believer. In the referendum he failed the key test of democratic politics—to cut through media cynicism and the mass of seething public discontents with a compelling, positive case for Europe that forced voters to listen.
Now I see no clarion call for the fight—only a three-line Whip in the Commons to force Labour MPs to troop through the Lobbies alongside a right-wing Tory Government dancing to Iain Duncan Smith’s tune. That was even at Third Reading, when all our so-called red-line amendments had been defeated. Of course we must live with the referendum result—but I do not believe that public opinion is fixed for ever in the same place.
I would not have liked it, but there could have been a national consensus behind Brexit. A Government who were determined to establish that could have proposed a different approach that took account of the 48% and not given top priority to the ideologues of the Tory right. That would have been a Brexit based on the single market and the closest possible political and security ties. But in January we had the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech, which prioritised sovereignty and immigration over jobs and living standards—and the British electorate last June did not vote for that.
The referendum cannot mean that Parliament is bound to accept whatever withdrawal deal Mrs May cobbles together. If her terms are contrary to the national interest, there must remain open at least the possibility that the Brexit decision might be reversed. But I do not see Labour fighting for that. The remnants of the 1970s hard left are still stuck on “socialism in one country”. A leading adviser to Ed Miliband opined the other day that,
“Brexit opens the door for a new and exciting programme—from regional industrial strategy to the end of the power of the City of London”.
I say: think again.
Then of course there are the Blue Labour intellectuals, who think that drastic cuts in immigration are the way for Labour to reconnect with the working class. Their analysis is highly questionable and their policy cannot be implemented without unacceptable cost. As regards their political tactics, John Curtice’s analysis for the British Election Study shows that even in Labour-held leave constituencies, 57% of 2015 Labour voters voted to remain.
As for cutting low-skilled migration, there is no possibility of achieving this without huge damage to our NHS and social care, or any chance of finding in the next five years the workers that Britain needs to build the houses and infrastructure that we all want to see. It is time for Labour to tell the truth. The biggest losers from Brexit are going to be working families and the poor. As the devaluation of the pound forces up prices while benefits are frozen, a sharp rise in child poverty is the inevitable consequence of Brexit—and on sterling, I warn you, we have seen nothing yet as Mrs May teeters along her infamous cliff edge.
I venture that our internationalist forefathers would be shocked by our present state. Keir Hardie, who left school at eight, bravely condemned racism in South Africa, backed independence for India and fought to build solidarity with European social democratic parties in the hope of averting the catastrophe of the First World War. He never flinched in the face of the jingoists and imperialists of the day—many of them, of course, in the working-class electorate. The same could be said of Bevin opposing Nazism and Munich in the 1930s.
If all the Labour leaders of the past had bowed the knee to populism, would the great Labour Governments of Harold Wilson, with Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary, ever have abolished hanging, legalised homosexuality or introduced the first laws on racial equality? Labour faces two choices: accept a catastrophic hard Brexit or expose the multiple deceits that it represents, and campaign for public opinion to shift before it is too late. I know where I stand: as a proud member of the Labour Party, I am going to fight for the internationalist, pro-European and egalitarian convictions I have held for the last 50 years.
Lord Green of Deddington (CB)
My Lords, I take a rather different approach from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. That may be one of the strengths of this House.
I would like to address three issues. First, on the Bill, I agree with our Convenor: the decision is now taken and there is no turning back. That was set out with remarkable clarity by my noble and learned friend Lord Judge last night. We must now get on with it and bring the expertise of this House to making it a success. As for a parliamentary vote at the end of the process, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hill, that in an extremely complex negotiation with 27 partners and a two-year timeframe it is simply not feasible.
Secondly, in contrast to some noble Lords, I would like to introduce an optimistic note. I believe that the decision to leave the EU will eventually be seen to have been right for Britain. That is for three reasons. First, the direction of travel towards ever-closer union was increasingly uncomfortable for many people in this country, as the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, outlined. Secondly, there was a real desire to take back control of our own affairs, expressed not in detail but in a very widespread sentiment. Thirdly, the prospect of massive levels of uncontrolled immigration was placing unacceptable pressures on our society. Indeed, Mr Blair acknowledged in his speech last Friday that, for many, immigration lay at the heart of their decision to leave. I would like therefore to speak briefly about this central issue.
The fact is that there were good reasons for the public’s view. It is no use skating over them. At current levels, we will be adding to the population of this country half a million every year. That is the population of Liverpool. Imagine building that every year. Secondly, at similar levels, we will have to build a new home every five minutes, night and day, for new migrant families. Thirdly, there is the rapid change in the composition of our society—a society that is already struggling to absorb and integrate newcomers. The present Government, and indeed earlier Governments, have understood the need to get the numbers down. Unfortunately, our European partners stuck to what they saw as a position of principle and they declined to offer any viable remedy—hence, I suggest, in large measure, the outcome of the referendum.
Lastly, I will speak about the central question of what in fact can be done to reduce immigration from the EU. Efforts have been made—one was made yesterday by the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson—to suggest that Brexit will make no difference to immigration numbers. Clearly, if that is true, the project is in real difficulty. But it is not true. Migration Watch has made some suggestions. Here I declare a non-financial interest as its chairman. In briefest outline, the key lies in the fact that 80% of EU workers who have arrived in the last 10 years are in lower-skilled jobs. We have therefore recommended that the current work permit scheme be extended to EU migrants who wish to work here. We estimate that that would reduce net migration from the EU by about 100,000 a year—that estimate has not been seriously challenged. That would be a significant step forward. Of course, there will have to be some transition arrangements—the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, referred to various categories where there is the need for transition—but in the medium to long term, that will be its effect. For others, such as students, tourists, the married, the self-sufficient, we would like to see, and we believe can get, visa-free access in both directions. That, we think, is extremely important to maintain the enormous variety and important links that we have with the people of Europe.
I recognise that I have skated over a lot of complexities, but I thought it right to outline that there is a way forward. I fully appreciate that the ride will be bumpy—perhaps extremely bumpy at times. It may well take five or 10 years, but in the end we will have stepped away from a union that in my view we never really fitted into. We will indeed have taken back control of our own country.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, one of the deep delights for me in your Lordships’ House is the fact that we have such deep divides in opinion and yet we can still stay polite. That was the position that I found myself in during the referendum campaign, when I was campaigning to leave the EU. I found myself in some unsavoury company at times, with some people with whom I share not a single view, apart from the fact that the UK would be better off outside the EU.
I believe passionately that we have made the right decision, but at the same time we have to be absolutely sure that we go about it in the right way. The Bill that the Government have presented to us is simply inadequate. Had there been a decent White Paper with some detail about the things that many of us care about, I would have felt calmer about voting for the Bill as it exists. However, the Prime Minister is approaching these negotiations with a blank sheet of paper. Where are the underlying principles? There are underlying principles in the EU, but where are the underlying principles that we will maintain during negotiations, or are there to be no principles at all?
The Green Party is particularly concerned that the Cabinet will attempt to dump protections for everything from wildlife and the countryside to the social protections that we see as normal in society nowadays. The Government could use a combination of exit negotiations and secondary legislation to do all sorts of things that the majority of people who voted leave would not want to happen. It is wrong to use the referendum result as cover for bypassing proper parliamentary procedure and scrutiny. The Lords has the job of ensuring that a democratic process is followed throughout the different stages of the negotiations.
As somebody who has advocated leaving the EU ever since we joined as a result of the 1975 European Communities membership referendum, I resent people suggesting that I am out to wreck the Bill by seeking to amend it—someone even said that it would be “traitorous”. That is an unpleasant thing to say about people who are trying to improve things. As for threats from the other place to replace the House of Lords with a different sort of Chamber or abolish it altogether, for me, that would be a welcome bonus. I believe that it is time for us to be abolished and replaced by a democratically elected Chamber. For me, therefore, that is no threat at all. However, it is bullying. What do we do with bullies? We stand up to them.
I will try to amend this Bill. I have put down five amendments that I feel would definitely improve the Bill and I will support amendments from other Members of your Lordships’ House. It is our job to advise and to reform and improve the sometimes very poor legislation that comes from the other place. My five amendments cover the following areas: transitional arrangements; legal enforcement; environmental regulators; access to justice; and employment and equality protections. These are self-evident. They will ask for detailed plans, lots of preparation and proper funding, which I know this Government have a huge problem with.
I am going to keep my remarks brief because some of what I would like to say is probably best left unsaid. However, before finishing, I would like to add that I also commend the amendment from a recommendation of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which will protect the residence rights of EU citizens legally resident in the UK on the day of the referendum— 23 June 2016. It is a precautionary but self-evident amendment and it would be cruel not to include it. I cannot see why the Government would have any objections to it being in the Bill.
Finally, although the outcome of last year’s vote was what I wanted, I have not taken a moment’s pleasure from it in the intervening time, partly because of the way in which the campaigns on both sides were conducted and partly because of the conduct since. There has been so much hatred and vile rhetoric, which has inflamed people. I am sure that many of us here have had abuse. That is a normal part of any progressive politician’s inbox but it has now reached levels that are just incredible.
We should take pleasure in issues such as immigration, because it is good for our country: it is good for the economy and it is good for our culture. I also believe that if you accept free trade, then why not accept the free movement of people? When we look at the Bill and vote on it next week, I hope that the Government will understand that we must not lower our standards. Whether it is on food, social protection or protecting our countryside, we must not go down the route of making things worse. In a sense, society is already worse because of the referendum and the Government must do everything in their power to heal as much as possible.
Lord Gilbert of Panteg (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, whose contribution perfectly illustrated the breadth of opinion that this House brings to this debate. In the referendum I campaigned for the remain side as an adviser to Britain Stronger in Europe, an interest I declared in the register, and which ceased following the referendum. I campaigned alongside old friends from my own party and new friends from other parties and from none. I do not think any of us enjoyed a campaign which created such division, but I do not doubt that the Government were right to fulfil their manifesto commitment to renegotiate our membership of the EU and to allow the British people to decide in an in-out referendum—originally, of course, a Lib Dem policy of unusual robustness.
I reflected at the time of the campaign on the words of Liam Fox MP who said:
“Those who wish to remain in the EU are not ‘unpatriotic’, and those who wish to leave are not ‘idiots’”.
The campaign was not a thing of beauty, and it had some low moments on both sides, but it brought together people who set aside differences to fight for something that they passionately believed in. It engaged people who had never got involved before in our politics. I believe that the arguments about the trade-off at the heart of our membership of the EU—the balance between the benefits of access to the single market on one hand and control of our own laws and of immigration on the other—were weighed up by voters when they cast their votes.
I do not agree with noble Lords who argued yesterday that leave supporters did not know what they were backing. They knew what they were doing, and as democrats we must accept their decision. The result was close, but it was clear, and it was equally clear that a vote to leave would lead to the triggering of Article 50, which is what this Bill does. We know that the process of negotiating our exit from the European Union is incredibly complex. Our diplomats, our civil servants, this House and the other place face a great test. A very heavy burden falls on the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.
We now have to work together to get the best deal for Britain. I hope that we will work together in such a way that we restore trust in our politics, and that in our debates we will be thinking of the 48% as well as the 52%, that we will be ambitious for our country and respectful of one another. It is not enough to set the right tone in this House, as we have done in this debate. I did not agree with many of the arguments made by my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft, but I was shocked by her account of the abuse she has endured for her views and for speaking passionately and, frankly, bravely for what she believes to be right.
We have to do more to ensure that our own discourse is courteous. We have to do more than that. Those of us who have any influence must shout out those who are behaving in this way, and do everything we can to support the police in taking appropriate action.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Green, I am optimistic about the future because I have always believed that Britain can be a success in or out of the EU. I am optimistic because I believe in the course charted by the Prime Minister and the principles powerfully set out at Lancaster House. I welcome the Prime Minister’s determination that Britain will be an outward-looking, forward-looking nation confident of its place in the world, but I am not so insensitive that I do not understand that many of my friends on the remain side of the argument on both sides of this House do not share this optimism. They have fears and concerns that they must feel free to express, and they must have the opportunity to urge their case for the kind of Brexit that they think is in Britain’s best interests.
It is not thwarting the will of the British people to do so, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, pointed out in her admirable speech. It is their duty as Members of this House to make those arguments. I pay tribute to my noble friend the Minister. I know from many years’ working alongside him that no one is better equipped to deal with the intricacy and detail of this work, and I know that across the House his openness and the time he commits to meeting and consulting with noble Lords is appreciated. I wish him and his colleagues well in the task they face.
Listening to my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal in her generous opening speech, I was reassured that the Government recognise the role of this House and the contribution it that can make during the negotiations. It is clear that a great deal of good will is going to be needed if the Government are to meet their commitment to ensuring that this House, through debate and scrutiny in this Chamber and through work in Select Committees, is able to make the contribution that she described.
On the basis of the remarks from both Front Benches yesterday I see an abundance of good will and I welcome that. However, I accept the argument made so powerfully by my noble friends Lord Hill of Oareford and Lord Hague of Richmond that to tie the hands of our negotiators while the negotiations are under way is not in Britain's best interest. I therefore believe that the right balance has been struck between the vital need for real parliamentary scrutiny and the need for Ministers to be able to negotiate on our behalf in good faith. That is why I believe that this Bill, which simply allows the Prime Minister to notify our intention to withdraw from the EU as mandated by the British people, should pass without amendment.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)
My Lords, I do not believe that leaving the European Union is in the best interests of this country. I voted to remain. I very much wish that the remain side had prevailed in the referendum. However, it did not. The people of this country voted decisively—not overwhelmingly, but certainly decisively—to leave, with a majority of 1.3 million over we remainers. However, as others, including my noble friend Lady Kennedy have made clear today, the referendum vote last June was not legally or constitutionally binding either upon Parliament or upon the Government. That said, it is hard to escape the political reality that it was a clear instruction from the British people. Nevertheless, it raises questions about how the result of the referendum fits in with our representative democracy.
Yesterday, the noble Lord, Lord Hague, said that Tony Blair would not have been “amused”—I think that was the word that he used—if he—that is, the noble Lord, Lord Hague—had challenged the result of the 2001 election within nine months of its taking place. He is probably right. However, the crucial difference is that the people of this country had the right to change their minds four years later in 2005. Will the British people have the right to change their mind in 2019 or 2020 when the results of these negotiations are clear? Is the truthful answer not that the position will become settled, not just for this generation, not just for us, but for the next generation and probably long after our generation has gone?
Accordingly, I seek clarification on two issues from the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, when he answers this debate. In paragraph 26 of the recent Supreme Court judgment that found that the Government were wrong to believe that they had the prerogative power sufficient to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty and that only Parliament could take that decision, the Supreme Court said,
“it is common ground that notice under article 50(2) … cannot be given in qualified or conditional terms and that, once given, it cannot be withdrawn”.
The judgment goes on to say:
“It follows from this that once the United Kingdom gives notice, it will inevitably cease at a later date to be a member of the European Union”.
There is some doubt, because the Supreme Court said that it had not fully tested that argument and obviously there are differing views. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, who, as the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, said earlier, knows a thing or two about drafting treaties, has been quoted as saying that the Government can withdraw from Article 50 at any point during the negotiations. What is the Government’s view?
It is a vital point. Once Article 50 is triggered, will this country be irrevocably committed to leave without an agreement on future relationships or without the sort of agreement that our European colleagues say they are willing to give us, which will be much worse than the agreements that we already have? I stress that I am not asking the Minister a political point; I am asking him for his legal view on the legal advice. Can he, unlike the Justice Secretary, who evaded this point repeatedly at the weekend, give us a clear answer?
The fact is that at the end of the negotiating period in 2019 it will be almost three years since the referendum decision, and demographics change. In a few weeks’ time there will be half a million new 18 year-old voters. At the same time, approximately the same number of the over-65s who were eligible to vote last June will have died. In two years, those figures will be even more startling. It was clear in the referendum that a substantial majority of 18 to 30 year-olds wanted to remain but that the majority of those aged 65-plus wanted to leave. Binding future generations with no option but to accept whatever the outcome of these negotiations happens to be seems at the very least to be unwise, unfair and probably unworkable.
I am the chairman of the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce. Since the referendum, the chamber has worked very hard to encourage discussions with our members on free trade agreements. We had a conference at Lancaster House last year and, of course, we visit the region regularly, and I shall be doing so again very shortly. Like many others, I am committed to doing everything I can to keep this country prosperous and to support trade and investment whatever the outcome of the negotiations. However, the Government must answer the vital questions about what will happen in those negotiations.
Our currency has lost 15% to 20% of its value, prices are rising in our supermarkets and family budgets are more squeezed than ever. The noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, probably made one of the most telling points in her remarks yesterday when she said that, whatever the people of this country voted for on 23 June last year, they did not vote to become poorer. So a take-it-or-leave-it vote in Parliament will not be sufficient and it will not be fair—not fair to business or to manufacturing; not fair to families; not fair to the people of this country; and, overwhelmingly, not fair to the young people who will have to live with the results of these negotiations far longer than any of us debating here today.
Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, with 190 of us speaking, there are about 23 of us for every line of this short Bill, but that shows how important the Bill is. There were powerful speeches yesterday, including from the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, who spoke at 12.07 last night. There was even unprecedented applause from the Public Gallery for my noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham after her passionate defence of EU citizens living here. There have been brave and passionate speeches today, such as those from the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. But, for me, the most moving speech yesterday was that of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, who likened the debate to an elegy. The UK’s involvement in the European project might turn out to be, he said,
“a fine, if ultimately doomed, cause”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 74.]
We appear to be on course for much more than a Lord Patten Hong Kong moment.
In the UK, we rarely learned about the EU as a project for peace, even though in recent memory on our continent there have been conflicts in the Balkans, Northern Ireland and Cyprus, with freedoms brutally suppressed in eastern Europe. Nor was it often pointed out in the UK that almost half of our trade is with the EU. We look at the US and marvel at how it could possibly have elected Donald Trump. Round the world, including in the Commonwealth, I have found that people wonder at how we could have voted to leave the largest, wealthiest and strongest trading bloc in the world.
So how does this Bill chart our way forward in the light of the referendum result? There are indeed different routes, and I seek clarification in the Prime Minister’s speech. She prioritises controlling borders over our membership of the single market. She rejects the European Court of Justice, which adjudicates that single market, yet she wants the maximum,
“freest possible trade in goods and services”,
for British companies in the EU. She says that “we may wish to retain” elements for our strong industries—for example, the financial services and automotive industries. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Hill, pointed out yesterday, we are not the only ones negotiating; there are 27 others. What will they make of the words “we may wish to retain”?
Recently, in Berlin, I spoke on a panel with two Brexiteers to German businesspeople. Like Merkel, to a person they said, “No cherry picking”, even if it damaged their immediate interests, lest the EU as a whole be undermined. Our Prime Minister agreed in France that she would not cherry pick. In which case, what then for the financial services and automotive industries? How does the UK prioritise sectors of its economy? What about the pharmaceutical industry or high-tech? What happens as our economy changes? Any privileged access for certain sectors must mean some kind of equivalence in regulation. Do we invent another ECJ? Theresa May wants us to have a customs agreement with the EU but does not want to be in the customs union. What would this mean, given our interconnected supply chains? What would be the threshold for it being possible to have deals elsewhere?
Our trade with the rest of the world has been growing, seemingly unhampered by our being in the EU. However, in 2015, India took only 1.4% of our goods and desires a trade agreement that prioritises freer access to the UK, and New Zealand took only 0.2% of our goods. Yes, we must redouble our efforts, but we must also recognise the significance of the EU market to us and our greater ability to secure good trade deals via the EU.
We understand that there will not be a hard border in Ireland, but how is that to work? Are we about to see people trafficking displaced from Calais to Ireland?
We gather that we will not be paying what are described as “vast amounts” to the EU. It is not mentioned that the net amount is under 1% of GNI.
We wish to maintain our lead in science and the universities, but we already see EU students looking to Canada rather than the UK. We hear that Oxford and Warwick are considering campuses in Paris so that they can access EU funds.
We are told that we will have no cliff edge but transitional arrangements. However, the Government also make it clear that we are willing to walk away. That means that risk remains.
The Prime Minister’s speech appeals to those who voted for Brexit and seeks to address the concerns of those who oppose it. The problem is whether the two strands are compatible at all. My noble friend Lord Marks described this as the biggest foreign policy mistake in decades, so let us look at our position in the world. Justin Trudeau apparently feels lonely on the world stage, and one can see why. The EU is still the champion of liberal democracies and the rule of law, though populist movements even now challenge that. Populism has achieved an extraordinary result in the USA. We see a revived Russia active on Europe’s borders, in Crimea and Ukraine, threatening the Baltic states. The global world order is shifting eastwards. By 2050, China will be the largest economy in the world, with India in second place and Indonesia in fourth. Being part of the EU gave us disproportionate impact in global affairs. We are all members of NATO and, with France, we serve as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. We have indeed served as a bridge between the US and the EU; others will now become that bridge. The world is an unstable place and we must all be aware of populist, simplistic movements across our continent—not surprising in the wake of profound economic crisis.
This short Bill presages a long and complicated process. Parliament must be fully engaged, including meaningful votes at the end. If, at that end, we judge that what has been negotiated turns out not to be those sunlit uplands and is not in the interests of our now divided country, we must not be afraid to say so.
Lord Lisvane (CB)
My Lords, almost exactly 44 years ago I was in Strasbourg as one of the secretaries of the British delegation to the European Parliament, at the first session of the Parliament that had the United Kingdom as a member state. Bringing up the century as the 100th contributor in this unprecedentedly long list of speakers may have a certain symmetry about it, but it is in no way an outcome that I wished for when I cast my vote on 23 June last year.
Over the years, I have spent a good deal of time on the relationship between this Parliament and European institutions. I devised the protocol on the role of national parliaments which was appended to the Amsterdam treaty, thanks to its enthusiastic endorsement by the highly effective then Minister for Europe during a UK presidency, someone for whom I had and continue to have great regard—and who by one of life’s little ironies is now the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU.
As many noble Lords have said, this is a refreshingly short Bill, but I am a little puzzled by the catch-all provision in subsection (2) of Clause 1. Is it simply an insurance policy—an attempt to avoid an “Oh crikey” moment within Government when some inconvenient provision of legislation is unearthed? Or do the drafters have something particular in mind—something which might be found to be at odds with the main provision of the Bill? It is as well to recall the old rule of legislative drafting: if you do not specify the target at which you are aiming, the courts may not agree that you have hit it. I am also looking forward keenly to the Government’s response to the magisterial intervention of my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead about what further legislative authority may be required. No doubt there will need to be a ratification of the exit treaty according to the CRAG 2010 procedure, but if prior approval of the terms of that exit requires legislation, that would of course add a new dimension. How practical any choice would be as the clock ticks towards the end of two years is another matter entirely.
The noble Lord, Lord Boswell of Aynho, and others, have spoken about parliamentary scrutiny of the negotiations as they proceed. My particular concern is about the legislative process that will follow, and of which the Bill now before us is a precursor. Chapter 1 of the White Paper says that the great repeal Bill will repeal the ECA 1972, preserve EU law where it stands at the moment we leave the EU, and where necessary make changes to allow that law to function sensibly. There will be a triage process where this Parliament and the devolved legislatures will,
“be able to decide which elements of that law to keep, amend or repeal”.
In the referendum campaign we heard a lot about regaining our parliamentary sovereignty; perhaps it is a little ironic that we have had in the first instance to rely upon the assistance of the courts. However, it would be even more ironic if the legislative process of withdrawal involved a major transfer of power to the Executive.
The extent of delegation of powers to Ministers, and the level of parliamentary scrutiny, will be crucial. One test, and it would be a strict one, could of course be that secondary legislation must be “necessary” to allow EU law to function sensibly, and to reflect the outcome of negotiations. However, if the test is merely that that subordinate legislation should be “expedient” then that allows a much greater degree of ministerial discretion. The means of scrutiny will be key. Although super-affirmative instruments allow in-depth scrutiny, Governments are quite allergic to them, and I doubt whether Ministers would be attracted by a surge of super-affirmatives. Perhaps some bespoke process might be devised—the issues are certainly substantial enough to warrant it—and I look forward to the conclusions of the Constitution Committee on this aspect.
I will conclude with two other thoughts. The first is on timing. There is a temptation to think that policy areas will come forward one by one to be tied up in neat parcels and dealt with by whatever legislative or scrutiny process is in place, but that is not the way that negotiations proceed in practice. A deal in one area may depend on reaching agreement on a wholly unrelated issue elsewhere. The practical effect of all this will probably be to move everything to the right, and only late in the two-year process will there be something to bite on in legislative terms.
It is welcome that the White Paper states in paragraph 1.8 that,
“any significant policy changes will be underpinned by other primary legislation”.
Here again, however, the pressure of time may be the problem. The process will, in any case, be a business management nightmare and the temptation to proceed by skeleton Bills will be powerful. That will pose real questions about parliamentary accountability.
Whatever means are found to scrutinise and authorise the process, I hope that it will involve people outside government, Parliament and the devolved legislatures. The changes in prospect will have profound effects on the lives and livelihoods of the people of this country, and Parliament has some ground to make up. Evidence-based scrutiny is the best sort, and this should be an opportunity to allow access to the process to those who will be directly affected, rather than have them simply as onlookers of a private conversation between Parliament and the Executive.
Noble Lords might feel that I have strayed a little from the Bill before us, but I would suggest not. The Bill would trigger notification, but it would also start us on what will be an extraordinary challenging time for Parliament. Now is the time to think seriously about how we meet that challenge.
Lord De Mauley (Con)
My Lords, although I voted in the referendum, I did not campaign in the run-up to it because despite believing, on balance, that we would be better off out, there were genuine and strong arguments on both sides. However, we are where we are, and we now need to get on with it. Before I go further, I must declare an interest as a beneficiary of payments under the common agricultural policy.
I listened carefully to the debate yesterday and this morning. Much of it has been fighting last year’s battle. I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I take the rather novel course of making a speech on the Second Reading of the Bill before us. Many issues have been raised and amendments have already been tabled that deal with all manner of matters, and I have no doubt that there will be more to come. I intend to address only three key areas that have been raised in another place and are covered by amendments that have already been tabled here.
The first is EU nationals living here and their right to continue to do so. That is something that many of us—if not all of us—would wish to see. The Government have said that they are prepared to give them that right and that it must be reciprocal, with our citizens living in EU countries being given the same right. There is pressure unilaterally to give EU citizens the right to continue to live here, but it is in the nature of negotiations that related and reciprocal matters are dealt with together. If one point is conceded, this risks losing the reciprocal point, so by definition, to do this would run the risk of British citizens currently living in another EU country losing the right to continue to reside in that country. That would be grossly unfair on them, and that is why I would resist any attempt to insist upon the unilateral approach.
The second issue I want to address is that of scrutiny by Parliament between the triggering of Article 50 and the completion of the process two years later. In this context, scrutiny means two principal things: the provision of information and allowing time to debate it. I have no problem with allowing plenty of time for debate. As regards the provision of information, the Government have said that they would provide Parliament with the same information that the EU Parliament receives. That seems fair and right, but as far as the provision of additional information is concerned, I look to my career as a negotiator. I negotiated a significant number of corporate acquisitions and disposals in Europe and the Far East during that career. One of the golden rules of negotiating is that information about your counter party’s position and the detail of what is important to them, is gold-dust. You learn everything you can about their backstop positions, what they will negotiate on and what they cannot, the intricate details of their financial position and things that might not seem important but might later prove to be. It is a forensic science, and it makes all the difference to the outcome. Any information about our position that comes into the possession of the large number of people and institutions that make up our counter party—the Commission, the Council, the Parliament and their various members—will be used against us. That is why I would resist the provision of additional information.
My third issue, impact assessments, is closely related. I have explained my reasons for strongly resisting the provision of information to this Parliament beyond that provided to the European Parliament. An impact assessment on Brexit, if it were to be of any value, would reveal information about our options and negotiating position which would be hugely valuable to our counterparty, the negotiating representatives of the EU. That information would, without a shadow of doubt, be used against us by them. I am afraid that confidentiality arrangements that allow limited access to documents have a habit of failing to prevent leaks, so I do not find that suggestion of any comfort. As such, I resist any proposal for impact assessments.
Those are my views on three key areas. Many other issues have been and will be raised, and I look forward to hearing the views of noble Lords still to speak, to the Minister’s response and to debates at subsequent stages.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, as a signatory to the amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, I would like to draw attention to the impact of Brexit on the UK’s trade, aid and security policies relating to developing and post-conflict countries. Aid to developing countries is under attack almost daily by elements of the press. Just this Sunday there was a report in the Sunday Times about using Brexit as an excuse to divert aid to eastern European countries to buy their good will. Will the Minister give an assurance that Brexit will not be used to divert the 0.7% of GNI devoted to development aid and that only countries on the DAC list are eligible for ODA? The fact is that development aid fulfils an essential task: not only is it right to help the poorest in the world but it is essential if we are to reduce the factors that push people out of their own countries and, in desperation, lead them to seek shelter with us.
It is a pity that on leaving the EU we will not be able to influence its attempt to manage the largest mass movement of people we have seen since the Second World War. The Calais camp on our doorstep may have been demolished but the problem has not gone away, and refugees are returning to the region because they have nowhere else to go. Can the Minister say, now that we have declared ourselves to be on the road to a hard Brexit, what consideration the Government have given to the Le Touquet agreement between ourselves and the French, whereby they police our border on their soil and vice versa? Can the Government guarantee the border will not move to Dover?
I will return to the broader subject of the impact of Brexit on aid, trade and security in relation to developing countries at later stages. For now, I would like to talk about the rights and wrongs of the process by which the Government are taking us toward Brexit, which is the undeniable result of the advisory referendum, albeit with a very small margin. What is happening is the stuff of nightmares. It is unprecedented in British history to have both the Prime Minister of the day and the Leader of the Opposition on the side of extreme risk-taking. But how else can we characterise their willingness to enter Brexit negotiations with hard-line rhetoric seemingly designed to remove any vestige of good will towards us? The only option we will be given at the end of this do-or-die road is a vote to take it or leave it. Given that the exit options have the potential to change our country so fundamentally, surely it is only fair and democratic that we ask the people what kind of Britain they want to live in. The process started with the people; it should end with the people.
I genuinely do not understand why that is controversial. The only reason why anyone would oppose that that I can think of is if “take back control” did not include the people. Come to that, the Brexiteers did not want it to include Parliament either. Who is meant to take control? Them? An unelected Prime Minister? What happened to trusting the people?
There are those who say that it is the patriotic duty of Peers to wave this Bill through. If noble Lords do not mind my saying so, that is utter tosh, because what, then, is the point of us? It is indeed our patriotic duty to debate and scrutinise this Bill and any amendments it attracts. It is then incumbent on each and every one of us to vote according to what we believe to be in the best interests of our country—and hang the consequences.
When people voted to leave the EU, by and large they did not vote to leave the single market. During the Richmond Park by-election, I knocked on many doors. Many who had voted to leave last June also voted for the Common Market in 1972. They do not want the hard Brexit that the Government are offering them. That is why Liberal Democrats, with their clear message on fighting against a hard Brexit, against leaving the single market and in favour of safeguarding the future of EU nationals, were able to overturn a 23,000 Conservative majority against a popular local MP and send Sarah Olney to Westminster. Let me end this point by quoting Winston Churchill, who said,
“the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin … Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/6/1940; col. 60.]
That was prophetic in 1940 and is perhaps prophetic again today.
Boris Johnson said that Brexit would take us to “sunlit uplands”, but my theory is that, as we plod our weary way uphill and look back on the grassy meadows bathed in mellow light that we leave behind, we will hear the curfew toll the knell of parting ways. I hope that noble Lords will pardon my taking liberties with Gray’s Elegy, but it is not as grave a liberty as that taken by Boris Johnson in his shameless parody of Churchill’s words. The “sunlit uplands” that he referred to were those of a united Europe, which our Government seem content to put at risk.
Baroness Murphy (CB)
My Lords, I am truly astonished by the events of the past eight months. The future of the country is apparently to be decided on the outcome of a single vote—as Kenneth Clarke said, an opinion poll on a simplistic yes/no question on which few had any relevant information, nor any means to acquire it. As we have heard, the noble Lord, Lord Green, of Migration Watch is of the firm opinion that it was based largely on worries about migration; it is a vaguely anti-foreigner vote. Indeed, the contributions to the debate so far, and what I have heard in the past eight months from our Government, have given me absolutely no reassurance that the people’s advice on this matter should be accepted by Parliament as the last word.
The hard Brexit that we are promised seems to make it all the more important to think again about what we are subjecting the country to. To quote from the Daily Express, the notion that one should not,
“thwart the will of the people”,
does not mean that Parliament should become the poodle of the people. On three occasions—in Denmark on the Maastricht treaty, in Ireland on the Nice treaty and in Ireland again on the Lisbon treaty—voters initially rejected an EU proposal, only to vote in favour of it in a second referendum. I was in Dublin at the time of the second vote on the Lisbon treaty in 2009, and it was clear that the ordinary voter—the non-political voter—had no more idea about the content of the treaty the second time round than they had the first time round. They were voting on their emotional warmth towards the EU. Yet here, the Government have decided to give in and go with the rather angry flow on the first vote, even though the majority recognises that it will be to the detriment of the UK, of Europe and of the world. Well, I am unwilling to abandon my conviction that we should be full members of the European Union. However imperfect—and I agree it is imperfect—it is a whole lot better than the isolationist future proposed in this Bill.
Actually, it is not just the economics of the decision that worries me, although as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said, nobody voted to be poorer; it is the likely adverse impact on the health of the population through our health service, and on our future achievements in science, engineering and medicine. I really detest the unpleasant anti-migrant stance being pandered to. However, I am far more worried about the failure of the long-term political determination to make Europe safe from ourselves for ourselves. It seems we have very short historical memories. I am with Kenneth Clarke, the Member who, to me at least, made the most sense in the other place. But I am also with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker: I am with Tony. And here today I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, who made such sense on how we might work our way towards getting a further opinion from the population; and with the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, who as always spoke such great sense in this House.
I cannot change my mind just because other Members of this House who were remainers have decided it is now politically convenient to change sides; nor should they expect me to. While I am sympathetic to the intelligent insights of the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Oareford, into the mind of Brussels, which wants us to make up our minds fast so that we can all get on with it, when the outcome is so catastrophic, frankly, we should wait, try again and see whether we can cajole and persuade people that the emotions they have today are wrong. I will leave you with John Donne, and a poem which will mean something to us all:
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less”.
I fear that this Bill will make clods of us all, to be washed away as Europe slowly disintegrates. I will not collude with any step that seeks to distance us from our European allies, and I will support the Liberal Democrats and those others in this House who wish to amend as far as we can, but also seek to persuade that we can make things happen another way.
Lord Framlingham (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, but I fear I am going to take a slightly different line. All great issues are essentially very simple. We make them complicated when we do not want to face them. Our leaving the European Union will count historically as one of the greatest ever examples of this. Quite simply, we are leaving. In the short time I have to speak, I am not going to talk about yesterday, or even much about today, but about tomorrow, about the future—the future of our country, of our people and quite probably our House of Lords.
Nor do I plan to talk about how I cast my vote in the referendum. It is on the record, but it is now irrelevant. Referring to how we voted in debates such as this is seriously counterproductive. It tends to colour not necessarily what we say but how our remarks are perceived by others, who assume we are seeking to justify our position and remake our case. For those of us seeking to move forward, this is just not so. The vote was taken; it is behind us; and we must now as a House prepare to face the future.
It has been said by some that in last year’s referendum the people did not really understand what they were voting for, the ramifications of their actions, and what was at stake. This is, I believe, wrong and patronising. No one could possibly understand every little consequential detail, but surely people knew and understood the broad principle and its effects.
There are three big differences between a general election campaign and this particular referendum. In a general election, the country divides broadly speaking on party lines; in the referendum, party allegiance counted for nothing. In a general election, each party produces a long and detailed manifesto, which few people take the time and trouble to read through; in the referendum, all the most important issues were set out by the Government and the opposing parties, and were further teased out in protracted debates—many on national television. The country was, and still is, as engaged as never before on this issue. Finally, in a general election people have just three weeks to take in all the available information and come to a decision, again usually falling back into their party groupings; in the case of the referendum, the country has had 40 years to watch the EU unfold. People have had plenty of time to digest its effect on their lives and quietly make up their minds. Many people will have had personal experience of the effect of belonging to the EU. Indeed, fishermen and farmers, to name but two groups, will know and understand the workings of the EU as well as anyone. I suspect that the votes cast in this referendum were given more careful consideration than any cast in this country in living memory, and to doubt the genuineness of people’s decisions is to do them, in my view, a great disservice.
Churchill said, as has been quoted before, “Trust the people”, and that is exactly what we should do. This debate, despite the way it is going from time to time, is not or should not be about the details of our leaving and the negotiations involved, but simply about the principle of leaving and starting the process. The country is looking to us at this crucial time. We are in the spotlight as never before. Which road are we going to choose?
Most people are expecting, and certainly the media are confidently predicting, that we will be difficult, grudging, unhelpful, obstructive, curmudgeonly, backward-looking and yearning for what has gone before. What a wonderful opportunity to prove them wrong. Let us be forward-looking, positive, helpful to the Government, constructive and, dare I even say it, optimistic. I know that for many of us this will mean a real leap of faith. It is asking a lot, but such a lot is at stake. I know and understand that divisions and loyalties are long-established and run very deep, but we must have faith—faith in the people, faith in their decision, and faith in their willingness to make it work. If they are willing to make that commitment and effort, should not we be prepared to make it too?
I have played a lot of sport in my life at all levels, and one thing I know for certain is that it is quite impossible to achieve a successful and happy result if half the team members not only want you to lose but are vigorously working to bring that about. I repeat what I said at the start of my remarks: all great issues are essentially very simple, but we make them complicated and we do not want to face them. We must face this one, the biggest decision that we in this House will ever be asked to make. We must face it and make it a success for the sake of the people, the country and, I believe, the future of your Lordships’ House.
Lord Morris of Handsworth (Lab)
My Lords, immigration dominated the EU referendum. Who can forget UKIP’s “Breaking Point” poster unveiled by Nigel Farage during the campaign? Given that the debate was about whether we should leave the European Union and not about whether we should leave the world, it is worth noting that not everyone who comes from mainland Europe to the UK has the intention to immigrate, nor is every immigrant who comes to our shores from the European Union. Recently, the other place defeated attempts to persuade the Government to give EU citizens permanent residence after Brexit, a right I hope will be accommodated by reciprocal arrangements. We can all speculate about what might happen in the future. I want to look at what is actually happening now. You do not have to travel very far to recognise that some of the decisions being taken are almost tantamount to shooting oneself. Of course, it is not difficult to shoot oneself in the foot, but to stand on your head to do it takes some energy.
Just who are these workers that the Government think we can do without and treat with such derision? It is recorded that some 55,000 NHS workers are from EU countries—doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, support workers and administrative staff. European workers make up 10% of our registered doctors and 4% of our registered nurses. It is common ground that the UK economy needs more workers with these skills, so why are we so ready to turn our backs on them as we say goodbye to our membership of the European Union? It is also common ground that we need more care workers. Currently, 5% of our care workers are from EU countries; approximately 90% do not have British citizenship and their future immigration status remains uncertain. Our nursing homes are closing at the rate of one per week due mainly to a shortage of nurses. It has also been reported that 15% of our researchers and lecturers in universities and higher education are already leaving or rejecting UK higher education posts because of Brexit. Many of these are scientists and researchers whose skills we badly need. Some 90% of British fruit and vegetables are picked, graded and packed by 60,000 workers from overseas, mostly eastern Europe. One farmer is quoted as saying:
“either we bring the people to the work or we take the work to the people”.
This shortage of agricultural labour brings economic danger because we import some 25% of our food from other EU countries.
The Government seem to be confident that they will be able to deal with the countries on which we are turning our backs. As a former negotiator, I would not be so confident. It is reported that the number of EU citizens applying for permanent residence has risen by nearly 50% since the referendum. However, research carried out for the Financial Times suggests that three-quarters of EU citizens working in the UK would not meet current visa requirements for non-EU workers if Britain left the block. The media coverage last weekend of the leaked documents from MEPs will be no surprise to many EU residents in the UK. They already find themselves in a legal no man’s land long before we actually leave the EU. Is it any surprise that EU nationals are already leaving what they see as a sinking ship? The financial and emotional cost to applicants and their families is enormous. What about the cost to us of losing their skills? What of UK citizens living in other EU countries? Recent headlines have warned of a backlash over the Prime Minister’s Brexit approach. Many have lived and worked in EU countries for years, building families and communities and being model citizens. They do so often into retirement and beyond. What are we offering to them? Not a lot—and some would say nothing at all.
I for one wanted to remain in the EU, but as a believer in the democratic process and accepting that the majority of people chose to leave, I accept that the will of the people should prevail. But this is not a political game. People on both sides of the Channel cannot be left in limbo. Decisions have to be made about their futures. Part of my responsibility in another life was the oversight of the union’s membership in Gibraltar. Ten years after retirement, I am still receiving letters about the position of Gibraltarian citizens. That is a neglect of duty and of moral responsibility. If we do nothing for weeks and months, we must address the uncertainties and fears of the Gibraltarians. I say that because I remember working through the problems associated with Gibraltar’s status some 10 years ago. Let us not ruin the relationship that has been built between Spain, Britain and Gibraltar. That also underlies this debate. I trust that the Government will give it serious and urgent consideration.
This is not a political game. We must reach an early decision, because too many decisions are being left in the out-tray without any attention in terms of businesses, communities and the lives of individuals. We must act now. The European Community came together to ensure peace. If we are to leave, let us leave in peace with our heads held high.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, one effect of growing up as a post-war child was hearing the amount of discussion and determination among the political classes that we would never have another war in Europe. At the top of my list of worries about Brexit is that we shall see an insular, narrow-minded nationalism taking hold and turning us from an outgoing, internationalist nation into an inward-looking nation.
We have heard much in the past day and a half about interdependence, which has to be one of the keys when we think about what we should do next. Brexit is not all about trade, although to listen to the Government you might think that it was. I firmly believe that, first and foremost, it should be about peace and security. I agreed strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, when he said yesterday that endangering peace and security in Europe would be grounds to reject the deal. Incidentally, although I agreed with some of the speech made by Tony Blair, I thought it ironic he should tell everyone to rise up. When more millions than were ever seen all rose up and marched when he was Prime Minister, he took not a blind bit of notice.
Many of your Lordships will know that I spend a lot of time in France when I am not here. My experience of reaction to the UK decision to seek Brexit is that it has been one of extreme concern that it will accelerate the rise of extremist nationalist parties. That is happening all over Europe now. Europe and its member states therefore have many concerns and worries other than negotiating a Brexit deal with the UK. Those whose job it is will of course concentrate on it but, politically, any deal will have to be negotiated against a fast-changing political picture in Europe. It is not as though our negotiating partners will stay unchanged. By the end of two years the Europe with which we are negotiating will be very different. It may be a much longer timescale than the Government are thinking.
In the meantime, I worry what we are going to do about the day-to-day legislation we should be looking at. My noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie put it so eloquently yesterday when he said that day-to-day life will be sacrificed. We will be spending time on the great repeal Bill and not on all the other incredibly important issues. There are so many pressing issues in the area which I concentrate on in this House—the environment, agriculture and food—yet the immense changes that are going to happen as a result of Brexit will be a threat to our food quality, animal welfare standards, family farms and landscape. If at the end of this we have a hard deal where WTO rules apply, we will see our food production driven down to the lowest common denominator. It would be a disaster in so many ways. It would not be accompanied by lower food bills: another day-to-day effect will be people seeing those go up.
Over the course of this debate it has bothered me that in the Government’s mind there appears to be a direct trade-off between UK citizens living in the EU and European citizens living here. In fact, UK citizens living in the EU face 27 different sorts of issue and their position is not necessarily equivalent to that of EU citizens here. The Government should, therefore, settle the situation of EU citizens here—thereby creating some good will—but at the same time do far more to help British citizens abroad, who have been left with no information, not even a helpline. The Government could decide now to give much more information about the future to those people who have to plan to relocate and find new jobs, schools for their children and care for their elderly. This would be about not the result of the negotiations but what their rights are now. That has been put on the sidelines because of this so-called trade-off.
There has been much talk of patriotic duty: I believe mine is to try and do what is in the best long-term interests of this country. As my noble friend Lord Newby said at the beginning of this debate, it is unconscionable to sit on our hands. If there is no deal, or the final deal is appalling, or it threatens peace and security, there is an absolute duty on us as parliamentarians to call a halt. I hope we will amend the Bill in order that we can offer that safety net to the Government and the country.
Lord O'Neill of Gatley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I would like to make four points. First, the decision to hold a referendum on membership of the EU in the first place was driven by politics, especially those of the party governing the country. Not a great deal of thought was given to the economics of the issue, but now that we are faced with the reality we must do so. Secondly, while the decision to leave the EU is hugely important for the future of the UK economy and our society, I do not believe that it is the only important economic issue for our future. I believe that the challenge of productivity, the ongoing apparent weakness of key aspects of our education system and skills training, and the highly unbalanced nature of the overall British economy are all at least as important. Of course, sadly, it may be the case—indeed, it probably is the case—that each of these challenges will become even more difficult as a result of the decision to leave the EU. If the decision to leave were to result in more serious focus on these challenges, and smarter, better-thought-out polices, it might allow for some positives out of the EU departure than otherwise might not have occurred. There is, as of yet, no real evidence to support such an optimistic hope but one lives in hope. In this context, this House certainly has a role to play, and it should by ensuring we make the best out of a poor hand.
Thirdly, as someone closely associated with the changing nature of the world economy, I would have hoped for sharper thinking about trade issues. There has been, and remains, enormous focus on legal and other technicalities of Article 50 and trade deals. While partially understandable, the degree of it in my view is misplaced. The biggest drivers of trade are the performances of domestic demand growth and competitiveness, as well as the geographic distance from trade partners.
A country’s imports are greatly driven by the level of its own domestic demand and the cost of imports relative to domestic goods and services. Similarly, exports are typically driven by domestic demand in the most important markets and the price of those exports for foreign consumers. While bilateral and/or multilateral trade agreements are important, they are not as important as rates of domestic demand growth. It is noteworthy in this regard, for example, that today China is the number one importer—I emphasise importer—for at least 70 countries, without having meaningful trade deals with hardly any other countries, other than, of course, being a member of the WTO.
This kind of evidence suggests that UK trade could prosper outside the EU, but we would need to go about life perhaps somewhat dramatically differently than we have started to do so far. Since the referendum result, we should have, and should still be doing even more than before to try and boost our so-called golden relationship with China—not doubting it—and aggressively pursuing stronger relationships with other rapidly rising economies, including, of course, India. At the same time, we need somehow to do our best to keep as close as we can to our geographic neighbours in Europe. While their share in our overall trade has declined, and is set to continue to decline, it will be a long time before any other country or region gets close to the importance of the EU.
Focusing on geographically distant and smaller countries, as beautiful as they are, such as New Zealand, may be easier, and might suit the politics, but they will not be materially relevant for the economics of our future trade performance. It is also the case that some highly globally integrated industries, which among other things, are very important for UK exports. They need something effectively as close to the single market rules as possible to continue thriving. This is true for autos and financial services, and no doubt some others.
Fourthly, as important as our trade ambition should be, the bigger concern for me is our ability and desire to continue to attract the world’s most talented and skilled immigrants. There is a huge amount of evidence that skilled immigration is very positive for productivity, for some key industries, and of course, for our excellent universities—perhaps crucial. The Government need to be highly focused—and more focused—on making sure that any obsession with demonstrating overall impact about immigration does not result in losing key talent.
I would also like to say in finishing that it also continues to make little sense for overseas students to be included in any overall target for reduced immigration targets, and I encourage the Minister to request a shift in this part of the Government’s stance, irrespective of this Bill and any amendments to it.
The Marquess of Lothian (Con)
My Lords, last June I voted to leave the European Union. After years of urgently needed reform of the Union being promised and never delivered, and finding ourselves on the path inexorably to ever-closer union, I decided that the time had come to leave and, thankfully, a majority of the British people took the same view. This has been and still is a marathon debate and we have heard an enormous number of views. Most of them I have seen as trying to refight the referendum all over again and I do not intend to be part of that argument. That argument has had its airing. I want to look forward to what is going to happen after the Bill is passed. The Bill will start the exit process simply and without frills. We do it no favours by hanging amendments on it. The process will be complex anyway and it will not be helped if this House appears to be making it even more complicated.
We have heard a lot in this debate and before about the need to set out a negotiating strategy publicly in advance. I learned during the peace process in Northern Ireland that successful international negotiations are better carried out under the radar. Attempts publicly to lay down the ambit of negotiations help only the other side. Equally, you do not negotiate with your cards face up on the table, much as Mr Barnier would like you to. You hold them close to your chest and play them at the best possible moment. No successful negotiations can be conducted if one side in those negotiations is at war with itself. I make this point in all seriousness. That presents an open target to the other side and we must think very carefully about how we deploy our feelings as we move forward. We have all expressed our views over these past months and I respectfully suggest—although, I have to say, not with great hope—that in the national interest we should now all exercise restraint and let the Government get on with it.
That is not all. There is another thing we need urgently to look at. We have a duty to think with imagination and self-belief about the future, not just our relations with Europe but our place in the world. The democratic decision to leave the EU provides an enormous opportunity to do this. Whether we seize it depends on whether or not we plan and prepare for it now. It will not happen if we are still fighting our old referendum battles. We must now put them behind us and look forward. It is not about just bilateral trade deals and rights of residence. Of course those are essential elements, which must be established as we move through the Brexit process and beyond, but we need to raise our eyes and our aspirations. We need urgently to decide how we see a future Britain. We need a new, bold view of what we want Britain’s role in the world to be—something which, I have to say, has rarely been possible within the EU. We should seek once and for all to end the culture that Churchill once described as being “adamant for drift” and to outline a clear new purpose towards which we can begin to plan now.
The history of our country was built on a combination of vision, dogged determination and the courage to take on the odds and win through. I believe that those elements are still part of our national psyche. Over these past years, they may have been somewhat dormant. The time has come to reawaken them. The Bill presages a momentous point in our history—whether for good or bad ultimately will depend on us. One thing is certain: successful momentous outcomes do not fall into your lap. You have to go out and earn them. We need a vision and a strategy and then that dogged determination and courage to make them a reality. That ultimately is how Brexit will be judged and, in the end, that is a challenge for us all.
The Earl of Sandwich (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow a friend of over 50 years. Even Brexit will not divide us.
The Prime Minister’s foreword to the White Paper says that we are “a great global nation”. Few would quarrel with that. What concerns me today is our responsibility to that globe. Have the Government considered properly the effects of our proposed withdrawal on developing and post-conflict countries in particular, including Commonwealth countries and our own overseas territories? The noble Lord, Lord Morris, has just reminded us of Gibraltar. I have tabled an amendment because even the White Paper is silent on this.
Ironically, before last June’s fateful decision, David Cameron had presided over some of the higher moments relating to our global responsibilities, most notably the new dawn of the new sustainable development goals. Today the more vulnerable countries, which value their relationships with the UK, fear that our leaving the EU also means a downplaying of our international relations and our many commitments to help them. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said a lot more about that.
I start with the effect of Brexit on post-conflict countries in eastern Europe, having just returned from a visit to Kosovo, a country which we have championed and were the first to recognise. The Government can hardly deny that leaving the EU must mean giving up on enlargement, one of the cornerstones of our European policy. I have had reassurances from Ministers that we “remain committed to European security”, but what about the civilian CSDP programmes in Ukraine and Kosovo? The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, made strong points on security. I expect the Minister will say something definite about this.
NATO will remain the principal channel of security in eastern Europe. However, Russia has always feared and exaggerated Europe’s influence on its own former protégés. The EU’s projection of ideas can have an implicit political impact and the Commission may have overreached itself in Ukraine. Surely, however, we must stand firmly behind the Copenhagen principles of human rights, democracy, transparency and the rule of law that underlay membership of the EU. The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, reminded us that we were behind many of these principles from their origin. I assume that they continue to apply post-Brexit, not just for two years but well beyond the time of our departure. They may be difficult to apply in some countries, but we must resolutely stand by them. I fear that leaving the EU could weaken that resolution.
The European Union also brings these ideas to the poorest countries. In Africa the UK has been prominent in EU programmes, such as those to defeat piracy and to rescue trafficked migrants from the Mediterranean. We need to know how we are supposed to continue these operations other than in partnership with the EU. Will the Minister comment on that at least? In Mali and Niger the UK has played a small part in the EU missions against terrorism which, on the whole, have been successful in containing al-Qaeda, especially in the north of Mali.
Trade is another major area that brings considerable uncertainties. Once we leave the EU, we will need to negotiate separate free trade agreements with all 78 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries that currently enjoy tariff-free entry into Europe. This will not be an easy process in itself, but if it is left to the last minute some of the poorer, smaller nations could be left high and dry as far as our trade relations go.
On aid, I hope it goes without saying that the UK will continue to join international partnerships devoted to health campaigns against HIV/AIDS, polio and malaria. I expect our leadership role there to be unchanged, but all this will have to be reviewed. We make a huge contribution to health services in Africa, just as health workers from Africa make a vital contribution to our own NHS. Long may this continue while they can obtain visas and rights of residence.
I am less certain where we stand with the European Development Fund and ECHO. The EDF focuses on the least developed countries and the UK is the third largest donor. Our departure will have a great impact. ECHO is the EU’s humanitarian programme. It monitors emergencies on a daily basis throughout the world. Both are programmes of major importance to the poorest and most disaster-prone countries and the ones that are vulnerable to climate change. The EDF is technically outside the EU budget but it is a significant instrument, linked to the Cotonou agreement. Have the Government calculated the effect of our withdrawing from these on the beneficiaries as well as on the programmes?
EU member states form the world’s largest source of development funding, and taken together they currently make a huge contribution to poverty reduction and help to defeat epidemics. The UK’s withdrawal presumably will not mean that we no longer share data with other European countries, yet without partnership of some kind, we will be losing that important connection in international health—just as my noble friend Lord Blair reminded us also happens in policing and with the European arrest warrant. Can the Minister explain how this will work? Far be it from me to present Cassandra-like forecasts of doom, but no one has yet done the homework, and our former civil servants on the Cross Benches are quite doubtful about the cost of the whole process. But what is certain is that by withdrawing, we remove an important pillar from the European structure of aid and development, which we know is bound to hurt our most vulnerable trading partners.
Lord Trimble (Con)
My Lords, this is obviously an important debate, but I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I say that there is a certain degree of unreality about it, not just because so many people are anxious to refight old battles but because the discussion is about a negotiation. However, there is no negotiation at the moment, so to a certain extent this is so much hot air, talking about what might happen or what you might do. It is not until we get into the negotiation that we will start to encounter reality.
Therefore I say first to our Front Bench that we should trigger Article 50 as soon as possible, perhaps not even wait until the enactment of this Bill. The more time that is spent before Article 50 is enacted, the more time there is for people to waste their energy and confuse themselves—and there is plenty of that happening. I am not suggesting that immediately after triggering Article 50 things will be easy. They will be very difficult, I think, at that point.
I remember some time ago taking evidence in a Select Committee about the trade agreement, TTIP. A couple of witnesses observed to us that the European Union was a very difficult body to negotiate with. When asked why, one said that it spent so much time getting a common position among all 27 countries that it found it incredibly difficult to move away from that position. When we go in and put down our proposals, they will have already spent time working out their proposals, and I am not sure whether there will be any real progress after that.
As to how one should conduct the negotiation, I agree with the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and my noble friend Lord Lothian, and with yesterday’s speech by my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, which all included good things to bear in mind about the negotiation. But we will just have to see how that works out.
What do we do in the meantime? We have 15 to 18 months to go. Addressing our Front Bench again directly, I think we should bring on the great repeal Bill as quickly as possible so that Parliament can get into it. There will be a lot more meat in that than there is in this Bill, and all the things that people are talking about as likely amendments would be dealt with much better in that context than in the context of this Bill. In fact, as the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, observed in the Times today, this is not a matter of scrutinising or improving the Bill, as all the amendments would put strange new things into the Bill that were not part of it. That is not really what we should be doing at this stage. We should do that at a later stage.
Bringing forward the great repeal Bill and going through its processes is fine up to a point, but there is a huge amount of work to be done alongside or after that, because that Bill will bring all our existing EU legislation into our own system. We can then look at it and consider what we want to keep, what we want to amend and what we want to remove. That will be a huge job, and it is difficult to see what will go into the Bill that will do it. We should start on that job as soon as possible. Saying that we will wait until the exit negotiations are complete is just sitting twiddling your thumbs when you could be doing something useful. We will have to consider how we are going to deal with this. We need a bespoke solution. Trying to modify normal legislative practice could cause some difficulty. Some people are anticipating the largest and most comprehensive Henry VIII clause that there has ever been. I do not think that is a terribly good way of doing it. We will have to find a way. We could then spend time—indeed, this House, with its experience in these matters, could make a significant contribution—sorting out what we do with the inherited acquis, which cannot just be left without being looked at; it has to be considered.
Another thing should be in the great repeal Bill. There is probably a plan for it to be in there, but if not I am sure it will go in. There should be some clauses to meet the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, yesterday. Such clauses could be tailored to provide the parliamentary involvement that he said the courts have indicated will be necessary. We should look at that.
By virtue of getting this Bill going, we underline and strengthen the Government’s position that they are prepared to walk away from a bad deal. It is important that they are prepared to walk away. If you are dealing with a negotiation such as this with lots of rules, it is importance to remember that you have no leverage if you are not prepared to leave the table. At the same time, you have to persuade people that you bring to the table something that is worth having. Those points are not entirely consistent, but you have to be prepared to do it. We will have to be prepared for something fairly tough.
My final observation does not follow from anything I have just said. It goes back a bit. There have been references to David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate our position in Europe, which led to the referendum. My comment is simply this: had Europe really wanted to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union, it should have given him something of substance, something really important, to enable him to win his referendum. Its failure to do that tells you an awful lot about its basic approach.
Lord Thomas of Swynnerton (CB)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, has often shown by his example something which can inspire us.
As speaker number 112 on this list, I must be your Lordships’ dinner gong as well. This is quite appropriate since, as a historian, I found in my archives a reference to the Flemings—when they negotiate, they ask you to lunch. This pearl of wisdom derives from a history of the 16th century, written at the time by the noble Bishop Bartolemé de las Casas, which I have in my library.
Lunch or not, I am a survivor of the first referendum on Europe—that of Harold Wilson in 1975. I organised, at that time, a list of no fewer than 200 writers who supported the idea of Britain in Europe. They included two of our Nobel prizewinners for literature—Sir Vidiadhar Naipaul and Mr Harold Pinter. I also wrote a pamphlet in the 1970s, entitled Europe, the Radical Opportunity, at a time when I still thought the adjective “radical” had a benign usage. I mention those activities, since I am tempted to say that I regard myself as still bound by the referendum vote of 1975, rather than of 2016. How long does a referendum bind its voters? There has been no discussion at all on this important constitutional matter.
I was impressed by many speeches yesterday, but I want to mention three. The first was by my noble and right reverend friend Lord Eames who was archbishop of Ireland. He adjured us to be exceptionally sensitive about the words we use. Language is more important than we think it is, he wisely commented.
I was also impressed by, and pleased with, the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem —I hope that I have pronounced that correctly—who insisted that Britain should adopt a generous, positive and affectionate attitude to all the European Union citizens who have come to live here. Mean behaviour is always a mistake.
I also enjoyed the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, not just because I once went to tutorials in Newnham, an important suburb of Cambridge, with a great scholar, Dr Walter Ullmann, but because I, like her, believe that the great achievement of the European Union, European Community or Common Market—however you put it—has been to confirm a permanent peace in Europe enjoyed by our generation. We do not always remember that Britain has been a continuous participant in European wars—not just the great wars of the 20th century but all those beforehand, with the exception of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
I was also affected by the eloquent speech of my noble friend—whom I am glad to see more or less in his place—Lord Faulks, who, like me, voted to remain, as he told us, and who I think argued that the time to contrive a new creative relation for this country has not quite come. That point was of course made by my noble and learned friend Lord Hope. However, it will have to be done, perhaps using NATO as our starting point, as suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham.
The late Lord Dacre of Glanton, Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose absence from this House is very much regretted, and always will be by those who remember him, described in one of his essays how his hero, the great Edward Gibbon—a Member of the other place as a matter of fact—was a European. It is an accolade which all historians and enlightened persons should aspire to obtain, whatever the details at the conclusion of our negotiations on this matter.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Tuesday 21st February 2017
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 103(h) Amendment for Committee (PDF, 52KB) - (21 Feb 2017)
Lord Tugendhat (Con)
My Lords, this is in many ways a sad occasion for me because, as the House knows, I was a European Commissioner for many years. I was very proud to serve in that role; I believed then, and I believe now, that the work on which I was engaged was in the underlying and long-term interests of the United Kingdom. Now that we have decided to leave, I share many of the emotions that were expressed last night by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, at the beginning of her speech. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, for the words of appreciation that he expressed for those of us who have worked in European institutions and who have sought to further the cause of Britain in Europe. However, we failed to convince our fellow countrymen and women, and we therefore have no choice but to accept the result of the referendum.
The referendum was fought on the basis of in or out, and the Government, supported by Parliament, promised to accept the result. Indeed, I myself promised to accept the result when we debated the referendum Bill in the summer. To attempt to go back on that result would not just have been a massive breach of faith; it would have ended in disaster. The Government would have lost all credibility both within this country and within the European Union, and it would have been quite impossible for them to conduct any sort of constructive policy either here or there. I hope that this is a point that my noble friends Lady Altmann and Lady Wheatcroft, who spoke with such emotion, would like to reflect upon. The right course now, in the Government’s own words, is to set out to create a new partnership that works both for us and for the European Union and its member states, with whom we have so many bonds of friendship and common interests. These are economic, financial, foreign policy, strategic and security, and I believe that the approach set out in the Lancaster House speech and the White Paper is the right place to begin.
I say that not least because it respects the stated wishes of the other EU leaders. They have made it quite clear that their emphasis is on the integrity of the European Union. What they do not want is a repetition of the negotiations over opt-outs and derogations involving issues of principle that necessarily characterised the Cameron negotiations. If we go down the route of aiming to stay in the single market and the customs union as an object of policy, we will be going down exactly the route which our negotiating opposite numbers do not want. We cannot combine those objectives with taking back control of immigration and rejecting the supremacy of the European Court of Justice. It is, therefore, far better to set out with the 27 remaining members of the EU and with the EU institutions on building a new UK-EU partnership covering all our common interests that takes account of their red lines and of our referendum.
The negotiations may well be very tough—the noble Lord, Lord Birt, expressed a strong view on that last night—but they need not be either protracted or overly difficult, and I shall explain why. In a normal negotiation, the two sides have to put together a new structure. In this one, we start with a structure because we are all members of the European Union. The question is how much of that structure to dismantle, to the disadvantage of both sides, and how much to retain under a new brand and in a new form as part of a new partnership. There is no need in these negotiations to start from scratch and then go through all the work that would have to be done. We should start from where we are and see how much of the existing arrangements it is in the best interests of both sides to keep within the context of the new partnership. There are models that could be moved from one to the other; there are models that can be built on; there are models that can be retained. That is the direction down which the negotiation will, I hope, go. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, might be right and it might all end in failure, but, personally, I take a more optimistic view.
Of course, the other 27 members and the EU institutions will not want the new deal to be as good for us in their eyes—I emphasise in their eyes—as the existing relationship. We must accept that. The challenge for Britain will be to make up for that by taking advantage of the new opportunities that open up for us in trade and in other fields as a result of leaving the Union. That will not be easy, but I hope very much that we will succeed. I hope, too, that we will maintain as much co-operation as possible with the other members of the EU on matters of foreign policy, security, research, Europol and wherever else is to our mutual advantage.
I hope very much that the new partnership will be a more harmonious one than our membership of the European Union has sometimes been. We must not look back on the past through rose-tinted spectacles. All of us who have been involved with the European Union know that the marriage was not always a very happy one, and we must hope that the new partnership will be set up on more lasting lines.
Lord Darling of Roulanish (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. I agree with just about everything he said. I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests. In particular, I am a director of Morgan Stanley, a trustee of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and president of Chatham House.
Invoking Article 50 is the inevitable consequence of the referendum result last year. There is no alternative but to do that. I am being consistent here. Throughout the Scottish referendum campaign, in which I played some part, I made it very clear that the result would be binding. If we voted to leave, that was it; there was no going back. For the sake of consistency, and because I happen to think it is right as a matter of democratic principle, if we ask people what they think and they come back with an answer, even if we do not like the answer, we have to go along with it. There is no point in trying to rerun the arguments that should frankly have been made with more force on my side last year. It did not work and we now have that result. It is now up to us to ensure that we try to shape things so that we get the best possible result for the United Kingdom, as the noble Lord has just said.
However, that will not be easy. I also, of course, part company with the many who have spoken who take a different view from mine—mainly from the Benches opposite—who are more or less inviting us to give the Prime Minister and the Government a blank cheque. I am not prepared to do that. The problem is this: whereas a narrow majority, but a majority none the less, voted for us to leave the European Union last year—we know what they are against—there was no plan B, no alternative on the ballot paper. It is not at all clear exactly what people were voting for. The truth is that there will be a whole spectrum of people who voted to leave the European Union and will not be happy until we treat it as any other third country—keeping it at a distance—and those who just wanted a rearrangement and a slightly different sense of direction.
The problem is that the leavers did not expect to win and the remainers thought they would, and the result was that there was no plan B waiting to be taken down. That is why we get the impression that the Government over the last few months have been very much making up matters on the hoof and why we have a White Paper which must be the thinnest government publication I have ever seen—I say that having been a Member of a Government for 13 years. This has precious little to commend it.
The next two to five years will be critical and, of course, they also take place in unusual circumstances in British politics. The Prime Minister has chosen to tack towards the Brexiteers because she does not see that there is much in the way of opposition that would pull her back the other way. However, that means that the middle ground of British politics has been abandoned, which is a very dangerous place for us to be. There are many people in this country—even a majority—who are prepared to say that there will be a different relationship, but they want a voice and at the moment they are not always getting it.
I might also say that the idea that after a referendum people will come together may be a pious hope. I live in Edinburgh; Scotland is more divided now than it was two years ago. The wounds every day are being reopened and, as the House will know, the nationalists never accepted the result and have always said they will come back. I imagine that had last June’s result gone the other way, the idea that those who were against the European Union for the last 40 years would have kept quiet and gone away is fanciful.
Those of us who believe in openness, in trade, and who take a liberal view of where this country should stand in the world, will not want to abandon everything that we believe in but we have to accept the referendum result. However, we must also be ready to engage.
Following on from the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, I would say that there are alliances to be made if only the Prime Minister and the Government would allow themselves to make them. This is not a divorce with one party on either side of the table. There are 27 on the other side, and in many ways 27 different views as to where we ought to end up. If we were living in a rational world—the world described by the noble Lord, Lord Hill, yesterday—and there was no politics in all of this, I suppose we could say, “We all have problems with freedom of movement of people, so why not look at this again?”. We know that there are problems with the construction of the single European currency—the euro and the Eurozone. However, we have to recognise that the politics on the other side of the channel is different. We are the only country that joined the European Union largely because of trade. Most of them joined to escape their history, to avoid some of the terrible things that happened in the past. That is why we have an attraction to an ever closer union because they saw it as a political rather than an economic construct.
We also need to have a grown-up conversation with our own people. Negotiations inevitably involve compromise, and it does not matter whether you are negotiating with the United States or anyone else. By the way, I do not regard a deal with the US as an alternative to a deal with the rest of Europe. If America is to come first, it seems to me that somebody will have to come second. I do not have the slightest doubt that we will get some sort of deal but I just wonder what it might be. So it is not an alternative, and that is all the more reason for engaging constructively with the European Union as we go through the difficult issues of trade and the free movement of people.
All these issues are set out in the White Paper and they all sound absolutely fine, except that someone on the other side has to agree to them. That is why I do not accept the argument that from now on those of us on the remain side should sit back, say nothing and simply give the Government a blank cheque to proceed. We cannot do that because there are so many uncertainties and unanswered questions, whether on the freedom of movement or sectoral trade agreements, which sound like we are going back to the planning agreements of the 1940s. How will all this work?
Finally, none of these negotiations will be conducted in secret. It is not a case of sending away negotiators who will come back in two years’ time. There will be a running commentary on all this every single day. You cannot talk to 27 other countries and expect anyone to keep quiet for more than about 30 seconds. So let us be grown-up about it and engage positively. However, the Brexiters and the Government have to accept that there is a large section of the population in this country and a large number among the membership in this House and the other place who will not for one moment accept some of the extreme arguments being put forward and who think that the voice of reason must prevail for the good of our country in the decades to come.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I have tabled an amendment on Euratom. Contrary to what the Leader of the House said yesterday in her opening speech, there is no mandate to leave Euratom. It is not part of the EU and it seems that, as a country, we are in danger of cutting off our nose to spite our face for no reason in terms of an electoral mandate.
Today, I want to speak primarily about my great-grandfather, Samuel Miller. He was a master sergeant in the Middlesex Regiment in the late 19th century. I think that he served in South Africa but in the late 1870s he was posted to Dublin. There, he fulfilled his military duties and one year later, in 1880, my grandmother, Edith Blanche—later Leddra—was born. Because of that accident, I was able to take on Irish citizenship, and indeed did so in 1996. I am a dual national. Therefore, after Brexit takes place, I will be able to have all the privileges of a European citizen, but that will not be the case for the 16 million people who voted to remain part of the European Union. Not just those with relatives who were born in other EU nations but those born in Ireland will also be able to decide whether to continue to have those privileges as European citizens in the UK beyond Brexit.
Perhaps I may remind your Lordships of some of those privileges. They include non-discrimination alongside other European nationals, the ability to move and reside without hindrance in European Union countries, the ability to work within the European Union, to establish a business, to export and to trade without red tape, the ability to have diplomatic representation, the ability to use our qualifications throughout Europe, and of course the right to healthcare and a European health insurance card when travelling in the EU.
I looked through the White Paper with a great deal of interest. As other noble Lords have said, it is not very long. Strangely, although there were a number of comments about reinforcing UK citizens’ rights in the rest of Europe, it said absolutely nothing about the 16 million of us who will be denied those privileges and rights through the vote of the 17 million. On that, there is a complete void. It is because of that that I feel that those 16 million who along with me voted to remain—I am not going back in history; this is just how it was—have been abandoned by this Government. It is not mentioned in the White Paper. There is no plan for us to retain those rights.
I have spoken with the European Parliament. It is my intention with other parliamentarians who have a similar concern not to negotiate with our own Government—I have no questions for the Minister today, because the Government cannot give what I am asking, nor do they have the power to do so—but to take a delegation of other parliamentarians to meet the rapporteur of the European Parliament and to ask it to protect those rights of our citizens either through membership or associate membership, and to try to achieve that where our own Government have clearly failed and have no interest.
Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)
My Lords, like previous speakers, I believe that the people’s decision in the EU referendum requires the Government to trigger Article 50. The Government should get this Bill and get ahead with their negotiations as soon as possible.
With regard to those negotiations, we must accept the logic of the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech. To regain control over immigration, the EU rules require the UK to leave the single market. If the UK is to make independent trade deals with third countries, we must leave at least parts of the customs union.
On the other side of the account, as the noble Lords, Lord Tugendhat and Lord Darling, said, the UK has much to offer our EU neighbours in terms of access to our markets, our financial services, our security co-operation, our universities and research establishments —and much else. Correspondingly, we have much to gain from our European partners.
Thus far, I go along with the Government. Like the noble Lords, Lord Tugendhat and Lord Darling, I believe that there is a deal to be done in rational negotiations. Press reports today suggest that Germany and some other of our European neighbours are prepared to take such an approach. I hope that those reports are right. But we cannot be sure that the negotiations will be rational. We have to allow for the possibility that, as the noble Lords, Lord Lawson and Lord Birt, said forcefully yesterday, such an agreement may not be available. We may ask our partners for things that they may feel unable to give; and they may ask of us things that we are unwilling to give, such as continuing large subventions to the EU budget.
Is the outcome of last June’s referendum to be interpreted as meaning that a majority of the United Kingdom want to leave the EU whatever the terms? The Government clearly think so. But on a matter of this importance have not the Government a duty to be sure before our departure becomes final? One has to ask why those who base their arguments for Brexit on the will of the people are now opposed to consulting the people on the outcome of the negotiations. One has to suspect that they fear that they will get a different answer, but, if so, we ought to know. I must say that I was surprised by the closing part of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, when he said that establishing the up-to-date view of the British electorate would be undemocratic.
I have a question for the Minister—there have not been many speeches that I have heard that have left questions for the noble Lord who is answering the debate tonight. Do the Government regard the views of the British people on the outcome of the negotiations as irrelevant to our departure?
I said previously in your Lordships’ House that I will support an amendment requiring the Government to consult the people again before our departure becomes final. Having said that I would support such an amendment, I will—but, in truth, I doubt whether such an amendment to the Bill is of much significance. As the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, said, much will happen over the next two years. If there is no agreement, or if the terms of any agreement are unsatisfactory, and if there is evidence that public opinion may have changed, I expect that the Labour Party will not be as co-operative as it is now, rightly, over the passage of the Bill. We know the position of the Liberal Democrats and of the Scottish Nationalists.
The Government may well be defeated in the House of Commons, as well as in this House, at the end of the negotiations. A matter of this importance is certainly an issue of confidence. If I am right that there is the prospect of that happening, by one route or another, the Government or a new one will have to return to seeking the views of the British people—and so they should.
Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)
My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests. I recognise that at this stage in the debate one struggles to find anything original to say, so I will content myself with a few short points.
On the Bill, it never occurred to me that after the vote happened last year there could be any question but that Parliament should have a voice before the triggering of Article 50. I recollect, possibly rather tragically, as a teenager sitting in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons during the six-day debate it had before the decision was made for Britain to join what was then the Common Market. My noble friend Lord Lamont permitted me to be a signatory to the Maastricht treaty as his deputy—my opportunity, he said, to put my footprints on the sands of history. I recall that, both before and after the agreement of that treaty, there were two-day debates on it in the House of Commons, which undoubtedly informed the way in which the negotiation took place. It is important that on something of this magnitude and gravity Parliament must have a role, a voice and a say.
Having said that, of course a decision has been made, not an expression of preference or view, by the public in the referendum. They were invited to make a decision and they did so. Therefore, it is completely appropriate that there should be a full debate, as is happening in this House, but it is totally inappropriate for the Bill to be significantly amended, and I hope that this House will think again. To me it would be a double affront to democracy to seek to overset both the verdict of the public and of the elected Chamber on this issue.
I remained undeclared during the referendum campaign and took no part in it. I thought the arguments were finely balanced, and that if there was a vote to leave there would be some short-term downside and some medium to long-term upside opportunity. For those who cheerfully say, “Well, we are in the short term and there has been no downside”, I simply say that the short term is not over yet. We are only eight months into this period, and the short term certainly includes the two years we are going into when the negotiations will take place, when businesses looking to invest will have concerns before they do so. With regard to the longer-term upside opportunity, I stress that it is opportunity and not certainty. Whether those opportunities are realised depends very much, obviously, on what happens in the meantime. Of course, as many of your Lordships have said in the course of this debate, the eventual arrangements are not in our sole gift; these are to be negotiated. We hope that collective economic self-interest among us and our 27 current partners will prevail and that there will be sensible arrangements which benefit all, but we know that rationality does not always obtain in politics.
There must of course be control over immigration, although I suspect that the actual number of immigrants is unlikely to fall by much, although its composition may well change. It is also extremely important that this country remains not only open to talent from around the world but that it actively seeks it, because that has been our history and much of our strength.
Will economic self-interest prevail and outweigh the desire that there clearly is in some parts of the EU to hurt the UK and to make sure, as my noble friend Lord Tugendhat said, that the UK cannot be seen to be better off afterwards than it was before? It was clear to me, as Trade Minister, that many of our partners in the EU see this as a zero-sum game. They see a benefit to one country as being a loss to others. We know that they are wrong. I hope that there is a consensus in this House that that is wrong. Economics is not a zero-sum game.
In the context of the excellent EU Financial Services Sub-Committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, looking at the clearing of euro-denominated instruments in London, of course it is open to the European Central Bank to ordain that that must happen within the EU. We know that that activity is not just about the euro; it is co-mingled with the clearing of other currencies. There are huge efficiency gains to the whole of the European Union from that continuing to be the case, and there would be a significant efficiency penalty, as well as potentially some systemic risk, if that were to be undermined. There are only two financial centres where this can take place—London and New York—and there is no place in any kind of medium term where that can take place within the rest of the European Union. Certainly, the European Central Bank can ordain that, but it is not what the doctor would order for the eurozone’s fragile financial system.
My last point is this: what is within our unilateral gift is to set the environment for business to take place in this country. It needs to be unequivocally welcoming, and we need to make this, as it has been for much of my lifetime, the go-to destination for people who want to put to work their expertise, their energy, their money and their ideas. That means a proportionate regulatory environment, a simple and low-rate tax regime, and continuing support for the world-leading science and research base. If we do those systematically, the arrangements to be reached with the European Union will matter—they are certainly not marginal—but we can do a huge amount ourselves unilaterally to make sure that the upside opportunities in the medium and long term that I see from Brexit can actually be realised.
Lord Triesman (Lab)
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Maude. I was once told by somebody else that he and I were true free marketeers and entrepreneurs, so I had better draw attention to my commercial interests in the register.
I will say a few words about the way in which I want to approach this. I have, sadly, been on the losing side in general elections. I recognise that the Government that were elected are the Government that are elected. But it never once occurred to me that I should be expected to abandon values or not try to do the job of Opposition. It was a fundamental expectation of our democracy that we should review things, hold people to account, amend and sometimes even reject—although in this case I accept the result in the referendum—but we should do so responsibly and respectfully, and without threatening one another or the existence of the political Chambers in which we work. None of that is of any help in trying to get a proper discussion in our democracy.
Indeed, I always thought that the point of being described as the “loyal Opposition” is that there is, of course, loyalty to the Crown and loyalty to the nation, but there is also loyalty to the concept of opposition and doing the job properly in a democracy; that is what people expect. For that reason, if we were to say, on a massive existential issue, that we are just going to wait until somebody thinks that we are more right, and then we will have the freedom to act as we wish and we should pass over any of the other tasks of the Opposition, that would be a woeful neglect and would never be understood by anybody in a democracy such as the United Kingdom.
I say to other noble Lords: be careful what you wish for. In many ways, it is the absence of a serious Opposition at the other end of this building that is the gravest risk to the Conservative Government. Not being able to say to people, “You have sometimes a rather curious view of the world, and there are other things and other voices that need to be considered”, is hugely dangerous, and we can avoid it at least in this House. Keir Starmer has done a fine job—a heroic one in many ways—but nobody could say that opposition has been shown fully. For example, the Prime Minister probably came here yesterday to seek a nostalgic reminder of what opposition was like, on the grounds that she had a very small chance of seeing it in the Chamber in which she operates.
I opposed leaving for lots of reasons, notwithstanding the EU’s irritating characteristics. There are a number of reasons why it is important to consider what we might say in the context of the Bill. When it started out, the decision that “Brexit means Brexit”—a transposition of a line from Alice Through the Looking-Glass: it means whatever you want—morphed, rationally or not, first into leaving the economic area and then into something along the lines of leaving the customs union, or at least substantial parts of it. It has morphed all the time, and the only thing that has finally ended up as consistent is the Prime Minister saying that she would rather have no deal than an unacceptable one. I have never believed that politicians were good negotiators and I will say it candidly in this House. Anyone who went into a negotiation and said, “This is my final point”, can expect the people on the other side to play it for all it is worth. It is an amateur approach and needs to be thought about with a great deal more seriousness.
I believe that we will be worse off on a number of fronts: the economic future; the staffing of the NHS and care homes; the excellence of our universities; in defence, where our key counterpart in the White House is an isolationist and, at least on the question of Sweden, a fantasist; on Europol; on Euratom; on the environment; on employment protection; on Ireland and hardened borders; and on the security of the United Kingdom as a union, which is something I have always supported. I think that we have problems, and the referendum debate on both sides did not throw much useful light on those issues.
I know that others disagree with me: they think I am wrong; I think they are wrong; and that is absolutely fine. However, none of us knows what it will be like in two years’ time. Of course we do not know what the conditions or the final settlement will be. In those circumstances, it is perfectly fair to say that the final terms need to be approved by a future Act of Parliament and we should consider that amendment. I also believe that it should go back to the people, exactly for the reasons described by the noble Lord, Lord Butler. If there is no agreement, it must be open to Parliament and the people of this country to consider whether they want any kind of system to replace the one from which they will be departing. Those are fundamental, existential issues for our country.
We should not play with people’s lives. They have put down roots; their kids go to school; they have families here. They are people about whom we normally express profound values. Let us not play with that. The use of “grandfathering” yesterday was not an accidental choice of word. It is about family and deeper values in the way we deal with people.
My final brief point is that this has been a very divisive period. A number of communities have felt the full force of that, including my own. I do not know how they have done it, but the Portuguese Government have managed to track some of the Sephardic community that left in 1492. I am in the happy position that I may apparently be offered Portuguese nationality, although I will have to take an exam in Portuguese which I am not optimistic about. Real, deep strains are coming out and people are experiencing fear and violence. To all the Brexiteers who said, “That is deplorable, the law should protect people and we always want to do so”, I say, “Stand up and do the things that protect people—do not leave them in this position where their lives seem parlous for no reason at all”.
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is in his place, I will thank him for the opportunity to debate this legislation which we might not have had if he had not played such a good role in the Supreme Court. As our party spokesman on home affairs I want to make absolutely clear that I support the protection of the rights of EU citizens resident in the UK and of UK citizens living in the EU.
This afternoon I seek to make only one point and to use one example to illustrate that point. The British people did not know the full consequences of leaving the EU at the time of the referendum and did not therefore make an informed choice. They are entitled to a vote on the final deal. As the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, said, none of us, on either side of the argument, knew what the full consequences of leaving the EU were going to be at the time of the referendum—and, of course, we will not know definitively until the negotiations are complete, although there are some things of which we are certain and which I will come to.
Let us be honest: no one, least of all the Conservative Government, thought much about the consequences of a leave vote because they never believed it would happen, as the noble Lord, Lord Darling, has just said. That is why the people need to decide, once they can make an informed choice, whether to accept the final deal negotiated by the Government. One thing is for sure: it is the people who started the process that will lead to the negations to leave the EU. Therefore, it is only the people who should decide, by means of a referendum, whether they want to go through with it once they have all the facts.
I come to my example. As the noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal said yesterday, the Government’s White Paper sets out in detail the 12 objectives for the negotiations, one of which is to continue to co-operate with our European partners in important areas such as crime, terrorism and foreign affairs—the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, clearly articulated how important such co-operation is. My noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire pointed out yesterday:
“The White Paper also pledges to maintain close co-operation on internal security, intelligence and crime, but without accepting judicial oversight of such sensitive issues. That will not be possible”.—[Official Report, 20/02/17; col. 30.]
A major plank of the leave campaign was to make the UK Parliament sovereign and for law to be decided by British courts. But, as I shall seek to demonstrate, essential co-operation with the European Union on issues of terrorism, serious and organised crime, policing and justice—matters that are the primary role of any Government to keep their people safe—cannot be achieved without ceding sovereignty. To be effective in combating terrorism and serious and organised crime, such as people trafficking and child sexual abuse, and to bring to justice criminals who flee from the EU to the UK or vice versa, there needs to be a mass exchange of information between the countries of the EU and the UK.
At the moment there are shared electronic databases, with more due to come on stream in the coming months. They enable a police officer who stops a suspect in the street in the UK to check instantly whether they are of interest to the security services anywhere in Europe and whether they are wanted under a European arrest warrant. Fingerprint and DNA samples found at the scene of a crime can be checked across the EU in seconds, minutes or hours, rather than in the weeks or months—if it could be done at all—that it would take using Interpol.
These EU databases are subject to data protection law agreed by EU member states. Compliance is overseen by the European Court of Justice. At the moment we have a say as to what these EU data protection laws are. When we leave the EU, we will not. If we are to continue to have access to these vital databases, we will have to comply with EU data protection law over which we will no longer have any say.
The Government have also said that they will no longer be subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. So who will adjudicate on our compliance with EU data protection law? The Government may say that there should be a bespoke body specifically to adjudicate on such matters, as it suggests in its White Paper. This will obviously duplicate the work currently undertaken by the ECJ. Who is going to pay for this bespoke body that will ensure that the UK complies with EU law over which we will have no say? One thing is for sure: it is not going to be the Mexicans.
The British people believed that we would be safer outside the EU. They believed that we would no longer be subject to EU law and that we would no longer have to pay anything to, or for anything to do with, the European Union. That is what they were told during the referendum debate, whether in good faith or not. The reality is that we will either be much less safe if we no longer have access to the information held on these EU databases, or we will have to give up sovereignty by complying with EU law over which we will no longer have any say. We will either still be subject to the ECJ or we will have to fund an alternative body to adjudicate on these issues. Not many people realise this, and even fewer realised it at the time of the referendum.
This is why we are proposing an amendment to the Bill which will enable the British people to decide on the final deal when they know exactly what the consequences of leaving the EU are. This is not necessarily because they were misled or did not understand, but because it is only now beginning to dawn on all of us what the full consequences are going to be. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, said, what is not democratic about giving the final say to the British people?
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, I am as much a Eurosceptic as any Brexiteer. I do not like the way in which the European Parliament works. Nobody knows their MEP; MEPs have no connection with their constituencies and move from Brussels to Strasbourg every month. The euro is a disaster; one size will never fit all. Thank God we did not join it. I thought that we missed out on Schengen for business and tourist visas, but one of my favourite sayings is that good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. We are lucky not to be in Schengen. In many ways, we are not affected as much by the migration crisis. From a security point of view it is better not to be in Schengen.
There is no question but that, with our democratic system, we have to accept the result of the referendum, however narrow it was. When the Minister sums up, will he clarify why, when we passed the referendum Bill, this was an advisory referendum? Why was it not set in stone that it would become law straightaway? Why was there no supra-majority, which is normal for something like this? Compare it with the AV referendum, which was very simple. The outcomes were spelled out—yes or no; for or against AV. It was a simple yes or no question. Here, however, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell, said yesterday, the question was black and white—remain or leave—but with a technicolour answer.
As several of my fellow Cross-Benchers and other noble Lords have said, we have to accept the result of the referendum. However, because the outcome of the no vote is totally unclear, it is not that simple. People voted to leave for a number of reasons. Many, sadly, believed the figure of £350 million a week to save the NHS. No one put it to them that this was despite its being a gross figure and despite the fact that the £8 billion to £10 billion of our net contribution is barely 1% of our Government’s annual expenditure per year. I have met people who voted for that reason. People voted to take back control of EU laws. When I have asked people who did this to name any EU laws that affects them day to day, they cannot name one. I built Cobra beer from scratch over a quarter of a century and I have not spent one hour of one day worrying about EU legislation. EU law, the law that is made in this country, is predominantly made by us in this Parliament, whether it is about taxes, planning or business rates.
The biggest issue of all was immigration. How badly this subject has been portrayed. These 3 million EU citizens, many of them leaving homes and families thousands of miles away, not knowing the language, come over here, work hard in an alien culture and put in five times more than they get out in taxes and benefits. Are we grateful to them? If we are grateful to them, right now, without legislation, we should be guaranteeing that they should be allowed to stay here. The Government should confirm this and I ask the Minister to do so. Far from being a burden on our country, these people work in our public sector. In fact, many parts of our public sector would collapse without them. Some 160,000 work in our NHS and care sector. Sajid Javid wants to build more homes: 250,000 people from the EU work in our construction sector. We have less than 5% unemployment, the lowest in living memory. We have the highest level of employment in living memory. What would we do without these people? We would not be the fifth largest economy in the world.
I am chancellor of the University of Birmingham and I chair the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School. Some 20% of our academics come from the EU. I am president of UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs. We have 450,000 foreign students, 180,000 of them from the EU. It is not just about the money that comes for research. As the vice-chancellor of Cambridge said, more worrying than the loss of revenue is the damage to the networks of collaboration on which world-class science depends today. The Indian high commissioner gave an interview just this week in which he said, “Yes, we can talk about free trade agreements, but we also need to talk about visas and immigration”. Does the Minister accept that we should stop including international students in our net migration figures? They should be removed at once.
When these facts are made clear, when we move away from going back to hate crime and racism thanks to this wretched referendum, then people will have every right to change their mind. After all, the Prime Minister changed her mind; she was a remainer. Phillip Hammond changed his mind. Our court jester, Boris Johnson, was emphatic to remain just a couple of years ago. We are respecting the will of the people but not accepting that the people can change their minds. Look at the hypocrisy of it. It is said that countries such as the United States of America, China and India do not have trade deals with the European Union but they still deal with the European Union and that Brexit means that we are unleashed to do deals with the whole of the rest of the world, but we are going to give up the biggest deal on our doorstep—50% of our trade. What hypocrisy. Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind”. Here, the facts may not change but people will wake up to the facts and then they may want to change their minds.
I think it is wrong that this House of Lords has been threatened. I think it is wrong that people are told that they are not patriotic if they are not for Brexit and that they are not for Britain if they are not for Brexit. That is wrong and it is disrespectful. The attitude of this Government, who have had to go to the High Court and the Supreme Court and have produced a White Paper only when pressed to, is neglecting government. If we want to negotiate now we will have to negotiate with many different countries, yet the Government are saying that no deal is better than a bad deal. Leaving the single market and ruining our economy would be a bad deal. To emphasise what the noble Lord, Lord Butler, said, logically, because of the nature of this question, there is no way we can respect the will of the people if we do not go back to them with the deal that we have and ask, “Are you now happy to leave on this basis?”.
Where sovereignty is concerned, I conclude by saying that we have our sovereignty. We measure our roads in miles and our petrol in litres. I pour my draft beer in pints and sell it on the supermarket shelves in litres. No one can force us to join the EU army or force us into further integration. As the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, said, there will be complications for the Civil Service. There are 38 countries and regional assemblies that we will have to negotiate with—six in Belgium alone. The majority of the youth of our country voted to stay. We have to think of the youth of our country. I conclude by quoting Professor Deepak Malhotra of the Harvard Business School, a world expert in negotiation, who said, “Karan, read a book called The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the beginning of the First World War”. We are currently commemorating the centenary of that unnecessary war that sacrificed millions of lives. He said, “Reading that book is like watching a train crash in slow motion”. That is what we are watching right now.
Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)
My Lords, we have heard many home truths in the previous speaker’s speech. I voted to remain and I regret but certainly accept the outcome of the referendum. There is a wide perception around the country, which is true even among the remainers, that we now need to get on with the negotiation under Article 50. It is not, as some would assert, because suddenly a national consensus supporting Brexit has now emerged, but because of the simple and common-sense realisation that uncertainty is economically damaging and marking time is not healthy politically. So the Government have my strong support in sticking to their timetable and getting on with the negotiation. There will be plenty to do in the coming months before the elections in continental Europe have concluded, and plenty to avoid as well, I might say, not least a massive bust-up over the value of European Union assets which could sour subsequent negotiations.
No one can tell at this stage how we are going to get on. Let us hope for and do what we can to further enlightened behaviour around the negotiating table to obtain what the Prime Minister has termed as the best possible outcome. We certainly need the partnership that has been promised. As many noble Lords have pointed out, the UK’s hand is not totally devoid of cards to play, and we have plenty to offer our partners. If the deal is a good one, it will be supported in the country at large and I do not think that it will be necessary to have electoral verdicts on it. But that does not exclude the need for endorsement by Parliament in statutory form, and I hope that this issue, which is clearly going to come before us, can be resolved without further resort to the Supreme Court. Parliamentary sovereignty is not to be mocked.
Sadly, we cannot exclude the possibility that the outcome will be judged as less than satisfactory either by the people or by the Government, or indeed by both. What happens next is the question preoccupying many, and we have heard references to the need for another referendum. If the British people judge that responsibility for a bad deal is borne by EU negotiators, which might well be the case, the likelihood of them wishing to crawl back into the European Union can be ruled out. I do not think, as some people fondly hope, that a second referendum will be a sure-fire ticket for a return. Equally, as it has been well put in the debate, the British people did not vote to be poorer and they will be entitled to judge whether the negotiations lead to that outcome. Moreover, they will want a say in any radically new economic model which the Government propose as a response to a bad deal. So, frankly, I think that we can rely on the normal electoral processes of this country kicking in to deliver a verdict on what should happen next, and I reckon that this will happen in a timely way. Our system will certainly cope with whatever outcome the negotiations deliver.
In the time remaining for me to speak, I want to focus on a different aspect which has not been covered so fully by other noble Lords. Whatever the final outcome, which could take years, this country has embarked on a course where it cannot respond in a “behaviour as usual” manner. Underlying the political and economic turbulence of our times is a technological revolution of vast proportions and significance. The word “transformational”, which is overused, is nevertheless appropriate here. We shall need to master rather than be overwhelmed by the changes in train and turn them to our advantage. That means leadership by government and followership in the country. An important start has been made in the Government’s consultative document on an industrial strategy, which must turn not only into a good strategy but into implementation plans which lead to the exploitation of the strong science and research base of this country, upskill the workforce, draw in the private sector as a partner and reward achievement.
Giving them a future is especially owed to the young people of this country, and we know how the majority of them voted. As a people and as a country, I do not think that we like massive organisation and planning, but this is a moment in our history when we must make the most of the opportunity we have of laying a new economic base for the whole of the United Kingdom.
The Government have a lot on their plate, and I hope they have both the bandwidth and the nerve to take forward an ambitious industrial agenda. It is emphatically not a time for characteristic half-measures or failures of departmental co-ordination. Long-term consistency of policy often fails us Brits—we tend to mess about—but we really cannot afford this. A bipartisan approach would be a strength and would, I suggest, help with the task of recreating national unity, which certainly does not exist at the moment. I plead that we do not allow preoccupation with Brexit, important as it is, to drown out the important task of mapping out our national future.
Lord Livermore (Lab)
My Lords, in the referendum last year I voted for Britain to remain in the European Union. Along with millions of other people, I did so not out of a lack of patriotism but because of a deep and abiding concern for my country. I was convinced that leaving the European Union would be an act of monumental self-harm that would diminish Britain’s prosperity and our influence as a nation. I saw nothing from the supporters of Brexit during last year’s campaign, nor have I seen anything from the Government since, to change that view. However, this debate is not about refighting the referendum, nor is it about the principle of whether or not we should leave. Instead, it is about a seemingly narrow Bill that disguises a far broader intention. Without a meaningful provision to ask the Government to think again, the Bill seeks not just a mandate to leave the European Union but a mandate to negotiate a very specific outcome.
What was set out in the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech and in the Government’s White Paper is the hardest of Brexits, giving up our membership not just of the single market but of the customs union too, before even getting to the negotiating table. This is only one possible interpretation of the referendum result, and it is an interpretation for which there is no majority in the country. The referendum campaign, and the relatively narrow margin by which it was won, revealed a country deeply and almost evenly divided. Even among the 52% who voted to leave, there were multiple and often contradictory reasons for wanting to do so. There will have been leave voters who believed the claims that Brexit would mean an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. Others will have been persuaded that it would mean the revival of traditional industries and an end to the impact of globalisation. Still more will have believed assurances that we could end immigration while not having to leave the single market. However, it is now clear that Brexit meant none of these things. They were fake promises and false assurances, specifically designed to deceive.
Rather than seek to heal this divided nation, hold an honest conversation with the country and try to build a national consensus, since 23 June this Government have chosen a very different route. Through the constant repetition of empty phrases such as “Brexit means Brexit”, they have sought to simplify the mandate, disguise its central complexity and distort the meaning of the result, while what they ultimately seek becomes clearer with every threat made to our former partners. Their clear goal is an offshore, small-state Britain, meaning not more money for the NHS but less, and the systematic reduction of the rights of British workers. I have no doubt that this vision of Britain as a mid-Atlantic Singapore is strongly supported by hard line ideologues in the Conservative Party and in some sections of the media. But equally I have no doubt that they would never have won the referendum had they been honest enough to articulate that beforehand.
The verdict of the referendum has now become so distorted as to be unrecognisable. In this Bill, we are being asked to support an unelected Prime Minister, with no mandate of her own and pursuing a policy opposite to that in the manifesto on which her party was elected, as she seeks to negotiate the hardest possible interpretation of Brexit for which there is no majority in the country and which will be devastating to the lives of millions of those leave voters on whom the outcome depended. Yet the Government now have the nerve to lecture us about respecting the “will of the people”.
There was an opportunity in the House of Commons for the Labour Party to resist this interpretation. I am proud that many of my colleagues stood up for an alternative way forward, putting growth, jobs and living standards first. However, at the very moment when the country needed our party to act in the national interest and in the interests of the people it was created to defend, our party’s leadership was found badly wanting.
As a result of that vote in the Commons, I have no doubt that the Bill will pass, but I cannot support it. From the outset, the issue of Brexit, from referendum to negotiation, has put narrow political interest before the national interest. The decision to hold the referendum was made purely to keep the Conservative Party together. The Government’s response has been simply about electoral calculation. Now this House has been warned that, if it dares to act in the national interest, it faces abolition.
I have great humility about the outcome of the referendum and about the unelected nature of this House, but if we sincerely believe that the course we are on will do untold damage to our country, we have a duty, whether elected or unelected, to say so, to oppose it and to tell the truth. I believe that working people’s lives will be made worse by this Bill. I believe that those who voted for Brexit in the greatest numbers will suffer most from the outcome. I believe that the very real problems in their lives were not caused by the European Union, and will not be solved by our leaving. I believe we will do them no favours by pretending otherwise.
Those of us who believe that Britain’s national interests are best pursued inside the European Union must listen, learn and understand why our view was rejected, but we should never stop telling the truth. The British people are being sold a lie, and we should say so. When the extent of this betrayal becomes clear, when what has been promised turns out to be undeliverable, there will be a terrible reckoning—maybe not now, maybe not in two years or even in 20, but history will judge us very harshly indeed if we now connive in that betrayal when we believe in a different course.
I want to know that I did the right thing so, with a clear conscience, I feel bound to affirm my opposition to the Bill and to its profoundly damaging effect on our country.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
Yesterday, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, spoke of the vision of what was known as the Common Market. My first vote was in 1975, in the referendum to remain in that Common Market. Although I was born in the 1950s, the war still cast a shadow. I was a young woman, newly married to a junior officer in a very, very much larger Royal Navy—one which could certainly cope east of Suez—and the idea of binding states in trade to avoid conflict appealed to me then, as it still does.
Britain’s withdrawal from the EU comes at a time of great global instability. Russia, resurgent and hostile, flies nuclear sorties through UK airspace, harasses NATO’s eastern flank and claims to be seeking a “post-West world order”. The American President expressed ambivalence towards NATO as recently as last Wednesday. Europe has been wracked by a wave of extremist attacks, and the chaos swirling in the Middle East shows no sign of abating. Against this bleak backdrop, the passage of this Bill will set in motion the greatest upheaval of UK foreign, economic and domestic policy in recent history. I submit that the triggering of Article 50 will also have—and, indeed, has had—a profoundly negative effect on the UK’s defence and security.
As I noted last July in this House, Brexit means losing our place in defence institutions such as Europe’s common security and defence framework. Last July, it was clear to us that the loss of access to these important networks might hold unknown risks to our ability to defend ourselves, but last July Donald Trump was not President and NATO did not seem any more at risk than at any time since the end of the Cold War. In difficult times, we must preserve our global alliances and friendships, and yet this Government have failed to provide assurances that they will work to preserve our key security links with the continent after triggering Article 50.
I would be grateful if the Minister could reassure the House that, in this hard-Brexit world, our defence alliances with mainland Europe have not been overlooked. Defence and security should not be bargaining chips to be pushed back and forth across the negotiating table; they are essential commitments which protect our citizens and those of our allies. We cannot allow our withdrawal from the EU to jeopardise or sour our security alliances, and yet the Government’s approach risks doing just that.
It is not just our European alliances that are at risk. Since the 23 June referendum, the pound has fallen by more than 20% against the dollar. At the end of last year, RUSI predicted that if the decline were sustained, the cost of Britain’s defence imports could increase by around £700 million a year. This means, in effect, a 2% cut in the purchasing power of Britain’s defence budget. Last month, a National Audit Office report on the MoD’s equipment plan found that the MoD had already eaten through the £10.7 billion of headroom built into last year’s budget to provide flexibility. That report found that,
“The affordability of the Plan is now at greater risk than at any time since reporting was introduced”—
an effect of the declining exchange rate.
There is, in short, a significant rising threat to the affordability of the defence of the UK. Despite the commitment to spending 2% of GDP on defence, the continuing capability of the British military to meet strategic objectives is far from guaranteed. Just last week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported that, in 2016, Britain failed to meet that spending commitment despite the Government’s 2015 pledge to commit at least 2% of GDP for defence for each and every year of this decade. These rising costs might necessitate a revisiting of the 2015 SDSR or else there will be a reduction in expected UK defence capabilities at a time when the world is becoming markedly less secure.
The Government will need to accept that the effects of Brexit on defence will require either a substantial rise in taxes or cuts to vital domestic services. If the UK Government cannot accept these options, they must admit to British citizens that their borders will be less secure and their security more uncertain; they must acknowledge that they have broken their NATO spending commitments at a time when NATO’s future is already uncertain. It is clear that, in just a few months, Brexit and this Government’s Brexit strategy have made the UK less secure and less well defended.
It is not clear, however, that on 23 June last year voters assumed these risks. Leave campaign leaders promised that Britain would reclaim its place on the global stage, yet Brexit has left UK forces less able to defend key interests and has seen the UK diminished within its network of alliances. Brexiteers promised more secure borders, yet our borders are set to become less secure against those who wish to do us harm. They promised us more money for services such as the NHS, but the Government might now have to slash those services if they are to defend our borders and interests in an increasingly unstable climate.
In short, while 52% of voters cast ballots last June for a departure from the EU, they did not vote for that destination. On matters of defence, that destination seems increasingly bleak. My noble friend Lord Paddick and other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, have said that the voters should have a final say.
Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, I am sure that we all welcome the fact that the Prime Minister was present for part of our proceedings yesterday. Although it is reported that she looked as if she had come to intimidate more than to learn, I hope that she found her appreciation of the issues enriched, for the debate has been every bit as rich as House of Lords debates can be. She might have learned from the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for example, that member states have more scope to influence levels of immigration from other member states than is commonly supposed, or, at any rate, than is commonly made clear.
Like many other noble Lords, I deplore all the sabre-rattling about abolishing the House of Lords if it does not toe the line. At least, I would if the threats were not so empty. For a Government encumbered by the task of extricating the United Kingdom from the European Union, a commitment to abolish the House of Lords is all you need. If you are going to go in for sabre-rattling, you need to have some sabres to rattle.
I was in South Africa all last week. As I travelled back from Heathrow, I thought someone must have been putting something in the water as I picked up on the rather febrile suggestions that by exercising its traditional function of scrutinising legislation and asking the Commons to think again, the House of Lords would be acting unconstitutionally. It might be wrong on a particular issue but the idea that it would be behaving unconstitutionally is preposterous, especially when the Commons has been so pusillanimous in exercising the authority which the Supreme Court has confirmed it has.
By this point, there must be a premium on brevity so I will cut to the chase. We do not normally vote at Second or even Third Reading in this House but if we do, I will vote against the Bill. In the nearest I get to blogging—my Christmas round robin—I said that I was in favour of a second referendum on the terms of withdrawal once negotiated and would take every opportunity to vote against moves to remove us from the European Union, partly because the vote to leave was won on a fraudulent prospectus and partly out of sheer bloody-mindedness. As the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, put it—for once, in more parliamentary language than mine:
“I will oppose it by any legal and constitutional means”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 110.]
The equation between the referendum and democracy is specious. I looked that word up in the dictionary. It means superficially plausible but actually wrong. As I said in the debate on 6 July last year,
“a snapshot of public opinion on a particular day is a very bad way to determine a question as complex as to whether we should remain a member of the European Union”.—[Official Report, 6/7/16; col. 2075.]
Moreover, the democratic credentials of the referendum are contested. If the vote had gone the other way, you can bet your life that the leavers would be mounting just the same criticism as the remainers.
Yesterday the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, whom I normally find a genial and engaging debater, reminded us in an uncharacteristically intemperate speech of a government leaflet which said to the British people:
“The referendum on Thursday, 23rd June is your chance to decide if we should remain in or leave the European Union … This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide”.
In a final taunt, he said:
“What part of that do those on the Liberal Benches not understand?”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 60.]
The Liberal Democrats can speak for themselves but I understand it all right. However, I will make five points which suggest that we should take it with a substantial helping of salt.
First, notwithstanding the Government’s language, there has never been any doubt that the referendum was advisory—and, I submit, the more flawed, the more advisory. Secondly, I do not make my stand on the flawed nature of the referendum. We are where we are. However flawed, there can be no question of setting the referendum aside. Whatever else it did, it certainly gave the Government a licence to open negotiations with the EU about withdrawal. But there is no way that it mandated a hard Brexit and there is no way that I am going to vote for triggering a negotiation designed to achieve a hard Brexit, which is likely to be so damaging for our country in terms of the economic growth essential for prosperity, living standards and the progress of civilisation and opportunities, and so inimical to an outward-looking and internationalist approach.
Thirdly, as others have said, a hard Brexit shows a cavalier disregard of the 48% who voted to remain and an unstatesmanlike indifference to the need to work for unity and reconciliation in our country. Fourthly, I cannot emphasise too strongly that support for a second referendum on the terms is not the same as seeking to refight the referendum campaign, which is what supporters of a second referendum are accused of. As Tim Farron MP said in the other place,
“voting for departure is not the same as voting for the destination”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/2017; col. 290.]
Accordingly, I shall support an amendment designed to provide for a second referendum. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market, put it very well in a typically thoughtful and unpolemical speech when he said that he did not believe that the referendum vote should be decided as final, that the real issue is the reaction to the outcome of the negotiations, and that that is where the final judgment and vote should take place.
Finally, I shall support amendments which seek to maximise our access to, or retain our membership of, the single market. The Conservative manifesto for the 2015 general election indicated support for the single market. Especially if, in a bespoke deal, you wish to retain as many of the advantages of remaining in the single market as possible, it makes no sense to signal up front your desire to withdraw from it. If that is the way we are going to conduct the negotiations, we are going to get a very bad deal indeed.
Lord Robathan (Con)
My Lords, it is indeed a challenge after some 124 contributions to say anything original at all. We live in a parliamentary democracy and I am absolutely no fan of referendums—neither the first one nor the second that some are calling for. They were described by Clement Attlee as a device of dictators and demagogues—a quote repeated by Margaret Thatcher, so we have both sides of the political divide covered, and indeed by my noble friend Lord Balfe yesterday. However, in 2015 Parliament abrogated its responsibility and devolved the decision on this matter to the British people—and at Third Reading in the House of Commons there were no dissenters. We gave away our authority on this matter. Politicians are much maligned; they are accused of a lack of integrity and a lack of consistency. We need to show both integrity and consistency, or we will be criticised for not keeping our promises and saying different things to different people at different times to curry favour.
I will focus my brief remarks today on those calling for a second referendum. We know what they want, notwithstanding what the noble Lord, Lord Low, has just said. They want a different result. Tony Blair said exactly that when he called upon us all to rise up; the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, said exactly that yesterday, when he said—and it can be read in Hansard—that he wanted a second referendum to allow people to change their mind. It is perfectly reasonable to change one’s mind, but this is actually about telling people that they got it wrong. I recall the Danish no vote on Maastricht in 1992 and the two Irish referendums, on the Nice Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty. On all these occasions the people were told, “Get away, you got it wrong, vote again”. And if the second referendum were to take place, and the same result came out, would there then be calls for a third referendum from those who could not accept the will of the people?
I would like to take the House back to the People’s Budget of 1909, which I do not think has been mentioned before. It was the Liberal Government of Asquith. Lloyd George was Chancellor and Churchill—who was later a successful Conservative—was Home Secretary, so we have all sides covered here. It was the threat of the creation of hundreds of Liberal Peers that led to a similar Budget and the Parliament Act of 1911 being passed. Now that sounds familiar to me today.
I will turn to the inheritance of the Liberal name. On 26 February 2008—at least two noble Lords currently on the Liberal Benches were Members of the House of Commons then—Nick Clegg led a stunt. He led out the Liberal Members of Parliament from the House of Commons because the Speaker had not selected the amendment that he had put down on calling a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. My noble friend Lord Finkelstein pointed out that Nick Clegg then led a campaign. “It is time for a real referendum”, he said. Although there are only two in the Chamber at the moment, in the Commons in 2008 there were 11 Members of Parliament who now sit on your Lordships’ Benches on the Liberal Democrat side. Did they take part in the march out? I have no idea. But what is their consistent intention today?
Also involved in Liberal Democrat politics at the time was the chief executive of the party, the director of communications, the head of the leader’s office, two members of the federal executive and the chairman of the electoral campaign at the time—and they all now sit on the Liberal Democrat Benches. The leader—who is in his place, so I think I may name him—was, I think I am right in saying, chief of staff to Charles Kennedy in 2005, and was then on the Front Bench between 2008 and 2010.
So do those people who then supported the Real Referendum campaign consistently now want to accept the result of the referendum? In 2005, the Liberal Democrat manifesto said of the proposed constitution that,
“ratification must be subject to a referendum of the British people”.
The 2010 manifesto—I see that they all remember it—stated:
“Liberal Democrats therefore remain committed to an in/out referendum the next time a British Government signs up for fundamental change”.
The noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, sadly is not in his place. His comment on the day of the referendum has been much quoted by my right honourable friend Michael Gove and by my noble friend Lord Bridges and yesterday by my noble friend Lord Blencathra. However, it bears repeating. He said:
“I will forgive no-one”—
no one—
“who does not respect the sovereign voice of the British people once it has spoken, whether it is a majority of 1% or 20% … It is our duty as those who serve the public to make sure the country does the best it can with the decision they have taken”.
Tim Farron, on 1 February, said:
“Democracy means accepting the will of the people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 1/2/17; col. 1047.]
He then called for a second referendum. In 2008, Nick Clegg said:
“Only a real referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU will let the people decide our country's future”.
On 31 January this year he said that,
“the British people gave the Government a mandate to pull the UK out of the EU”.—[Official Report, Commons, 31/1/17; col. 843.]
He then called for a second referendum.
Do my friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches not understand why they were so comprehensively rejected in 2015? The reasons were integrity and consistency. The British people expect us to live up to our statements and our promises, in this House as well as in the elected House down the Corridor. I hope that those calling for a second referendum will eventually show that consistency, respect the decision of our peoples and be on the right side of history.
I will end on an optimistic note, because this has perhaps been a little partisan.
Lord Robathan
Perish the thought.
In 1805, Prime Minister Pitt said:
“England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example”.
The circumstances were very different, but I believe and hope that that may be the case both for us and for Europeans in 2017.
Baroness Quin (Lab)
My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Dixon, whose death the Lord Speaker announced earlier today. Don Dixon was my constituency neighbour for many years. Throughout a long and distinguished parliamentary career in both Houses he was utterly rooted in and devoted to his own constituency.
About six months ago, before the referendum, I was involved in a debate at the Cambridge Union Society on the motion that this house believes that the European project has been a failure. Given that the EU, formerly the EEC, had existed for 60 years, that it had grown from 6 to 28 members, that it had underpinned democracy and economic transformations in many countries, had stood up for employment rights and had stood for better environmental regulations, the question seemed to be a no-brainer. There was no way that it could be considered a failure, particularly given the contrast with the first 50 years of the 20th century when the countries of Europe had twice been torn apart by war. During that debate I said that if the EU did not exist, given the conditions of trade in the modern world and the many international challenges that we face, we would need to invent something like it. To a certain extent, the Government seem to have accepted this logic in their talk of a new partnership with the EU and how close we are going to be to the EU in future, despite not being members.
I welcome talk of partnership but I find the Government’s approach so far unconvincing. Their approach, particularly as seen in the White Paper that they were forced into producing at the last minute, is vacuous. As many people have said, it seems to be a case of the Government wanting to have their cake and eat it, served up with a huge helping of wishful thinking.
I also find the timing of this Bill troubling. At the Conservative Party conference, the Prime Minister announced that Article 50 would be triggered by the end of March. I am not sure why she chose that particular date, and certainly the world has changed considerably in the meantime. I understand—many people made this point in the debate yesterday—that people want to get on with it so that we can conclude the divorce and make progress with the newly negotiated relationship. However, Article 50 states that,
“the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with”,
the state concerned,
“setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union”.
That seems to indicate that it is a question not of doing the one thing followed by the other but of these things happening concurrently. However, I am very conscious that in a few minutes there will be a contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, so perhaps I had better not say anything further about Article 50, as the undisputed authority on the subject is present in the Chamber.
There are huge gaps in the information that the Government have given us so far. I am amazed that in the 12 principles outlined in the White Paper there is absolutely no mention of environment policy, even though I and others have questioned the Government on it many times. There is nothing on foreign policy and nothing on defence. On trade, there is little realism about the difficulties involved. The Government talk blithely about creating new trading arrangements, yet the countries with which we want to forge trade deals will doubtless want to know first what our future trading relationship with the EU will be. The trading and investment issues are very important to all of us, and they are particularly important in regions such as mine—the north-east—where 58% of our exports are to the EU and inward investment relating to access to the European market is vital.
I hope that we press the Government hard on better involvement by Parliament in this process. The way in which they have tried to bypass Parliament so far means that their current assurances ring hollow. Such parliamentary involvement will also be important in allowing Members of the House of Commons, in particular, to explain to their constituents what is happening. People out in the country will have a right to some accurate information about the negotiations as they proceed.
The previous speaker said a lot about referendums. I am wrestling with the idea of having another referendum because I have always disliked them for all sorts of reasons. I have never supported any of the EU referendums that my party has proposed—for example, on joining the single currency or on the ill-fated European constitution. However, I can see the logic that, if a vote of the people began this process of withdrawal, there is a case for people having a vote on the final deal. They ought to be able to compare the deal against the promises made by those who advocated to leave during the campaign—particularly the promise on the National Health Service, which I know was very tempting to people in my part of the world. It also strikes me as quite ridiculous that those who were so keen to have a referendum on this issue now seem to be saying that there should never be another. Their view seems to be that the people have spoken but, having spoken once, they should never be allowed to speak again.
Finally, I want to say a word about the role of this House in this process. I respect those who are so keen to trigger Article 50 that they do not want to see amendments tabled debated or passed, but I reject the view that we are not entitled to make amendments or to ask the Government to think again. We have our established revising and questioning role, which we should carry out in relation to this legislation as we do with other legislation
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, I start by making a point about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Robathan. I just want to clarify that the Liberal Democrats are not asking for a second referendum; we are asking for a first referendum on the outcome of the Government’s negotiations. I see nothing at odds with democracy in the electorate changing their mind. In my experience, they change their minds every four or five years.
I am a member of one of the EU sub-committees of this House, and week after week we take evidence from major British businesses. When asked what sort of trading arrangements they would like to see in the future, almost without exception they have said, “Something as close to what we have at present if possible, please”. They want, and indeed expect, the Government to honour the promise in their manifesto to remain in the single market.
We must accept the decision of the referendum but I will not accept the Government’s interpretation of that result. It was a clear result but a narrow one. Therefore, the Government’s winner-takes-all approach to the result is completely unacceptable. The 52% should be respected but so should the 48%. The Government are intent on ignoring the views of the 48% so it falls to this House to give them our full attention. The Government’s White Paper was one of the most depressing documents I have read in many years. The view expressed throughout it was that we are the best; that the world owes us a living. The fatal hubris shines from every page.
I speak on transport. Time and again I have heard the Secretary of State for Transport tell gatherings of transport professionals that all will be well because they need us more than we need them. What is not factored in is that there are 27 of them and only one of us—for each individual EU country, trade with us is a relatively small part of their economy. Our EU sub-committee has taken evidence from Ministers too, of course. Depressingly, they speak only in percentages and billions of pounds. They fail to speak of hundreds of jobs or of individual companies. I have no doubt that over time our industries will adapt to the change but individual businesses will go to the wall and there will be casualties along the way. Transport is heavily integrated across the EU. Across the various modes, from aviation to road haulage, transport businesses can operate freely from one EU country to another. We have a huge stake in this. We have, for example, the EU’s largest aviation sector and the Government cite this as a strength. In fact, it is a point of weakness. There is much for the rest of the EU countries to gain if we were to be removed from a fully competitive position. There is no reason why Germany or France, for example, should not mop up our markets if, for example, easyJet could no longer fly easily and freely from one EU country to another or within any individual EU country.
Trade in all industrial sectors stands on the shoulders of the transport industry. We cannot succeed if we cannot transport our goods or personnel. I remind your Lordships’ House that in 1988 it required 88 separate documents to transport goods from London to Rome. It now takes one document. If we go back even a few steps towards 1988 it will cost time and money and increase complexity. There will be a huge impact on our ports, on Eurotunnel and on the individual businesses and industries that create the goods that the lorries and so on are transporting. The Government talk of friends across the other side of the world, with exotic trade deals in China, South America and so on. The large shipping lines and airlines will adapt, but parts of the transport sector cannot adapt. For the bus operator taking tourists down the Rhine valley, for instance, a thriving tourist trade in China is no use at all. Ferries cannot operate on the other side of the world, across long distances. HGV operators can operate only with neighbouring countries, and Eurostar and the Channel Tunnel are pretty immovable. So for these reasons, the transport industry can cope with the single market but not a hard Brexit.
Across the world, countries trade most intensively with their neighbours. The reasons are obvious: distance costs time and money and makes your goods less competitive. Despite the vote on 23 June, we cannot ignore the realities of geography. The EU countries are our neighbours and it would be economic suicide to abandon them. We must remain part of the single market.
The Government need to see the reality of this. They need to recognise the dangers of a hard border in Northern Ireland. They need to recognise the rights of EU citizens living here and they must acknowledge that the referendum gave them the power to negotiate and not to decide our final destination. The voters must decide that.
This journey started with the people and it must end with the people. I will vote in due course for amendments that implement that.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
My Lords, I leave the great constitutional issues to Edmund Burke and the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock—they are very similar thinkers; I am a great fan of both of them. I want to say a word about the White Paper. Others have mentioned that it is a little long on assertion and bravado and a little short on facts. I thought that I would offer four facts.
First, it is a fact that if we leave the European Union, our economic relationship with it will be less advantageous than it is now—that has to be a fact. If we leave the single market and the customs union, if we reject common regulation and common jurisdiction, there will be a price to be paid; there has to be a price to be paid. Secondly, it is a fact that our relationships with the rest of the world will be more difficult economically. We will be less attractive to them. Why should they be so keen to open their markets to us if we are no longer their entry point to a market of 500 million? Thirdly, it is a fact that trade halves as distance doubles. Fourthly, it is a fact that customs controls cause delays that damage modern global supply chains and that building trade barriers hurts both sides, but the bigger economy loses less. Obviously, the Government know all these facts but have decided to put our autarchic sovereignty ahead of economic well-being. It is a sad fact that it will not be those who got us into this fix who will suffer. The Bullingdon boys will be just fine; the country may not.
But the country is still in the dark; it does not know where it is going. We are in this bus heading for Heathrow, with mendacious slogans on the side, and we have no idea what the destination is. We do not know what the Government mean when they say that they may have to change our economic model. They may have to go for a low-regulation, low-tax and low-welfare economy. What do they mean? The White Paper does not tell us. The White Paper does not tell us the future of farming in this country, of environmental law in this country or of social law in this country. It does not tell us how the Belfast agreement can survive if the Irish Government are obliged on the inner Irish frontier to run the customs frontier of the European Union.
It will not do just to refer to the oxymoronic repeal Bill and to tell us that all applicable laws will be temporarily extended while we think about their fate. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, spoke authoritatively yesterday on the Supreme Court ruling. The Supreme Court says that rights resulting from EU membership can be extinguished only by legislation; this Bill extinguishes no such rights. But some rights fall away the moment we leave the European Union and cannot be extended by the oxymoronic Bill. The rights enjoyed in this country by our citizens that are enforceable against other member states go. Rights whose geographical scope extends into other member states go. Rights whose enforcement requires the co-operation of other member states and the EU institutions go. We will need a new legislative rendezvous, and that is nothing to do with the great repeal Bill.
In my view it would make sense to improve the Bill before us to provide for that rendezvous in at least two respects. First, the Government have given us no undertaking that they will come back to Parliament if the negotiations threaten to break down. I rate the chances of breakdown at well over 30%. The White Paper is totally silent on the impending row about money and the bills we will be asked to settle as we leave. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, no deal is much the worst deal. Walking away would mean recourse to law or arbitration, extended uncertainty about any continuing links with our largest and nearest trading partner and no legacy rights in its 50 agreements with third countries—a disaster for business and citizens alike. If the bravado of the White Paper proves hollow, the Government must come back to Parliament before the clock runs out.
Secondly, we need to consolidate in the Bill the Government’s quasi-commitment to give Parliament its say before the die is cast on any emerging settlement. The European Parliament’s similar right is enshrined in the language of Article 50. This Parliament deserves no less. It will not do just to give Parliament Hobson’s choice—to say, “It’s this deal or no deal”. Timing is crucial. Parliament must have the chance to consider at least three other options. Under option one, Westminster could follow the frequent practice of the United States Congress, say that it does not like the emerging deal or some particular aspect of it, and ask the Executive to go back and try harder. As one who has negotiated with two US Administrations, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Oareford, who thought that any such possibility would weaken the Government’s negotiating hand, that that is the exact opposite of the truth. Saying “I hear you but Congress would never wear it” is a negotiating weapon our American friends frequently use to great effect. I speak from experience.
As regards the second option, if timing proves tight, Westminster could invoke Article 50(3) and invite the Government to seek an extension of the two-year period. The European Union is a union of democracies. If this Parliament asked for an extension, and our Government conveyed our request, in my judgment it would certainly be given.
Under the third option, Parliament could invite the Government or the country to think again. An Article 50 notification is not irrevocable. The President of the European Council and a gallery of EU legal luminaries have confirmed—of course, the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, is among their number—that a member state may, in accordance with its constitutional requirements, withdraw its notification within the two-year period or its extension. This morning, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, asked about the Government’s motive in conniving in the High Court at the fiction of irreversibility. I cannot answer her but the fact is that Article 50, which first saw the light of day under the heading “voluntary withdrawal” is not an expulsion procedure. We remain full members of the European Union throughout the negotiating period—the two years or its extension. If, having looked into the abyss, we were to change our minds about withdrawal, we certainly could and no one in Brussels could stop us. If it were not so, I would have to oppose the Bill. As it is, all we need do is improve it and make sure that the rendezvous with history, which comes when we know what the Government want for the future of our country and its relationship with our continent, is clear.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, it has been an extraordinary afternoon as Peers have greeted each other in the Corridor, saying, “What number are you?”. I am number 129. While it is tempting to say that I agree with numbers one, five, eight, 16 and 30, that would not be in the fine traditions of the House.
This House is usually thought of as an august, deliberative body. It can indeed impress with its breadth and depth of knowledge and grasp of legislative detail, and, in certain circumstances, it can much improve Bills put before it. But I doubt whether this is one such Bill that will allow us to showcase the best of your Lordships’ skills. Indeed, I fear just the opposite—that we could make ourselves conspicuous by our lack of democratic mandate and overstep the constitutional boundaries which we are all responsible for upholding.
The Bill, as many have said by way of criticism, is short on detail. Indeed it is: that is because its purpose is simple and exclusive—to grant a parliamentary mandate to the Government to trigger Article 50. The other place understood this and voted it through with a significant majority, despite some confusion in the party opposite and disquiet from many in all parties who did not want to be in this position. I ask noble Lords who are still thinking of tacking on amendments to ignore their own personal views on Brexit at this time. We all had our say, along with the rest of Britain, at the ballot box. I ask them not to rerun the argument as to whether they believe it will harm Britain or not. I ask them to focus on whether Brexit, the referendum, the Bill and Article 50 are the will of the people. As democrats, that will requires us to do our duty and carry it out.
We have heard many esteemed figures, not least a former Prime Minister, say that people did not know what they were voting for and, as such, should be given a chance to reconsider, to vote again on an eventual deal, or even to have the referendum question put again, only this time with more detail, such as questions on the single market, on the free movement of people and so on. I fear that this simply will not wash with the British people. It is similar to when we saw EU countries vote down the EU constitution, only to be asked, shamefully, to vote again until they got it right. Put simply, Britons knew what they were voting for and the Bill, unadulterated, is a key enabler to carrying out that popular will.
The 2015 Conservative Party manifesto promised an in/out referendum. The Conservative Party was elected on that manifesto and duly held that referendum, and the people voted to leave. The manifesto, it is worth saying, went on to state that after the referendum the Government would “respect the outcome”. I hope that noble Lords will keep that sentiment at the top of their minds today and respect the tradition of this House of honouring the elected party’s manifesto. It is now said that, having voted to leave, people did not know what they were voting for. This is patently nonsense. We can be certain that leaving the single market was accounted for in the vote, not least because Michael Gove said so specifically during the campaign—many of us heard him say so on the Andrew Marr programme—as did others. Crucially, staying in the single market would mean not having sovereign control of who can come and go. Who can deny this? Sovereignty was an aspiration of the majority of voters.
Having canvassed in a dozen or so extremely marginal seats over a number of elections, most of which Labour subsequently won, it has been very clear to me that people have been very unhappy with the four pillars of freedom of movement and that successive Governments, including ones I supported, have just not listened. Can it be realistically posited that people expected Britain to continue paying into the EU budget after we left, or that our laws would continue to be written in Brussels? No, and that is why the Government’s current strategy—of setting out clearly that we will leave the EU, including the single market and of course the customs union, and seek a bespoke deal for Britain that is in the interests of Britain, of our allies in the EU and, I truly believe, of our other trading partners, particularly developing countries—is the right one. Anything else is simply a defiance of the democratic will.
I call on noble Lords from the Liberal Democrats to reflect on this. It was not so long ago that having a referendum on EU membership was their party’s policy. It is a shame that they have forgotten this. I appreciate that some in opposition parties see this as an opportunity to position their party for an election which they worry may come soon. It is entirely understandable that they should want to do this and draw attention to their views in this way, fuelled in some cases by an indifference as to whether this House remains appointed, or even in existence. However, I simply comment that the British people will see through this. They do not like opportunism and in my opinion the British public always call it right, to the point that I even grudgingly accept that this was the case in 2010, with the creation of the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition.
The noble Lord, Lord Newby, exhorted us twice to listen to Gladstone and “trust the people”. We will do this by passing the Bill without amendment. This House should support the Bill and then use its undoubted talents, which I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, to shape and make a success of Brexit via the great repeal Bill, the right forum for determining what form Brexit might take. I hope that the Minister will confirm that there will be that opportunity and other junctures to debate the nature of Brexit and the protections which we as a House believe should be sought.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in what I suppose will be described as this great debate. I am particularly grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, who, regrettably, is not in his place at the moment. I felt that he raised some fundamental issues yesterday. He posed questions to the Minister; I subsequently had a word with him and said that I hoped that he might table amendments himself. He mentioned that he had friends who might do the same, so I look forward to the possibility that the Cross-Benchers, who can make such a big impact on our deliberations, will come forward with amendments—not a lot of them, but fundamental ones. Can the Minister please give me an assurance that he will give a reply to the questions from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Butler, and—again, she is not in her place—from my noble friend Lady Symons, who raised a particularly pertinent point this morning on the legal position?
I will be broadly supportive of the Government, which might come as a surprise to some and may upset some of my colleagues around me. However, as an old negotiator, I have some fairly simple approaches: know your red lines; keep them to yourself; keep your cards to yourself; and do not give much away in advance before you start the negotiation. We are in a mess, and my role here today, along with others, is to try to pull ourselves together as best we can. We are a divided nation—we are in bits and pieces all over the place—and so I look to be as constructive and helpful as I can rather than spending my time looking backwards. I was a remainer. I regret that we lost but I see no point in saying that today. I am in the moment, and we have to move forward. We should come together in any way we can and in doing that help the Government to protect the majority in the country—not the Brexiteers, not the minorities or anything—and try to get them behind the Government. It will not be easy.
I come back to the point the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made. A price will be paid at the end of this exercise; we will be weaker in security and defence, and so will Europe, and we will be weaker in terms of trade for quite some time. However, if the only alternative, if we pull away, is a deregulated, Singapore-style environment, with no protection for workers, which some people would like, the Government should reflect that life is very much on a knife edge these days, particularly with social media and with the kind of press we have at the moment, and that as recently as 2011, when we were pushing hard cuts—there may be cuts to come—we had riots in London and in cities around the country. They started on the pretext of a dispute with the police, but there were underlying factors behind them. These days people can very quickly communicate, bring great numbers together and create great disturbances, so let us not forget that when we talk about a hard-line Brexit. I do not want that, and I do not believe that any of us want that, so we need to look for an alternative, too, in the event that in fact the negotiations that Mrs May brings back are not satisfactory. Maybe we should look for a halt or a delay or for more time, or perhaps even a different approach entirely, which might involve going back out to the people. We have to be as flexible as we can in trying to deal with what is a quite extraordinary, difficult situation.
So I give a view as an old negotiator, and I back the Government there: get on with it as quickly as you can, and come back as quickly as you can. We should try to encumber them as little as possible. The judgment will then be made when Mrs May returns. It is at that point that I rather sense the House is trying to find some additional mechanism which is needed within Parliament, whether in the Commons or here, or out with the people, whereby a further check can be made on what is being delivered to find out whether it is acceptable to the people.
The other day the Minister persuaded me to be more patient in response to another issue on the industrial strategy. I have listened to his words; I am being patient. I give the Government the chance, but they must listen to all that is being input and answer in particular the searching questions on the legal side and about where we stand on the constitution. Also, they should think about how they themselves can lead the initiative to present the outturn of the negotiations in a way that will find good support in one way or another rather than simply saying that it is “Take it or leave it”.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, it remains a remarkable piece of good luck if you are born in our country and a remarkable judgment if you choose to make our country your home, but I am fearful about our union of nations and I am especially fearful for the views that our young people have about their future.
The Leader of the House and I have at least one thing in common: with our birthdays 18 months apart, we have lived all our lives in a country that has been a member of the EU. We are, I understand, two or only three Members taking part in this debate, of 190 speakers, for whom the UK’s membership of the EU is older than we are. The majority of the people of our country of our age and below voted to remain; the Leader of the House is in a minority. Britain’s youngest voters will have an average of 60 years to live with the consequences of the Government’s decisions in the coming two years. Sixteen and 17 year-olds—those with the most at stake—were denied a say, and very many of them are now frustrated that they are denied a voice. If with some good fortune I am now at the halfway point of my life, I fully acknowledge that I may need to come to terms with living in a country that I passionately believe is going on the wrong path. I may have to come to terms with that and we may not be able to turn back.
We use our best judgment in this House on legislation for the future’s interest, but we know that we cannot easily bind our successors. However, with this Bill the Government are explicitly telling us that we are binding our successors, who will be living with the consequences long after most of us are dead. So I refuse to be silenced on having a say if my say is different from that of the Government of the day, and I refuse to be intimidated about having a vote in Parliament on what kind of agreement is in the best interests of the country and its future. Indeed, as this is of such seismic importance, the people of the future—the next generations to come—should have a real say as to what is in their best interests, especially since we are now having to bear down on the reality of the commitments and promises, many of which were known to be mistruths, given to us during the referendum campaign. I am reminded of what Sir Walter Scott said:
“Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest”.
We are now having to pick up the pieces for the next generation.
So far, the Government believe that the future is for them, and them alone, to decide. It was their decision that we should have no formal participation in the common economic market or a free trade area or the customs union or the regulatory bodies. These decisions were based on new Conservative Party policies—made only in months—and there was little mandate for them, not to mention any cross-party consensus. As I say, these were seismic choices made by one party according to what it defined as the will of the people. A Government elected by not even 25% of the electorate made choices based on a referendum won by a narrow majority of those who voted but a minority of the electorate as a whole.
The Government have set extreme parameters which months earlier they argued passionately would be highly damaging to the country. I agreed with them then and still agree with their previous position. The recent White Paper is weak in comparison with its pre-referendum predecessor. The economic facts and realities have not changed. Indeed, the challenges ahead are immense, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that some are perhaps insurmountable. How unkind history would have been if Keynes had been reputed to have said, “When I change my mind, I change the facts. What do you do, sir?”
The Government are approaching this alone, and they should not do it alone. In Scotland after the referendum I saw—as we all knew it would—that a winner-takes-all approach would be wounding and perpetuate a deep division in the country, which is hard to heal and continues to be hard to heal. That is why there was a Scotland Bill as a result of cross-party consensus and a commission, with a radical transfer of fiscal and welfare powers after it. But even with the Scotland Act, many people in Scotland on the losing side of the referendum feel aggrieved. In many respects, the response by the Government to the EU referendum simply confirms the suspicion that we now have a UK Government which is effectively an English Government playing for an English audience. They play the lines of the unionists when it suits the play, but when they retire for the curtain call the real personality of their character as an English-only party comes to the fore. “Party first” will not do now. You respect the result of a referendum not by courtesy but by action.
What has been quite hard to accept in the debate so far has been many on the government side saying that they would not even countenance the people having a say on the deal. I ask myself why the Government have not ruled out a second Scottish referendum. All of the rhetoric in this debate suggests that they would never countenance a referendum after the previous one for Scotland—when the margin was much stronger and the issue much clearer—but the Government do not say this. They say that the people have a right to decide, and in fact, in confidential briefings to the press before Christmas, the Scotland Office floated the idea that it may well consider another referendum, but only after a Brexit deal is arranged. Is this perhaps for political imperatives? We cannot afford political imperatives any more.
People of my age and younger, who will have to live with the consequences of the next two years for the rest of their lives, and perhaps come to terms with this in the context of a whole different world order, will perhaps agree with the American comedian and commentator who came up with the term “truthiness”: the notion that if I feel something to be true, it must be legitimate. This may well be the new Trump doctrine, but surely it cannot be the Brexit mantra. Our next generation will live with the consequences of this. They need to have a say on whether it is in their best interest, and I will refuse to deny them a voice whenever I have an opportunity to vote in this Parliament.
Baroness O'Loan (CB)
My Lords, we are facing change on a scale probably not experienced since World War II. The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, spoke very eloquently on the changes we face yesterday. This is a time of massive global economic uncertainty. As Members of this House, we know a little of the complexities of roles, function and status which derive from our current situation as a member of the EU. But I wonder, despite what some noble Lords have said, whether those who voted for Brexit—I was not one of them—really understood the extent to which our economic, social and cultural realities are interwoven with those of our fellow member states in the European Union.
When I started teaching European law, more years ago than I care to remember, freedom of movement was available only to those who could support themselves and satisfy various criteria. That has changed utterly, as have the rules on freedom of movement of goods. There were restrictions, some of which might have seemed eminently sensible had we been looking to reform the European Union today. It needs to change—I think there are very few who would say otherwise—and it would be good had we been able to be part of that change. But that is not going to happen.
When the Supreme Court said that legislation was essential for us to trigger Article 50, it did not say that we had to rubber-stamp the outcome of the referendum. Rather, it said that it was for Parliament to determine what should happen and, as your Lordships know, the House of Commons voted conclusively on that issue. Now we have to decide whether to endorse that view. I will not repeat the contributions of many Members in articulating the reasons why I believe we cannot vote against the Bill or really amend it. My reality is that although, as a citizen of the UK, I believe that our best interests would be served by remaining in the EU, I do not believe that as a Member of your Lordships’ House I should vote against the Bill.
I have read with care the many amendments suggested. The issues with which they deal are very often of fundamental and enormous significance, but I do not think that anything will be achieved by attempting to alter the Bill. It has but one purpose, and that purpose, however regrettable, must be achieved. Other issues must be dealt with during the period of negotiation. The EU committees here—I was a member of the Justice, Institutions and Consumer Protection Sub-Committee—have produced several reports on various vital areas of concern. We will have to ensure that all that should be taken into account is taken into account.
I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, talking about the effect of triggering Article 50, but it is possible that any attempt to retract Article 50 would end up in the European Court of Justice, with the delays which would inevitably follow from that. The fourth report from the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House says that Parliament should work on the assumption that if we trigger Article 50, it will not be reversible. I do not know the answer to that and I do not think that any of us knows.
Contributions have been made both in this House and in the other place that have been very disparaging about the White Paper, but the reality is that it goes to the negotiations that will take place and nobody would expect a negotiator to disclose their hand at this stage. We in Northern Ireland know that negotiations always go to the edge, and it is at the very edge that the most important concessions are made by both sides.
Having said that I do not think we can amend the Bill, I will refer to two issues. In Northern Ireland we have an uncertain peace. I have said before in your Lordships’ House that we cannot assume that our peace agreement will stand. I am sure that the election we face in just over a week in Northern Ireland will result in direct rule. I do not believe that our politicians will be able to form a Government, so to my mind direct rule is inevitable. That will create space for malefactors who will then argue that the Good Friday agreement has failed—and, of course, we still have active dissident and loyalist paramilitary groups that manage a large empire of drugs, fuel smuggling, people smuggling and so on. There are still a lot of guns in circulation and we continue to have shootings and bombings, so we cannot be complacent and I do not think we can suggest that there is nothing to worry about. Brexit will recreate the border between the north and the south.
Borders are by their nature divisive, and this border will attract protest, hostility, violence and significant economic delay. Other borders across Europe will also create delays for those who seek to export from the United Kingdom into Europe—but, ironically, the border could be the thing that precipitates the demand for another referendum on a united Ireland, which is provided for in the Good Friday agreement. The Governments are talking glibly of not recreating the problems of past border stops, but that seems inevitable because how else are tax and customs regimes to be managed?
If we leave the customs union and the single market, or if we enter them on different terms, as we must if we leave the EU, we will have to have alternative systems or some form of alternative access to European markets. As other noble Lords have said, it is inevitable that that will come at great cost. We will be one country seeking to deal with 27 separate states who are already in—and it does not take much effort to work out the odds in that situation. So my question for the Government on the subject of borders is: how does the UK intend to manage restrictions on freedom of movement? Is it not inevitable that there will have to be some sort of presence on the one land border that we have in these islands—the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic? Otherwise, people will move into the UK through Ireland, and into Ireland through the UK. That is going to be costly and difficult.
I also find it difficult to imagine how trade and customs tariffs can be managed without some visible form of border. The border between the north and the south of Ireland has many crossing points and was always difficult to police. It was done during the Troubles by destroying crossing points—placing massive concrete bollards in the way and often having a military presence. That generates resentment and no one wants to see a regular visible military presence again. If roads are closed, that will attract direct action to reopen them because they have been open for so long now—and that will lead to violence. I suspect that if electronic forms of surveillance are put in place, they will be blown up after a few days. How are Her Majesty’s Government going to manage that situation? How will we generate some sort of a programme to win over the minds and hearts of people to the division of the island of Ireland that will be necessary to enable both Brexit and the functioning of the EU? These are not idle questions; they are fundamental.
I will make one more point, on security and policing for the protection of the UK. There is an expectation that everyone will understand that it is in everyone’s interest to continue the Europol arrangements we have with Europe. That is the theory. When there is a need for immediate co-operation, as there is when things suddenly go terribly wrong—and they always do go terribly wrong suddenly—you need to have the databases, contacts and everything else in place. It is not enough to start talking about them then. We have seen the failures of the security services in America, France and elsewhere, as well as in Ireland, and we have seen what happens. So I would say that this issue must be one of the Government’s primary targets in terms of focusing on what must be done to enable everything else that will follow in terms of trade.
So there are huge dangers and huge opportunities. I wish the Prime Minister well in the journey that she is embarking on. She has got to do her best for all of us and we have to go with this referendum result, but I would say to the Government that there are far more important issues yet to consider, and noble Lords will have that opportunity.
Lord Sheikh (Con)
My Lords, last year I voted for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union because I believed we should control our own destiny. First and foremost, we should be able to do business with whomsoever we wish. Exiting the EU means that we can now realise a greater economic potential.
The United Kingdom has a long and rich history as a successful trading nation—long before the concept of the EU was ever envisaged. In the 17th and 18th centuries, we started actively to send merchant ships to different parts of the world. Companies such as the East India Company were established. In fact, the East India Company at one time controlled half the world’s trade. In the 19th century, our manufactured goods dominated world trade. We became the so-called workshop of the world. Our success led to us becoming the world’s first modern industrialised nation. It is in our blood to innovate and to export this innovation globally. Such enterprising spirit is a part of our heritage which can now be released, no longer restrained by outside directives and burdensome regulations.
During the last 18 months, I have visited four overseas countries—Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Sudan. Wherever I go, I find that we are well respected and that there is an appetite for building closer ties with us, both economically and politically. For example, in Kazakhstan, the English language will be used in the Astana international financial centre and, furthermore, English law will apply. With regard to central Asia, I am hosting a conference in March where we will be discussing trade links with Kyrgyzstan. I urge the Government to establish trade ties with Sudan, following the lifting of sanctions previously applied by the USA. I have connections with African countries such as Uganda and I can assure your Lordships that there is appetite in the region to do more business with us. I know a number of ambassadors and high commissioners who also give me the same message. It is liberating to know that we will now be truly free to make policy decisions, relating to all these countries and others, for ourselves.
Trading relationships define friendship and co-operation between countries. They are a part of a nation’s character. It is, therefore, so important that we build them for ourselves, rather than as a component part of the European block. Not least, we should be seeking to revitalise our trading links with other Commonwealth countries. The importance of the Commonwealth in world trade has grown significantly in recent years. During the last 20 years, the combined GDP of Commonwealth countries has doubled. They include a third of the world’s population and two key BRICS emerging markets—India and South Africa.
I believe that our wider ties with the Commonwealth have suffered as a result of the overwhelming imposition of our membership of the European Union. We have been forced to present ourselves primarily as an EU nation. I now look forward to strengthening relationships with countries, based on our deep historic roots, shared values, mutual respect and common language.
We also have a great deal to offer the world in the field of Islamic financial services. The United Kingdom has the largest Islamic finance industry outside the Muslim world, with assets now exceeding $20 billion. We have a vast number of highly skilled accountants and lawyers, including the largest legal services market in Europe. They are ready to promote and supply our Islamic finance expertise and other financial services to the world.
We must be bold and ambitious in seeking new trade agreements. I applaud the formation of the new Department for International Trade and will support it in every way that I can. Aside from new trade opportunities, leaving the EU will allow us to regain full control of our borders. This is an important principle of our national sovereignty and public confidence. If our border policy is seen to have integrity, people may become less hostile to immigration. In addition, there would perhaps be more incentive to integrate following a proper process of migration, rather than having an open border.
I hope that we can also increase our educational links with academic institutions overseas. Much like trade, these relationships help to build bridges between nations, and exchange knowledge and learning without the need for centrally imposed bureaucracy.
I have a long-standing connection with the City of London and can confidently say that the City will flourish after Brexit as long as it develops a global gaze. We must be firm in our plans and invoke Article 50. I feel that we should avoid uncertainty—any hesitation will have adverse consequences. The will of the people must prevail.
Lord Hollick (Lab)
My Lords, the Prime Minister has decided that gaining control of our borders to reduce migration from the EU is to be the central plank of her Brexit strategy. From that decision, much else flows. We are to depart the single market and the customs union and avoid the unwelcome oversight of the European Court of Justice—except, the White Paper goes on to say, in those sectors of our choosing where we do not wish to depart and, indeed, plan to remain in the single market and the customs union. It remains to be seen whether this desire for, shall we say, a relationship on the side on terms of our choosing after the marriage has ended will survive the inevitable turbulence and recrimination of the divorce proceedings or whether it is perhaps the triumph of hope over experience.
The conflicts inherent in this approach speak to the fundamental truth that the UK’s economy is, and will continue to be, inextricably intertwined with the EU, our largest market. Yes, we will over time build stronger relationships with countries outside the EU—we will rediscover the Commonwealth. However, for the foreseeable future, our economy will have to depend upon the continuing strength of our relationship with the EU and, in one important area, our reliance upon the enormous contribution made to our economy and society by migrants from the EU. The Office for National Statistics estimates that 3.3 million EU citizens live in the UK, of whom 2.1 million are in work. Important sectors rely upon their continuing contribution: 30% of the workforce in the food processing industry and 17% in the hospitality industry come from the EU; 170,000 EU citizens work in the NHS and residential care homes; 200,000 work in the construction industry. It is quite shameful that these citizens and their families—a good number of whom have been resident in the UK for many years—should have any shred of doubt whatever about their rights to remain here.
Securing those rights is one of the dozen principles set out in the Brexit White Paper, but it is not too late to give a pre-emptive commitment to those citizens and recognise and match the commitment they have made to our country. That they have been designated the status of negotiating chips is repugnant. If, as a result, they decide to leave, it will damage our economy and our reputation and be a massive own goal. The White Paper acknowledges that we will always want immigration, and it rightly asserts that openness to international talent must remain one of our distinctive assets. At the same time, the White Paper wants to design a migration system to control the number of people coming into the UK according to quotas based on the Government’s assessment of sectoral needs.
Are cumbersome state-planning quotas to help control migration likely to work? The omens are not good. In her five years as Home Secretary, Mrs May failed each year to achieve her net migration target of 100,000. The largest contribution to her failure was not the free movement of people from the EU but the migration from outside the EU, where work permits favour her degree of control. As a former Home Secretary, she knows only too well that information on migrants, including details about their participation in the workforce, is patchy and wholly inadequate to provide the basis for effective management and control. In the absence of better information and improved systems, control of migration risks becoming a blunt and bureaucratic instrument, unresponsive to the many and changing needs of our economy and of society more generally.
Let us be clear: we need not only to retain 3.1 million people from the EU who live here already; we also need to attract new EU migrants to help the UK economy to prosper. For instance, the Housing White Paper targets an increase in home building of 100,000 a year. To reach that level, the construction industry estimates that it will need 500,000 additional construction workers. The Chancellor’s welcome decision to increase infrastructure investment by £23 billion during the life of this Parliament will add further to the demand for skilled and semi-skilled labour.
What is clear is that for the foreseeable future we will need more—not less—immigration, and not only the brightest and the best, who feature heavily in the White Paper, but also those with less glamorous but essential skills to help deliver a growing economy. The Government must be honest about this. At the same time, they must commit and come forward with moves and investment to put more resources into increasing our own national skill base.
The heated and divisive dialogue about migration—which, if anything, has grown more rancorous since the referendum—provides scant reassurance to those from the EU and from countries outside the EU who have made their homes here, and it may deter those living in the EU who might otherwise consider coming to the UK. The best, the brightest and the skilled have choices, and unless our words and our actions speak to the enthusiastic welcome we want to extend to them as fellow citizens, they may choose not to join us. In every respect, we will be the poorer for their absence.
Lord Taverne (LD)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Low, who is not in his place at the moment, I want to talk about democracy. I never thought that, one day, speaker after speaker in a Commons debate, on an issue of immense significance for Britain’s future, would announce that, although they believed that Brexit would gravely damage our national interests, they would nevertheless vote to leave because the will of the people must be obeyed. They did not say, “Of course, we have to take the decision of the people very seriously, but in the end we have to make up our own minds”; they declared, in effect, that they were not in Parliament to exercise their own judgment but were delegates who had to vote the ticket of populist correctness.
Out goes the tradition of parliamentary democracy, with its checks and balances; out go Locke, John Stuart Mill and others, who created liberal democracy, which has been much admired; and out goes Edmund Burke, who argued that MPs were representatives, not delegates. The doctrine of Rousseau now rules in Westminster, that the will of the people must always prevail, a doctrine much admired by autocrats ever since the days of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. With great respect to my noble friend Lord Ashdown, the idea that the will of the people equals democracy or the national interest is a fallacy. Before the Second World War, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin all commanded overwhelming public support and represented the will of the people. That hardly made them democrats or left their countries better off. Today Putin and Erdogan are among the most popular populists. They boast about their majority support. Are they democrats, even though they suppress dissent and trample on the rule of law?
Of course, the view of the majority matters. It is often, in my view, probably generally right but there have been times when the majority has been disastrously wrong. In 1938 Chamberlain came back from Berchtesgaden with a piece of paper, declaring, “peace for our time”. His message was almost universally acclaimed. Only a few dissented against the wish of the people. They were led by Churchill, who was denounced as a warmonger, a pessimist and, no doubt, a moaner. Then Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
I fear that the vote for Brexit will turn out to be one of those occasions. If we are heading for disaster, we do not lie down and give up but fight to avoid it and point out the dangers of what we are heading for. If after the very short period for negotiations there is no deal or one that leaves us all much poorer, must MPs accept that we must still leave the European Union because the June vote requires them to act as lemmings? Mrs May graciously allowed Parliament a vote on the final deal, if there is one, but even if her deal is a very hard Brexit, Parliament’s only choice will be either to accept or to reject and fall off a cliff—no chance for the people to change their vote if they change their mind or because circumstances have changed.
In fact, circumstances have changed. We now know, as several speakers have pointed out, that curbing immigration is the Government’s first priority, not economic welfare. In addition, Mr Trump was elected President. The United States used to lead the world as the champion of free trade. Now it is “America First”. He threatens a trade war with China. His election, like the Brexit vote, encouraged every protectionist and nationalist in Europe. What price then for the Brexiteers’ promise of a bonanza of free trade? Worse still, having decided to abandon the European Union, Mrs May feels she must cosy up to someone who wants to destabilise the European Union itself, has doubts about the importance of NATO, seeks a new deal with Putin as a strong man he greatly admires, and who declares that torture is an effective weapon against terrorism because torture works.
The forecasts of most independent economists that we are now in the calm before the storm may prove wrong. So far there is no clear evidence of a significant shift in public opinion. If there is none before the end of next year, it is doubtful that Brexit can still be avoided. But if opinion does shift, because the economists are right and the pound falls further, inflation rises, employment suffers, more companies emigrate and living standards decline, or if increased dependence on the good will of Trump repels the public—a future symbolised by Mrs May and Mr Trump walking hand in hand—the June verdict must be open to review. Brexit is not yet a done deal. A new referendum will not be a rerun of June, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, pointed out, because this time we will know what Brexit means. Its consequences will not be speculation but reality.
It is also said that the June verdict is irreversible. Dictatorships do not allow people to change their mind but in a democracy no decision is ever irreversible and if people feel they have made a mistake, they must be allowed to change their mind.
In her famous Bruges speech, Mrs Thatcher made a profound observation about Europe when she said that,
“on many great issues, the countries of Europe should try to speak with a single voice. I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone. Europe is stronger when we do so, whether it be in trade, in defence or in our relations with the rest of the world”.
Is now the time, in the Trump era, for Britain to leave and weaken the European Union, ourselves and our influence in the world?
Lord Owen (Ind SD)
My Lords, yesterday the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, talked about the historical freight that this legislation carries. It carries a great deal, but it also carries the historical freight of referendums which have been coming into this country’s democracy for some years. We have barely mentioned 1975, but that was also a time when the country had the chance to leave or to stay, and it chose to stay. Broadly speaking, that decision has lasted until the present. There was an attempt at one time, which was finished by the election of 1983, to come out without a referendum despite a referendum’s having been given eight years earlier. That failed.
I will not say any more about this, but the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, did not mention the referendum. You cannot face this issue and ignore the decision of the referendum, but equally, you cannot talk about a United Kingdom without being aware that a substantial number of people did not vote for it and, in my view, tragically, we were split in Scotland, though not in my own nation, Wales. We have to take account of those divisions as we approach this next and most crucial stage.
One of the issues of a referendum is that you do not have manifestos about what you are going to do. You have referendums because political parties are split. What you do is charge the Government of the day with negotiating on behalf of the whole country. I believe this Government have tried to do this. It is right that we are having a debate now; it should probably have been conceded straightaway. Nevertheless, it was impossible, given that no preparation whatever had been made for this referendum by the previous Prime Minister, for the present Prime Minister to take time to look carefully at all the detailed issues and be in a position to negotiate. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union wisely said on 2 February that,
“once we are outside the EU, the question of whether we automatically cease to be a member of the EEA becomes a legal empty vessel. We will look at that. If we do propose to withdraw from the EEA, we will come back and tell the House”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/2/2017; col. 1227.]
It seems to me that that indicates a flexibility we all need. We have to be flexible on many things. We need to come out of the EU as quickly as we can, and I would not wait two years to do this. That is the fundamental decision as I understand it, and which I believe is virtually irrevocable as the result of the referendum.
How we handle the next few years is a very difficult question. It is becoming apparent that negotiating a trading agreement with the EU is going to be very difficult. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said that he thought it was virtually impossible. It will take far longer than it should and far longer than I would want. Therefore, there has been a growing recognition that there has to be a transitional period, but that transition should be after we have gone from the EU and before we have a trading agreement. In that area, there are flexibilities that we should be examining. Of course, we must first talk, as we are bound to do under Article 50, to the 27 EU member states—our friends with whom we will, as Europeans, be working in many, many fields for decades to come.
We should also talk to our other European friends—the non-EU members of the EEA. This House does not seem to understand that there is a huge difference between the single market and the EEA. There are two quite different tracks within the EEA, apart from anything else. It is beholden on us to talk to those members, and it is necessary for us to see whether a transition period could be put in place that would give us time to get what we need, and that is a trading agreement. The Government hope that it can be done by a bespoke agreement, and they have established areas in which they think they might be able to achieve this. I very much doubt whether that will be easily given, and certainly not in a short timescale.
All this time, we face a world in a fragile state, an extremely fragile European economy—look at what is happening to Greece as we talk—a dysfunctional EU that is unable to grapple with the problems of the Eurozone, and a financial situation that could get worse at almost any time over the negotiating period. Therefore, we should stage these negotiations; most negotiations actually are staged. Often, it is best to take the most difficult issues first. That is the one on which we have the clearest mandate: to come out of the EU. As to how we handle the transition period, there are flexible ways of dealing with it: it will be negotiated, but we do not know the details. As the Minister said, if they do propose to withdraw from the EEA, they will come back and tell us.
Why do I stress the EEA? The EEA has nothing to do with ever-closer union: it is an economic arrangement. There are separate surveillance mechanisms that are outside the European Court of Justice. They are also outside foreign trade, fishing and many other different aspects. It is a very different mechanism and it must be looked at, because it might be a mechanism for healing some of the wounds and for gathering a higher percentage of people in support of a policy of coming out of the EU. That must be our objective.
It is certainly not our objective to “rise up”. I hope nobody else goes to Bloomberg to make speeches. The reason we are in this mess is the speech by the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, and now we have another past Prime Minister going to Bloomberg to tell the people to “rise up”. What we need is unity, the maximum unity possible.
Baroness Finn (Con)
My Lords, the debate both before and after the referendum has been passionate and, at times, heated. However, I will briefly restate three points. First, the decision to call the referendum to ask the people whether they wished to leave or remain in the European Union was endorsed by both Houses in this Parliament and was based on a manifesto commitment of this Government. Secondly, the referendum decision, on a turnout of more than 72%, was clearly to leave. Thirdly, the overwhelming will of the elected other place—both Her Majesty’s Government and the loyal Opposition—is to accept and respect the outcome of that referendum and to carry out the instructions of the people. It would be undemocratic for this Chamber of appointed Members to do anything other than vote for this Bill. To do otherwise would demonstrate a lofty disdain for the democratic mandate and could cause enormous harm to the status of your Lordships’ House.
There will be many important debates in the months ahead about our future relationship with the European Union. The Prime Minister’s speech in Lancaster House, and the Government’s subsequent White Paper, set out a common-sense plan for the wider relationship between Britain and the European Union. I trust that Brexit will not mean Britain turning in on itself. That is not in our history, not in our culture and not in our nature; nor is it in our short-term or long-term economic interest. Speaking as the daughter of a refugee from communist Czechoslovakia who defected to the liberal West, I believe it is vital that that applies to immigration, where the aim should be control, not arbitrary reduction, and it should certainly apply to global free trade. Post-Brexit Britain must be open, free market and liberal.
The Prime Minister has also, correctly, promised to resolve the status of EU nationals in the UK, calling this “right and fair”. The sooner we can give a guarantee to EU citizens that they are welcome to stay here, the better. The Prime Minister’s noble attempt to fast-track a deal whereby EU workers currently living in the EU are allowed to remain, in exchange for an agreement that would give British expatriates in the European Union similar rights, was rebuffed by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. It is deeply regrettable that European politicians are playing politics with people’s lives to force the Government’s hand. I very much hope that other member states give the Government the guarantees they need to resolve this issue at the earliest moment.
This will not be a winner-takes-it-all process. It is, after all, a negotiation and negotiations require compromise. We need to seek the best deal possible. It is vital not to bind the Government in any way, administratively or legally, because they must have the ability to negotiate flexibly and in the national interest.
The EU institutions and member states have obdurately held to the position that negotiations cannot begin without notification, although the demand from the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, for €60 billion in advance of trade negotiations appears to be at odds with his own declaration that he should be holding his peace.
The Prime Minister must therefore trigger Article 50 before the discussions commence. My appeal to remainers who also support free trade and liberal values is to move on from attempts to frustrate Brexit through clever procedural amendments and to join the debate about what sort of country we want to be and what policies we want to have after Brexit. We must allow the Government to get on with their negotiations. I therefore support the Bill and urge other noble Lords to vote in favour of it.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
My Lords, I want to use my time not to repeat the arguments that have already been well rehearsed in the context of the referendum but to reflect on the significance of the Bill before this House. We are, after all, discussing the simplest of simple Bills—just two clauses—with the simplest of simple objectives, which is to begin the process of carrying out the decision of the British people as expressed in a referendum. It was a referendum based on a Bill that this House passed without opposition and, by the way, it was a referendum held all of eight months ago. Yet here we are with a two-day debate on the Second Reading and 184 speakers. I cannot remember when we ever had a speakers list quite like this, but it is absolutely in line with the phenomenal focus that this House has shown on the referendum and related matters since 23 June last year.
Like, I dare say, one or two other people in this House, I spent a bit of time during the short recess knocking on doors in a by-election, and I have to report to the House that our interest in this subject is not matched by people on the doorstep. Bearing in mind that one of the reasons most frequently advanced for the leave vote being so high is that people feel politicians are out of touch, I simply hope that in the months ahead there is a better match between the subjects that we are discussing in this House and those being discussed by our fellow citizens. The fact is—and the polls demonstrate this—that the public have largely made up their minds about the referendum, its significance and the result. An ICM poll on Saturday showed that 68% of us want the Government to get on with the process of leaving the European Union, and that includes no less than 48% of those who voted to remain.
That brings me to the role of the Lords in relation to this Bill. The first point is something on which I think we all agree—the primacy of the Commons. This, of course, expresses itself in a number of different ways. Very rarely, the Commons has to assert itself through the Parliament Act; much more frequently, the view of the Lords in respect of Commons decisions, and the extent to which they are challenged, is dependent on the clarity of the judgment the Commons has made. Well, the message in respect of this Bill is clearer than any I can remember. The Commons decided by a majority of 384 that this Bill should become law. What is more, the Commons’ verdict is a massive endorsement of the even more important decision made by the people in the referendum. Let us be absolutely clear: there really is no wriggle room. If you enter a contest or competition, especially one in which you have written the rules yourself, as we did in the referendum Bill, then surely you must accept the result.
“Ah,” say some remainers, “but this was only an advisory referendum”. Of course, legally that is true. It is advisory. Parliament could reverse it. There are no substantial constraints on what our Parliament can do, apart of course from the very substantial ones applied by the European Union. But politically, and most of all democratically, the referendum was binding. I very much doubt that if remain had won the argument and the Government had then decided that we were going to leave the European Union anyway, there would have been many remainers saying, “Well, fair enough, it was only advisory”.
If you play the game, you accept the result. When I watch Stoke City at the weekend I accept the rules and the result, though I have to admit there have been many occasions when I would have loved to have been able to say that the goals against us were only advisory. Any amendment proposed during the passage of this Bill that has either the effect of seriously delaying the implementation of the verdict of the British people, or at worst rejecting it, should, in my view, be unceremoniously rejected.
What about the suggestion coming from the Liberal Democrats that it is not one referendum we need but two? No doubt they are hoping that the second one will go the other way. I have to say in passing that, where I come from, that would make it one all and we would need a decider. However, I have to acknowledge, at least, that a second referendum would be in the finest traditions of democracy European Union style. Have a referendum if you must, but if you get it wrong, have a second one to reverse it. The EU has plenty of form on this—ask the people of Denmark and Ireland.
A second referendum would be a betrayal of the record number of people who voted in June last year. The turnout was 6% up on the 2015 general election. In my own region, 60% voted to leave. People were enthused to vote who never normally take part in elections. They were assured they had been given a hugely important, once-in-a-lifetime decision to make.
“Ah”, say some opponents of the Bill, “the people were duped. They were fed false information. The referendum wasn’t fair. The people didn’t know what they were voting for”. I say this with all seriousness—with acute seriousness—that in a democracy we should be extraordinarily careful about using the argument that we know what is good for the people better than they know themselves. I have some authority on this because I have the dubious distinction of having lost more general elections than probably most people in this House. My record is: played eight; won four; lost four. The pattern when you lose is always the same: it is because your opponents made promises they could not possibly keep, you say; it is because they lied; it is because they had the press on their side; it is because they had far more money for their campaign. When you win, of course, it is a triumph for democracy.
On the argument that the public did not know what kind of Brexit they were voting for, the answer is simple—they did not vote for Brexit at all. It was not on the ballot paper. The choice was remain or leave. They voted to leave. Brexit may be ambiguous; leaving is not. If you leave an organisation, you no longer sit on the executive committee, you do not have to pay the subscription and you do not have to obey the rules. That applies whether you are leaving a political party, the snooker club or the European Union.
Those in this House who are seriously thinking about voting against the Third Reading and voting this Bill down should think very carefully about the implications. That would mean a straightforward clash between the Commons and the Lords. It would, in my view, inevitably result in a general election very quickly after such a decision had been made. We can all speculate about the conclusion of that general election. It is now eight months since the people made their decision, and one which the Commons has overwhelmingly endorsed. It is now our job to scrutinise the Bill in the most effective way, as we always do, but as our constitutional practice has made clear, not to thwart, delay or block it, and I am confident that we will do just that.
Lord Chidgey (LD)
My Lords, from the Prime Minister’s 12 point plan, the clear intention is that the UK should be destined to leave the single market and the EU customs union. It does not require too much scrutiny to work that out. That is in order to pursue bilateral trade agreements with faster growing economies outside the EU. In considering this Bill, it is not therefore unreasonable to consider the impact on the economies of the countries with whom we trade within the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific groups and beyond.
In the Prime Minister’s 12 point plan, point 8 refers to the establishment of free trade into the European market through a free trade agreement, and point 9 is about concluding new agreements with other countries. It is blindingly obvious that this means that the UK will leave the EU customs union and the single market, while assuming it can establish a free trade agreement with the EU that is unlike any existing agreement.
I was fortunate to secure a debate on Africa and the EU economic partnership agreements—the EPAs—on 17 November last year, recorded in Hansard Volume 776. In his response to that debate, the Minister of State commented that UK leadership had secured,
“the world’s most generous package of market opening for developing countries”,
of which, 44 are in Africa, in which I have a special interest.
With Brexit, the Minister stressed that, while the UK remains part of the EU,
“we … remain governed by the EPA arrangements”,
and,
“all rights and obligations will apply, including our commitments to developing countries through the EPAs”.
He said that we enjoy,
“strong trading relationships with many developing countries, and we will look to strengthen those ties in future. That will be part of the negotiation package as we move forward”.
I repeat:
“That will be part of the negotiation package as we move forward”.—[Official Report, 17/11/16; col. 1642-44.]
At the same time, the Government have set as a priority a target of increasing trade and investment with the Commonwealth, estimating that Commonwealth trade will surpass $1 trillion by 2020. However, until Brexit is completed, the UK is bound by EU regulations, which forbid members from negotiating trade agreements with others, including the Commonwealth nations. That is, of course, where the dichotomy lies—between ambition and reality, emphasising clearly why the outcome of these negotiations must be sanctioned by Parliament before any deal is ratified.
In its paper for the Commonwealth secretariat, well-known economists Mohammad Razzaque and Brendan Vickers confirm that,
“Once the UK has formally exited the EU, however, all rights and obligations under these various agreements will cease to apply”.
They also point out that, between 2000 and 2015, sub-Saharan Africa merchandise trade with the UK increased from $6.5 billion to $12 billion. Significantly, the same countries achieved far greater expansion in trade into the rest of the EU over the same period, with their exports far more than doubling—from just over $30 billion to $71 billion over the same period. Despite its relatively low market share of EU trade with Africa overall, the UK remains an important destination for countries such as Botswana—we take 40% of its exports here in the UK—while for Kenya we take 29% and for South Africa 26%. The impact of Brexit is bound to include a decline in exports to the EU from these and other African countries if the EPAs exclude the UK in the future.
Furthermore, any erosion of preferences in the UK market for the many current value-added products could have an adverse impact on the continent’s plans for structural economic transformation, as set out in the African Union’s development plan, Agenda 2063. More than 20 ACP countries face most-favoured-nation- tariff increases on the value of their total exports to the UK, amounting to some $250 million. South Africa would have to pay the largest import duties, of about $80 million, while its neighbours Swaziland and Namibia would face a potential tax bill of 8% of the value of their exports.
As Razzaque and Vickers point out, there are a number of policy options that the Government could pursue for EPA countries. For the least developed countries, or LDCs, the UK could devise its own generalised system of preferences, or GSP, building on and improving arrangements for the world’s poorest countries. The UK could also reduce non-tariff barriers and introduce more relaxed and more generous rules of origin. It could follow the Australian and Canadian models, which require recipient countries to add only 25% to the local value for goods to qualify for duty-free access. A UK offer of trade preferences could extend to services in line with the agreed least developed countries waiver under the World Trade Organization, or WTO.
A key issue is whether the UK can accede separately to existing EPAs or whether it can install replicas for ACP countries that have signed the deals with the EU. The Government will have to consider not only whether the replication of EPAs is possible but whether it is worth pursuing at all.
As we can see, Brexit will have a profound and far-reaching impact on our trade with African countries, in or out of the Commonwealth. I look forward to the Government’s response in terms of negotiating Brexit with the EU prior to further deliberation by Parliament and before asking the people to endorse that decision.
Lord Pannick (CB)
My Lords, I was counsel for Mrs Gina Miller in the court case that led to this Bill.
Lord Pannick
I want to pay tribute to Mrs Miller, because her determination in the face in particular of quite outrageous racist and sexist abuse has ensured that we have the opportunity to debate whether—and, if so, on what terms—Article 50 is invoked. The whole House should be very grateful to Mrs Miller.
The Divisional Court and the Supreme Court carried out their constitutional responsibilities by affirming the supremacy of Parliament. It is now for this House to live up to our constitutional responsibility. It is for us to scrutinise a Bill of enormous importance to the future of this country.
I think that the Bill requires amendment, in particular to ensure parliamentary sovereignty as the process of withdrawal occurs over the next two years. Noble Lords know that the Prime Minister has promised that any agreement with the European Union on the terms of our withdrawal and our future relationship with the EU will require the agreement of both Houses of Parliament. She has said that the agreements will so require before any agreement is put to the European Parliament for its consent. That promise should be written into the Bill. A political promise, made by the Prime Minister in good faith, is no substitute for a clause—an obligation—in an Act of Parliament. The reason for that is that political circumstances can change; Prime Ministers can change over the next two years. On a matter of this importance, it is vital to ensure that there is a clear and binding obligation on the Government to return to Parliament at a defined time to seek the agreement of both Houses of Parliament for the terms of any agreement. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, this Parliament must have at least the same powers that the European Parliament has to disagree with the terms of any draft agreement.
In the course of this debate—I have listened to much of it and read the rest of it—I have heard only two arguments for why this political commitment should not be included in the Bill. The first is that we should get on with it—that is, get on with notification. The answer, of course, is that to amend the Bill in this way would not affect the Prime Minister’s deadline of the end of March for notification. The only other argument that has been made by noble Lords is that we must be very careful not to weaken the negotiating power of the Government in Europe. However, the Prime Minister has already promised to seek the consent of both Houses for any agreement that the Government reach with the EU. If there is any weakening of our negotiating position then it is the result of the Prime Minister giving that commitment, not the result of writing it into the Bill. In any event, and again the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made this point, surely it will strengthen the Government’s hand for the Prime Minister to be able to say to the Europeans that she has to get the deal through Parliament. Of course Parliament has previously imposed legally binding duties on Ministers to secure parliamentary approval before a treaty is ratified—for example, Section 20 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 and Section 2 of the European Union Act 2011. The question is: why not in this Bill?
I am also concerned about what happens if there is no draft agreement between the UK and the EU on the terms of our withdrawal. In my opinion, parliamentary sovereignty must also apply in those circumstances. Surely it must be for Parliament to decide whether we prefer no deal or the deal offered by the EU. It is for those reasons that I have added my name to an amendment that would require parliamentary approval for an agreement or for no agreement. The Supreme Court recognised the constitutional requirement for Parliamentary sovereignty. I hope noble Lords will do likewise.
Lord Cavendish of Furness (Con)
My Lords, I support the Bill and hope that it goes through unamended. I should say that I joined the Brexit campaign but only after hearing the proposed deal that Mr Cameron came back with.
One of the functions of parliamentary democracy is to provide means of resolving differences that citizens cannot be expected to resolve among themselves. By their very nature, those differences tend to be intractable. People hold very different views on the legitimate reach of government. I happen to believe in small government, not least because whatever Governments do, they do it expensively and often not very well. However, I wonder if the tendency on the part of modern Governments to overreach has not perhaps led indirectly to the divisions that shook the UK last June and which still persist.
I was born in an age when, whoever was in power, we enjoyed a comforting sense that we received governance from one another’s hands. The administration of these islands had a national flavour and, broadly, enjoyed public support. Authority was all around us, and it seemed on the whole to be benign and on our side. Much of that has been lost. In my life and work I feel that authority has come to be seen often as hostile, remote and even menacing. This has produced a public malaise that it strikes me has grown as the influence of the EU has grown.
To make sense of that malaise, we have to look back. As a lifelong member of this party, I was among those who genuinely felt cheated when the deal that we voted for not only turned out to be something quite else but undermined some fundamental freedoms and values, things that my father and grandfather had fought and suffered to defend in two world wars. Of course, for most of my youth Britain was weak and tired and I think it is safe to say that a well-meaning official class took it upon themselves to steer us, not without a degree of stealth, down the road that led to where we stood on the eve of the referendum; that road, as we now know, was labelled “managed decline”. It took no account of the possibility that the decline might be reversed, as in fact happened. This is not the place to say how it happened and at whose hands.
The party opposite’s journey in its approach to the Common Market and its successor entities is very different and completely fascinating. The Labour Party of my youth, as I remember it, believed passionately in the British parliamentary system and was loath to see its participation, won at such cost, assailed and diluted. Then suddenly the orthodoxy changed. Even before the famous Delors speech, I remember reading tracts by socialist authors, saying in effect: “Listen up, brothers; this is a new, global world. Socialism will become an increasingly hard sell with the voters. We must infiltrate the institutions that will give effect to our agenda of redistribution”. All I can say is that I salute them; it has been a triumph for Labour. Shedloads of British taxpayers’ cash is doled out by unaccountable officials without the need for politicians to explain to voters where their hard-earned cash has gone
For the Liberal Democrats, the journey has been different again. There is something counterintuitive to me about seeking political power only to give it away again. It is also insulting to those who entrust power in the first place. Pro-EU politicians seem to be seduced by the superficial attractions of holding office without shouldering the responsibilities that their electors conferred on them. Voters, it now appears, expect more of them. Those I spoke to in Copeland last week certainly understood why, for example, the country had to endure austerity, even if the opposition parties cannot. “That is why we elected them—to make the difficult decisions”, one man said. This Copeland man’s insight suggests to me that many politicians, and probably all Liberal Democrat ones, fundamentally lack the confidence to govern in the modern age—the confidence and the competence. It is hard not to sympathise and agree with them, but the solution does not lie in handing powers that rightly belong to Parliament to a cadre of officials, most of whom have scant understanding of Britain’s needs and aspirations.
It is time, I feel, for those who feel oppressed by the heat in the democratic kitchen to leave it and make way for those prepared to give electors the bad news as well as the good, those who will find solutions to those intractable problems. I have a glorious vision of a new generation of post-Brexit men and women entering public life, valued perhaps as much for their experience outside politics as for their contribution within the Palace of Westminster.
Time allows me to say very little about trade, but once again I remind Ministers that it is the SME sector that is driving UK growth. I declare my interests as an operator in the SME sector, as given in the register. There can be no doubt that regulation impacts on the SME sector disproportionately. It hinders small business by magnitudes more than it does large businesses. The EU has been, and remains, the enemy of small business. It is an enduring stain on EU practice that some 50,000 lobbyists representing large multinationals have been made welcome in Brussels, where in effect they buy regulation to benefit their clients and to damage their smaller competitors. I have always found it odd that EU supporters are so uncritical of this widespread corporate venality.
However, all the defects of the EU pale into insignificance beside the constitutional issue. Anyone with experience of the real world understands that when the discipline of accountability falters, a car crash ensues—not possibly, not probably, but inevitably. In terms of accountability, the European Union is a scandal. Its failures threaten personal freedom. It has contempt for democracy. The ancient settlement under which the citizens of these islands are free to do what they will until Parliament decrees otherwise, and under which government is by consent, this priceless legacy, has been taken apart piece by piece and replaced by forms of governance entirely alien to us.
People may patronise Brexit supporters, characterising them as Mr Blair did over the weekend as having “imperfect knowledge”. Let me tell him what experience should have taught him: the people do understand and a majority spoke last June. Those people I talked to in Copeland understand. They are not rude about immigrants; they are not inward-looking; they are not xenophobic. They want, as I want, our children and grandchildren to walk in freedom under the law. Put simply, they want their country back, and so do I. Let us give a fair wind to the Bill, unamended.
Lord Lipsey (Lab)
My Lords, it is rather difficult to stand out in a debate of 185 speakers, but I am perhaps almost unique in one aspect, in that I really do not have terribly strong views on Europe. I voted no in 1975, rather to the horror of Anthony Crosland, for whom I then worked. Even this time, I hummed and hawed a good bit before voting to remain, partly for fear of the unknown but more because I found the egregious lies told by the leave campaigners even more offensive than the egregious lies told by the remainers. So I am not passionate about Europe, but I am passionate about the British constitution and parliamentary sovereignty, and I am a particular opponent of the concept of binding referendums.
Last year, with the noble Lord, Lord Cooper, I arranged a series of seminars at St Anthony’s College, Oxford about aspects of direct democracy, including referendums. I therefore had to read up on the subject. I now know more than I would like to admit about referendums in Uruguay, which is the referendum capital of the universe as well as one of the most unequal countries on earth. The more I read, the more the concept of referendums seemed to me to be flawed. I was delighted in the last Parliament when I had the opportunity to block the private Member’s Bill providing for the referendum here by proposing the adjournment of the House. But it was a short-lived triumph, and this Government brought it back in.
Let me run through the arguments, not in my words but those of the rather remarkable 2009 book by James Fishkin, When the People Speak. He identified the following defects in referendums. First, the difficulty of motivating citizens to become informed. This is particularly so because each individual knows that his or her voice does not count for much and it is not therefore rational to spend their whole time investing in acquiring great knowledge.
Secondly, citizens hate to admit to being ill informed. A famous piece of American research showed that citizens had very strong views on the public affairs Act. In fact, save for in the minds of the researchers, there was no such Act.
Thirdly, the model of the individual rationally deciding his or her view is a distortion of what really happens in families and groups. For one thing, people have a strong inclination to discuss things with people whom they know agree with them. I do not suppose that many Members of this House know very many leavers, but they are 52% of the population. However, this inclination has got much worse in the age of Facebook and social media, which means that we try very hard—and usually successfully—never to read anything with which we are certain we are going to disagree.
Fourthly, and critically, the process is manipulated by politicians. It is not something that grows on its own—the timing of the initiative lies with the politicians. The decision to hold this referendum, now seen almost universally as a disastrous one, was taken without a thought to the national interest and solely in the partisan interests of the Prime Minister of the day and his party.
Today, we are in a position that defies belief. Four-fifths of the Members of the House of Commons are remainers and believe that this is a disaster for Britain, and yet four-fifths voted for this Bill for exit. It would have been better for Parliament to wait until negotiations were much further advanced and see what the temper of public opinion then was, then either hold a vote in Parliament or—fingers firmly clasped on the nose—hold a second referendum, which is the course being put before this House. However, we are not yet at the end of this tale. Negotiations will take place and they could be prolonged. There are scenes, indeed whole acts, to come before the fat lady sings. Will Brexit mean Brexit? We shall have to see.
Baroness Janke (LD)
My Lords, I wish to speak about some of the issues that have been raised by people and organisations in my own city of Bristol. The first thing to say is that the moralistic argument that “the people have spoken” has a rather hollow ring in my city, where a large majority voted to remain in the EU. They have spoken too and they feel that no one in government is listening to them.
Bristol is a highly successful city with an economy driven by an innovative business community which is based on strong links with the EU, particularly aviation and its supply chains throughout the south-west. Through the partnership of its two world-class universities, it is also a test bed for technological and environmental development and a trailblazer in the creative, media, digital and microelectronic industries. It is Britain’s leading smart city and was the European Green Capital in 2015. Bristol is a city of small companies. Having read some of the case studies in a local chamber of commerce survey, I do not recognise the description that I heard from the noble Lord, Lord Cavendish. The small firms in Bristol very much value working with the EU. Due to the skills shortages in this country many of them are dependent on recruitment from the EU and EU workers’ freedom of movement. They feel that the constraints that may be put in their way may well lead some of them to consider operating from Europe, where access to skills and freedom of movement fit much more with the kind of businesses they run.
Bristol is a city of young people. Many noble Lords have mentioned that the remain vote was much stronger among young people. There is a very strong tradition of internationalism in Bristol, which has a young people’s culture. It has one of the highest graduate retention rates in the country and is part of a very innovative, international culture, in partnership with EU countries and colleges. One thing that I have not heard mentioned today is the importance of those shared cultural heritages.
As an international port, Bristol welcomes people from other countries. It has many diverse communities and is not a homogenous city. We need to acknowledge that many cities, particularly in this country, are in the same position. When talking about divided communities, we need to think about the difference between our cities, which are sometimes defined as the economic powerhouse of our country, and other areas. Bristol is a city that welcomes people from outside the UK, and the distressing plight of the EU nationals there is a matter of great concern. The barriers that have been put in their way as they have tried to apply for residence are legendary. I had a group of them here yesterday. They told me that the form they have to fill in consists of some 85 pages. It is the longest of any EU country. For these people, many of whom have lived here for 40 years, worked here and paid their taxes, surely this is a most distressing state of affairs. Not only have barriers been put in their way, they have been subject to hate crime. Many of them tell me that they have lived here for 40 years. They came to this country because they valued its qualities of fairness, justice and constancy and a culture where they feel at home and where people from other countries feel welcome. Their experience since the vote has been quite the contrary. I spoke to people yesterday who told me that they are not sleeping; they are depressed, and their families are suffering as a result. All they want is reassurance—to know that they are welcome and will have the rights they have had over the last 40 years. I will most certainly support an amendment to the Bill that will give them those rights.
To come back to the argument that “the people have spoken”, when I talk to young people, more and more of them tell me that they are quite shocked to find that the only political party they have to support them is the Liberal Democrats. They have spoken to other parties and they are not—
Baroness Janke
That is borne out by the increasing numbers of people who are joining the Liberal Democrats for that very reason. If you read their reasons, you will understand why.
There was also a challenge to the point that somehow the punters are not interested. They are very interested in my city, and they were very interested in Richmond Park, where that was a key issue in the by-election. Maybe some people are not interested, but many are.
The outcome of the referendum was a huge shock and disappointment to people who have devoted their lives to co-operation and peace, internationalism, shared common values and beliefs. These will not be dismantled so easily. Despite this, we respect the right of others to differ. We do not say, “They got it wrong”; I know it is a jolly good phrase that gets passed around, just like “The people have spoken” and “Brexit is Brexit”, but we do not say that at all. None of us in this Chamber or in this country can know what the outcome of the negotiations will be. We also know that things will change. How many people on 23 June would have believed that Donald Trump would be elected? We know that circumstances can change, which is why we in this party are absolutely committed to the idea that people should vote and should have the final say on any deal that emerges. Two years is a long time—even a week is a long time in politics—and so much can change. As others have said, this started with the people, and so it must finish with the people.
Lord Warner (CB)
My Lords, my involvement in the Bill stems from a deep concern about the Government’s approach to EU withdrawal. Their excessive optimism is accompanied by a reluctance to accept Parliamentary scrutiny of the EU withdrawal process. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said yesterday and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said today, it is constitutionally clear that it is for Parliament, not the Government, to authorise and give legal effect to the changes in domestic law and existing legal rights that follow from the negotiations after Article 50 is invoked.
It is of course impossible for Parliament to discharge that responsibility until it knows the terms of any proposed changes to the rights of British citizens and businesses and of EU citizens lawfully here. It also needs information and sufficient time to consider whether the proposed changes are in the country’s best interests. Neither the Government’s actions since June nor the Bill show proper recognition or acceptance of this fundamental constitutional position and its consequences.
I suggest that the Government started on the wrong foot with their oft-repeated claim that on 23 June the British people clearly voted to leave the EU. It is a fact that only 17.4 million people of the 46.5 million eligible to vote actually voted to leave the EU—some 38% of the electorate. The other 62% either expressed no opinion by not voting or voted to remain. The Government are claiming a mandate that is based on a voting threshold that did not reach the 40% required for most public sector strikes under their own Trade Union Act 2016.
Since June the Government have tried to use the royal prerogative to exclude Parliament from starting the withdrawal process. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, this was stopped only by a courageous citizen and the Supreme Court saying that Parliament must authorise the triggering of Article 50. The Government have continued to resist parliamentary scrutiny of the negotiating process and have promised to give Parliament only a take it or leave it choice on a final deal, without scope for amendment.
The Government’s negotiating strategy has been less than reassuring so far. They have ruled out membership of the single market and the customs union. They take an extremely optimistic view of the UK economy’s ability to cope when it no longer has guaranteed tariff-free access to the single market—our nearest neighbours. They have an inflated sense of the strength of their negotiating hand and the weakness of the EU’s, and have shown a touching belief that the rest of the world is just gagging to do better trade deals with us once we have left the EU.
Another flagship claim by the Government is that people voted to control our borders and that that can be done only by leaving the EU. The realities are somewhat different. Only about half the annual net increase of over 300,000 immigrants to the UK actually comes from the EU. Most of these people are needed to cope with staff shortages in many key sectors such as the NHS and care and hospitality, and many of our high-value research and technology sectors. Many others are students who help to keep our universities financially afloat. The Government are also ignoring the fact that the UK needs continuing inward migration because our own workforce will not be able to handle the growth of the UK’s non-working population over the next two decades.
As the start of the Article 50 negotiations approaches, there are myriad other complex and important issues to be resolved for this country, as many noble Lords have said. Not least of them is a classic parliamentary issue: the taxpayer funding an EU exit charge. At present there seems little government willingness to involve Parliament until a deal is done or the negotiations collapse amid massive recriminations. This is both unrealistic and not in the best interests of the country or even the Government. Instead, we are expected to be satisfied with the Government’s rather Panglossian White Paper and to nod through the Bill unamended. I think not. There is a wide range of amendments to be considered that will strengthen parliamentary scrutiny and involvement in our withdrawal from the EU. We should not be deterred from debating and passing some of these, whatever bloodcurdling noises are heard from inside or outside this House.
It is time for the Government to move on to a more mature approach to EU withdrawal and, if I may say so, to look a little less—here I will introduce a little poetry—like Edward Lear’s Jumblies:
“They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
The water it soon came in, it did,
The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
And they fastened it down with a pin”.
I do not think we should end up like the Jumblies. I think we should amend the Bill to best meet the needs of the British people.
Lord Fairfax of Cameron (Con)
My Lords, speaking at number 145 in this debate, it was inevitable, and I expected, that some previous speakers would have eaten my lunch. But I did not know that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, would have eaten my lunch, plate, knife and fork and even the table—and more amusingly, perhaps, than I can. As Russia has been mentioned at least once, I must first declare an interest, which is in the register, as an executive for a Russian shipping company.
The Bill, carried overwhelmingly and unamended in the House of Commons, simply gives effect, as the Government have said, to the referendum result. What did the referendum show? It was something very simple: a wish by the majority that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK. This was totally understood by some young Ukrainian friends of mine with whom I was discussing this subject several months ago. Having been brought up in the Soviet Union, they understood the result of our referendum very clearly. As a proud descendant of Sir Thomas Fairfax—some noble Lords may be aware that he was the commander of the parliamentary army in the English civil war—I understand about standing up for the rights of the people against an oppressive and undemocratic ruler.
As others have said, this is not about rerunning the referendum arguments, but I will make two short points. The first is about democracy and the role of this House; the second is about the negotiations, which some noble Lords have touched on. Here in this unelected place there may be a large EU-phile majority, but that view is out of line with the UK as a whole. I need not refer to the ICM poll as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has already done so. I understand that this may be very painful to many here, including to some members of the EU nomenklatura, as their condescending disdain for the majority view often shows. This includes many Liberal Democrat Members of this House who, as my noble friend Lord Robathan showed, campaign for a referendum one minute and then reject it when the result is not to their taste. The country is watching and will judge them by their behaviour.
I will say a few words about the negotiations. As anyone with any experience of business or the world knows, negotiating with one hand tied behind your back—all the more so if your counterparty knows that—severely reduces your chances of achieving a successful outcome. This being so—and as my noble friend Lord Hill commented—amending the Bill is not conducive to the best outcome. It is against our national interest to do so. I have heard the contrary argument, made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, 10 minutes ago, that having an element of uncertainty when negotiating enables you to say to your counterparty, “I cannot agree that because I must go back”. But in reality that would not be the case here, because the Government would know that, particularly in this place, their authority is questionable and may even, as we will discover soon, be subject to defeat. Therefore, that argument does not hold weight.
In closing, I applaud the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, the Leader of the Opposition, for some extremely realistic and constructive remarks in her speech yesterday—if I understood them correctly. As many speakers have said, everyone is entitled to express their views.
Lord Fairfax of Cameron
But there should be no rerunning of the referendum, despite the EU’s form in that regard. Let us pass the Bill without delay and unamended, as the elected House of Commons has done. The majority of the country is expecting nothing less.
Lord Lennie (Lab)
My Lords, we voted to leave on 23 June and the consequence is leave we must. No thresholds were in the referendum Act: it was in or out and we voted out. The public would not have it any other way. Some are frustrated that we have not already left, while others think that we have already left. We voted to leave after years of Tory public dissatisfaction with the EU. It does not matter how I voted; we are to leave the EU.
A family anecdote shows in microcosm what was going on, relating to what my noble friend Lady Armstrong said yesterday about the disconnect between the EU and those who can benefit from it. I will try to conceal their identities, but it involves a young, twentysomething snowboard instructor, living and working in France, speaking to his grandfather. It went like this: “Did you vote in that referendum, Grandad?” “Yes, I did. I voted to leave”. “Why?” “It was those Albanians”. “Where are they?” “They’re in Albania”. “What’s the problem?” “They’re going to come over here”. “How do you know?” “It was in the paper yesterday, so I voted to leave the EU”. People do not see the connections between the EU and their or their families’ lives.
This House seems to be full of emotion. Some have described a grieving process taking place and seem to have reached the anger stage, while others are in reflective remembrance of things past. But exiting the EU must be a calm, considered and orderly process, as the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, advised us yesterday. We are asking a huge amount of those whose job it will be to negotiate on our behalf over the next two years and to get us as close as they can to the Government’s 12-point wish list. Is it doable? I doubt it, but we will see. If it is not achieved, an interim future beckons. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, reminded us, the debate would not be taking place but for the bravery of two citizens who took on the Government and won in the Supreme Court. He and they deserve our thanks.
The Government started this process without a plan. The former Prime Minister was gone, the emperor’s clothes were reassigned and the present Prime Minister bought time to get her house in order by declaring, “Brexit means Brexit”. But what did it mean? The Government came to the strategic conclusion that controlling immigration trumped everything else and from that conclusion everything else would follow: no running commentary, no White Paper, no need for parliamentary approval and no need for a vote in Parliament to approve or reject an agreement. All of that has been overturned. Our role now is to scrutinise and make the Government accountable for what will happen. It is not enough to say that Parliament will get a vote at the end of the process. That must be on the face of the Bill.
What about the EU and EEA nationals living here? What about the promised vote at the end of two years being in the Bill? What will our relationship be with Euratom and myriad other agencies working in the EU? What will be the impact of withdrawal on the economy of the north-east? What about environmental safeguards and equality? Where are the impact assessments for those? What about open borders in Ireland? These issues are to be debated next week and must show the House of Lords doing its job.
This is a procedural, not a substantive Bill. It gives the Government the right to begin the process of negotiating our withdrawal from the EU. That they will get. I fully accept the primacy of the elected over the appointed Chamber, but it is our responsibility to ask the Government questions and to reconsider when we feel that it is necessary for them to do so. The amendments will show that, where things require to be reconsidered, we should send them back asking for change through probing and seeking clarity. That is what we do.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)
My Lords, when we are told that the people have spoken, we are referring to the one-third of the electorate who supported the leave campaign. I would say that the people have not spoken. They were taken on a ride in a bus built in Poland by a German company. On its side it said, “When we are out of the EU, we will have £350 million a week to spend on the NHS”. That was the promise, yet in Arron Banks’s recently published book, The Bad Boys of Brexit, he says that from the beginning they knew that it was a blatant lie. One of the biggest donors, giving £5 million to the leave campaign, has said that they knew from the beginning that it was a blatant lie.
If it was a lie, is it not possible that the result of the referendum was because of a lie on the side of a bus? In all probability, by the leave campaign’s own admission, the referendum was won on a blatant lie. If that was so, we have every right to ask the people to consider it again when the time comes. It will determine the future of every one of us—our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. This House can either go along with a lie or it can decide that we are going to stop this here.
People say that we can rely on the Government. I have heard it argued that we can sort out the minutiae of this. I hope that the Government’s promise to do this is firmer than their promise to bring 20,000 Syrian refugees to the UK and to provide a home for 3,000 unaccompanied children. I do not trust this Government to keep their promises.
The difference between 23 June and today is that we have a different Administration in the United States. When people voted, Obama was President of the United States. Today we have a very different presidency —a Trump presidency. Every day we recoil in disbelief at the news from the US, the daily edicts of an Administration who are totally unpredictable. We only have to go the other way—to Russia—and, again, we have questions.
I am not going to speak at great length but, at this time of tremendous instability in the US, in Russia and perhaps in other states in Europe, I suggest that this is the very worst time for us to weaken the European Union. We are the basis for stability. We have our faults. We know that the European Union has its faults, but our own UK Parliament and Government also have their faults. What could be worse than for us to withdraw from Europe? It could be the beginning of the unravelling of the European Union at a time when we need it more than ever before. I would urge this House, at every opportunity, to secure not only our own future but the future of other countries in the world by voting to stay, strongly committed, at the heart of the European Union.
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster (CB)
My Lords, in the referendum on 23 June, I voted to remain. I took the view that the economic prosperity of the UK was likely to be better looked after if we stayed in the EU than if we left. I thought that, for all its failings, the EU was an integral part of the international system created after two catastrophic world wars originating in Europe. It was intended to enable intra-European disputes and differences to be resolved by peaceful means and to give the countries of Europe, acting together in a world increasingly dominated by superpowers, an influence that none could exert on its own. Our history shows that, when there are differences and disputes in Europe, we are inevitably—and to protect our own interests—drawn into them. We should be taking a full part in Europe, not standing aloof from it.
I welcome the way in which the Prime Minister is seeking to restore and strengthen the relationship with our United States allies. Of course, this is very important, but there are limits to the extent to which we should allow ourselves to become too dependent on it. President Trump’s priorities are crystal clear—America first. We are a stronger and safer ally for the United States as part of the EU than we would be on our own.
So I regretted the outcome of the referendum but, whatever one may think about the quality of the campaign, the result was what it was. We have to respect that and pass this Bill. The result was not a legally effective decision; it was, in effect, a political mandate. It was an instruction to the Government and to Parliament to enter into negotiations with the EU for a treaty and to introduce legislation that would give effect to that instruction. The Bill that we are now debating is, in effect, a process Bill. It does not set out the terms for our leaving the EU; it simply authorises the Government to enter into negotiations with the EU for a treaty that would take us out of it. The elected House has approved the Bill by a substantial majority, and the unelected House should not seek to reverse that decision—or, indeed, to amend it.
The negotiations for our joining the EEC, when there were only six member states, were complex enough. The negotiations for getting us out of the EU by unstitching more than 40 years of membership, when there are 27 other member states, are likely to be much more complex. It is very likely that we shall need to invoke the part of Article 50 that allows the period of negotiation to be extended beyond two years.
I cannot see the outcome of the negotiations; the fog is too dense. It may be possible to negotiate an agreement which gives us a reasonably open and comprehensive trading relationship with Europe; which preserves our participation in European scientific, technological and academic organisations—it benefits them as much as us—which allows the continuance of the flow of migrant and immigrant European workers, on which large parts of British economic and social activity have come to depend; which deals with the problems of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland; and which preserves the rights of British citizens who have chosen to live in Europe and of European citizens who have chosen to live in this country. That is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. But there are so many uncertainties and variables that we cannot be sure of it. The EU is under strain for other reasons than Brexit, not least the strains created by the introduction of the euro. There are electoral uncertainties in a number of European countries that could have profound consequences for the European Union.
At the other extreme is the risk of coming out of the negotiations with a deal that is clearly not in British interests. We have been told that we could be faced with a choice between coming out with a bad deal or coming out with no deal at all. That, to me, has an air of political unreality. Surely the Government who presented such an outcome for parliamentary approval would have utterly failed the nation and would have to pay the price for such a failure. There would be a major political crisis at home, as well as a major crisis in our relationship with the EU.
Because the outcome is so uncertain, it is very important that Parliament should be given an opportunity to consider and vote on it when the time comes. I welcome the Government’s commitment to seek parliamentary approval when the probable contents of an agreement are clear, and before any final decisions are taken. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the judgment of the Supreme Court the other day means that whatever parliamentary approval is sought will have to be given by legislation, not by a Motion or a resolution.
By the time the outcome of the negotiations is known, it will be nearly three years, if not more, since the referendum. If a week is a long time in politics, three years are an eternity. When the time comes, the Government will have complied with the political instruction of the referendum, and it will be the responsibility—indeed, the duty—of the Government and of Parliament to look not just backwards at the referendum but forwards to what, in the situation then prevailing, is going to be in the best interests of Britain and the welfare of British citizens, whatever that solution may be, and to set their course accordingly.
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong of Ilminster. He gives wise counsel, as ever. I have respected and valued his judgment ever since 30 years ago he gave me a box 1 marking when he did my annual appraisal at the Cabinet Office. I draw attention to my interests as recorded in the register, particularly in relation to Low Associates, which has contracts for event management and other services with the European Commission.
I was a member of David Cameron’s Cabinet when he first promised a referendum on our membership of the EU. I campaigned to remain. I regret that we lost but I respect the result. I therefore support the Bill and I will not back any amendments to it. The Bill is specific in empowering the Prime Minister to trigger Article 50—no more and no less. Any amendment to the Bill is seeking either to fetter that power or to anticipate issues that should properly form part of the discussions on future legislation to implement withdrawal or to establish our future relationship. That legislation should be debated; indeed, probably a year from now we will be debating the so-called great repeal Bill. That will happen while negotiations are still under way.
The Government did not want this Bill but, rightly, were required to bring it forward. I pay tribute, as have others, to those who initiated the case before the Supreme Court. The Government’s mandate to leave is of course in the referendum, but their authority to do so, and the authority for the future agreements with the European Union, will derive from this Parliament. We must exercise that authority at the right time—that is, before the die is cast. Of course, the Government promise a vote on the final deal, but that is not good enough. Parliament must be fully engaged with, and party to, the potential outcomes before that happens. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, was quite right to illustrate how Parliament could be engaged properly in that negotiation, and about the potential value to the Government of Parliament being engaged in that negotiation.
One of the most alarming statements among many being made recently about Brexit is that “no deal is better than a bad deal”. I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, about that statement. “No deal” is a bad deal; it is potentially the worst deal. It would be a disorderly exit. It is a cliff edge, if not so much for trade in goods then certainly for services and reciprocal arrangements for health, benefits, accrued rights, research and scientific collaboration—and issues such as policing and justice, as the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, reminded us. I therefore do not share the inference of the noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby, that a good deal for us is a bad one for the EU and vice versa. There are many areas, such as health, science, the environment, policing and security, where continued close collaboration is of mutual benefit. Even in relation to trade and migration, it remains true that open markets deliver growth for both parties.
Open markets, like competition, are a tide that lifts every boat. If we are true to our championing of free trade, our approach to the future relationship with the European Union must be built on the expectation of continuing freedoms to trade and for investment, freedom of capital movement and indeed freedom of movement for skills. There is ample evidence that the British people understand and accept this. I am reminded that my former boss, my noble friend Lord Tebbit, quite often said, “We voted for a Common Market and we’d like to have one”. We still want one.
As the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, said, Britain has long advocated the economic benefits of European Union membership, including Conservative advocacy of the single market, but our enthusiasm has been progressively eclipsed by the political drive for ever-closer union, which this country has never accepted for itself. There are many across Europe who, recognising our increasingly semi-detached nature as a consequence of our EU membership ever since Maastricht, concede that a new relationship, with a comprehensive economic free trade agreement and continued collaboration on that wide range of potentially beneficial issues, could enable the variable geometry of Europe to be realised in a way that EU membership could not accommodate.
I am being optimistic. There are many obstacles, although the worst are not in the enormity of the technical issues but in the politics. European politicians accept that we are leaving but want us to pay a price, including a budgetary price. They want to deter any future secessionist tendencies. They deeply resented the anti-EU rhetoric and perceived misrepresentations of the leave campaign, and they see too much of it being replicated in the Government’s approach prior to the negotiations. They will not accept a have-your-cake-and-eat-it outcome.
So tough decisions are ahead. I sympathise with my noble friends Lady Altmann and Lady Wheatcroft in their anger at what is potentially being done to the future prospects of this country, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay: this is not what I, my children or indeed my former constituents—who voted 62% to remain—wanted. The response, however, should not be to deny democracy but to use our parliamentary democracy to build a new settlement. To achieve this, our starting point must be to reject anti-EU rhetoric and to respect the decisions of other member states and their commitment to a European ideal as much as we are committed to our own path. Our offer should be to be the closest friends and partners of our European neighbours, to see working together as a natural approach and to be prepared for compromise, including through transitional provisions, regulated co-operation and the orderly unwinding of the budgetary settlement.
Shortly after the referendum, an Austrian friend of our family emailed us a picture of his children, with the accompanying text, “Whatever happens, our children will still be friends”. That is how it must be.
Lord Harrison (Lab)
My Lords, one of the seldom-discussed reasons why Britain voted for Brexit is that we do not speak foreign languages. Our ignorance of continental languages, people, customs, habits and especially markets has made us carelessly complacent. We idly rely on speaking English fortissimo in brokering trade deals. The result? Our shameful balance of trade deficits. The supreme irony is that, when we leave the EU, English will remain the lingua franca binding the EU 27 as they circle the wagons against existential threats. There is slim hope that we will expand our linguistic capabilities as we become buccaneers trading those wider world markets. Does the Minister agree that our ropey language skills have weakened us when it comes to competing within the single market, and will do so again outside of it?
Our domestic failure to ready ourselves for the challenge of the modern world persists: look at the habitual, stumbling response to our poor productivity rates, where we lag behind the rest of the G7. Brexit is not a tailored response to our self-inflicted shortcomings, and that brings me to some practical concerns. Do we have sufficient skilled and experienced civil servants to conduct trade negotiations now and in the future? Have we hired Jonathan Faull, the former right-hand man of Michel Barnier, who will be conducting these conversations?
I know that in my own field of financial services, the Government are begging, borrowing and stealing financial experts from the City of London, at goodness knows what cost, while our civil servants’ negotiating skills in the art of trade have lain dormant for years. How are we to make up this shortfall in trade experts and at what cost? Indeed, what preparations are HMG undertaking to broaden and deepen those trading skills as we look to new markets round the world? Will the Minister say how much we have paid in hiring those financial and trade experts? Why could we not have done all this beforehand? As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said, when we were in the single market, why did we not make the effort to make it a proper, working single market?
For some years, I was your Lordships’ representative at the parliamentary conference of the World Trade Organization. Pascal Lamy was its fine director, but even his agile mind could not resolve the contradictions inherent in the bilateral, the plurilateral, or the multilateral paths of advancing world trade. However, the vagaries of WTO trading rules are the very pit into which we will slip if we fail to secure a deal with the remaining 27. Is that what we want? Is that what we really, really want? The WTO rules are a disgrace and a disaster. Parliament must have the final say on securing a deal if we are to be pitched into the WTO rules.
Here is the essence of what I want to say: what decisive advantage do HMG discern in embarking on this hard Brexit for the UK? I ask the Government to please spell it out. The White Paper is shifty, while the three Brexiteers retire daily from the fake advantages they hailed in the run-up to the referendum. The weekly £350 million for the NHS was the most evanescent of the will-o’-the-wisps cited by the leavers. We are buying a pig in a poke.
Financial services is, as they say, my bag. Perhaps the Government might ponder the thoughts of your Lordships’ EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee, which I had the honour to chair from 2010 to 2015. In its recent Brexit report, it saw the City of London under threat from New York as well as the continental contenders such as Frankfurt and Paris, to which it was reported this morning that 1,000 employees of HSBC will repair. Why on earth are we imperilling the City of London’s pre-eminence as Europe’s global financial centre? Moreover, what will be the consequence to our domestic services industry of losing the London-based European Banking Authority, chaired by the excellent Andrea Enria? The consequence will be the loss of jobs and influence, but what is the gain?
So I will indeed do my patriotic duty and oppose this reckless, ill-thought-out plunge into the murky waters of illusory UK independence in a world of ever-increasing interdependence, the trading world. I was sent to the Lords to use my block, not to be part of the block vote of blind Brexiteers. I was sent here to think through and test Governments of all persuasions to think about their errors, missteps and policy stumbles, as were we all. Perhaps the Minister can explain how his many companions here and in the other place suddenly found themselves born-again leavers, no longer remainers. Are we not a representative democracy, where MPs think for themselves, as they have done on assisted dying and the bring-back-hanging debate? Referendums are reserved for Prime Ministers to wriggle out of their given responsibility to act in the best interests of the country.
Note, too, the Brexiteers’ lazy assertion that the Anglophone world will embrace us with open arms if we leave, but the Commonwealth is a small corner shop compared to the vibrant shopping mall of the EU single market. Holding hands with a rudderless President Trump will not make up for our wilful self-exclusion from the world’s biggest single market.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, I have no interest to declare, save that I have waited for 25 years for this moment. The decisions about Brexit did not start last summer. There are a number of reasons why this House will not bring credit upon itself by obstructing the Article 50 process. The first is the continuing failure to appreciate that people knew what they were voting for. The disdain shown for leave voters is unprecedented. They do not want to be patronised. Many voted to leave precisely because they were being treated as ignorant.
Over the years, leavers have seen, sadly, that tolerance, the rule of law, judicial integrity and freedom of the press have all failed in various countries of the EU; that it is dysfunctional; that a number of EU states are low in the league table of world corruption; that some eastern European states are sliding backwards, with leaders who espouse the same attitudes as President Trump to barriers and to rejecting migrants on religious grounds. The UK has been unable to stop this happening. This country should not be part of a union, let alone have laws determined by it, if it has such failings.
Leavers have seen the damage that the institution has wrought through, for example, state aid rules and the imposition of the euro; the lack of effective foreign policy and accountability; the failures to deal with migrants and the rise of the extreme right wing; and even diesel. The economic benefits that membership may bring are outweighed in my mind by the EU’s weaknesses over principles of rights and proper governance which are far more vital to us in the long run. I am not prepared to compromise my values on an altar of tariffs and I am optimistic that things will work out. Another reason is that a significant number of noble Lords have close ties to the EU: the perception will be that this affects their judgment.
It is for the House to determine the question of relevance, but in ordinary parlance the amendments do not seem to me to be within the scope of the Bill, which is about giving notice to withdraw under Article 50. There is no scope within Article 50 itself for embellishments. The negotiations and agreements come later. In considering our negotiation aims, where is the equivalent of our White Paper from the 27 other members, setting out their position and their goals? All we have heard from the EU since the referendum is a desire for punishment and self-protection. There has been no rallying call, no conciliation and no plans for a better future—only fear and a desire for revenge and money, rather like a bad divorce where mediation has failed. I would not want to be a member of a club that will not let me leave even though I am disliked.
The time for seeking agreements—for example, about the residence rights of EU nationals living here and UK citizens living abroad—is later, but in relation to residence rights the UK is now, and will stay for the foreseeable future, a party to the European Convention on Human Rights. The call for immediate guarantees on residence is, in fact, a red herring: it is impossible to imagine that any EU national living here could suffer an arbitrary reduction in benefits or threats to family life, let alone mass expulsion, without recourse to the Human Rights Act, with every prospect of success. To embed rights for residents now is to force Her Majesty’s Government into a position without the real need to do so and to hamper the Government in their negotiations.
So far as a second referendum is hypothetically concerned, why would it be any more binding than the first? Losing it would be as unacceptable to the losing side as the June referendum was. Would there have to be a third referendum—the best of three? It would plunge negotiations into chaos at the moment of conclusion and leave us in limbo. Clauses that might be added to the Bill now could, of course, be repealed by the Government, like the provisions of any other Act. One can envisage the Government coming back in two years and saying, “We have to repeal this addition because it does not fit in our negotiations”. If they have a majority, that is what they will achieve. Only after the two-year process is over does Parliament get its sovereignty back.
The House of Lords, although it may disagree, always concedes to the Commons that which is promised in the manifesto of the party that won the election. I quote:
“We will let you decide whether to stay in or leave the EU … We will honour the result of the referendum, whatever the outcome”.
Some 65% of the electorate did not vote to remain. There has been a strong undemocratic attack on the referendum result, and some of these amendments are plainly designed to undermine Brexit or to make it meaningless. It is impossible to imagine that had a political party with a radical manifesto won a general election by 2% or 3% the losing side would chip away at and more or less refuse to accept the result in a way reminiscent of those tin-pot dictators in some parts of the world who refuse to accept defeat. The nature of the push-back is summed up by the mission of the former Prime Minister whose judgment on another international situation led directly to the Chilcot inquiry. As for voting with one’s conscience, even if one believes that Brexit would turn out badly, that prerogative belongs to the Cross-Bench Peers. Every day in this House, Peers belonging to political parties troop into the lobby to vote in a particular way as mandated by their party—because democracy in our system is tied to party discipline—and so it should be today. The duty of the House is to give this Bill a fair wind as it stands.
Lord Howard of Rising (Con)
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. This Bill is simple: its only purpose is to give Her Majesty’s Government the authority to begin the process of leaving the European Union, as voted for by the British public. I remind your Lordships that this House is bound by the Salisbury convention, which states that where a Government have made an election promise which was included in their manifesto, and voted on by the electorate, that promise will not be rejected by this House. How much more should this respect for voters’ wishes bind this House when the issue has been directly voted on by the electorate in a national referendum?
The proposed amendments for Committee stage are distractions designed to impede the process and avoid carrying out what the people of this country have voted for. The amendments should be rejected; this Bill is only about firing the starting gun. This House has no alternative but to agree this Bill, which directly reflects the will of the people, and give it a swift passage.
Comment has been made that the majority in favour of leaving was not large enough for such a momentous decision and therefore lacks legitimacy. That is not so. It was a clear majority and was achieved in the face of the most appalling bias, starting with more than £9 million of taxpayers’ money being spent on a leaflet containing inaccuracies. An embarrassing and truly shaming amount of pressure was then put on organisations of all types and sizes to say publicly what a disaster Brexit would be, even to the extent of the previous Prime Minister trying to get the editor of the Daily Mail sacked. Well done the proprietor for resisting this and well done Paul Dacre, the editor, for standing up for the newspaper’s integrity and not being corrupted by the antics of the fear campaigners!
The fundamental argument is this: should Great Britain be governed from Westminster by a democratically elected and accountable Government or should it be governed by unelected bureaucrats in another country? It is a simple argument. Personally, I do not want to surrender my country to another power. The sovereignty argument is overwhelming but for those who have concerns about the economics of leaving the European Union, I point out that we have a trade deficit some £70 billion a year with the EU from which it benefits. This makes the EU the supplicant and puts it in the weaker bargaining position. The European Union needs us more than we need it. This economic imperative will push towards a solution agreeable to all, in spite of some of the pessimistic noises made during this debate. With large corporations such as Google, Nissan and Apple making commitments in Great Britain, there is increasing evidence for optimism. European politicians—notably Germany’s Finance Minister—have also started commenting on how essential Great Britain is to the European economy.
The only real impediment to a satisfactory conclusion to Great Britain leaving the European Union would be to fetter the British negotiators with amendments at the Committee stage of this Bill. This would damage the negotiating position by taking away flexibility and room to manoeuvre. Frankly, some of the amendments put down show only that those proposing the amendments are doing so with ill intent or lack experience of the real world.
The British people were asked what they wanted—to stay or to leave. They chose to leave and it is not the place of this House to get in their way.
Baroness Cohen of Pimlico (Lab)
My Lords, batting at number 153 as I am, I do not seek to make a balanced and complete argument as many have done. I am here, however, to speak on two points where I have specific real-life, worldly experience. I voted to remain but I am also among the 48% of us who want to find out as quickly as we can how our lives, families and jobs will actually be affected.
I am particularly concerned about the economic effects. We are a small island, unable to feed ourselves, and we live by trading, as we always have. I share the concerns of my noble friend Lord Harrison about our abilities to do all this. This sounds like history now but I started my Civil Service career in the Board of Trade—even before we joined the European Union—and I was concerned with the annual negotiations on how much butter, bacon and lamb the Australians, New Zealanders and Danes were to be allowed to sell in the UK. This took weeks every year and burnt up senior time. It would be as nothing to the negotiations we will have to undertake, sector by sector with the European Union or severally with the USA or Canada, on the full range of goods.
Nor can we have any confidence that negotiations will succeed. Our fellow members of the European Union are naturally disposed to seek to negotiate away our perceived advantages, most obviously in the financial services sector. Here I remind the House that I was a director of the London Stock Exchange Group for 12 years until 2013. The recent merger between LSEG and Deutsche Boerse is an example. The deal—I voted for it as a shareholder—provides that the headquarters of the joint group shall be in London and subject to UK regulation. The deal is under attack already from German politicians who now see the possibility opened by Brexit of getting the headquarters in Frankfurt, hoping that jobs and business will follow. The French are trying much the same. All that will happen if they are successful is probably that the jobs will go to New York because that is where financial services will move. A prominent Brexiteer in the other place sought to persuade me that clever investment bankers will adjust. Yes, they will. They will do the business where they can, move people where they need to, and it will not be here but most probably in New York.
In other sectors we will also lose business and jobs, particularly in the short to medium term, while we struggle to get our trading positions and prospects back to where we are now. Nor should we put much reliance on even the most potentially willing of our allies, namely the United States. However much President Trump wants to help us, he is also committed to keeping business and jobs in the USA, and in any conflict between the interests of an ally and the interests of his own core voters there can be no doubt which way he must go. Similarly, Australia and New Zealand would very much like to trade with us again but, since they are both knowingly exporters of agricultural products, what they mean is that they would like to sell us things, which will not necessarily be very productive for our balance of payments.
I suggest that in an even more serious consequence, again in an area where I have experience because I was an adviser in the Ministry of Defence from 1998 to 2005, as well as being a non-executive director. We, and everyone else in Europe, have been sheltered by the American umbrella since the Second World War. The Americans have expected, and largely got in return for this a united Europe, a united defence against their perceived enemies. I wonder whether they will feel the same about us if we become yet again a small island, no longer attached to the European name.
I believe that we must all—remainers and leavers—be allowed to oversee and understand that the majority wish to resile; indeed, it is a course of action on which we are embarked. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, reminded us, we can do all that within the Article 50 process. We do not have to hurry and it is not for ever.
There is another point on which I have specific knowledge and on which I want to speak. My eldest son has lived in Germany for the last 20 years and my brother is married and lives in France. Despite this, I think it is a matter of honour that we should here and now announce that immigrants from Europe now in the United Kingdom must legally be guaranteed the right to stay. We must take this step because it is a moral duty. I also believe that it is an important step to keep the immigrants who are actually here and working in our most critical industries feeling reassured and welcome in a climate where they are suffering, quite unjustly. I also believe that it would be an important reassurance to our European partners that we are not hostile to them and prepared to treat their people decently, and that this would improve what is at the moment a very sour negotiating climate in which difficult negotiations will take place.
Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)
My Lords, the Telegraph reports today that the EU Bill for a Brexit divorce is €60 billion. It is made up of existing annual budget commitments until 2019, pension obligations and other longer-term liabilities. The European Commission concedes that the United Kingdom should be allowed to offset against that Bill its share of the assets of the EU, perhaps between €15 and €20 billion, so we are left with a net hefty €40 billion or so to stump up as the price of divorce.
What does the Government’s White Paper say about this prospective liability? Absolutely nothing. Do the Government agree we have a price to pay? If so, how much? We do not know. This is not a poker game, and this is just one card in a whole stack of cards. The Government’s argument is that to disclose our negotiating position on any issue would harm our national interest. I do not believe for a moment that that is the reason for their reticence. If you do not disclose your hand, and keep your cards close to your chest, there is no measure by which the public can judge whether your negotiations are a success or failure. Whatever deal can be dragged out of the negotiations can then be termed victory. That is exactly what David Cameron did a year ago. The Government cannot be seen to fail. Where they create a desert, they call it peace.
My noble friend Lord Campbell of Pittenweem pointed out yesterday that if the deal goes pear-shaped, as we believe it will, the members of the public who voted for leave will look the other way, and everybody will blame the politicians. Yet Brexiteers heap scorn on our suggestion that the people of this country should be given ownership of the deal that is negotiated by ratifying it in a referendum. Let them own it. No, the Government say, “You gave us the mandate to start the process, so you must accept the result”. Well, fair enough. Press the Article 50 button and let the Conservative Party take the consequences. This is where I enjoyed the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, yesterday—I regret to say that he has just deserted his post. Like a good general, as Jo Grimond once reminded us, he marched his troops towards the sound of gunfire. There is no longer any point in attacking Her Majesty’s Opposition. It is rather like the fall of France in June 1941, when the leadership had deserted and left behind strong pockets of courageous resistance; the Free French have become Free Labour.
The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, spends his six minutes attacking the Liberal Democrats. He is a latter-day Earl of Cardigan, leading the charge of the Brexit brigade. He bellows at our Benches: “Yours not to make reply, yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die”. The Russian gunners thought the Light Brigade charged the guns at Balaclava because they were drunk. I think the Brexiteers are, for the moment, intoxicated, but merely by the success of their campaign. Unfortunately, it is we in Wales who will share the depths of their hangover.
Wales is a net beneficiary of European funding to the tune of £680 million annually. Importantly, EU funding is based on need, not on a calculation of population share, like the Barnett formula. For example, Welsh farmers receive £274 million each year in direct subsidies under the CAP. These are significantly above the Barnett share of UK receipts. It reflects the marginal nature and low incomes of much Welsh farming. Are the farmers going to receive this support after 2020? Will they face the destruction of their industry by cheap imports or by a trade deal with New Zealand, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cohen, spoke of a moment ago?
Take the support for the poorer parts of Wales. The European Social Fund is due to invest £800 million in Wales in tackling poverty, supporting people into work and increasing skills among young people and the most disadvantaged. Will the Government commit to replacing this funding after 2020? Take economic development. The current ESIF programmes are investing more than £1.1 billion in research and innovation, business, renewable energy and urban development in Wales. We have spent years creating a single market, removing barriers to trade, standardising our regulations and creating a level playing field for us all to serve a market of 400 million people. It is not good business to abandon it all. Progressives believe that it will lead to the impoverishment of the people of this country.
The noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Robathan, who indulged in some light skirmishing earlier today, are both right. We are the enemy—to Brexiteers, to Trump’s vision of America and to populist politics everywhere. We are progressives. We stand instinctively for co-operation, not conflict, in Europe; for universal human rights; for social welfare and the health service; for the solution of environmental issues across borders; and for a common standard of justice throughout Europe. We have been led along these paths by Lloyd George, Keynes, Beveridge, Attlee, Nye Bevan, Roy Jenkins and many others. The wheel will turn again.
Thirty-six years after Balaclava, Rudyard Kipling reflected on the aftermath of the famous charge in his poem “The Last of the Light Brigade”:
“O thirty million English that babble of England’s might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children’s children are lisping to ‘honour the charge they made—’
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!”
Lord Taylor of Warwick (Non-Afl)
My Lords, we must organise, not agonise—this is not the time for your Lordships’ House to agonise but to organise a smooth journey for the Bill to allow the Government to invoke Article 50. Speculation is not legislation. The reality is that until the Bill is passed into law, all that has happened since the Brexit vote remains uneasy speculation. The Bill must become law in order to implement the people’s referendum result and respect the judgment of the Supreme Court.
Brexit is a process, not an event. The passing of the Bill is an essential part of this process. We are privileged to be engaged in the most important season in British history since World War II. But as the Prime Minister, Theresa May, said on 17 January:
“We are leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe”.
For example, after Brexit we will remain an influential permanent member of the UN Security Council, the second-largest contributor to NATO after America, and a leading member of the G7, the G20 and the Commonwealth. However, we are now seeking partnerships no longer dictated by Europe. This is the opportunity to become a truly global Great Britain.
My wife, who is here today, is American and between us we have at least seven nationalities in our family. Lady Taylor is Swedish, Cherokee and Texan. My side is Caribbean, Irish, Indian and, of course, Birmingham. Recently Lady Taylor and I were guests of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington DC at a dinner addressed by the Vice-President, Michael Pence. There was also an invitation to President Trump’s National Prayer Breakfast. At this landmark event, the only people allowed were the President of the United States of America and me—and about 2,000 other guests. I had the privilege to be interviewed by Fox News and other American media. It was striking from these experiences that as a result of the referendum our biggest single trading partner—America—clearly now sees Britain very much at the front of the trading queue. The Americans and other huge trading partners such as China and India are watching very closely to see whether we seize the opportunity that Brexit gives us. This is not the time to delay or draw back.
For your Lordships’ House not to pass the Bill would be missing an amazing open goal. Being a long-suffering supporter of Aston Villa, missing open goals is an activity I am used to watching. In fact, there was a rumour that Aston Villa would be applying for a European trademark on missing open goals. But unlike in football, we cannot rely on extra time or a replay. In order to win for global Britain we have to stride forward and score the greater goal now.
The prizes ahead for winning are clear. They include, first and foremost, control of our own laws, with the end of the European Court of Justice overruling British courts. Brexit will strengthen the union between the four nations of this United Kingdom by returning power to Westminster and the devolved Administrations. We will be able to control immigration to attract the brightest and the best to work or study here. There will be a free trade agreement with the European Union. We will no longer be shackled by the EU’s single market or burdened with paying huge sums to the EU budget. Britain will become a truly global trading nation, making trade agreements around the world, including with the 52 nations of the Commonwealth, free from the constraints of EU customs union membership. The result will be not only a stronger Great Britain but a stronger Europe and a stronger world.
I am from a diverse racial background and I greatly admire the contrasting cultures and languages within the European Union, but the EU has 24 official languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Then there are the classified, semi-official languages, including Basque and Catalan. Let us not forget the main immigrant languages, including Russian, Berber, Turkish and Kurdish. Each language brings with it a different identity and understanding. I am a great supporter of diversity, but the EU has become a bureaucratic tower of Babel where complexity and confusion increasingly frustrate co-operation. Compare this with the 52 nations of the Commonwealth family who possess the spirit of Great Britain. They are one-third of the world’s population. The Commonwealth nations share an immensely rich and enduring history and culture, with English as a common language, and the same sovereign—Her Majesty the Queen. The timing of this Bill is excellent, since Britain is due to host the next Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting—CHOGM—in 2018.
This Bill is not a leap into the dark. When fear knocks at our door, we must answer it with faith. In doing so, we have the assurance of Proverbs 16:9 that people make their plans but God directs our steps. It was Sir Winston Churchill who said:
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”.
Brexit has for ever rewritten British history. Now, through this Bill, we can make Great Britain an even greater Britain.
Lord Giddens (Lab)
My Lords, bananas. I am just trying to get the attention of noble Lords at this point in the proceedings. “Bananas” was the response given by a member of the audience on the BBC’s “Question Time” to explain why she had voted to leave the EU. The essence of her point was that there are too many rules and regulations—it comes to something when the EU decides what shape of banana we can buy in the shops. The bendy banana is, of course, a favourite of the anti-EU media as well. Pressed on the issue, she added, on a more positive note, that “there are opportunities out there that we ought to seize as a country”. She immediately became a Twitter star and showed herself to be an articulate, feisty person.
There are indeed opportunities out there, but they will not take the form of a leap to freedom from burdensome regulation. The banana trade is a huge business and heavily contested, as anyone who is familiar with the banana wars will know. Outside the EU, Britain will be faced with the same need for detailed regulations concerning how that particular fruit and a multiplicity of other goods are to be defined and traded. It will not be magically released to determine these regulations, which are fought over and decided both bilaterally and within the WTO. The wrangling often goes on for years. Britain has much more chance of influencing the outcome as a member of the EU than it has acting in isolation, because the bargaining power of the Union is far stronger than that of an individual nation. So the case of the bendy banana actually shows the opposite of what is often claimed.
The situation is no different in the case of migration. There is no magical la-la land waiting for the UK outside of the EU here, either. Any significant bilateral trade deals made after leaving the Union will almost certainly mean us making concessions on freedom of movement. We can all agree that the anxieties felt about migration, especially in poorer communities, must be responded to. The causes of the resentment involved are complex and the policy responses must be as well.
The Government have declared that Britain will leave the single market and will try to negotiate a pick-and-mix agreement with the rest of the EU. The obstacles, both political and economic, standing in the way are huge. The phrase “global Britain” is trotted out as a mantra, but it is dangerously misleading. It is absolutely not the case that distance has become irrelevant to trade. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, touched on this point in his magisterial speech, but he did not develop it. Trade is strongly influenced by proximity and by effective regulation, especially in the case of services, which make up the bulk of Britain’s exports. It is a mistake to suppose that the advances in global communications have altered all that.
The results of a recent study carried out by a non-partisan body, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, on this issue are both revealing and disconcerting. The author calculates that quitting the single market will reduce UK total trade in the long term by 22%, even if Britain manages to set up a free trade agreement with the rest of the EU, an outcome that is itself far from certain. She estimates that trade gains from the much-touted possible free trade deals with the BRICS would amount to no more than 2%. Those set up with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand would be only fractionally larger, at under 3%. The single market has been very successful at reducing non-tariff barriers, so important for trade in services, but crucially she concludes that free trade deals reached with non-EU nations are by contrast almost wholly ineffective in reducing such barriers. Services free trade agreements tend to be limited in scope, especially as regards financial services, and fall far short of the passporting rights of the single market. These are troubling conclusions indeed for the British economy, given that services make up the bulk of our exports.
A total of 16.1 million people voted for Britain to stay in the EU, versus 17.4 million to leave. We do not know what proportion of those who voted to leave wanted to abandon the single market, since the leave option was left empty of content, or made deliberately ambiguous. There was no forward plan at all. If even 10% of leavers were attracted by the Norway or Switzerland models, there was no majority for hard Brexit. I echo what other noble Lords have said about the assertion that no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain. No deal would be a very bad deal indeed, not least for what remains of this country’s manufacturing industry and for all smaller farmers too. I shall therefore support amendments which keep open the chance of the UK staying in the single market, and I hope that many other noble Lords will do the same.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest. For 37 years we have had a much-loved home in Italy, which today lies broken by the recent earthquakes and falls of snow. But we will rebuild it, and do so with confidence in the future as committed Europeans.
Naturally, I wish it had been clarified that EU citizens resident here and UK citizens in the EU will stay—but this was refused by others. One hopes that they will soon come to their senses, for the idea that in my small comune in Italy, where live British, Germans, Romanians, Dutch, Albanians, Belgians, Macedonians and Russians, there would ever be a rastrellamento to drive out the British, while letting others stay, is quite preposterous. Let the blockers of this deal relent—and until they do, we do not need a divisive campaign to pin blame for this uncertainty on our Government, who want the matter cleared.
I will vote against that and all amendments to this Bill, for each and every amendment is, in my judgment, an attempt to bind the will of the people in coils of silk. That includes the proposal by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, to give, as I heard it, an effective veto on the details of the UK settlement with Europe to an unelected House that largely supported remain.
The British people decided by a majority of 1,269,501—a figure which is not so very small, being more than the populations of Sheffield, Manchester and Leicester combined—that Britain should leave the European Union. We must therefore leave, for better and for worse—and there will be both—and this Bill is the first step in that process. This House should not stand, at any stage, against delivery of the clear will of the people, supported by the elected House.
Nor, I submit, should this House now send a message to the British people that your Lordships so little respect their decision that we already want a second referendum. That would be seen as exemplifying the stubborn refusal to listen to the people that has brought political establishments and the EU itself into growing disfavour.
I also plead for an end to the political rhetoric that sets generation against generation. Young people are just older people in waiting, and older people, if they are wise, hold close to the idealism of youth. We are made of the same stuff. No class, age or place voted monolithically in the referendum. No one betrayed anyone. No one failed to think of the future. The great British people came together in numbers never seen before and issued a collective wisdom that we should all respect.
I voted in 1975 to stay in the EEC. I saw the free trade side of the coin and missed the protectionism. I saw the co-operation and missed the drive for harmonisation. I respect those who still cherish that idealism. But, as a child of the Sixties who marched for freedom, I must say that I would not march with enthusiasm today to stay under what an unreformed Brussels has sadly become—remote, sclerotic, undemocratic and the slowest creator of prosperity in the developed world: the landline in the digital age.
When we hear, as we did from the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, that the future is uncertain, and when we hear time and again that the future will be bleak outside the EU, I have to say that for millions, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, said so compellingly, the grass is not greener on the inside. The catastrophic euro project is grinding southern Europe and squeezing life out of the small businesses that are Italy’s lifeblood. Italian GDP has shrunk since 2011 and living standards are no higher than they were when Italy joined the euro in the first place. Those, too, are facts. That is the real “lost generation”. It is not what may be to come post Brexit but what is in the book—what has been done.
Youth unemployment has more than doubled in 10 years in Italy to over 40% and Greece’s condition is worse, yet the establishment clings to its euro project, sacrificing a young generation on the altar of a flawed currency ideology. They call it “internal devaluation”; I call it profoundly immoral. The EU has shown itself utterly incapable of dealing with the challenge of half a million illegal immigrants who have been landed in Italy in the last three years, drawn by the prospect of winning asylum under the aegis of the ECHR.
At all this the average Italian looks on with a sense of impotence and despair. Once, with no loyalty to a malfunctioning state and with a self-seeking and unaccountable political caste, Italians were the most enthusiastic in Europe in looking to the European Union as a guarantor of legality and stability. Far fewer feel that way now. The great majority still wish to stay, but it has not taken the earthquakes to make many people feel that years of sacrifice under the burning sun have been in vain and that they are drifting back to the poverty of the past. Increasingly, voices are raised against Brussels—and Berlin. An Italian small businessman said to me, “Europe was fine when we all sat at a round table. Now we sit at a very long, very bare table, with Germany at its head”.
Not only is coming out uncertain: staying in is uncertain, too, and we should remember that balance in this debate. As one who is no less European now than I was last June, I say with reluctance that, as the EU has now become unwilling or unable to reform—as David Cameron found to his cost—the British people were right. They took the correct decision and I support the Bill.
Lord Truscott (Ind Lab)
My Lords, as a former Member of the European Parliament, I have always believed that the British people are European, geographically, politically and culturally. We are not some pop-up island in the mid-Atlantic; we have ties to the European continent that stretch back centuries, millennia even. However, as we have just learned from the Brexit vote, that does not mean that British people are necessarily wedded to any set of European institutions. Unfortunately, and as I witnessed at first hand, the EU’s leaders overreached themselves and failed to take their people with them; nowhere was that more true than in the UK. The EU increasingly became perceived as a self-serving edifice, a huge ideological and political project, run by an elite remote from the daily concerns of Europe’s citizens. The euro always had a political rather than an economic rationale, designed to bring about the ever-closer union to which the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, referred earlier. Greece should never have been allowed to join the euro in the first place.
In Britain, for over 30 years the European Union was pilloried by our press and much of the Conservative Party as costly, undemocratic, overly bureaucratic and slightly ridiculous. I remember well the straight banana saga referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens. I was an MEP at the time and had the pleasure of receiving a rotten banana through the post. We should hardly be surprised that the British people, conditioned to be anti-EU for so many years, voted for Brexit. When David Cameron came back from Brussels with his non-deal, his fate was sealed, and so was our country’s. I remember Mikhail Gorbachev suffered the same fate in 1991. Asked for financial support, Europe’s leaders refused. A Russian coup followed shortly, and within months the USSR had ceased to exist, after 70-odd years as the Soviet Union. The EU’s leaders’ myopia led to Brexit. Some 60 years after the treaty of Rome, Europe is in crisis and it is an open question whether the EU will survive to its 70th birthday.
We should not rail against the British people for voting in favour of Brexit, no matter how small the margin was. Those who voted did so with their eyes open because they were concerned about mass immigration, loss of national identity, sovereignty, globalisation and marginalisation. That they did so reflects badly not on them, but on a comfortable liberal elite too smug and complacent by far. Brexit, as shown by the election of Donald Trump, was not a purely British or even European phenomenon but one with global implications. Protectionism, largely eradicated in the beggar-thy-neighbour 1930s, is back on the agenda.
I do not believe in government by referenda; I believe in government through a representative democracy, with Parliament at its heart. However, if you ask the people a question, you cannot ignore the answer simply because you do not like the result, as has been said many times in your Lordships’ House over the last couple of days. When people vote for a Government, they live with that choice, often for four years or more with no opportunity to change it. With a referendum, you cannot ask people to keep voting until they come up with the right decision. That is not only contemptuous of democracy, but treats the electorate as stupid. That would be a very dangerous concept to embrace, and would undermine the very principle of democracy that has sustained this island nation since the middle ages.
There is another factor that your Lordships must take into account in this debate. On 23 June last year we heard the verdict of the people. We may not like it, but it was clear. More recently, the other place has spoken, with a Third Reading majority of 372 in favour of triggering Article 50. I agree with the arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and others on this point. To my mind, it is inconceivable that this unelected House should try to hobble the elected one or the will of the people on a clear issue of principle: that the Government notify the EU of an intention to withdraw and thereby start trade negotiations. Triggering Article 50 is the only logical and democratic response to the referendum held on 23 June. If the elected other place has decided not to approve amendments, then it is not our place to do so on an issue of fundamental principle.
Your Lordships are not being asked to amend or revise some common or garden piece of legislation. In response to the question asked earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, when he said that he had not received a convincing argument as to why your Lordships should not amend the Bill, the issue at stake here is the primacy of the House of Commons. That is the fundamental principle of our unwritten constitution. As a historian, I think it would be totally unacceptable for this unelected House to flout the will of the House of Commons and of the people. That is the difference between this piece of legislation and other pieces of legislation. This was a political decision made by the people and taken by the people. As the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, said, it was a political mandate—a clear mandate by the people to their elected representatives and to Parliament as whole. As many noble Lords have said, your Lordships’ House should not put itself on a collision course with the elected Chamber in a battle that it cannot, and should not, win.
I welcome the fact that the Government have promised a final vote on the deal they will bring back from Brussels, and no doubt there will be further discussion and debate on that. I am sure that the Prime Minister will not make the same mistake as her predecessor in trying to sell a hopeless deal to Parliament and the British people.
As for the EU itself, it has some challenging days ahead. Brexit already means that it will have to adapt to survive. Politically, the thunderstorms in Europe are gathering. Whatever lies ahead, this country will survive. It is the task of Parliament and Government to ensure that it prospers.
Lord Watson of Richmond (LD)
My Lords, I declare a historic interest and note that I have no contemporary interest. I worked with the late—and great—Lord Jenkins in the European Commission for just over four years, at the end of which period I decided to come home. It was an interesting revelatory moment with regard to working within the European Commission, because when I attempted to resign, the head of personnel, who as it happens was an Englishman, said, “You can’t possibly do that—you are a fonctionnaire permanente!”. He meant every word. However, I persisted, and came home. I took my pension agreement with me at that point and I no longer have one from the European Commission. I make that clear.
On 15 June, a number of days before the referendum, we had a debate in this House on the referendum itself. By then, it was already clear that the referendum was in many ways dangerous, certainly divisive, and likely to be damaging. But for me, the most important thing about it was its folly. It was an unnecessary referendum, a miscalculation, and a high price has been paid. However, for the time being, as many noble Lords have said, this is water under the bridge. Cruel events over the next two years may well change the electorate’s perspective, but meanwhile, what can be done? I find three imperatives compelling and possibly hopeful.
First, over the next two years, we have the opportunity —and the obligation—to change the narrative on Europe. I remind the House that the White Paper’s title is The United Kingdom’s Exit from and New Partnership with the European Union. We should take that title seriously. There is a positive experience—a number of them—on which to base a more positive narrative. First, it is factually correct that on the overall economic balance, membership has been good for the United Kingdom. Look, for example, at the role of the City, which has enormously benefited in its standing and prowess, and in particular its transactions related to the euro. Look at what a Minister called recently the “beacons of success” in manufacturing; namely, the car industry. Why are we the recipients of this huge flow of inward investment? From South Korea, India and Japan, the cars that are being manufactured make Britain numerically one of the greatest car manufacturers and exporters in the world, and that is because we have this access to the single market. Look at research and development and at our universities. I say, as a Cambridge man, how interesting it is that Oxford is to make the first move in terms of situating itself in part on the continent.
Our membership has also been very good for the European Union. Reference has been made to the role of English, so let me share something with noble Lords. One of the things that I am proud of during my four years in the European Commission was a certain battle for the English language. I well remember going to a meeting, having had it explained to me beforehand by a Frenchman in the Groupe du Porte-Parole that if I submitted a paper on Mondays for a decision on Wednesdays in English, it would not appear for three weeks. If I submitted it in French, it would be dealt with that week. An Italian was in the chair at the meeting—it was a Council meeting but I was there for the Commission—and everyone began to speak in French. The contributions were being made in alphabetical order and Watson is at the end of the alphabet. As it came near to my turn I thought, “What on earth am I going to do? Well, I can speak German”. But then I thought to myself, “How stupid. English is a European language”. So I went into English and the Irishman who was sitting next to me said, “Oh begorra”—I should not say “sweet Jesus” in this House—“thank you for doing that”. He too immediately went into English and from that moment on everyone else did. So that was quite gratifying.
The second imperative is that when we trigger Article 50, which we will, we will also trigger the so-called new partnership. On 10 October last year I put down a Question for Written Answer asking what the Government were going to do to respect and take fully into account the votes of the millions who voted for remain. I received this reply:
“Our guiding approach is to … deliver the … best deal for the British people … working constructively with our EU partners going forward”.
I would therefore like to ask the Minister what plans Her Majesty’s Government have for going forward constructively with our new partners in Europe. We have heard all about the opposite, but let us hear a bit on this side. I also think that this House has a key role to play and Parliament clearly so in terms of scrutiny and above all in ensuring that this new relationship is, in the end, voted on by both Houses of Parliament, and that the vote is important and decisive so that there is no legitimacy to this outcome unless that vote takes place.
Thirdly, I want to refer to a contribution made yesterday to the debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, is in her place. In her speech she used a wonderful analogy. She said that when marriages break up, there is usually a messy divorce and the only people to benefit are the lawyers. I have a horrible feeling that that is exactly what we are going to replicate over the next two years. But she went on to say that quite often after a divorce has happened, there is a reconciliation and an amazingly large number of partners remarry. Is that la-la land? One thing I can say is that it is a much better prospect than its alternative of division, disaster and maybe catastrophe.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Watson, particularly in his reference to language because I can remember being told by a department of state in London when I was a Member of Parliament that it could of course produce a document in Welsh, but it would take two or three weeks to translate it if it was to give any attention to it. These things happen, I fear, all around the world.
I believe that the advice given by the voters in June’s referendum represents a disastrous course for the UK and one which in time people will come to bitterly regret. My party, Plaid Cymru, wants to see Wales and Britain remain in the EU, and if that is now impossible, to secure as open a settlement as is possible with our EU partners. Plaid’s three MPs voted against the Bill because of the Government’s stance in backing the hardest of hard Brexits. Had a single market or customs union linkage been accepted by the Government, we would not have opposed the Bill, but the Government rejected such amendments.
Let us never forget why European countries came together after World War 2: to make it impossible to go to war against each other ever again. Since 1945, we have enjoyed over 70 years of peace, the longest unbroken period of peace in 400 years. I trust that this House will not be rushed into taking decisions against its better judgment on the basis of an arbitrary timetable imposed by a Prime Minister who seems to be running scared of scrutiny.
Let us remember that lack of scrutiny was evident in the funding claims made by the Brexiteers. People were told downright lies about the funding consequences that would arise by leaving the EU. In Wales, we are £245 million a year net beneficiaries from the EU. The gross figure is some £650 million, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, mentioned earlier. EU structural funds have underpinned dozens of local economic projects. People in the old industrial areas of Wales voted out because they were told that every penny of EU funding would be replaced by the Treasury, but amendments to that end were rejected by the Government.
Last June, people voted out for many reasons. We were repeatedly told by Brexiteers that we could continue to co-operate with EU countries on key issues, including security and migration, and maintain close trading links with Europe. Half a dozen models were advocated by various parts of the rag, tag and bobtail amalgam which constituted the Brexit campaign. Individuals knew what they were voting against: farmers voted against Brussels bureaucracy; fishing communities against overfishing by continental vessels; small business owners voted against overregulation; and some objected to the European courts. Only a minority of such people were motivated by immigration issues and I cannot accept that 90% of those who voted out did so to block immigration.
If I am right, then the mandate to leave the EU is not a mandate to halt the free movement of people and thereby block UK citizens from working, studying or retiring in other EU countries. Nor is it a mandate to block EU citizens from coming to work or study in Britain. Yes, let us negotiate controls to prevent abuse of our health service or social security provisions, but let us remember that UK citizens also move to France to benefit from French healthcare provisions. Present uncertainties are undermining 1 million UK citizens living in other EU countries or who have bought continental property ready for their retirement. The threat felt by EU citizens working in Britain—in the NHS, university research, tourism and food processing—is an appalling by-product of the Brexit campaign which, at its worst, has stimulated odious racist campaigns. This has to stop and stop now. The Government have to flag up that absolute control over EU citizens working in Britain is not fundamental to their negotiating position.
From a Welsh perspective, two-thirds of our manufacturing exports go to EU countries. Companies such as Ford, Airbus, Siemens and Toyota will be hard hit by tariff barriers. Two hundred American and 50 Japanese companies are located in Wales in order to sell to EU markets. That strategic element of government industrial policy in Wales will be undermined by a hard Brexit. Our agricultural sector faces similar challenges. Over 90% of beef and sheep-meat exports go to EU markets. Any tariff barriers would be a kiss of death to rural Wales.
Wales needs unfettered access to the single market. That is the basis of the excellent White Paper produced by the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru, in co-operation and with Liberal Democrat support, entitled Securing Wales’ Future, which calls for full single market participation. I know from earlier comments by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, that the Minister is seriously considering the approach taken by Carwyn Jones and Leanne Wood, and I urge the Government to accept amendments to that end and to work closely with the devolved Administrations. This constructive approach might also offer a formula relevant to both Scotland and Ireland. The challenge we face in relation to Ireland has within it the seeds of not only destroying the Good Friday agreement but potentially dismantling the United Kingdom.
How any final negotiated agreement will be ratified is a basic question. It is the perceived will of the people which is driving us towards the cliff edge now, and so it is the people who should be allowed to ratify the Government’s negotiated outcome. Do the Government accept the recent legal opinion, of which I have a copy, by Sir David Edward QC and others that, if there is no agreement with our EU partners, then Article 50 paragraph 3 would not automatically bring to an end the UK’s membership of the EU?
I appeal to the Government to be more flexible and to step back from the mindless threats against this Chamber. As a revising Chamber, our role is to propose those changes which, in all conscience, we deem necessary. If we cannot change a dot or a comma in such a major Bill, we can justly ask what the point is of having such an impotent Chamber. Much more important than the future of this Chamber is the future of the nations of these islands and of Europe itself. It is for that reason that I cannot support this Bill in its present form.
Baroness Oppenheim-Barnes (Con)
My Lords, I think that I am right in saying that I am the only Conservative still alive who voted against joining the EU in the first place. My Whip was a very young man by the name of Kenneth Clarke. I was probably the start of his campaign of dealing with difficult women and I can assure your Lordships’ House that I made it as difficult as possible and I voted against joining. I have never regretted that for one moment since.
It is not only the petty things, but goodness knows they have been annoying enough—loads and loads of regulations, ill-thought-up, imposed on British consumers without any recourse to deal with them or to change them, because every time negotiations started they stopped half way through because they were not getting anywhere.
I have not heard any noble Lord mention—I apologise if they have—that membership of the original Community that we joined has changed immensely. Members that we probably would never have thought of accepting are now firmly in the Community and are often causing a lot of heartburn and trouble, not only within those countries but for the Community in dealing or helping to deal with those problems.
I feel that this has been a fantastic opportunity that I never dreamed would come our way in my lifetime. I am deeply grateful that it has and that one has the opportunity, if that is what the country wants, at least to change our position and, I hope, our membership. I have the greatest admiration for our team that has negotiated so far. It has got ready quickly to start the difficult and important negotiations that will undoubtedly have to go on for some time. I wish it well.
On this occasion I would like, unusually, to mention another Member of your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart. He was and still is a great admirer of Brexit. He was very much looking forward to speaking tonight but unfortunately has been taken ill and is unable to do so. I have spoken to him on the phone. He is doing well and his message is: “I am just delighted about Brexit. Please tell everybody from me”. On his behalf, it is a great pleasure to do so.
Finally, I will not detain the House, but I hope that when our team has completed these proceedings, those involved will be able to continue to negotiate as well as they have in the difficult circumstances that they have faced from the very beginning. If it happens and if all goes well, I will have a small tear in one eye at the thought that the day may dawn when I will see us leaving Europe.
Lord Hoyle (Lab)
My Lords, it has been a very interesting and informative debate. In fact, I welcome to the House people who I have not known before who have joined in the debate. I hope they will come back and join in other debates in the future—I should certainly welcome that.
Looking at the issue, I see that it would be totally wrong for this, an unelected House, to try to overturn what the British people and the elected House have decided. We must accept the decision. Nearly all the speeches in this Chamber have mentioned how dependent we are on the European market. I will say one or two things about how the European market benefits from the UK market as well. For instance, there is a £50 billion surplus on trade between Europe and ourselves—that is not something to be thrown away lightly. Also, we are one of the biggest importers of German cars; at one time, it was running at some 30%. Germany has a £25 billion surplus in relation to trade with this country. I then go on to Italy. I think all of us enjoy Italian wine and goods, and it has a £3.45 billion trading surplus with us. No one enjoys French wine more than those of us here, and France has a £5.2 billion trade surplus with us. I put it before noble Lords that when we go into the negotiations, we should bear in mind that they also have quite a lot to lose in relation to the British market.
I move on to Gibraltar, which has been mentioned by several people on this side. We must not forget the people of Gibraltar when we are negotiating, either now or in the future when we are dealing with trade. Gibraltar must be included because, in 2002, 98% of people there voted to remain with the UK, and in 2016, 96% voted to remain in the EU. Gibraltar is a haven for financial services, and they do extremely well there. However, more than 90% of that trade is with us. Again, when we are looking at the issues, we must not forget the service Gibraltar has given us. All these issues are important as we go forward.
Several speeches have been made decrying what the British people have decided. I remind noble Lords to consider that although some of the British people were not well informed and did not know, you must always trust the electorate and the people of this country. You may not like what they do—many times, as a politician, I have certainly not liked the Government they have returned—but they take that decision. It is wrong for this unelected House then to discuss overturning what has been decided.
What will happen in the future? I remind noble Lords what was said when we went into this referendum. I agree that the arguments made by the Prime Minister were not the best. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, that the arguments he has made today are far more important than the economic arguments. The First World War and the Second World War were caused by disputes between European countries, but the fact of Europe coming together means it is unthinkable today that that would happen. I give that to the EU.
However, I say that there is a bright future for this country in going forward and deciding where we want to go on our own, not forgetting that we have responsibilities to countries such as Gibraltar, which have shown that they want to stay with us. I think we can secure agreements not only with Europe but with the rest of the world as well. We are still a very important trading nation, but I come back to where I started: the British people have decided and we should respect the decision that they made.
I hope there is no longer any talk of an unelected House trying to overturn the decision of the British people and the decision of the elected House. It is not for this House to do that. By all means let us be constructive in what we say and the way we look at the issue, but our future lies in the direction that we have been told by the electorate in this country. We should go forward and look not with pessimism but with optimism at the future that we can generate for the people of this country.
The Earl of Caithness (Con)
My Lords, I wish to start with a few quotes from some excellent speeches. We have heard a wealth of expert and apparently reliable information that flatly contradicts itself. We have been told that if we cannot compete inside the EU we cannot compete outside, and the advantages of our being within it seem compelling. We have heard that we are turning our back on many of our friends and on what is in our own interest. Equally, we have heard from some who have spoken of a slow and difficult acceptance that an era has come to an end. We have been warned of the danger of flying in the face of public opinion, albeit a minority. It has been argued that the Government have taken the policy of pushing the Bill through the other place, will undoubtedly do the same thing here and, in the circumstances, cannot do anything else. They cannot admit even small amendments because that would upset the whole timetable. A headline in a national newspaper has boldly stated that this Bill is, “The mandate that never was”.
All those arguments came from our debates in this House in 1971 and 1972. Nothing has changed except the actors and the fact that people on one side are using the arguments that the other side used at that time but with slightly different words. The only major difference from that time is that our speeches are, thankfully, limited to six minutes. I am the only Peer taking part in this debate who listened to those debates. As I did so, sitting then on the Cross Benches, I became increasingly convinced that the UK was right to join the EEC. As I have listened over the last two days, however, I have become increasingly concerned. In the 1970s, the minority accepted the will of the majority. The great difference now is that the minority do not. They are fighting on, banging the war drums and threatening disruption to the Bill. The more that that minority continue their strident tone, which becomes ever more shrill, the more I fear for the future as it will be so much harder to get the unity that we need, and the narrative right, for the oncoming negotiations.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, said in a powerful speech that we need to know what the Government want for the future of the country and its relationship with our continent. I believe the Government have done so as it is very clear in the Bill. It is not the Government who have suddenly sprung the Bill upon us; what has happened is that enough of the British people have changed their minds on the benefits of staying in the EU since the 1970s. The Government are merely reflecting that, and we must respect it too, however difficult it is and however many hazards lie ahead.
The EU is in a mess. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, called it dysfunctional. Although Brexit is our top priority, it is certainly not that in the EU. That was clear in the negotiations that Mr Cameron had with the EU, and it will become clear for our Ministers shortly, when their negotiations start. That will add to the EU’s difficulties.
My noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, in another powerful speech, said that we should listen to what our friends said, so at the weekend, I spoke to friends of mine in France. They likened the EU to a colossus with feet of iron and clay. We know what happens to such a colossus. My friends also suggested to me that it was essential for the UK to leave the EU for the EU to change to save itself from becoming ashes. Our leaving is the electric shock that is needed and, when it reforms, it will again benefit from the UK rejoining. They are right that the EU as we know it has to change for Europe’s sake and for ours. For a start, it will have to address its budget contributions now that one of the few milch cows is leaving.
None of the extreme predictions of the 1970s came to pass, and neither will the worst fears of the extremists today be fulfilled. It will be difficult. There will have to be changes and yes, I firmly believe that people’s minds will change. However, now is the time to accept the results of the referendum, whether we like it or not—and I did not like it. My daughter, who is much younger than anybody taking part today and works in the City, was firmly in favour of us leaving.
We must allow the Government to trigger Article 50, do the best negotiation they can and come back to Parliament as promised. It is only at that stage that we will know what is and what is not on offer.
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, there is a very strong argument that the constitution belongs to the people and that we and our friends in the other place are practitioners within that constitution. We have one of the biggest decisions to have faced Parliament for many years, and the challenge to get on with our responsibility as practitioners is a heavy one. We in this House have become very good at scrutiny. Our job will be to take scrutiny seriously, to look at the implications and consequences of what is proposed and contribute our findings to the public debate.
Looking at the situation in the other place, I must say that I am one of those who is disappointed, because the strength of British democracy has very much relied on its representative nature, individual responsibility and the role of the individual conscience of Members of Parliament. I find it extraordinary that there has been a sort of herd action in the other place which seems to have said that our conscience—what we know to be right—must be put on one side because we must bow to the will of the people. It is not that we are not bowing to the will of the people; it is enabling the people to understand, as the practitioners we are, the real implications of what is happening. We must take that seriously.
There has been a good deal of talk in this debate about taking the 48% seriously, but there is another statistic that we must never discount. Only 37% of the electorate actually voted for Brexit. That is hardly an indication of the overwhelming popular will; it is an indication that some highly motivated people mobilised their case well and effectively.
Of course the consequences of coming out of the single market will be far reaching across so much of our lives, and it will be unthinkable for Parliament not to establish how the Government propose to deal with the consequences. It is an abandonment of responsibility; this is what Parliament is here to do—to find out what the Government are proposing and how far they will look to the well-being and interests of the people.
On Ireland, we are playing with fire, almost literally. We must know from the Government how they are going to meet the new challenges of potentially a border between Northern Ireland and the European Union in Ireland, and what the consequences politically and in any other dramatic ways might be.
My noble friend Lord Grocott, who is an old friend, said that the people feel we have lost touch. That is because we have allowed ourselves as a political community to become elitist and inclusive, and have failed to communicate with the public as we should by explaining to them why issues matter and why legislation is being introduced in response to what matters.
The issue will not go away. We are in a highly interdependent world. We need ways in which to co-operate with others to meet almost every challenge that faces us, our children and grandchildren. That is true of climate change and the environment. There is no way in which to protect the environment or respond to climate change on our own. It is also true of security and terrorism, as we have heard clearly in this debate. It is true also in the operation of justice and legal co-operation. I serve on the European Justice Sub-Committee and it has been striking to hear distinguished lawyers explain how so much law now crosses borders and how useful practice is being implemented all the time, enabling lawyers to meet their responsibilities to their clients. That is strong in, for example, the sphere of children, when there are broken families and so on, and making sure that children can be properly protected. That is getting better year by year, and we are in danger of throwing that away. How are we going to meet that situation? Interdependence is also there in the case of learning and knowledge, as we have seen with universities. We can have effective universities only if they are part of international communities that in every sense of their operation reflect the challenges of the world and the way in which we must work together.
I am sure that when we have done our work in Parliament, which we must take seriously, it would be unthinkable not to have put before the British people again the outcomes of what we have discovered and are finding. We owe it to them. What on earth are we talking about when we refer to democracy and responsibility if we do all this work, and then make a decision in the inclusive club of Parliament that we do not put to the people?
Lord Strasburger (LD)
My Lords, we find ourselves in a situation that most of us would not have thought possible a year ago. Our Prime Minister seeks not only to invoke Article 50 but also to needlessly destroy our country’s tariff-free and frictionless access to the largest market in the world, thereby doing serious damage to our economy. Stranger still, this is not some dystopian, Corbynista nightmare—it is a Conservative Prime Minister choosing, at a stroke, to destroy for ever her party’s reputation for economic prudence. She is putting at risk the prosperity that our country has enjoyed since we joined what was then the Common Market. She will also be undoing the success of the coalition in pulling our economy back from the brink after the 2008 crash. She and her party will not be forgiven for their collective madness when everything goes pear-shaped—as it surely must.
What is this lunacy for? It is for a small reduction in immigration, which in itself will damage our economy. Can it be that Mrs May is so scarred by her failure to meet the impossible target of cutting immigration to below 100,000 in her six years at the Home Office that she is hell-bent on having another go through the most extreme and damaging of Brexits?
Or is there a more sinister explanation? There is a loony-right clique of well-organised Brexit zealots in her party, known innocuously as the European reform group. Have they pushed Mrs May into gambling that she can somehow mitigate part of the damage she is doing by making trade deals with people such as Donald Trump? Trump can spot desperation a mile off. Being a property man, he knows exactly how to fleece someone who has been stupid enough to sell their house before they have one to move into. By rashly throwing away the single market card before the negotiations even begin, Mrs May has put us in precisely that situation. All the talk of global Britain and fantastic trade deals is just that: talk, pie in the sky, whistling in the dark. One thing is sure: our prosperity, investment and jobs will suffer. The only question is by how much.
Many noble Lords on the Benches opposite are, like me, businessmen. If the chief executive of a company that you were chairing came to you saying that he was going to withdraw from the company’s biggest market immediately, with no certainty that he could rescind the decision, and that he would try to fill the vacuum with clients that the company was only just getting to know, I think that your first call—like mine—would be to a headhunter to find a new chief executive.
Mrs May asserts that we voted to leave the single market. This is a total fabrication on her part. The question on the ballot paper made no reference to the single market, indeed both Vote Leave and the Conservative manifesto of 2015 said that we would stay in the single market. Likewise we did not vote to leave the customs union or vote for WTO rules. Moreover, we did not vote to destroy our currency, to lose sterling’s reserve status or our triple-A rating. We certainly did not vote to become an offshore tax haven and see our employment rights destroyed. We did not vote to have our public services starved of funds and to witness the consequent destruction of the NHS. We did not vote to put the integrity of the United Kingdom into play, to put the Good Friday agreement at risk or to have our safety and security endangered. Nor did we vote for EU citizens living in Britain to be used as bargaining chips and to be subject to racist abuse. We did not vote for our Government to cosy up to dictators and demagogues in a desperate search for something—anything—to make up in a small way for the folly of leaving the single market. We did not vote to see our environmental protections whittled away.
Many people fear that the West is drifting towards fascism. Experts are being denounced. Judges who uphold the law are called enemies of the people, just as happened in Germany in the 1930s. Liberals are disparaged as unpatriotic. Foreigners are scapegoated. Muslims are being vilified in America. Anyone who opposes the Government is viciously attacked. With a delusional egomaniac in the White House, we should be huddling closer together with our European neighbours, not pushing them away.
Should we not be asking ourselves: why are the Government in such a hurry? Why are they so intransigent and intolerant of meaningful scrutiny of the deal they hope to bring back from the negotiations? The explanation must be that deep down they realise that they cannot possibly secure a deal anywhere near as good as the one we have right now. Whatever they get will not stand up to close comparison with membership of the single market and the customs union.
Our patriotic duty is to scrutinise and amend the Bill. We must protect Parliament’s sovereignty and give it a chance to accept or reject the deal, with the status quo as one of the alternatives, rather than automatically going over the WTO cliff. We must protect the rights of EU nationals already in the UK and we must give the people a say in the final decision. That way, if the best deal the Government can get is not good enough, Parliament and the people will have a final chance to stop the self-destruct button being pressed.
Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)
My Lords, I will confine my remarks to the effect that leaving the European Union will have on Welsh devolution, in particular on the Welsh devolution settlement contained in the Wales Act 2017.
Wales achieved a reserved-powers constitution in that Act. As the House will appreciate, there are two main patterns of devolution. One is a reserved-powers constitution where there is notionally a transfer of the totality of powers and then a reservation of certain specific exceptions. The other is a piecemeal system—what is called conferred devolution—and that is what Wales had from 1964 onwards, when it achieved its Secretary of State, and indeed there have been hundreds if not thousands of what one might call confetti-like situations of conferring individual powers.
Central to the concept of a reserved constitution is the idea that the mother parliament has on the table, as it were, the totality of powers that are available and relevant in the situation, and that the mother parliament looks upon those powers and says, “This is all that we have. This is where we draw the dividing line between the totality that is transferred and that small remnant that is retained and reserved”. If indeed for some reason the mother parliament did not have the totality of powers at the time, it goes to the very heart, kernel and essence of a reserved constitution. I make the case that that is exactly what happened.
From 1972 onwards—indeed, from 1 January 1973 when we entered the Common Market—it meant that the European Communities Act ruled with regard to a very considerable swathe of legal authority. Exactly what percentage that represents of the laws affecting us I would not like to calculate but it is very substantial. It may be 25%, it may be 30% or 35%, or even higher. What it means for Wales, and it affects Scotland in exactly the same way, is that some 5,000 elements of law affect those devolved countries and yet the authority was not on the table of the mother parliament. That seems to me to go to the very heart, core and kernel of the idea of a reserved settlement.
What can one do? We can look at three situations: one is the Sewel convention, a convention that is now contained in the Scotland Act and the Wales Act of last year. That convention says that it is accepted that the mother parliament, being the supreme authority, can do what it wishes in relation to a devolved Administration. It can change the situation overnight if it wishes, but it will not do so, and would not think of doing so, unless asked by that sub-parliament or unless there were some very exceptional circumstances. That, as I said, has been written into the law by way of the Scotland Act and the Wales Act.
It is a convention. The Supreme Court said it was a convention and nothing more. It does not have the power of law. That obviously must be the situation technically. However, the Supreme Court went on in its judgment, in paragraph 151, to say that, nevertheless, a convention is important. It is binding morally and politically. It goes on to say that such conventions are of immense significance and have to be respected to bring about the harmonious situation and amity between the mother parliament and the devolved parliaments.
Although you might say that Europe was a reserved matter altogether, that is not so. Paragraph 8 of the schedule says that, although European relations are reserved, the question of the administration and oversight of the operation of European relations is not reserved. Clearly, that is covered by the convention.
Secondly, there is the question of the Joint Ministerial Committee, where, in utter confidence, matters are disclosed between one party and another. It has a very considerable future: it is possible to build a mutuality of trust that can be more important for the future of the United Kingdom than anything else.
Thirdly, there is the question of protocols. When the legislation was going through in relation to Scotland and Wales in late 1990s, it was said that on matters that were not devolved, there would have to be protocols. In fact, however, it was a dead letter. I would like to see the breath of life breathed into the cold clay and dry bones of such institutions, which I think have a very considerable future.
As for the situation now, when these powers are repatriated, they will be repatriated, of course, not to Wales, nor to Scotland nor, indeed, to Westminster. A joint body should be set up between Westminster and Scotland and between Westminster and Wales to see exactly how one can bring about a settlement that is fair, just and lasting.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Tugendhat, who spoke almost 60 places before me on the list, I regard this as a rather sad and sobering day. I do so because I remember, in particular, a very happy day in 2004 when I was with a group of parliamentarians at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. There, a group of us from the All-Party Parliamentary Arts and Heritage Group—not a freebie, I hasten to say—with our spouses were greeted by the rector of the university, who said that they were only recently accustomed to freedom and how thrilled and proud they were that their nation was now a member of the European Union and a member of NATO. I remember looking at my dear friend, the late, great Tam Dalyell, and both of us nodding enthusiastically in agreement.
This is coming to an end. I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Watson, reminded us of two crucial words on the cover of the new White Paper—“new partnership”. If there is to be any real hope in the future, there has to be a new partnership with our friends and allies in Europe. We have to continue to regard them with affection and respect, which we hope will be reciprocated. My noble friend Lady Hooper talked yesterday about divorce. Well, we may have filed for divorce but I hope that, following the White Paper, we will build a true civil partnership in every sense of those words.
I feel that we have had two sobering days of debate. They have illustrated, very eloquently in many cases, that the divide is still there and that the wounds are still deep. We have a collective duty, on whichever side of the argument we were on 23 June last year, to work together in the national interest. It is not going to be all that easy. These two long days of debate are but the beginning of endless days of debate. This subject will dominate our agenda, not just this year or next year but far into the future. I think that it was the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who reminded us that it is not necessarily what people are talking about in the Dog and Duck, but the future of our country is in our hands and it is absolutely vital that we recognise that.
Those of us on the losing side—the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, yesterday, and the noble Lords, Lord Darling and Lord Triesman, today—say to those on the winning side, “Please do not think that we can discard our beliefs any more than we can discard our beliefs after a general election if the other side has won”. As a Member of Parliament for 40 years in Staffordshire, I had to work—as I did, happily and co-operatively—with a Labour county council for almost the whole of that period. We could do that only if we respected each other’s differences. We have to come together through a mutual respect in the years ahead.
Another theme that has run though this debate has been how complex the situation is. I was sitting next to a colleague at the long table just a few weeks ago. He was a Brexiter. I asked, “Did you really realise it was going to be quite as complex as this?”. The answer was an honest, “No, but we’ve got to make it work, and I believe it will work very well”. I know that he meant that. The fact is that it will be far more complex than many of us thought.
My heart is very much with my noble friends Lady Wheatcroft and Lady Altmann, and I feel similarly to them. My noble friend Lady Wheatcroft, in her powerful speech last night, talked of Kenneth Clarke in the other place, a colleague of mine for 40 years. We entered the House of Commons on the very same day. Had I been in the House of Commons, I might well have gone in with him, but I was not. When I was in the House of Commons, I had an electorate to whom I was responsible and answerable every four or five years. Although my heart is with them, my head is with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who made an extremely compelling speech. If this House is to fulfil its constitutional duty properly, it must always recognise that supremacy lies at the other end of the Corridor, with the elected House. We have a duty to examine and scrutinise. It may well be that on one or two issues we ask the Commons to think again when we come to our Committee and Report stage deliberations, but we must not push that too far. If they refuse to think again and they send it back, we have to accept that, however sadly. It would be quite wrong for this House to frustrate the will of the elected one and hold up this process.
I say to noble friends such as my noble friend Lady Altmann, “Please, please think very carefully. Perhaps exercise a vote on an amendment once or twice, but don’t push it, because this House must not jeopardise its important constitutional position”. I make that plea to all noble Lords who are intending to vote on one or more of the amendments. I have particular sympathy with the amendment on EU nationals. I have spoken on the issue several times in your Lordships’ House and I was delighted to hear the UKIP Member, the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, say that he wanted that to be resolved as quickly as possible.
There will be difficult days ahead. We have had a splendid debate, but I hope very much that we can keep a sense of perspective as we go into uncharted waters or perhaps, to use another metaphor, into the quicksands and the fog.
Lord Monks (Lab)
My Lords, as general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation for eight years, I was keenly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the EU. I will pick out a number of quick points. It has been a very successful institution in spreading peace, freedom and democracy in the south and east of our continent after the collapse of the dictatorships in those countries—remember them? We could not do very much for Poland, for which we went to war, in 1939 or in 1945, but since 2004 we have been able to do a lot to help the development of that country and others in eastern Europe. The EU has also built some common labour standards to complement the single market. I am particularly proud of the role of the European trade unions and the TUC in achieving that. It was not always an easy task, given the attitude of British Governments.
However, I readily acknowledge that it has not all been a success. It was swept by a tide of neoliberalism around the turn of the 21st century and it has not recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Austerity policy has made things worse, here as well as there. I am not starry-eyed about the EU but I am deeply concerned about the terms of our impending divorce from it. I still regard the EU as a noble project, despite its flaws. However, the Bill is not simply about triggering the divorce and those who keep saying it is should think a bit more widely. It is also a de facto endorsement of the Government’s post-Brexit plan: the White Paper and the plan set out in it. If the Bill passes Parliament without amendment, we are giving the Government a mandate for a very clear but very hard Brexit, with the UK outside the best trade deal we are ever likely to get. The risk for jobs, rights and prosperity are enormous. These risks are recognised, not just by me and other remainers, but by some of the leading campaigners of the leave side in the referendum such as Boris Johnson—“I would vote to stay in the single market”—Owen Paterson, Daniel Hannan and Arron Banks. At the last election, the Conservative Party manifesto said:
“We say: yes to the Single Market”.
The White Paper says no to the single market, yet it could be possible for the UK to honour the result of the referendum and stay in the single market, and so reduce the risks of Brexit to our economy. Of course, other EU members might not let us do this. Why not put the onus on them to negotiate us out? Let us not give up, even before talks are under way.
Clearly, the Government have in mind the requirement of the single market to accept free movement of labour. We all recognise that migration was a factor in the referendum result. We could apply new conditions to migration ourselves. In particular, a migrant must have a job to come to. Jobs should be advertised locally and not just in eastern Europe. Migrants should get the rate for the job, not just the minimum wage. Other EU countries do these things; why not us?
The Prime Minister has said that we cannot accept the European Court of Justice continuing to have jurisdiction in our country. Let us be clear. Any comprehensive trade agreement will need an adjudicating body. There will remain a need for our exporters to adopt EU rules and regulations—regulatory equivalence, as I note it has now been called by Ministers in the last few days. This will be a major factor in any new deal.
To stay in the single market we would have to pay but, as we are about to find out, the cost of Brexit will be enormous. It is not just the hefty divorce payment, but all the staffing of the different organisations that we will need, such as more customs staff, more negotiators and more diplomats. There will be new institutes for which we will have to take responsibility, as the work is currently done at EU level. Being only in the single market means that we would have no seat at the top table of the EU when decisions are taken—decisions that would apply to us. This is very uncomfortable. I find it implausible that our interests would or could be trampled on by the EU and its democratic members. It would not be in anyone’s interest for this to happen. So, next week, I will be one of those calling for the UK to remain in the single market and so avoid a colossal act of self-harm.
Finally, being in the single market would help ease the dangerous border issue in Ireland. It would also remove at least one reason for another referendum in Scotland. It would protect supply chains, avoid tariffs and all the consequent delays that would take place in ports. It would be making the best of a bad job. It is the patriotic duty of this House to put the option back on the table and ask the Government to consider it. I do not think that is a constitutional outrage.
Viscount Ridley (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a beneficiary of the common agricultural policy.
The British people have decided to leave the European Union. The Commons has passed this Bill unamended. We, in this House, pride ourselves on scrutinising and revising Bills, but what is there to scrutinise? What is there to revise? This is a two-clause Bill. It is not our job, as my noble friend Lord Lang said yesterday, to adorn legislation. If we amended this Bill, we would be adding to it. This is just about all there is to say on the matter.
However, listening to all the doom and gloom in this debate, I am reminded of what Woody Allen once said,
“mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction”.
We must, he said, make the wise choice.
That, all too often, is how we have been talking about the future. Being a rational optimist, let me take just a few minutes of your Lordships’ time—less than six, I promise—to strike a note of hope. You might call it “project cheer”. I will start with why I, for one, am surer now than I was on 24 June that the British people have done the right thing. Voting to leave the EU last June has had precisely the opposite effect to what project fear told us would happen. Instead of an emergency Budget and an immediate and profound shock to the economy, a loss of confidence, a drying up of inward investment and a collapse in the stock market—all of which were promised if we voted leave—we have seen an acceleration of growth, now the fastest in the G7. There have been record highs on the stock market, votes of confidence from Apple, Google, Siemens, Nissan, Snapchat, McDonalds, IBM and many other companies. There has been a manufacturing revival, a narrowing of the trade deficit as exports pick up, thanks to a welcome devaluation of the pound, and the humiliation of economic forecasters at the IMF, the Bank of England, the Treasury, the European Commission and elsewhere.
I know that it is early days but to those who say that we face disaster when we actually leave, I say: project fear having failed last year, such warnings cut even less ice with the British public now. Besides, we are rarely ambitious and positive enough about our future. Leaving the exchange rate mechanism in 1992 proved a turning point, not a catastrophe. Staying out of the euro turned out to be a triumph, not a trauma. Moreover, it is becoming clearer by the day why the European Union is stagnating while the rest of the world grows and why so many EU countries have had a lost decade, while some African and Asian countries have doubled the size of their economies. The centralised, top-down dirigisme of Brussels is stifling innovation at the behest of big companies, big bureaucracies and big pressure groups. The Brussels system is hamstrung by an overzealous version of the precautionary principle that is too pessimistic about future possibilities, too complacent about present systems and too convinced that bureaucrats know better.
From the Reformation to Napoleon’s continental system and after, this country has throughout its history done better when it looked outward to the world more than inward to the continent. We are an island, not a peninsula. Perhaps in the 1960s, it was just about understandable that we should try to retreat inside a tariff fortress to get access to a single regulatory zone. But today in the age of container shipping, budget airlines and the internet we have a global language, we are a science superstar, we have immense soft power, we have championed free trade for generations, and we have lent the world our systems of law and finance, of medicine and technology, of ideas and discovery.
Finally, in Theresa May we have a Prime Minister who intends Brexit to be a global, outward advance not an isolationist, defensive retreat. Now I know there are those on the other side of the referendum divide who say that we globalists won the referendum only because we were supported by people with a darker agenda who wanted to pull up the drawbridge, go back to the 1950s and stop all immigration, not just control it. We are told: “What have you unleashed? Are you sure you know how to ride the tiger of populism?”. I say to those who take this view: look at what the Government say and what they do. It is run by the globalists, not the isolationists. If you want to strengthen their hand—our hand—and make sure the globalists get their way and not the protectionists, then come on over and join us. Bring as many of the 48% as you can and we will bring as many of the 52%. To echo what my noble friend Lord Cormack just said, together we can build an unassailable majority for an outward, confident and ambitious country, trading and thriving, inventing and discovering, leading and enlightening the world as never before. This is a great country with a great history, but we have hardly started.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, may be a rational optimist but I am afraid that I am a realistic sceptic. I should declare interests as outlined in the register as chairman, president or vice-president of a range of national and international environmental NGOs.
I want to focus on two linked issues. Leaving the European Union is probably the most significant change experienced by this country in living memory, so I believe firmly that Parliament must be able to provide proper scrutiny on a regular basis, and effectively monitor and actively contribute to the negotiation. I began to get a bit unhinged round about September last year and that lasted through almost to today. It felt as if there was a period over the autumn and winter when democracy had gone into a kind of limbo. The Government were saying absolutely nothing about any emerging thinking on the detail of Brexit. Indeed, they were making a virtue of their silence by saying that to do otherwise would risk revealing their negotiating hand.
The result was that the normal and hugely valuable checks and balances in our democratic process, with commentary on and the influencing of government proposals by NGOs, the media and expert bodies—and indeed by Parliament—simply stopped, as there was absolutely no substance to comment on. That, I believe, was hugely dangerous. The Government cannot hatch up solutions in isolation and in the dark to the myriad complex challenges that face us in the post-Brexit settlement. If we are to get halfway sensible solutions on the fine grain of the new arrangements, it needs everybody—civil society, academia, industry, the media, expert bodies, the public and indeed Parliament—to have transparency of the proposed arrangements and to be able to comment on them and influence them. That is part of how we will develop a consensus and a buy-in to the arrangements that are to follow. It is imperative that Parliament, among others, is able to scrutinise proposals regularly, to effectively monitor and to actively contribute to the negotiations. That provision is so important that I believe it needs to be in this Bill.
The second point I want to make is about what happens after this Bill. Again, it is an issue of transparency and an understanding of what the Government’s intentions are. Environmental standards have been a huge benefit coming from Europe. About a quarter of all EU legislation that applies to the UK is about the environment, and that legislation has done a really good job in raising environmental standards. But the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said that up to a third of that EU environmental law may not be able to be transposed through the great repeal Bill. We need urgently to understand how the Government will fill the gaps left by the transposition process with the new regulations, to ensure that at least as good standards as the EU legislation laid down are continued. The Government need to guarantee that they will not water down the rights, the duties and the remedies without full parliamentary debate and scrutiny. I very much share the concerns outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, in his contribution to this debate from his experience and expertise. The statutory instrument process will work only if it is a transparent maintenance of the standards, not a reduction of them. A first step would be to publish the list of environmental legislation and regulations that cannot be directly transposed. Will the Minister undertake to do that? If we cannot even have the transparency of a list of things that will need a statutory instrument or even primary legislation to bring them over successfully, we are not getting the degree of transparency that we should.
In the White Paper, the Prime Minister said that the EU acquis will be transferred into UK law. As well as directives and regulations, the acquis includes principles of European law that are set out in treaties, including, in the case of the environment, the precautionary principle, the principle of sustainable development, dealing with damage at source, the principle that the polluter pays, and various access-to-justice measures. These principles need to be transposed, too.
All this environmental standards stuff is not just nice to have. It is not just about birds and otters, or even about clean air and water for human health. British business—and, indeed, British agriculture—needs to know what environmental standards it should be committing to meet in planning and developing its goods and services for the next five to 10 years., and British business tells us—I was a regulator for the environment for many years—very firmly that it likes to have clear environmental regulation that does not flip-flop around and that allows them to plan for the medium and longer term with some degree of certainty. We need the Government to say, in much more detail than the general platitudes outlined in the Brexit White Paper, how they are going to give business that security for the 30% of environmental legislation that cannot be transposed.
I suppose where I am at the moment—with a very heavy heart and less joie de vivre than the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley—is that I voted to remain in the EU. I believe that the Government are playing a very unpredictable and hazardous game of poker, with their cards too close to their chest for the sake of democracy in this country. I will support this Bill only if it can be significantly amended to ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny and an assurance from the Government about greater openness in the future, so that we can fulfil our proper purpose of holding the Government to account in the interests of the people.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)
My Lords, I wish to declare an interest. Noble Lords may be rather surprised that on a Bill of this length one could declare an interest, but it is the following: my father, Con O’Neill, negotiated the UK’s entry into the Common Market. I do not, of course, know how he would have judged all the later developments of the European project, but I think that some aspects of his experience may be relevant to the negotiations that will have to be entered into if and when the UK invokes Article 50.
The Bill we are discussing is, of course, minimal—incredibly minimal—but it is also quite opaque and obscure. Clause 1 simply confers on the Prime Minister the power to notify under Article 50(2) the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU. That much seems clear enough; it is only a matter of notifying the EU of an intention. The rub comes later, after notification has been given and the UK seeks to act on this intention and negotiate withdrawal. This may be where my father’s experience might be in some ways relevant.
It is obvious that in negotiations one does not always get the deal one wants. Folk memory in the UK has it that the UK got a harder deal on entry than it might have done otherwise because of the action or attitude of the French and, in particular, of General de Gaulle. My father had a more complex view. While he thought that the negotiations had achieved less than might have been achieved if we had got serious about entering the EU earlier, in his view the difficulties were not solely or wholly to be attributed to de Gaulle or to France.
I do not think that we have reason to think that negotiations to exit the EU and form a new relationship with the 27 after Article 50 is invoked will inevitably go more smoothly or that they will deliver everything that is desired, or everything that would be in the interests of the UK, any more than in the past. We often hear enthusiasts for Brexit pointing out how many EU states and EU companies have strong interests in specific sorts of engagement and trading relationships with the UK. That is surely true. However, such interests are often dispersed and are not shared by all member states or by all companies. Indeed, some member states and some companies will have considerable interests in securing the exclusion of the UK or of UK companies with which they would have to compete. They may seek to obstruct that solution. In short, there is likely to be the most enormous co-ordination problem in these negotiations because so many interests will not be widely enough shared to make agreement simple or obvious. As the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, said, we are now dealing with 27 not six other parties.
The negotiations may not go smoothly despite the fact that many have an interest in reaching an agreement and it would irresponsible of us not to be clear about that reality from the start, so I wonder whether the Minister could take time in winding up to state what happens in the event that negotiations lead to no deal or that the only deal on offer is unacceptable or very harmful to the UK. What happens in the event of no deal and what happens in the event of a bad deal? I do not think that we know, but it is something that has to be understood when invoking Article 50.
Two different possibilities are mentioned. By one account, if there is no deal, nothing has changed and we are still a member of the EU. By another account, though, we will have left the EU with no agreement in place. That is one pair of views on the matter. If the latter, then on some views we would be able to trade on WTO terms, but on other views WTO terms are not an automatic default, since our membership of the WTO hinges on our relationship with the EU and a failed negotiation would not deliver WTO terms. Again, this needs to be clear not merely to Members of your Lordships’ House but to our fellow citizens. It is important, before the Bill passes, to understand the situation in the event of either no deal or an evidently bad one. That is why I hope that the Minister will set out the Government’s present understanding of the situations in the event of no deal or a conspicuously bad deal.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)
My Lords, here is the paradox. I happen to believe that it is the historic rapprochement between France and Germany in the 1950s that has led to the Bill before us today. The establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community and the Common Market itself could not have happened without the brilliant leadership of Jean Monnet and the founding fathers. There had been three devastating wars between France and Germany in less than a hundred years so political leadership was required to bring the two countries together, and it was brilliant leadership.
It was top-down leadership, though—it had to be. That is how the Common Market, and later the European Union, began its life, and that is how it continued. That is why there has been a growing democratic deficit. You have only to look at the reaction of European leaders when the peoples of Ireland and Denmark voted in their referendums the wrong way; they were made to vote again because the leaders thought they knew better than the people. Look at how the euro, the single currency, was steamrollered through, with its devastating effects on young people in southern Europe whose lives have been blighted by it. Once again, the European leaders claimed to know best.
Surely if Europe is about anything, it is about democracy, the coming together of democratic countries by popular consent. Top-down leadership may have been necessary in the 1950s but today people want their say, and last June the British people had it. The Bill before the House today has one purpose only: to give effect to the decision of the British people in that referendum to leave the EU. That is what was on the ballot paper—one question, remain or leave, nothing else. The ballot paper did not have on it any questions about EU nationals, the single market, the customs union or immigration. It asked one question only, so the Bill rightly confines itself to that one question. Anyone who has ever canvassed on the doorstep, as many noble Lords know, knows that people vote for this party or that party for all sorts of reasons, often unpredictable and indeed bizarre. We do not and cannot know why people voted the way they did. The only evidence we have before us is the ballot paper.
Surely one of the things in which we in this House take great pride is basing policy decisions on hard evidence, not speculation or hearsay. The ballot was a one-issue ballot so this is a one-issue Bill, and so it should remain.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, in my 40-odd years in political life, I have voted six times in referenda. I was on the winning side three times and I was on the losing side, including this one, three times. On all those occasions, I had to accept that, whatever my personal views, I would accept the views of the people in that referendum, and I willingly and happily—perhaps not happily but willingly—accept the views of the British people in this one. But that does not mean that there is no role for Parliament or for the House of Lords to consider the issues affected so dramatically by the single decision of coming out of the European Union.
The political landscape of the United Kingdom in the past 20 years has changed dramatically. Despite the decision of the Supreme Court not to allow the devolved Administrations their wish in this matter, politically Parliament and this House of Lords cannot ignore the issue of the devolved Administrations and what might happen in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I was never a Scottish Minister, but I was Secretary of State for Wales and for Northern Ireland, and I want to address a couple of issues with regard to those countries and how the Bill and subsequent legislation will affect them. In his winding-up speech, I hope that the Minister will be able to address these points. Next week, amendments will be tabled and debated with regard to the devolved Administrations.
Wales voted to leave. That does not mean that there are not issues in Wales that need to be addressed. Seventy per cent of Welsh exports are to member states of the European Union. The great Airbus factory in north Wales is heavily dependent on European business. Tens of thousands of Welsh farmers rely on European money and are wondering what will happen when it runs out. Hundreds, indeed thousands, of organisations and communities in Wales depend on European Union funding too, and they are concerned about what will happen. Our Welsh universities and colleges depend on European students, but also on a great deal of resource for research. I hope that the Government will take these matters seriously and discuss them with Carwyn Jones, the Welsh Government and the Welsh Assembly.
I turn to Northern Ireland. There, the situation is different. The people of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union. The people of the Republic of Ireland are strongly in favour of their membership of the European Union. Yet that country, Ireland, will be affected more than any other European country as a result of our decision to leave the European Union. Billions of pounds every year are spent in trade between Ireland and the United Kingdom. The European Union Committee issued a great report on the issue which I hope we will be able to debate in the months to come. What about Northern Ireland? There, the issue of the border looms. There has been no border, other than at the time of the Troubles, separating North and South in Ireland. The fact that the Troubles disappeared and that the border went with them was a huge issue in bringing about peace in Northern Ireland. I hope that the Government are, with the Irish Government, looking extremely carefully at how to deal with the situation in practical terms.
There is more. I chaired many of the talks that led to the Good Friday agreement 20 years ago. It was based on the common membership of the two Governments —the two countries, Ireland and the United Kingdom—of the European Union. That common membership permeated every strand—1, 2 and 3—of those negotiations. Strand 2 concerned relations between the North and the South. Most of the bodies that have been set up between Ireland and Northern Ireland are based on Europe. Therefore, if we leave the European Union, that essential element of the Good Friday agreement is jeopardised.
Money came too, of course—not just Objective 1 money, important though it was to Northern Ireland, but peace money too. The distribution of that peace money from Europe to Northern Ireland meant that nationalists and unionists, Catholics and Protestants, worked together in distributing those funds in Northern Ireland in itself helping to bring about peace. The people of Northern Ireland in a referendum in 1998 voted for the Good Friday agreement. At the same time the public of the Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly voted for that agreement. The people of Northern Ireland voted to stay in the European Union and yet the people of the United Kingdom decided to come out. If that is not a huge dilemma for the Government, I do not know what is.
I will finish by simply quoting the preamble to the Good Friday or Belfast agreement of 1998. It says that the two Governments wish,
“to develop still further the unique relationship between their peoples and the close co-operation between their countries as friendly neighbours and as partners in the European Union”.
The European Union has been vital to the Northern Ireland peace process. It must not be jeopardised by the Brexit process.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, given how many noble Lords have already spoken in this debate I aim to be as succinct as the Bill itself. However, some additional comments have crept into my notes in response to the quality of debate I have heard from noble Lords’ earlier contributions. For example, I noticed how frequently Members on all Benches disclosed their own reactions to the outcome of last June’s referendum. To bring some balance, I will mention my own reaction. Frankly, I was chuffed that the people of this country wrested back the ability, in the words of our Prime Minister already quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy,
“to hold their governments to account”.
Collectively we rejected the strong supranational institutions created by the European Union which, as she said,
“sit very uneasily in relation to our political history and way of life”.
My first point is simply that we have already, and unusually, been given the opportunity to vote on this issue. Unlike in parliamentary elections, members of this House were included in the plebiscite that decided to leave the European Union. We have already had our say; hence we should do nothing to resist the majority decision reached through that process which is implemented by the Bill before us.
Secondly, however vital our scrutinising role, the many amendments that have been tabled seem to me to be at odds with the scope and purpose of the Bill, which is simply to notify withdrawal, not to set any kind of terms. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra said with his customary forthrightness:
“There is nothing in this tiny little Bill to scrutinise … The amendments are nothing to do with scrutiny. They are an attempt to build in conditions and tie the Prime Minister’s hands”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 116.]
Moreover, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, was right to criticise government by referenda. It risks an even more short-term approach to politics than the one already criticised by so many. Cabinet Ministers testify that the progress of government business was grievously hindered almost from the outset of 2016 with a good six months still to go to the referendum.
In relation to the concern many share about amendments, my third point is that venturing into certain territory such as proposals to guarantee EU citizens’ rights to remain flouts the basic rules of trading, of which I have some relevant experience, albeit not always of the successful kind. Stating from the outset that these rights will be granted without obtaining the same rights for our own citizens in the EU breaches the elementary principle that you do not give anything away in advance that will weaken your position if you do not need to, and certainly not in order to communicate what kind of a country we aspire to be.
This is very costly virtue-signalling. Looking good does not belong in hard bargaining. We have already learned this to our cost. It would repeat the same undemocratic error that the Blair Government made when we, unlike most of the old EU 15 countries such as France and Germany, opened the door to citizens of the 10 new accession countries, including Poland and another seven eastern European states, without transitional arrangements. We did this because we wanted to say, “This is the kind of country we are”. Events have shown that the kind of country that the electorate want us to be is pragmatic about the level of population that our services can sustain, not idealistic about opening our arms to all. It is an inescapable fact that we are a small, overcrowded island; research published yesterday reveals that our roads are the most congested in western Europe. Delays cost £31 billion per year, a little under £1,000 per driver. In terms of quality of life, those who drive in peak periods are stationary in traffic jams for about four working days per year.
The public want us to get the best deal for the UK and for UK citizens abroad. To echo a former Chancellor and noble and learned friend in this House, Lord Howe, they do not want our negotiators to go in with broken cricket bats that they would be equipped with if we downgraded the importance of our own interests so unnecessarily from the outset. My noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral deployed a similar metaphor: we have to keep this simple—it is not just the patience of the elected Government that we will be testing if we do otherwise; it is also the good will of the electorate itself.
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, this Bill has come to us, as it should, with a White Paper. The White Paper has been dealt with quite frequently this evening and yesterday in the debate, and a number of things have been said about it. It has been described as “hubristic”. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, described it as Panglossian, I think, and I accept both of those epithets. But what struck me most about it was how very uninformative—almost insultingly uninformative—it was. Nothing precise was said at all about the benefits of Brexit and nothing whatever was said about the costs.
I looked in vain for even the words “cost” or “risk” in the whole document. If you put out something like that in the private sector as a circular to shareholders or a prospectus for a public offering, you would be faced with a criminal prosecution. Is it because the Government do not think that there are any costs to Brexit, or do they think that public attention should not be drawn to the costs and, if possible, people should be kept ignorant of them? Either of those explanations—and there are no logical third or fourth possible explanations—is deeply disquieting.
The fact is that the Government know perfectly well about some of the major costs of Brexit. Only a few days ago a Minister, Greg Clark, went over to Paris to offer Peugeot SA a large financial package wrapped up as grants for training or innovation or something of that kind—rather along the lines of the similar offer made to Nissan—to bribe PSA into agreeing to keep open their Vauxhall plants in Ellesmere Port and Luton if they go ahead with the takeover of Vauxhall in this country. There is no doubt at all that every other multinational automotive manufacturer in this country will want the same kind of treatment and will have to get it. So the British taxpayer is faced with having to pay out a lot of money for this purpose to reward the shareholders of these international companies, and have no idea what the cost is; the Government refuse to answer questions on that subject, on the spurious ground that it is commercially confidential. Of course, it is not: those payments will appear in the accounts of the UK subsidiaries in due time but, if the payments are not made until after Brexit, and the accounts concerned are not produced for a year or so afterwards, it will happen safely after the next election. That is just an example not merely of the costs but of how the Government are trying to conceal them from the British public, which is deeply disturbing.
The British public are at the very beginning of learning about some of the costs, particularly those of the Brexit devaluation and the inflation that we have had since. Real wages will fall this year, which will put most people in a very uncomfortable position—but it will be particularly bad for the poor and for those who are just getting by, the group that Mrs May says that she is so concerned to help.
A lot has been said this evening about many areas where there will be some real costs, and I will pass over important ones—such as universities, for example, which have been dealt with, and Euratom, which has been dealt with. I will just say in passing that it is an extraordinary idea, when there is such a shortage of nuclear scientists, to decide to duplicate a regulator of that kind. In January, there was an article in Nature, a very well-respected scientific journal, stating that this would almost certainly lead to increased costs and delays in the delivery of our own nuclear programme.
No one has said very much about the European Medicines Agency. What happens if we withdraw from that and set up our own regulatory registration of new pharmaceutical products agency? The answer, of course, is that you will duplicate the costs of registration to pharmaceutical companies. We have heard for years from those in the pharmaceutical industry that a major cost for them, and a major disincentive to put new products into the registration pipeline, is the cost of registration. Fewer drugs will be registered, unless the costs can be successfully passed on to the customer, in which case the NHS budget will be under further strain, as if it were not under enough strain already. Why is that? Why would any sane person do such a thing? I think it has something to do with trying to avoid any contact with the ECJ.
We had a series of very good debates on these subjects here in the House, the most recent one being about the justice and home affairs aspects of the whole question—the membership of Europol, the common arrest warrant, the Prüm exchange and information system, and so forth. It was an extraordinary debate because, very unusually in parliamentary circumstances, there was complete unanimity. Everybody who spoke on both sides of the House, and indeed the members of the sub-committee and its report, were absolutely agreed. They agreed on three things. The first was that these measures are vital for the protection of the British public against terrorism and other forms of serious international organised crime. Secondly, any other arrangement than the one we currently have with full membership of these institutions would be very problematic, difficult and time consuming to negotiate. Thirdly, no alternative arrangement would be anything like as good as the status quo. Everybody said that. So why are the Government doing such a thing? I realised during the course of the debate why it was, although the Government never admitted it. It is because they do not want any contact with the ECJ. This extraordinary decision against the national interest is driven entirely by ideology.
We have heard even worse problems in the last few days. We have heard that the Government propose to malversate money in the international aid budget to give it to east Europeans as a bribe to vote in favour of good terms for Brexit. We have had the most extraordinary suggestion by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister directly that if we do not get what we want in these negotiations we will start a kind of corporation tax war with the rest of the EU, cutting corporation tax and trying to undercut them. As I said in a letter some colleagues may have seen in the Times, we are actually the least well-placed Government in any EU country to undertake a war of that kind as we have the highest fiscal deficit already. So what is going to happen? Will we have a higher fiscal deficit? Will we take the money out of public services when public services are already underfunded—the National Health Service, social services and defence are dramatically underfunded—or will we increase other areas of taxation, put the burden on income tax or on consumption taxes? We have not, of course, been told.
The Government have gone far away—right over the hills and out of sight and beyond—from the referendum in coming up with these policies. They are taking the referendum as a mandate to undertake a series of steps that would have absolutely horrified the British electorate if there had been any mention of them last summer during the referendum campaign. Nobody dared to speak of such things at the time. We should not be in any way inhibited by the referendum in opposing them and we need to have the robust kinds of amendments that have been tabled in this House on this Bill to make sure that the Government do their job and to keep them under some kind of control, answerability and responsibility to the public and to Parliament.
Lord Stunell (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, has given me a wonderful introduction to what I was going to say in any case. Leaving the European Union is strongly against the long-term interests of the United Kingdom and it will hit hardest those citizens who rely most heavily on public services for the well-being of themselves and their families, and for whom economic prosperity is crucial for their job, the roof over their head and the money to pay for the services on which they depend. Several noble Lords have urged us to surrender the best interests of those hard-pressed citizens without a fight, misusing words like “democracy” and “accountability” to do so. But it is not anti-democratic to speak up for the views and interests of the 16 million people on the remain side of the debate, and it would be anti-democratic to leave their voices unheard in Parliament.
However, I also note a paradox. The same noble Lords who complain so bitterly about those of us in the House who have the temerity to speak up and say that Brexit will leave Britain weaker and poorer, diminished abroad and shrivelled at home, are also, almost without exception, against this House actually being representative of public opinion. While my noble friends have consistently advocated and fought for the democratic accountability of this place, our critics in this debate have argued over the years that a representative and accountable second House is the last thing they want to see.
The paradox is that those calling for our surrender to populism today do not believe that this House should represent the public, and have often set out their view that the Lords’ role is best understood as moderating the headstrong impulses of the mob with a strong dose of rationality and expertise. Indeed, just a few moments ago the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, said that we are famous for our evidence-based approach to issues that come before us. That is exactly what I and my colleagues are doing and will continue to do throughout this whole damaging and self-harming process.
That is why I will use the remainder of my limited time to focus on one very important but so far ignored sector: the construction industry. I remind the House that the Conservative Government are committed to delivering, among other things: 1 million new homes by 2020; large-scale school expansion and prison-rebuilding programmes; the three Hs of Hinkley Point, Heathrow 3 and High Speed 2; the northern powerhouse and a massive rail electrification programme; and, of course, a boom in exports across the world, needing new factories, workshops, laboratories, roads and ports.
Last November, the Exiting the EU Select Committee in the other place took evidence from the Brexit Infrastructure Group, led by Sir John Armitt, the past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers that to deliver all those things in a timely fashion, the construction industry needs to expand its capacity by 35% over the next decade. To deliver the Government’s investment programme, the construction industry has to grow by 35%. But to deliver the Government’s hard Brexit policy, cutting all access to EU 27 workers, would cause it to shrink by 9%.
Construction is bigger than aerospace and vehicle manufacture combined, contributing around 8% of UK GDP, but of course enabling far more. According to the ONS it employed 200,000 EU 27 workers in 2016—9% of its labour force. In London, EU 27 workers form 54% of the construction workforce, at every level, from top engineers and designers to site labourers. Just to maintain current construction output, EU 27 labour is essential, and the first step must therefore be to safeguard the position of those already here if output is not to decline steeply. To deliver the Government’s infrastructure and housing targets will require more migrant workers, not fewer.
However, that is not all. UK construction projects benefit from the tariff-free flow of goods from the EU 27, with one-third of all materials and construction products, including 90% of timber, imported from them. Therefore the mutual recognition of standards and qualifications, and a zero tariff, should be taken as givens in maintaining frictionless trade with the EU, and as essential if the construction sector is to grow in capacity and deliver the Government’s investment programme. A hard Brexit will certainly not be frictionless for the construction industry.
The Government’s response to this so far has been to downgrade construction in their negotiating strategy. In a list of 50 industrial sectors—where the grades are essential, important and low priority—construction appears as low priority, while the Government’s industrial strategy White Paper is silent on how to recruit and skill up the UK workforce needed to replace the 70,000 construction workers who retire each year, let alone how to plug the 200,000 gap when the EU 27 workers leave—and the 35% increase in capacity to deliver the Government’s infrastructure and housing objectives comes on top of that. A hard Brexit will cripple the construction industry and will leave the UK diminished and hamstrung. This Bill should go no further.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, I shall focus my remarks on a single piece of EU legislation. The EU General Data Protection Regulation, expected to become UK law in May 2018, imposes new responsibilities on controllers and processors of personal data. It affects every single one of us as it provides an essential arrangement with vast numbers of organisations and businesses, most notably the global companies of Silicon Valley, that is the very basis upon which our personal data are gathered, stored and sold. It is an arrangement that no individual nation state has achieved.
At the heart of the GDPR is the demand that the terms and conditions that sweep up all rights, all privacy and all ownership of our every move and transaction be transparent, secure and fair. It is immensely powerful information, fundamental to every transaction we make, which can be used to work out what brand of sneakers we like but can also assess our suitability for employment, our propensity to addiction, our sexuality, our mental and physical health and our political leanings. It can affect our finances, careers, reputations, arrangements for our health, insurance and so on.
The GDPR introduces the requirement of informed consent, provides more stringent definitions and standards of security, sharing and transporting of personal data and preserves some of the rights we currently give away when we habitually tick the “agree” box without reading. It seems to me a significant disaster not to be alongside the bull-headed bureaucrats at the EU as they put checks and balances on the world’s most powerful companies, who are, after all, based nowhere.
While the GDPR is only one of an unfathomable number of agreements that will need attending to, it provides a metaphor. By being asked to trigger Article 50 we are being asked to sign up blindly to terms and conditions we have no idea about. This is not informed consent. Just as the GDPR insists that it is undemocratic and immoral to be denied the right to understand what we are giving away, triggering Article 50 without provision to opt out of the actual terms of Brexit, which will determine every aspect of our future, seems equally immoral and undemocratic. Informed consent is a concept that we use in many arrangements and all areas of life, and it is now considered that consent which is not informed consent is no consent at all—it is coercion. Just as the global corporations of Silicon Valley need to be checked, so too do the Government.
The result of the plebiscite is clear on one binary question only: there is no detail on the face of the Bill. The priorities stipulated in the White Paper manage simultaneously to be too broad and to fail to cover whole sectors. There is nothing about cost and risk, and it includes a fantasy assessment of how the UK fits into the global landscape. Most importantly, the White Paper offers no impediment to accepting a lousy deal. As the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, said earlier in her excellent speech, this document would fail the “treating customers fairly” test. You could not sell someone a washing machine, let alone a pension on this basis.
It is not patronising to say that the electorate did not know what they were voting for: none of us do. It is not yet decided. In this House, we have one power only: to ask the Government to think again. So I ask the Government to think again and make certain that they have the informed consent of UK citizens on the exact terms and conditions of exit from the EU, even if that means a second referendum is a necessity.
Baroness Morris of Bolton (Con)
My Lords, although it is now many hours since my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal opened this Second Reading debate with her excellent speech, it has been a remarkable two days and a privilege to take part. Both my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, whose speech I also enjoyed, paid fulsome tribute to the work undertaken by our EU Committee and sub-committees. I had the pleasure and honour of chairing, for a short time until ill health forced me to stand down, the sub-committee on foreign affairs, aid and defence and I, too, praise the exceptional hard work of these committees, their officers and special advisers, whose role will be crucial in the two years ahead.
Over the years I have been critical of and vocal about plans to join the euro and in the early 1990s caused grief to senior members of my party, many of whom are now my very good noble friends and sitting on the privy counsellors’ Bench, by being somewhat less than enthusiastic about our membership of the ERM. But I voted in June 1975 to stay in the Common Market and on 23 June 2016 I voted to remain in the European Union. While in 1975 I voted for economic reasons, that was not the case last June. Like my noble friend Lord Maude of Horsham, I thought both sides of the referendum argument made valid points about the effects on our economy of a vote to leave, and I certainly did not feel qualified to know where the greater truth resided. I just suspected what I suppose was glaringly obvious: that there were advantages and disadvantages to both and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, said—in what was a brave speech from the noble Baroness’s Benches—there is an inherent risk in any decision about the future.
As one of the Prime Minister’s trade envoys I have reason to be confident that British companies will adapt to life outside the EU and thrive, although I do not pretend that it will always be easy. What ultimately caused me and I suspect a lot of other people to vote remain was the uncertain state of the world. For all its shortcomings and the visible cracks in its structure, I still felt that in a number of complex areas the EU offered relative stability and I was concerned about rocking that stability. So for me and countless others, it is the kind of relationship we build with our European friends and neighbours that will be the test of a good Brexit. Over the past eight months I have been greatly reassured and encouraged by the language and tone of the Prime Minister and her Ministers in seeking to form that new partnership with Europe.
Like many noble Lords I, too, hope that one of the first issues to be resolved once Article 50 has been triggered will be the status of EU nationals working and living in the UK and UK citizens living and working throughout Europe. It is a concern that has been raised across your Lordships’ House and is of equal importance to those who voted leave as to those who voted remain, although no one expressed it quite so well as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, who blushed rather charmingly and modestly when she sat down to applause from the Gallery. All this and more will be the topic of intense debate and difficult negotiation for months to come. That is where I hope that the knowledge and experience of noble Lords who have expressed their deep concerns in this debate will be brought to bear, because the concerns of noble Lords and the ambitions of the Government cannot be properly debated and settled until Article 50 has been triggered. The Bill simply starts that process.
Although I very much heed the sage words of my noble friend Lord Lothian that we must think carefully how we deploy our feelings as we move forward, this House has a right to debate fully the Bill before it and it is an important part of our scrutiny to seek clarification, raise issues and put comments on the record. However, good scrutiny of a Bill does not necessarily mean amendment of it and I hope we send this one, unamended, back to the Commons, from where it came to us, with a thumping majority in order to allow Ministers the greatest possible flexibility to negotiate on our behalf.
I was struck by the powerful speech of my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, who pointed out that this is not just about us. There are 27 other countries affected by the referendum result last June and they too want and deserve clarity and certainty as soon as possible. At the risk of being labelled an incurable optimist—or maybe I am just one of my noble friend Lord Ridley’s rational optimists—the negotiations might not be as bad as some fear. There seems to be a marked difference in attitude between officials of the European institutions and the politicians of the 27 countries with which we have to reach an agreement. The former feel they have to treat us harshly in order to stop anyone else getting any ideas, but there is more realism in the corridors of power of the individual countries. As reported in the papers a couple of days ago, the German Foreign Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said at a security conference in Munich that:
“We should resist the temptation to treat Britain overly harshly, not out of pity, but in our own interest”.
He went on to say that:
“We need Britain, for example, as a partner in security policy, and I am also convinced that Britain needs us”.
Last week, at a lunch in Abu Dhabi, I had the pleasure of a brief chat with the Finance Minister of Luxembourg. He is on record as saying that:
“I think everybody should remain calm and make sure that we can do this in an orderly way … the British population has given its verdict. It is now up to the British Government to trigger Article 50”.
I hope we are in a position to do that soon, so that we can start the important task of building the post-Brexit Britain, so eloquently wished for by my noble friend Lady Finn, as a Britain which is open, free-market and liberal.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan (Lab)
My Lords, as a remain voter my first reaction was to consider opposing the Bill and voting against it if the opportunity arose. However, given the view expressed in the elected House, that is not an option. In some respects, I am here to abstain in person at this stage. What has concerned me since the vote is not so much why we did not get these issues brought out and addressed in the debate but more the exposure of unintended consequences. We seem to be encountering difficulties that nobody thought about before.
For example, the European sub-committee for policing and security, on which I serve, discovered that the European arrest warrant would be one of the casualties of our departure. This is an eminently sensible means of avoiding lengthy extradition processes and it brings prisoners speedily to justice. If we go further, UK involvement in police collaboration through Europol will have to end. Neither of these involves great financial cost, so the health service is not going to benefit. They are largely irrelevant to the free movement of people, apart from accelerating the process of moving accused from one country to another. The fact is that the withdrawal of the UK’s participation in both schemes will make our country less safe and our criminal class more comfortable, to the contradiction of all the hopes about defending our shores and having the ability to pass our own laws.
This was evidenced when the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, in opening the debate, spoke about another of these “Oops” issues, as it were, that we did not really anticipate were going to happen. She devoted a paragraph of her speech—in the context of the length of the speech, this was quite a generous contribution to the debate—to the Euratom treaty. We joined Euratom at the same time as we joined the Common Market. The two are now inextricably linked as they have been integrated into EU institutions, so we find that Article 50 requires us to leave not only the EU but Euratom.
The noble Baroness the Lord Privy Seal was less than fulsome in the assurances that she sought to give us. She said:
“Our nuclear industry remains of strategic importance and leaving Euratom does not affect our aim of maintaining effective arrangements for civil nuclear co-operation, safeguards, safety and trade with Europe and our international partners”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 13.]
One of the consequences of leaving Euratom will be the termination of British participation in the fusion projects at Culham. This is a scientific project of enormous significance, one in which Britain has historically played a significant role. It will to an extent be overtaken by the establishment of the ITER programme in France in the next two or three years, but our contribution and the significance of British involvement in this will be of massive importance. I will not trouble the House by reading out the White Paper in its entirety. Suffice it only to give the title of paragraph 10:
“Ensuring the United Kingdom remains the best place for science and innovation”.
The pious wishful thinking is there for all to see.
The point is that as far as the nuclear industry is concerned, there is far more involved than simple power generation. We enjoy a significant presence in a number of these areas. Once we are outwith Euratom, though, our ability to co-operate will be very limited. As I say, this is only one example of how our negotiators are likely to be encumbered by these—as I call them—“Oops” issues, the issues that we forgot all about. If we need any argument for the accessibility of Ministers coming to this House and providing us with clear indications of what the emergent problems are, the examples I have shown are crystal clear.
I am not arguing about arrest warrants or Euratom. I am making the point that this is an issue of process. That is what the legislation is about: improving the process whereby we can make the Government of the country—our negotiators—more accountable, clearer and more disciplined in the manner in which they go about it. Rather depressingly in this debate, from the introductory speech onwards—I have quoted the example of Euratom—we have had a thoroughly misleading approach to this whole issue. If that is the way the House is going to go and that we are going to be treated then we need to amend the legislation, and as quickly as possible.
Lord Dobbs (Con)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure—humbling, in fact—to follow that fine speech by the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan, and indeed so many others during these two days. It has been a great debate for the reputation of this House, and we need it.
It is a funny old world. When I stood up in this House three years ago and introduced the Private Member’s Bill, the European Union (Referendum) Bill, I expected it—dare I be honest?—to be a “snowball in hell” moment, and I was not disappointed. I remember that, during a crucial Division, one noble Lord climbed on to the leather Bench, pointed to the Not-Content Lobby and cried, “This way to kill the Bill!”. I thought that was a rather strange thing for a Liberal Democrat to do, given the party’s previous, passionate commitment to a referendum, but consistency, I suppose, is no more than the sign of a closed mind.
Yet there has been consistency of a sort. Let us put our EU referendum in the context of others: for instance, the earlier referendums on the proposed EU constitution. Noble Lords will remember that voters in France, then voters in Holland, rejected that proposal with huge majorities. But the EU did not simply throw in the towel. It “rose up”. It ignored those referendums. It just carried on and brought the constitution back, with every clause, every comma, and called it the Lisbon treaty. That treaty, too, was rejected by the voters in Ireland. So they were cajoled and threatened and forced to hold another referendum until eventually they gave the right answer.
There has, indeed, been a consistency in approach, and that has been repeatedly, over many years, to ignore the people in the name of some higher ideal—like preventing German domination in Europe. Well, that worked well. Now our own little referendum has got out of hand and delivered the wrong result. The response is precisely the same: change it, delay it, get rid of it, hold another one in the hope that they will change their minds. In the other place, 293 amendments were proposed, and already the amendments are piling up here like a snowdrift. Some, of course, are entirely genuine, but for too many of them, I am reminded of the words of that noble, if nameless, Lord: “This way to kill the Bill!”.
This is a time of considerable passions. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, was passionate yesterday, and last week, when he said that we have to amend this Bill because—I hope I am quoting him accurately—“We don’t trust Theresa May”. Well, that is a point of view. But it is possible that the noble Lord has forgotten that, according to every opinion poll, Theresa May is trusted by many, many more people than either Mr Corbyn or Mr—I almost said Mr Farage, but he is the well-known one—Mr Farron. But let us be fair. Personally, I find it uplifting that those who wanted to abolish this unelected House in the name of the people now want to use this unelected House to defy the people. That takes courage.
This House has a right—more than a right, a duty —to examine every Bill. But alongside that right stands our overwhelming responsibility, which is to the people. I am not suggesting we should wash our hands of the details of withdrawal, but the appropriate vehicle for that serious and maybe searing examination, described so eloquently this afternoon by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, will be the great repeal Bill and other associated Bills. I might even join in. Brexit may be a simple word, but it ain’t going to be a simple process.
I hope that the next two years of debate and discussion will mark a renaissance in the reputation of this House. We are parliamentary worms, but we may yet become glow-worms. But if we amend this Bill—today’s Bill—we know that it will come straight back. We will have achieved nothing but delay, and we will, I fear, have undermined our credibility at a time when almost everything we do is being mocked in the media.
We are a constitutional anomaly. We have no rights other than those that are tolerated by the people. It is not our role to second-guess the people, to wish that they were wiser, to treat them as children or to refer to them as a mob, as I thought I heard suggested earlier. Least of all, it is not our role to insist that we know better than they do. That is just the sort of arrogance that dragged us into the tragedy of Iraq. We have been given that awesome but utterly unambiguous instruction to start the process of withdrawal in the name of the people, by the will of the people. It is our responsibility to respect their instruction to allow that process to begin, and to do so without delay.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, even while I disagree with so much of what he said. It is also a great privilege to have the last Back-Bench speech of the evening in such an historic debate, one in which the issues have been so well argued and so passionately felt. One of the reasons why I am very pleased to have the opportunity, even at this hour, is to keep faith with so many people who feel, as I do, that the country has embarked on a major gamble with the future of this country, a gamble that could isolate and impoverish the next generation, which has no voice now other than the one that they will find in this House.
Most do not expect us to try to stop this Bill—they are wiser than that—but they do expect us to try to mitigate the damage and to be clear about the huge risks that we are now wilfully taking. They expect us to inject some principle into the negotiating process. I hope that we can do that, because so many people already doubt the parliamentary and political process so far, which has led to an even further loss of trust. I understand why this has happened, but I am not reconciled to it. There has already been, to my mind, a massive failure of political leadership at every stage of this process. The referendum was conducted in the half-light. It was conducted on the basis of half-truths. In so many ways, it was a vote against the past, a past which had failed many people. It was not a confident vote for the future.
The Prime Minister’s objectives are largely declaratory but we do know that, out of weakness rather than conviction, we will be leaving the single market and the customs union to cut back immigration. We are, in short, prioritising a political goal which may in fact be unattainable, but which is likely to inflict further damage on our country and its public services. It is very hard to imagine a more perverse outcome. Likewise, the White Paper has no answers as to how the Government will manage the hugely complex task of reconstructing our new relationships, whether that is a new customs union, the future of Euratom or the future of Erasmus. There is nothing about the impacts, the costs, the consequences or the choices that already have been made. There is little clarity, and there is less certainty.
Of course we respect the decision of the referendum, but I say to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, that the real challenge is to take the next step and trust the people with what, on best evidence, we know to be the likely consequences of the referendum as they are now emerging and how we can remove avoidable risks. Many of the amendments proposed to this Bill are about facing that reality. In fact, they will enable Parliament and the people to take back control throughout the process ahead. To those who try—and will no doubt go on trying—to bully this House out of its duty of scrutiny, I simply say that in this respect, your Lordships’ House has never been more solidly or more visibly on the side of the people of this country and their right to know what all this is going to cost us in every sense.
Of course the European Union needed reform. We should have been in there leading that process, being part of it, advocating for it. I have always believed that belonging to the European Union expressed the best of our values, whether that was peaceful co-operation or the working principle of equality—which means that richer communities support poorer communities—or the movement of labour and skills, which benefits us all. The 3 million Europeans who have made this country their future in good faith in recent years have brought huge energy and skill, as have our citizens who live in other parts of Europe. The idea that they should be trafficked as part of some bigger deal is repugnant to people on both sides of the Brexit debate. If the Prime Minister is serious about uniting the country, this is where she will start: with a principled guarantee of their legal rights. I shall be supporting amendments to secure that.
I will also support amendments that mitigate the economic and social risks to this country, particularly to the marginalised communities. This will include amendments to give the devolved countries real purchase on the negotiations and real accountability from government, which will affect not only the disproportionate losses they will suffer from Brexit but all the risks that it now poses to a United Kingdom.
One of the most abject sights in recent months has been to watch the Government twist and turn in the courts to exclude Parliament from the decision. I shall support every amendment that seeks to give Parliament its right and proper constitutional role to check and challenge what the Prime Minister comes back with, particularly if that is a no-deal. I think our European friends and neighbours will understand clearly why we are intent on doing that. One of the reasons for asserting the role of Parliament at this stage is that there are no precedents to lean on in this process. There is still an active legal debate over many parts of the process. Nothing is settled and, frankly, nothing is ruled out, including revocation. Parliament must be fully engaged and we must also be vigilant against the excessive use of executive power and secondary legislation in the course of the so-called great repeal Bill.
Last June is long gone and with it, the illusions that were peddled of a quick fix and lashings of new money. The European Union Committee’s report on the options for trade made it clear, for example, that having swept out of the single market, none of the off-the-shelf alternative models will work for us and none will be modified to suit us. Whatever options are open, they will certainly take more than two years. They will come with costs; some will even require some additional movement of people. To manage this safely, we will need maximum flexibility and a transitional arrangement, negotiated as soon as possible.
The world is indeed turned upside down and Mr Trump is now a part of that. We have a genius in this country when we face crises for muddling through. I do not think we can muddle through this time. I hope we can bring to bear, not just through debate on the Bill but throughout the whole process, the wisdom and experience we have already heard in the past two days. In doing so, I hope we will help to achieve a safer and smarter Brexit. This will require more humility than has been shown to date by the Government, and it will need a greater commitment on behalf of the people to both truth and transparency.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I draw the attention of the House, and perhaps the Daily Mail, to the fact that my receipt of an MEP pension is in the register.
We have had a long and intense debate, with many excellent speeches. I concur with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in thanking Gina Miller for the fact that we have had this debate. It has been a marathon rather than a sprint, just as the Brexit process itself will prove to be over possibly a decade of blood, sweat and tears. Those who swallowed the myth perpetrated by some Brexiteers that it would mean “With one bound, we are free” are going to be cruelly disappointed. This is just one of the many disillusionments to come. Another is the unravelling of the notion that leaving the EU will solve all our problems. There are in fact many sources of valid dissatisfaction, grievance and frustration among the people of the United Kingdom today. To most of these problems, Brexit will bring no relief but there is no spare capacity in this Government to focus on anything but Brexit. As Tony Blair so rightly said in his recent speech:
“This is a Government for Brexit, of Brexit and dominated by Brexit. It is a mono-purpose political entity”.
The Government’s Statement introducing the White Paper three weeks ago made an extraordinary assertion about the Bill. They said that the Bill is not,
“about whether or not we leave the EU, or even how we do so ”.—[Official Report, 2/2/17; col. 1310.]
From these Benches, and as we have heard from others, there is profound disagreement with that assertion so Liberal Democrats are not prepared to throw in the towel. We hope that majorities will form for key amendments and I welcome indications from across the House of such support.
Against the citation by the noble Lord, Lord Hague, and others that 37% of the electorate voted to leave, I set the riposte of my noble friend Lady Walmsley: that means that 63% did not vote leave. Thus, it is perfectly legitimate to try to persuade the other place to think again. Indeed, waving this Bill through with no change, while harbouring serious reservations, would be an abrogation of our responsibility—as the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and my noble friend Lord Taverne emphasised. We are being asked to rubber-stamp Brexit at any cost, the most extreme of all the options open to the Government.
Extreme Brexit shamefully forgets the interests of the young, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, noted. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said, we will be asked, “What did you do to stop this?”. To the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, who espoused the “doctrine of unripe time”, I say: if not now, when? When do we try to stop the fall off the cliff edge? As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, no deal is the worst deal of all. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, coined the best phrase of the debate for the Brexiteers—“sore winners”—and I believe that the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Lawson and Lord Forsyth, bore out that description. Responses came from my noble friend Lady Featherstone, who said, more or less, “Do not bully or threaten me to give up my belief in a close relationship with Europe”, and from the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, who said that speaking out is our right, our responsibility and our duty.
There have been objections to the Liberal Democrat call for people to have the final say on any Brexit deal. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, said it was not very British to have a further referendum, but Mr David Davis, who is surely very British, thought it was a good idea. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, you cannot start with democracy and end with a stitch-up, and I am grateful that other noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Butler and Lord Triesman, agreed with that proposition. As my noble friends Lady Randerson and Lady Kramer stressed, this would be a first referendum on the result of negotiations, the first chance for the British people to pass judgment on the Brexit deal that the Government come back with. It is not a second referendum in the sense of a rerun of last June. Some noble Lords need to grasp this essential difference, which was well understood by the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston.
My noble friend Lord Newby, in his long-ago introduction, referred to Gladstone’s call to trust the people. This was in fact requoted by Randolph Churchill, but Gladstone originated it, and it is worth recalling the whole quote:
“Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear”.
It is that fear which is so driving the Brexiteer intolerance of disagreement or dissent from the true faith—fear that people might realise that the extreme Brexit emperor has no clothes, and that will mean exposure to cruel, cold winds.
Last June’s vote cannot possibly be interpreted as a decision to leave the single market, as the noble Lord, Lord Darling, emphasised. Not only was Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, the original sponsor of the European single market, but the Conservatives obtained an overall majority at the 2015 general election—the last one we had—with an explicit manifesto commitment to safeguard the UK’s position in it, as my noble friend Lord Shipley reminded us. The noble Lord, Lord Leigh of Hurley, urged respect for that manifesto. Perhaps he might ask his noble friends on the Front Bench and in the Government to respect that manifesto commitment to the single market.
The price we will pay for the alleged privilege of global Britain freedom is not only a restriction of opportunities for all our citizens but also the far greater weight and expense of red tape for exporting to the EU from outside the single market and the customs union. My noble friend Lady Walmsley said that the single market gives us the freedom to sell and the confidence to buy.
The refusal to seek continued membership of the single market is due to two self-imposed red lines—against enforcement of EU law through ECJ jurisdiction and against free movement of people. Yet it is blindly obvious—even the White Paper says so—that, in any transitional period or longer term under a free trade agreement or security arrangements, we will be obliged to follow EU standards and the ruling of the court either directly or indirectly. My noble friend Lord Lester pointed this out, as did the noble Lord, Lord Monks, and my noble friend Lord Marks labelled the Government’s position as absurd. The Government are clearly hoping to get away with a smoke and mirrors concealment of this link to the ECJ.
The Government turn their back on free movement without either acknowledging that it is a two-way street, enabling many British people to explore the delights of study, residence or retirement in another EU country, or options for flexibility and change. This was urged by the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Hain.
Some speakers seemed to think we could have the single market without the single market. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, expects free trade as at present. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, wants mutual market access for insurance. My noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Mandelson, rightly refuted any such notion as delusional.
The noble Lords, Lord O’Donnell, Lord O’Neill and Lord Giddens, explained how global trade agreements could not offset the disadvantages of exit from the single market. Other noble Lords explained how Brexit would harm co-operation in different sectors, such as financial services. My noble friend Lord Paddick talked about security and my noble friend Lady Jolly mentioned defence.
The potential effect of very hard Brexit on these islands is alarming. Much concern was rightly expressed about the effects within the island of Ireland of pulling out of the single market and the customs union. The White Paper gives no clue about how it will actually avoid a hard border, as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, pointed out. My noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed rightly feared for the social unity of this kingdom and for the future of the union. My noble friends Lady Humphreys and Lord Thomas deplored the effect on Wales and Welsh economic development of pulling out of the single market.
The Government seem blind to the economic, social and personal distress being caused by their refusal to guarantee the continued residence and other rights to EEA nationals already legally here. Liberal Democrats are totally committed to securing the continued rights of Britons across the EEA, as well as those of EEA citizens here. We believe—I cite the words of the noble Lord, Lord Howard, in evidence to the EU Select Committee—that it is “inconceivable” that a first move will not be reciprocated. So I hope there will be wide support across this House for an amendment.
In conclusion, it is Parliament’s job to seek to put the “how” into Brexit in a way that at least puts a reasonable proposition to the people and allows them to make a sensible choice between that and continued EU membership. Let us have a return to the pragmatic, common sense on which Tories traditionally pride themselves, even if this is not as exhilarating as the revolutionary ideology gripping this very un-Tory Government now. Britain is set to pay a high price, unless the Conservative Government can be deflected from their inflexible pursuit of the hardest of hard Brexits.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a memorable, indeed historic debate, as befits your Lordships’ House. At 187 contributions, I think it has beaten the record of 182 who spoke in the debate on the House of Lords Bill in 1999. We have had Peers from across the House putting their legal, constitutional, political, public service, scientific and environmental expertise at the disposal of the Government over one of the most important decisions any country can take. We heard the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, with his description of our debate as “an elegy” for 45 years which might become seen as an “aberration”. The noble Lord, Lord Hill, reminded us to heed what the other 27 countries are thinking. The noble Lord, Lord Blair, warned of threats to security and law enforcement. The contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, was an education as well as a privilege to hear—as it always is, I am corrected. Some 150 others recounted a little bit of history, here in the Chamber in the last couple of days. Of course, every speaker kept to the “Just a Minute” rule—no deviation, hesitation or repetition. As the person volunteered by my noble friend to reply, I may not be quite so disciplined.
One issue that has been well covered should be unrelated to the Bill—that EU residents should not be used as bargaining chips, for moral reasons but also for the age-old principle that no one should be affected retrospectively by legislation or, indeed, a referendum. A mere 5% of our people think that EU citizens should be asked to leave. It is no surprise, therefore, that 39—at my count—of your Lordships pressed this point in the debate. The Government’s response tonight will indicate how they will respond over the coming 18 months to future debates and the work of our EU committees. If they do not heed such a clear call, what hope is there for them to be in listening mode as we move forward? I hope, therefore, both for the interests of EU nationals here and for what it says about the Government’s genuine willingness to engage, that the Minister will give more comfort than we have heard so far. He has seen our amendment on EEA nationals, for which we anticipate majority support. How much better would it be to resolve this before we get into Article 50 territory, because this really has nothing to do with our negotiations with the other 27 and everything to do with our regard for people already on our shores, including many dedicated front-line public servants in care services and the NHS?
The Leader of the House told Radio 5 Live that the Bill should not be amended and we should not vote on our amendments, as was suggested also by the noble Lords, Lord Blencathra, Lord Lawson and Lord Forsyth —now what do they have in common?—and a few others. What kind of a legislative Chamber would that make us? We have a duty to perform our constitutional role. Our amendments are not to tie the hands of negotiators but to ensure that the legislation dealing with the outcome of the referendum and the negotiations is correct. We would certainly be happy not to vote on our amendment on EEA nationals if the Government give that pledge. But without it, I see no reason to hold back.
I turn to a key demand, which has been rehearsed by a number of your Lordships, and given a learned and erudite introduction by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, which is the necessity for legislation to implement our actual departure from the EU. At present, the Bill authorises the Prime Minister only to open negotiations. It says nothing about their outcome or the role of Parliament in giving legislative authority to the final deal. We welcomed the announcement in the Commons that there would be a vote in both Houses before any vote in the European Parliament. But this should be clear in the Bill so that come what may—a full withdrawal treaty, just the withdrawal agreement with a framework for future relations, or even a failure to agree, or an extension to the negotiating period—wherever we are when the talks are over, the outcome should be voted on to give the Government the legislative mandate to conclude the deal. We will seek to amend the Bill to provide that certainty—for the public, for Parliament and for the Government themselves.
The Minister can count, I think. If not, he has a five year-old who can teach him. He will have heard the numbers tonight and will have totted them up. So perhaps a government amendment in line with the advice of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and others would be the best course of action. Our role in this House, however, will not be simply at the end, so we will seek access to the same impact assessments that the Government see and a continual quarterly dialogue with negotiating Ministers, both so that they can benefit from the expertise of this House, but also so that there are no surprises when the final deal is done.
No matter how much I regret the choice of the British people, I respect and accept it. Indeed, I have learned throughout my rather long career that the true worth of any leader, chair or chief executive is not simply to take the right decision but to make the decision taken right. That is why I believe the priority is to ensure that the terms of our exit create a Britain that instils a sense of hope, especially for the young, and protect living standards, consumer and workers’ rights, the environment and our children’s futures, all of which also depend on the peace and security of our country, which in turn rely on our relations with our neighbours and close allies.
I share the view of my noble friend Lady Royall that the EU has helped to stabilise democracy. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Darling said, most other countries joined the EU to escape their history, as with Estonia, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and Poland, mentioned by my noble friend Lord Monks. As put so elegantly by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, the EU changed the pattern of history, replacing centuries of war by peace. This should remain uppermost in the Prime Minister’s mind as she negotiates our exit.
Getting a good deal will be a tall order for this Government, whose leader never favoured Brexit. As my noble friend Lord McKenzie and the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, she inherited no contingency plans for our method or pace of leaving, nor for our future relationship with the remaining 27 or with other trading nations. She leads a divided country, with Scotland and many of our great cities and university towns having voted one way and Wales and much of England another. As she begins the talks with the 27, she has a duty to put all our people’s interests centre stage: the regions and areas which have fared poorly from globalisation; consumers and shoppers; the retired and the young; manufacturing, the service sector, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, tourism and travel; EU nationals, and our own people living elsewhere in the EU. She also has a duty to seek to reunite our divided country—to come together, I think the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said—and to heal the fractures caused by the referendum. If the Government think they can take the UK out of the EU any old way, they are wrong. We will be watching them, which I think the Prime Minister will appreciate, having indeed come to watch us.
This Bill only starts the negotiations with our partners. Our amendments will be to safeguard the Northern Ireland peace process, to ensure that the devolved Administrations are involved throughout the process and to ensure, as the Government negotiate the divorce and the framework for our future partnership with the EU 27, that the prospect of needing legislative authority at the end of the process will make certain they produce a deal which can win the consent of the elected representatives next door and of your Lordships’ House. We would welcome a positive willingness from the Government to reach consensus on this. That would be good for Parliament and the right way to start this challenging process.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, the Bill before this House is just 137 words long, yet it has been the subject of almost 20 hours of debate and it is, and has been, an historic debate. On my rough calculation, about 1,000 words have been spoken for each word in the Bill and there are more to come. However, with quantity has undoubtedly come quality and I thank everyone who has spoken. Simply to read out the names of all 183 speakers would take me several minutes, so I ask your Lordships to forgive me—and maybe even thank me—for not addressing every point made by every single speaker.
The level of interest in this Bill is hardly surprising. Our nation’s membership of the EU has been part of the mental map, a fixed point, for many people for decades. So when I hear the concerns that have been raised by your Lordships about what the future holds, I do not dismiss them with a complacent flick of the hand. After all, like many in this House, I too voted to remain last year. I believe that significant opportunities lie before us, but any change brings challenges in its wake—challenges which this House has a rightful role to highlight and debate.
If anyone was in any doubt about the value of this Chamber in the legislative process, they should certainly read the debate of the past two days and the work of our excellent committees. Consider the subjects raised by your Lordships: the rights of citizens, immigration, Ireland, universities, our nuclear industry, agriculture—I could go on. These are all important issues but we must not confuse the policies that flow from Brexit with the core purpose of this Bill. This Bill’s core purpose, indeed its only purpose, is to start the process of leaving the European Union. This was noted by a number of noble Lords and they are right. Other noble Lords were right to point to the democratic process that has brought us here.
The electorate voted for a Government who had pledged to hold a referendum, and respect its result. Parliament then voted—by a majority of six to one in the other place—to hold a referendum. The question people were asked, one agreed upon by Parliament, was brutally simple, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said: did they want to leave or remain in the European Union? Some 33.5 million people entered the polling booth that day last June. This was not, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, suggested, just an expression of a point of view. It was a decision. As the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, said, they knew what they were voting for, and 17.4 million people picked up that stubby little pencil and voted to leave. That was the point of departure.
Parliament attached no conditions, no small print, no caveats. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said:
“It is simply unacceptable for Parliament—for this House—not to honour its commitments. That is what happened when Parliament enacted the referendum Bill”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 123.]
As the noble Lord, Lord Darling, said, there is no alternative.
So here we are tonight, debating a Bill that was passed, unamended, by the other place by a majority of 384 to start the negotiations. It is a Bill to deliver on the result of the referendum, so that we can, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, put it, get on with the negotiations so we can get the best deal for the UK. As he said,
“there is no turning back”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 22.]
At this point it would be somewhat churlish, and the sign of a bad loser, not to compliment the skill of one of our number—I refer, of course, to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. He is a worthy adversary and I now know whose door I would knock on were I ever to need legal help, although I fear it would have to be pro bono.
Let me now address some of the issues raised by your Lordships over the last two days: first, parliamentary scrutiny. I really do not like to say this after almost 20 hours of debate, but in terms of parliamentary scrutiny, we are just about approaching base camp. As the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, put it, we have a long way to go. As well as this Bill, Parliament will vote on the great repeal Bill to repeal the European Communities Act. Primary legislation such as an immigration Bill and a customs Bill, and secondary legislation, will be required to ensure that our statute book is operable on the day we leave the EU.
The Government have announced that we will bring forward a Motion on the agreement to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, asked whether a further Bill might be needed to authorise our withdrawal from the EU. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, asked if this vote will be under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act. The Government’s commitment is to bring forward a government Motion, which goes above and beyond the constitutional requirements set out in CRAG, and, of course, any new treaty that we agree with the EU will be subject to the provisions of CRAG before ratification.
The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, raised the issue of revocability of the notice to withdraw. There is obviously no precedent for a country triggering Article 50, let alone seeking to reverse such a decision. As a matter of firm policy our notification will not be withdrawn. A clear majority of the electorate voted to leave the European Union and we will respect the will of the British people. There can be no attempt to remain inside the EU, and no attempt to rejoin it. Further, extending the negotiating period cannot be guaranteed by an amendment in this Bill; extending the negotiating period requires unanimity of all 27 members. It is not within the Government’s gift or Parliament’s.
To those who argue that Parliament should be able to amend a treaty put before it, I would echo the words of my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford: how would this be taken by our European partners? We have said we will approach these negotiations in good faith. We, like them, want to have a smooth and orderly Brexit. So if Parliament was given the power to unravel the agreement after months of painstaking negotiations, how could our European partners know that the agreement would be honoured? They could not. Consequently, this approach would inject more uncertainty into the whole process. I do not say this just because I believe Britain needs certainty, although I certainly do believe that, but because I firmly believe that Europe needs certainty too. If Parliament could amend one treaty and send it back because it did not like some terms, what is to stop it amending the revised treaty and the one after that?
This House and the other place will have the opportunity to scrutinise and debate the Government’s approach as the negotiations proceed. My noble friend Lord Boswell suggested that Parliament be involved as much as possible, and I totally agree. We have promised to give this Parliament at least as much information as the European Parliament, while protecting our national interest. The key point, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said, is that we need to be realistic. These are going to be tough negotiations. So parliamentary scrutiny, yes; giving away our negotiating position, no.
Other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, raised the issue of publishing our assessment of the impact—the costs and benefits. At this point, all I would say is that such an assessment would surely undermine our position, and be exactly what those on the other side of the table want.
Let me now turn to the issue of a second referendum. The noble Lord, Lord Butler, asked if the views of the people on the final deal are irrelevant. The Government clearly do not think the views of the public are irrelevant, as we are honouring the views they expressed in the referendum. We are engaging with the public, and will continue to do so as the negotiations are scrutinised and the agreement is voted on in Parliament. As my noble friend Lord Hague said, we cannot go round in circles. We need certainty and clarity—certainty and clarity that would be dashed by a second referendum. As the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, argued, we could descend into a world of “neverendums”.
As to the point of the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that such a referendum would bring the country together, let me ask this: given that the Liberal Democrats argue the first referendum has created so much division, why would a second one bring the country together? To insert a second referendum now would backslide on this Parliament’s and this Government’s commitment to honour the result. As a number of noble Lords have said, it would undermine our negotiating position and, as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, put it, that way lies peril.
The noble Lords, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, and Lord Morris of Handsworth, turned to the issue of EU nationals. They spoke of the valuable contribution that EU nationals make to the UK and I agree. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, raised the issue of the rights of EU nationals in the UK and UK nationals in the EU. Many noble Lords commented that both groups have felt unsettled by the result of the referendum last summer. The Government share their wish for a fair and speedy resolution to this issue. They hoped this issue could be sorted out before we triggered Article 50. I was delighted when last year the Prime Minister suggested to EU leaders that they should come to an agreement covering both EU nationals in the UK and UK nationals in the EU as soon as possible. Many favoured such an approach but others did not, saying they wanted to wait until formal negotiations begin. Therefore, we cannot begin formal discussions on this pressing issue until we have triggered Article 50. That is why we need to pass this Bill as soon as possible.
I note the strong views expressed about the wish for the Government to move unilaterally on this issue. As my noble friend Lord Lamont said, a unilateral move by the Government to address the issues facing EU nationals in the UK, however well intentioned, will not help the situation of the hundreds of thousands of our own citizens in the EU. They could end up facing two years of uncertainty if any urgency to resolve their status were removed by the UK making a one-sided guarantee. We need to act fairly and provide certainty for both groups of people as quickly as possible, and that will remain the Government’s position.
We are sighted on the future of UK nationals working in EU institutions, about which my noble friend Lord Balfe spoke. We should indeed thank them for their work and we intend to do all we can for them in the months ahead.
Let me now turn to issues regarding our approach to the negotiations. We must do all we can to create the right conditions for a grown-up negotiation with our European partners, which is why, as I have said, we need to show that we are negotiating in good faith. However, it goes further than that. As the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, said, this country will continue to face challenges that European nations face, such as terrorism and human trafficking. We will continue to share a thirst for knowledge and research and we must never forget that it remains overwhelmingly and compellingly in our national interest that the EU should succeed. Our approach will be to seek to collaborate and co-operate on issues wherever it is in our national interest to do so.
Some have characterised the Government’s approach to the negotiations as extreme Brexit. I would argue that it is nothing of the kind. It sets out an approach for a new partnership, to work together and trade together to our mutual benefit. It reflects a world where digital technology is turbocharging the forces of globalisation, as my noble friend Lord Howell remarked. To repeat, it reflects the fact that people voted to leave the EU.
The noble Lords, Lord Mandelson and Lord Hain, spoke passionately of their wish to protect jobs and investment, and I applaud their sincerity and the consistency of their views. Where I part company with them and others such as the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell, is that this means we must remain in the single market or in the customs union. Staying in the single market would mean not controlling our borders; it would mean remaining under the EU’s rules without having any say over them. Maintaining our current status in the customs union would mean not having the ability to strike our own trade deals. These are issues on which the British people made their views quite clear, and doing as the noble Lords suggest would mean not leaving the EU.
Secondly, our European partners made it perfectly clear, before and after the referendum, that the four freedoms are indivisible—a point my noble friend Lord Tugendhat made. We respect that, which is another reason why the Government are taking the approach set out in the White Paper.
However, this Bill is about the process of our leaving the EU. It is not about the shape of the negotiations to come, nor the Government’s approach. I will happily debate these matters with your Lordships, and I am sure that there will be other occasions on which to do so over the coming months and years. But as the other place has shown, and as my noble friend Lord Hunt said, the Bill is not the place to put constraints on the Government’s negotiating position.
A number of your Lordships—the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Murphy, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, to name just four—raised the matter of the island of Ireland and Brexit. They are entirely right to highlight the challenges we face. I can assure your Lordships that the Government are fully committed to the Belfast agreement and its successors. Nobody wants to return to the borders of the past, so we will make it a priority to deliver a practical solution as soon as we can. I can also assure the House that we are consulting closely with Ministers in the Republic and Executive Ministers in Northern Ireland.
I further assure the noble Lord, Lord Empey, that the comments he raised about the border have been clearly heard in government. As he knows, the open border for people and businesses has served us well. We had a common travel area between the UK and Ireland long before either country was a member of the European Union. We will work to deliver a practical solution that allows the maintenance of the common travel area with the Republic while protecting the integrity of the United Kingdom’s immigration system.
Over the last two days, inevitably attention has focused on what divides us, so finally I will focus on what brings us together. First, we agree that in this debate everyone in this House, no matter what their view, should be heard and respected. We are all here because we want to help our country prosper and thrive in the future. To question and scrutinise is certainly not a sign of being unpatriotic. We can all agree that this House has a clear and proper role in scrutinising the Bill. It is equally clear that, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay,
“it would not be proper or correct for this House to frustrate the triggering of Article 50”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 102.]
Furthermore, at the end of the negotiations, we all agree that the United Kingdom will still wish to co-operate with the European Union and work with our European partners to tackle the challenges we all face.
Finally, whether one voted to leave or remain, we can all agree that, after 20 hours of debate, it is time not to remain but to leave this House and to go to bed.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Monday 27th February 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 103-II Second marshalled list for Committee - (27 Feb 2017)
21:21 - Division on Amendment 4 - Ayes: 136 / Noes: 299 - Amendment 4 disagreed.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I think that one of the themes of these two days in Committee will be that there are no easy answers to the dilemmas we all now face in the United Kingdom. There are upsides and downsides to every option for Brexit and the country’s future. That includes membership of the European Economic Area.
Perhaps I may remind the Committee that we can retain our membership of the single market without membership of the EU only through maintaining our membership, which of course we have already, of the EEA. To spell it out, membership of one or the other is required; that is, either of the EU or of EFTA. That is why I need to say a little more about how we would work within EFTA, which currently comprises three countries: Norway, Iceland and the Duchy of Liechtenstein. We cannot, as we sometimes seem to be doing, rule out all of the options before us, and certainly not rule them out prematurely. Rather, we should look at the pros and cons of each, as has been done in the outstanding report of the joint sub-committee of the European Union Select Committee on Brexit and trade options, chaired by my noble friend Lord Whitty.
We were members of EFTA from its inception in 1960 until we joined the EEC in 1973. I declare a retrospective interest, having chaired the last meeting of the EFTA consultative committee, which was made up of national employers and trade union organisations in consultation with the Council presidency. The meeting was held in Vienna in December 1972. The EEA has a two-pillar structure: the EU on one side and EFTA on the other. They meet together in the EEA council at government level, with various joint committees on particular points, along with a joint parliamentary committee and the EEA consultative committee.
The substance of consultations with the EU depends to an extent on the weight of the member states involved, but I am told by contacts in Norway that these are not without value, and I think that something like this was also the burden of the message sent by the Norwegians who gave evidence to parliamentary committees in both the Lords and the Commons. On the objection to this approach, there is of course the constant complaint that plan B, C or D falls because, “We would not be at the table”. I have to point out that the famous 52% asserted—or supposedly asserted, if they knew what they were doing, which we assume they did—that, without equivocation, they did not want us to be at the table. So that can hardly be a drawback to where we go from here: end of story, full stop. Surely we can all agree that we have to balance influence on the one hand and freedom of action on the other.
EFTA has its own court of adjudication on issues such as interpreting the EFTA treaty and its application of rules of origin, technical standards et cetera. So we will be bound by the rules of EFTA consequent on the relationship with the single market, but obviously there is a great deal of legal alignment with the EU. The four freedoms can themselves be interpreted in different ways. For its part, the Commons Select Committee noted in paragraph 122 of its report that the Secretary of State for Brexit had indicated on 1 December last year that the Government,
“give very high priority to both tariff-free access and access without tariff barriers … that may or may not include membership of the single market”.
The Lords committee report stated in paragraph 82 that in trade terms, becoming a non-EU member of the EEA,
“would be the least disruptive option”,
providing free access to the single market in services and partial access to it in goods. The trade agreements are often negotiated advantageously by EFTA itself. I believe that there is a score of such agreements rather than agreements with individual member states.
I turn now to freedom of movement, border controls, work permits et cetera. Every facet of this debate has now been opened up more than it has been for many years—and by “open” I mean open and not closed down in advance. There is a considerable degree of variance among EU countries on how free movement is interpreted. In Belgium, there is a requirement for a job to go to, it is necessary to pay the rate for the job and no job advertisements can be placed in eastern Europe without being placed also in Belgium. Our Secretary of State seems to have come up with a new form of words about the guarantees for people who are already resident and working in this country. I would simply say that this is an area where we all know that constructive thinking needs to go ahead on a bipartisan basis.
Regarding attitudes in Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein towards our application to become members once again, which have to be thought about, it is fair to say that we have very close relations—with a possible question mark in the case of Norway about something that happened 1,000 years ago—notably because of the North Sea energy fields from Shetland through to Aberdeen and further south, in particular in the north-east of England and down the east coast. This is true for the UK as a whole in a great variety of ways, including through the activities of the Norwegians’ well-managed, energy-based sovereign wealth fund, which is now worth £250 billion. A lot of that investment is deployed via London, as we were told in a recent briefing by the fund.
Without being presumptuous, and while recognising that EFTA would change its internal dynamics and, to some degree, its character and profile, the advice generally is that one would not expect hostility in Norway—the largest of the three—to any hypothetical application from the UK to rejoin the association. Positives would also arise from this for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, compared with the alternatives. This is becoming more and more obvious as the weeks go by.
In paragraph 58 of its report, the Lords committee observes:
“Various studies had shown that from the EU’s perspective, ‘the EEA is the most preferred model’ of association for third countries”.
That is not a consideration to be underestimated, and it may influence attitudes among the EU 27 countries. These options for trade, investment, tariffs et cetera have to be the subject of not just theoretical argument but practical experience, such as was given by a Mr Emerson, who pointed out in evidence reported in paragraph 70 of the report that the advantage of the EEA option is, inter alia:
“It is a system that exists, offers legal clarity and actually works. It is closest among other options … to the status quo in economic terms and it would avoid uncertainty and thereby minimise damage to the UK as a destination for foreign investment aimed at the EU market”.
These are among the reasons why it would be counterproductive to leave the EEA, certainly prematurely. I know that going down the route I am advocating would entail Ministers eating some words. But I am sure that their digestive systems will be up to it once they have all run a few times around St James’s Park. I beg to move.
Baroness Quin (Lab)
My Lords, I support the amendment moved by my noble friend as a way to probe aspects of the Government’s approach to our future trading relationship with the European Union. The EEA was created when the UK, Denmark and Ireland changed from being members of EFTA to members of the EU, but the scale of their commercial relations with the other EFTA countries made it necessary to abolish customs barriers between the two groups of countries. A similar imperative will operate in the current situation as far as the UK market is concerned, given the scale of our trading with the EU. Obviously, in many ways the EEA would not be my preferred option because I would prefer to be in the single market—indeed, I would prefer to remain in the EU. However, given where we are after the referendum, I certainly think it is worth the Government considering and responding to the points that have been made.
My noble friend referred to the excellent report by the European Union Committee on Brexit: the Options for Trade and the fact that paragraph 5 of the conclusions says:
“EEA membership would be the least disruptive option for UK-EU trade, not least because it would maintain membership of the Single Market for services”.
I specifically ask the Minister whether this paragraph of the report, highlighting the importance of services to our economy and the way that that can be handled within an EFTA-type solution, has been discussed with the City of London, and what kind of response was made by the City to the point in the report.
Obviously, we will have a further chance to look at the report when it is discussed in this House on Thursday, but it is very germane to the discussions this afternoon, both on the EEA and on the single market. Therefore, it is quite right to highlight it today and I take this opportunity to do so. Certainly—this point has been made many times—whatever people voted for in the referendum, we are all pretty sure that they did not vote to make themselves poorer. As a result of that, exploring the best deal possible, in looking at all the possible options, is going to be vital. I believe that the Government need to take the amendment and the report very seriously.
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, I agree very much with my two noble friends, who have set out very well the purpose of the amendment. I, like them, feel that it is a disaster for our country to leave the European Union in any circumstances, and that the economic costs have not begun to be properly assessed in this country, although as every week goes by we become more aware of some of them. However, I think it is common ground, even with those who think that we should leave the European Union and who voted and campaigned for that, that there are economic costs and even they would accept that those economic costs are very serious.
The economic costs essentially affect manufacturing, particularly areas such as automotive and aerospace where there are a large number of supply chains in the European Union going across countries, with parts and components and so forth going back and forth more or less the whole time. That business will be very severely affected by our leaving the customs union and the single market, particularly where we would have to pay tariffs, as we would do in the case of motor cars, for example. The other area is financial services, which accounts for 10% of the gross national product of this country, as we all know. The City at the moment is the financial capital of the European Union but that is likely to cease if we left the European Union. It is very difficult to imagine how it could continue to be that unless we had some way of remaining in the internal financial market.
The great thing about the EEA is that it is a way of avoiding some, if not all, of the economic costs—there would be a loss of investment in many areas and as time went by there might be threats to our competitiveness as a country, both in services and in some of the manufacturing areas I mentioned. Nevertheless, it would mitigate and very much reduce the economic costs, which everybody is agreed are considerable and serious. Therefore, it seems extraordinary that the Government have not even bothered to consider or negotiate the possibility of our remaining in the single market by virtue of becoming again a member of EFTA or otherwise.
The Government have very reluctantly conceded that there should be some parliamentary process in this procedure of leaving the European Union. They have very reluctantly conceded that they should report to us at least as much as the European Commission does to the European Parliament on the progress of negotiations. They have very reluctantly exposed to us some of their thinking on some of these points, which have been dragged out of them in different ways—and we have to go on doing that.
However, as we begin to get clearer sight of what the Government are doing, it becomes more and more curious because we observe that they are actually breaching some of what one had always thought were the golden rules of negotiation. They are behaving in a way that is clearly irrational. No normal person gives up an option unless he or she gets to the point when they have to. There is no point in giving up an option in advance so why did the Government state in advance they were not interested in becoming a part of EFTA and remaining in the single market on that basis?
Secondly, the Government have said that their priority is to prevent freedom of movement or stop freedom of movement in future so far as this country is concerned. We now hear from Mr Davis that he does not expect any significant reduction in immigration from the rest of the EU or anywhere else for the next few years. In other words, the benefit for which the Government are apparently prepared to pay this enormous economic cost is much less than it was always made out to be. That is very clear.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
On the subject of giving away an option in advance, is my memory playing a trick on me in recalling that the noble Lord and others on the remain side during the referendum campaign argued that membership of the EEA would be the worst possible option because we would be bound by all the rules but have no say?
Lord Davies of Stamford
The noble Lord is uncharacteristically inaccurate; he normally does his homework before intervening in this way. He is quite right that I and many on the remain side argued against the EEA being the right solution but he is quite wrong to suggest that any of us argued that it was the worst solution. On the contrary, throughout the campaign I always said while it was a very bad solution, it was the least bad solution of all those on offer. I am on record as saying that and probably said it in debates in which the noble Lord took part. Indeed, that is my strong view today and is the case I now argue.
I wish we could stay in the EU—period, as the Americans say, or full stop—but if we cannot we must try to mitigate the enormous damage. That is the argument I have been making. The way to do that is to try to find a way to stay in the single market, and one way we could certainly do that is to rejoin EFTA, as my noble friend Lord Lea set out. It is extraordinary that the Government have excluded that possibility and I now come to their extraordinary behaviour.
The Government have not only revealed that the benefit for which they are prepared to pay this high cost is nothing like as great as it was always made out to be, but not even considered negotiating on the single market regime provided by the EEA and using that as a basis for trying to get some concessions on freedom of movement. My two noble friends suggested a way forward that might be possible. I do not think that we on this side of the House will be able to take over these negotiations but we want to know—it is important that everybody in the country knows—why the Government did not even think it worthwhile to sit down with our European Union partners and say we would like to stay in the single market but we would also like to curb freedom of movement at least to some extent. We could have a negotiation on that basis.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
Could my noble friend refresh the House’s memory on what success the previous Prime Minister had in having this as an objective in his renegotiation of our terms of membership of the European Union?
Lord Davies of Stamford
I think the previous Prime Minister was a completely incompetent negotiator. The way to make progress in European affairs—it is extraordinary that after all these decades the Tory party has not learned this—is to adopt a communautaire approach and the language of one’s partners, to say that what one is seeking to do is in the interests of everybody and not purely in the selfish interests of this country, and certainly not just to get a good headline in the Daily Express or Daily Mail. We make it clear that we share the long-term objectives of our neighbours and partners for the future of western civilisation, as well as for prosperity, competitiveness and employment and these important economic but ultimately subsidiary objectives. Then we say pragmatically, as we have a reputation for being pragmatic, “Would it not be a good idea to do X, Y and Z which would strengthen our common purposes and take further forward our common ambitions?”. That is the way to make progress but it is the opposite of the confrontational approach the last Prime Minister adopted. It is not surprising that he did not get very far.
I am glad that my noble friend made this brief intervention because it enables me to say that I am extremely worried—I am not alone in this—that the Tory party has learned nothing at all from this experience or from any other experience over the last 40 years of the European Union and so will make the same mistake again. It will find itself not achieving what it ought to in the national interest in these negotiations. They will be a disaster, and a largely avoidable disaster, precisely because the Tory Government have not learned the obvious lessons of the past which my noble friend was kind enough to give me the opportunity to remind them of this afternoon.
If you have somebody negotiating on your behalf—a solicitor, an accountant or some representative, agent, trustee or whoever—and you watch carefully what they are doing, you are entitled to get worried should they do something that goes quite counter to normal human common sense. I pointed out three ways in which the Government are behaving in an extremely irrational fashion. I will repeat them so that the Minister can address them when he sums up. First, why are we pursuing this particular objective with the same kind of intensity and passion when we have acknowledged that the objective that we are trying to achieve—what we are trying to obtain in exchange for the high price of giving up our membership of the single market—is not anything like as great it was previously made out to be?
Secondly, why have we not decided to negotiate on the basis of the available option, which we know exists, of our potential membership of the EEA and see if we can perhaps do a little better and achieve some additional concessions? We have not even tried to do this—why not? Thirdly, why are we proceeding in this negotiation by giving up options in advance, before we have even explored them and before we have even started the negotiations? It is a very extraordinary thing to do.
Lord De Mauley (Con)
My Lords, I wonder whether the Labour Party could find room for others in this debate. Even if the noble Lord, Lord Lea, were right that we did not have to go through a process of joining EFTA and the EEA—I do not think that he was, actually—being a member of the EEA means accepting EU laws, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth has said, without any political representation or influence over them. This would, of course, result in less control for the UK over its destiny, rather than more. That is not what people voted for in the referendum. I oppose this amendment for those reasons and because it is directly inconsistent with the White Paper.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, there are those who say that, since voting to leave the EU was the only question on the ballot paper, it is legitimate to argue that people did not vote to leave the single market or the customs union. They are wrong, but we will deal with that in the fourth group of amendments. Those same people also argue that we can join the EEA and benefit from it while still leaving the EU. I believe that that, too, is wrong and misguided. However, your Lordships should not take my word for it: I will quote from the EEA website. After it describes what the EEA is, who are the contracting parties and when it was agreed, it goes on to say in point 4:
“What is included in the EEA Agreement? The EEA Agreement provides for the inclusion of EU legislation in all policy areas of the Single Market. This covers the four freedoms, i.e. the free movement of goods, services, persons and capital, as well as competition and state aid rules, but also the following horizontal policies: consumer protection, company law, environment, social policy and statistics. In addition, the EEA Agreement provides for cooperation in several flanking policies such as research and technological development, education, training and youth, employment, tourism, culture, civil protection, enterprise, entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized companies. The EEA Agreement guarantees equal rights and obligations within the Single Market for citizens and economic operators in the EEA. Through Article 6 of the EEA Agreement, the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union is also of relevance to the EEA Agreement, as the provisions of the EEA Agreement shall be interpreted in conformity with the relevant rulings of the Court given prior to the date of signature, 2 May 1992”.
Therefore, if we join the EEA, we would, in effect, still be in the EU to all intents and purposes, with the exception of agriculture, fishing, justice and home affairs. All the rest of it we would have, lock, stock and barrel. We would not have control of our borders, our laws, our courts or much of our money. We would thus betray the people who voted to leave the EU, and that is why we should reject this amendment.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, I will make four very brief points. Will the Minister assure the House that this amendment is actually within the scope of the Bill? The Bill is about notifying withdrawal: this seems to me, as with many other amendments, to be about something completely different. Secondly, it is not within our unilateral gift. Even if the Prime Minister is instructed to remain a member of the EEA on our behalf, she cannot necessarily achieve this on her own. Thirdly, it is not a good idea to tie her hands in that fashion, and fourthly, even if this amendment succeeded—and the same is true of many others—and it became a part of this Bill, as the two years unrolled, it might prove to be inconvenient and an obstacle. There would be nothing to stop the Government simply repealing, or bringing forward measures to repeal, this particular measure, were it to be added to the Bill.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, surely the problem with the EEA is that it is a waiting room for people who want to join the EU. It was never designed for people who wanted to leave it. I do not quite understand why we have to sit here saying that we must take one of the options on offer from the EU. We are the third-biggest economy in the EU. The EU sells 50% more to us than we do to it. Why can we not have a unique free trade agreement with the EU? Why do we have to go along with any of these things that are on offer from the EU?
Lord Davies of Stamford
Perhaps I may be permitted to correct the noble Lord, who I know is an expert on these matters and normally gets his facts absolutely right. We have sat on European Union committees together for quite a long time. But he is wrong about the EEA being a waiting room for applicants to the EU. Norway had a referendum which decided against joining the EU. It decided not to be a member of the EU but it decided to be a member of the single market and to join EFTA on that basis. For Norway, it is not an anteroom, it is an alternative, as it could be for us if we so wished.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
I accept that but it was designed originally to be a waiting room for those who wanted to join and that is why it has been put in place and you have to comply with all the regulations of the EU. But I come back to my point that if we join the EEA, we do not join the customs union so we have all the problems of the customs regulations. It enables us to do free trade deals with others but it has many disadvantages and I still do not really understand why we have cannot have our own unique arrangement with the EU. I am sure that is the ambition of the Government and that is why the amendment should be opposed.
Lord Elton (Con)
My Lords, in declaring an interest—which is really my only qualification for joining this short debate—as a half-Norwegian, I advise the Minister to test the noble Lord’s assertion that the Norwegians are broadly content with their situation. Conversations I have had over the years with relatives and friends suggest that they see all the disadvantages that my noble friend Lord Forsyth so forcefully expressed five minutes ago.
Lord Green of Deddington (CB)
One of the major difficulties that might stem from membership of the EEA is its implications for freedom of movement. I ask the Minister, when he responds, to give the Government’s assessment of the implications for freedom of movement for the UK of membership of the EEA.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I think the Committee has heard quite enough from me so I will not speak on this other than to say that this will come up when we discuss the single market and I will reserve our comments until then. The Committee will probably know that we will not be supporting this amendment.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie) (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for the amendment concerning the European Economic Area, which seeks to ensure that the UK remains a member of the EEA.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, I wonder if the Minister will give way—
Lord Keen of Elie
Not yet, no. While I understand the issues raised and agree with the desire to debate them in this House, I cannot accept the amendment.
Lord Keen of Elie
I wonder if the noble Lord will allow me to make a little progress before he launches into the water. This Bill is about the process of our leaving the European Union. It is not about the Government’s approach. I will happily debate these matters with your Lordships, and I am sure that there will be other occasions on which to do so over the coming months and, indeed, years. But as the other place has shown, this Bill is not the place to put constraints on the Government’s approach.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
What is it that the Minister says? I am obliged to him for giving way. As this is the first time we have heard from the Minister on this subject since the weekend, I wonder if he would care to comment on one of the most significant happenings. A very distinguished Member of this House, who sat through almost the whole Second Reading on Monday and Tuesday—a former Deputy Prime Minister for whom we all have the greatest respect—has said that he is going to oppose his own Government on this. He is completely against Brexit. What is the Government’s reaction? Are they not going to take account of the views of someone so distinguished, someone with such great experience of government and of the European Union? Would the Minister care to respond?
Lord Keen of Elie
Yes, of course. The noble Lord to whom the noble Lord refers is not in the House today.
It is my intention to make some progress with this matter. The Prime Minister clearly set out her vision for the future of the UK post-exit in her speech on 17 January, including our future trading relationship with the EU. She was clear that we do not seek membership of the single market. Instead, we seek the greatest possible access to it through a new, comprehensive, bold and ambitious free trade agreement. We want the UK to have the freest possible trade in goods and services with the EU’s member states but also to be able to negotiate our own trade agreements. As the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, observed, we seek our own, bespoke deal.
The United Kingdom has always been a leading voice for free trade, not only in the European Union but globally, and we have been consistently clear that we want the maximum possible freedom to trade for businesses in both Britain and Europe. But we also want to take back control of our laws and control immigration to Britain from Europe.
Being a member of the EEA would mean complying with the EU’s rules and regulations that implement the four freedoms—in respect of capital, goods, services and people—without having a vote on what those rules and regulations are. It would mean accepting a role for the European Court of Justice that would see it still having direct legal authority in our country. It would mean not having control over immigration. EU leaders in the other 27 states have been clear as to their belief in the indivisible nature of the four freedoms, and we respect that. The people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, not to maintain partial membership of its bodies or institutions. When the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union institutions, they did not intend that we should leave by the front door and rush back to attempt entry by the back door.
As set out in the White Paper, we recognise that we will require alternative forms of dispute resolution once we leave the EU and are no longer subject to the European Court of Justice. But again, these mechanisms are common both to agreements between the EU and third countries and in international agreements to which the United Kingdom is also party, of which there are many examples. Once we leave the EU, the EEA agreement will no longer be relevant for the United Kingdom. It will have no practical effect. It will be an empty vessel. That is because the agreement is defined as covering all EU members and those three EFTA states—Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway—which have chosen to join the EEA. As we are leaving the EU, we will automatically be outside this definition, as found in Article 126 of the EEA agreement. So there is no choice open to us to leave the EU and remain a member of the EEA, which would require a separate negotiation with the EU and the three EFTA states that I have just mentioned. For example, Switzerland, which is also a member of EFTA, has separate bilateral agreements with the EU even though it is not in the EEA. EFTA membership is not, of course, the same as EEA membership.
Although it will have no practical effect after the EU exit, we are considering what steps might need to be taken formally to terminate the EEA agreement as a matter of law, as we will remain a signatory to the agreement. This could be done through Article 127 of the EEA agreement on giving 12 months’ notice, or by some other means, but no decision has yet been taken on that. We have laid out in the White Paper, however, the relationship we are seeking: a new strategic partnership which includes a new customs agreement and an ambitious and comprehensive free trade agreement. We are seeking the greatest possible access to the single market as part of this.
The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, referred to the fact that we would not be at the table. That is absolutely right, and that is not what 52% of our population voted for when they voted leave. It is one thing to have power without responsibility; it is another to have responsibility without power, and that is what we would have in these circumstances. It was suggested that freedom of movement could be open to a variety of interpretations. That is not the view in Europe. It is open to only one interpretation—one which we have been under for a number of years.
The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, referred to the report of the House of Lords committee. I can reassure her that we take the terms of that report very seriously, and we will be taking forward our consideration of it in due course. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, referred to the suggestion that somehow we could keep our options open so far as the EEA is concerned, but that is not the case. EEA membership is not an option that is simply open to us if we leave the EU. As I said, it becomes an empty vessel. We have to face up to the indivisibility of the four freedoms, as insisted upon. It is not a case of going to Europe and saying, “We would like to negotiate out of one of the four freedoms”. We are told repeatedly that they are indivisible, and we have to take that into account.
At the end of the day, we cannot embrace membership of the EEA any more than membership of the EU without freedom of movement in Europe. In these circumstances, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw this amendment on the understanding that we cannot retain membership of the EEA for the reasons I have sought to set out.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
Before the noble Lord sits down, there is one issue on this question which is very important to the national interest. When the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, came to the Select Committee to answer questions about the Government’s negotiating strategy, I asked him whether—as part of a transitional arrangement—they had ruled out membership of the single market or the EEA, and he said they had not. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s current position?
Whatever the Front Bench opposite thinks, most observers think it will be impossible to negotiate a comprehensive trade agreement within the practical 15 months of negotiation that will be available after the German elections. This implementation phase that the Prime Minister talks about is in fact a transition. Are the Government saying that under no circumstances would we consider being members of the EEA, or the single market? If they are, we are facing the most horrendous cliff edge as an economy.
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I do not accept that we face a cliff edge—there is no cliff and therefore no edge. We fully intend to negotiate a suitable settlement within the period set out in Article 50 and that is the course of action on which we are setting out at this time.
The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, questioned whether this amendment was within the scope of the Bill. That is a question for others, but clearly it is not related to the purpose of the Bill. The Bill is concerned with process and, if we lose sight of that, we are liable to become rudderless in very difficult waters.
Lord Liddle
Will the Minister give me an answer to the question? It is a reasonable question on such a vital matter of national importance: is this ruled out in a transitional arrangement or not?
Lord Keen of Elie
With respect, the noble Lord’s question proceeds on a supposition that I do not accept.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, on that last point, I would point out that the Government are very good at demolishing every possible hypothesis that is put up, but at some point they will have to look at them constructively—they will have to look at the report on Thursday, as we have just heard—and consider the costs and benefits of each of them. At the moment, what seems to be happening is that one after another various ideas are brought up in debate, which is what we are here for, and the Government produce a tremendous round of artillery to blow up that particular bridge—that is, that particular idea. However, they have never laid out how those couple of sentences in the Lancaster House speech, reproduced in the White Paper, will work. We on this side are opening ourselves up to the vulnerability of saying exactly what we think might be an option. It behoves the Government very soon, in the national interest, to look at what might work rather than at what might not. We will have to return to these matters and look at the pros and cons of this option as well as all the others.
Instead of the Government just saying what is ruled out, it would be good to hear a bit more about what is ruled in. Instead of concluding, like Mrs Thatcher, that “there is no alternative”, they should see that there are several alternatives to just walking away, but we have not heard about these in any detail. We are getting to the ridiculous position where we will have the so-called great repeal Bill, and this Bill will be on the statute book, but there will be no detailed prospectus at all, on the flimsy grounds that that would give the game away about our negotiating position. This does not bode well for the Government coming back with a satisfactory solution to the serious challenges facing the country. However, that is as far as we can take this today, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“( ) Before a notification can be given under subsection (1), the Prime Minister must give an undertaking to negotiate under the process set out in Article 50 to support the maintenance of the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as set out under the provisions of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and subsequent relevant agreements.”
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, this amendment is also in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Alderdice and Lord Murphy of Torfaen. It will be noted that this is a cross-party amendment by two former Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland and a former Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
In a few days, the people of Northern Ireland will go to the polls for the second time in eight months, at a moment when Northern Ireland’s self-government is in a political cul-de-sac and unresolved legacy issues and the past, including the prosecutions of long-retired British soldiers, continue to haunt everyone. The settlement in Northern Ireland is built on the delicate balance of the three strands of the Good Friday agreement: relationships within Northern Ireland, between Belfast and Dublin and between Dublin and London. Brexit will test each of these relationships and, if the Government pursue a hard Brexit, they could do profound damage to all three.
When I was Secretary of State in 2005, I flew many miles by Army helicopter from east to west along the mountains and fields of south Armagh that mark the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Knowing what had afflicted that area over so many years, it seemed to me that it had what Yeats called, in a different but related context, “a terrible beauty”.
Frankly, the border was, even at the height of the Troubles with security controls, impossible to police. Then it was dubbed “bandit country”. It is estimated that along the entire 300-mile Irish border there are up to 300 crossings and countless additional paths, with 35,000 people crossing each day and each month 177,000 crossings by lorries, 208,000 by vans and 1.85 million by cars. Since family farms straddle the border, there are goodness knows how many animals on the move, from domestic pets to livestock, conceivably being forced to carry ID tags if they stray either way in future—all because the border will become the customs frontier of the European Union.
Bertie Ahern, who served three terms as Taoiseach between 1997 and 2008 and was a central player in helping to secure the Good Friday agreement and deliver power sharing, was reported in the Observer recently as saying that the establishment of an Irish land border could have devastating results, putting Northern Ireland’s peace process in jeopardy.
“‘I worry far more about what’s going to happen with that,’ he said. ‘It will take away the calming effects [of an open border]. Any attempt to try to start putting down border posts, or to man [it] in a physical sense as used to be the case, would be very hard to maintain, and would create a lot of bad feeling.’”
I would suggest that “bad feeling” is an understatement.
“‘Any kind of physical border, in any shape, is bad for the peace process’, he said. ‘It psychologically feeds badly into the nationalist communities. People have said that this could have the same impact on the nationalist community as the seismic shock of the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement on unionists, and I agree with that. For the nationalist community in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday agreement was about removing barriers, integrating across the island, working democratically in the absence of violence and intimidation—and if you take that away, as the Brexit vote does, that has a destabilising effect.’”
I agree with him. I am particularly aware that the consequences of a hard customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic are potentially immense, and are not addressed at all in the Government’s White Paper. Frankly, I am not convinced that the Government have even begun to grasp the political significance of it.
I, like Tony Blair and my predecessors—my noble friends Lord Murphy, Lord Reid and Lord Mandelson—was utterly non-partisan when dealing with the Northern Ireland parties, even though in the space of two meetings we would be accused by one of being for a united Ireland and by the other of being rabidly pro-union. But I built as close a relationship with Ian Paisley as I did with Gerry Adams, with Peter Robinson as with Martin McGuinness. I remain unaligned today—and that allows me, I hope, to talk bluntly, and some might even say inappropriately, about the politics of Irish republicanism and nationalism.
For these people, an entirely open border of the kind that has operated without security or hindrance of any kind for many years now is politically totemic. It marks an everyday reality to all republicans that progress, albeit in their terms slow progress, has been made, and is being made, towards their aspirations for a united Ireland. It has been as if the border no longer mattered. Citizens resident on either side can and do take advantage of the health and education services nearest to where they live, on a cross-border basis. Northern Ireland businesses invest without hindrance in the Republic and vice versa. The two economies are being steadily integrated: there is even a plan to cut corporation tax in Northern Ireland to synchronise with the low rate in the south.
Of course the island of Ireland has not been united politically or constitutionally—to do that would properly require endorsement by referendum, and the principle of consent is one of the cornerstones of the Good Friday agreement—but it is almost daily becoming united in everyday life. That is welcomed by unionists as well, secure in the knowledge that there can be no change in the constitutional position without their consent. Above all, it is a symbol of the normalisation of relations between the two parts of the island. The Government disturb that at everyone’s great and grim peril.
Those who maintain that because the Prime Minister has said that she does not want a return to a hard border it will not happen should be aware that the Irish Government, who do not want a hard border either, have nevertheless, as a contingency measure, begun identifying possible locations for checkpoints along the border with Northern Ireland in the event of a hard Brexit.
The Northern Ireland peace and stability process is very far from over. The current disturbing breakdown and impasse in the Northern Ireland Assembly and its Executive is a manifestation of the extent of unfinished business. I do not say that we will go back to the murder and mayhem of the Troubles, but I insist that the process could easily unravel. It requires continuous forward momentum; a reimposed border with any form of restrictions is the very reverse of that. If the referendum means Brexit at any price, it might well be at dangerously high cost for the Northern Ireland peace process.
Apart from the politics, the post-Brexit border issue is fraught with practical problems. The excellent House of Lords report, Brexit: UK-Irish Relations, stated on page 65:
“The only way to retain the current open border in its entirety would be either for the UK to remain in the customs union, or for EU partners to agree to a bilateral UK-Irish agreement on trade and customs. Yet given the EU’s exclusive competence to negotiate trade agreements with third countries, the latter option is not currently available”.
The report added:
“Short of the introduction of full immigration controls on the Irish land border, the solution would either be acceptance of a low level of cross-border movement by EU workers, or allowing Northern Ireland to reach its own settlement on the rights of EU citizens to live and work there … which would require … an adjustment of the devolution settlement”.
In evidence to the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on 1 February, international trade lawyer Michael Lux dismissed the Government’s commitments to an open border as “nice words” and warned that Britain’s departure from the customs union would require a significant enforcement infrastructure on the Irish side, possibly including cameras and helicopters. Lux calls for,
“a special status for Northern Ireland”.
In subsequent testimony to the committee, Irish Ambassador Dan Mulhall said:
“I just don’t think it’s remotely possible to think in terms of having a border that would really control every movement of goods and people”.
He also warned that it was,
“essential that Brexit does not affect the Good Friday Agreement, and that the people of Northern Ireland can have confidence that this will be the case”.
Experienced customs officials from both sides of the border have questioned the practicality of reimposing controls. Former UK customs officer Gerry Temple told the BBC:
“The border runs through many properties and it would be impossible for customs to check what comes in the southern side and goes out the northern side. The re-opening of the unapproved roads has changed everything and made the task for customs impossible”.
The Police Federation for Northern Ireland has also expressed concern about the consequences of a hard border.
“We are still operating under what the government says is a severe threat, which means an attack on our members could happen at any time and is highly likely”,
PFNI chairman Mark Lindsay told the Guardian. He added:
“If we are saying in the future that police officers could be deployed to customs posts and other fixed points on a hardened border then they would become static targets. They would in effect become sitting ducks for the terrorists”.
I am assuming that he is talking about the dissident IRA groups.
The outgoing leader of the Alliance Party and former Northern Ireland Justice Minister, David Ford MLA, observed that,
“the issue of the common travel area is not dealt with by people simply saying, ‘The CTA has existed since 1923’, because it had never existed when one jurisdiction was outside the EU and the other within it”.
Your Lordships’ European Union Committee has already highlighted the danger of exacerbating an existing smuggling problem on the border, a judgment that reflects testimony from Northern Ireland’s Justice Minister and police service among others. A hard Brexit risks a double windfall for paramilitaries from increased opportunities for fraud alongside growing political tensions. One wheeze, apparently emanating from the Government, is to have electronic controls of some sort.
“I haven’t found anyone who can tell me what technology can actually manage this”,
Bertie Ahern said. David Ford MLA observed that it was “utterly meaningless” to talk about electronic controls as a preventive tool against cross-border smuggling. He noted that there was already evasion of the different excise duties on either side of the border. The leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Mike Nesbitt MLA, agreed that electronic monitoring of the movement of goods,
“just will not cut it”.
We need maintenance of the common travel area, the right of free movement within it for UK and Irish citizens, and their right to reside and work in both countries. We need the retention of the right to Irish, and therefore EU, citizenship for the people of Northern Ireland. We need a customs and trade arrangement between the UK and Ireland if the UK leaves the customs union. We need reaffirmation by both Governments of their commitment to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and continued support for cross-border co-operation.
Lord Alderdice (LD)
My Lords, I have always been a fervent European. It is an emotional thing as much as an intellectual one. In my own family there are people from outside of the UK. My wife and I make our home not just in Northern Ireland but also in continental Europe. As a former vice-president of the European Liberal Democrat Party and someone always committed to Europe, it is part of me politically; and intellectually, the principles behind the European project have been a driving force in my own way of understanding a better way of doing politics, particularly, of course, in my own part of the world in Northern Ireland.
The border was not the cause of our problems; it reflected problems that were there before but it also exacerbated them. The way that the European project worked for many years provided us with inspiration and a model to change relationships within Northern Ireland, between north and south, and between Britain and Ireland. However, for me, sadly, it was neither entirely a shock nor a surprise when the referendum went the way it did. For some years, as some noble Lords will know, I had been warning that, unless those with influence in Brussels and those of us who are pro-European influenced our colleagues in Europe to change the way that the European project was developing, we would find those opposed to the European Union increasing in number and in fervour, and it would not be good for the project—indeed, it would be destined for disaster if there was no change. I said so in your Lordships’ House on more than one occasion but there was not a preparedness to listen.
For me, the European project was essentially a peace project. It was not about the euro or the single market, and it was not about providing a space at the top table of global affairs for Presidents and Prime Ministers of small European countries. It was a peace project to try to make sure that Germany and France, in particular, and the rest of Europe did not go to war again, but now it has become the focus of division within Europe.
Those of us who are pro-European should have been looking for a long time at why things were going wrong. If a couple divorce after 40 or more years and the one who leaves does not do so in order to go to another partner, the one who is left needs to ask themselves some serious questions about the motivation for the divorce after such a long time. The answer is that the European Union was not developed on liberal principles of freedom, flexibility, organic growth and development, and sensitivity to differences of identity and culture right across Europe, particularly between northern and southern Europe. Instead, it was centralising and focused on itself and on the interests, concerns, preoccupations and beliefs of the elite, with the result that many ordinary people found themselves becoming disenchanted. This is a disaster. We know what happens when Europe becomes divided, but divided it has become, and our job now is to try to find a way of bringing it together.
Before turning to Her Majesty’s Government, I want to refer to our colleagues in Brussels. It is not a one-sided business—relationships require movement from both sides. Immediately after the referendum, Mr Juncker demanded that Britain implement Article 50 straightaway, saying that it was a requirement. It was not a requirement but it was an extremely unhelpful intervention because it was precisely the impression of Brussels talking down to everybody that had produced the problems.
Therefore, through the medium of this intervention in your Lordships’ House I need to say to our friends in Brussels and across the European Union, “Understand that relationships are a two-way affair. You have to be prepared to be flexible too if there is to be change for the better”. It may be too late to do other than have a relationship where the United Kingdom is outside the European Union, and it may be almost too late for some of the other countries, because this is not just a question of Britain. Many other countries are asking themselves these questions and have deeply dissatisfied populations, and this year in particular is likely to see developments of a thoroughly untoward order.
When it comes to the border in Ireland, I hope that people in Brussels understand that it is in their interests to start being flexible over it and not simply to say, “Well, take it or leave it. If you want to do Brexit, here are the consequences”. Rather, they should say, “First, this is a relationship. Secondly, we are a peace project, and we are not about disrupting a peace project that was painfully put together in Ireland. And, thirdly, if there was ever trouble again in Ireland, it would be trouble within the European Union, even if Northern Ireland isn’t part of it, because the trouble would be north and south of the border, as it was before”. But, of course, the amendment is particularly addressed to Her Majesty’s Government. I appreciated the fact that the Prime Minister, as one of her first initiatives, contacted the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, and expressed her appreciation of his positive regard and relationship. I know that, despite the difficulties he is in, he or any successor would be able to have useful and positive contact with the Prime Minister. However, it is not a question just of what we do and say, it is a question of our impulses.
I remember in 2013 when the then Crime and Courts Bill was being debated, one of the first things I did when I realised that problems were emerging in Northern Ireland over the question of whether there would be a legislative consent Motion in the Assembly was to meet the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, who was responsible for the Bill in your Lordships’ House, and to say to him: “Has the right honourable Theresa May”—who at that stage was Home Secretary—“had a consultation with the Minister for Justice in the Republic of Ireland? Because the NCA, which is going to be created by this Bill, has border security as one of its fundamental requirements. That is one of the things it is about. The only land border we have in the United Kingdom is with the Republic of Ireland. We have a British-Irish Council. We have a whole series of international agreements. We have meetings of Ministers in every context. Has the Home Secretary consulted the Minister for Justice in the Republic of Ireland about this question?”. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, is a very honest and open man, not given to dissembling. He was clear: it had not even entered their minds to have such a conversation. It had not even entered their minds. It was not nasty, it was not malevolent, it was not a snub or a dismissal; it just had not even entered their minds.
My fear is that now she is Prime Minister, Theresa May is bringing to the office of the Prime Minister many of the attitudes, the people and the approaches of the Home Office. If that is the case in relationships with Ireland, north and south, it will create problems for her and for all of us. So my appeal is to understand that being Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is not just about being Prime Minister of England and a few add-on bits. It is about Scotland; it is about Wales; it is about Northern Ireland; and it is about many parts of England that do not necessarily feel entirely at home with the approaches that are taken here in London. That will entail a stretching of imagination and political creativity, it will mean engaging with people and it will not be entirely easy, but it is absolutely necessary if we are to create the kind of environment we need within this United Kingdom and in our other relationships, of which I hope there will be many, not just in the EU but outside the EU. Indeed, goodness knows what kind of EU, if any kind of EU, will still exist by the time we come to March 2019. We have no idea. The world is changing dramatically before our eyes. However, there are some things that we know do cause trouble, even if we are not sure what things cause good to happen.
One of the things that will cause trouble is if people in the nationalist and republican community feel that the progress that was made in relationships, in understanding and in sensitivity are being rubbished because there is no longer the threat of violence. That is why—although I have not put my name to it, and I have some questions about the detailed drafting—I have great sympathy with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, which reflects something that was said by the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny. That is that there needs to be an appreciation in the engagement with Brussels that if, as is the case under the Good Friday agreement, the people of Northern Ireland give their consent and show their wish to leave the United Kingdom—not something I expect in my lifetime at all—it would effectively mean that they would then become part of an Ireland which, in total, would be part of the European Union, if the European Union still existed in the same way.
It does not seem to me that this is in any way in contravention of the Good Friday agreement or any of the other agreements. It is certainly not talking about promoting a united Ireland; it is entirely different from the situation in Scotland, because Scotland would be leaving to be a separate country and then apply, whereas Northern Ireland would become part of a country that was already part of the European Union, albeit an expanded one. It does not affect other things, but it may well be one of those things that can give sufficient comfort to people in the Republic and in the nationalist community to enable us to negotiate in the way that we desperately need to. It is not about us proposing solutions but rather about insisting on the maintenance of relationships that can get us through the very difficult period that stands ahead.
Lord Trimble (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. His description of the difficulties that he saw arising within the European Union and the way in which the European Union has not been governed very intelligently by the people in Brussels was seriously meant and I hope that everyone will reflect on it. But I hope he will forgive me if I go back to the amendment in front of us. It is unnecessary. The amendment asks the Prime Minister,
“to support the maintenance of the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland”.
The Prime Minister does that now. It is in the White Paper, so the amendment is unnecessary for that reason. That is a technical answer to the amendment, but I will move on to a general discussion of the common travel area.
As was mentioned in the debate, the common travel area has existed since 1923. From the mid-1920s onwards, tariff differences existed because tariffs were charged on the Irish border—and those continued right up until our entry into the European Union. So going back to having tariffs is not a new thing for us. Having to have regard to the movement of persons is not, again, a new thing. Noble Lords may not be fully aware that the impact of the common travel area on the free movement of people is not general. It applies only to citizens of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. It does not apply to other citizens.
I remember hearing in a news bulletin several months ago that the Irish police had intercepted a car that had just crossed over the unmarked border. Police stopped the vehicle in order to remove from it half a dozen persons who were travelling to work within the Republic of Ireland but had no right to do so. So that is an example of the movement of persons being monitored. How effective that monitoring is is another matter—and whether that monitoring can be done in a more effective way, again, is open. So there should not be any insuperable difference on the question of the free movement of persons, provided that there is serious co-operation between the British and Irish Governments. Without knowing the detail, my understanding is that very active discussion is going on at the moment between the British and Irish Governments about how that could be handled.
If there is a serious problem, it comes with the issue of tariffs. The tariffs that were charged from the mid-1920s to the 1970s were enough to stimulate smuggling. It was a local cottage industry, particularly in South Armagh. If significant tariffs come back, it will create, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, mentioned, another line of activity for the boys down there who will profit from it. They might complain about it but they will certainly enjoy the profit and might not be too keen if someone took the profit away. So one has to be aware that there is more than one side to this.
There will be difficulties if there are serious tariffs, but the difficulties will exist mainly for the Irish Government rather than for ourselves. In the paper mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, Mr Lux talked about installations on the Irish side of the border. That is where they will be, because under EU law there is an obligation on countries that have part of the EU’s external border to have installations on that border. So if installations exist they will certainly exist south of the border. Whether they exist north of the border I am not sure; that is a matter for our Government to consider. However, the difficulties are going to be there.
The difficulty for the Irish Government is not just to do with the installations but with trade. Although the Irish have tried to develop their trade in other ways, their largest market is the United Kingdom. A tariff between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom would have very serious implications for them. Incidentally, their second largest market is the United States. Almost all their trade is done with Anglophone countries; they have very little trade with the rest of the European Union.
That actually points to a solution. When we joined the European Union in 1972 the Republic of Ireland joined on the same day; and it did so because of the economic factors I have mentioned. Those factors are still there. The Republic of Ireland is going to have to think very seriously, in a couple of years, about where their future prosperity will lie. At the moment the Irish Government are probably trying to do what they can to educate people in Brussels about the problems that they will face and about the desirability of having tariff-free access. That is also the objective of our Government. They, too, want tariff-free access, and if they achieve that there is no problem—although we should bear in mind what my noble friend Lord Lawson said in last week’s debate: that as things stand, it does not look as though there is much chance of getting agreement on the absence of tariffs. If we do not get that, the Irish Government will have a problem. We would of course want to be sympathetic and do what we can to mitigate matters; but at the same time that is not something that we need as a major element in this debate.
The amendment talks about,
“the open border … as set out under the provisions of the Belfast Agreement”.
Look at the agreement: what provisions? I do not see any. The common travel area was part of the background at the time that we were discussing this, but to say that this is something mandated by or based on the agreement is not correct. It is just a way of hyping up the argument, in the same way that some people suggest that the current peace might be threatened by what is happening here. That is the equivalent of shroud-waving and is not something that we should be too concerned about.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill (LD)
My Lords, when the Minister replies to this debate he has a choice. He can focus on the amendment and explain why it is unnecessary—which he can probably do fairly easily. If he does that, but does no more than that, the Government will be losing a very important opportunity, which is to reply to the remarkable speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and seek to reassure the inhabitants of Ireland, north and south, about the very real concerns that have been expressed by my noble friend Lord Alderdice and the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Trimble, among others.
I am not Irish, although there are times when I wish that I were; but I have lived in Ireland as a privileged guest of the nation for 44 years. I am a member of the Bar of Northern Ireland and of the Republic. I have been frequently to the north, as well as living in the Republic. I say to the Minister—if he does not know it already—that the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, are not debating points; they are very real. As the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, said, Ireland joined the European Community when we did. I think that the Irish were always more European than we were; they saw John Bull’s island as between them and Europe and saw their destiny in Europe—and Ireland has benefited enormously from its membership of the European Union, as have we.
The troubles mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, are acute and I am concerned that, whatever happens with the amendment, which I regard as trivial compared with these issues, both in the debate on Second Reading and in the White Paper the Government have shown a disregard for the seriousness of the issues affecting Ireland as a whole. I urge the Minister, if not today then as soon as he possibly can, to make sure that full reassurance is given to the people of Ireland, north and south, about the concerns that have been expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Hain. That is far more important than the fate of this amendment.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I declare two interests as the last surviving member of the Whitelaw commission which led to the Sunningdale agreement in the 1970s and as a long-standing fan of the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, who in his assessment of the situation in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland speaks for nearly all of us. The only questions for us today are what this has to do with the Bill before us and why this amendment is necessary now. If, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, has just suggested, we are asking for reassurances, I think that we can give them. As my noble friend Lord Trimble has said, the common travel area has been in place since 1923. The trade interests of the Republic of Ireland with the United Kingdom are overwhelming and growing very fast, not only in goods and agriculture but obviously in services as well. It seems to have been largely overlooked that the services element in international trade is rising much faster than the goods element, leading to more and more of the earnings of both the whole of the United Kingdom and the Republic being expressed through digital and data transformation. Indeed, McKinsey has said that it represents more than half the total earnings of international trade. The whole pattern of trade has changed radically in the past 10 to 15 years with digitalisation and it should come into every assessment of the new relationship.
The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, is right to say that the problem lies with the European Union. Will it be able, first, to accept the common travel area—it must because it was there long before the European Economic Community was formed—and will it accept that concessions are needed, or bilateral arrangements of the kind that can perfectly well be organised now between the Republic and the United Kingdom, of which Northern Ireland is a part? In the low-tariff world we are moving into, indeed a zero-tariff world more generally with 80% of all industrial goods not covered by tariffs—people talk as though tariffs are a wall, but they are not—I think that we can be assured that a practical solution is possible. I imagine that it has already been discussed by Ministers and many officials in Dublin, Belfast and London.
I am absolutely sure that various elements of gluing the situation together can develop, with one that I cannot resist adding being that Dublin is showing an enormous interest in association with the Commonwealth. One of the most lively branches of the Royal Commonwealth Society—I declare an interest as its president—is in Dublin. It is attracting a great deal of interest because the Republic sees more and more that its future lies in its relations with the rest of the British Isles while working within the reforming European system, which is going to be difficult because the EU is going through vast political, economic and social changes. So I see very little problem—I do not say that there is no problem because the noble Lord, Lord Hain, speaks with authority—and believe that it can be resolved through good will on all sides. I see that good will in place and there is absolutely no necessity for bringing this issue into the Bill before us.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, from our perspective here, Northern Ireland is the forgotten part of the UK. It rarely gets a mention in this House and there is little media coverage in the London-based press. I am worried about Northern Ireland, and two or three years of answering for the Government on Northern Ireland issues taught me that politics in Northern Ireland is not as solved as people in England often assume it to be. I am worried about Northern Ireland because it is clearly a difficult time, with the breakdown of power-sharing and the imminent election. Clearly there are difficulties in personal relations that have not always existed in recent years.
Lord Kerslake (CB)
My Lords, I shall speak in general support of the issues raised by this group. I have not put my name to any particular amendment but I feel that the issues raised demand proper debate. This is the first time that I have spoken in any of the Brexit debates in this House. I have a personal interest: my mother came over from Ireland after the war and made this country her home. Due to a long-standing personal commitment, I made the start of the Second Reading debate but was not able to take up my speaking slot. Therefore, before coming to specific issues, I will say a few words about my overall position on the Bill.
I voted remain in the referendum. This did not make me a cheerleader for the EU. I could see its current difficulties and challenges all too clearly. Indeed, anyone involved in negotiations on EU structural funds would have been in no doubt about those challenges. However, on balance, I believed that it was clearly in the interests of this country to remain—if you like, a realistic rather than a reluctant remainer.
The referendum result answered one question: whether this country wished to remain in the EU. However, as others have said, it left a whole lot of other questions unanswered. Should we remain in the single market? How can we best secure the future of the United Kingdom, something I feel very passionately about? What should our approach be to EU and EEA citizens? Those are just three examples of questions that we should be debating in these amendments. To want to debate these issues is not the same as wanting to block or delay the Bill. Reviewing, scrutinising and proposing amendments to legislation is, after all, what we are here to do.
Much has been said about the ardent remainers, if I can call them that, being in denial of the referendum result. I have no doubt that there are some—maybe even some in the Chamber—who fit that description. However, my biggest concern is the ardent leavers, who seem to be in denial of the enormous risks that a badly handled Brexit will have for our economic, social and political interests or, indeed, how much we are going to have to give up in order to secure Brexit on the terms currently envisaged. We cannot simply hope for the best and leave these issues to the outcome of the negotiations. The likely result of that approach is that we will be left with Hobson’s choice: vote for a deal that we are deeply unhappy about or face being bundled out of the EU without an agreement. It is much better to discuss, debate and, where necessary, vote on the issues now.
Turning to the amendments in this group, the Government’s Brexit White Paper sets out 12 principles, one of which is:
“Protecting our strong historic ties with Ireland and maintaining the Common Travel Area”.
It rightly highlights the extensive movement of goods, services and people across the border and says that the Government will work with the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to find “a practical solution”. What is much less clear in the plan, however, is how this principle will be reconciled with the other principles in the plan and, if they cannot be reconciled, which principle will take precedence.
Paragraph 4.4 of the White Paper says:
“When the UK leaves the EU we aim to have as seamless and frictionless a border as possible”.
So there will be a border. Like much of the White Paper, the clear headline principle at the start of the chapter is undermined by the text. The question is not whether we have a border, it is how seamless it is.
As many have said this afternoon, the issues here go well beyond free trade and free movement. The report of the EU Committee made it clear that the implications of Brexit for Ireland were more profound than for any other member state. Indeed, in my own discussions with the Republic of Ireland when I was head of the Civil Service, the prospect of Britain exiting from the EU and the potential consequences was by far their biggest concern. This fear has now become a reality. It seems clear that the harder the Brexit, the harder the border. It will in effect become an external customs border of the EU. While of course there may be some shroud waving, we cannot ignore the comments of former Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who was after all instrumental to the Good Friday agreement, that Brexit might put the peace process in jeopardy. There must surely be no circumstances in which we could contemplate that happening.
Of course, the EU Commission negotiators have an important role here. I recognise that, but in the end this will come down to the choices we make in the negotiations. What negotiating goal finds priority over another? In my view, our commitment to both the letter and spirit of the Good Friday agreement must—I emphasise must—stand above most if not all our other ambitions. I sincerely hope that the Minister will confirm this in his response.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
Thank you. About 25 years ago, I was a member of the independent Opsahl Commission on the future of Northern Ireland. Through that, I learned a lot about the economic and social problems faced by Northern Ireland and also became acutely aware of how in the rest of Britain these problems, and Northern Ireland, generally were pretty much ignored other than through the lens of the Troubles. Plus ça change, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, already noted.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, quoted from the EU Committee report on UK/Irish relations that the implications of Brexit for Ireland are more profound than they are for any other member state. The report went on to say that the profound issues raised for the island of Ireland are often overlooked on the British side of the Irish Sea. That is why I very much welcome these amendments and believe that there is a role for us to debate them in the context of the Bill. They should not be overlooked by your Lordships’ House. It would be a tragedy if Brexit undermined the Good Friday agreement and the continuing peace process—as many fear it will, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, said earlier.
At Second Reading I spoke about some of the human rights implications of Brexit, which are especially profound for Northern Ireland, as the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission both underlined. I have just had brought to my attention a speech by a member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission which raises important questions for the Article 50 negotiations. She asked whether human rights and equality could be mainstreamed into European Council guidelines for a withdrawal agreement, pointing out that,
“the EU is founded in its governing Treaties on stated values including equality and human rights”.
She goes on:
“What this could mean in relation to the concrete content of the negotiating guidelines and the withdrawal agreement we don’t know. Questions that have been asked in the European Parliament in relation to the peace process and Brexit have been met with stock answers pending the triggering of Art 50. But it might be important to remember the primordial status of human rights and equality when it comes to questions such as how human rights can be protected for all rights holders in NI, including those holding Irish or dual citizenship under GFA, and what consideration is to be given to provision for cross-border rights in relation to free movement, welfare rights and mobility, etc. Following from Arts 2, 6 and 21, the principles of human rights and equality should be included as core in the negotiating guidelines”.
So this is important for this Bill when we consider it.
She goes on to say that,
“it is vital that the EU-UK withdrawal agreement expressly protects the Good Friday Agreement. The EC treaty itself is a peace agreement which in its origins in the 1957 treaty resolved to ‘strengthen the safeguards of peace’”—
as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said so eloquently earlier. She said that,
“it can’t be overstated that the exit agreement to be concluded between the EU and the UK must not now undermine the peace that has been achieved in Northern Ireland with such difficulty, perseverance and commitment on all sides. The GFA is founded on a golden thread of respect for human rights and equality. The EU’s external action is … a binding commitment ‘to preserve peace and prevent conflicts’ and the withdrawal agreement must honour this”.
Those are very important words and I would welcome the Minister’s observations on these crucial points regarding human rights generally, and the Good Friday agreement in particular.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I will raise a point that was not raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, but was very much on my mind as someone who was closely involved in the negotiations over Protocol 36, under which the United Kingdom withdrew from a large number of justice and home affairs provisions, and then opted back into the 35 most important ones. This point was raised both at Second Reading, by my noble friend Lord Blair, and in the debate that we had on the new Select Committee’s report on justice and home affairs.
The relevance for the matter that we are discussing today is very real, because those of us who took evidence on that matter know perfectly well that the underpinning of the Belfast agreement, the open border and everything else depends on the strengthening of law enforcement co-operation that has taken place in recent years under EU legislation. The European arrest warrant, the exchange of criminal record information, Europol: this great raft of things underpins, and above all has helped to achieve, the depoliticisation of these law enforcement issues between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
All those bits of EU legislation are now at risk. There is no doubt about that. The Prime Minister herself, who, after all, is well aware of the problems in this area and negotiated very effectively in the case of Protocol 36, knows it extremely well. However, she has said that no deal is better than a bad deal. No deal means that we go over the cliff, as far as all this law enforcement legislation is concerned. I would therefore like to hear from the Minister, when he replies to this amendment—which I am speaking in favour of—just how the Government intend to avoid that situation. They need a better story to tell than they have had hitherto. Frankly, the story has been thin and threadbare so far: it is a statement of assertions, desires and wishes but of absolutely no sense of direction in how to get there. I hope that the Minister will address this issue, along with all the other ones that other noble Lords, and particularly the noble Lord, Lord Hain, raised. It is an important one and there is no plan B in this case. If we go over the cliff there are no WTO trade rules that we can fall back on: there is just nothing.
Lord Pendry
My Lords, I wish to associate myself with the amendment so ably and eloquently moved by my noble friend Lord Hain. I intend to raise the problems that beset certain industries in Northern Ireland, particularly the largest economic provider in terms of employment and revenue, the agri-food sector. I declare an interest at this point: I served in the 1970s as a Minister in the Callaghan Administration, in particular for agriculture, which experienced enormous problems—problems galore—as a result of the complexities of the common agricultural policy, which affected the north adversely in relation to the south.
One recognises that the Government, at least on paper, are committed to doing their level best to secure the best possible arrangements for a smooth transition to a cross-border solution between the north and south of Ireland during negotiations, and will work closely with the Republic of Ireland in so doing. However, these could be soft words unless meaningful action is taken. No meaningful indications appear to have emerged from the debates in the other place of any positive proposals of a practical nature. I hope that in the course of our endeavours, the Minister in this House will cover some of the positive suggestions that were made in the other place and will give us an indication of how the Government will address some of the problems that will certainly emerge in the weeks and months ahead—indeed, in the next two years. I intend at a later stage to mention one or two of the problems facing the Ulster Farmers Union.
In the White Paper, the Government stated their intention to have,
“as seamless and frictionless a border as possible”,
between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but it is not clear, certainly not to me, that this means anything that we can pin them down to. Once Northern Ireland and the Republic are no longer both members of the European Union, the question is: is a border inevitable? There are concerns among politicians from both the north and the south that the return of a border, even a light customs border, could bring about bad memories of a troubled past. Northern Ireland is distinctly different from Scotland and Wales in that it faces significant challenges from Brexit. The Irish border is a major factor for Northern Ireland, with its high dependence on the Republic. That has to be seen and understood by our negotiators and Northern Ireland needs to be armed with the necessary ammunition to fight its corner during these almost certainly difficult talks that lie ahead.
Although Northern Ireland has an overall high dependence on the EU, recent figures show that, unlike any other country in the UK, over 50% of Northern Ireland’s exports go to EU countries and almost 40% to the Republic in particular. From that it is clear that if barriers were erected, the situation in both the north and the south would be detrimental. Should trade barriers be erected, without question, the agricultural and related industries will suffer.
Lord Rooker (Lab)
Perhaps I might give my noble friend a practical example of what he has just said. The EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee recently received evidence that the milk in Baileys Irish Cream crosses the border during manufacturing six times.
Lord Pendry
My Lords, I was coming to that, but may not put it as well as my noble friend did. It is understandable that farmers in the Irish agri-food sector are concerned that their fears will not be heard during these negotiations. Smaller producers especially are clearly worried, and this is where I come to the point that smaller producers and traders—fisheries, dairy farmers and meat producers, for example—cross the border daily to trade. It is of the utmost importance that we work to maintain existing trade connections between the north and the south during the negotiations before we consider withdrawing from the European Union. In both the south and the north, agriculture and the agri-food industries are highly significant to the economy. It is estimated by the Northern Ireland Food and Drink Association that the number of jobs in 2010 in the agriculture and agri-food industries was 92,000, including direct employees, farmers and those in the supply chain. The situation, I suspect, has not changed very much since then.
The North/South Ministerial Council in Dublin and the Irish Government have agreed—as, we hope, will the Northern Ireland Executive—that, following the Brexit negotiations, they will work together to ensure that the important north-south co-operative structures are fully protected. Without setting up any new structures to existing frameworks, the current North/South Ministerial Council should continue to be the forum, although it may have to be strengthened in changing circumstances. The overriding aim must surely be that the sharing of information and co-operation between both sides of the divide are protected, as this will prove essential for the smooth running of Brexit.
Having served, as I said, as a Minister in the Callaghan Government, with my primary responsibility that of agriculture, I recognise that there are particular difficulties in so far as at that time the south had a massive advantage over the north. My throat is playing tricks with me, so with those words I merely say that I agree with this amendment and hope that when the Minister replies, he will recognise some of the important issues facing the agricultural industry in Northern Ireland.
Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD)
My Lords, I will just make a short intervention. It is many years since I was happily debating, hour after hour, the Northern Ireland police Bill, and it is very heartening to see so many Members of your Lordships’ House show such an interest in Northern Ireland matters. As a recently retired member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, I warmly support the amendment. I know how much concern there is about the effect Brexit will have on both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The foundations of the peace process are built on an open and accessible island of Ireland. It is welcome that the Government are committed to ensuring a frictionless border between the north and south, but they have not said how this might be achieved. Can the Minister enlighten us? We must have more clarity from Ministers on the practical implications of Brexit for the 35,000 people estimated to cross the border every day. Can the Government guarantee freedom of movement on the island of Ireland? I would like to think that they could.
This was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, but your Lordships also need to know that the Police Service of Northern Ireland is on record stating that the security risks posed to police and border control officers are of great concern. Officers are still acting under severe threat, meaning that an attack from dissidents could happen at any time. There have been recent attempts on the lives of officers in north Belfast and Londonderry/Derry. If police officers were to be deployed to customs posts on a fixed border, as the noble Lord said, they would become sitting targets. What extra measures are the Government taking to ensure these concerns are addressed and that the incredibly brave and dedicated officers and staff of the PSNI will be consulted on any future changes to their functions?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, I hesitate to intervene on Irish matters but no one has spoken to Amendment 30, which is grouped with these amendments, or explained the thinking behind it. It has extraordinary implications for Scotland. It says that it should be a,
“priority in negotiations … for the Prime Minister to seek terms that would not give rise to any external impediment to the ability of the people of the island of Ireland to exercise the right, on the basis of the consent of the people of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, to bring about a united Ireland, to be treated as a European Union Member State”.
I assume—contrary to his position—that the noble Lord, Lord Hain, accepts the view that if people vote in a referendum that should be taken as the consent of the people. If so, that suggests—as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, pointed out—that it should be part of the Government’s negotiations to secure the right of Northern Ireland, if it voted in a referendum to become part of a united Ireland, to automatically become part of the European Union. If the Government were to embark upon such a negotiation, I would find it difficult to understand why that would not enable the Scottish nationalists to argue that what was good for the goose was good for the gander, or perhaps it is the other way round. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said that it is completely different because this is part of the United Kingdom joining a state that is a member of the European Union, and not the other way round. I very much doubt if Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond would present it that way.
The main point I want to make is that this is a Bill about firing the starting gun for Article 50. There are many issues, and there is great sympathy in the House for the position of Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister has said, in the clearest possible terms, what the Government’s policy is. Frankly, some of these amendments and speeches do not seem to be prepared to take yes for an answer. The idea that we have to amend the Bill in order to hold the Government’s feet to the fire for their policy on something as important as this is pretty extraordinary. We go back to the fundamental point: the President of the Commission, the leader of the Opposition and the then Prime Minister all wanted to implement Article 50 immediately. The Prime Minister is anxious to get on with the negotiations; these issues will have to be considered. The noble Baroness, Lady Harris, said, “We accept that, but we want to know how you are going to do it”. The very worst thing you can do in any negotiation is announce in advance how are you going to negotiate, because then you are committed to that position and the people on the other side will make it very difficult for you, so I worry about Amendment 30 in particular. It illustrates how foolish it would be to amend this Bill—which is after all starting the process. I have no doubt there will be many happy hours for us to discuss those issues of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the future, and the implications for Scotland, the EEA and everything else. But I venture to suggest that this is not the Bill in which to do so.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, I remember that at the time of the negotiations leading up to the agreement in Belfast, the EU was there in the forefront being supportive, and indeed EU finance developed cross-border projects and played a significant part in the process.
I want to make two points. First, whatever we think, we know that the Irish Government are deeply concerned about this issue. We are belittling their concerns if we say, “We don’t need to bother about this amendment because it’ll be all right in the end”. We all know that the previous Taoiseach, the present one and many other people are very concerned. We owe it to them at least to show that we are concerned about the situation.
My key point is that I think it would be right to have the amendment in the Bill if for no other reason than that it would send a signal to Brussels. It is all right saying that the Prime Minister will do her best in the negotiations, but I would have thought that in her position she would be much better off if we had the amendment in the Bill; it would strengthen her resolve and she could say, “The British Parliament is so concerned about it that we have put it on the face of the Bill”. That is why we should move forward with the amendment.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, I notice that the amendment has been signed by virtually a who’s who of people who have had a high profile in Northern Ireland affairs over many years. For that reason, one has to take seriously what has been put before us. The truth, though, is that today we have really been having a Second Reading debate, not a debate on the amendment. I suppose that in the absence of a Speaker to slap us down, we will probably all be tempted on to that turf.
There are a couple of things I want to say at the outset. I have heard absolutely no one, in any political party or any Government, say that they wish to see a hard border. The closest we came to anyone saying we had to have one was the official to whom the noble Lord, Lord Hain, referred. No one wants it. The British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, which a number of us are associated with, is working to ensure that it does not happen. Both our Governments are working to that effect, and Brussels has openly said it has got the message. With that sort of momentum, I believe we will find means.
I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Hain, to the extent that at this stage I would rule out nothing electronic or technical, or indeed any form of technology. We do not need to paint ourselves into a corner; it all may have a part to play. I am quite sure that it already has a part to play in everyday life, in tracking criminals and so on, so we should not rule out what could be a contributing factor to finding what we all want, which is a solution other than concrete and barbed wire. Why should we rule out one possible solution at the very outset?
The House is greatly adorned by many senior legal figures who have demonstrated their robustness and capability in recent months. I am not a lawyer—I am absolving myself of any responsibility in advance—but we have had two recent cases that I wish to refer to. My fundamental disagreement with the amendment is that it is my belief that we are making a mistake in linking the Belfast agreement with triggering Article 50; they are two totally separate things. That is not just me talking. I refer to the two cases against Brexit that were brought to the Belfast High Court last September, one by a well-known victims campaigner and the other by a group of human rights organisations and Stormont politicians, including the leaders of the SDLP, the Greens and the Alliance and a Sinn Fein former Minister. The premise of each case was that taking Northern Ireland out of the EU would breach the Belfast agreement. The High Court heard both cases together and rejected them on every point.
It is worth a quick run-through of those points to demonstrate how comprehensively the breach has been debunked. The plaintiffs claimed that the constitutional establishment in Northern Ireland was being changed without the population’s permission, contrary to the consent principle underpinning the entire peace process. They said that the nine mentions of the EU in the agreement mean that membership is “inextricably woven” into the law enacting it. However, the High Court in Belfast came to the conclusion that references to the EU in the agreement are “incidental”—the judge’s own word. The Northern Ireland Attorney-General, John Larkin, decided to refer some aspects of this to the Supreme Court because, although he felt there was no link, he wanted to make absolutely certain that there was clarity at the highest possible level.
When the Supreme Court produced its decision in the Miller case—a split decision, although there was a substantial majority—it was unanimous on the issue specific to the Northern Ireland case, and said, without any caveat, “This is not a breach”. That is the highest court in the land. When it came to other treaty issues, such as the treaty between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland that deals with the border poll and issues surrounding that which are obviously linked to this group of amendments, it added that nothing about Northern Ireland’s removal from the EU breached any law, any treaty or any part of the constitution.
We were all horrified when the headline “Enemies of the People” appeared before us some months ago and, when the Gina Miller case came to a conclusion, everyone said that we must respect the views of the court and accept that a decision had been made. Here we have the clearest of clear decisions—that there is no breach of any treaty, of any Act or of the constitution as a result of the decision to leave the European Union, whatever we happen to think of that decision. I therefore contend that the amendment is defective, in that it tries to put on the face of the Bill an agreement that is not relevant, when no offence or violence is being done to the constitution of the United Kingdom.
The noble Lord, Lord Hain, said that one possibility was to devolve immigration powers to Stormont. If we did that, I assure noble Lords that people would need a pass to go from County Antrim to County Down. The last thing we need is to devolve immigration powers to Stormont. Stormont cannot agree a budget; it cannot agree anything at present. Sadly, the place has fallen in on itself again. The idea of giving it an immigration power is fanciful, and would be extremely dangerous.
The concept of special status has been mentioned. That term referred to the special category status of prisoners in the Maze prison—or Long Kesh, as it then was—which led to the hunger strike. “Special status”, certainly to a unionist, means something less than being part of the United Kingdom—and that is exactly what it would be. The fact remains that either we are in the United Kingdom or we are not. When we were trying to design the Belfast agreement—I thank my noble friend Lord Trimble for giving me and the noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney, the opportunity to be part of the team that negotiated it—we found ways, through that agreement, of resolving these very difficult issues.
The problem with leaving the European Union is not breaches of the Belfast agreement; the political problem is leaving the European Union. It may be what is upsetting a lot of nationalists, and a lot of people in Dublin, but it is not relevant to this Bill. There is something I want to say to Ministers about this—something I have raised with them many times, both privately and in this House. When it comes down to it, we need assurances that there are red lines in the forthcoming negotiations, and one of those red lines must be that there will be no internal border within the United Kingdom.
We have been talking about the border with the Republic, and I totally agree about an open free border. I had the privilege of being the Northern Ireland Minister who started up InterTradeIreland and Tourism Ireland—two of the north/south bodies—and I can say that nobody I have come across wishes to see any border, in terms of a physical construction.
Lord Davies of Stamford
What a depressing afternoon this is. If we in this legislature were trying to get rid of barriers, borders and frontiers between people, what a good day’s work we would be doing, instead of which we are talking about creating new barriers and frontiers between us and the continent, between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and possibly potentially between England and Scotland. Those are all very depressing thoughts.
One of the advantages of Committee is that we can have a debate. It is possible to respond to what other people have said and, if what they suggest is plainly possible, it is obviously very desirable to take it on board. I thought that my noble friend introduced his Amendment 2, which I strongly support, with a brilliant speech. I agree with every word of it except one very important sentence, to which the noble Lord, Lord Empey, referred in a very powerful speech—namely, it is utterly intolerable and inconceivable that we should have an internal border within the United Kingdom. I regard that as an utterly unacceptable solution. We need two sets of red lines in these negotiations. We must have no borders within the United Kingdom and no border between the Republic of Ireland and the Province of Northern Ireland—between the 26 and the six counties. Those two things should be absolutely immovable desiderata and requirements of the British Government in conducting these negotiations. I hope, and believe, that we would have the understanding of Brussels and the rest of the European Union in insisting on those two points.
I was mystified by one of the things that the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, said and quite shocked by another. I was mystified when he said that freedom of movement in Ireland, called the common travel area—it is exactly the same thing—has been in place since 1923, so it would be nothing new if it was somehow modified or constrained. The Irish Free State came into being only in January 1922 when the treaty was ratified, so there was never a border before then. Clearly we were then part of the same country. If there has never been a border since 1923, on that calculation there has been only one year in the course of the last 800 years of Anglo-Irish history in which there has been any restriction on freedom of movement within Ireland. That being the case—I believe it to be the case—it would be profoundly shocking and would have a traumatic effect if we suddenly started to introduce one now. What a very sad thing to do after the last 20 years. The thing that shocked me, though, was when the noble Lord appeared to say that if the Irish Republic was observing its own interests, it should leave the European Union. I remind him that the people of the six counties voted very substantially to remain in the European Union only a few months ago. Surely, in all courtesy, we should leave it to the people of the 26 counties to make their own decision on that matter and not lecture them from the British Parliament—a habit which I am afraid has become too bad a habit over too many centuries.
The matter we are discussing is particularly important because during the Bill’s passage we will debate other matters such as the single market. We have already had a go at that and will come back to it. If we make a big mistake in that regard—we know that we may well make some very big mistakes—we shall be the major sufferers. But in this matter we shall not be the major or the only sufferers; the equal or the substantial sufferers—certainly the equal, perhaps the greater sufferers—will be the people of the island of Ireland. Therefore, we should be particularly concerned to get matters right.
Some people, including probably the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, will not like what I am about to say. However, I remind the House that this country’s and Great Britain’s relations with Ireland over the last 800 years have been just about as hideous as relations between neighbours could ever get. Right from the 12th century, the Anglo-Norman invaders imposed on the Irish exploitation and a form of apartheid-type discrimination. In the Reformation that was followed by persecutions of a different kind. We had the massacres under Queen Elizabeth. We had the massacres under Oliver Cromwell of every man, woman and child in the cities of Drogheda and Wexford.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I knew that some noble Lords on the other side would not like this but they are going to hear it. We had the heartless expropriations of Catholic property by Oliver Cromwell, and again in the 18th century, contrary to the Treaty of Limerick. We had a series of broken promises—four major historic broken promises—the Treaty of Limerick itself, the promise made to Grattan’s Parliament in 1782, the promise made by Pitt in 1800 to introduce Catholic emancipation and the promise made by Asquith to bring in, live up to and carry out the third home rule Bill. All those promises were broken.
Even at that point the British Government did not get it. We did not get the Easter rebellion. We tried to impose conscription on Ireland. Even when Sinn Fein won every seat in the November 1918 elections except, I think, for two in the 26 counties, we still did not get it and, within two months, we had the Anglo-Irish war. We know what happened to that. After the treaty, we neglected Irish matters in this House. We allowed Stormont to get away with an absolutely scandalous programme of deliberate job and housing discrimination—job discrimination even explicitly encouraged by a unionist Prime Minister by the way—and other breaches of civil rights, and, of course we did not get it. We did not intervene after the attack on the civil rights march by Paisley’s thugs at Burntollet bridge. We then had the appalling violence and terrorism by the IRA.
In the last 20 years we have had the brightest moment in Anglo-Irish history that we have had in 800 years, starting with the Belfast agreement. It may have been prepared before the Belfast agreement in the great co-operation that took place between our two countries after we both joined the European Union. I remember Garret FitzGerald, a very great Taoiseach, saying to me once over lunch that that had transformed the position of the Irish and the British. After 800 years in which we had been the patronising imperialists and the Irish had been the petitioners, we were equals, involved in the same programme and the same agenda in the European Union, or the European Community, as it was originally, and we needed each other’s support and votes to get our business done. That was the basis on which a new relationship was created. That has been a great asset and great achievement of the last generation. It is now at risk if we gratuitously decide to impose a border upon the beautiful country and proud people of Ireland. It does not matter whether the border is a mechanical border, a human border, an electronic border, an analogue border or a digital border, it is a border, a frontier. That is the important psychological fact and we cannot get away from it. There is no way you can get away from it. It is completely and utterly out of the question. The Government are quite good at saying that we had the discussion on the previous set of amendments about them dismissing the idea of our remaining in the single market through being a member of the EEA. Why do the Government not—as they should—dismiss the idea altogether of being a party to the end of freedom of movement in the island of Ireland, let alone, of course, within the United Kingdom itself?
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, we should remember Sir John Major and Albert Reynolds and the fact that my noble friend Lord Trimble shared the Nobel prize with John Hume for what they did to create the foundation for a peaceful settlement. No one in this Chamber needs a lecture from my friend the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, and a rehearsal of Irish history—a very poor rehearsal as my noble friend Lord Trimble interjects.
We have had some very notable speeches in this debate. I pay particular tribute to my noble friend Lord Empey and the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice—
Lord Davies of Stamford
The noble Lord is very welcome to correct me and if I have made a historical error I apologise, but will he tell the House what the historical error was?
Lord Cormack
The noble Lord certainly left out Henry VIII and many other things. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, put the thing beautifully in context and gave a very remarkable speech. We should all be grateful to my friend the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for introducing the amendment in the way that he did but I hope he will not push it to a vote. I say that with great respect. He knows I mean that because I had many dealings with him when he was Secretary of State and I had the honour to be the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in another place. I had members of seven parties on my committee and we remained unanimous throughout, even though we looked at issues such as organised crime, prisons and many others. He knows how closely we worked together as a committee.
What we need today—and I hope we will get it—is an assurance from my noble friend the Minister that the Government truly recognise the importance of the points that have been raised. They recognise that Northern Ireland is not only in many ways the most beautiful part of the United Kingdom but also the most vulnerable. We are not going to strengthen this procedural Bill by hanging this amendment on it. There may well be a time when we return in the context of the negotiations that will follow. There may well be amendments later in this Bill that I will feel I need to support to ask colleagues in the other place to think again, but this is not one of them and I very much hope that my friend the noble Lord, Lord Hain, will withdraw his amendment at the end of the debate.
Baroness O'Loan (CB)
My Lords, I actually live in Northern Ireland and have lived there for the past nearly 50 years; I have experienced the Troubles personally, having lost a child in a bomb explosion, and having nearly lost a son to a sectarian attack. Article 50 is about taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union—it is not about the Good Friday agreement; it is not about the security of Northern Ireland. To attempt to introduce it in this haphazard and hasty way—with great respect to noble Lords—does not serve the interests of the country. The interests of the security and the economy of the United Kingdom and the security and the economy of the Irish Republic will be best served if these things are dealt with in the course of negotiations, with complete flexibility. We should not, in any way, attempt to fetter the discretion of the Prime Minister. This is not an amendment that would benefit the United Kingdom or any part of it.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
My Lords, on behalf of these Benches I shall speak very briefly in favour of Amendment 2. As has been said by other noble Lords, the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union and there has been a commitment by all to no return to a hard border. The years of hard-earned peace have become an example to the rest of the world and we should acknowledge that this process has in no small part been aided by UK and Irish membership of the European Union and the equality of status that this has granted at European Council and Council of Ministers meetings. However, as the Government have announced their intention to remove the UK from the customs union, the Northern Irish border with Ireland will de facto become the EU’s external border. Under EU law, a bilateral customs union between Ireland and the United Kingdom is not permissible for Ireland as an EU member state unless special status is granted by the EU. The people of Northern Ireland deserve clarity on how this will work in practice before Article 50 is triggered.
I welcome that President Juncker said last week that the EU does not want a hard border. He said,
“we want land borders being as open as possible”.
There has been concern that there is a lack of awareness in Brussels about the complexities involved in maintaining the Good Friday agreement post Brexit. My greater concern, however, is that there is a lack of awareness of these complexities among many British politicians, most particularly among the hard-line Brexiteers, who all too frequently have a very English focus. There are so many unanswered questions on how all this will work in practice. As the noble Lord, Lord Hain, said, there are 200 crossing points on the border, with 177,000 lorries and 1.85 million cars crossing per month. Since the Good Friday agreement, there are increased shared public services, with school and hospital provision frequently being based on the nearest available services irrespective of the border.
There are unanswered questions, too, about the freedom of movement of people within the EU. How will the promised frictionless Northern Irish border work with the promised curb on the freedom of movement of EU nationals announced in the Daily Telegraph today?
Visiting friends in Northern Ireland last month, I was struck by people’s very real concerns about the future and maintaining the progress made through the Good Friday agreement after Brexit. At the very least, the Government need to give much greater clarity on exactly how they propose to maintain a genuinely open border before they trigger Article 50. The people of Northern Ireland deserve no less.
Lord Kilclooney (CB)
My Lords, I want to comment briefly on one or two points. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, in his historical analysis of Ireland forgot the Battle of the Boyne. I am amazed. Secondly, he forgot the fact that there used to be no Irish living in Ireland. They invaded the island. The Scotti lived on the island originally. The Irish invaded our island and drove the Scotti out, and they went 20 miles away to a country now called Scotland. That is where it gets its name from—the Scotti who were driven out of the island of Scotia. When the Irish invaded, they changed it to Hibernia. Read Magnus Magnusson’s book on the history of Ireland.
I am the one Member here who lives near the border and I do not want to see a hard border. I want to see the common travel area preserved. I speak as one who was a very active European. I was chairman of the European Youth Campaign in Northern Ireland. I campaigned strongly in the EEC referendum. I then became an MEP for 10 years and, after that, I spent seven years in the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. Likewise, living near the border, I was very keen on north-south relations at a time when the Dublin Government refused to even recognise that Northern Ireland existed.
When I became chairman of the Young Unionist Council—in the middle of the last century—I said we would meet people in Dublin to see if we could start improving relations. We arranged to have a meeting in Dublin with the central branch of Fine Gael. The Ulster Unionist Party went crackers. They said I would get expelled. We should not do it. How can you talk to somebody who does not even recognise that you exist? We went to Dublin and had our meeting. I looked at the Irish Times three weeks later and what did I see? “Party branch expelled”. I thought, “My goodness”, but it was the central branch of Fine Gael that had been expelled for meeting the unionists. That is life in Ireland.
I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, who was quite right to say that the southern Irish are petrified about the impact of Brexit. I see it every day where I live. Thousands of people now come every day from the Republic to Northern Ireland for the obvious reason. The depreciation of the pound sterling means that the ladies all come up to our border towns to do their weekly shop. Our border towns are now—“exploding” is the wrong word to use—absolutely thriving, and people along the border who think about the economics say what a great thing Brexit is. However, it is worse for the Republic of Ireland. The largest number of its tourists come from England and, because of the 15% depreciation, tourism is now going into decline.
A second point is that meat cannot be exported from the Republic to Britain because, again, meat prices are down by 15%. Farmers are now demonstrating outside supermarkets in the Republic because of the collapse in the prices. Furthermore, mushroom plants are closing down. Hundreds of people have already lost their jobs for the same reason: they cannot export mushrooms.
Of course, a special status is required for someone but not for Northern Ireland. It is offensive to suggest that it should have a special status. It is the Republic that needs it. We must keep the common travel area there, and we must get Brussels to recognise, as the Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland has stated, that the Republic will be more seriously damaged than any other nation in the European Union. It will suffer badly. It is suffering already, but what will it be like in two and a half years’ time when the United Kingdom leaves the European Union? The Republic of Ireland needs special status and we should support it in its attempts to get that in Brussels. As one who lives on the border, I say: keep the common travel area.
I was involved in the negotiations on the Belfast agreement and I have an original copy of it here. There is not one mention of the European Union in any of the four articles at the end of the agreement. Of course, human rights are mentioned but that is in relation to the Council of Europe; it has nothing to do with the European Union. I will oppose the amendment.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate lasting almost two hours. I am making a guest appearance at this Dispatch Box as the Minister for Political Development who partly chaired the peace process 20 years ago. When I look around this Chamber—I cannot look behind me but they are there—I see a large number of noble Lords who took part in the talks on that agreement.
I do not accept that the amendments in my name are intended to frustrate in any way the passage of the Bill. Because I am sure that the Minister will give us proper undertakings, it is unlikely that I will move them. However, I think that noble Lords would agree that the quality of the debate and the number of people who have spoken indicate the importance of the subject. I do not think that there has been anything more important in my political lifetime than the Northern Ireland peace process, and the second most significant process is what we are debating today: Brexit—and I say that as a remainer. The interrelationship between the two is extremely important. I see today’s debate as a starter—a reminder to the Government that they have to address huge issues with regard to Northern Ireland and Ireland, and in the few minutes available to me I would like to touch on them.
In the debate in the other place some weeks ago, there was a speech by Owen Paterson, whom I regarded as a very committed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, but I disagreed with him on the following. He said that he wanted to correct the narrative that the European Union played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace process. When I was appointed as the talks Minister, I was also appointed Minister for Europe. That is no coincidence, because Europe played a huge and significant role in the peace process. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney, that strands 1, 2 and 3 of the Northern Ireland talks referred to aspects of our membership of the European Union.
I will now comment on the remarks of my noble friend Lord Empey. He said, quite rightly, that it is not the legalities of this issue that matter but what produced the agreement, and it was the politics and the international treaty between the two countries that did that. There was a will on the part of the two countries and, above all, a commitment by all the political parties in Northern Ireland to come to the Good Friday agreement. It was our joint membership of the European Union, as opposed to any legalities or technicalities, that meant that Ministers from both countries were able to meet: the Taoiseach and the Prime Minister, Ministers at Council of Europe meetings, and Members of Parliament through the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly or its equivalent in those days. I remember taking the entire Northern Ireland Assembly to Brussels at the invitation of the European Union so that Members could see how important Europe was to the future of Northern Ireland. The excellent report produced by the House’s European Union Committee on British-Irish relations post Brexit says that joint membership has been a “vital ingredient” in those relations. Of course it has.
Money was important, too. Northern Ireland had Objective 1 status, and that was significant to the people of Northern Ireland. As noble Lords have said, there was also the peace money, which was unique in the whole of Europe. Money was designated by the European Union to help the process of making peace in Northern Ireland. However, it was not simply the money itself; it was how the money was distributed. I remember, as Secretary of State, going around Northern Ireland and talking to the groups which received the money from Europe and had to spend it between them. Unionists, nationalists, Catholics and Protestants met to distribute the money—and that in itself broke down barriers in Northern Ireland.
My noble friend Lord Hain made a very powerful speech. There is no question that over the last 20 years the border has diminished visibly and psychologically. I believe that the lack of a hard border allowed nationalists in Northern Ireland to develop a sense of common identity with their fellow European Union citizens across the border. In the same way, I vividly remember the meetings at Stormont House when there was a reluctance on the part of the unionist parties to accept devolution in Northern Ireland—that is, strand 1. However, as soon as we had in Great Britain as a whole a Parliament in Scotland, an Assembly in Wales and an Assembly in Northern Ireland, it meant that it was easier for the unionist community in Northern Ireland to accept it. We had to make these compromises.
I am reminded, too, by my noble friend Lord Rooker of the milk travelling from Northern Ireland to the Baileys plant. I remember it vividly because I opened the plant many years ago—although I never appreciated the international nature of the milk. Of course, if you think about it, that applies not just to the milk but to the sheep, the cows and the whole of the agricultural industry, which straddles the border and has no match anywhere in the rest of the European Union.
So the issue of the border is hugely significant, and I know that the Government take it seriously. It is an issue that cannot be allowed to drift—it has to be top of the agenda. The brightest minds in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Dublin and in the Northern Ireland Office in Whitehall, not to mention the officials in Brussels, should be engaged in dealing with this very tricky issue.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office and Scotland Office (Lord Dunlop) (Con)
My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, to the Front Bench. He played a hugely important role in negotiating the Belfast agreement and he brings huge authority to this debate. I also thank all those who have taken part in the debate on this group of very important amendments relating to Northern Ireland. All the contributions have been thoughtful, sincere and passionate. I pay tribute to the work of the EU Committee and, in particular, its report on Northern Ireland, which has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords. The whole House is very conscious of the political situation in Northern Ireland and the need to provide support to the parties there, with Assembly elections this Thursday and the aim of re-establishing strong and stable devolved government. I am sure that we are all united in this place in our sense of duty to the people of Northern Ireland who support the devolved institutions and want to see the forward momentum of the peace process maintained.
The people of Northern Ireland have seen the benefits that flow from the peace process: a reduction in violence, although it is still far too prevalent; economic and social progress; and the gradual normalisation of everyday life. Around this Chamber, on each side and in every part, are noble Lords who have made significant contributions to the peace process and to the progress Northern Ireland has experienced over the last 20 years or so. I have said many times from this Dispatch Box that we have enjoyed the longest unbroken period of devolved government in Northern Ireland for 45 years, a period that started in 2006 on the watch as Northern Ireland Secretary of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, who opened this debate. In our House and in the other place support for establishing, re-establishing and then maintaining the devolved institutions has been a bipartisan effort. The Government recognise and are grateful for the level of bipartisan support that the parties opposite continue to provide. It is for the Northern Ireland parties to work together to form a functioning Executive, and we all have a role in supporting those efforts. Everyone in this House wants and is working for the same outcome.
The Government are very conscious that as we negotiate the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU and secure our position as an open, successful trading nation, we need to make certain that the unique interests of Northern Ireland are protected and advanced. There can be no doubt about the priority the Government attach to the interests of Northern Ireland and, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, noted, to providing strong reassurance to the people of Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech and the White Paper set out the 12 principles that will guide our approach to the negotiations. Two of these refer explicitly to the needs of Northern Ireland. The first makes clear that the Government remain fully committed to the Belfast agreement and its successors as part of securing a deal that works for all parts of the United Kingdom and strengthens the union. The second highlights the importance of protecting our strong and historic ties with Ireland and maintaining the common travel area. Nobody wants to see a return to the borders of the past. The border is clearly a vital economic and trade issue. We recognise that the Northern Ireland economy is deeply integrated with that of Ireland, as well as with that of the rest of the United Kingdom. The issue of milk has been raised very vividly on a number of occasions so I will not repeat what was said.
However, this is more than just an economic issue. It is a social and psychological issue as well. For example, it is about families who use hospital services or are signed on with a GP across the border, or about the coaches of Northern Irish rugby supporters travelling to Dublin to watch Ireland play in the Six Nations. It is about the ease of everyday living and how you feel about the place in which you live. The open border for people and businesses has served us well and none of us wants to see the border issue become a renewed source of tension or division between different parts of the community in Northern Ireland. We want to ensure that goods and people can still move freely across the border and the Prime Minister has been crystal clear that the Government want trade across the Irish and Northern Ireland border to remain as frictionless as possible.
Of course, I recognise that this raises practical issues of the sort that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, and others raised at Second Reading about what specific solutions might be put in place to achieve our desired outcomes. Such questions have been raised again today. As we have said before, and as the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, expressed so succinctly and eloquently, this is a straightforward Bill that gives the Prime Minister the power to start the process of withdrawal; it does not concern the wider negotiating process that will follow or the Bills that will come before this House and the other place on such matters as immigration and customs to give effect to what is agreed. To address the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, we will look to negotiate the best possible deal to secure practical cross-border co-operation on matters of justice and security. However, we start from a position of shared interests and common ground. The relationship between the United Kingdom and Ireland has never been closer or stronger than it is today.
There is a very strong joint commitment from the Irish Government, the Northern Ireland Executive and the UK Government to find a practical solution that recognises the unique circumstances on the land border between Northern Ireland and Ireland and all the social, political and economic implications that flow from them. I believe that the EU will be sensitive to the specific challenges around the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Only last week the President of the European Commission, following a meeting with the Taoiseach, said:
“During the BREXIT negotiations, the EU and Ireland must look to minimise the impact. We don’t want hard borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland”.
I also welcome Guy Verhofstadt’s comments about prioritising,
“the specific needs of Ireland and Northern Ireland”,
and Michel Barnier’s remarks about doing the,
“utmost to uphold the success of the Good Friday Agreement”.
This reflects, I think, an acute appreciation in Brussels and in other European capitals of the important role the European Union has played in helping to ensure and preserve peace in Northern Ireland, a point touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice. I hope that this will continue.
Before I turn specifically to the amendments I want to address a point raised by both the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, on the even-handedness with which the UK Government deal with the political parties in Northern Ireland. Let me be very clear: the Government recognise the importance of establishing good working relationships with political leaders representing both unionist and nationalist traditions. We have always said that we govern in the interests of the whole community in Northern Ireland. In recent years, two very significant cross-party agreements—Stormont House and Fresh Start—have been reached, which demonstrates our ability to work effectively across the community with the major parties in Northern Ireland.
I turn now to the three amendments. Amendment 2 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, would include in the Bill an undertaking by the Prime Minister to support the maintenance of the open border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. No such undertaking is necessary in the Bill, as my noble friends Lord Trimble and Lord Howell have made clear, particularly in light of the strong assurances that I have given and our desire to keep this Bill clean and simple.
The Government’s intentions on this matter are already clear and there is no fundamental difference between us on the outcome that we seek. Maintaining the common travel area and protecting the high level of operational co-operation that underpins it will be an important priority for the UK in the talks ahead. As has already been pointed out, there has been a common travel area between the United Kingdom and Ireland for many years. Indeed, it was formed before either of our two countries were members of the European Union and reflects the historical, social and economic ties between its members.
Similarly, we recognise that Ireland is by far Northern Ireland’s biggest trading partner with goods exported worth £2.1 billion and imports of £1.6 billion in 2015. This underlines the strong mutual self-interest that exists. We will work closely with the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive to find practical solutions to keep cross-border trade as seamless and frictionless as possible.
In finding solutions to the land border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, my noble friend Lord Empey sought reassurance that we will not create an internal border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. I can give my noble friend firm assurance that this Government are clear that we must do nothing that makes any citizens of our country feel strangers in that country. Our guiding principle as we leave the EU will be that no new barriers to living and doing business within our own union are created.
Amendment 10 would exempt provisions derived from the Belfast agreement. The Government’s commitment to the Belfast agreement and the three-stranded approach—which makes clear that the government of Northern Ireland will be determined by consent—is rock solid, including the principles that recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose. The United Kingdom’s departure from the EU will not change that. The institutions, including the North/South Ministerial Council and the six implementation bodies, remain intact. So while the Government do not disagree with the core sentiment lying behind this amendment—namely, unwavering support for the Belfast agreement—there is no need to legislate for it.
Lord Hain
My Lords, I think that brevity is called for so I will briefly respond to clarify the point made by my noble friend Lord Empey. I did not advocate the devolution of immigration to Northern Ireland; I simply quoted from your Lordships’ European Union Committee, which said that that might be one of the issues on the table. The paradox I see is that everyone is actually agreeing with me, or so they say, except that as the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, pointed out, the harder the Brexit, the harder the border. I hope that the Minister, who responded very ably and encouragingly, will bear that in mind. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, there is no plan B for the border in that respect. The trouble is that if we get this wrong—and it is enormously complex, as all noble Lords have understood—for the United Kingdom it might be perilous, but for Northern Ireland it could be politically lethal. That is the problem. In light of the Minister’s firm assurances and undertakings, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Newby
“( ) No agreement with the European Union consequent on the use of the power under subsection (1) may be ratified unless—(a) it has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament;(b) the Prime Minister has obtained authority to put it to a national referendum; and(c) it has been approved by such a referendum.”
Lord Newby (LD)
My Lords, this simple amendment would require the people to ratify in a referendum any agreement reached by the Government pursuant to triggering Article 50, and I thank my co-signatories from across the House who support it.
I set out the arguments for such a confirmatory referendum in my Second Reading speech. Fundamentally, we believe that the people, having initiated the Brexit process, should have the final say. It is clear that the Government’s preferred option is that they should have the final say. Under pressure, and no doubt as a result of votes that we shall have in your Lordships’ House, they will be dragged slowly but inexorably towards giving Parliament a final say on all the options. However, while that is better than the Government simply taking the final decision themselves, it simply will not do.
As we saw with Parliament’s votes in advance of last year’s referendum, the Government’s track record in judging the public mood on this issue is poor. While as a general principle it is accepted that parliamentarians should exercise their own judgment and not simply echo that of public opinion on this issue, Parliament has already said that our membership of the European Union is for the people to decide. Trying to take back power at the end of the process having ceded it at the outset is both devoid of principle and likely to stoke further public dissatisfaction, whichever way the decision goes.
Secondly, and flowing from this, is the fact that in contradistinction to what the Prime Minister asserted in the White Paper, the country is more divided than ever over Brexit. That is largely because those who were in favour of remaining in the EU were relatively passionless in advance of the referendum because they complacently thought that they would win it. They were wrong, of course. Now many of them are angry about the issue for the first time. No small part of that anger is caused by the fact that they believe that many people were decisively influenced in the way that they voted by what they see as a number of misrepresentations, most notably on NHS spending, which were assiduously asserted by the leave side, including of course a number of members of the current Cabinet. They are also angry that, by leaving the single market and customs union, the Government have chosen a particularly harsh form of Brexit. As a result, they believe that the people should have a vote on the final deal, when it will be impossible to conceal the real consequences of leaving the EU—as happened last summer.
At Second Reading, the Minister asked me why such a vote would help to bring the country together. The answer is that such a vote, conducted in the full light of the facts of the deal, would produce a result that could not be questioned, in the same way as last June’s vote, on the basis that the people were misled. I believe that that would apply to the losing side as well as to the victors. At Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord Butler, asked why,
“those who base their arguments for Brexit on the will of the people are now opposed to consulting the people on the outcome of the negotiations”.
As he said:
“Do the Government regard the views of the British people on the outcome of the negotiations as irrelevant to our departure?”.—[Official Report, 21/2/17; col. 208.]
In reply, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, said that the Government opposed a referendum on the terms on the grounds that it would dash the certainty and clarity that we need. I agree that we need that too, but nothing would give greater certainty and clarity than the people having expressed the final view on the deal. The Government’s attitude is that if the views of the people were to change significantly against Brexit over the next 18 months, the Government would still ask Parliament to ratify any deal it reached, or simply crash out of the EU. How could that be justified? They are saying in effect that the people are not allowed to change their mind—an approach that is the antithesis of democracy, which is that the people are regularly asked to express their preferences and do indeed regularly change them. This is from a Government with many members who have very publicly changed their minds from being convinced remainers to being cheerleaders for Brexit.
Lord Grocott
My Lords, the noble Lord may be coming to this in his speech, but the first requirement of his amendment is that any agreement must be,
“laid before and approved by”,
both Houses of Parliament. I ask him: if one House says, “Yes, we agree with the agreement that has been negotiated”, but the other House says no, what happens next?
Lord Newby
My Lords, we will spend a lot more time on Wednesday discussing the role of Parliament. The point I make in my amendment is that Parliament will want to express a view before the vote goes to the people again. We will talk in great detail on Wednesday about how it might do that. That part of the amendment is not its most central part.
Lord Newby
Some have argued that if Parliament rejected the Government’s Brexit deal, the will of the people could be tested in a general election. I think that that would be extremely unsatisfactory. We all know that general elections are about many things. For example, any election called by the present Prime Minister with the same leader of the Opposition would not be simply or even primarily about Brexit, but be about who was best fitted to lead the country. We all know the answer to that. If the people are to be consulted, therefore, it must be through another referendum—and the people should certainly be consulted.
Lord Robathan (Con)
The noble Lord was talking about people changing their minds. Given that he campaigned for a real referendum in 2008—in or out of the EU—could he tell us when he then changed his mind to decide that we should not accept the judgment of this last referendum?
Lord Newby
My Lords, I am arguing in favour of the principle that, when events change, people change their minds. I do not consider that to be a dishonourable practice. When I look at the Government Front Bench in either this House or another place, I see person after person who apparently had a miraculous change of mind either just before or just after the referendum; I accept that that is sometimes what people do. The noble Lord possibly has never changed his mind, but most people in your Lordships’ House have a greater flexibility of approach, which is to be welcomed. I beg to move.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
My Lords, although I oppose this amendment, I can imagine two circumstances in which a second referendum might be justifiable. The first would be after we had actually completed the negotiations, left the EU and then people decided they wanted another referendum. That would seem perfectly justifiable.
The second situation where a second referendum would be well justified would be if the original referendum question had been framed in such a way as to say, “Do you wish the Government to enter into negotiations about leaving the EU, and then to put the result of that referendum to a second referendum later on?”. However, that was not the question on the ballot paper. As we have heard endlessly, the question was whether to remain or leave; it was quite unambiguous. It seems that we are slipping into the habits that the EU itself has with referenda. Mr Juncker on one occasion famously said, “If the people vote the wrong way, we must go on voting until we get the right answer”. I suspect that that is the real motivation behind the amendment. We saw this in the EU with the referendum on Maastricht. After the Danes said no, they had to vote again. We saw it with the treaty of Nice: when Ireland said no, we had to have another vote and that reversed the first one. We saw it most blatantly of all with the European constitution, as proposed, which was rejected in recommendations by both France and Holland. In order to avoid a referendum, that was then translated by a device into the Lisbon treaty. We absolutely should not go down that road.
Lord Cormack
If we had a second referendum and the question was, “Do you want to stay out or go back?”, how could that realistically be asked, unless we knew that they wanted us back?
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
I think that the question of whether they want us back is a very real one. I wanted to come to that very point. At Second Reading I quoted the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, as having said that he was firmly opposed to a second referendum. He is shaking his head; if he wants to correct me I will gladly be corrected, although I have three other press reports of where he said a second referendum was not desirable and should not take place: one in the Times on 20 September; a report from Asia House of his speech there on 6 September, together with a second report of that speech; and an article in Somerset Life on 24 June—so I have quite a lot. The noble Lord may have been misreported. If he has been misreported once, I apologise to him, but he seems to have been misreported several times.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)
I am content to be misquoted by the noble Lord and I am content to be able to intervene, not least because my words have been used in the past. I shall make an intervention later in which I shall clarify the position.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
We look forward to that clarification. If we wanted to, we could quote many other Liberals, not least Mr Vince Cable, who I am sorry is not in this House. He made it clear that he thought that there should be no second referendum:
“The public have voted and I do think it’s seriously disrespectful and politically utterly counterproductive to say: ‘Sorry guys, you’ve got it wrong, we’re going to try again’, I don’t think we can do that”.
My noble friend Lord Cormack made the point that there is also the assumption that the EU definitely wants us to remain in. There is also the assumption behind the amendment that Article 50 is reversible. As I understand the position, this is legally an open question. The Supreme Court did not opine on it because the two parties to the case, Mrs Miller and the Government, agreed that they would not argue about the issue in front of the court, so it did not take a view. I understand that lawyers are divided on the matter, but it is by no means clear that Article 50, once it has been invoked, is reversible.
Regardless of what the legal argument is, politically it seems difficult to believe that Article 50 could be reversed. Would the EU really want to negotiate with a country that is saying, “Well, we will get some terms from you which we will put back to the people, and then we may come back and ask for a better set of terms if they are not satisfactory”? If my noble friend Lord Cormack and I are wrong about this and the EU definitely and 100% wants us to remain in, it will give us the worst possible bargain, knowing that it has to be endorsed by both Parliament and a referendum. The amendment that has been proposed seems to be opportunistic and it does not have any logic to it at all.
Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)
My Lords, “the will of the people” is a phrase much bandied around in the wake of the referendum and it has taken on a totemic significance. Anyone who suggests that the country should not now blindly leap off the cliff into the unknown that is hard Brexit risks being accused of trying to defy the will of the people. When the Supreme Court judges examined the Government’s plans to ride roughshod over the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament, they met with a disgraceful headline labelling them “Enemies of the people”. Their determination to stand up for the rule of law rather than the rule of the mob was seen as defying the will of the people.
I do not wish to defy the will of the people. Amendment 3, introduced so persuasively by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, proposes the opposite of defying the will of the people. It is about upholding democracy, not denying it. It simply proposes that once the terms of our withdrawal from the EU are clear, the public should be given the final say on whether to accept them. As I said at Second Reading, I cannot understand why even the most devoted Brexiteers would not wish to give the public the final say on the terms of such a momentous decision unless they feared that the terms might not be acceptable.
The process would demand simply that Parliament should approve the terms by a resolution of both Houses. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, it would be the vote of the Commons that was decisive; we know our place in this Chamber. If there is no deal, however, and the Government simply decide to withdraw from the EU, this too should be the subject of a resolution of both Houses. I will support a later amendment that calls for that procedure. I believe it to be absolutely crucial that, if the Government think that they have secured a good deal for this country, that deal should be put to the public in a referendum.
We are a proudly democratic country. We hold elections and we abide by the results even if the majority is wafer thin. The party with the largest number of MPs gets to govern. But the difference between a general election and the referendum is that a few years down the line the country has a chance to change its mind and to think again. People judge the efforts of those whom they have elected and, if they are not satisfied, they throw them out. A Parliament is not for life. However, when the country is now embarking on one of the most momentous decisions ever, a decision that will affect our children and our children’s children, there seems to be a perverse determination to insist that the people have made their bed and that, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, they are jolly well going to lie in it in perpetuity.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
While we are on the subject of being uncomfortable, is my noble friend comfortable with the many press reports following the referendum of her saying that she would use her position in the House of Lords to prevent and reverse the decision taken by the people? Is she comfortable with the idea of unelected Members of this House using procedure to try to frustrate the result of the referendum?
Baroness Wheatcroft
My Lords, I have just said that I have no intention of defying the will of the people; I am giving the people a chance to exercise their will, which some noble Lords may not wish to do. I do not believe that we should not give the people the final say.
When a majority of those voting voted to leave the EU, they had different visions of what that would entail. In answer to my noble friend Lord Lamont, I do not think that the original referendum was, with the benefit of hindsight, drafted as well as it might have been, because I think that people were voting for different things. Some might have favoured an arrangement that continued to give us strong trading links with Europe while others might have voted with a view that we could remain very close to the single market. Some might have hoped that our students would be able to continue their education throughout Europe while others, particularly those in the financial services sector, would almost certainly have been hoping that what they were voting for was an arrangement that would allow their products to be passported into Europe so that they could continue doing business as they do now. That looks increasingly unlikely to happen, with dire consequences for our Exchequer. The one thing on which most voters would surely have agreed is, as others have suggested in this debate, that they were not voting to get poorer.
The most logical solution is that, once the terms of departure are clear, the public should be able to weigh them up and decide whether they want them. Do those who oppose such a suggestion not believe that the British electorate are capable of examining a deal and judging it on its merits? To take that view certainly would be to show contempt for the electorate and I do not. I am not a fan of government by referenda, but nevertheless once one has embarked on that route, it seems that only a referendum can complete the process. This is about listening to the will of the people, not defying it.
Lord Grocott
My Lords, I had not intended to speak but I need to, because so far no one has addressed the specific terms of the amendment that is before the Committee. There is no element of sarcasm in this when I say that that is uncharacteristic of the noble Lord, Lord Newby. I asked him a specific question about his amendment. Also uncharacteristically, the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, has made a speech that is not based on the terms of the amendment. So let me remind the Committee briefly of what the amendment states. Three conditions are set out:
“No agreement with the European Union … may be ratified unless … it has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament”.
I do not know what meaning that has other than that it has to be approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament, which the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said is not a problem because we always defer to the lower House. If that is the case, it needs to be in the amendment.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
Perhaps the noble Lord would be good enough to look at Amendment 32 tabled in my name, which will be debated on Wednesday. He will see that this point is addressed in the proposed new clause by using the phrase “both Houses”. I take the point that the noble Lord is making with regard to “each House”, but does he agree that if the phrase “both Houses” is substituted, the point is made?
Lord Grocott
I am a long way from reaching Amendment 32, but I shall certainly look at it in good time. Before we get to any question of consulting the people on an agreement, which was the thrust of the comments of both the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, it has to clear the first hurdle of being passed, or I should say approved, by both Houses of Parliament. We need to know what happens if one House says yes and the other no, because it occurs to me that there is a considerable possibility that the House of Commons, with a Conservative majority, might well, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, agree to approve the Prime Minister’s recommendation. There is also a considerable possibility that this House, not being so bound by recommendations of Prime Ministers of whichever party, will decide that it does not agree with the recommendation made by the Prime Minister and the Government. That is the question: what happens if one says yes and the other no?
That is the first hurdle that would have to be cleared before there can be a referendum, but there is another. New paragraph (b) says,
“the Prime Minister has obtained authority to put it to a national referendum”.
That would require a Bill and an Act of Parliament. That is the second hurdle that would have to be cleared by the House of Commons and the House of Lords before we could reach the third stage, which is the referendum itself—new paragraph (c) provides that it should have been,
“approved by such a referendum”.
I say to those who have spoken so far that unless there are rather better answers to the question, particularly about the two Houses—
Lord Rooker
On the issue of the two Houses, I agree with the amendment, although I will vote against it.
Lord Rooker
No—the amendment’s flaw is: are we seriously going to attempt to send an amendment to the other place that requires the accession of some 15 to 20 Conservative Members of Parliament to vote with the rest of the Opposition to keep it in the Bill? That is the only audience we have. It is not ourselves or the people; it is the 20 Tories in the other place who would be prepared to vote for what we send. They are not going to vote for this, so why are we going to try to send it there?
Lord Grocott
After the best part of 40 years over which my noble friend and I have been in Parliament, we do not disagree on much. I am delighted to see that we clearly do not disagree on this amendment either. In the absence of any satisfactory answers to the questions I have put, I hope that the House will decide against the amendment, should it be put to a vote.
Viscount Hailsham
My Lords, I intervene briefly in opposition to the amendment. In fact, referring to an amendment coming down the track that I hope will be discussed on Wednesday, I have tabled a new clause that would enable Parliament to direct a referendum. The amendment that we are discussing would require Parliament to hold a referendum. That seems to be fundamentally different in kind. If two years down the track the public mood has changed after the negotiations, I for one believe that the public’s opinion should be tested in a referendum, which Parliament would then decide. Alternatively, if in two years’ time Parliament decides not to approve agreed terms, I fancy that Parliament would decide that its decision had to be underwritten by a referendum.
That is different in kind to this amendment, which would require Parliament to direct a referendum, whether there is a change in opinion or not. That seems fundamentally undesirable, because we know that referenda are profoundly divisive mechanisms. They are the policy of last resort. If there is not a perceptible change in public opinion, or if Parliament is not minded to vote down the agreed terms, I see no need to require the holding of a referendum. This is a mandatory amendment; I am against it for that rather narrow reason.
Lord Empey
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Newby, is one of the most distinguished Members of this House. I gently say to him that I do not think that I have heard him defend an argument in such threadbare circumstances. We have sometimes been lectured on the fact that we have a representative parliamentary democracy. Now we seem to have developed referendumitis. What about the implications of this proposal for Scotland? What would it do to the Scottish nationalist argument? We said that we were having a referendum for a generation. This would open the door to the argument, “If they can do it for Europe, they can do it for us”. That is the second time that that has been mentioned today.
The ball was dropped, if dropped it was, when the referendum Bill came to this House. That was the opportunity to put in a back-up clause to say that we would put it to the test at the end. Speaking for those of us who have had referenda—in our case, the border poll in the 1970s, on the Good Friday agreement in 1998 and the potential for another one—if we are going to do this on an ad hoc basis to suit a party management situation, or a bright idea someone happened to come up with, we will destabilise the whole constitution of the United Kingdom. I caution Members on this. The time to fix this was when we started it. We should have put it in the Bill. If I recall, this House was silent when it came to that question in the Bill. That was the opportunity to do it. The question asked was amended by the Electoral Commission, if I recall correctly, which produced the clarity in the question. There was no caveat or qualification.
If we send Ministers to Brussels to negotiate with Michel Barnier and so on—
Viscount Ridley (Con)
Further to the point that the noble Lord is making, I remember spending long hours discussing the referendum Bill in this place. One of the things that we particularly discussed was the need to make sure that this was a decisive result that was accepted by the losing side as well as the winning side. Those of us who then went into the campaign with all sorts of disadvantages because of the Government’s ability to spend and so on were none the less just about content that, if we lost, we would be able to accept the result. The other side appears not to have come to that conclusion.
Lord Empey
I am grateful to my noble friend. Perhaps I should rephrase what I said: we were silent on amending the legislation to provide for a second referendum. Therefore, the Electoral Commission changed the wording, which was accepted to get the clarity that we need.
I fear that if we go down the road of trying to send Ministers to Brussels against the backdrop of a number of these amendments, we would not be sending Ministers with whom Brussels will negotiate. We are sending a second 11: we are sending delegates, not Ministers. As someone who has been in a prolonged negotiation, I know that it requires a stretch on the part of both parties. If you were sitting in Brussels and were minded to try to reach an agreement with our Ministers, why would you stretch yourself outside the four freedoms or take a big leap if you thought, first, that you were not dealing with people who could make agreements with you and, secondly, that you would be shot down because there were people in this Parliament and in this country who could undermine you after you had made the effort to reach an agreement? There are a number of amendments along these lines. We need to think carefully of the mechanics and atmosphere around the negotiating table.
Lord Flight (Con)
On the territory about which the noble Lord is talking, I cannot understand, if negotiations have gone on for two years or more and we have finally agreed all the thousands of things that need to be agreed, how we could possibly then put it to a vote. The whole process of negotiating the deal with the EU will not work if we have a vote at the end.
Lord Empey
One way of dealing with it would have been to make it clear that we were going to put things to a vote at the end. But now we are in a position of risking getting any kind of meaningful negotiation from Brussels because we would be sending people there who are incapable of making an agreement. We understand that it has to be approved by Parliament. Let us not forget that the European Parliament has to approve it—anyone who has had experience over there will know that that will not be a pleasant experience. I caution the noble Lord, although I understand what he is trying to say.
Lord Robathan (Con)
But is that not the point of the amendment—to undermine the negotiations and, in fact, reverse the decision?
Lord Empey
I cannot attribute the motivation. The noble Lord has his view. I am simply saying that if we are going to send people to Brussels to do a good deal for us—and whether they can, I do not know—the one thing we cannot do is saw their legs off before they go; otherwise we will get absolutely nothing.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
But the noble Lord will recognise that that is already the case under Section 20 of the 2010 Act. Every treaty has to be ratified by Parliament. If that is true of every other treaty, why not of the present negotiations?
Lord Empey
I am not opposed to the concept, of course. We have already said that it is going to be ratified by Parliament. I make the point that if these amendments are inserted—and there are others on the Marshalled List to be dealt with at a later sitting—we are going to send a team of people to negotiate on our behalf. Clearly people in Brussels will say, “These people do not have the juice to do a deal so why would I take a political risk as a Brussels negotiator to stretch out towards them”—which is what is going to be needed on both sides—“because they know that they have no chance of getting a deal at the end of the day?”.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)
My Lords, we have already seen this afternoon in our very serious debate about the implications of the present situation—let us put it neutrally—for Northern Ireland that the referendum was, in fact, about a matter of the greatest constitutional importance and about the integrity of the United Kingdom, a great worry to any of us who come from Northern Ireland. However, although I agree with my noble friend Lord Empey that we should not tie the hands of negotiators, that a referendum at the end is a bad idea and that one constitutional error cannot be remedied by another constitutional error, nevertheless something needs to be said about the possibilities of no deal or of a bad deal. Those are two realistically possible outcomes. I think that at this stage it should be possible for the Government to say a bit about their plans in the event of either contingency.
Lord Warner (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment. I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, and the noble Lord, Lord Newby, set out the case pretty well. I do not want to go over that ground again about a second referendum. However, I am a strong believer in the sentiment that those who giveth can also taketh away. It seems that that is an underlying principle: if the people have spoken but they are given new information, they can change their views at the end of the process.
I will say a bit about why I put my name on this amendment because the reason is a theme that will keep coming up on some of the other amendments. It will certainly come up on Amendment 8, which is in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Oates. Do we actually trust the Government to conduct these negotiations unsupervised after what we have seen of their behaviour so far? We are entitled to be fairly sceptical. We also have no reason to believe, if I may say so, that in Whitehall—and I speak as an old Whitehall warrior—there is this crack team of negotiators who we are going to send across the English Channel and who are going to do a fantastic job without any involvement in Parliament. We have no reason to believe that they will come up with a solution at the end of this process and we will all sit here and nod very sagely and say, “Fantastic. You have hit every particular button”. The world, on the whole, does not work that way.
We all have views about how to conduct negotiations. Many noble Lords have had a go at conducting such negotiations, and we will all have our own approach. Sometimes I have actually thought it quite useful in negotiations not to have too much flexibility—that I have got a mission that I want to deliver. It is quite good to be able to shelter behind that kind of instruction about the way in which I conduct the negotiations. As a former senior civil servant, I certainly did not want a lot of Ministers telling me to go out there and do my best. I would like to have a bit of guidance. I would have thought the same applies to Ministers. I have been a Minister and wanted to know what the Government and public were likely to accept while I did those negotiations. Therefore, I see nothing wrong in principle with the approaches in the amendment.
The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, knows as well as I do—he has been a Chief Whip—that it is often the case in Committee that we put down an amendment that may be technically a bit defective. We are trying to have a debate about a principle or an issue and we often withdraw them and come back at a later stage in the Bill with a rectified amendment that meets the concerns expressed. That does not mean it is wrong in principle to put these issues before the House and see what people’s views are. I support the amendment. We should think very seriously, as we discuss further amendments to the Bill, about whether we really believe that it is safe to send the Government into these negotiations without any requirements about the involvement of Parliament with that process.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord has made the central case for the amendment: do noble Lords trust the Government and the way that they have used the vote on the Brexit referendum or not? Frankly, we do not, for very good reasons that I shall seek to explain in a moment. That is not to say that we challenge the fundamental decision made in that referendum. Since I have been substantially misquoted on many occasions, let me say what I said on the night of the referendum, because government Ministers have been frequently using this as though somehow or other we had behaved in a way inconsistent with these words:
“I will forgive no-one who does not respect the sovereign voice of the British people once it has spoken. Whether it is a majority of 1% or 20%, when the British people have spoken, you do what they command. Either you believe in democracy or you don’t”.
Those are my words and I stand by them because we do believe in democracy on these Benches. We accept the sovereign voice of the British people.
Noble Lords may laugh but that is the fundamental question: do we challenge the “yes” or “no” outcome of that referendum? No, we do not, and this amendment does not in any way. We accept the decision that has been taken, and the decision is that we should leave. We are naturally bitter and sad about that, but whatever our personal feelings the judgment of the British people has spoken. However, to say we leave is not the same as the British people providing a mandate unto the solution that the Government choose in order to leave. The Government have actually taken what they claim to be a mandate to leave—which we concede the Government have, of course—and turned it into a mandate for the most brutal form of leaving possible.
I ask noble Lords to look back to the conduct of that referendum, in which many of us took part. I had a number of interesting debates with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and very good they were too. On every single occasion during that referendum, we asked those who proposed Brexit to say what kind of Brexit. Did it mean leaving the single market? Did it mean a complete ban on immigration? Never were we given an answer. I have Mr Hannan, a well-known lion on the Brexit debate, on the record many times: there is nothing about this that says we must leave the single market. If I recall, in the meeting that I had with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—I do not think I am wrong—he too said that it was not necessary to leave the single market.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
What I said, as the noble Lord will recall, was that there was a difference between being a member of the single market and having access to the single market and that those who were arguing for remain were deliberately deceiving the people.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
As I recall, the conclusion that I and the audience reached—but we probably cannot go over this now—was that the noble Lord would leave but it was not necessary not to continue with access to the single market. However, that is what the Government have now said. We accept that the Government have a mandate to leave the European Union, but what mandate do they have to leave the single market or the customs union? None. The Conservative Party manifesto at the last general election committed the party, as a manifesto promise, to continue to stay in the single market. They have taken the British people’s votes—
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
Would the noble Lord please correct what he said about the Conservative manifesto saying we would stay in the single market? That was in the context of the negotiation that the Prime Minister promised to undertake, and was on the assumption that, as he wanted, people would say “yes” to remain. If the referendum went the other way, it was made perfectly clear that the single market would no longer encompass Britain.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
The noble Lord could have been much quicker if he said, “Yes but we just changed our minds”—which is exactly what the Government have now done. The Government have a mandate to leave but they have no mandate whatever for this brutal form of leaving that will damage this country. By the way, it is not us that has been undemocratic but the Government. They have taken the British people’s vote and hijacked it for their anti-European prejudices. That is why now they need a referendum on the outcome—not a second referendum on “in or out” but a referendum on the deal. Noble Lords and the House will know the enormous difference between the hard Brexit that the Government propose, with no access to the single market and no membership of the customs union, and a Brexit maintaining access to the single market. The difference between these two options is huge for the people of this country, for our influence in Europe and the wider world, and for jobs, industry and our economy. Maybe the Government have got it right in their judgment—their guesswork—that the British people are content to leave the single market, but let them test that. They have no mandate from the referendum outcome whatever for that solution.
Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise (Con)
Surely the most brutal form of leaving would be to leave with no deal at all. The problem with this amendment is that it does not say, “We should have another referendum on whether we stay or leave”. It says, “We should have a referendum on whether we accept the terms of the deal”. If we say we do not accept those terms, that does not mean we stay in the European Union. Article 50 is very clear about that. Be careful what you wish for.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
I am grateful that the noble Lord led me on to that because I was coming to it next. The Government say that this is the deal they will do. It will be the hardest possible deal with no access to the single market and huge damage done to our industry, jobs and influence. If they cannot get that, the alternative is to tow this country out into the middle of the Atlantic as some kind of mid-Atlantic Singapore: a total free market with no regulations at all. The Foreign Secretary has been very clear about that outcome. The difference between these two things is basically asking the people of this country and our Parliament to either say “yes” or jump over a cliff. That is not a reasonable option to put. When the High Court said that Parliament should have a say, it meant a real say, not an option between “take it” or “leave it”. That is not the kind of solution that will produce the best outcome for this country. Our proposition is simple. We accept the case that has been made and the judgment of the British people that we must leave. We do not accept that the Government have a mandate for a brutal form of Brexit that will damage our country’s influence and economy. They have no mandate whatever to take this country out of the single market. If they want to test that proposition, let them do so before a court of the British people.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, if we can get back to the amendment—I thought for a moment we had segued into the next debate—it is on a second referendum or ratification that I think initially sounded quite attractive to a number of noble Lords. However, when you actually look at the amendment it is flawed.
First, there is the point made about the two parts of the amendment. Paragraph (a), which says that it must be,
“laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament”,
fails to recognise the primacy of the other place. That is not how we have handled this Bill or other issues. On that point, our later amendment on a meaningful vote is a better way to judge parliamentary opinion and for Parliament to deal with this issue.
Demands for a second referendum started even before the polls closed on the first one. An online parliamentary petition called for a second referendum should the first have less than a 60% vote for either remain or leave on a 75% turnout threshold. That set a high bar and it received around 4 million signatures. We do not require that level of support for Governments; the last time we had a turnout of higher than 75% was back in 1992, nearly 25 years ago. This amendment does not seek such conditions. I agree that it would be strange to set new and different conditions for a second referendum from the first one but the point has been made previously in debates that for such a major constitutional issue to be decided by a simple majority has caused concern.
National referendums are rare in the UK. As we know, there have been three UK-wide ones. In 1975, Harold Wilson called a referendum on remaining in or leaving the European Economic Community. In 2011, during the coalition Government, we had a referendum on whether to change first past the post to the AV voting system. Then we had the EU referendum in 2016. I must confess that I am naturally cautious about politicians demanding a national referendum on an issue. If I was a cynic—of course, I am not—I would suggest that we do that rarely on a point of principle but more often because we think it will endorse a position we take and give us the result we want. However, I feel differently when there is public demand for a referendum. I accept that it is not always easy to judge that. Certain petitions and polls are not satisfactory. Yet it becomes clear over time and the polls for the EU referendum were evidenced by the turnout.
Let us look at the public support for these referendums. In the EEC referendum in 1975, 64% voted. That was probably depressed by most people thinking that it was clear the UK would remain. Some 72% voted in the referendum in 2016. Yet when we had the referendum on the voting system, for which there was no real public demand as it was politician-led, it motivated fewer than half our fellow citizens, with a turnout of just 42%. My fear now is that, with no significant public demand for a second referendum at this time, this is being seen as a campaign to challenge the result of the first referendum. That in itself creates a mood of opposition and hostility from the public.
The noble Lord, Lord Newby, reinforced that view in his speech, but in the The House magazine he said it was “implausible” not to grant a second referendum if public opinion shifts in favour of the EU. What if it shifts away and more people are opposed to the EU? Is that still grounds for a second referendum? Not according to his article. Indeed, the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, spoke of having a second referendum so people could express a change of mind. That is not solely a reason to have one.
As the previous debate illustrated clearly, the coming months of negotiations will be complicated and complex. We are pressing the Government to ensure that Parliament is kept fully engaged and informed throughout the whole process, and that Parliament has the opportunity for a real, meaningful final say on the exit arrangements or deals. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, made a good point on this when he said that the Government did not want to engage with Parliament through a vote and had to be persuaded to do so by a court judgment. However, Parliament will now have to make its judgment and the MPs who do so will be accountable to their constituents. That is what parliamentary sovereignty means: taking responsibility.
I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that his logic is flawed because he and others from his party feel no need to respect the result of the referendum. The noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, just refuted this but I find that hard to accept. I do not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said, call the result the will of the people. I am not sure that referendums express that. However, there is a clear result. The noble Lord’s party said that there is no need to respect that result and voted against it in the House of Commons. It is now calling for a second referendum. Is that to be the same, to be seen as advisory, or do we just accept what a second referendum says? I find it hard to see the circumstances in which a second referendum could deal with all of the detail that would be required on the terms of an exit deal and not just be a rerun on the principle of continuing the process to leave or staying in. That is, in effect, the same as the first one.
The final judgment on the exit deal has to be very measured. It is going to involve forensic detail and it cannot just be an appeal to the emotions without hard, actual facts. In the first referendum, we saw different sides campaigning; they lobbied around the principle of staying in or leaving. I am on record as saying that I was deeply unimpressed with both the remain and leave campaigns. I have not yet been convinced that the approach of a referendum works well when dealing with the detail of negotiations over a period of two years. We have to have some faith in our Members of Parliament and in your Lordships’ House to make a serious, factual judgment on the benefits or otherwise of a final deal. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, who asked whether we trusted the Government. I have been clear that I do not trust the Government enough to wave them off for two years and come back, and that is why we have later amendments about parliamentary engagement and votes. However, there is no impediment: if, as time and negotiations progress, there is genuine evidence of a widespread public demand for a second referendum, that should be listened to, but at this stage, our priority has to be that Parliament has the final say.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, the House will be delighted to hear that I intend to speak briefly on this amendment, as I get the sense that many of your Lordships’ minds have already been made up on this issue. I am going to explain why the Government believe that this approach would be wrong in principle and wrong in practice. A number of your Lordships have already made a number of good points, which I will not repeat.
I begin by taking a step back to consider people’s trust in politics today. It is at a somewhat low ebb. For many people, there is a sense that too many politicians say one thing and then do another. There is a sense that Parliament is divorced from day-to-day life, and this frustration and disillusionment with mainstream parties encourage them to look to others to represent their views. This is the backcloth to the debate on this Bill and this amendment.
Let us not forget the democratic path that has brought us here. The Conservative Party promised to hold a referendum and respect the outcome. This Parliament gave people the choice of whether to leave or to remain in the European Union: a choice without caveat or condition. It was a choice that the people exercised, having been told by the Government in the leaflet sent to every household in the land:
“The Government will implement what you decide”.
The majority voted to leave, not to have a second referendum and not to think again. The people have spoken and this Bill delivers on their wish.
My first question to your Lordships is: would it help build trust in politics if we, the unelected Chamber, were to tell the people, “We did not like your first answer; please try harder”? I think not: quite the reverse. When Scotland voted against independence, what was the response from any politicians? I shall quote one:
“You have to abide by the outcome ... I don’t think re-opening old wounds would be good for Scotland”.
Those were the words of Mr Nick Clegg. Whatever the cynical machinations of the Scottish Nationalists today, I believe that what Mr Clegg said was true then as regards Scotland and is true today as regards Europe. We promised a referendum, not a “neverendum”. The government leaflet said the referendum was a once-in-a-generation decision, not a twice-in-five-years decision. We cannot keep asking the question until we get the answer that some want.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
The Minister is making the case against a question that we did not ask, which is, “Shall we have another referendum on in or out?”. We accept that that is not going to happen. We accept that the Government have a mandate for Brexit. Will he tell us what mandate they now have for leaving the single market?
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I am sorry to say that the noble Lord is just making my point for me. We had a referendum in which people were asked very explicitly whether they wanted to leave or remain in the EU. The leaflet that I have here said it very clearly, and many people in this House and outside it—on both sides of the argument—made the case that a vote to leave was a vote to leave the single market. That was the choice, people were aware of it and that was the decision that they made. We are going to come on to this in the next hour or so.
Furthermore, many people on both sides of the argument, leave and remain, are now coming together to make a success of our exit from the EU and to forge a new place for our nation in the world. Why would we want to open up all those old divisions again by holding a second referendum, as this very debate has just shown? Well before last June, a number of politicians argued—
Lord Dykes (CB)
When the Minister talks about the advisory referendum which was giving an opinion, that was the result that we had to respect at the time. Of course, there are comparisons with other European countries; in the process of the European constitution and subsequent Lisbon treaty, it was very interesting that in France, Denmark and the Republic of Ireland, there was always under the compulsory written constitutions a “no” vote in that first referendum. Each one was reversed by their Governments because they knew it was a vote about the unpopularity of internal politics and nothing to do with Europe.
Lord Bridges of Headley
I hear what the noble Lord is saying, but I am sorry to say that that boat, and all this argument, sailed when we passed the referendum Bill. That is just simply the fact.
Well before last June, a number of politicians argued that a referendum on our membership of the EU was needed precisely because Europe was poisoning the body politic. One politician said some years ago that it was,
“time we pulled out the thorn and healed the wound, time for a debate politicians have been too cowardly to hold for 30 years ... Let’s trust the people with the real question: in or out”.
Again, these were the words of Mr Nick Clegg back in 2008. I agree with the Nick Clegg of 2008. Now that we have had that referendum, I would argue that another would put that thorn back into British politics, and rub salt in the wound.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
Since this is an occasion for quotations, I remind him that John Maynard Keynes said:
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”.
Is it the Government’s position that if, after these negotiations, they decide that no deal is better than a poor deal, the Government will not put that to the people of the United Kingdom?
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, the Government’s position is very clear. We are absolutely going to stand by the instruction given to us by the British people to leave the European Union. That was the decision and that is the Government’s policy, and that is what it will remain.
Lord Spicer (Con)
Is not the real reason people are calling for a second referendum that one side lost and they do not like it? Then, might it not be the case that somebody loses another referendum and we would have to have a third one? Indeed, we might even have to have a fourth referendum to decide which referendum was the real thing.
Lord Bridges of Headley
I agree with my noble friend, and this is why we have the prospect of a “neverendum”.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
Does the Minister really think that the British people had any idea at all what it would mean if there was no deal and they ended up in the arms of the WTO and all that that means?
Lord Bridges of Headley
I am sorry to say that I dispute what the noble Baroness is saying. The British people voted to leave. There was a very loud and passionate discussion, with lots of people issuing lots of papers about what it would mean to leave, and the British people made a decision.
My noble friend raised the issue of a “neverendum”. This brings me to certainty. One thing we all agree on is the need for certainty. Therefore, let us think of European families here, of British families in Europe and of the thousands of businesses right across this country that are listening to our debate. For them, the prospect of another referendum at some unknown date years ahead, with a Bill—as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said—and a question we do not yet know, would simply create more uncertainty.
Let me say here a word about business in particular, given that my noble friend Lady Wheatcroft edited the Wall Street Journal. I would like to draw the Committee’s attention to a report just issued by the Institute of Directors. It recommends:
“A … measure to boost both political confidence and certainty for business would be for all parties to rule out a second referendum over the next parliament—either a repeat on EU membership or on the final terms of the deal”.
The IoD represents 35,000 businesses which employ hundreds of thousands of people. Those businesses are saying that they want certainty.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
Perhaps I might press the Minister for clarification. He says that people want certainty. Is he saying that if that certainty is, to a business, “Yes, you must move your headquarters, you must take jobs out of this country”, and to people that, “You will face higher prices and fewer opportunities for your children”, that is what the Government will choose to make the British people live with—and with no voice to challenge it?
Lord Bridges of Headley
The noble Baroness and I have many interesting discussions, but I dispute the grounds on which she is approaching this. We have set out very clearly, to provide clarity and certainty, a view regarding what we wish to achieve in the negotiations. That has provided a considerable amount of certainty and clarity to many of the businesses I have spoken to and in nation states across Europe. That is exactly what we now need to deliver on.
I will turn quickly to the issue of parliamentary scrutiny, which the noble Lord, Lord Newby, slightly dismissed. Parliament will be heavily involved in the process of our leaving the EU. This Bill, the Bill to repeal the European Communities Act 1972, primary and secondary legislation, Statements, Select Committee appearances—the list is quite long. On top of that, the Government will bring forward a Motion on the final agreement to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. So the nub of the matter is very simple. On 23 June people voted to leave the EU. It was a choice that this Parliament gave them and it is a decision that, now it has been made, we must obey. So I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Judd (Lab)
The Minister has deployed with great moral strength the argument that the people have spoken. I remind him that the majority of those who voted have spoken—but, in fact, barely a third of the potential electorate in Britain voted. The situation is not as absolute as he suggests. I say to your Lordships that this is a very good reason for taking very seriously the argument that the road of referenda is a very dangerous road indeed.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, the Minister said a moment ago that the decision will come back to both Houses after there has been an outcome to the negotiation. What if both Houses reject the negotiated settlement that is forthcoming? Does Parliament then overrule the people or do the people have a chance to make the final decision?
Lord Newby
My Lords, the Minister is entitled not to wish to answer the question—and I can understand why. I will make just three points. First, I am sorry to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that I was so hard on him earlier on. I should have welcomed—and indeed do now welcome—his intervention because he has given me some very helpful drafting advice for the amendment that I will be bringing before your Lordships on Report.
Secondly, I have never heard the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, sound so defeatist. If this House took the view that the House of Commons might not accept an amendment that we passed, we would hardly ever pass any amendments. We would certainly not have passed the amendment on tax credits. Therefore, I urge him to take that as a precedent and think that, so impressed by the quality of our arguments, those 20 Conservative Back-Benchers might change their minds in an instant on reading Hansard and that we would get our victory when it went to the other place.
Thirdly, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Empey—a number of noble Lords spoke about the parallels with or differences from Scotland—this is a completely different situation from that which obtains in Scotland. The SNP wants a second bite at the same cherry. We want a vote of the people on a firm proposition, rather than the vote which did take place on 57 varieties of proposition that were assiduously and separately propounded by different people on the leave side. So it is a completely inapt parallel and I cannot accept it.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
The noble Lord says that the Scottish situation is completely different. The Scottish nationalists argue that people did not know what they were voting for because of project fear. Surely that is precisely the same argument that is being used by the noble Lord.
Lord Newby
I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord but I am afraid that that argument simply does not hold water. The principle that we are putting forward in this amendment is straightforward: who decides at the end of a process initiated by the people? Our view is that the people should decide and nothing that any noble Lord has said this afternoon has made me question that principle in any regard. For today, I will withdraw the amendment.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
This would normally be the time when the House would be looking to take dinner-break business. I have spoken to my noble friend Lord Hodgson, who has a regret Motion for debate in the dinner hour. He has agreed that we should adjourn that debate to a future day so that we can carry on with the Bill—because obviously there is a lot to talk about. Noble Lords who have expressed an interest have spoken to the usual channels and we all agree that this is the right course of action. I hope that the Committee agrees.
Amendment 4
“( ) Before a notification can be given under subsection (1), the Prime Minister must give an undertaking to negotiate under the process set out in Article 50 on the basis of the United Kingdom retaining membership of the European Single Market.”
Lord Hain
My Lords, Amendment 4 is sponsored also by my noble friend Lord Monks and the noble Lords, Lord Oates and Lord Wigley. Since I hope to divide the Committee later, I will be briefer than I thought I would be before proceedings went on.
The hard Brexit the Government seek will be the worst possible outcome for the United Kingdom, for which the referendum gave them absolutely no mandate whatever. Cutting us off from our largest market and seeking new trade partners elsewhere will cause huge job losses and many business closures. Over the 10 years or so that it will take to adjust to the shock of exiting the single market, we must expect a pound of pain for every ounce of gain.
When the country voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union, the single market was not on the ballot paper. Voters were never asked about it. In fact, in the run-up to the general election of May 2015, the Conservative Party manifesto promised to,
“safeguard British interests in the Single Market”.
The manifesto said:
“We say: yes to the Single Market. We want to expand the Single Market, breaking down the remaining barriers to trade and ensuring that new sectors are opened up to British firms”.
There were further contributions.
“Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”,
said leading leave campaigner Daniel Hannan MEP.
“Only a madman would actually leave the market”,
said ardent Brexiteer and Tory ex-Cabinet Minister Owen Paterson MP. Some leave leaders said that the UK could quit the EU while remaining a member of the biggest, richest single market in the world, accounting for nearly half our trade. Others talked variously of Norway, Switzerland, Canada and even, bizarrely, Albania. There was the very opposite of clarity on this issue. I know because I knocked on many hundreds of doors in the referendum campaign and people voted to leave the European Union, not the single market.
Reaching an agreement on withdrawal from the single market within two years of triggering Article 50 will be difficult, if not impossible—and extremely complex. In my drafted speech, I was going to go into the many complexities. It will also need to be followed by subsequent trade agreements, and not only with the remaining 30 EU and European Economic Area member states; new agreements, under WTO rules, will be required with around 52 third countries outside the EU with which we have existing trade deals through the EU.
Trade deal outcomes are about relative economic power and weight. Contrary to breezy and I think complacent claims by government Ministers and their Brexit acolytes, the UK and the EU will not somehow be equal partners in any negotiation of new trade agreements. The UK depends on the EU for 45% of its exports, whereas the EU exports only 8% of its produce to the UK. We have a trade surplus in services, mainly financial, with the rest of the European Union of £17 billion.
Lord Howell of Guildford
At the outset of this debate, the whole focus is on the concept that we have benefited and will continue to benefit from being members of the single market, and that by being outside and only having access to it—like every other country that exports into the European region—we would be vastly disadvantaged. I am afraid I am going to say something that will probably be unpopular on both sides and which asks your Lordships to look more closely at what is actually happening in the patterns of both European and world trade currently. I am not talking about 1990, or the world of globalisation in the last century, but about the fantastic, revolutionary disruption and transformation of the pattern of trade that has gone on for the last five or 10 years. Unless we understand that, and the impact it is having on trade throughout the region and on the relevance and nature of the single market, which has changed beyond recognition from the single market of a decade or so ago, we will not reach very sensible conclusions.
Lord Keynes was quoted earlier. He said many things, but one of the interesting things he said was that his real quarrel was not with those who disputed his economic theories or arguments but with those who persistently failed to see what was actually going on. That is the theme I want to develop. We can expend enormous indignation on asserting that in the single market everything will be okay but that out of it there will be disaster. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Hain, has suggested that with great eloquence and clearly believes it to be the position. But we have to grasp what is going on and understand the nature of the flow of trade to see just what the disadvantages would be if, instead of having membership of the single market, with all the standards, regulations, access, tariff-free areas, co-ordination of regulations and so on, we were outside it, although still obviously able to trade into it like any other country.
I start from a rather remarkable statement made by the chief economist to the Bank of England, I think last week, that from his point of view whether we were inside or outside the single market would have no “material” effect on the UK’s growth over the next three years—he put a time on it. That is rather a remarkable statement from a very high authority, not someone known to be biased one way or the other but someone speaking totally objectively. I had to ask myself how he could come to that conclusion. Have we not been told that outside the single market it will all be disaster and we must somehow stay in as full members? This raises all the other issues we have so vigorously debated, including the problems in the island of Ireland and many other issues. If one begins to look at the detail, the answer is very interesting.
I suspect what he has seen, and what your Lordships might possibly turn their eyes to, is that the whole nature of international trade is shifting at record speed in two directions. First, there is the vast growth in services, digital information, data transmission and information exchange, so much so that McKinsey is telling us that more than half the wealth generated worldwide comes from the transmission of data and information and not from goods trade at all. The old world of trade being dominated by containers or great ships sailing out of Felixstowe, or whatever it was, is rapidly disappearing. Services are the huge growth area in every aspect of international trade, including into the European Union. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, is quite right that sales of services into the European Union have been large—they are about a third of our total export of services throughout the world—but frankly they are not doing very well. In so far as they have got in to Europe’s single market, services have gone through a bit of a struggle, not through tariffs—because you cannot put tariffs on those services—but through all sorts of local and national regulations and control. They have been pretty flat over recent years because there never was a glorious single market in services. We struggled for 40 years to improve one and got nowhere at all, and the chances are that countries outside the European Union have done rather better with our services and imports into the European Union than we have.
It may be that in future, outside the single market—this may be in Mr Haldane’s mind—we can do rather better with services in Europe. If we cannot do better in Europe—it is very difficult because of the all these local restrictions on how things are set up—we should look to the areas where service developments are growing at a very fast pace. This is certainly right across the part of the world that deals in the English language and has common legal, political, social, ethical and cultural practices, which tends to be a Commonwealth network in English-speaking nations, including the United States of America, which is our biggest export market of all. We have no single market and no free trade agreement with America, but it is by far our largest single market of any country.
That is the first point: services are growing at a phenomenal exponential rate and now dominate world trade and are beginning to dominate our own earnings overseas. Secondly, services know no boundary or tariff barrier, so the services we sell into Europe—this, again, may be in Mr Haldane’s mind—will not be very much affected by whether we are in the single market or not. It is a tough area anyway. We export £89 billion, gross, of services of every kind, including financial services, into the European market and that is about a third of the much bigger degree of service exports all around the rest of the world. It is not a question of tariff barriers. The tariff barriers are anyway extremely low, except for one or two things such as car components, which are at 10%. We would have to think about that, but generally we are moving into a zero-tariff world. It is quite different from 1990, when developing southern and eastern countries were taught that they would have to have high tariffs and heavy investment protection.
Lord Howell of Guildford
I shall just finish this sentence. The culture before 1990 was of high tariffs and protection against foreign investment, which was deemed colonial. The culture of the last 30 years has been the opposite, with low tariffs all around the world and direct investment agreements to encourage more investment. I give way.
Lord Davies of Stamford
I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I am listening to him with great attention, as I always do. He is making the case for certain aspects of the digital services market; he does not say much about whether we are part of the single market or not. Does he not agree that for manufacturing, which is about 10% of our GDP, the imposition of tariffs would be extremely serious? Does he also not agree that for financial services—which, as I have already mentioned in a different context, accounts for about 10% of our GDP as well—the loss of the passports which enable us to trade in the single market would be equally catastrophic?
Lord Howell of Guildford
Although manufacturing is very important, it is a smaller and diminishing proportion of our export earnings. As I think the government White Paper points out, at least 33% of the value embedded in any manufactural product—I think the figure is 37%—comes from services. When you think about manufacturing, you have to think about something that is really not quite a manufacture or a service; it is a product of a service and high technology. A good example for the noble Lord is the Japanese company Uniqlo, which produces garments—not from Japanese manufacturing but from Japanese technology and services. All around the world, this pattern is developing. What I am trying to bring before your Lordships is the realisation—
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
Is the noble Lord aware that chapter 9 of the White Paper shows that the fastest growth in goods and services exported from this country is in Liechtenstein, at 40%? In the first 20 of the only 21 countries shown in the White Paper, the United States does not even get a mention.
Lord Howell of Guildford
I am not sure I follow the power or logic of that particular point. I am afraid that only three of the 20 fastest-growing countries in the last 10 years, in terms of exports, are members of the European Union—and we are not one of them.
Without delaying your Lordships further, I point out—in the words of the European Commission and their analysts—that “90% of world demand” over the next ten years,
“will be generated outside the EU”.
I suspect at least half or two-thirds of that will be generated from the fantastic, disruptive explosion in the transfer of know-how, information and digital technology of every conceivable kind. This is the world of the very near future: we may have arrived there already. What it means is that there is this apparent cliff edge, as it has been called, disaster, or dividing point between being inside today’s single market and being outside it, but we are dealing with many things that do not have a tariff on them—our services know no national boundaries and can be transmitted regardless of distance whether to a nearby European region or to the other side of the world—and it is becoming a completely new pattern in which we have to operate. To operate effectively, we must think in terms of a vast improvement in skills and a massive acceleration in innovation, and find our way into the gigantic, new growth markets of the future, which I am afraid are going to be largely outside the European Union.
Europe remains very important to us; the bilateral arrangements we have with European countries remain important to us. We are not all sure at the moment—this outlines the absurdity of trying to tie down the Government—whom we will be negotiating with, how much power Mr Barnier will have or what the 27 capital countries will say. I noticed that the Visegrad group—four at the moment—are coming together and have said they want a separate treaty; they do not agree with the approach of the European Commission in Brussels and they are thinking about separate arrangements because they are not satisfied with the general approach. We all heard the day before yesterday one of Mrs Merkel’s chief spokesmen saying that they disliked the whole aggressive approach of Jean-Claude Juncker and the Brussels Commission. We have no idea what is being brewed up as a position on the other side of the Channel to approach us, or whom we will be dealing with. What we do know is that the trade trends I have described are proceeding at a great pace; they are driven by technology that is growing at an exponential pace, with the development of Moore’s law, Metcalfe’s law and all the other aspects we know about; this is what we should take account of.
All I plead is that before your Lordships express too much indignation about whether we are inside the single market or outside it, we might reflect that, as we proceed in this entirely new pattern of international trade, we can do pretty well in dealing with all the aspects—they will be complex—of all the industries and services that will ensure our survival and prosperity in an extremely competitive world.
Lord Monks (Lab)
My Lords, I would like to address the question of the single market, which the noble Lord, Lord Howell, has just been talking about and rather discounted its importance, both currently and in the future. I do not whether he and other noble Lords have noticed but there is rather a tide of protectionism running through the world at present, not least in the United States of America—“America first” has been said a lot of times. Just remember that that is the context in which we are operating. I am not going to bandy too many statistics, but if 42% of our exports are going to the EU, compared with 15% to the United States of America, that is still a lot on both accounts, but you do not throw 42% into some lottery for the future. You hang on to what you have got and you seek to improve elsewhere. I agree with the noble Lord about the need to improve our game and raise our skill level, our innovation level and business investment—which, by the way, is going down because of the uncertainty which surrounds the future of the British economy at the present time, and that is a major worry. We are not innovating to the extent that we should be, and certainly not to the extent that certain other northern European countries are. Chucking that away rather lightly in the hope that we will catch a surfer wave of innovation and become the new silicon whatever-it-is island seems to be a rather fanciful notion.
I am not familiar with what Mr Haldane said—I read it but I did not get the same impression as the noble Lord, Lord Howell—but the Treasury’s most recent forecast is that if we collapse out of the single market, that will cost us 7.5% of GDP after 15 years. I am not an expert and I do not know who is right and who is wrong, but we should bear those facts in mind.
I am not going to speak for very long as my noble friend Lord Hain covered this topic very well and the earlier debate about the EEA, on the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Lea, covered it too. However, I remind Members of the Conservative Party in particular why they should consider the single market to be important. After all, Mrs Thatcher was, as much as anyone, the originator of the single market. She, with Jacques Delors adding on a social bit, basically came up with the idea of the big single market. I remember, as will my noble friend Lord Lea, Jacques Delors explaining at a TUC conference the conversation that the two of them had had. She said, “I want a big market”, and he said, “You can have one. I’ll do my best”. He added in some helpful social things that the trade unions liked; to be honest, they were about the only reason why we liked the single market. However, we may not like a free-trade agreement that does not have any social protections. A NAFTA-type agreement would certainly not suit us because that becomes a race to the bottom on labour standards, welfare and social considerations.
It was not just Mrs Thatcher, either. My noble friend Lord Hain reminded the other side about the number of people in the referendum campaign who spoke in favour of staying in the single market, not least the current Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who said he would vote for the single market. He differentiated between the single market and EU membership, and that is what we are seeking to do today with this amendment.
The single market is important for inward investment, which is the point that was so important in the 1980s. It is important for companies’ supply chains; we have heard about the milk in Ireland but there are many other examples where things are going backwards and forwards—the car industry, Airbus and so on. Let no one dismiss those as old technology that the digital revolution is going to make redundant; they are not. They are fundamental to who we are and what we are, the kind of country we are and what it is going to be in future.
The tariffs on some goods will be substantial if we collapse into the WTO system. As for the passporting issues in the City of London, there are already signs of banks establishing extra offices and extra staffing within the EU—at the moment, particularly in Paris. Even HSBC, our biggest bank, is doing so, so we should not be complacent about this issue.
Membership of the single market would of course ease the problems in Ireland, as debated earlier, and would perhaps remove at least one reason for another referendum in Scotland. What is at stake here is jobs, living standards and rights. We should bear that in mind; if we go down the Government’s route, we will be playing poker with people’s livelihoods on a big scale. Are we likely to get that comprehensive free- trade agreement within two years? I have not yet met anyone who knows anything about trade negotiations who thinks that is the case. Before we ditch the single market, we should be very careful. I was disappointed when I heard what the Prime Minister said at Lancaster House, and indeed in the government White Paper: that the Government are moving in that direction. I hope they will keep the scope to change direction.
We should also bear in mind the points that my noble friend Lord Liddle made earlier: could this be an issue on which there could be an interim provisional transitional measure while we negotiate a trade agreement? Is there something that we could put in place that we could continue with? In fact we do not have to put anything in place because it is in place already, so why do we have to give it up? It is in place and we should try to hang on to that, pending the negotiations that the Government seem so keen on.
That is my plea today: we should have a look at the amendment and at keeping our membership of the single market. I would like to see us keep it on a permanent basis but, if that is not possible, keeping it on a transitional provisional basis might just be possible. It might in fact be the only game in town when we get to the end of those two years.
Lord Spicer
My Lords, a distinction is made on purpose between access to the single market and membership of it but most of the speeches made on behalf of remain make that confusion. No one is arguing—or at least I have never met anyone who does—that we should not have access to or do business with the single market, in the same way as they will still want to do business with us. The question is whether we want to be members of it. I so agree with what my noble friend Lord Howell said about the fact that the world is changing now. For a start, the single market is a trade bloc, and it has a long and noble history of being one. It is based upon German technological protection and general French centralisation and protection. That is the foundation of it philosophically. Britain is a high-seas trading nation and, I think, should not be part of that market, but of course it should be trading with it. No one argues otherwise, although of course one has to point out that it is a fairly sluggish market because that is what protected markets are.
Lord Lea of Crondall
On the idea that you can choose between access and membership—membership has some obligations regarding what you have to do on standards and so on—I ask the noble Lord to reflect on whether it is Alice in Wonderland to say, “Oh, we would much prefer to have access but not membership”.
Lord Spicer
Of course not. The choice is there. As has been said today from the Front Bench, the public certainly believe that by leaving the EU we will be leaving the single market as well. Of course we can make that choice, and of course the members of the single market will want to choose whether they want to continue trading with us, but since we are one of the largest markets the answer is likely to be yes.
I turn to my other point: my noble friend Lord Howell is absolutely correct in his diagnosis of the markets changing. The fact is that much of what is now up for grabs in negotiation is outside the terms of the single market. One example, which the proposer of this amendment and I have had discussions about in the past, is the air service agreements. People talk about Open Skies. When I was Minister for Aviation I started to negotiate that agreement, but I did so on a bilateral basis. The ASAs are outside the terms of the single market. That is just an example of what my noble friend was saying about other aspects of trade, services and so on.
I quite agree with what he said both in its detail and in its contemporary context. In its context, it becomes far less important—in fact, unimportant—to be a member of the single market, but of course we must have the biggest trading relationships that we can with it. In my view the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, made the same confusion about access and membership. I really think we have to get that sorted out.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, I have put my name to Amendment 4, which was so effectively moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hain. Amendment 5, which is in my name and grouped with it, covers some of the matters that have already been discussed in the debate on Amendment 1.
The issue here is vital to much manufacturing industry in the UK and I am grateful to the noble Lord who spoke a moment ago emphasising that. The EU market is absolutely critical for manufacturers. This is generally true throughout the UK, but it is particularly true in Wales, where manufacturing represents a significant part of the economy and where the service sector is somewhat smaller than it is in other parts of these islands. I note the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and I respect them, but those arguments do not carry so much weight in Wales, given where we are now.
That is why the Welsh Government, led by Labour First Minister Carwyn Jones, jointly with the official Plaid Cymru Opposition led by Leanne Wood, have taken the unusual step of publishing a joint White Paper, Securing Wales’ Future, which has been endorsed by the National Assembly for Wales as a body. The White Paper calls for us to have,
“a new relationship with Europe”,
so it obviously accepts that, as a result of the referendum, we are leaving the EU as it is presently composed. That is something that I greatly regret, but it seems to be the reality.
The central theme of the White Paper is encapsulated in the following summary paragraph:
“We believe that full and unfettered access to the Single Market for goods, services and capital—including our key agricultural and food products—is vital for the forward interests of Wales and the UK as a whole and we urge the UK Government to adopt this as the top priority for negotiation with the EU”.
The reason for putting so much emphasis on this dimension is simple. When the old heavy industries in Wales declined as a source of employment, the replacement strategy adopted by successive Labour and Conservative Governments in London, and thereafter by Governments of Wales in Cardiff—and central to the highly successful work of the WDA—was to maximise inward investment to Wales by companies from America and Asia wanting to secure a manufacturing base in order to sell to the EU market.
This approach has been the key strategic element that has helped Wales to build a new manufacturing economy over the past three or four decades. I personally saw the merits of this at first hand, having worked before entering politics with three American corporations—Ford, Mars and Hoover, which was at Merthyr Tydfil at that time—and then having helped to set up a small company, Alpha-Dyffryn, which I chaired for nine years. This company was the sprat that caught the mackerel and secured the Siemens factory at Llanberis, which employs some 400 people and was established to sell to the European market.
What I know about all American companies coming to be based in Wales—companies such as Ford at Bridgend—is that they do so in order to sell to a European market of 500 million customers. If such companies had to overcome tariff or technical barriers, they would think twice before locating in Wales—or, indeed, in north-east England, Merseyside or the Midlands. They would certainly think twice about increasing their existing investment. Such unhampered access is equally relevant to key Welsh industries such as agriculture: 90% of our exports of beef and sheepmeat go to the European market.
The Welsh Government are not blind or deaf to the outcome of the referendum. They recognise that two elements that influenced some, though not all, of the out voters were, first, migration levels from the EU to the UK—although this amounts to only 2.6% of the population in Wales—and, secondly, the wish to avoid what some saw as unnecessary regulation. Those two elements may militate against our continuing full membership of the single market—although we note that, as has been mentioned, this is a price that Norway finds worth paying. Indeed, as has also been mentioned, some of the campaigners to leave the EU argued during the campaign that we would be able to seek a Norway-type relationship.
The Assembly White Paper states explicitly that the Welsh economy,
“will continue to need migration from EU countries to help sustain our private sector economy and public services”.
This is true of the tourist sector, of food processing, of the university sector and of much more. It is in the interests both of Wales and of the EU to reach an agreement that allows barrier-free access to the single market in return for an agreement to allow EU migrants to come to Wales to work. I emphasise the words “to work”. That is the key element in the approach of the Assembly White Paper, which explicitly states that,
“freedom of movement of people is linked to employment”.
That is the requirement and it should be acceptable both to EU countries and to ourselves.
What we ask in the amendments is that the Government commit to such an approach in their negotiations with our 27 EU partners. Equally, with regulations that may be needed to avoid market distortion, it should be possible to agree, and for the UK to legislate, for such regulations as may be needed to maintain a level playing field. In fact, the European Union Committee recognises this in its report Brexit: The Options for Trade, which, in paragraph 43 of the summary, on page 76, says:
“The notion that a country can have complete regulatory sovereignty while engaging in comprehensive free trade with partners is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of free trade. Modern FTAs involve extensive regulatory harmonisation in order to eliminate non-tariff barriers, and surveillance and dispute resolution arrangements to monitor and enforce implementation. The liberalisation of trade thus requires states to agree to limit the exercise of their sovereignty”.
In the context of these amendments, that is a very pertinent paragraph.
What is being sought by the cross-party approach in Wales is neither unreasonable nor impractical. Indeed, the wording of the Government’s White Paper leaves a small chink of light that suggests that they may in their heart be amenable to such an approach. Indeed, in paragraph 8.3 of the White Paper they say that a new negotiated agreement,
“may take in elements of current Single Market arrangements in certain areas as it makes no sense to start again from scratch when the UK and the remaining Member States have adhered to the same rules for so many years”.
Precisely. So why will the Government not accept one or other of the amendments as a token of their sincerity in that approach, or at least table their own amendment along these lines on Report? Industry, business and agriculture would then sleep much more easily—and so would the Government of Wales.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I have no problem in agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, that a good trade deal, and a fair trade deal, is important for Wales—and, indeed, for all parts of the United Kingdom. My problem with the amendments is that they fly directly in the face of what the people voted for. Since the referendum, many remainers have been peddling the myth that the people voted to leave the EU but not to leave the single market. The single market was not on the ballot paper, they say, so the people could not have voted for it. Apparently they just wanted to leave the EU but to stay in the single market; we heard that point put passionately by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, a few moments ago.
Remainers have accused my right honourable friend the Prime Minister of “opting” for a hard Brexit. I submit that that is nonsense. The Prime Minister is not opting for a hard Brexit, a soft Brexit or any sort of squishy Brexit; she is merely attempting to carry out the wishes of the people to leave the EU. That automatically means leaving the single market, because if we stay in the single market we are still in the EU, to all intents and purposes.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Would the noble Lord respond to the notion that the people decided that they wanted access but not membership? So the 48%—let us get this right—wanted membership of the single market and the 52% wanted access? Was that on the ballot paper, by any chance?
Lord Blencathra
My Lords, it would be difficult to respond to that without tying myself in circles, because the noble Lord has got it slightly wrong. But I will come on to the point about people saying we could access the single market. At one point during the campaign, it may have been my right honourable friend Boris Johnson who said, “We could leave the EU and still access the single market”. What happened? All hell broke loose. It is not that we were shot down but the Government and their advisers dropped the equivalent of all their bunker-busting bombs on us. “No, no”, said the then Prime Minister, the Treasury and the BSE campaign. “If you vote to leave the EU, then you are out of the single market. You are out of the customs union. You can’t have one without the other”, said all the government spokesmen. “You can’t have your cake and eat it”, they said. On that occasion that is what the Government said. Opposition Members have quoted various leave spokesmen who have said, “Oh yes, we want to be in the single market and leave the EU”, or, “We want to access the single market and be in the EU”, but the response from the official BSE campaign, the Prime Minister and the Government was, “No, you can’t. Leaving the EU means leaving the single market too”. On that occasion, the remain campaign was not economical with the truth.
Baroness Kramer
I just make the point that the argument that leave made was that the remainers were exaggerating and they were wrong. To their credit, people believed them and voted on that basis. So if you were a leave voter and you had listened to Daniel Hannan, if you were a leave voter and you had listened to Boris Johnson, if you were a leave voter and you were at any one of the many hustings that I went to, you would have heard the leave campaign saying absolutely clearly that you would have identical access; indeed, you would be in the single market even if you voted leave. That happened over and again and there are witnesses to it throughout this House.
Lord Blencathra
If the leave campaign tried that early on in the campaign, it was certainly shot down by the Government, the Treasury and all their spokesmen very early on.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Is not the point a very simple one which the noble Lord does not appear to appreciate—that every country in the world has access to the single market? The issue was whether one was a member of the single market, which would mean that all businesses—that is, 90% of the businesses in this country—would be bound by these rules and regulations, which would apply to exporters. That was the distinction made.
Lord Blencathra
My noble friend, as an expert in these matters, is absolutely right. He puts it very succinctly. Please correct me if I am wrong—I am very happy to be shot down on this point—but is it correct that if we stay in the single market, then we have to accept what the EU calls the four fundamental freedoms, including open borders? Is it true that if we stay in the single market, we have to pay into the EU budget to a certain extent? Is it correct that, if we stay in the single market, we have to let the European court rule over us? Is it correct that, if we stay in the single market, we have to accept laws made by a body over which this Parliament would have no say or control? That is not leaving the EU, and those who advocate staying in the single market know it full well. It is staying in the EU by the back door, and that is not what the British people voted for.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Perhaps the noble Lord would explain about the people of Norway who voted to not join the European Union and accepted all the things he said they had accepted.
Lord Blencathra
My Lords, the last thing I heard about Norway was in the news last week. I believe that a Norwegian Minister, or former Minister, said, “Whatever you do, don’t join the EEA like we did. It was a terrible mistake”. I am not here to answer for Norway’s decision. I am here to support the decision of the British people—all 17.2 million of them. I was part of the leave campaign, a little junior cog, and after we were successful, some detailed studies were done. Contrary to the public view that everybody voted leave to stop or control immigration, the vast majority of people—72%—voted leave because they said that they wanted to get back control and sovereignty of their country. Only about 23% put immigration at the top of the list. Of course, admittedly, if you are taking back sovereignty and control and putting Parliament in charge, that means Parliament is in charge of immigration and a lot of other things as well. But let us not pretend that people voted leave purely because of immigration or because they wanted to stay in the single market.
I conclude with a comment that I made in my Second Reading speech, when I quoted my right honourable friend Sir Oliver Letwin MP, one of the Government’s foremost remain campaigners, and one of the then Prime Minister’s gurus when thinking about these things. He said in the other place on 31 January:
“I made it … clear … that … an inevitable consequence of leaving the EU would be leaving the single market”,
and leaving the customs union. He continued,
“it seems to me … that the people who voted to leave were voting with their eyes wide open, knowing that the consequence might be our falling back on the WTO”.—[Official Report, Commons, 31/01/17; col. 871.]
The Government made it clear at the time that leaving the EU meant leaving the single market. There is no excuse now to try to build in this amendment to thwart the decision of the British people.
Lord Oates (LD)
I support Amendment 4. I do so because what the Government are doing is beyond me with their extreme form of Brexit in taking us out of the single market. Why are they doing it? Above all, why are those on the Conservative Benches who supported remain allowing them to do it? It is true that there was an instruction from the British people that we should leave the European Union but there was not an instruction for us to leave the single market, however much the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, might wish there was. That was for the very simple reason that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, pointed out, that matter was not on the ballot paper. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, and other noble Lords on the leave side of this argument can speculate as much as they want about the reasons people voted the way they did, and I can speculate as well. However, the truth is that none of us actually knows. All we know is the instruction that was given on 23 June. The referendum campaign did not help much. The campaign on either side, frankly, in terms of getting to the facts, was not terribly helpful. The noble Lord quoted a number of Conservative politicians. That is part of the problem. The referendum campaign was effectively a factional fight between two wings of the Conservative Party, which did very little to illuminate the facts but, tragically, a very great deal to divide and damage the country.
What we do know—however much those opposite may protest—is what all the mainstream parties promised the electorate at the time of the last general election. It was that we would stay in the single market. That was at a time when the referendum was likely. Indeed, it was a pledge in the manifesto of the Conservative Party. As the noble Lord, Lord Hain, also mentioned, the Conservative Party manifesto could not have been clearer. To avoid any ambiguity it emphasised its clarity. It said:
“We say: yes to the Single Market”.
There was no caveat in the way that people suggest, so it is unclear to me why the Prime Minister has decided—given that she has no other mandate on this matter than that manifesto—that she is saying no to the single market. I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, and other noble Lords, including some Ministers, argue that the unambiguous pledge in the Conservative manifesto was somehow trumped by the fact that there would be a referendum and the Government would respect the result. You can respect the result of the referendum and withdraw from the European Union without withdrawing from the single market. Deciding to leave the EU does not mean leaving the single market, however much noble Lords opposite would like it to do so.
As has been mentioned, a number of countries are members of the European single market but not members of the European Union. Norway, in particular, was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. Norway sought to negotiate joining the EU at the same time as us in the 1970s. In the end, it had a referendum and voted against but it became a member of the single market. We should be very clear that when Norwegian Ministers were saying it was not ideal, they were not saying, “Don’t be members of the single market”; they were saying, “For goodness’ sake, stay in the European Union”. To suggest otherwise is just nonsense.
It is clear that it is possible to be both outside the EU and inside the single market. The question, therefore, is whether it is desirable. In my very strong view, it is. We know that the issue in world trade increasingly is not tariffs but non-tariff barriers. As the IFS noted in its report on the single market published in August last year, the service sector is particularly important to our economy and to our tax receipts and is particularly vulnerable. The financial services sector is likely to be disproportionately hit by loss of the single market.
For many of us, the decision to leave the EU is a tragedy that goes far beyond economics but it is compounded by the Government’s decision to pursue extreme Brexit no matter the cost to our economy. We have the opportunity tonight to ask them to think again. We should take it.
Lord Green of Deddington
I can be extremely brief. I just want to take up one point that the noble Lord, Lord Hain, raised earlier. He acknowledged the significance of immigration to the result of the referendum. He did not say that it was the main reason but he acknowledged its significance. So it seems to me that a key question is whether we can stay in the single market and control immigration. He mentioned that other countries such as Belgium have found a way to control immigration within the single market by removing people without a job.
The situation in the UK is entirely different from that of Belgium. We have more than 2 million European citizens working here—which is fine, but we cannot skate over the fact that the whole situation is different. The numbers are much larger. Noble Lords may not know that last year 625,000 EU citizens took out national insurance numbers. They will not all be working; some will be short term. But the scale of it is enormous. We know that net EU migration is 180,000, equal almost to that from the rest of the world. There is no prospect of any serious measures of control if we remain in the single market.
Lord Cashman (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to follow the noble Lord, Lord Green. I am going to be brief—I hope very brief. For far too long during the campaign and since we have had the fear of the stranger. The fear of someone who comes from another country and, none the less, comes to this country and wants to play by the same rules. I have no fear of such strangers.
I am not interested really in what was said during the campaign—
Lord Green of Deddington
I hope that the noble Lord is not suggesting either that I have such a fear or that I am trying to create it. I am certainly not. For 15 years I have tried to bring to people’s attention the broad facts on the issue and I hope that the noble Lord will acknowledge that.
Lord Cashman
I acknowledge that fully and I hope that the record will reflect that I referred to “the campaign and since”.
I am not interested in what was said during the campaign—who said what and where they said it. What matters is now, and how we build on this. It was wonderful to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Howell—and he always listens with such generosity to others—but I am going to take a slightly different approach.
I want also to revisit something that was said by the Minister about people’s trust in politics. He is absolutely right. It was at an all-time low and it is our duty to pull it back up. However, at the root of that is a real fear, and I sense that that fear is growing. People are wondering what will happen to them and their rights when we start to negotiate our way out of the European Union. It is a fear shared by UK nationals living in other countries, such as the more than 1.2 million people living in Spain; it is a fear of others who have come to this country to live, work, study and contribute; and it is a fear that we must address. That is why, I suggest, there is such a large number of amendments to this very simple Bill; they reflect a real, deep concern outside.
I make no apology for my attachment to membership of the single market. It gives social responsibility to the market; it gives rights to consumers and to the people who work within it; and, as I said in my previous speech, it gives wonderful rights of non-discrimination, not least in the workplace and in access to training and vocational training. There is a fear that, when we remove the freedom of movement that quite rightly comes from membership of the single market, all those rights that people enjoy—although they no longer take them for granted—will disappear. That is why I very much support this amendment, as I do the protection of the rights of EU nationals.
Lord Smith of Finsbury (Non-Afl)
In the light of what the noble Lord has just said, does he share my dismay that the leaders of the Official Opposition appear to have set their face against supporting this amendment? At the heart of the amendment is surely an instruction to the Government to put membership of the single market at the very heart of their negotiating strategy.
Lord Cashman
I promised brevity. I share the noble Lord’s dismay for the very simple reason that when I negotiate and have a vision, it is not for the short term or to pander to public opinion but about where I want this country to be in the long term, generations down the line.
I conclude by saying that my deep concern is that, when we no longer have access to the single market, the rights that are currently enjoyed will not be replicated in their entirety elsewhere. It has been suggested that no deal would give us the opportunity to do whatever we want. That is not the reality. No deal will bring great costs. One of those costs—or benefits, as has been suggested—is that we will become a tax haven. My deep and bigger fear is that we will become an offshore, unregulated sweat-shop of Europe, and I am happy to support the amendment.
Baroness Altmann (Con)
My Lords, I have listened carefully to all the contributions on the amendments so far and I feel that I must intervene. I have been deeply troubled in trying to understand why the Government are so set on the idea that no deal is better than a bad deal and that we can contemplate leaving the single market and the customs union with some kind of equanimity. That was brought home to me by the comment of my noble friend Lord Howell about the failure to see what is going on. It brought to mind his eloquent description of how he sees the future of global trade and global business, which is not in manufacturing but in services. But that vision is not shared on other Benches across the House, and nor indeed by me. Indeed, I would argue that it is not shared by the majority of the people in this country. His remarks imply the destruction of our manufacturing sector and of millions of jobs across the country, and I do not believe that that is what the British people voted for.
Lord Howell of Guildford
The implication is not that at all; it is that the patterns and processes of production are now being internationalised on a scale that we have never seen before, so that even different stages in the processes of production are spread through fantastic new value chains right across many nations. Of course production will go on—but it is now very much an international rather than a national affair. That is happening now.
Baroness Altmann
I do not disagree with my noble friend that that is what is going on, but by leaving the single market we are hampering our manufacturing industry and putting barriers in the way that will ensure the destruction of millions of jobs. Unless we get some kind of access to the single market, we are sacrificing the integrated supply chains so many of our smaller businesses depend on. If we believe that no deal is better than a bad deal, we are gambling millions of manufacturing jobs, 10% of our GDP and peaceful developments in Northern Ireland—our debate on Northern Ireland was particularly important this evening—in exchange for the hope that we will achieve the White Paper wish list. My noble friend the Minister did indeed set out what we wish to achieve, but we still have no idea what might happen if we do not manage to achieve that. We are giving up the integrated supply chains and Euratom membership, and leaving the customs union, the EEA, EFTA and the single market in the hope that we can benefit from the growth in services and technology.
We need to recognise that leaving the single market was never put to the British people. I believe that it will be hugely damaging to our economy. Somebody may decide to buy a house and, on the basis of the estate agent’s details, may make an offer that is accepted and decide that they will move there. If they then have a survey done, or their lawyer discovers some unexpected legal small print, they want the chance to change their mind. They do not want to be bound by their original decision if what they end up with is not what they imagined. Therefore, I believe it is the duty of this House to ask the other place to think again on some of the vital issues that are bound up in what is, I agree, a very short and potentially uncomplicated Bill.
Lord Mandelson (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness because, with her sharpness and clarity, she has brought this debate back to earth with a bump. Yes, whether we stay in the single market goes to the heart of the Brexit debate but, much more importantly, it goes to the heart of our future prosperity as a country—the lives, livelihoods, jobs and standards of living of all our fellow citizens—and therefore we should dwell on it.
In the coming negotiations, Britain should have three primary objectives: first, to secure, as far as possible, the continuity of our existing trade in the European Union; secondly, to be in the best position to attract future supply chain investment in Britain by international companies; and thirdly, to optimise our ability to make future trade agreements with other countries. All these objectives would best be served by our continuing in the single market, through the European Economic Area, as Norway did when, in the 1990s, its public rejected membership of the European Union but, seeking the economic opportunities available to it in Europe, decided instead to join the EEA. I believe this very strongly. I have to say this not only in opposition to the Government’s chosen path—what has rightly been called, “Brexit at all costs”, which is both desperate on their part and potentially very damaging indeed to our economy—but also in disagreement with the argument on grounds of sovereignty, made by Keir Starmer in the other place, that staying in the single market through the EEA would make Britain subject to rules that the rest of the EU has made. That is what lawyers would describe as a piece of Nelsonian knowledge. It is what happens when you intentionally place a telescope to your blind eye.
I accept that, hitherto, the EEA shows what small countries such as Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein were able to secure when committing to being part of the single market, but Britain is not of the same status, size or type as any of those countries. A British version of membership of the EEA—this is a key point—would retain much more influence and clout in setting the standards for our largest export market. By removing ourselves from the European Union and the single market, we would only theoretically be more sovereign and we would be considerably poorer. I am reminded of what the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said:
“A man alone in the desert is sovereign. He is also powerless”.
I respect the result of the referendum, but I part company from the Government in my belief that we now have an absolute duty to obtain the closest and best possible economic relationship with our largest export and investment market after we leave the European Union. Merely seeking a future free trade agreement between Britain and the EU that deals with tariffs and some customs procedures will fall far short of actually being in the single market. Yes, that is the difference between access and actual participation through membership of the single market that the noble Lords, Lord Spicer and Lord Forsyth, drew to our attention. The former—access—we have to beg for; the latter, we have by right. That is a fundamental difference.
If we simply do as the Government are proposing and seek a free trade agreement, I assure noble Lords, as a former Trade Commissioner and this country’s Trade Secretary, that it will give us significantly less trade than we have at the moment, no automatic market rights in Europe and a paltry means of enforcing those rights that we have. Believe me, I have negotiated those things on Europe’s behalf with countries trying to access the European single market. I know how ponderous the European Commission can be when it comes to such negotiations. I know how difficult it is for third countries, which is what we would be, to get access on the terms that they want and need.
A free trade agreement would not cover all trade; it would not cover services as well as goods, which is a fundamental point. The agreement—if we ever get one, given how relations between ourselves and our European partners have gone downhill since the Prime Minister’s October speech to the Conservative Party conference—will take a very long time to obtain and will certainly stretch way beyond the two-year cut-off point of Article 50 itself. That is why John Major was absolutely right to make his speech this evening at Chatham House in which he strongly and in vigorous terms attacked the Government’s approach to Brexit and called, quite rightly, for a little more charm towards our erstwhile partners and a little less cheap rhetoric.
In a number of key national capitals—
Lord Dykes
With his distinguished European background, why does the noble Lord not fight to keep us in the European Union, as Kenneth Clarke is doing in the Commons?
Lord Mandelson
Why am I not fighting to keep us in the European Union? My word! Judging by my email inbox, the noble Lord must be the only person in the country who does not believe that I am fighting for Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. Of course being a democrat, I respect—oh, there is no point his waving his hand in that Edwardian way.
I am afraid that we have had a referendum, but the point is this: we can now make a choice between leaving the European Union and wrecking our economy, or leaving the European Union and making the best economic job that we can of doing so. There is a huge difference between negotiating our future trade relationship from the safety of being a relative insider, which is what we would be as a member of the EEA, as opposed to being an outsider and jostling for preferential access to Europe’s marketplace like any other country—fighting with many others for access at Europe’s border. Of course the single market is not perfect, notably in its coverage of all services. However, almost half of British trade in goods and services takes place in the European market. It should therefore be an absolute priority for us to secure the continuity of that trade we already have.
There is another crucial issue for us, given the nature of our manufacturing sector in this country. Other noble Lords have touched on that. The point is that the single market is not just a huge trading space: it is also a giant factory floor. Among mature economies trade is now increasingly less in finished goods than in part-finished goods moving back and forth across borders, often many times, as part of increasingly sophisticated value chains.
Lord Spicer
If everything is so hunky-dory, why is there such a massive balance of payments deficit?
Lord Mandelson
My Lords, it is not a question of everything being hunky-dory, but of how desperately worse off we would be were we not to remain in the single market. For goodness’ sake, let us apply a little reality to this. Even President Trump may wake up one day and realise that, given the nature of 21st-century trade in the world today, 40% of the content of Mexican exports to the US actually originates in the US. That is the reality of trade and of the single market; that is why I have no hesitation in describing it as a vast factory floor.
Another thing that is changing interests is that while tariffs and customs controls are important, as we will find out, increasingly so are product standards, copyright and intellectual property rules, investment rules and, yes, rules governing data sharing and transfer. The point is that in the single market we have a single rulebook that covers all these things and therefore we have an even playing field across the entire European single market on which our businesses can conduct their business. We will struggle outside it, especially if in pursuit of a US trade deal we choose to comply with equivalent American rules instead of European ones. The more we diverge from European rules, the more difficult we will find it to trade in our own vast home European market.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, we on these Benches fully support the amendment and the excellent arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and the other signatories, the noble Lords, Lord Monks and Lord Wigley, and my noble friend Lord Oates. We also support the tour de force from the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, and the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann. They are extremely convincing. My noble friend Lady Kramer answered the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who said that it was clear that leaving the EU means leaving the single market. That is absolutely not the case. The point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, about the Conservative manifesto of 2015, which said:
“We say: yes to the Single Market”.
He answered very effectively the noble Lord, Lord Lamont.
The Government claim they want free, seamless and frictionless trade, at least as possible. Those two words “as possible” have great import and meaning, because it will not be possible to have free, seamless and frictionless trade if we are not in the single market and the customs union. Anything else is very much second best. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, summed it up: it is about integrated supply chains. If it was not important whether we are in the single market and the customs union we would not have had such reactions from successive car firms, such as Nissan and Vauxhall. Now, apparently, BMW is about to move production of electric Minis out of the UK. No doubt it will knock on the Government’s door very soon to try to get a similar comfort letter out of them.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, talked about how goods sailing out of Tilbury was passé. It does not seem to be passé to manufacturers in this country. Any alternative to being in the single market and the customs union is more bureaucratic and more cumbersome. In addition, any terms for trading freely with the EU single market will mean compliance with product standards, other regulation and data standards, which were mentioned. That has caused huge problems for non-EU members, including the United States. On this fetish that the Government have to pretend that we have never heard of the European Court of Justice, they will have to face up to the fact that, one way or another, directly or indirectly, we will have to accord with EU law and the rulings of the court. As I said the other day, there will be some sort of smoke and mirrors there.
The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, stressed how important the single market is to Wales. I pick that up, because my noble friend Lady Humphreys stressed it at Second Reading. Indeed, she mentioned the Airbus factory in Wales, which must have the same integrated supply chain issues that were mentioned.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, was dismissive of the EU market, which takes only 42% or 44% of our exports. That is three times as much as the US market takes. The point is that the EU is a battering ram to try and open up US and other markets. One of the problems is state-level public procurement in the US and with “Buy America” being reinforced by President Trump, we are going to need all the help we can get from the European base. We are not going to be able to open up those markets on our own.
The other red line, besides the Court of Justice, is the fetish of free movement. It has been made a red line by the Government and, I am afraid, by the Labour Opposition. It became apparent in exchanges we have had in the last few weeks in this House at Question Time that the UK Government do not even know whether they are enforcing the existing restrictions on free movement, and they are refusing to explore the flexibility and change that it might be possible to get across the EU or the EEA. The noble Lord, Lord Green, says that there was no prospect of any serious measures of control. However, what was interesting about the renegotiation of the former Prime Minister David Cameron was the quite extraordinary principle introduced of the possibility to discriminate on the grounds of nationality, which was actually pretty revolutionary.
The Government are not even trying to explore the flexibility there, as well as, of course, ignoring the two-way street and opportunities that it gives the British people. Just throwing away free movement is telling particularly our young people, as well as retirees, that they can dish any plans they had to work, study and retire in Europe. Therefore, from these Benches we fully support the amendment. I hope that the speeches from distinguished noble Lords on the Labour Benches—and even not on the Labour Benches—and the dialogue, will have persuaded the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, to join these Benches in supporting the amendment.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, what a nice invitation to have from the noble Baroness. It is almost impossible to disagree with my noble friends Lord Hain, Lord Monks and Lord Mandelson, and, indeed, most of the other noble Lords who have spoken, certainly from this side but elsewhere, about the benefit of the single market to the UK’s economic and social prosperity. As many noble Lords know—they have had to hear from me far too many times—my commitment to the EU long predates the creation of the internal market, although it was perhaps more for me the peace project referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, in an earlier amendment. I nevertheless believe that the internal market has contributed to these wider objectives in addition to the trade and prosperity that it has helped to generate.
Indeed, the arguments we have heard are exactly those that I used day after day during the referendum. However, some of the speeches today, I fear, were about trying to rerun that argument. Amendment 4 is rather as if the referendum had not happened and the result was not for leaving. The Bill is about authorising the Prime Minister to begin the process. It is not about going over the arguments. What it demands is a statement from the Prime Minister contrary to her White Paper. I think she is getting the approach wrong, but that it different from making it a statement from her, that only at that point could we trigger Article 50 because that statement makes it conditional within the amendment. I think asking a Prime Minister to eat her own words before she triggers it is something that this House probably cannot and would not want to do.
Anyway, our continued membership of the single market once we are outside the EU—that is, back in the EFTA, which we left in 1972—is also difficult as we would have to accept ECJ jurisdiction as well as free movement. I cannot see the problem with the ECJ. I simply do not understand the Government’s horror at accepting an international court. We will need some sort of adjudication system anyway in any free trade agreement with the EU. Whether the Government will then complain about that I do not know.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
Let me finish on this particular point. I will give way if I can first make one statement, as I think I am allowed. It would make us mere recipients of rules decided elsewhere, as I found when I worked in the European Parliament. Those were the only words I wanted to add before giving way.
Lord Mandelson
With great respect, we would not be mere recipients. We would be large, senior, influential members of the EEA negotiating our membership of it on terms that would give us significant influence over policy-making and rule-making in the European Union. Everyone accepts that and I cannot understand why my own Front Bench cannot see it.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I wish that my noble friend Lord Mandelson was right on that. If it were the case, we might be in a different position but at the moment it is a hope rather than a guarantee.
When I worked in the European Parliament, as any noble Lords who may have been in the Commons at the time might remember, we saved 1000cc motorcycles. We also saved kippers and Scottish Arbroath smokies. As noble Lords may remember, on the 1000cc motorcycles we had those wonderful big bikes going round and round Parliament Square before they headed off to Brussels. I think it was Commissioner Bangemann who had tried to ban 1000cc bikes. Of course, other than in the States they were made only in Britain. Elsewhere they made smaller ones and they came up with this argument that the larger ones were inherently unsafe. Actually, it turned out that they were safer than small bikes, partly because they are ridden by safer riders. Unfortunately, we won not because of the great display of bikes going round Parliament Square but because we had a Minister at the Council of Ministers as well as MEPs. He is not in his place but I think my noble friend Lord Tomlinson was probably the MEP concerned at the time. So we were able to challenge that argument and we won.
It was similar with the smokies, on a smaller issue. Some bright spark in the Commission thought they should be transported only below a certain temperature. Of course, they can be sent by post—in those days, we used to get them early enough for our breakfast. We managed to save those, too, but we did it because we had MEPs in the European Parliament, we had a Commissioner and we obviously had a Minister at the Council of Ministers.
What worries me—and, indeed, what worries me about the intervention just made—is that we would become rather like what we saw a lot there, namely lobbyists around the corridors of Brussels, using others to make the arguments for us. Norway said to us, “We use our Scandinavian friends; we have a very close relationship, for obvious reasons, and they make our representations for us”.
The other issue, of course, that we are all beginning to see, relates to the regulations. These are the regulations that your Lordships’ House will soon have to put into the great repeal Bill. These have all been passed by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, in both of which we are represented as a member of the EU. Once we put those into the great repeal Bill, others will continue to be made. In the short term, there will be no problem, and in the transitional period, membership of the EEA is extremely attractive because it will take a long time before those are replaced. Certainly, if we remain in the customs union, which I very much hope we will be able to do, we will have to abide by rules, even if we have not made them, on those elements with which we trade and by which we export. That, however, is different from being bound by the whole acquis and judged by the ECJ, with no British member, on rules that we have not made, in a Parliament in which we have no seats and in a Council in which we have no vote. That is not what the referendum said.
Therefore, my heart is with the movers of the amendment and with wanting to stay as we were, but I also have time, occasionally, to read books. I am a great fan of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, with its famous advice:
“Everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same”.
Alternatively, in some translations—Italian speakers will know better than I—he says:
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.
I want things to stay as they are, in that we should continue to trade freely with the EU 27, but to achieve this, we will have to change, and negotiate tariff-free, encumbrance-free access to that single market and it to us. That is what we must aim for. We have a fight ahead of us to keep our position in the customs union, to ensure that tariff-free trade and to work for the three objectives that have just been set out by my noble friend Lord Mandelson and the closest possible relationship with the EU 27. Our task is to persuade the Government that they have set their sat-nav for the wrong destination. That is where our energies must go. However, it is unfair to give people the unrealistic hope that staying in the single market, despite the referendum and our exit, is a possibility. We need to continue to trade as freely as possible with the EU that we have to leave. For that reason, we are not able to support this amendment.
Lord Bridges of Headley
I think that I would like to say a few words, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, says. I sense there is some division. Let me start by trying to mend some bridges—pardon the pun. All of us in this House wish our country to prosper. We all want to see more investment and more jobs. The very simple question raised by these amendments is this: in light of the vote to leave the EU, how can we best do that? I know that the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Monks, and other noble Lords whose names are on these amendments, have long-held views that the best route to achieve that aim is, at least in part, for the United Kingdom to remain within the EU and within the single market. I respect their views and the steadfastness with which they hold them. I will try my best to be eloquent, but I am sure that what I am about to say will not deflect them and a number of other noble Lords, such as the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, from supporting this amendment. But I will briefly set out why the Government oppose the amendment. The first and most obvious reason is that it has nothing to do with the Bill. The Bill has one purpose only: to enable the Government to start the process of negotiation. It is not a means to dictate the terms of the negotiation.
The second reason concerns the democratic arguments. Very briefly, as I said earlier, the Government promised to hold a referendum and to honour its result. Yes, I know that the Conservative Government said that they would protect our role in the single market in the manifesto. But as my noble friend Lord Blencathra pointed out, the manifesto also promised to respect the result of the referendum—a promise which this Parliament endorsed by passing the European Union Referendum Act.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, the debate we have heard tonight has been a rerun of the referendum campaign. As I said earlier, during that campaign, every household was sent a leaflet which spelled out the consequences of leaving as regards our membership of the single market. A number of people on both sides of the argument pointed out that we could not vote to leave and then try to remain in the single market. Criticising the leave campaign, one of those arguing to remain said:
“Some of those advocating British withdrawal suggest that we can have our cake and eat it by staying within the European single market to retain the great bulk of our trade which is with EU countries”.—[Official Report, 2/3/16; col. 855.]
Those are the words of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and he was quite right. The four freedoms are seen by many across Europe as indivisible, and we should respect those views.
Much more than that, as other noble Lords have said, remaining a member of the single market would mean complying with the EU’s rules and regulations that implement the four freedoms, without having a vote on what those rules and regulations are. It would almost certainly mean accepting a role for the Court of Justice of the European Union. It would mean still not having control over immigration—relying on enforcement powers rather than creating an immigration system, which this Government intend to build, which allows us to control numbers and encourages the brightest and best to come to this country.
As to the customs union, were we to remain a full member, we would remain bound by a common external tariff, which would greatly limit our ability to strike our own trade deals and our freedom to determine the level of UK tariffs. Were we to remain within the common commercial policy, we would not be able to pursue freely our bold, ambitious trade agenda with the rest of the world. We would instead, as now, be ceding responsibility for this to the European Union. So to remain a member of the single market and to remain a full member of the customs union would, to all intents and purposes, mean not leaving the EU at all.
As to the EEA, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, that it suffers from a democratic deficit. Once we leave the EU, as my noble and learned friend said earlier, the EEA agreement will no longer be relevant for the UK. It will have no practical effect. But we expect a phased process of implementation to cover our withdrawal from the EU in which both Britain and the EU institutions and member states prepare for the new arrangements between us. This is intended to give businesses enough time to plan and prepare for the new arrangements. The interim arrangements that we rely on will be a matter for negotiation.
Lord Liddle
Does that mean that the Government are not ruling out EEA membership for the transition?
Lord Bridges of Headley
I have nothing further to add, other than to say that it is a matter for the negotiations. It is a matter for the negotiations and I am not going to go further. I checked the transcript of the Select Committee hearing that the noble Lord so rightly brought me up on earlier and that is what I said. It is exactly consistent with what I have said.
I turn to our approach to trade with the EU once we have left. My noble friend Lord Howell pointed out the intricacies of this. It is absolutely true—a basic point—that across the world countries which are not members of the single market trade with Europe. The single market is not a tablet of stone. As the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, so rightly said, in services, which drive so much of our wealth creation, the single market is incomplete; likewise, on digital services. With that in mind, the Government have a clear aim: to seek an agreement for the freest and most frictionless trade possible in goods and services between the UK and the EU. We start these negotiations from a unique position. The EU exports to the UK £290 billion of goods and services each year, and on day 1 we will have exactly the same regulations and standards as our negotiating partners. The focus will be not about removing existing barriers or questioning certain protections but about ensuring new barriers do not arise, and the scale of trade means that it should be in our interests, and Europe’s interests, to come to an agreement.
Lord Hain
My Lords, respectfully, I completely disagree with the proposition that the Minister has just made. Yes, I did say that the European Union was preferable to staying in the single market—that was my belief. That was also what he believed and what the Prime Minister of the day, David Cameron, argued. It is what all of us on the remain side argued—but now our task is very different. Given that we are due to leave the European Union, we have to make the best of a bad job. We have to rescue something from this which will protect jobs and prosperity, and that is what this amendment is about.
It is suggested that this will add delay. No, it will add no delay. The text of the amendment says that,
“the Prime Minister must give an undertaking to negotiate under the process set out in Article 50 on the basis of the United Kingdom retaining membership of the European Single Market”.
It talks about achieving and negotiating—it is about trying to go down that road. This would be a lot easier and quicker than the alternative under the WTO rules and the completely unknown waters that we are about to sail into. We do not know how difficult that will be and how long it might take. If the Minister is concerned about delay, he should support this amendment, because it will produce a much simpler outcome than the one that otherwise awaits us.
I would also say that remaining in the single market would not be against the outcome of the referendum. The referendum was about leaving the European Union. That was the question on the ballot paper; it was not about the single market. If we retain our membership of the single market, there is a much better chance of Scotland staying in the United Kingdom. If we retain membership of the single market, there is a much better chance of resolving the problems that we discussed earlier in respect of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
I do not accept the case put—very eloquently—by my Front Bench that staying in the single market will result in a democratic deficit. The WTO alternative will result in a much bigger democratic deficit than is perceived by those who criticise this amendment. As a very large economy we will still—as my noble friend Lord Mandelson said—have the opportunity to have significant influence; maybe not in the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament because those bodies require a membership of the European Union that we will no longer have, but by having the clout that we will have in the negotiation for future rules and so on in the single market.
I make no criticism of those on my Front Bench—they have done a fantastic job in very difficult circumstances. My criticism is of my party leader. I think that he will be judged by history as being on the wrong side of this argument and of forcing us to do something that we in the Labour Party do not in our hearts really believe in. What we will be doing, in my view, is nodding through a Conservative agenda for a right-wing, hard-right Brexit—Trump-like—of deregulation, low-tax, small state, shrinking public services and even more austerity.
Lord Hain
“Hear, hear”, they say—there we have the confirmation. I do not go lightly against my party Whip. In my 26 years in Parliament—in the Commons and in this House—I have only ever done this once or twice. But this for me is a matter of crucial importance to this country and to the future of the people, their jobs and their prosperity. The Minister—with all due respect—is doing a great job on a sticky wicket. But the truth is that he and the Government have no clue where we are going. They have no idea where they are taking us. For the sake of our jobs, prosperity and businesses, it is important to pass this amendment and I therefore wish to divide the House.
Baroness Quin
“( ) Subsection (1) does not come into force until Her Majesty’s Government has laid before each House of Parliament an assessment of the impact of—(a) withdrawing from the European Union, and(b) Her Majesty’s Government's negotiating strategy for withdrawal,on the economy of the North East of England.”
Baroness Quin
My Lords, this amendment stands in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. It calls on the Government to lay before Parliament an impact assessment of the effect on the economy of the north-east of England of both withdrawing from the EU and their negotiating strategy. I say at the outset that this is a probing amendment and I do not aim to divide the Committee on it. However, through this amendment I wish to highlight the situation in my part of the country and the region where I live—the north-east. I recognise that this group of amendments raises a number of other issues about taking various parts of the UK into account in the negotiating strategy. I support many of those amendments, although I am obviously speaking to my own amendment in this instance.
In tabling the amendment, I was conscious of the fact that the north-east of England has a particularly heavy dependency on trade with the EU. Some 58% of its exports are destined for the European Union and its largest trading customers by far are in the European Union. I am proud of the fact that the north-east has a positive trade balance. It is unusual in that respect as compared with other regions of the UK. However, I am also concerned that this situation is very much under threat because of the Brexit strategy adopted by the Government.
In tabling this amendment, I also seek to ensure that the north-east has a voice in the Brexit process and that the Government are committed to taking the interests of the region to heart. I recognise that in many of the other amendments the importance of consulting the devolved authorities is mentioned and I would certainly not argue with those amendments in any way. I also support the amendments before the House that refer to the importance of environmental protection in the Brexit negotiations and those concerned that equalities provisions are not endangered. However, I am concerned that in our current devolved structure the regions of England—particularly the northern regions and the north-east itself—often risk being the Cinderellas of our political and economic system and are easily overlooked, despite the fact that the size of their populations and the importance and potential of their economies should give them a more important say.
My amendment is in line with some that were tabled in the House of Commons, in particular proposed new Clause 31 about the impact on regions and proposed new Clause 163 on the importance of consultation with regions. I echo some of the words spoken in the other place, particularly, as regards the north-east, the comments made by my honourable friends—if I can call them that—Catherine McKinnell MP and Phil Wilson MP. However, the amendments in the Commons overall received little attention and almost no response from the Minister, no doubt in part because of the rushed timetable and the programming that governed the Commons proceedings on this Bill. Therefore, I make no apologies for introducing my amendment and supporting other amendments before us this evening.
My amendment is about process so, given that earlier the Minister kept saying that the Bill should stick to process, I hope that it will appeal to him. Also, it cannot be criticised for giving away the Government’s negotiating strategy in advance or tying the Government’s hands in their dealings with our European partners. Where it tries to tie the Government’s hands is in committing them to a proper structure for dialogue and consultation with the north-east and the rest of the United Kingdom.
In the referendum, some areas of the north-east voted remain—Newcastle in particular—and some voted leave, but I believe that all parts of the north-east would not wish to become less prosperous as a result of Brexit. The Government should bear that very much in mind. The Government have a responsibility to do what they can to create a balanced economy throughout the United Kingdom and to ensure the future economic well-being of all parts of the United Kingdom, including the north-east.
Last month, the IPPR report The State of the North 2016 was debated in this House thanks to my noble friend Lady Massey of Darwen, who is in her place. The report expressed great concern about the possible effects of Brexit on the northern regions and it called specifically for a north of England Brexit negotiating committee to identify how the north can thrive post Brexit, given that it is more dependent on trading in advanced goods such as pharmaceuticals and automotives than the south of England.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, I support Amendment 6, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. I will speak to Amendment 9, which is in my name and refers to all parts of the United Kingdom and not just the north-east of England. This whole group relates to the impacts of Brexit and the need for there to be assessment before the Government go much further.
It is estimated that around 160,000 jobs in the north-east of England are directly linked to our being part of the single market. That is because 58% of north-east exports go to the European Union, against a national figure of 42%. After 2019, with a hard Brexit there will be no automatic access to the single market, which is the largest free trade area in the world. Therefore, what are the economic advantages to the north-east of England or indeed to any part of the United Kingdom of losing that automatic access? I would like the Minister to explain how the Government plan to protect it.
I understand that the Minister met the North East Chamber of Commerce last Friday following an initiative by my noble friend Lord Beith. Will this be the first of many such meetings? I ask that because there are structures in London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for the Government to relate to, but what about the rest of the United Kingdom—the English regions? Regular meetings must be held with those regions to put them on an equal footing with Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London. For that reason, I think that we need regional impact assessments of leaving the European Union. As an example of the problem, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, emphasised, the north-east of England has a net balance of trade, with total exports amounting to £12.14 billion in 2015. No other region does so well in having such a positive balance of trade. The trade surplus in 2015 was £3.4 billion in the north-east—that is, the north-east local enterprise area and the Tees Valley local enterprise area added together.
It would be a disaster for jobs for this surplus to be lost. Chemicals had a trade surplus of £2 billion and the machinery and transport sector had a trade surplus of £2.3 billion. Some sectors had a trade deficit, which accounts for the overall surplus being £3.4 billion. Such a trade surplus is a very impressive figure for a small region in population terms such as the north-east of England. That is why I have concluded that the Government should establish resilience task forces in each part of the United Kingdom to work with the Government on the problems that will arise if we leave the single market and the customs union.
The abolition of government offices in England has not helped this situation and it has resulted in England being treated as a single entity run out of London. England is not a single entity and its differences should be reflected in the Government’s work on Brexit. In terms of EU funding support, we could look at our universities. The north-east universities are receiving £155 million in EU funding in the current funding period, 2014-20. They stand to lose access to much of that funding once we have left the European Union. Will the Government pick up the bill? Will they guarantee equivalent funding after 2020? In terms of structural funding, the north-east of England, including Tees Valley and the North East LEP, is receiving £590 million in structural funding from the EU in the 2014-20 period. Cornwall will receive £476 million, and Greater Manchester and Leeds City Region will receive more than £300 million each. England will receive £5.6 billion and the UK as a whole more than £8 billion. Will the Minister tell us what the Government’s plan is to make this money available after Brexit?
The question matters because it is the poorer parts of the country that voted more strongly for Brexit, but those are the very parts of the country that are in receipt of much higher levels of EU support. This is the challenge for the Government: have they any plans in place, eight months after the Brexit vote, to make those poorer parts of the United Kingdom resilient in the face of Brexit? The danger is that it is these very areas that will fall yet further behind once we leave the EU in 2019. What are the Government’s plans, in the face of Brexit, to generate growth in the poorer parts of the United Kingdom?
Lord Blencathra
I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for attempting to get in before him: I had forgotten that other noble Lords had amendments they might wish to speak on. I must warn my noble friend the Minister that I am very tempted to support these amendments, provided he can give me two firm assurances—first, that these assessments will be carried out by the Bank of England, the IMF and the same geniuses at the Treasury who forecast that by 2030 we would all be £4,322.15 worse off; and secondly, that he will send these assessments to Mr Juncker and Mr Barnier. I can think of nothing more likely to completely mislead those with whom we will be negotiating. Better still, he might get PricewaterhouseCoopers to do it, after its spectacular success at the Oscars last night where it could not count up a few hundred votes correctly.
In all seriousness, when have we ever seen an impact assessment attached to a government Bill which was remotely worth the paper it was written on? They are meaningless rubbish and no one takes them seriously. I did take one seriously when I was asked to chair the joint Select Committee on the original draft so-called snoopers’ charter Bill, which some noble Lords and Members of the Commons served on. We went through that impact assessment in detail and tore it to shreds. It estimated about £900 million as expenditure and our committee calculated that the real figure would be about £2 billion to £3 billion. We all know that impact assessments are not very accurate.
On the other hand, let us suppose that the Government did manage to write a proper impact assessment. We could do that on a sector-by-sector basis for each industry. I suppose that we could get the leaders of all those industries and all the other experts to draw up a proper SWOT analysis where Ministers have a pretty accurate assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to that industry from staying in or leaving the EU. Let us say that those SWOTs were spot-on accurate. Does anyone seriously suggest that we should then publish them and hand them straight over to the EU negotiators so that they can spot all the weaknesses in our position and the strengths that we want to exploit? It would be the height of folly to do such a thing. Indeed, it would be barking mad. If we were to do that, why stop there? Let us send Mr Putin a list of all our defence weaknesses and get MI6 to tell ISIL about any gaps in our security. Will Mr Barnier and the EU give us a paper on their strengths and weaknesses? Will they tell us their impact assessment of Britain? Of course not.
I am not being totally facetious. We will embark on negotiations that will determine the future of this country. The EU is reported to be demanding a £50 billion divorce settlement from us. I hope that we will strongly resist that. But if we are so daft as to publish any weaknesses in our arguments against it, we could end up robbing the taxpayer of billions of pounds. Billions of pounds are at stake.
I am not against impact assessments per se, although I prefer the SWOT analysis. Indeed, I hope that our Ministers and the Prime Minister have them. But I also hope and pray that they are keeping them under a top secret cover and keeping them very close to their chest. The last thing we want is to have them published or shared or laid before Parliament, which is probably even worse than publishing them in the press.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, I will be slightly less cynical than the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, on the subject of impact assessments. I will speak to Amendment 22 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and my noble friend Lord Kerslake. I will take a less cynical view about impact assessments.
For the historical record, it might interest noble Lords to know that when we were negotiating our accession to the European Union, the first thing that we tabled in Brussels was an impact assessment of the European budget on the United Kingdom, which of course had not been part of the European budget until then. It was a very long way different from the one tabled by the Commission in return, but we were actually right. The consequence of being right was a very long negotiation in the 1980s under Baroness Thatcher that resulted in the rebate system. My point is that when we were negotiating with the European Union from the outside, we had no hesitation whatever about producing an impact assessment—and thank heavens we did. Otherwise, we would not have got the commitment from the European Union that if things went as we predicted rather than as it predicted, it would adjust the budgetary burden, which eventually it did.
I want to look forward now and not backwards, because this seems quite odd. We are now a little over eight months from the referendum and it defies belief that the Minister and his colleagues have not conducted impact assessments by now. If not, I am not at all sure what they have been doing—but since I know that he is an extremely hard-working person I can assume that they have in fact quite a lot of impact assessments but are not sharing them with anyone else. It was rather odd, when the Prime Minister spoke at Lancaster House, and even odder when a White Paper was published, that there was not a single blooming figure in either of those two documents—not one. That was a trifle odd. It is not what the Government normally do. It is even odder if they do have impact assessments; it could be that they are so awful that they do not want to tell anyone about them. That also would not be hugely comforting.
I would like to play the game by the Minister’s rules. He has argued several times that to publish impact assessments would be to give the game away and give the people with whom we are negotiating some deadly secrets that they would be unable to get from anyone else. Okay, let us play the game by those rules. In that case, there are two impact assessments that could be published which would not have the slightest possibility of doing damage to us. The first is an assessment of where we would be in terms of our economy if we stayed in the European Union. That is not difficult to do, because the previous Government did it. If he looks at the papers that were published last March he will find it all there.
Lord Howard of Rising (Con)
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, seems to place great faith in these assessments or forecasts—but they have almost universally been completely wrong, ever since before the referendum. If noble Lords would like an example, I have from the House of Commons Library some comments on the Treasury:
“In May 2016, the Treasury published forecasts for the immediate economic impact of voting to leave the EU. It forecast for a recession to occur in the second half of 2016, with quarterly GDP growth of minus 0.1% in both Q3 2016 and Q4 2016”.
A second “severe shock” scenario was an even worse forecast.
“In reality, the economy continued to grow at its pre-referendum pace, with quarterly growth of +0.6%”.
That has now been adjusted by the Governor of the Bank of England to close to 2%. Frankly, the assessments and the forecasts are absolute rubbish and there is no point in publishing them.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I remind the noble Lord that the impact assessment he is reading from was of course produced by the Government that he supports—although he seems to have little shame about that now. Moreover, if one looks at government legislation that comes through every day, hundreds of impact assessments are produced by the Government he supports. Is he saying that they are all rubbish?
The Lord Bishop of Newcastle
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the court of Newcastle University. The amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, asks for an impact assessment of the effect of Brexit on the economy of the north-east. When we think about that economy, perhaps our thoughts turn first to the EU funding that the economy receives and then to the manufacturing sector. But the city of Newcastle is deeply enriched by the presence of two first-class universities, and there are 50,000 students in Newcastle. Tomorrow a report will be released to the media which details the extraordinary contribution of Newcastle University to the economy of the north-east.
The university adds £1.1 billion to the economy overall. Newcastle University alone, not including all the other universities in the north-east, is the fourth-largest employer in the region and accounts for 6% of all jobs in Newcastle. In addition, research grants totalling £105 million have helped to support major investment in research projects ranging from research into ageing to subsea and offshore engineering on the banks of the Tyne. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that the Government will assess the impact of Brexit on our universities, and in particular on our universities in the regions, which clearly are major players in our economic flourishing. If universities are undermined by not being able to attract students from this country, Europe and beyond with limitations on immigration and if they are not able, as Newcastle University does at the moment, to go for staff who are at the top of their field and not see nationality as a limiting factor, as well as being able to attract the EU funding referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, it will have an impact on them as world-class institutions and on their contribution to the economy of a place such as the north-east.
Newcastle University, like other universities, is a major player, so I hope that the impact assessment will value the economic significance of universities and the contribution that they make to our economy, as demonstrated by the report to be published tomorrow on Newcastle and the north-east.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I rise to speak finally to the three amendments in this group tabled in my name, Amendments 13, 14 and 15. These are not about the negotiations or begging the EU for a decent Brexit, they are about the things we have to do here in the UK to make sure we have enough environmental protection for the future.
Amendment 13 would ensure that, in relation to EU-derived environmental protections, the UK judicial system would be ready, following departure from the EU, to perform effectively the enforcement functions currently undertaken by the institutions of the EU. As has been noted by many Members of the Committee, the environmental protections currently guaranteed by our membership of the European Union rely on an established and robust system of monitoring and enforcement provided by EU institutions and agencies. We must make sure that we replace them with something. The most important part of the system has been the strong pressure to implement the law, and to do so within a specified timescale. This incentive to adhere to the law arises from the monitoring role of the EU agencies and the Commission acting as the guardian of the law and responding to legitimate complaints. If the Government are serious in their ambition to be the first to leave the environment in a better condition than that in which they found it, Ministers must give details on how this complex and robust system of legal enforcement will be replaced here in the UK.
Amendment 14 concerns environmental regulators and would ensure that, following withdrawal from the EU, the UK’s environmental regulators and enforcement agencies—that is, the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—are adequately funded and authorised to perform effectively the regulatory functions currently undertaken by EU institutions. Again, effective and robust environmental protection relies on well funded and staffed institutions to monitor compliance with environmental law. It also needs powerful regulators and courts to ensure that breaches of the law are challenged.
For the past 40 years this system of environmental enforcement in the UK has been grounded in the institutions of the European Union, the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. So far, we have had only a few offhand comments from Ministers and one line in the White Paper giving no detail about how this important system of checks, balances and safeguards will function once we are out of the EU. The Government are basically asking us to vote blindly and without caveat for a major upheaval in the way our countryside, wildlife and natural environment are protected. We still do not know whether the Government intend to rely on existing regulators to fill the gap after we leave the EU. It is time to be very clear about what we are going to do, because millions of people care about this.
Amendment 15 concerns access to justice relating to environmental legislation, so that the UK Government would remain committed to providing access to justice on environmental issues for citizens of the UK following withdrawal from the EU. The enforcement mechanisms established by the EU legal framework have been sophisticated. If a member state is deemed non-complaint with EU environmental law, the European Commission can bring infringement proceedings that can ultimately lead to large fines. This independent accountability mechanism has proved quite effective and the risk of penalties for non-compliance has been particularly important in motivating Governments to act, albeit rather slowly at times. But there has been little indication so far of what institutional mechanisms would perform this role. Many of us are concerned that there will be no mechanism at all.
I have listened to most of the debate in this House, either in the Chamber or from my office. I want to combat something I heard earlier. Somebody on the Benches opposite said something about the will of people being that the Bill passes unamended. That is complete nonsense. It is a Bill dreamed up by the Government. Although I understand exactly why the Government have made it this simple, it is our duty to amend it because it simply is not enough.
Somebody else mentioned how it is quite anti-European to be talking in these terms. Personally, I am very pro-European. I can manage to get by in two European languages—three if you count English—and I have many friends who are from the European mainland. I want to dispel the myth that what we are doing from these Benches in trying to amend the Bill is in any sense against the will of the people.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, it most certainly is against the will of the people. The noble Baroness is quite wrong. The Bill is about firing the starting gun to bring forward what the people voted for, which is our withdrawal from the European Union. The mechanism the Government have chosen is the use of Article 50. I have some sympathy with some of the amendments, including hers, but these are matters that will become the responsibility of the United Kingdom’s Parliament. An amendment I should like to make is to the Long Title of the so-called great repeal Bill. As a name, I can think of nothing more inappropriate—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Yes, the Short Title; I have been corrected. The Bill’s name is misleading, because it will enable us to bring into UK law all kinds of measures, under the jurisdiction of this Parliament. May I ask the noble Baroness a question: is there any aspect of European environmental regulation that she dislikes?
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
I thank the noble Lord for the opportunity. Yes, there is quite a lot I dislike, but that is not for now. There are parts of the common agricultural policy and the common fisheries policy that I dislike very much.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
My point is that we have to make sure our standards do not drop, because we as a nation have got used to very high standards. We need not only to transfer the decent things, but to make them even better.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I have the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. The noble Baroness has very honestly answered on the things that she would like to see changed. The great news is that, as a result of this, she will be able to persuade this Parliament to do so. Currently, she can make many speeches in this House, as can people in the other place, but we do not have the power to change these matters. That is the great breakthrough. I am surprised that the noble Baroness is tabling amendments to a Bill that is simply starting the process that will enable her to make the kinds of changes that she wants, provided she can persuade a group here. The other bird that can be killed came from a sedentary position. As we heard from the Liberal Benches, the noble Baroness is a leaver. We are all leavers now.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Oh, apparently we are not. Well, I have been listening to speeches from the Liberal Benches telling us that they accept and respect the results of the referendum.
Baroness Ludford
Does the noble Lord accept that there is a difference between accepting the result of the referendum and changing one’s own personal, passionate convictions?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I do not think we are particularly interested in the noble Baroness’s personal conviction when, in the other place, more than 300 elected Members of Parliament put aside their personal conviction and voted for the Bill to come here to enact the will of the people. We had a very revealing glimpse there of how the Liberals are trying to refight the referendum campaign when we should be following the lead of the amendments put down by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and others, and thinking about what our policy should be in the future. However, this is a completely inappropriate place to do it. There will be weeks and months ahead when we can debate these matters.
I want to ask the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, a question. Perhaps I am a bit stupid, but I cannot for the life of me imagine how the Government could possibly do an impact assessment without knowing the results of the negotiation and starting that process. Noble Lords on the Liberal Benches say, “Absolutely”. If they think that it is impossible to do an impact assessment, why are they putting down amendments asking for the Government to do impact assessments? The answer is: because this is a wrecking measure—another attempt to delay the Bill and prevent it going forward. For example, Amendment 9 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, lists all the regions—
Baroness Quin
My Lords, I said at the outset that my amendment was a probing amendment to raise various issues that I thought it was important to bring to the Government’s attention. I cannot see the inappropriateness of doing that in this debate.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I am most grateful to the noble Baroness. I suppose then that she will be withdrawing Amendment 6 and I do not need to argue against it any further. As she has always been a doughty champion for the north-east, I completely understand why that should concern her. I simply point out that this is not the Bill in which to make that argument. I have no doubt that there will be an opportunity to discuss these matters when we get the great repeal Bill, as well as in the intervening period. There is nothing to stop people putting down Motions in either of the Houses of Parliament and pressing the Government on any of these matters.
Amendment 9, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, lists every region of the United Kingdom and asks what the impact of withdrawing from the European Union will be. Every penny of regional aid for any of these regions is our money. It is money that we have given to the European Union that comes back. That money is not going to disappear. I remember as Secretary of State being forced into supporting projects that were not priorities for us because we had to get agreement that they were additional and that they represented the prevailing policy at the time of the European Union. The difference will be that we are actually able in this Parliament to decide how our money is spent on our priorities in each of the regions. That is a great step forward. I do not, for the life of me, understand how the noble Lord could expect the Government to come up with an impact assessment of that. It will depend on the negotiations, on how much of our money we get back, and on a whole range of issues.
Lord Shipley
The noble Lord said two things that I do not accept. First, he said that the money that comes from the European Union is not going to disappear. There is a real danger that it will disappear because the country is going to be poorer and the Government’s tax income is going to be less. There is no evidence at all that all the money that is currently used in structural funds is going to carry on in the same volume. I do not accept that the money will simply be there and will be redirected again by the UK Government.
The noble Lord also asked who would do the impact assessments. Impact assessments are being done for London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland because there are governance structures in place that can do so. The Government have regular meetings with all those bodies. My point has been that the rest of England is being left out from that process. That is the problem and I hope that the Minister can alleviate my concerns later.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I am sure that the Minister in his excellent way will respond to these particular details. I am looking at this amendment, which says that we cannot start the process of leaving the European Union until we have,
“Her Majesty’s Government’s negotiating strategy for withdrawal on the economy, investment and regional funding of”,
all these regions. That is ridiculous—absurd. Perhaps the noble Lord put down the amendment just to have a debate and is not proposing to press the matter, but to say to the Government, “You cannot implement what the people voted for until you have done a set of calculations that are impossible to do until you start the negotiations”, looks to me like a circular argument and yet another device from those Benches to prevent us from getting on with what people voted for.
Lord Shipley
Amendment 9 is a probing amendment and I think that the other amendments in this group are similar. There is an issue about whether the Government are prepared to guarantee the levels of funding post-2019 and again post-2020. I very much hope that the Minister will assure this House that the levels of funding will not disappear.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
That is not what the noble Lord’s amendment says. It is an interesting argument. When he says that the money is going to disappear because we will be poorer, that brings me to the extraordinary Amendment 22, which appears to be supported by a former Cabinet Secretary. It asks for,
“any existing impact assessments or economic forecasts relating to the United Kingdom’s future trading relationship with the European Union conducted by HM Treasury, the Department for Exiting the European Union, the Department for International Trade or the Office for Budget Responsibility”.
As my noble friend Lord Blencathra pointed out, the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility told us that we would have a recession and limited growth and that unemployment, interest rates and mortgages would go up, all of which has not happened. We have turned out to be the most successful economy in the G7. This continuing running down of our economy and telling people that we will be worse off is not good for confidence or for the Government and it flies in the face of what people voted for. They listened to all these impact assessments and decided not to believe them, which is why they voted to leave the European Union.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Is the noble Lord wishing to intervene? The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, wants to intervene.
Lord Berkeley
I just wonder if the noble Lord would find it useful if one of the four noble Lords whose name is down on Amendment 22 spoke to it before he responded to it.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
To be absolutely fair, I spoke to Amendment 22 earlier in the name of the others. I am sure that my noble friend Lord Kerslake will now manage to deal with the aspersions cast upon him.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Except that I have not finished. Finally, on Amendment 22, there is an interesting idea in subsection (2). Ministers have been extremely active in engaging with Select Committees and both Houses of Parliament. My noble friend Lord Bridges has done an outstanding job in talking and engaging with everyone. There is an interesting idea that perhaps it is possible as we go forward with the Bill to find some way of operating with committees of Parliament with some degree of confidentiality, although experience tells me that dealing with Parliament with some degree of confidentiality is not always easy to achieve. I am just about to sit down but I give way to the noble Lord, now that he is awake.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
The noble Lord is giving former MPs in this House a bad name.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I just say to the noble Lord that at least I am not asleep.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, I intend to build on the comments made by the right reverend Prelate in relation to universities and to link that subject into the whole debate about leaving the single market. The Indian Finance Minister is in the country and he was asked a question today about free trade agreements between the UK and India. He made it clear that free trade agreements are not just about tariffs and goods; they are about goods and services and people. He specifically mentioned students and the ability of Indian students to study over here.
A report came out on 23 February saying that almost a third of university academics are from outside the UK. If you look at certain areas—engineering and technology—non-UK academics account for 42% of the staff. In maths, physics and biology, 38% of staff are non-UK and most of them are from EU countries. Then you have the statistic—I declare my interest as chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School and Chancellor of the University of Birmingham—provided by Professor Catherine Barnard from the University of Cambridge, who told MPs that her university had seen a 14% drop in applications this year from EU students. There is, therefore, already a worry about the future of EU students and EU academics.
You cannot just say, “We don’t do impact assessments”. That would be foolish in business: if I make a forecast and I get that forecast wrong, does that mean that I stop forecasting in future? I would be foolish not to forecast. You have to keep trying to forecast, even though you might not always get it right. Impact assessments are absolutely essential. It is wrong to keep going on about the will of the people and saying that we therefore do not need to do anything, or to say that the forecasts were all wrong so we can ignore forecasts and experts. We are going to start sounding like Donald Trump complaining about the elites and ignoring the experts. No, we must continue to forecast and have impact assessments. We must look at the concerns of our universities, our academics and our students and at the potential loss of EU students and academics in the future.
Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 27. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, has just said what he did about impact assessments, because I, too, am going to speak about them, but in this case in relation to inequality. I support the views of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, on impact assessments and other issues. Of course they are not all rubbish; they are for measuring and calling to account. That is what we should be doing.
The Equality Act 2010 provides a basic framework of protection against direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimisation in services and public functions. It provides protection for people from discrimination because they are perceived to have, or are associated with someone who has, a protected characteristic. It extends the provisions related to disability and includes gender pay discrimination, private clubs and new powers for employment tribunals. The purpose of this new clause is to ensure that the impact of decisions on those with protected characteristics is considered, taken into account and debated at every stage of the negotiation process for Brexit. That is all—just looked at and debated.
The word “equality”—and its implications—is curiously absent from documents from the White Paper onwards. Given the various debates that Britain and Europe have had about race, disability, gender, sexuality, employment and so on, it seems amiss not to be screening for discrimination in these and other areas related to equality. We must have regard for such potential discrimination during the process of our deliberations and in the final deal. This new clause would ensure that considerations of equality were at the forefront of government thinking throughout the withdrawal process and would inform the new arrangements. That is necessary to ensure a good deal for everyone and to make sure that any negative impact on those with protected characteristics was presented up front and that steps were taken to deal with potential negative impacts.
The Minister in another place responded to the deliberations on this new clause by saying:
“The Prime Minister has been clear: we want the UK to emerge from this period of change stronger, fairer, and more united and outward-looking than ever before. We want to get the right deal abroad, but ensure we get a better deal for ordinary working people at home. In the White Paper, we set out our ambition to use this moment of change to build a stronger economy and a fairer society by embracing genuine economic and social reform”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; col. 392.]
What I am seeking in this amendment is a reassurance that practical measures, such as scrutiny of equality implications, and protection will be built into the Brexit process for all, whatever their condition, in all aspects of life.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of my noble friend Lady Quin. Before I do that, I want sincerely to say a word of thanks to the Front Benches on both sides. They have to sit through all these debates—they are obliged to, unlike those of us on the Back Benches. I pay particular tribute to my noble friend Lady Hayter, who has had a very difficult job, treading a high wire; she has done it with great skill and good humour and she deserves our thanks for doing so. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie. I do not think that under normal circumstances she would have chosen to spend her birthday in this way, but I am sure that we all wish her many congratulations.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, that the Labour Party was against this referendum. We did not want a referendum. Mr Cameron got us into it in a casual way, without any careful thought of the implications or the impact that it would have. If we had had impact assessments before the vote, we might not have voted to come out. We would have known the implications. That is when we should have had these. We are going to have some very serious impacts in Northern Ireland, as we heard earlier, and in Scotland. The way things are going, we could end up with this whole United Kingdom breaking up, with Northern Ireland opting to be part of a united Ireland and with Scotland as a separate country. That is what David Cameron in his casual way has let us in for. I think that he will go down in history as one of the worst Prime Ministers this country has ever had.
Lord Kerslake
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Hannay’s Amendment 22. I do so for one simple reason. I have a passionate belief that open government is better government. If we—as those who are in charge, if you like—want people to buy into what we are trying to do, we have to be able to trust them with the information that should be available to them. That is particularly true in relation to Brexit. We know that the referendum campaign was deep and divisive. We reached a point where virtually no one trusted anyone in that debate. That is fundamentally undermining to democracy. There is a growing gap between the governing and the governed, and one response to that is to have transparent government.
We have heard two arguments this evening for why a very simple amendment—to publish the impact assessments that can sensibly be published, which have already been done since the referendum—cannot be made. The first, from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is that you cannot trust impact assessments. Not every impact assessment is good. I might even have been responsible for a few that were not that good. But if that is the argument we are now making—that we will not publish impact assessments because they might be wrong—that way madness follows. What about trusting the people and Parliament to make their own judgment about the quality of the impact assessments? That is what transparent government is all about. If we cannot trust people to make their own judgment about the information, if we worry that they will be depressed because the impact assessments are too downbeat, there is something seriously wrong with our thinking.
The second argument that we have heard is that it might in some way interfere with the negotiations. It is possible that some information published might cut across them, and there has to be a responsible attitude to that, but I worry that that argument is going to be rolled out time and again to keep Parliament and the public in the dark about what is actually happening through the negotiating period to the point where it is impossible to impact the outcome of the process. We have to have a better system than that. I quite believe that Vladimir Putin does not want to publish his impact assessments, but we are not Russia: we are an open democracy and should trust the people to use the information that is made available to them responsibly. That is why I support the amendment.
Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)
My Lords, it is not my job to do this but the House needs to move on. We should hear from the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, and then go the Front Benches.
Baroness Finn
My Lords, I do not see the need for any requirement for impact assessments in the Bill, because the need does not arise. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth has said, the Bill is not taking us out of the EU but simply enabling the Government to trigger Article 50. There is no impact to assess from that enabling. This is not the place to get into detail over the negotiations or the structures around them, and it is vital that we do not bind the Government, either administratively or legally, in their negotiations, because that will only undermine their ability to get the best possible deal for the country.
I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said that my noble friend Lord Blencathra was being cynical about impact assessments, but I dealt with a number of impact assessments when I worked in government and was frequently frustrated by their lack of accuracy. This was in part due to the lack of management information in government departments. Non-executive directors of government departments appointed from outside the Civil Service were often shocked by the poor quality of the information on which decisions were based. My noble friend Lord Maude, who I see in his place, made valiant attempts to improve the quality but I fear there is still a long way to go. Just last week, my right honourable friend Sir Oliver Letwin criticised the quality of advice from civil servants, in particular expressing the concern that not enough of their advice was factually based. My concern is therefore a general one about the utility of such impact assessments.
The other point I was going to make, which I think has already been made, is that impact assessments are inherently driven by a number of assumptions and predictions. I do not want to labour the issue, but various predictions made about the immediate consequences of Brexit—not only by Her Majesty’s Treasury but also by the IMF, the IFS, the OECD and the Governor of the Bank of England—failed to materialise. My concern is that impact assessments could well be of dubious quality and accuracy. On that basis, I urge noble Lords not to press their amendments.
The Earl of Sandwich
My Lords, I do not know what the Conservatives are worrying about. I have listened to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, saying the same thing again and again. We need to have open government, as my noble friend Lord Kerslake has just pointed out. We are helping the Government by moving probing amendments. The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, has given a direct reply and that should surely be satisfactory. I am not going to waste too much time but will speak about developing countries, because I believe we should have an impact assessment relating to the effects on those countries. I have spoken to the Minister and know that he is kindly going to reply to this. I will be as quick as I can and will not repeat what I said at Second Reading.
Amendment 28 reflects my concern about the effects of withdrawal on the least developed countries and countries recovering from conflict. I have consulted the Overseas Development Institute and Traidcraft, the experts in this field. I know one of the answers the Minister will give is that we really cannot tell what the effects will be in numerical terms at this point. It might be of interest to him that the ODI estimates that the least developed countries could lose approximately £323 million annually if current preferential access in the UK is discontinued.
I accept that there will be pluses and minuses. On the one hand we may be sacrificing the interests of the ACP countries that currently benefit from their association with the EU, especially the smaller states and islands that are vulnerable to climate change. On the other hand, some countries—sugar cane producers, for example—will have suffered from the EU’s protection of its own markets and may well want us to abandon fortress Europe in favour of bilateral agreements through the WTO, or a new version of the generalised system of preferences, and I accept that.
But not yet knowing the maths does not mean that we can take no action. The interests of LDCs have not been mentioned in any of the documents relating to withdrawal. The Government must surely undertake a review of some kind and assess whether these countries will be damaged; how we respond to that must be part of the negotiations. We may well have to introduce or reintroduce aid policies to make up for any losses in trade and investment. Aid agencies generally see fair trade agreements as more beneficial than aid, but they fear that Brexit will mean new free trade agreements or EPAs that could disadvantage poorer countries. They would like to see trade policies which are linked to the sustainable development goals, so crafted that they are lined up with those countries’ own objectives. I quote Sir Simon Fraser’s Tacitus lecture. He said,
“these EU trade agreements are vital for their development goals. The UK will no longer be able to champion their access to the EU market as we have in the past. We have a moral responsibility to address the concerns of these countries, which illustrate how Brexit may have unforeseen repercussions well beyond Europe”.
Finally, I mentioned security and enlargement in eastern Europe, another area in which we may need to use our aid programme to make up for shortfalls left behind. NATO membership will not be enough. If we withdraw from the EU the economies in those countries will suffer. We need to know the effect of our withdrawal on aid programmes as well.
These are my concerns and it is not asking a lot of the Government to say that they need to make some assessment. We have a considerable reputation as a trading and aiding nation and we must take care not to damage our relations with countries that respect our values and traditions, both in the Commonwealth and in the rest of the world.
Baroness Kramer (LD)
My Lords, it is getting late and I will therefore try to be brief. First, I congratulate the noble Lords and noble Baronesses who put their names to the various amendments in this group, because probing amendments are an entirely appropriate part of our process. Every one of these amendments reflects an underlying anxiety that exists in different sectors and in different regions of our country. People engaged in activities, from universities to working with less developed countries, feel that their issues are not being considered by the Government at this crucial time as they choose to trigger Article 50 and that, if those issues are not considered at this time as the Government consolidate their negotiating position, they will never be properly considered anywhere in this process, so I see this as entirely appropriate.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I fear that this is an entirely spurious argument. We have wonderful Select Committees in this House which have produced outstanding reports; we have had debate after debate on these matters; we have opportunities for many other such debates; and we have other legislation coming. What we have before us is a one-clause Bill. We have had seven hours of debate and we are on only the fifth group of amendments. We have probing amendments which people say they have no intention to carry. There are other fora in this House to have those kinds of discussions. We should get on with delivering what the people and the House of Commons have asked us to deliver.
Baroness Kramer
I say to the noble Lord, Lord True, that there is a real difference of opinion within this House. For many, the point at which Article 50 is triggered is one at which they need that reassurance, and I hope that the Minister will take that on board because we have quite a range of amendments that have come forward. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, stands rather separately because it focuses on issues around the regulation and enforcement of environmental protection under whatever will be the new regime. However, nearly all the other amendments call for an impact assessment because there are regions of the country and sectors of our economy that are concerned that the Government have not taken their issues on board and do not understand the impact that the shape of their negotiations will have on those regions and sectors. My noble friend Lord Shipley is exactly right to say that the Government have thought that impact assessments were entirely appropriate for some sectors and regions, including London, the region that is closest to my heart. That does not mean that the same degree of attention, engagement and dialogue is not necessary for other parts of the country and those many varied sectors. As I say, I hope the Government will take that very much to heart.
Lord De Mauley
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, told us earlier of a specific example of where our impact assessment was completely different from that of the EU.
Baroness Kramer
You can have differences, but the point is that those differences become relevant in the process of negotiation. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, pointed out that by being clear about our impact assessment we gained strength and opportunity and were able to position ourselves far more effectively in the negotiation. As someone who has spent a lifetime in negotiation, one thing that bothers me is constantly hearing negotiation discussed as if it were some sort of poker game. It is not; it is a grown-up activity. Making sure that our negotiators fully understand where they stand and what the issues are, and that that is done best by transparency, is fundamental. I say to those who simply dismiss the idea that we need to deal with our weaknesses as well as our strengths that that strikes me as just an extraordinary situation. If we do not recognise, discuss and understand our weaknesses, I do not know how we will put together a negotiating position.
I am not going to continue because these are only probing amendments. I look very much to the Government to take on board the underlying message, which is that many parts of the country and many sectors feel disengaged. The Government have said that they have certain priorities. When I talk to those in the financial services industry, they say, “We’ve been guaranteed top priority. Others will be sacrificed for us”. If that is the message, it is one that leaves people genuinely, and appropriately, worried. That discussion has to take place; we need to know on what basis all this will move forward.
Impact assessments are a normal part of a normal process. Transparency around such assessments is also a normal part of that process. I hope that the Government will recognise that and not try to pretend that they are entering into a poker game rather than a mature negotiation.
Lord Lennie (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 22, on impact assessments, seeks to put us on a level playing field with the Government. We want the information that has already been published—the impact assessments that may have taken place, or have taken place, since the referendum in the various departments listed: nothing more, nothing less. Others have commented on other areas of the work of the European Union where we stand to suffer a loss, and they are right to make those comments. They referred to the north-east, the environment, equalities and so on.
In the Commons the big issue was how to deal with confidentiality. We have made provision for that by the subsection of the proposed new clause in Amendment 22 that defines the right of the Government to hold back from publishing anything that they feel would harm our negotiating position in any way, for any reason, and to restrict it to a few wise heads. We do not even define how that should happen. It could be on Privy Council terms or whatever other terms the Government wanted. That seems to me an entirely sensible way to proceed. I shall not detain the House any longer, but I ask the Minister to respond to these requests in the spirit in which they have been made. These are probing amendments, which we expect to be useful, and we look forward to a positive outcome to the discussion.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I, too, shall try to keep things brief. To pick up on what the noble Lord just said, I share the motive that I believe genuinely and sincerely underpins many of the amendments, which is to ensure that Parliament has the means to scrutinise the negotiations as they proceed. Obviously, that is the subject of the next group of amendments, which we want to get on to, but let me say now that the challenge that we—that is, Government and Parliament—face is to get the balance right between providing enough information to enable scrutiny and ensuring that our negotiating position is not revealed.
I would argue that some of the amendments fail that test, as they would expose the Government’s negotiating position. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, and others spoke about business and business experience, and I have to say that I disagree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, on this point. We have had many amicable discussions but I disagree with her on this. I see it as a cardinal rule of any negotiation not to tell those on the other side of the table how much certain scenarios and outcomes would cost or benefit you—but that is what the publication of an impact assessment would do. I fully accept that Amendment 22, which the noble Lord just mentioned, accepts that an impact assessment could be kept confidential. The whole matter of sharing information is the subject of the next group. All I would say at this stage is that this Bill is not the vehicle to insert conditions on negotiations.
Since the referendum the Government have indeed been undertaking rigorous and extensive analysis work to support our exit negotiations, to define our future partnership with the EU and to inform our understanding of how EU exit will affect the UK’s domestic policies and frameworks. This includes analysis of what it means right across the UK, including regional analysis. I realise that this House and the other place are obviously eager to know more. So let me repeat to your Lordships what I and my fellow Ministers have said before—I am thinking specifically of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, when I say this. If and when we believe we can share further information, we will—so long as it does not undermine our negotiating position. We will ensure that our Parliament receives at least as much information as the European Parliament.
Let me now address some specific points that were raised. Amendment 27 refers to the Equality Act 2010 and protected characteristics. We are of course aware that exiting the EU will herald change in a whole host of ways. I can assure the House that all the protections covered in the Equality Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2010 will continue to apply once the UK has left the European Union. The UK is already well placed to continue championing equality, thanks in part to the legal protection assured by the Equality Acts.
The public sector equality duty requires public authorities, in the exercise of their functions, to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation, to advance equality of opportunity and to foster good relations between people who share protected characteristics and those who do not. We will continue to comply with our legal obligations under that Act.
I agree with the sentiments of Amendments 13, 14 and 15. The UK is fully committed to remaining an international leader on environmental co-operation. As part of the great repeal Bill, we will bring current EU law, including the current framework of environmental regulation, into domestic British law. As my noble friend pointed out, any changes to it would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval. However, this is not the time to set down in statute anything on environmental regulation.
As to the Aarhus convention, this is a United Nations agreement to which the UK is a party in its own right, meaning that the convention will continue to apply to the UK after we leave the EU. Many of those convention obligations are currently implemented through EU law, which, as I say, will be converted into domestic law.
Amendment 28 refers to the impact of withdrawal on the UK’s trade, security and aid policy towards developing and post-conflict countries. As I have said, leaving the EU does not, and cannot, mean the UK turning its back on Europe or the rest of the world. We will continue to face the same global challenges. We want to work with our partners in Europe and elsewhere to alleviate suffering and hardship. Doing so is not just in our national interest, it is the right thing to do. Therefore, we aim to enhance our strong bilateral relationships with our European partners and beyond, projecting a truly global UK across the world. As your Lordships will know, we are one of only a handful of countries in the G20 that has pledged to, and delivered on, spending 0.7% of GNI on overseas aid, and the UK will continue to be one of the most important global actors in international affairs.
As to trade, to which the noble Earl referred, the UK’s exit from the EU creates a major opportunity to send a positive signal that our markets are open and that we wish to forge new trade deals with nations across the world, both developed and developing. I know that this House and the other place will wish to debate this in the months to come. My door remains open to the noble Earl and others to discuss this. However, once again, now is not the time, and this Bill is not the place, to commit to publishing a report on this prior to notifying under Article 50.
Amendments 9 and 6 call for impact assessments on the individual regions of the UK to be published before we trigger Article 50. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that I and my fellow Ministers in other departments regularly talk to local government and regional organisations about a whole range of issues as we are completely committed to securing a deal that works for the entire United Kingdom. To illustrate that, my Minister of State met the chairman of the Local Government Association in January and will hold further regular meetings. He has held a joint meeting with the Local Government Associations in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There are monthly meetings hosted by the DCLG, including representation from local government, the local enterprise partnerships, the National Housing Federation and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives. On top of that, my Secretary of State is already committed to bringing together the northern elected mayors for a summit in York in the summer, to which the mayors of Liverpool, Greater Manchester, Tees Valley and Sheffield will be invited. So we are very engaged. If the noble Lord or the noble Baroness wish to meet me to discuss this, and have further ideas on how we can do more, I am all ears.
As regards funding, all I can say is that where we can we will give as much certainty as possible. My right honourable friend the Chancellor has confirmed that the Government will guarantee EU funding for structural and investment fund projects, including agri-environment schemes, signed before, and which will continue after, we have left the EU. Funding for projects will be honoured by the Government if they meet the two following conditions: they are good value for money and in line with domestic strategic priorities. However, when considering this amendment, I repeat the point I made earlier that such a publication of regional impact assessments would not serve to strengthen our negotiating position, any more than a general impact assessment would.
While I understand the wish and desire for more information, the Government cannot, and will not, do anything to undermine our negotiating position. We will not accept conditions being attached to a Bill that has a very simple purpose—to deliver on the result of the referendum. Therefore, I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Quin
My Lords, as I made clear from the outset, my amendment and, I believe, others in this group simply sought to raise issues that we feel it is important for the Government to consider, even at this early stage. I am glad that the majority of contributions to this debate show that that purpose was worth while. I thank the Minister for his reply. I am sure that I and others would like to take up his offer of further dialogue on these important issues. I hope, too, that he and his officials will look at some of the points raised in this debate that he has not been able to answer in his wind-up speech and perhaps write to us on those important subjects. Having said that, and repeating that it was a series of probing amendments, I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.
Lord Warner
“( ) Within a period between 9 and 12 months from the date of a notification under section 1, the Prime Minister must lay before each House of Parliament for their approval a report on progress on withdrawal negotiations with the EU that covers progress on—(a) future trading relationships with the EU, and an assessment of the implications of likely changes in those relationships for the major United Kingdom industries and sectors;(b) future arrangements for the movement of citizens of the EU and the United Kingdom between each other’s territories;(c) the cost and make-up of the exit charge to be paid by the United Kingdom to the EU;(d) the likely implications of these negotiations for the devolved administrations, especially the border between Ireland and the United Kingdom; and(e) such other matters the Prime Minister considers should be included.”
Lord Warner
My Lords, we come at this late hour to an important group of amendments, which provide for greater parliamentary oversight of the withdrawal negotiations. I support all these amendments but I will contain my remarks to Amendment 8 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Oates.
As I hope I have made clear already, I am not seeking to delay the start of the negotiations but I believe strongly that there must be statutory provision for much greater parliamentary oversight of the negotiations before we reach the end game than the Government have so far been willing to accept. Amendment 8, rather kindly, lets the Government get on with the negotiations after Article 50 is triggered for about half the two-year period provided for in Article 50. That is in part because I am not convinced from what I have seen from both the EU’s and the Government’s likely approaches that much will be settled that quickly.
However, as we approach—if I may put it this way—the half-time period in this game, I suspect there will be more goalmouth scrambles and possibly even a goal, but I am less than sure of the net. Some time after nine months and before 12 months from the triggering of Article 50, this amendment requires the Prime Minister to lay before both Houses of Parliament for their approval a progress report on the withdrawal negotiations. It specifies four key areas that must be covered in the report: future trading relationships for the major UK industries and sectors; future arrangements for the movement of EU and UK citizens between each other’s territories; the cost and make-up of the exit charge to be paid by the UK; and the likely implications for the devolved Administrations. The amendment enables the Prime Minister to add to the report any other aspects of the negotiations she wishes and to decide when within the three-month period she reports to Parliament. But return she must and secure Parliament’s approval of the progress that has been made—or not, as the case may be.
The reason for this amendment is the deep scepticism many of us have about the capacity of the Government to secure a satisfactory outcome from these negotiations that serves the best interests of the UK. As I said on Amendment 3, there are widespread concerns about the Government’s approach to the negotiations, even among those who voted to leave on 23 June. Some of those people are saying to me and to others that they would not have voted to leave if they had realised how the Government were going to go about the withdrawal negotiations, particularly the withdrawal from the single market and the customs union. Announcing that decision up front has only increased those anxieties and concerns and made people wonder what other mischief the Government will get up to in the negotiations.
I believe that there are big question marks over the quality and quantity of the UK’s negotiating capacity. If I may say so, there has been a great deal of swagger and bravado from Ministers and their parliamentary supporters about the strength of their hand and how much the EU needs the UK, together with the glittering array of trading opportunities that await us once we are out of the EU. I have not noticed that optimism being shared by many of the expert trade or EU negotiators. Most of the stories that have appeared have been about the lack of Whitehall’s preparedness for the leave negotiations and the shortage of skilled negotiators available to the Government. There is no crack negotiating team just waiting to be helicoptered over the English Channel in the best traditions of the SAS.
We should be extremely cautious about allowing the Government to effectively bypass Parliament on these negotiations until it is too late to do much about an unsatisfactory outcome other than reject the deal. That is why, when we come to it, Amendment 17 on parliamentary approval of the outcome of the negotiations will be so important, and I shall certainly support it.
However, I suggest that it is not sufficient to rely simply on Amendment 17, important though it is. Parliament needs to be more clearly and statutorily involved in the withdrawal negotiations at a much earlier stage and to be able to sound warning bells if things seem to be going seriously off piste. That is why I hope something like Amendments 8 or 18 will be agreed before the Bill leaves this House. I am not a proud author. If Amendment 18 is liked more, I shall be happy to support it.
I suggest that if I were in the Prime Minister’s shoes—although perhaps that is not a very good metaphor—I would be secretly pleased that a load of parliamentarians were overseeing these negotiations and some of the likely deals that might have to emerge at some stage before the end game. I suggest that that would give her a bit more political cover if things were going a little awry and were not where she wanted them to be. Therefore, I think that this is a helpful amendment for the Government and I hope the Minister will consider it carefully. I beg to move.
Lord Oates
My Lords, given the late hour, I shall speak briefly in support of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and the amendment he has just moved. Many of us have been deeply shocked by the approach that the Government have chosen to take post the referendum. Clearly, none of us in this part of the House was happy with the referendum result, but some of us thought that with a new Government we had a grown-up as a Prime Minister and that the approach taken would be sensible, measured and thoughtful. However, I am afraid that since 23 June the evidence has been absolutely in the opposite direction. Therefore, it is particularly important that Parliament has a proper role in this matter.
The noble Lord, Lord Warner, has set out some of the key points of the amendment relating to our trading relationships, the movement of citizens, the potential exit charge and the implications for the devolved Administrations. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, has said a number of times, including recently, that the Bill is not the place to constrain the Government’s negotiating position, but I think many of us here want to ensure that Parliament has a role in constraining because we are so alarmed at what has taken place since 23 June. I am afraid that scepticism has been caused by the Government’s actions, and they have only themselves to blame for that. I think the Government, Parliament and the whole process would benefit from proper information being provided to Parliament so that we can assess this process as it goes on and do not just get to a cliff edge at the end, finding the catastrophic position that some people outlined in earlier debates. On that basis, I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Warner.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
I support Amendment 18. All these negotiations are going to be complex and long and for the Government to expect a respite from parliamentary scrutiny would be quite wrong. If we have a commentary it will also raise the likelihood of Parliament accepting the outcome, because there is nothing worse than something being sprung on you. My noble—I was going to say my noble enemy, but my noble opponent—the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said earlier that the leavers had actually come round to the thought that if we lost the referendum, we would accept the result, and I think that that is partly because we talked through those things, we actually thought about it. It will be true for the EU negotiations as well that if the Government give as much information as they possibly can then the whole nation is more likely to accept what has happened.
Lord Blencathra
My Lords, I oppose this amendment partly on the basis that we do not need to put it in the Bill and partly because I think I have heard my noble friend say on countless occasions that we will have scrutiny after scrutiny in this House and, no doubt, in the other place. We have no legislative requirement at the moment to scrutinise the EU. Does the Minister have at his fingertips, or will he be able to tell us in his reply, how many Oral Questions we have had answered on this? We seem to have one on the Order Paper every day on an EU issue. Half the Order Papers have Written Questions on the EU. We have some excellent Select Committee reports from our Select Committees—we seem to debate one every week—and we have countless other debates. We are having more scrutiny that I think we can cope with.
My worry is that once we trigger Article 50 this House will have nothing much to do next year. The other place will start with the great repeal Bill. All we will have will be the EU retaliating immediately after we have put in our bid and saying, “We are not having any of that nonsense—we want £50 billion, thank you”. We will have German and French elections—the Dutch elections may be over by then—and we will have information coming from Europe which will be from politicians and will not be helpful. All we will have, in the other place and in this place, will be colleagues rushing in, demanding Urgent Questions, putting down Motions here, there and everywhere, demanding ministerial Answers.
Lord Warner
If the noble Lord reads my amendment he will see that the Government will actually have a clean bill of health for at least a year before they need to come back to Parliament on any of these issues.
Lord Blencathra
Exactly what I was about to say was, if we could have these amendments where we will have an annual report, or a quarterly report, I think I would be happier to have that, in a structured form, agreed between the Government, the usual channels and the Select Committees, so we could have proper, structured debates on good nuggets of EU information, rather than the daily panics we are about to have as colleagues from all sides and in the other place, rush in demanding Urgent Questions on every rumour and scare story which comes from Europe. I do not think that we need to put in the Bill that we are going to have scrutiny: we can do scrutiny at the moment—we may be doing too much of it. Let us try to structure it so as to have sensible debate over the next two years.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, oddly, I am in the very strange position of mildly disagreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but certainly disagreeing with Amendment 18. I commented in my Second Reading speech that I felt that anything that added to uncertainty was very bad news and that uncertainty where commerce was concerned was bad news because that was the root of our prosperity and gave us our services that we need so dearly. I felt that uncertainty for people was particularly bad. We have had lots of uncertainty for people; we talked about the people of Northern Ireland this evening and there are lots of other people as well.
The other thing I said was how powerful our Select Committees are. I sit, as I remind the House, on the European Union Select Committee. We have already delivered, since Brexit, 10 reports for debate in eight months and there are a further seven reports for debate coming along. Tomorrow, I am sitting in a meeting talking about other reports that will come up before the anniversary.
Amendment 18 reckons that there should be one debate every quarter. I cannot believe that that is right. The Select Committees are serving up things for the House at a good rate and we are completely impartial. We are of this House and as and when we identify matters that need to be debated, boy are we down there like a rat down a hole. We make sure that the relevant people come before the House and the full expertise of the House can be brought to bear. Putting in place a structure like this makes the work of the Select Committees more difficult. It makes it more difficult for us to get Ministers, their staff and others before us answering sometimes more than two hours of tough questioning from people who are intelligent and engaged in what is going on. It would shut down opportunity to debate in this House were we to support Amendment 18. We should not fetter the House at all.
It is not only the Select Committees that will keep the Government right. One year after the end of this process, of course, there will be an election. If the Government are not right, they will be flung out. Accordingly, the best way of handling this is not to have formal structures, quarterly meetings or any of the other things in these amendments, but to rely on the strength of our own wonderful system of Select Committees. We should use them and the threat of being thrown out at the next election to make sure that the Government are fully held to account in this difficult process which will require all of us to co-operate.
Lord Berkeley
My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 24 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Lea. In the last grouping, I thought that the response of the Minister to my noble friends Lady Massey and Lady Jones on the issues that they raised was very helpful. As we are in Committee, it is reasonable for us to be able to probe issues of concern to us and I hope that we will be able to continue to do that. Amendment 24 asks the Minister whether the Government have considered what will happen to these 22 different agencies—there are probably an awful lot more—with a very wide remit. We will be talking about some of them such as Euratom on Wednesday. What do the Government think will happen to these agencies? It would still be possible under certain circumstances for the UK to be represented on some of these agencies, depending on the future structure of and our relationship with Europe.
What I get from discussions with many different organisations—some of the ones listed here, particularly the railway ones, but quite a few others—is the uncertainty. Manufacturers and the industry are worried about it. My noble friend Lord Mandelson spoke about this earlier. This is to do with standards and who administers them and it affects whether or not a piece of equipment can be sold or operated within the EU.
I hope that the Government have started thinking about all these agencies. They obviously have about some of them because the medical agency has already decided to leave, which is very sad. But each one is a fairly major agency in its own right and affects a lot of people’s jobs and businesses. So I would be very pleased to hear from the Minister what thought has been given to this. I cannot believe that any of it is really confidential, but I look forward to hearing his comments.
Baroness Ludford
My Lords, I support this amendment. A good case was made by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, and my noble friend Lord Oates. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, made a very good case for structured scrutiny instead of ad hoc questioning. That is exactly what these amendments do. I cannot see what objection there could be to laying down the parameters for progress reports or access to documents, as proposed in Amendment 18. Today we heard a second former Prime Minister give a very interesting speech. John Major said he has watched with concern as the British people have been led to expect a future that seems unreal and overoptimistic. He urged the Government to be realistic about the timescale and complexity of the huge undertaking that lies ahead. Those are wise words. I thought that the words of Tony Blair were wise, too. It is funny what kind of alliances one is forging in these times.
Such warnings should be heeded. The complexity of the task demands the kind of scrutiny and reassurance that would come from regular reporting. I am sorry to disagree with the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, who contributes so wisely on the EU Select Committee and, indeed, on the same sub-committee that I do. Select Committee inquiries and reports are very different because they are on certain topics and issues. They are not the same as regular reporting on the progress of negotiations and the detail of what exactly our relationship is going to be with all the agencies listed in the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley.
We on these Benches believe that it is very important to lay down an overall framework covering the regularity and content of reports and knowledge of documents. We have heard pledges from the Secretary of State that the Westminster Parliament will not be treated any worse than the European Parliament—a scenario evoked by my noble friend Lord Teverson. There cannot be any objection to the Government agreeing these kinds of parameters.
Lord Lennie
My Lords, in Amendment 18 we seek a quarterly report on the position that the Government have reached in negotiations across the European Union. It is quarterly rather than bi-monthly because the latter was dismissed by the Commons as being rather too frequent—so it was looked at and extended. We want to make sure that we are at least as well informed in this place as in the European Parliament by the provision of the public documents that are available there during this process.
The Government have now said that we will always be as well informed as the European Parliament, so now is the opportunity for them to prove that they mean what they say and confirm that this will be an acceptable way forward. It will not be sufficient to come back at the end of the process with a take it or leave it deal. Much, much more will be needed in the intervening period. The Government should properly recognise the expertise available in this place, which has been contributed partly today and partly in the debate that has already taken place—and which will also be contributed next week.
The technical agencies listed by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, are essential working bodies. They are bodies that the Government volunteered to become part of; they exist because of the unanimity about their need to exist in the European Union. It therefore seems perfectly appropriate to ask what on earth happens when we leave the European Union to those affected by the work that these bodies undertake.
These are the two fundamental questions in the amendments and I ask the Government to agree to quarterly reporting and to publish a report about continuing co-operation with the agencies listed in the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Berkeley.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, restoring parliamentary sovereignty lay at the core of what the British public were seeking to achieve when they voted to withdraw from the EU, so it is right that Parliament must and shall play a key role in scrutinising and shaping our withdrawal. As I said in my remarks on the previous amendment, the issue is one of balance. Parliamentary scrutiny must not come at the price of exposing our negotiating position and jeopardising what is in the national interest. All the evidence suggests that we can find common ground on this issue and get the balance right.
The EU Committee of this House produced a report last autumn that noted:
“Parliament can make a significant contribution to the development of the Government’s thinking, using conventional means such as debates and Select Committee inquiries”.
However, it also got to the heart of the matter when it acknowledged that scrutiny cannot jeopardise our national interest, saying:
“We agree with the Government … that Parliament should not seek to micromanage the negotiations. The Government will conduct the negotiations on behalf of the United Kingdom, and, like any negotiator, it will need room to manoeuvre if it is to secure a good outcome”.
It is worth remembering that this is something that the other place agreed with overwhelmingly when it was put to a vote on 12 October last year. Furthermore, it should be noted that this approach is shared by the European Commission itself. Its factsheet on EU trade negotiations states:
“A certain level of confidentiality is necessary to protect EU interests and to keep chances for a satisfactory outcome high. When entering into a game, no-one starts by revealing his entire strategy to his counterpart from the outset: this is also the case for the EU”.
Before I turn to the amendments, let me set out some of the steps that the Government have taken and will continue to take to ensure that Parliament is able to scrutinise Brexit. I start by answering a question asked by my noble friend Lord Blencathra about what I have done since Brexit. Since 23 June, I have given six Statements to your Lordships; my noble friends and I have taken part in four debates and answered 18 Oral Questions, which shows my willingness—I enjoy every minute of it—to deliver on this commitment. Along with that, Ministers in my department, myself included, have made no fewer than 13 Select Committee appearances. We believe that this approach is better than the one suggested in Amendment 18 for reasons that I will come on to.
We will continue to support and welcome the Take Note Motion debates that will tackle the most difficult aspects of our withdrawal, as well as the debates that emanate from the Select Committee reports referred to by the noble Earl and produced across Parliament. We are also continuing the programme of debates in government time in the other place. DExEU Ministers will also continue to appear at the EU Committee after every European Council and General Affairs Council, in addition to the Prime Minister giving a Statement in the other place, and my noble friend the Leader in this House, after every European Council. Ministers from across the Government will continue to give evidence at Select Committees on a wide range of withdrawal-related issues. Over and above this, we will also deliver on our commitment to ensure that this Parliament gets as least as much information as the European Parliament.
Parliament’s role goes beyond scrutiny, a point that I would say the noble Lord, Lord Warner, somewhat underplayed, for Parliament will also be a decision-maker. The Government will bring forward a Motion on the final agreement to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement. Parliament will also shape the legislation required to give effect to our withdrawal from the EU, including the Bill to repeal the ECA and the legislation that will be required for any significant policy changes. For example, we have said that we expect to bring forward separate Bills on immigration and customs, plus a programme of secondary legislation to address deficiencies in the preserved law. So we entirely accept the spirit of the amendments before us today.
However, there are several reasons why the Government cannot accept them. Some are superfluous in that what they are seeking to achieve while others are prohibitively inflexible or prohibitively broad, but most important of all, none of them is relevant to this Bill which has a sole purpose: to trigger the process by which we leave the European Union. Let me expand briefly on these points.
As regards Amendment 18, I recognise the desire to formalise a timetable for scrutiny of negotiations, but it is much better that the Government should come back to this House at the point at which they have something significant to update noble Lords on, and as I have said, we have shown our willingness to do that. Amendments 8 and 24 will delay us from triggering Article 50 until the Government have reported to Parliament about how the UK will continue to co-operate with some 16 agencies or institutions. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, is right to highlight the importance of these agencies. I am more than happy to meet him to discuss them all. They are very important and flagged in the White Paper. But, looking at the words of the amendment, I argue that many people want us to get on with the negotiations. I do not think they want us to hang around while the Government produce reports on agencies such as the Community Plant Variety Office, even though we are a nation of gardeners.
Other amendments are problematic because they force us to reveal what should remain confidential and may well still be under negotiation. Amendment 8, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, requests Parliament’s approval on a report about the progress of the negotiations some nine to 12 months after we have notified. It includes an impact assessment on how trading relationships with the EU will affect UK industries and sectors, and a report on the cost and make-up of the exit charge to be paid by the UK to the EU. It also says that these reports should be made for Parliament’s approval, meaning that the Government could be committed to an outcome from negotiations before we are able to judge what might be deliverable. Plainly, the Government cannot accept such prescription. Doing so would fall foul of the very concern that the Select Committee of this House raised: micromanagement and restricting the Government’s room for manoeuvre.
The Government entirely accept the need for parliamentary scrutiny, but these amendments are unnecessary or detrimental and have nothing to do with the purpose of the Bill, which is to deliver on the referendum result and to allow the Government to trigger Article 50. I therefore ask that noble Lords do not press them.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his explanation. It does not totally surprise me what his attitude is towards this, but the idea that there is one report back to Parliament half way through a two-year negotiating period hardly seems micromanagement of the Government’s negotiations. Some would say that I have been rather kind in waiting for nine to 12 months before we got that report back. I will certainly read the Minister’s comments and consider what has been said, but there is an issue about how we take an overall look at the negotiations at a reasonable period after they have started, but before we reach the end game. I will talk to other colleagues before Report, but in the meantime I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Wednesday 1st March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 103-II Second marshalled list for Committee - (27 Feb 2017)
18:27 - Division on Amendment 9B - Ayes: 358 / Noes: 256 - Amendment 9B agreed.
“( ) Within three months of exercising the power under section 1(1), Ministers of the Crown must bring forward proposals to ensure that citizens of another European Union or European Economic Area country and their family members, who are legally resident in the United Kingdom on the day on which this Act is passed, continue to be treated in the same way with regards to their EU derived-rights and, in the case of residency, their potential to acquire such rights in the future.”
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, it is a particular pleasure for me on St David’s Day to be opening this session on the Bill. I move Amendment 9B on behalf of the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Bowness, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, but also on behalf of perhaps 3 million people, who quite literally feel that they are being used as mere bargaining chips in order to secure the rights of another 2 million or so UK nationals who live, study or work elsewhere in the EU. It is legitimate for them to think that they are being used as negotiating capital because that is exactly what the Home Office told them. All of these 3 million, and indeed the four of us whose names are on this amendment, also share a real concern for those UK expats who, thanks to our EU membership, have settled in one of the other 27 countries. We have all heard of the serious worries of Britons living abroad with their homes, children, jobs and lives settled there. [Interruption.] We are in Committee, so I am sure the noble Lord will have plenty of time to come in.
As I was saying, we have all heard representations of the serious worries of Britons who have settled abroad. They have homes, children, lives and jobs there and now fear for their rights, and their access to medical treatment and other services and wonder what the future holds for them. It is not acceptable to place such people under that pressure. But these two groups of people should not be traded against each other. There are twin objectives, both to look after the EU and the UK nationals who live in each other’s countries.
I reckon that the Minister knows a thing or two about twins because his own, being a boy and a girl, are not identical. But neither are these two groups of people identical. Indeed, the big difference is that for EU nationals here, it is in the gift of our Government—the UK Government, answerable to this Parliament—to decide how to treat people resident in our country. So, contrary to the letter that was sent yesterday by Amber Rudd, we do not accept that this is a matter for our negotiations with the EU. This is a matter for the UK.
Amendment 9B would ensure that the rights that EU citizens here would have if we remained in the EU should stay the same on exit day. These people need to know now, not in two years’ time or even 12 months’ time. They simply cannot put their lives on hold. Some are planning schools for their children or moving jobs, renting or buying homes or acting as carers. Some are receiving healthcare. Many more are working in our health service. All should have their uncertainty removed, particularly as the reality is that many would have other rights to remain under the European Convention on Human Rights. Do we really want to clog up our courts and cause these people dismay by forcing them to court in order to assert those rights?
We should be clear that this view, decoupling their future from that of UK residents abroad, is supported by organisations representing British citizens in the EU which support the guarantee of such rights before the start of Brexit negotiations. Their statement on 20 February called on the Prime Minister unilaterally to guarantee rights of EU nationals in Britain. They say that it is,
“damaging to the UK’s reputation for UK citizens living in Europe and EU citizens in the UK to be treated as negotiating currency”.
They go on:
“Like UK citizens living in Europe, EU citizens in the UK have come and settled in another EU country in good faith on the basis of their EU citizenship rights … rights that cannot be withdrawn retrospectively and the guarantee of their rights should be given before the Brexit negotiations”.
The main, short-term request from UK nationals abroad that I know of, as Fiona Benson in Italy wrote to me, is that they want a helpline through our consulates for getting their documents sorted out.
In addition to the moral obligation that we have to all these workers, students and families established here and who want some certainty, we also need to think of the industries that depend on them—science and academia, large parts of the public sector, especially the NHS and social care, as my noble friend Lord Clark will outline. There is little wonder that the Conservative chair of the Commons Health Committee has called on the Government to guarantee the rights of EU nationals to stay, without delay. Consumers will suffer if the food and drink industry suddenly loses its workforce, which includes over 100,000 EU nationals at all skill levels. Unsurprisingly, the Food and Drink Federation survey indicated that 10% of them were already thinking of leaving Britain. And this in a sector already facing a large skills gap, due to demographic change. Indeed, the FDF estimates that it will need 130,000 new skilled workers by 2024. The Food and Drink Federation joins the 3 million-plus group and the British Chambers of Commerce in seeking urgent reassurance from the Government on the status of those already here and employed in the UK. I do not think that the Home Secretary’s letter is going to satisfy them—nor, indeed, the public. A post-referendum poll found that the vast majority wanted EU migrants living here and working in the UK to be allowed to stay. Just 5% demurred.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, in supporting this group of new clauses and amendments, I shall vote for any one of them that is most likely to commend itself to your Lordships’ House.
Perhaps I may begin by acknowledging that the Government have indeed shown sensitivity about this issue. Their position is essentially pragmatic. Their case is that unilateral action will not address the needs of UK citizens now resident in Europe. In essence, the Government’s position is that in order to increase the leverage that they have with the EU as regards UK citizens residing in Europe, they wish to keep on the table, as a bargaining chip, the right of EU citizens resident in the United Kingdom.
While I understand that argument, I remain extremely uncomfortable with it. I cannot accept the assumptions and implications inherent in that policy. We need to remind ourselves of the central facts, which are these: there are millions of EU citizens—maybe over 3 million—who have come to this country in the legitimate expectation that they will be able to live and work here for as long as they choose. For many of them, that has been a career-changing, maybe even a life-changing, decision, which may be irrevocable.
Their decision was entirely reasonable and proper, based on their assumptions. It accorded with the law that then existed. It accords with the law that exists today. For the United Kingdom now to disturb that expectation would involve an act of retrospective legislation and policy that would offend natural justice and, I suspect, the principles of human rights legislation. Indeed, it is probable that if we seek to deny European Union citizens now resident in the UK the right to continue to stay here, we would be challenged in the courts, and that challenge might well succeed.
Moreover, as a matter of general principle, legislation and policies that are retrospective in their operation should be avoided. Individuals are entitled to regulate their affairs in accordance with the law that exists at the time they make their decisions. To depart from that principle exposes all of us to risk to our freedoms and our ability to make safe choices.
I suggest that we test this this way. Many of us have relatives who were born outside the United Kingdom. My paternal grandmother was born in Tennessee. She came here to marry her first husband, who alas died, then she married my grandfather while she was living here. Both my maternal grandparents were brought up in County Galway. They came here after the First World War to settle permanently. Had my grandparents’ right to reside in those circumstances been challenged, and had I been aware of it as an individual, I would have said that that was a profoundly unconscionable prospect and I could not have supported it.
I cite a more recent consideration. On Monday I was lunching in the Members’ Dining Room of the House of Commons, where I was meeting staff whom I have known for many years. One of the waitresses there whom I have known for years came up to me and said, “What is going to happen to me when Brexit takes place?” She was born in France, but she has worked in the United Kingdom and been in the House of Commons for many years. I gave her my personal opinion, which was that there would be no problem, but I was not able to give her the guarantee she was entitled to deserve.
In the end, this is a matter of principle. This House can make a unilateral decision and give a unilateral guarantee. That is what we should do. Let us all remember how shocked we were when Idi Amin expelled the Asians from Uganda—so shocked that we offered them refuge in this country. Indeed, for those who are historians, keep in mind how shocked Europe was when Louis XIV revoked the edict of Nantes, causing thousands of Huguenots to flee France—often to this country—to its great impoverishment.
I do not say that we are going to do this. I do not think it likely that we will. But we have not put it outside our power for it to happen. That is wrong. I ask your Lordships to take the moral high ground and give reassurance to the millions who have made their home here in the expectation that they can continue to live and work here. To the pragmatic among my noble friends who sit on the Front Bench, such as the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, I say this: the moral high ground is very often the best ground on which to fight a campaign.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, in supporting Amendment 9B I shall speak also to Amendments 25 and 41. It is a pleasure to follow the powerful speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, and to agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. I assure the House that the colour co-ordination between us is a complete coincidence.
The Government’s case is that these matters will be dealt with in negotiations. They claim that, but for the obduracy of our EU partners, they would have had a negotiation before the notification of Article 50. It was never realistic to expect ad hoc negotiations on one particular very important issue in advance of notification. There has to be an expectation of structured negotiations.
If the UK Government give a unilateral guarantee now to the millions of EU citizens who are contributing in this country, not only will they be doing the right thing morally and economically but they will be supplying a crucial catalyst for a quick reciprocal deal. It was reported in the newspapers on Monday that the Prime Minister expected to reach a quick deal on the issue, so that it could be removed from the rest of the Brexit negotiations as soon as possible—an expectation which I think would generally be supported—but the truth is that the Government are holding EU citizens here not as hostages and bargaining chips for British citizens in the EU but for other goals. It is disingenuous to inflame the fears of British people settled elsewhere in Europe that their case would be undermined by a unilateral move by the British Government. I think that those groups have appreciated that their case would not be so undermined.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, mentioned some of the figures about the contribution of EU nationals to our economy. It is worth remembering that 10% of doctors here are from other EU countries. Sadly, there are reports of many of them wishing to leave or of others being deterred from coming here because of the uncertain environment that they face. Nine per cent of the workforce in construction are continental Europeans —my noble friend Lord Stunell emphasised that—with all the infrastructure ambitions that we have in this country. Similar figures, of 10% and 14%, can be cited for other sectors.
There were rather conflicting press reports earlier in the week about the Government’s intentions regarding a cut-off date. On Monday, it was reported that it was intended to set a cut-off date of 15 March—one’s instant reaction was, “beware the ides of March”—because it was said that government lawyers had advised that using the date of the referendum would be illegal. There was considerable comment that using any date short of our departure from the EU could also be illegal, because while we are in the EU free movement rights continue. There was then a rowing-back from No.10.
The Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, has stated that after Britain leaves the EU,
“we will be ending free movement as we know it”.
Not only must that apply to arrangements for the future but it must have some significance for people already here. While we are in the EU surely EU law on free movement, as on other matters, applies. Indeed, the letter from the Home Secretary states that,
“nothing will change for any EU citizen, whether already resident in the UK or moving from the EU, without Parliament’s approval”.
If that can be said, I think the Government can be in a position to make the unilateral guarantee that I hope this Committee will back today.
I want briefly to mention the problems that EU citizens, and particularly their families, are having in applying for permanent residence at the moment. Last July, the then Immigration Minister, James Brokenshire, gave assurances that nobody needed any documentation to demonstrate that they had a right permanently to reside if they had acquired five years’ permanent residence. I bobbed up and down occasionally to say, “But surely they will need some of kind documentation”. That has proved to be true. It has proved to be an 85-page document. One witness to the Brexit Select Committee in the other place displayed 34 kilograms of documentation, and she was only halfway through the collection. She had been here for 30 years, but she had to show the Home Office evidence of every time that she had entered and left the UK. Has anyone kept documentation for 30 years?
The goalposts have been moved retrospectively. People are being asked to document every move in their lives and they are being required to prove that they have private medical insurance. Although they were previously entitled and allowed to use the NHS, they are now told—having never been warned throughout possibly decades of residence—that they are not entitled to use the NHS. This is a matter of legal dispute, and I believe that the European Commission is making a statement on that subject to the European Parliament this afternoon. We might be enlightened about possible future infringement proceedings.
The upshot is that people are living in a state of anxiety, uncertainty, real dismay and turbulence. This is surely not a state of affairs that a Government whose Prime Minister has talked about the need for a kind and fair society can tolerate. The Government ought to accept that the weight of opinion is in favour of that unilateral guarantee, which will then trigger similar rights for Britons abroad.
Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, but I do not know what evidence she has for her assertion that the Government intend to use this issue as a negotiating encounter for wider issues once the negotiations start. On the contrary, at the end of last year the Prime Minister made an attempt to resolve this issue in advance of the negotiations on a reciprocal basis, but that was rejected out of hand by Chancellor Merkel and President Tusk on the grounds that no discussion of this issue could take place until Article 50 was invoked.
My noble friend Lord Hailsham, in his extremely eloquent speech, launched a great deal of obloquy on the legislation that would be necessary to deprive EU nationals of their rights. I agree with him, but that legislation is not before your Lordships’ House this afternoon. The question that your Lordships have to decide this afternoon is what action to take in the light of the truth—perhaps unpalatable to many of your Lordships, and unpalatable to me, because I have made it clear on numerous occasions that I actually favour a unilateral guarantee and think that that is what the Government should give—that the Government are not going to change their mind and that the other place, where this issue was raised, considered, voted upon and resolved by a majority of 42, is not going to change its mind either.
Lord Howard of Lympne
There are murmurs from the Benches opposite, but there are no new facts in this debate. This is an issue that is essentially simple. The arguments have been gone through in the other place; there are no new facts. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, criticised the Home Secretary for saying what she said in advance of the arguments, but we know what the arguments are. There are no new arguments on this issue.
Lord Richard (Lab)
A slight thought went through my mind as the noble Lord told us what will happen in the House of Commons: “If that is so, what is the point of the House of Lords?”.
Lord Howard of Lympne
There are many occasions when this House can bring forward new arguments and a fresh perspective on a situation, and genuinely make the other place think again. I do not believe that this is one of them. The question we must ask ourselves today is: how can we best help the EU nationals resident in this country? The best way is to bring the uncertainty of their position to an end as quickly as possible and the best way to do that is to pass the Bill and activate Article 50 as quickly as possible.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, on the issue of new facts, does the noble Lord agree that one new fact is the communication from all the expatriate groups across the European Union that they wish the House to pass this amendment because they believe it is the best way to secure their position?
Lord Howard of Lympne
I am sure many of those groups made their views known when the matter was debated in the other place. Though of course their views need to be taken into account, I do not see that as tantamount to a new fact.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, during this debate, which may be lengthy, it would be helpful for those of us sitting listening if speakers from the Conservative group of Peers did not refer to the Opposition raising objections when objections are being raised all around the Committee. That will not do any good to the image of the House.
Lord Howard of Lympne
My Lords, I do not think I ever referred to the Opposition raising objections. The noble Baroness uttered a legitimate rebuke but I do not think it needed to be directed at me on this occasion.
Lord Cormack (Con)
I entirely endorse what my noble friend said when he replied to the last interjection. However, he told the House a few moments ago that he was a unilateralist on this issue. The whole theme of the remain campaign, of which he was a distinguished leader, was taking back control. Why can we not have a unilateral gesture before the negotiations begin, seize what my noble friend Lord Hailsham called the moral high ground and make a declaration?
Lord Howard of Lympne
My Lords, we could but the Government decided not to. I wish we would. I would like the Government to take that view but they decided not to. I believe that this House needs to face—
Lord Winston (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Howard, has made one major assertion repeatedly: he kept saying that there are no new facts. There are new facts and they are really important to the British economy. The Government made it clear that science and technology is one way in which we will lead. Yet we are bleeding the best academics from this country at present. They are leaving one by one, or thinking about leaving, because they do not see themselves having a future in this country. That is urgent. It needs to be dealt with now.
Lord Howard of Lympne
My Lords, the debate in the other place was very recent. That fact, along with the others, was well known to those in the other place. With great respect, it is not a new fact. Clearly, many will disagree with me most profoundly but I believe that these amendments will work against the best interests of those they are designed to help. The best way to help them is to pass this legislation as quickly as possible, activate Article 50 and then negotiate to give these people the rights they deserve to stay in our country.
Lord Bragg (Lab)
My Lords, 3 million foreign nationals in a population of about 65 million represents a minority. This country has benefited greatly from minorities for centuries. Sometimes they are minorities of a people fleeing tyranny; most markedly in the middle of the last century, the Jews came to this country and enriched it immeasurably. Sometimes they are minorities who fight for the rights of their religion, such as the Roman Catholics and Unitarians over the past couple of centuries; or for their own rights, such as votes for women; or for the rights of others, such as the magnificent vote in the other place a couple of centuries ago that abolished the slave trade. Again and again, minorities have helped us become the best of what we are, as do the minorities here today in the 3 million we are treating so shamefully. From my own experience and that of others in your Lordships’ House, I can point to the dazzling contribution of minorities across the arts, the sciences and the widest spectrum of our cultural and intellectual life.
I speak strongly for minorities because I am a member of one—a bullied and beleaguered minority whose views have been dismissed and effectively gagged. I, like the Prime Minister, voted to remain. We have become a minority. I am rather surprised that with her pride in her sovereign intransigence, she did not stay on to lead the 48%—
The Countess of Mar (CB)
My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord but he seems to be launching into a Second Reading speech. Perhaps he might confine his observations to the amendment in hand.
Lord Bragg
I thank the noble Countess. I have a short speech—about as third as long as the previous speech—and I have nearly finished it. I was wondering why the Prime Minister did not lead the remain campaign after we had become a minority. Why did she not fight on, as so many other minorities have successfully done, to achieve what they honourably and passionately think is best, as we all do, for this country? It is outside the democratic development of our history that a single-issue vote should be allowed to change the course of that history for ever so dramatically and, in my view, so potentially disastrously.
Finally, one major aspect of the disaster is to turn our backs on those who have come here and given their talents and skills to the United Kingdom, settling here and transforming us in so many ways for the better. They are now reduced to pawns in a government strategy which, to many observers here and abroad, seems largely clueless and without any response, save bluster, to any critical questions. The answer to the question of foreign nationals, for our own national pride in who we are, is to tell those who are here now that we want them to stay here and be welcome.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My Lords, we shall hear next from the most reverend Primate.
The Archbishop of York
My Lords, Uganda was referred to by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham. It was regrettable that Idi Amin kicked out two types of Asians—British citizens and Ugandan citizens. My opposition to him was over the Ugandan citizens, who were the largest number. He kicked them out and my coming here in 1974 was as a result of my opposition to such behaviour. So I know how minorities can feel in a place. I know that we need to reassure our European friends who are resident here and want to remain here.
However, I have one great difficulty. Your Lordships’ House can scrutinise and revise legislation, but this simple Bill is simply to confer power on the Prime Minister to notify under Article 50 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union that there is an intention to withdraw. It is giving her the power which I believe only Parliament—not the royal prerogative —can give her. At the meeting of the Lords Spiritual before all this came about, I questioned her right to simply use prerogative power because of what had gone on way back in 1215 in Magna Carta. Clause 39 says:
“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land”—
and by “man” of course we now mean “woman” as well. Clause 40 says:
“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice”.
I think that is still enshrined in the rule of law in this country.
As far as I am concerned, until we have done the negotiation two years down the road, European citizens who are living here now will have every right to be here, like anyone else. People want to give assurance, but I think the assurance will be when the big Bill comes and we begin the debate. Remember, the European Union has free movement of people, free movement of goods and free movement of services. All that this little Bill is doing is starting a race: on your marks, get set, bang—and then they take off.
It will take two years to run this race. During the running of the race, we want to be sure that the concerns that are raised in this debate will come back. If, as I do, we want to see the Government take this decision on behalf of all of us—that EU citizens should be given a guarantee to remain—the best way to do it is to call the bluff of Angela Merkel by saying that we have now triggered Article 50, we will talk about it and unilaterally give the guarantee. It will be much quicker than the three months proposed in this amendment. I want it to be quicker than three months.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Does the most reverend Primate not understand the moral obligation on this Government? These people are not bargaining chips. If we say quite freely that they are free to stay, that gives the moral high ground to the Government in their negotiations. I would argue that all noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Howard, should vote with their conscience and not with their party.
The Archbishop of York
I never want to see any human person used as a bargaining chip. They are made in God’s likeness and as far as I am concerned, they are people and must be treated according to the rule of law in this country. The Prime Minister tried to give a guarantee. Angela Merkel did not want it before Article 50 was triggered. My suggestion is to trigger it and go back to what you promised.
I may be a Primate, but thank God I am not in captivity. The other Primate is definitely in captivity, because he is unwell and his legs have just had an operation—but I am not. I suggest that the sooner this becomes law, the greater the challenge we can give the Prime Minister on what she attempted to do but was prevented from doing because Article 50 had not been triggered. As soon as it is triggered and the power is given, we shall shout as loudly as we can and campaign as much as we can for her to go back to what she originally suggested.
People such as me were shocked, after being here and having to travel round on a travel document and pay huge sums for visas to visit the rest of Europe, to suddenly discover that when naturalised—that is the word that is used—as a British citizen we could suddenly visit the whole of Europe without a visa. That was great stuff, and I applaud it—but, please, this is a very limited Bill and we should pass it as it is.
I have one more suggestion for our Minister: to set up a truth and listening commission in every one of our four nations, so that the divisions which we are seeing at the moment can be healed and to listen to the truth and to what the people of Britain and Northern Ireland are looking for, rather than simply locking it in the Government. For those reasons I will vote against any of the amendments, as I do not think they are revising or improving the legislation. They are simply adding on and adding on.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, I support Amendment 9B, which is in my name as well as those of the other three noble Lords. It is about the rights of EU citizens in this member state, of course, not those in other member states. I support the amendment without hesitation because I believe we have a commitment to honour here, to recognise not just the rights of these citizens—although that is important enough—but the contribution they have made, are still making and will, I hope, continue to make to our economy and our society. The amendment does not seek to dictate to the Government the details of how these rights should be secured. That will be for the Government to sort out in the proposals that are called for in the amendment, and for Parliament then to decide. I would say here to the most reverend Primate that nor does it entail any delay in the triggering of Article 50 beyond the Government’s deadline at the end of this month.
So far as I can see, there is in fact only one faintly respectable argument against the amendment, which is that to speak unilaterally now about how we will treat European citizens here is not the right way for the UK to help the position of its own citizens who are living in other European countries. But that argument simply does not hold water. Otherwise, why on earth would British citizens right across the European Union have today issued a statement making it quite clear that they support our taking the decision in the amendment and believe that it is the best way to secure their rights?
I do not think I could be accused of supporting the cause of those fellow citizens right across Europe in a half-hearted way. I moved an amendment in the House which would have given them the right to vote in the referendum—which, quite shockingly, they were deprived of by the majority who voted against that. My own view is that for us to move unilaterally to protect the rights of EU citizens here is in fact the best possible step towards safeguarding the rights of our own citizens elsewhere in the EU.
I say that as someone with a little experience of EU negotiation. I negotiated our accession to the treaty, in a very modest way, as well as the budget rebate, the establishment of the single market and the opt-out on the euro. Of course, I cannot be sure that I am right, but I do think that there is a reasonable chance that I am right—and I do not believe that the transactional approach, which is the way that the Government wish to go, is the right way to proceed or is likely to produce good results—or will produce them quickly. So I hope that your Lordships’ House will approve this amendment when we come to vote on it.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, I support Amendment 9B, which overlaps with other amendments, including Amendment 37 in my name. There is a moral case—a human rights case—which has already been very well made and which I therefore will not repeat. I want to pinpoint four different categories of employment in which this issue is particularly acute. I do so from my own experience in Wales, but it is equally relevant throughout the United Kingdom.
The first group that I highlight are workers in the tourism sector, particularly those in the hotels and catering trades. In Wales, we benefit from having hundreds of workers from EU member states, such as the Baltic states, Slovakia and Hungary. It can be argued that most of these jobs could be done by residents in Wales—they could, of course, but the reality is that the work in this sector is not particularly popular, partly because some jobs are highly seasonal and partly because the wage levels are sometimes low. In Wales we now have a low unemployment rate of 4.4%, which is below the UK average. It is no exaggeration to say that if these employees were to depart overnight, the sector in Wales would be in crisis. Employers need to know now that their current staff will be able to remain and, indeed, to have some indication of the circumstances after Brexit or during any prolonged Brexit negotiations under which they will be entitled to employ staff from other EU countries.
Secondly, there is the food processing industry. Many of the same arguments apply—in some cases, to an even greater extent, because firms often overdepend on EU workers. Thirdly, in a different category, is our university sector in Wales and throughout the UK. In Wales, we have 1,355 EU nationals employed at present, often in key jobs where they cannot be easily replaced. Fourth is the NHS in Wales where, as in England, there is a high level of dependency on staff who have come here from other EU countries. I believe that more than 1,100 such EU employees work for the NHS in Wales at present. Without these, the service would be in real danger of collapse. More than 6% of our doctors are from EU countries, and we already have a critical shortage of GPs. Regarding this fourth group, I have been told of key jobholders, fearful of what may happen to them after Brexit, who are already actively seeking jobs in their home countries in case at some later stage there is a stampede of their fellow EU nationals seeking to return home, and getting a job there consequently becomes that much more challenging.
The Government have been taking the line that they will give priority to the position of EU workers in the UK when the negotiations start, but it is not at that point that the necessary assurances can be given to these workers. If the issue is subsumed as part of the overall negotiation package, the outcome will not be known until the negotiations are nearly complete. That would be totally unacceptable not only to thousands of such workers living in Britain but, I believe, to this House and the other place. That is why this amendment must be written into the Bill and why MPs must be asked to think again on this critical matter. If they do not, I believe that we should have the courage of our convictions next week, or whenever, to insist that this provision be enacted. Thousands of people are looking today to this House to give a lead, and I earnestly hope that we do not let them down.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
My Lords, what faces us today is an extremely serious issue, and I want to put before your Lordships the way I happen to look at it. Throughout the European Union there are a large number of people who were born in one European country—by that I mean a country that is a member of the European Union—and now reside in another, under the protection of the laws prevalent in these countries in consequence of the treaty that puts the EU together. Many people in our country and in other countries are in this situation.
I believe that the moral high ground is to treat all these people equally. They are absolutely equal people—and they are people. I completely repudiate the idea that I should treat any fellow human being as a bargaining counter or anything of the kind. I thoroughly reject that and have no truck with it whatever. I believe it is essential that all these people be treated properly and equally. The problem is that their rights of residence in the countries in which they live are now threatened by the vote that this country has taken—against the views of a number of people here, including my own—to leave the European Union.
The European Union, in its wisdom, has formulated a way in which such matters should be settled—by the terms of a negotiation under Article 50. Some members of the European Union have refused to get into any kind of negotiation until that mechanism, set up under the treaty, is triggered, and this Bill is intended to enable our country and our Government to trigger that mechanism. The Bill is necessary because it is appreciated, and was appreciated in the courts at both levels where the cases were heard, that this would affect people’s rights, secured by Act of Parliament, in this country. Of course, that applies to the same extent in the other countries of the European Union, because the law of the Union, by virtue of the treaty, has to be accepted as the law in those countries as well. So those people’s rights are all rights in terms according to the Treaty on European Union.
The European Union has stipulated a way in which, if any country wishes to leave, it should do so—and Article 50 is that way. I think that all these people have to be treated fairly. They are all in the same boat, and they are all people whose security in the country in which they are residing is threatened until that matter is settled under the European Union negotiation structure. I believe it is right that that should be done in a way that is fair to them all.
I am the first to acknowledge that we owe a tremendous amount to people from other European countries who are resident here—in the National Health Service and a whole lot of other places. I myself have often seen extremely good work done by people who have come from, for example, Poland, to work here. The work they do and the benefits they give to us are very great. However, that is not a reason to give those people preference over the other people who are affected in exactly the same way.
As the most reverend Primate has said, the right thing is for Article 50 to be triggered and for the Prime Minister to immediately ask—as she has said she will—for this to be settled, in a way which would cover the whole of the European Union. The only excuse that has been offered so far in Europe for not agreeing to this is that Article 50 negotiations, which are the way out of the European Union, have not been triggered. I would confidently expect—I have the greatest possible respect for the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick—
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
What is the argument against a unilateral gesture on the part of this Government, generating good will which could permeate the rest of the negotiations? There is no need for any negotiations.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
A unilateral declaration of that kind is not treating fairly all the people who are affected by this problem. The moral high ground is fairness and that is the only ground we can take in a negotiation of this kind. I thoroughly believe that the chances of a complete settlement of this matter are greatly increased if the negotiations are triggered and the Prime Minister makes this the very first requirement, as she has said she will. Nobody in the European Union has so far given any reason for not agreeing with it for all European nationals who are in other countries of residence.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
I respectfully point out to the noble and learned Lord and to the noble Lord, Lord Howard, that Liam Fox said at the Conservative Party conference that the uncertain status of EU nationals living in the UK is one of the “main cards” in the Brexit negotiations. For that reason, I do not trust the Government on this issue.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, I do not regard myself as bound by remarks made by Dr Liam Fox anywhere. I have been given the responsibility, so far, of being a Member of this House and of attempting to explain to your Lordships, as fully and briefly as I can, what I believe to be the moral high ground: to treat all people from the European Union who are in countries other than their countries of origin according to the rights secured by the European Union treaty. The time for a fair negotiation of the whole matter is when that treaty is departed from, in accordance with the rules set out in Article 50. That would come very quickly because, as I have already said—I am repeating myself now but I will not do it again—I have heard no argument from Europe against this, except that the negotiations have not been triggered in accordance with the provisions of the treaty itself.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 16A and 38 and I also support Amendment 9B. Whether or not one favours a unilateral guarantee to EU citizens in this country, as I do, there are key questions about the Government’s approach which can and need to be answered now. Amendment 16A is a probing amendment which seeks to draw out the answers to these questions. I hope that the Minister will respond to them fully when he winds up. First, what rights do the Government intend to provide for EU citizens and their families in the UK and to seek for British citizens and their families in the EU? The Government should tell us now. If they did so, they would provide much-needed clarity for EU citizens here and British citizens in the EU. Those citizens need to know that they and their families will not just have a right to residence and to work, but also have access to public services—in particular, health—without which, for many, the right to residency is meaningless.
Thirdly, what procedure do the Government envisage by which EU citizens in the UK will gain rights of residency under British law? As the report of the EU Justice Sub-Committee on acquired rights makes clear, the current indefinite leave to remain procedure would not be suitable. It would not be able to cope with the applications which would have to be processed and it requires documentation which, in many cases, EU citizens simply will not have because they have never needed it, or had any expectation of needing it.
Fourthly, what do the Government intend to be the qualifying date for the rights that they grant to EU citizens? Will it be the date of withdrawal—as it was in the case of Greenland’s exit from the European Union, which is the only precedent we have—or do the Government intend some other date? Again, people need to know the Government’s intentions so that they can get on with planning their lives.
Next, there is the question of comprehensive sickness insurance cover, or CSIC. As my noble friend Lady Ludford said—many noble Lords will be aware of this—there is a dispute between the UK and the EU on whether the National Health Service qualifies as comprehensive sickness cover. The EU maintains it does, but the UK maintains it does not. Whatever the merits of the dispute between the EU Commission and the UK Government on this matter, three facts are clear. First, many EU citizens had no idea this requirement existed. Secondly, those who did thought they were covered by their right to use the NHS—a reasonable assumption, given that that is the position of the EU Commission. The third and final stark fact is this: if the Government adhere to their current position on CSIC, thousands of people, many of whom have been resident in this country for decades, will find themselves without the right to remain in the country that they have made their home—that cannot be right. This issue is causing huge anxiety to millions of people and it is in the power of the Government to resolve it by stating that evidence of CSIC will not be a requirement for EU citizens to gain permanent residence. They should do so now.
Amendment 38 simply makes explicit the unilateral guarantee to EU citizens resident in the UK and provides that no agreement under Article 50 can be entered into which does not protect the rights of UK citizens and their families in other EU countries.
It is not my intention to put either amendment to a vote this afternoon, but I hope that the Minister will address the questions raised by both of them. I will support the cross-party amendment because it offers the best opportunity to send a clear signal to the elected House. But I will want to come back to the issue of British citizens in the EU, addressed in Amendment 38, because their rights are also of crucial concern to my noble friends, myself and many noble Lords across all parties in the House.
Many British citizens living in the EU have contacted me and many other noble Lords to say how abandoned they felt by the elected House and how heartened they were that this House was addressing their concerns. We must not abandon them again. Through no fault of their own, as the result of a referendum from which the majority of them were excluded, millions of British and other EU citizens suddenly find their future at the mercy of the whims of politicians. They fear that they may be excluded from the countries that they have made their home. In some cases, they fear being split up from their husbands or wives or partners. These are not spurious fears; they are not the result of scaremongering; they are the result of the Government’s failure to provide either moral leadership or administrative clarity. Take the example of an elderly couple—
Lord Spicer (Con)
My Lords, even if you are a Liberal Democrat you cannot have it both ways. You either give priority to people living here—those you think should have priority—or you do not. This amendment, which the noble Lord has spoken in favour of, does precisely that—it gives priority to EU citizens living here, rather than British citizens living elsewhere. He cannot have it both ways.
Lord Oates
Perhaps the noble Lord will forgive me but if he listens to my argument he will understand the answer to his question. Let us take, for example, an elderly couple, resident in Germany, who wrote to me recently—one a British citizen, the other a German citizen. They wrote to say that they are terrified that, if the final agreement does not provide for continuing access to healthcare, they will not be able to continue to live in the same country, and the same fears have been expressed by EU citizens in the UK. These are not abstract issues; this is about the lives of millions of people, it is about the anxiety and fear that has been inflicted on them since Brexit, and it is about the uncertainty that means that their lives have been put on hold. The Home Secretary claims in her letter to us that—
Viscount Ridley (Con)
The noble Lord talks about fear and anxiety but does he agree that what we have heard this afternoon—the inflaming of the fears of these people—has come from only one side, including spurious mentions of the edict of Nantes and Idi Amin?
Lord Oates
My Lords, no, I do not agree with the noble Viscount for one moment. These are fears expressed to me and to noble Lords across the whole House. They are not manufactured; they are real and present, and the Government need to address them.
The Home Secretary claims in her letter to us that a unilateral guarantee to EU citizens resident in the UK would cause uncertainty for British citizens in the EU. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, pointed out, that is not the view of the many groups representing British citizens in the EU that have written to me and have published a statement today. Not only do they accept the need for a unilateral guarantee but they have strongly urged it on me and, I am sure, on other noble Lords. Far from causing uncertainty, they believe that it would provide them with reassurance.
During the debate on this Bill, there has been a lot of discussion about who said what in the referendum campaign, but no one disputes that the leave campaign claimed that the rights of EU and British citizens resident in other countries would not be affected. That is what they said; they also said that to state anything else would be scaremongering.
Since the vote to leave, politicians from across the political spectrum have been clear that we should unilaterally state that we will protect the rights of EU citizens here. A prominent leave campaigner, the noble Lord, Lord Howard, spoke earlier. In evidence to the Justice Sub-Committee, he made it clear that that should be the case, at least as far as residence and rights to work and study were concerned. He said that he did not think we should,
“wait for any question of reciprocity”.
The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, rightly advised the Government—some months ago, I think—that they should lead by example. He has taken a clear, principled stance on this issue throughout, as have many noble Lords in this House, including the noble Lords, Lord Bowness and Lord Hannay, my noble friend Lady Ludford and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, who moved the amendment—noble Lords of all parties and none, remainers and leavers alike, because this is not a partisan issue; it is a question of principle.
Doubtless the Minister will tell us that this Bill is not the place to concern ourselves with such principles, but it is the only place. It is our one opportunity to send a clear signal back to the elected House that we regard the principle of protecting the rights of EU citizens resident here and British citizens resident in the EU as a matter of honour for our country, and, in doing so, to show that we have heard the distress and anxiety of millions of British and other EU citizens, and that we have been prepared not just to offer warm words but to act.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
My Lords, we need to try to organise this debate so that we hear all sides of the argument. I hope that noble Lords will understand if I suggest that it is the turn of my noble friend Lord Tebbit.
Lord Tebbit
My Lords, in a manner which has not been followed by anybody else in the House today, I should declare my interest in this matter. I have a nephew who has lived and worked in Germany for 20 years and I have a Danish son-in-law who has lived in this country for over 30 years.
Being here today has been an extraordinary experience. First, we have been unfortunately and unusually denied the presence of my noble friend Lord Heseltine, who is not in his usual place.
Lord Tebbit
Then perhaps he will do us the kindness of addressing us, because it is an almost unique experience.
The other reason that this is a remarkable day for me is that, at a time when we so often hear slave traders criticised, my noble friend Lord Hailsham has made the most splendid defence of them. He said that a man who decides to do anything is entitled to do so in accordance with the laws as they were when he took the decision. I hope that we will hear a little less about students tearing down portraits of slave traders now that my noble friend has dealt with that so effectively.
It seems to me that the first duty of this Parliament of the United Kingdom is to care for the interests of the citizens of this kingdom. If we are to be concerned about anybody’s rights after Brexit to live anywhere on this continent of Europe, we should be concerned for the rights of British people to live freely and peacefully in other parts of Europe. Somehow or another, today we seem to be thinking of nothing but the rights of foreigners.
Lord Tebbit
My Lords, people of nationalities of other countries within the union are foreigners.
Lord Cashman (Lab)
Will the noble Lord develop the argument about protecting the rights of UK citizens a little further? What would he say to a UK citizen married, perhaps, to a German or Dutch national and now worried about their right to remain, to work and to live in this country?
Lord Tebbit
That is exactly what the Prime Minister has said: we will look for an equitable solution. That means, in my view, that the rights of those who are currently resident here who, although they are not British subjects, are citizens of the EU, should be kept. But, of course, so should the rights of British citizens living within the EU. That is not a difficult matter. Why is everybody here today so excited about an amendment that looks after foreigners and not the British?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I point out to the noble Lord that the amendment is structured as it is because we are conscious of the powers of the British Government, who are able to determine the lives of the EU citizens resident in this country but not able to determine the lives of our own citizens abroad. That does not mean to say that we think any less of them; we are fighting for them.
Lord Tebbit
Of course we do not have the power to look after our citizens overseas—not in these days when we do not have many gunboats—but we have an obligation to look after the rights of those people and to look after those rights first. The best way we can preserve the rights of all those concerned—EU citizens here and our citizens on the continent—is to allow Article 50 to be proceeded with as expeditiously as possible, to get the worries over, and for a decent and proper arrangement to be made. I only wish that European statesmen such as Mrs Merkel would come forward, perhaps arm in arm with Herr Juncker, and say that that is exactly what they want, too. We do not need this amendment; it would make it much more difficult to get to that solution.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am sorry. It is the turn of the Labour Party. I suggest we hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, I support this amendment. I also have my name on Amendment 16A with the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and on Amendment 38. I want to reiterate the point about the position at the time of the referendum. During the campaign, reassurance was given to EU nationals living here, and to our citizens living abroad in the European Union, that their rights would be protected. They were told this would happen under the international law of acquired rights.
As chair of the European Union Justice Sub-Committee, along with my colleagues on the committee, I heard evidence on the international law of acquired rights. It became very clear to us—and this is the basis of the report which is available to all noble Lords—that international law does not provide the kind of protections that were being given as a reassurance to those many people. Our committee embarked on an evidence-taking session which showed us that, with regard to the position of European Union nationals living here as well as our citizens living around Europe, they would be in extremis if we did not take steps very quickly to secure their rights.
As we have heard, more than 3 million European Union nationals live in this country. But they are not the only ones experiencing anguish; it is also their family members, their employers and their neighbours. This will affect a whole cadre of people beyond the people themselves. I suspect that our committee is at the receiving end of the greatest number of communications from those people about their distress, their anxiety, the fears of their children and their fears about their future. So we should not think that this is about only 3.5 million people and that we are preoccupied—as the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, seems to think we are—with the rights only of people living here. We have received a huge mailbag from people around Europe who are fearful of what their pension positions are. They are fearful because they retired to places such as Spain and now wonder what their prospects are: they worry about their healthcare situation and so on.
When we say our position should be that we leave it to the great negotiation and that it should be number one on the list, I want to remind, for example, the most reverend Primate that our Prime Minister did not go to Europe and say that we would give a unilateral declaration. She said that she wanted a negotiation before the triggering of Article 50. It was not on the table because, as we know, negotiation begins only after that. What she should have done—and what we urge her to do—is say that we will take the principled position of honouring our responsibilities to people who live and work with us, because of the impact on their lives, the lives of their families and the lives of all the people around them.
I would like to explain something. We discovered while taking evidence something that was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Oates—that the law around permanent residence is incredibly complex and byzantine. In fact, Lord Justice Jackson described it as being such that its complexity would even have made Byzantine emperors envious. We have taken evidence about the impact of this on people making applications. The new piece of evidence that I offer to the noble Lord, Lord Howard, is this: we now know that in the period since the referendum, 30% of the applications made for permanent residence have been rejected. The refusals have been on the grounds of incomplete documentation or—and this is one of the most painful things to hear—that women who took time off from employment to have children did not pursue the private sickness insurance that the Government say was required. They are supposed to provide documentation to show that they had sickness insurance. If they are not able to provide it, they are told that they are not entitled to permanent residence. Many have received a refusal on that ground. These are the mothers of children, married to men here in Britain, living their lives here and having sent their children to school here. Many of them have been here for more than 20 years. We should understand the scandal that that creates.
I want to say to people who have been involved in any kind of business negotiation or legal negotiation that when you take a principled position at the beginning of a negotiation, it wins you so much good will. In communications we have received only today and yesterday, and from all those people in the European Union who are in contact with me as the chair of the sub-committee, people are saying to us, “Please pass the unilateral declaration amendment in the House of Lords”, because it is giving reassurance not just to those nationals there but to all of us in Europe who are fearful about the future and who feel that it will give strength to our arguments in relation to Governments such as the Spanish Government, the Portuguese Government and so on.
I urge your Lordships to accept that this is a matter of principle. This is about the honour of this House. This is about us speaking to what people need to put their fears and their anguish at bay. We have a real responsibility to those people, and in taking the responsibility for the ones whom we can make decisions about, we therefore take responsibility for our citizens living in other parts of the European Union.
Lord Bowness
My Lords, I did not participate at Second Reading because I could not be present for the closing speeches, but I have sat through, watched or read all the proceedings. Had I been present, I would have spoken in support of the Government taking the action urged in this amendment, to which I have added my name—something for which I have no regret, despite this afternoon.
Our attitude to this amendment will help define the kind of country that we want to be. I have read very carefully the letter to your Lordships from my right honourable friend the Home Secretary urging rejection of the amendment. I do not disregard it lightly, but I do not find acceptable the argument that we should be prepared to confirm the rights of EU nationals living here only as part of the negotiation about our own citizens. I think it is a misjudged position to adopt, and wrong both politically and in terms of justice and fairness. I find it neither justifiable nor, with respect, credible to prolong the uncertainty of EU nationals in this country. I wish that we could remove the uncertainty for our nationals in other EU countries, but that is not in our gift.
Our stance on this matter implies that, without a satisfactory outcome to the linked issues of UK citizens, the rights of EU citizens here might not be safeguarded. If we may use the rights of EU citizens here as a bargaining tool in connection with UK citizens’ rights, why not, some people think, for other important issues? But I do not believe it to be a credible argument. Does anyone believe that we in the United Kingdom would actually deprive EU citizens of their rights? For that matter, do we believe that our current partners in the European Union would want to make our nationals’ continued residence in their country impossible, impractical or intolerable? If we do indeed believe that, it says much about our attitude towards our partners. I suggest that in negotiations we need to demonstrate some greater trust. Before we start negotiations, we should reject outright the idea of some kind of diplomatic tit for tat.
Let us remember that we are not dealing with enemy aliens in times of war but with people who came to this country with our consent under the treaties of accession. In 2003, the United Kingdom, together with Sweden, Greece, Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands, agreed not to impose transitional arrangements limiting free movement. That was a brave decision at the time, which recognised that the countries of eastern Europe had waited a long time for freedom and membership.
That European Union (Accessions) Act was passed in the other place with no votes against. There were some discussions about transitional arrangements, and likewise, in this House, some discussions but no votes. Although any transitional arrangements would by now have long expired, there is no doubt that the United Kingdom and this Parliament offered an unconditional welcome, which was an attraction to many. We felt what has been described this afternoon: that we had the moral high ground. I suggest to my noble friend on the Front Bench that now is the time to take that high ground again and give certainty where there is now uncertainty and clearly state that we in the United Kingdom do not bargain with people.
We have chosen to leave the European Union. That is our choice and our right, but we should also recognise that as a nation we made it possible for people from other countries to come here and build a new life. Let us give reassurance and show that we are indeed the generous, outward-looking, internationalist country that we are stated to be heading for in these Brexit negotiations. Let us also not play a blame game with other leaders in Europe. I say with great respect to noble Lords who spoke earlier: do not read the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech as an unconditional offer to settle the issue of EU nationals in this country. Within the words of that speech, the “deal”, which I think was the word used, was inextricably linked to a deal on UK citizens in Europe.
I am very aware of the injunction that we should pass this Bill without amendment—indeed, I have been made very aware of it just in case I had not received the message. If we accept that we will not deprive EU citizens of their rights, what possible motive can we have for being so reluctant on this issue? I hope that it is not because we think it would be seen as a sign of weakness on migration issues. It remains my preference to hear the Minister say that the Government will make a statement that will meet the concerns of those who have put forward this amendment and other amendments in this group. But if he cannot do that now or later, then the matter has to be settled by a Division. For the Minister to take such a step would be preferable, because there are many issues that have been raised by me and other noble Lords that need clarification.
Our amendment refers to EU citizens “legally resident”. That should cover people resident here under their treaty rights. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, referred to that at some length. I ask the Minister to confirm that the Government recognise the rights of those EU citizens who may just be family members living with an EU citizen who has a permanent residence certificate.
To vote for this amendment is not to delay the Bill, to thwart the outcome of the referendum or to deny the will of the other place. It is a simple request to look at a very serious issue. Indeed, were we to do so, it would be in line with the recommendations of your Lordships’ European Union Committee report on this issue. There is plenty of time for it to go back to the other place and come back here. I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will understand that I, for one, do not want to be associated with a position which, whatever the motive for adopting it, appears mean-spirited and does us no credit.
With this amendment or a government commitment to EU citizens, we could commence negotiations—I hope that the future of UK nationals will be top of the list—by saying to our EU partners that we have already done the proper thing by their nationals. That could even assist in creating a good climate in which to start our talks. We want a new relationship with Europe. Let us make no mistake: there are many things that we shall need from our partners in the future. To open the talks with a generous gesture, freely given, would not be a bad start.
Viscount Waverley
My Lords, emotions understandably run high on this issue, both here and on the continent. As a long-term resident on the continent, and after a lot of soul-searching over the weekend, including consultation with multiple UK residents’ organisations that are consistent in the messages they project, I see, however, that the only course of action is to allow the Government a clear run on these negotiations.
A mixture of issues are at play this afternoon, some of which belong elsewhere. Matters such as meeting the dire needs of our health service should be parked as a subject for another day, as should other regrettable circumstances, including those of families, many with children, facing the stark reality of enforced separation or, worse, having to split up because of the quirks of being a non-EU spouse and not meeting immigration criteria set for residence in the UK. Let those needs indeed be recognised but tagged for resolution in legislative debate and amendments to an immigration or any other appropriate Act.
There is no guarantee that, should EU citizens be offered the right to remain in the UK in advance of negotiations, UK citizens’ rights to remain on the continent will be secure. It could be argued by Brussels, for example, that the UK’s need to propose this is more pressing than that of the 27 remaining members. This is where there is a coup de grâce, of which the Minister will be aware. It addresses the point wished for by the noble Lord, Lord Howard, about the need for a new fact or perspective.
Eight member states have thus far failed to notify the Commission of complete transposition into their national legislation of a citizens’ rights directive, thereby enabling working by citizens in another member state. Failure to react to the formal notice and the recent reasoned opinion necessitating compliance will be referred to the ECJ within two months. This does not help the cause behind these amendments. “Beware the small print” is an adage.
After the trigger, however, the Government could, with Brussels, agree to an across-the-EU process of removing a first stage of uncertainty by announcing that those compliant with national residency rules are good to remain. A limited grace period for compliance by others could then be agreed by mutual consent. The only practical way forward is to establish red lines on the criteria on rights to remain. Two sets of issues would then determine where the line in the sand could be drawn. First, two dates are relevant: the date of the referendum and the date of leaving the EU. Secondly, two sets of persons are relevant: those compliant with individual national residency criteria, who should be correctly registered with the national authorities of the country concerned; and those compliant with bilateral tax-treaty terms and correct reporting on the 183-day rule, taking into account primary residence status and centre of economic interests, paying national social security and municipal taxes as required, including conversion of driving licences and so on. In other words, there should be visible and verifiable commitment of intent. By complying with those conditions, one should be afforded the right to equal treatment as nationals in the country in which one is living, including the right to healthcare. The road map I propose would remove a first stage of uncertainty, from which could follow an incremental, reciprocal and mutual consent approach with Brussels that would be considered throughout the Article 50 process.
I will therefore not be supporting these amendments. They would complicate the process of exiting the EU, probably fail to deliver on a reasonable, timely and negotiated settlement, and lead to a hard Brexit.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
My Lords, I have tabled Amendment 25 on behalf of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, of which I am a member. It is also supported by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lawrence, who are also members, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. Inevitably, I will speak a little to the other amendments in the group, but I assure noble Lords that I have crossed out quite a lot of the speech I arrived with.
Of course, I am aware of the statements made by Ministers, most recently the Home Secretary’s letter to noble Lords, but none of these amounts to an acknowledgement of rights—I stress rights. That is almost where we started, with the second speech from the noble Viscount, who referred to natural justice. The JCHR has reported largely on the basis of the European Convention on Human Rights. In the spirit of the committee’s very moderate amendment, I assure noble Lords that our amendment, unlike others in this group, does not amount to an attempt to delay or frustrate leaving the EU.
I am puzzled by the logic of the Government being committed to assurances, while at the same time saying that nothing can be settled now. The latter must call the former into question. Noble Lords have talked about how offensive it is to treat people as commodities, but even if it were appropriate, how useful would it be as a bargaining chip? Ministers are saying that we have their assurances that this issue is a priority. Does not that give us the worst of all worlds—a bargaining chip without any negotiating advantage—because we have acknowledged its priority? Have we downgraded other issues? I leave these questions hanging.
It is said that a unilateral arrangement makes no sense, but I put a different view to your Lordships. Even at the cold, unemotional level of negotiating tactics, I believe it does. As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, said, a good will gesture or a moral gesture can be a very effective negotiating tool in itself. I do not have other noble Lords’ impressive record of high-level negotiation, but I have done my share of all-night stints constructing some agreements. I have found that it can be effective.
We are putting the responsibility on other states by saying that they insist on no negotiation before notification, but there is no technical reason why there cannot be a unilateral position. Of course, UK citizens in other European states have the same rights—or, if you like, a mirror image of them—so the scope for negotiation may be a little limited. Given the age of the many UK citizens abroad, particularly those living in Spain, I cannot help thinking that if they return at the same time as we lose or send away so many people working in our health service, we will be shooting ourselves in both feet.
It is not the best reason, but there are also practical reasons for the JCHR’s amendment and others. If some such provisions are not embedded, the burden on the Home Office of dealing with large numbers of applicants seeking to establish their position, and on the courts called on to apply Article 8 of the convention, would be enormous. I do not want to start considering what would then be the logical step of deportation.
We have referred to morality as well as rights. A guarantee is simply the right thing to do. Although I am disciplining myself from repeating what other noble Lords have said about representations that have been made to us, I take this opportunity to thank the enormous numbers of people who have emailed us, very personally, individually and in a very heartfelt way. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, said that there are no new facts. I do not think he could argue that there is not an increasing weight of evidence.
There is one cohort I want to mention: people who are vulnerable to exploitation. They are perhaps not hugely competent, and are often in the agriculture, construction and care industries. There is evidence now, which the JCHR has heard, that unscrupulous employers are taking advantage of their readiness to believe it when they are told, “You are illegal”, when no such thing is true.
We have heard many times, “Don’t tell the other side your bottom line. Don’t put your cards on the table”. I think this card is on the table, so that argument falls away. This Chamber should demonstrate that it is with those who want their nation to be one which understands common humanity and, dare I say it, human rights.
Lord Kerslake (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak in support of Amendment 25, to which I have added my name, and in general support of the amendments in this group. Like the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, I declare my interests: as chair of King’s College Hospital, chair of Peabody and president of the Local Government Association—this may be the only point of similarity in our speeches. My views are of course my own and not those of the individual organisations.
I should start by saying that this is a difficult judgment for us to make and it will be one of many that we face over the coming years. Like other noble Lords, I have read very carefully the Home Secretary’s letter, much of which I sympathise with, and reflected on the issues overnight. Having reflected, I still come firmly down on the side of supporting an amendment to protect the rights of EU citizens in this country.
The arguments for this are both principled and deeply practical. The principled arguments have already been well made today, so I will not repeat them all. More than 3 million EU citizens have come to this country in good faith. Many have made it their home and, in doing so, contributed enormously to the good of this country. I doubt if there are very many Peers in this House or indeed many people in the country who would actively want them to leave. The only argument we have heard for not confirming their position now, put forward by the Home Secretary in her letter, is that it would weaken our hand in the negotiations on UK citizens in Europe. Whichever way you dress up that argument, whichever way you think about it, it is using the rights of EU citizens as a bargaining chip.
In my view, it is not even a very good bargaining chip, because it is perfectly clear to the Commission negotiators that we need them to stay as much as they wish to do so—if not more so. So our negotiating position amounts to saying, “Do as we wish or we will shoot our own foot off”. I think the EU negotiators will see through that.
My practical reason for supporting the amendment is that, for our own sakes, we need to end the uncertainty for EU citizens now. The Government have said that we can debate this issue at a later stage. They have said that they will seek to reach an early agreement on the matter with the EU. I have no doubt about their sincerity on this point, but the hard truth is that early resolution is not in their gift. In the meantime, the uncertainty creates risks for desperately needed skilled staff, with devastating consequences—let me give just three.
For the building of new homes, which I am passionate about, we know that something like a quarter of construction workers in London come from the EU. In respect of the effective operation of our hospitals, I know that King’s would simply not be able to function without the European doctors and nurses who work for us. For the delivery of social care, EU workers form a vital part of the residential and home care provider workforce. Without those skilled workers, it would simply be impossible to run these functions properly and it is not possible to replace such workers in the short term. It may be that they will continue to stay here, but the survey that we saw in the Guardian today on European doctors immediately puts that in doubt. It may be that early resolution with the EU is possible: I have to say, from my own conversations with those closer to the process, that I am doubtful of this.
In the end, the key question for me is this: given the potentially devastating consequences for all the things I hold dear—new homes, a functioning NHS and delivery of good quality care—do I think that this is a risk worth taking? I do not. Sometimes in life—in fact, very often in life—the right thing to do is to do the right thing. I hope that today we do the right thing.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I think it would be appropriate to have my noble friend Lord Lawson and then hear from the Labour Benches.
Lord Lawson of Blaby
My Lords, I assure your Lordships that I will be very brief indeed. I shall start by declaring an interest, an even more personal interest than that declared by my noble friend Lord Tebbit. My home is in France, yet despite that, I have gone on record—in this House on a number of occasions and elsewhere—as saying that I would have liked to see the Government give an unconditional assurance that EU citizens in this country, legally here with a right to remain, should continue to remain. There should be no question of that right being taken away. I believe that the idea of somehow linking it with the position of British citizens resident in the European Union was well intentioned—in order to reassure those people—but mistaken. I cannot agree with this amendment, partly and fundamentally for the reasons so well set out by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York. This amendment has no place whatever in this Bill.
Secondly, the Home Secretary’s letter has been referred to. One of the things that she said—in fact, the most important one—was that,
“nothing will change for any EU citizen, whether already resident in the UK or moving from the EU, without Parliament’s approval”.
It is quite clear to everyone in this House that there is no chance that Parliament would approve the expulsion of EU citizens legally resident here. This is understood by the Government and there is no way that they would propose this, so there is no danger whatever to EU citizens resident in the UK.
Apart from a certain amount—too much, in my opinion—of virtue signalling, what is the purpose of this amendment and what is its likely consequence? The only consequence of this amendment would be to stir up fear and concern among the EU residents in this country that they might not be able to stay, when there is no question that they will be able to. That is something that I find wholly deplorable.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, I have put on one side the remarks that I was going to make because I want to concentrate on the remarks made by the right reverend Prelate—I am sorry, the most reverend Primate—and I do so declaring my interest as a member of the Church of England and a regular churchgoer.
The most reverend Primate seemed to base his argument on two points. The first was that the EU would agree to prioritise this issue above all things and not make it dependent on other parts of the negotiations. That is certainly the Prime Minister’s view but I do not know whether that prioritisation will be recognised by the EU. As for not making it dependent on other negotiations, I have negotiated as part of the EU and negotiations are never concluded until everything is concluded. The square brackets stay around everything until you can finally decide what you are prepared to bargain with, what you will give away and what you want to keep. That is the reality of negotiations and I am afraid that to say otherwise is misleading.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem (LD)
My Lords, I have the misfortune to disagree with the conclusions reached by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, although I agree with him about the disregard we should have for anything said by Dr Liam Fox. I take some consolation from the fact that I wholly agree with the compelling speech made at the outset of this debate by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham.
I do not need to trouble the House for long because at Second Reading I addressed this issue to a large extent but nothing I have heard today persuades me of anything other than the catastrophic consequences for the economy and so many of the services in the United Kingdom as a result of those non-British EU nationals who work in these industries and services no longer being available. I also recoil from the notion that we should say to husbands, wives, mothers or fathers of UK citizens, “You must leave the United Kingdom”. I recoil even more at the notion that were we to be in the position of expelling people, we would knock at doors—as I said at Second Reading—either at midnight or midday, saying, “You must leave the United Kingdom”.
Let us look at this from the point of view of families. What sort of stress and strain would it put upon a family? Indeed, what sort of apprehension has this already caused in many families? It is said that there are no new facts. The mounting volume of anecdotal evidence of anxiety on the part of those who may be struck at as a result of there not being an amendment of the kind we seek to pass today is exemplified day after day. The Guardian was mentioned a little while ago. There is a compelling article in that about a family who has already decided to go because the lack of a satisfactory understanding has become too much.
There is a further new fact in the utterances of Mr David Davis. He said earlier that it will be years and years before United Kingdom citizens would be able to take over those jobs fulfilled by non-British EU citizens. What is to happen in the interim? If you are a non-British EU citizen working in a hospital but you know that the long term depends upon whether enough British citizens can be found to take over the job you are doing, what kind of compulsion does that create in wanting to stay? Ultimately, the services you provide will be disregarded.
I go back to the question of the assurance of the Home Secretary. I tried to put myself in the position of those about whom we have been concerned in the course of this debate. I do not doubt that the assurance of the Home Secretary is given in good faith but I believe in belt and braces. I would rather have that assurance on the statute than depend upon the decision of a Home Secretary who in five years may no longer be in office.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
The noble Lord just made the point that he would rather have this amendment on the statute. I do not know if it has occurred to him but that is not for this House to decide but the other place, which already voted against this proposition. He is a very distinguished lawyer. This amendment refers to people who are “legally resident”. I cannot find any definition of what “legally resident” means. Which groups is he referring to?
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem
Just as Brexit means Brexit, legally resident means legally resident.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem
We might have to take the expert opinion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, but I fancy that the courts will be able to reach a conclusion on that.
I was saying that I endeavoured to put myself in the same position as those who find themselves under anxiety and apprehension. Were I in that position, I would be much more concerned to have a statutory right than a political assurance.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem
No doubt the noble Lord will try to intervene at another stage, given his characteristically generous attitude towards the Liberal Democrats.
The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, referred at the outset to the legal implications of what we are discussing. He is perfectly right because there may well be convention rights, and it is also the case that Parliament and even more so the courts have often been very reluctant to pass legislation with retrospective effect. Indeed, in my recollection the only time that has been done recently was in relation to former Nazi war criminals for whom the United Kingdom was determined to exercise retrospective extraterritorial jurisdiction. However, the mere fact that these issues are live in this debate surely indicates just how complicated any kind of expulsion might be and the extent to which its effectiveness would undoubtedly be adversely affected by people going to law. I venture to guess that they would get a successful outcome from any effort at judicial review.
It has been said already that this is the right thing to do. I doubt very much whether anyone’s mind has been changed to any extent by today’s debate. At least in my mind, it is still the right thing to do and I will vote for it.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I have suggested that we hear from the noble Lord, Lord Green. We will have a chance to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, later.
Lord Green of Deddington
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 40 and comment on Amendment 9B, which is the main focus, of course, of the discussion. My own amendment has a clear and simple purpose: to place British citizens in the EEA and EEA citizens in Britain on an equal footing. I am puzzled to hear it suggested that abandoning 1 million of our British citizens in the EU is the moral high ground. I was encouraged to hear from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who dealt rather effectively with that argument.
I put it to your Lordships that the nature of the problem we face has been widely misunderstood. In effect, what we are considering here is permanent residence for three different categories. First, those who have already been here for five years exercising their treaty rights will have acquired an automatic right to residence under EU law. It is simply not in doubt. They are sorted. The question is how to identify them. They will have to have their cases considered. It can be done no other way. They will then be granted ILR. That lot are not a problem. Secondly, there are those who will be arriving in the next two years before we leave. To grant them automatic right to permanent residence would be to risk a very large inflow of people from eastern Europe before the date of withdrawal. The third and probably trickiest category is those who have arrived to live here within the past three years. They will not have acquired the five years that they need so there will have to be a decision. I note that if that decision goes in their favour, and judging by the mood in the Committee today, it is rather likely to, some 85%—yes, 85%—of EU citizens currently in the UK will qualify for permanent residence. When we are talking about this, we should offer that reassurance to the EU citizens who are here.
There has also been some confusion over the role of EU workers. It has been suggested that we cannot build the houses we need without workers from the EU. That may well be true, certainly until we train our own, but there will be nothing to stop EU workers coming here to work on a work permit but without the automatic grant of permanent residence. We should not confuse the two issues. Certainly, we need their work and their help and they are welcome, but permanent residence will become a different matter.
Any suggestion that we should use the fate of EU citizens in the UK as some kind of bargaining chip is absolutely wrong in principle and in practice. I think everyone here agrees that its only effect would be to sour the atmosphere of a very important negotiation, but nor should we simply put aside the vital interests of 1 million of our own citizens. It has been recognised by the noble Baroness on the Front Bench that it will be a long time before the status of British citizens in the European Union is sorted by the 27 countries in which they reside. Therefore, we need a careful review, together with our former partners, to find a way forward in each of the many aspects of this problem. To take a very obvious and important issue—health—the solution may well be to extend the current EHIC system for another five or 10 years. But as of today, before the negotiations start, we have no idea whether or not that will run, so we have to be there, round the table with them, to see what is a sensible way forward.
Sadly, Amendment 9B completely disregards the position of British citizens in the EU. I suggest that in the real world, if our negotiating partners are assured in advance that the requirements of their own citizens have already been satisfied, it is inevitable that the issues relating to British citizens in their countries will slip down the agenda, which is already very long and complicated. It has been claimed that such a unilateral guarantee will set the right tone for negotiations. The Government have already offered that. It did not work, did it? It was turned down flat. That is not the way forward. There is a fine judgment there and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, comes down on the other side of that, but we have to be aware that the judgment is a fine one and the interests of 1 million British citizens are in the balance. So there we are. I leave it there. I think the two matters should be considered together.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, it is in fact the turn of the Conservatives.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate
My Lords, I was not able to be present at Second Reading, although I have—like, I am sure, other noble Lords—read the entire Hansard record of all the speeches that were made on that occasion. But like many noble Lords, and as a remoaner or remainer or whatever you like to call me, I would probably have preferred never to have been in this situation. But as we are, I felt I must contribute at this point, as a former leader of the Conservative Members of the European Parliament and a former UK Immigration Minister, working under my noble friend Lord Howard, and support the government position on these amendments. I also agree very much with my fellow Yorkshire resident, the most reverend Primate.
I want to intervene particularly in relation to Article 50 and its relationship to these amendments and because I believe, as do the Government, that we need to have sensible arrangements in place to secure the position both of citizens from the EU in the UK and of those who have left the UK for EU destinations. In acknowledging the role of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, who was Secretary-General of the Convention on the Future of Europe in 2002-03, and his final drafting of what later became Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, I point out that I was a member of that convention and took a particular interest in the article, actually attempting to amend it to add some political aims relating to the future trade arrangements of any country that decided to leave the EU later. Of course, the amendment, like others, failed because the convention did not favour such amendments. As we were reminded then, and are rightly being reminded now, the article was designed to be a process, not a manifesto—a process to enable a state to legally and honourably leave the EU. As noble Lords know, before the Lisbon treaty and this article, it was against international law to leave. But Article 50 was never designed to be used as anything more than a technical process in a limited form, so pursuing the wider aims that are now being pursued in these amendments is inappropriate. We all agree that EU citizens in this country deserve to be treated fairly and respectfully. We all owe them a great debt of appreciation for what they do while in our country, just as we expect our EU friends to treat UK citizens living in other states in a similar fashion.
As the Government have said, preliminary discussions have taken place. It is not really the will of the Government that they were not able to go further. Indeed, the Government are determined to achieve their ends in relation to fairness so far as the EU citizens are concerned. Ultimately, these issues might well be reflected later in an immigration Bill that might follow the great repeal Bill, which might not be the right vehicle to deal with these matters. But in the meantime, no one’s rights are affected. No one’s rights are going to deteriorate. No threats have been made by anybody. Some noble Lords are saying that these threats are being made. Okay, some newspapers might do so but in truth there is nothing, so far as this Government are concerned, that is any way threatening the present status.
As a former Immigration Minister, I have always believed that the key to any arrangements relating to those who wish to live and work in the UK and our citizens who wish to do the same elsewhere is reciprocity. The word “reciprocity” was referred to earlier by a noble Lord and a noble Baroness. There is nothing negative about reciprocity. All the agreements that we enter into, for good, for this country and its citizens depend on reciprocity. Our European neighbours are well aware of that and are positively inclined to that approach.
As far as I can see, although there is a lot of sensitivity and a lot of passion, these amendments in this context and for this Bill are inappropriate and, in my submission, illogical.
Lord Clark of Windermere
My Lords, I support Amendment 9B and shall speak to my own Amendment 42. Amendment 42 is very limited but I move it quite deliberately because it exemplifies much more of the wider debate. There have been some very fine speeches in the course of this debate. I will be very brief and not repeat the ground that has been so clearly covered.
I believe that the least we can do is to offer the 60,000 individuals who work in our National Health Service the right to remain in this country. I do so for a number of reasons. First, I believe that our National Health Service, which is under threat at the moment, is unique in Europe and something that we need to fight for. It is under threat because of the shortage of labour. The OECD says that we need an extra 20,000 doctors and an extra 47,000 nurses, just to bring us up to the European standard. And yet we currently depend on 10% of our doctors from the European Union and 5% of our nurses.
As the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, we are not in a very good negotiating position when we are negotiating for our interests. Many of these people are more use in their own countries, the European Union might say, than they are propping up—as it would see it—our National Health Service.
Before I make my two main points, I have a question for the Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Green, said, I think, that 85% of European Union citizens would have the right to permanent residency. When we had a series of questions on this issue in this House, within the last month, it was pointed out that European citizens in this country who had worked for five years had a right to permanent residency. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was not able to give us an assurance that permanent meant permanent and that, when we leave the European Union, it was indicated to us that in fact permanent would no longer be permanent. Can the Minister confirm that permanency means permanency?
Lord Green of Deddington
May I clarify what I said? Eighty-five per cent of EU migrants in the UK will have completed five years by the time we leave the European Union and therefore, in principle, would be entitled to permanent residence. However, each case would have to be looked at. That is the point.
Lord Clark of Windermere
I am very grateful for that intervention and I am sure that the Minister will be as well.
I have two points. The advantage of this amendment is that it is a win-win situation, because it is practically right for us to do so, and it is morally right to do so.
I was struck by the argument of the most reverend Primate. I understood it but does he not understand the pain, suffering and uncertainty of individuals working in our health service who feel hurt that they put in so much effort and give their time trying to help the people of Britain? They and their families feel very hurt and I think we owe them something in that respect.
The Archbishop of York
It would be quite invidious to suggest that those of us who are sticking to the rules in relation to Bills do not understand pain or suffering. As far as I am concerned, the Bill deals solely with the formal process of notifying the intention to withdraw. It does not relate to the substance of what withdrawal might look like. For the noble Lord to impute that I do not understand pain or suffering is not on. I said at the beginning that I feel the pain and anxiety, but as a legislator, my role is to look at what the Bill is about, not what the Bill ought to be about.
Lord Clark of Windermere
The point really is that we then move from the practical to the moral. Some of us take the belief that we have the high moral ground here and that is the ground which is occupied. I say this because we are in a win-win situation. As my noble friend Lady Kennedy said, we are going to have a much stronger negotiating position if we spell it out and show our European neighbours that we can be generous and that, even if we are not in the European Union, we want to remain part of the continent of Europe, working together with our neighbours. That is why I believe we are in a win-win situation with this amendment.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I believe the Lib Dems still want to make a contribution. Let us hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, I shall be brief. It has been a long debate, but this issue has exercised your Lordships since the week after the referendum, when it appeared that there was virtual unanimity across this House on how we should deal with the rights of EU citizens resident in the United Kingdom at the time of the referendum.
I will briefly give two quotations. The first came from the debate in July. I will name the noble Lord in a moment. He said:
“In common with other noble Lords, I am appalled by the unwillingness of the Government to give a clear undertaking that EU nationals resident here before 23 June will be able to remain, come what may”.—[Official Report, 5/7/16; col.1862.]
Another noble Lord, asking a question of the then Leader of the House, said:
“Could she say, on behalf of the Government, for whom she speaks in this House, that any European citizen living in Britain has a right to remain here and that right will not be in any way affected by Brexit, and that the position is not negotiable? She must be aware that many people are concerned about their position and their future and surely it is the responsibility of the leadership of this Government to make it absolutely clear that there is no question mark over that”.—[Official Report, 29/6/16; col.1576]
It would appear that there has been a mass outbreak on the Conservative Benches of believing that somehow the letter from the Home Secretary, who was with us momentarily and has now disappeared, deals with this matter and that somehow the statements that have come from the Front Bench give the guarantees that EU nationals currently resident in the United Kingdom deserve and desire.
We have all been receiving emails from people saying, “We are concerned about our future”. If the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, in his comments in July, and the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, in his question in June believed that there were concerns about EU nationals, the Government have said nothing so far to reassure those EU nationals. If the Government are not going to concede on Amendment 9B which deals with this matter—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I normally have the greatest respect for the noble Baroness’s diligence, but she is wrong to say that nothing has changed. What has changed is that the Prime Minister has said that this is her first priority. She said that the fate of those people living in this country from Europe will be determined by primary legislation and that no change will be made other than with the agreement of the other place and this House. That is good enough for me to not wish to amend a Bill that allows us to get on with the process of making that happen.
Baroness Smith of Newnham
My Lords, we have heard much about the issue of EU nationals being a priority, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, pointed out, whatever the ambition of the Prime Minister and however great her negotiating skill is likely to be, the nature of EU negotiations is that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. So having this as a priority will not, in itself, give EU nationals the security that they need. If the Government do not feel able to accept the amendment—and I suspect that they will not—could the Minister give further clarification not about some distant immigration Bill that will come after the great repeal Bill but about something in line with and in the spirit of Amendment 9B that will occur in the immediate aftermath of triggering Article 50?
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
My Lords, I very much agree with what the noble Baroness said at the end of her speech. As the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, said, this will be a nothing-is-agreed-until-everything-is-agreed negotiation. If we do not do the decent thing now—if we do not listen to what the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, said at the start—when will we do it? This negotiation could last all of two years and could end without an agreement. It certainly will not end with dossiers agreed in this calendar year. So if we all believe that the decent thing will have to be done at some time, why not do it now? The Tory party really needs to remember that its guru is Burke, who said:
“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom”.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, it is the Conservative Party’s turn. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra.
Lord Blencathra
My Lords, I, too, will be brief. When I was supporting Vote Leave, I, like many others, took the view that we should make a grand unilateral gesture to state that we would grant residence rights and other rights to all EU citizens living in the UK. I thought that for two reasons: first, because it was a nice, decent thing to do, but also because I reckoned that we would get an immediate response from our EU partners, who would reciprocate and confirm that all Brits living in the EU would get similar rights. I thought that we could get this simple issue off the table before the tough and contentious talking began. I was utterly wrong—not for the first time, of course.
The best outcome to get security and certainty for both EU and British citizens would have been a reciprocal agreement immediately after the referendum. That is exactly what my right honourable friend the Prime Minister tried to do—and I was surprised and indeed shocked that the EU rejected her approaches and has apparently refused to talk about reciprocal residency rights until we have triggered Article 50.
Lord Cormack (Con)
Would my noble friend not recognise that we are the ones walking out of the EU? We are the ones who have an obligation to those who, in all good faith, came to this country and invested their future in it. Should we not have done with sophistry and make a moral gesture?
Lord Blencathra
Yes, my Lords, but we also owe an obligation to almost 1 million British citizens living in the EU who could be left in limbo for up to two years unless the EU addresses this issue urgently. It is the case that the Prime Minister raised this with some EU leaders. However, I understand that, although 20 states were happy to agree reciprocal arrangements immediately, Angela Merkel and Donald Tusk refused to do so until we had triggered Article 50. So this venerable institution, the EU, lauded by many in this House as a bastion of decency, and Angela Merkel, are the ones who have given us harsh treatment and been intransigent; they are the ones who are not on the moral high ground.
The other worry is this. When we see the EU and Mr Barnier stating that nothing else will be discussed until we have agreed a divorce settlement of £50 billion, it seems that we are likely to spend all of this year, or at least until the German elections are over, arguing about that money while everything else, including all our citizens in Europe, will be left in the lurch. Indeed, if we have given away citizenship to Europeans in the UK, why on earth should the EU bother dealing with our citizens in Europe as a priority? This would be a very bad position to be in. We would have betrayed our own citizens and thrown them under the equivalent of a European bus.
This is not using people as bargaining chips; that is a silly description. Using people as bargaining chips would be saying something like, “If you give us access to the single market, we will let your people stay”, or, “If you put tariffs on our cars, we will not grant your people citizenship”. That would be grubby and unethical, but it is a million miles away from saying, “Can we agree, as a priority, reciprocal arrangements?”. It is our duty to look after our people in Europe just as much, if not more, than European citizens here.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I hear the desire of some Members of the House to have Front-Bench speakers. However, it would be good to hear from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and then from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde.
Lord Woolf (CB)
My Lords, I will be extremely brief. After such an extensive debate, there is just one aspect that I would like to draw attention to. We are dealing here with residents in this jurisdiction who at present have the right to go to the European Court of Human Rights. We are also dealing with residents in the rest of the European Community who also have that right. The present situation in this country is a matter to be dealt with by Parliament and not by the courts. I strongly urge us not to force people to seek to go to the courts, as they could in this situation in this jurisdiction. It is a matter which should be decided by both Houses of Parliament. As far as I am concerned, I shall vote for the amendment, for the very clear reasons given by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham. This is a matter of moral principle as well as one which could be a legal principle—and, so far as the moral situation is concerned, there is only one answer.
Lord Strathclyde (Con)
My Lords, much has been said this afternoon surrounding the whole issue of uncertainty. But the reason I cannot support these amendments is the fundamental flaw that lies at their heart: they will create more uncertainty, in particular for the 1 million British citizens living abroad. Noble Lords opposite have made two defences of that. The first is that they have received some letters from expat groups. Dare we believe that they may be wrong in asserting that giving unilateral rights now to EU citizens living in the United Kingdom will convince overseas Governments to give them the same rights? Secondly, they have said to trust the other EU Governments. But we do not know which Governments they will be dealing with in the EU. There are elections in a few weeks in France and Holland and, in a few months, in Germany.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
I am one of those who lives in France, and I must therefore declare an interest. Perhaps the noble Lord did not hear the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, when he made the point that all the ex-pat UK groups living in the EU have come together to make the case that they support this amendment.
Lord Strathclyde
I heard the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, loud and clear. What I suggest is: can we believe that these groups might be wrong and that, therefore, this House is putting at risk the future of a million British citizens living in the EU? That is why we should not support these amendments.
Noble Lords have said that they do not know what the policy of the British Government is. All they have to do is read the White Paper; it is there very clearly:
“We want to secure the status of EU citizens who are already living in the UK”.
We all agree with that. The bit that noble Lords opposite do not agree with says,
“and that of UK nationals in other Member States”.
Lord Bilimoria
I thank the noble Lord for giving way. He said that we should trust the British Government; the Home Secretary has written a letter to all of us in which she says:
“I … reassure colleagues that Parliament will have a clear”,
say. This is the same Home Secretary who wanted companies to list every foreign worker, from a Home Office with a Minister who wanted companies to pay £1,000 per EU worker. How can we trust the Home Secretary?
Lord Strathclyde
Very simply—the law can be changed only with the agreement of Parliament. That is why these amendments are at the wrong time, in the wrong Bill and on the wrong subject. We should support the rights of British citizens living in Europe.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, we have had a very good debate here tonight—
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I think the mood of the House is to carry on and to hear from the Front Bench.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
There is no constitutional crisis; there is good order in this House and I hope that the noble Lord will understand that we all want to hear from the Government Front Bench.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, the status of EU nationals living here and UK nationals living in the EU is, as this debate has so very clearly shown, one of the most emotive issues—if not the most emotive—created by our country’s decision to leave the EU. Whereas so many other matters that we debate focus on dry economics, this touches on the most basic and immediate of issues: the lives of over 4 million people who have chosen to make a foreign country their home—Europeans who are our neighbours and our friends, many of whom work in our public services, such as the NHS; and British citizens, who may live hundreds of miles away, but whose interests this Government and this Parliament have a duty to represent and protect.
We all agree that we have a duty and responsibility to British citizens in Europe. We also all agree that European nationals make a very valuable contribution to our nation, especially in organisations such as the NHS. We all know the uncertainty that Brexit has brought to these people’s lives, and we all want to do what we think is ethically and morally right. So we all wish to sort this issue out as quickly as possible, to bring certainty to the lives of these millions of people. The very simple question before us today is: how? I know this question has created a dilemma for many of your Lordships, on all sides of the House. The amendments before us make various points but, as we have debated, they coalesce around one point: they wish the Government to make a unilateral declaration to guarantee EU nationals’ rights. I could labour the point that such amendments have no place in this Bill, and that is true—others have said that this is a very simple Bill—but shall not dwell on this, because when one is discussing the issues of more than 4 million people, such arguments may seem somewhat overly legalistic. Instead, I shall make just two core points.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, it has been one of the highlights of one’s life in the House to hear this debate. I always like debates in which the words “moral” and “principle” are at the top of our agenda. I shall be brief, because I only want to say three things. First, the idea that, because we are asking for action on EU citizens here, we do not have equal concern for the others is completely wrong. Apart from anything else, my great-niece and my great-nephew live in Belgium and France respectively, so I am frequently reminded of this situation.
The morals, the principles and the decency of the case have been stressed, and I think this is the issue. There are insecurity and uncertainty now, and we have already heard that some people are leaving. It is all going to take time. We are all getting lots of messages, even while we are here: they are coming hot every moment to me. Nicholas Tilson from France says:
“You are quite right when you say that we … are not bargaining chips … The best way to protect us is to take a firm moral position and protect those EU nationals living in the UK”.
That is only one: there are another million, and I appreciate that. Do not think that we have done this without thinking and talking to people who live abroad.
The problem with using this issue in the negotiations is, first, that that would be wrong. Secondly, there are countries—such as Slovenia, Estonia and Croatia—that have only about 500 UK nationals in them. Unlike my noble friend Lady Symons, I have not negotiated. But I do know, from stories that I have heard, that sometimes one country holds up something irrelevant to them because they are trying to get something else. I understand that is why the European Parliament still meets in Strasbourg. When John Major was in Edinburgh, France wanted something, we wanted something else—maybe it was JET at the time; I do not know—and we ended up with the Parliament staying in Strasbourg. That is what happens with negotiations. At the point of negotiation there could be one country, with a very small number of UK citizens living there, which for some unrelated reason held up the agreement. We will finally have an agreement, but the uncertainty would be too long, and we should not make people wait.
It has been said that an assurance is enough. But your Lordships will understand—I do not think that my noble friend Lord Dubs is here.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I think my noble friend would probably testify that assurances are not enough. We want this on the face of the Bill. It would not delay the Bill or the negotiations; it simply asks the Government within three months to come up with proposals about what they are going to do with EU nationals. I would like to hear what the Committee has to say about that.
Lord Teverson
“( ) Section 3(2) of the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008 does not apply to subsection (1), and in subsection (1) the term “EU” does not include the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom).”
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I will reduce the temperature of the House a little during this debate, but perhaps I will wait an atomic second, or minute, until one or two Members have disappeared.
As I said, we are moving on to what I hope will be a rather less contentious area to debate in Committee. I thank the Government and in particular the noble Lord, Lord Prior, for having had extended discussions with me around this amendment on the subject of Euratom.
I do not stand here as a remainer or a Brexiter. This is an issue that I believe is important for our country. The amendment does not challenge the result of the referendum in any way but, if it were accepted, it would make the job of government easier over the next two years. I put forward the proposition of this amendment on that basis.
I would like the Minister to answer one question, as it seems to me that this amendment may not be necessary at all. On Euratom, the Explanatory Notes to the Bill say:
“The power that is provided by clause 1(1) applies to withdrawal from the EU. This includes the European Atomic Energy Community (‘Euratom’), as the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008 sets out that the term ‘EU’ includes (as the context permits or requires) Euratom (section 3(2))”.
Yet Clause 1(2) of this 137-word Bill says:
“This section has effect despite any provision made by or under the European Communities Act 1972 or any other enactment”.
That seems automatically to disapply the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008. The Explanatory Notes therefore seem to contradict the Bill, but they are not the opinion of Parliament and cannot be taken as part of the authority of any Act that comes into force.
My main point is that legally—this is a certainty—Euratom is not part of the European Union; it is a legally separate entity. As I am sure all noble Lords will remember, the referendum question was whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union. It did not in any way mention Euratom and nor was Euratom part of the parliamentary debate that took place during the passage of the referendum Bill. They are separate legal entities. Indeed, when I have been in discussion with some government Ministers, one of their concerns has been that giving notice on Euratom will in some way leave the Article 50 notification open to challenge.
Legal advice that I have taken has made it clear that the Government have no mandate to give notice under the Euratom treaty, nor have they entered into any consultation. Therefore, given that there has been no consultation on leaving the treaty—despite the fact that a number of rights would inevitably be lost through doing so—by giving notice on Euratom they open themselves up to judicial review. Therefore, the Government have an interest in not triggering withdrawal from Euratom, although there is currently a process for doing so.
The processes are very different. Admittedly, Article 106a of the Euratom treaty refers to the Treaty on European Union, but it is a Euratom treaty clause and method. Article 50 mentions only the Treaty on European Union and nothing else. Therefore, there have to be two notification processes, for only one of which is there a clear legal mandate, which is Article 50 to give notice on the European Union.
Why is this important? It is important not because of all those legal issues but for two reasons. One is what Euratom does and the benefit that it brings for this country. The other—in some ways, this is the more important and more political argument—is that over the next two years the Government have a huge amount to do to achieve a successful exit from the European Union and clearly it would be in the national interest for that to be successful rather than the possibility of having no deal on the cliff edge. So why do we risk going down the more perilous route of giving notice on Euratom at the same time? It will mean that we have to undertake another whole area of negotiation on which this country could, if the negotiations under Article 50 are not very successful, be held to ransom.
Euratom is important because of its functions. It effectively operates under the International Atomic Energy Agency; it is the body regulated and approved by the IAEA for nuclear safety and, even more important, nuclear safeguarding. That includes all the areas of non-proliferation treaties and would encompass areas such as Sellafield. It is also concerned with nuclear fuel supply security—clearly, we still have an important nuclear fleet that keeps our lights on. We also have nuclear research coming out of Euratom with a five-year budget of £1.6 billion. The UK is involved in 12 of those projects, the best-known of which are the JET project at Culham in Oxfordshire and the ITER project. I am aware that one of the few industries given a strong mention in the Government’s industrial strategy is the nuclear industry and nuclear research.
Trade in parts and nuclear fuel and the movement of key people all rely on our being a signatory to the Euratom treaty. That will be a problem if we exit from Euratom. The UK does not have a safeguarding authority, as it is known in these agreements. Internationally, at the moment Euratom has some 11 core agreements. There are 50 altogether, including with the United States, Canada and Australia. Without those, because we do not have a safeguarding authority that has been approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency, all that trading will stop. We are reliant on nuclear fuel from Australia and we have a number of important domestic nuclear issues with the United States and with France in relation to Hinkley Point C, as well as various other generating stations. We do not have a sufficient amount of those fuels in this country. It is not just a question of nuclear fuel; we need isotopes for radiology in hospitals as well.
It is not just a case of saying that we will get around this somehow. I remind noble Lords that Section 123 of the United States Atomic Energy Act 1954 makes any movement of such materials illegal under US domestic law if we do not have an approved safeguarding authority. I am aware that we can probably put all this in place at some point, although it might be more difficult with the remaining members of the European Union if the negotiations do not go well. We are dependent on French nuclear technology at the moment. Indeed, will we be able to have an agreement with Euratom? I hope that we will, but let us not forget that countries such as Austria try to block most things that go on in Euratom because they are anti-nuclear. We do not know what will happen in the German elections this year. Germany has got rid of its nuclear fleet operationally and is also anti-nuclear. Perhaps with a change of Government it will be difficult to negotiate with Euratom about continuing those relationships.
To sum up, I am not trying in any way to constrain Article 50 or the referendum result, but there is no need to leave Euratom at this stage. If we do not, we can ensure that the lights do not go out some time around September 2019, we can avoid the political risk of Austria and Germany vetoing future relationships with Euratom and we can take our time to make sure that the UK has a fully-fledged and effective safeguarding authority that will be recognised by other realms, including, in particular, Australia, Canada and the United States. But, most of all, I ask again: why go down the route of giving notice on Euratom now when as a country, as a Government and as a Parliament we have a huge amount to negotiate over the next two years? Let us give ourselves a break, think about it longer and do this properly—not threaten our energy industry, our radiology and all the other research that we undertake at the moment. I beg to move.
Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)
My Lords, I support this amendment and I support the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, who is an expert on Euro law. Euratom has shown considerable importance for past and future research, and in the practical use of atomic energy. The UK’s research and economy will benefit by continuing membership of and participation in Euratom. As an example, one of the profound scientific issues which will last long after even the EU, perhaps, is what to do with nuclear waste. This was not mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. There was an interesting PQ about 10 years ago from the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, on the question of transmutation. The question was about how we should deal with waste that could last 10,000 or even 100,000 years. Putting it in the ground is one possibility, which is favoured. But Euratom is considering transforming the waste material so that it will have a much shorter life of only around 100 years.
This is the kind of thing we can do with the other countries of Europe, in Euratom—it might be easier and more effective for us to remain. Another issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, was the ITER fusion programme. This is a very considerable investment involving many other countries, and Euratom is playing an important role in it. The UK is a part of this. The ITER programme will need to evolve, but it is more likely to do so if we remain part of it. I support this amendment and I hope it will go through.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan (Lab)
My Lords, I am a supporter of nuclear power and I would like to facilitate nuclear energy in any way I can. However, I am not sure whether the legal forest through which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, tried to take us can be dealt with as simplistically as he suggests. In the first instance, we signed up to a separate treaty when we joined the Common Market in 1973, but by 2008 circumstances had changed. Euratom was by that time integrated into the EU in a way that I do not think renders it the separate entity that the noble Lord has suggested. It is worrying that the Government clearly had not given any serious attention or thought to this. In the course of the last two or three weeks, there has been quite a major change in the climate, in so far as a number of people, myself included, have raised this issue at different times. But we have to recognise that, when we talk about the nuclear industry, we are not talking only about power generation. At the same time, it has to be said that EDF—the agent of the French Government, which I imagine will remain in Euratom—will be running 20 power stations for some years to come. Therefore, in that respect at least, it may be somewhat premature to get too worried about this.
The fact is that the nuclear industry is not just about generation. It is concerned with the fuel cycle, decommissioning procedures, regulatory arrangements for safety and general UK regulatory competence. In all these areas, we enjoy a position of world leadership. The industry gets castigated because we do not build our own reactors any more—we build them for our nuclear submarines, but not for civil generation—but there is an incredible amount of science and manufacturing expertise at stake here. Frankly, I am not too concerned at this stage about whether we are in Euratom, we are going to leave or we have to leave. I am concerned that this industry should demand the proper attention it requires. It has already been suggested that in the Government’s industrial strategy, such as it is, nuclear is going to play an important part. If so, we need to give proper recognition to the international character of the industry and to the fact that a considerable number of British businesses, and considerable British academic and industrial expertise, are still invested in this industry. In many respects, we will be pretty well the only country in the developed world with a nuclear new-build programme. We will see programmes in China and India, and there is one in America, but we do not see the kind of nuclear power development that we might have wished for.
If Britain is to carry on with and take advantage of this industry, the Government will have to give a lot more attention to it. I would like us to get beyond the platitudinous responses which have characterised the Government’s answers in debates and discussions so far. It would be helpful if the Minister gave us a little detail this evening on what is going to be done. How will we address this worrying conundrum of whether we will have a nuclear industry capable of operating on an international basis, and how can we take advantage of the very strong cards we still have to play?
Lord Krebs (CB)
My Lords, I refer to a report of the Science and Technology Select Committee from a few years ago, when I was its chair, on the subject of nuclear R&D in this country. In doing so, I support this group of amendments. In the report, we asked: given that the UK is committed to a civil nuclear programme and a refreshing of nuclear energy generation capability, do we have the skills in this country to deliver—not just in overseeing the build by foreign companies, but in the regulation? When we heard evidence from the witnesses, we realised that such capability in the United Kingdom has been seriously eroded. Here are some numbers: the workforce in nuclear energy and nuclear science decreased from 8,000 in the 1980s to under 2,000 by the early part of this century. Our investment in nuclear R&D is half that of the Netherlands and Norway, one hundredth that of France, and less than that of Australia, which does not have a nuclear energy programme at all.
Traditionally, we have not been investing enough in nuclear R&D capability. Therefore, the research capability sponsored through Euratom is, I believe, crucial to the future of our civil nuclear programme. In our report, we said:
“The nuclear industry and the regulator rely on the research base to train the next generation of experts. Once lost, these capabilities will not easily be replaced”.
It is important that the Government reassure us that, if we are to withdraw from Euratom, which I do not think we should, we have a mechanism in place to ensure that that nuclear capability is being developed. The Select Committee report made 14 recommendations, the vast majority of which the Government accepted. One was that the Government should set up a nuclear R&D strategy board. Has the nuclear R&D strategy board been consulted on this issue, and what is its view?
The Earl of Selborne (Con)
My Lords, I was lucky enough to serve on the Select Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and I now chair the Science and Technology Committee. We are revisiting this issue at present, looking at developments since the 2011 report. One of the recommendations, which was not fully implemented by the Government, but on which, nevertheless, there was a bit of progress, was that a strategy board be set up to advise government in the long term—and nothing could be more long term than a nuclear energy strategy. An organisation was set up called the Nuclear Innovation and Research Advisory Board. NIRAB was set up on a limited term of three years and produced its final report in February—last week, in fact—which is a survey of civil nuclear research in this country. I echo the question of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs: what will follow NIRAB? While in principle it is often a good idea for advisory boards and strategy boards to have a built-in termination—otherwise, they go on for ever—in practice we do need continuity of thought. That has clearly been lacking. Indeed, there has been no thought; that has been part of the problem. Successive Governments kicked this into touch. Nuclear research was an issue that, until recently, simply was not addressed adequately.
In its February report, NIRAB pointed out something totally obvious that nevertheless needs saying: that international collaboration is the main route for developing nuclear technologies. Of course, there are a number of ways of undertaking international collaboration, but we are quite a small player, however much we manage to build up our dismally low nuclear capability compared, say, with the 1960s, when we were indeed a large world player. We have been overtaken by a number of countries. If the industrial strategy, which has nuclear as one of its 10 pillars, is to be implemented, we have clearly got an awful lot of catching up to do.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, slightly failed to note that, although we joined Euratom before the European Union evolved from the EEC, the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008—which I must admit had escaped my notice—joined Euratom and the European Union at the hip in some way. A lawyer can explain to me the implications of that but paragraph 18 of the Explanatory Notes explains that we have to withdraw from the European Atomic Agency Community, Euratom, because it is now part of the EU in legal terms. Be that as it may, it is absolutely clear that we have to have a relationship with Euratom and with other organisations around the world which are collaborating.
One such collaboration, again thinking long term, is the Generation IV International Forum. This is looking very long term, leapfrogging through to new technologies which have still to be developed—we are thinking about the year 2030 and beyond. At the moment, the NIRAB report describes us as only participating as an inactive member—that was the case in 2011—through the subscription to Euratom. When the Government responded to the Select Committee report, they said, “We don’t have to worry about joining the Generation IV Forum if we want to remain connected to the emerging technologies, because we are members of Euratom”. Clearly, that answer does not work anymore if Brexit is going to happen and we are going to leave Euratom. We clearly need quite quick answers.
I agree entirely that this is not controversial. The Government are the first to say that we simply have to develop a nuclear strategy and a nuclear capability, and we have to collaborate. If, for legal reasons—and I do believe they are only legal reasons—we have to withdraw from formal membership, surely when the Minister responds he can tell us, without prejudicing any negotiating position in this case, exactly what ideal situation we would like to achieve.
Lord Hutton of Furness (Lab)
My Lords, I shall say a few brief words in support of the amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has moved this evening. Before I say anything further, I should bring the attention of your Lordships’ House to the interests I have declared in the register. I am the chairman of the Nuclear Industry Association here in the United Kingdom.
I do not think there is any doubt at all that membership of the Euratom treaty has brought very significant benefits to the UK nuclear industry and, in doing so, has served some vital strategic interests of our country. Unlike membership of the European Union itself, which remains a polarising and deeply divisive issue in our country, I have not heard anyone mount any argument at all—ever, at any point in this process—in favour of leaving the Euratom treaty. I get the very strong sense that the position of Her Majesty’s Government has come very late in this process. Having looked at how these two treaties have become intertwined in recent decades, the Attorney-General, giving advice to the Cabinet, has clearly favoured separation entirely, so that as we leave the European Union we face this rather grim and desperate situation where we might find ourselves without any internationally recognised nuclear safeguards operating in the UK.
Lord Inglewood (Con)
My Lords, I rise to add a few words to what has already been said about the Euratom treaty and its relationship to the UK nuclear industry. I declare an interest as a Cumbrian and as chairman of Gen2, which is one of the main suppliers of apprentices for Sellafield and some of the other west Cumbrian nuclear businesses. There is considerable concern because people just do not really know what the Government have in mind. As my noble friend the Minister knows, I have been interested in this topic over the past few months, and when I read the Lancaster House speech, I did not see any reference worthy of the name to the nuclear industry and the Euratom aspects, which have been vividly described by a number of speakers. What do the Government have in mind and how do they think they are actually going to bring about the changes they appear to want, in a manner which will enable the nuclear industry to continue in a way which contributes to the well-being of the country as a whole?
Lord Fox (LD)
My Lords, I too, have the pleasure of serving on the Science and Technology Select Committee under the watchful eye of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, so I am sure he will mark my card next week at the next meeting. The theme so far has been one of questions to the Minister, and I am afraid I am going to add to them. The overriding concern of the House seems to be that we need to get some idea of where this is going. This is a very important part of our industry and a very important part of both science and industry.
I will restrict myself very briefly to just two areas: research and safeguarding nuclear materials. The Minister knows that Euratom provides the UK with access to considerable R&D funding, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, pointed out, and I believe that at least 25 UK organisations are involved in that research. It would be useful if the Minister could tell this House what arrangements are planned to ensure international collaboration can continue in the event that we are no longer in Euratom. Some have said that each of those relationships will have to be separately negotiated. What is the Minister’s view? Do we have to unilaterally renegotiate each relationship, whether business or research? Very importantly, what is the position of JET, the Joint European Torus at Culham, which was raised by my noble friend Lord Teverson? I have friends working there, and there is a great deal of anxiety there about what is going to happen to that project and where it sits. Can the Minister give any comfort to our scientists there both for their future and how they are viewing that project going forward?
On safeguarding nuclear materials, I bow to the superior knowledge of a number of other Peers who have spoken here, not least the noble Lords, Lord O’Neill and Lord Hutton. Of course there are concerns around laboratories and other organisations that have to dispose of materials. I was speaking yesterday to someone who runs an academic laboratory who had occasion over the summer to dispose of some thorium. Of course, who did he call, how did he go and what were the protocols? It was all through Euratom. How does all this get replaced? Can the Minister explain what work is now under way and what scoping has been carried out as regards what will replace all the processes that currently exist for that? Can he confirm that there is some sort of timeline that says it will be ready to operate, fit to go, as soon as we exit the European Union, which plays to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hutton? If we are not ready at that point, then we effectively drop off a cliff in terms of the governance that we require.
The noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, mentioned that it is a busy period for the Government, to say the least. We see that DExEU is already galvanising other departments around issues such as immigration, air traffic control, customs systems and all sorts of processes are going on. If the Government were able in some way to delay this particular complication, their objective of a frictionless exit might be easier to attain. So I have two final questions. Can the Minister tell us what the experts are saying and can he publish what the expert view has been on this? Can he tell us how many civil servants are currently being deployed on the process of managing and planning this exit?
Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)
My Lords, I support this amendment. As a former member of the Science and Technology Select Committee, I particularly endorse the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, about the current—and rather weak—state of many of the nuclear activities in this country. It is clear that the Euratom issue has been, as it were, caught in the slipstream of the EU legislation, to the surprise of some people, and is an extra complication that needs to be sorted out in the most frictionless way. It is crucial that if we did not have our EU membership, we would have to reconstitute something very similar in relationships with the EU countries and also, as has been said, with the United States, Japan and Australia in order to continue our collaborations. We need these collaborations in so far as we are involved in not just the building of nuclear power stations but the medical use of radioactive materials, radioactive waste disposal and other safety issues, where Euratom has been very effective.
It is also important to bear in mind that, as has been said, even though we are rather weak—depressingly so—in many areas of nuclear technology, we are not so weak in fusion. The JET project, based in the UK, is one of the major projects in the fusion arena. We have other private projects in this country and we have a major involvement in ITER, so the involvement in fusion is very important.
It is important to ensure that there is going to be no hiatus in the ability to forge ahead with these collaborations if we were to have to leave Euratom. As a final comment, I point out that, although the Euratom issue has come up because of the special link, legally, with the EU, we are going to have similar problems in connection with other international projects. I will mention just two: one is Galileo, the European counterpart of the GPS satellite system, which involves us and is not solely an ISA project—it involves the EU; the other one is Copernicus, which is a set of spacecraft to do environmental monitoring. These are two things where our continued major participation will depend on some legal adjustments when we are no longer in the EU.
I hope the Minister is aware that it is not just in the context of nuclear energy but in other contexts of big international high-tech projects that we need to worry about what will need to be changed if we leave the EU.
Lord Warner (CB)
My Lords, I, too, support these amendments and associate myself with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. I, too, was on the inquiry of the Science and Technology Select Committee that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, so ably chaired. I just want to put a question to the Minister about the implications for the NHS of a messy withdrawal from Euratom. The NHS radiological services in particular are heavily dependent on the safeguarding arrangements for the transportation of radioactive material of one kind or another and also some of the waste disposal issues that are involved. What efforts have the Government made to discuss with the NHS, the Department of Health and the technologists in that sector about ensuring and guaranteeing the safe supplies of materials that the NHS depends on on a day-to-day basis?
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, I would like to add three points. I have a non-remunerated interest as patron of Trade Unions for Safe Nuclear Energy. The first point is on the referendum question. People have stretched it so far in its meaning, and it means all sorts of things, but I do not think anyone would claim that people voted to leave Euratom. I am not trying to make a debating point; I am trying to answer a point often made from the Government Benches: that you cannot drill down into the referendum question. Let us put that the other way round.
It occurred to me after the contribution the noble Lord, Lord Hutton of Furness, that in the past three weeks we have heard quite a lot of party politics about Copeland and how the Labour Party is not really lined up in favour of nuclear energy. Historically, that is nonsense. But a lot of things were said on the part—
Lord Hunt of Chesterton
That was not said about the Labour Party: it was said about a certain person in the Labour Party.
Lord Lea of Crondall
That was a cheap point from my noble friend. The Labour Party position was criticised and it led to some switching of votes. The fact is that the Conservative Party made a great number of gains by saying that it was the friend of the nuclear industry.
The nuclear industry is a lot smaller than it was. It is, as has been said, a long-term industry. Indeed, one could say that jobs at Sellafield are guaranteed for 20,000 years—which is a pretty good length of time to guarantee a job. Seriously, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is one of the best if not the best in that field in the world, and that will be a very important issue. We have been a world leader in promoting nuclear safety. We persuaded the Russians to accept mandatory safety inspections. All of these matters were through the World Nuclear Association, to which the role of the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, is affiliated. We have often led the progress being made—from training, health and safety, investment and so on. So this has to be looked at as a major issue of industrial policy.
Do the Government recognise that there is a legalistic question here? If a country joins Euratom, does that mean that it has joined the European Union? No, it does not. I remember Ireland in 1961 announcing its accession to Euratom, which was a precursor to joining the European Union. But they are not umbilically connected like that. As a matter of industrial policy and of looking at the long term, does this not illustrate that the sooner we get to where we are going to engage positively with the EU in the future, being outside it, to have a real central engagement on all these issues of industrial policy is a very high priority for the country that we have not yet heard enough about.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, I will raise a brief point in relation to Culham, to which there has been reference. I am Lord Hayward of Cumnor—and, for noble Lords who do not know the geography, Cumnor it is a mere few miles from Culham and Harwell. I was brought up there and my family have regarded that as their home community for many decades.
I am not going to comment on the overall agreement on Euratom, but, as I understand the position—and I know that Ed Vaizey, John Howell and Nicola Blackwood have been pursuing this in another place—there is a need to underwrite JET through to 2020. That underwriting has to be completed by the end of this month for European Commission purposes. I am aware that discussions have been taking place on the subject, but clearly this specific issue is truly immediate. In answering this debate, will my noble friend comment on what progress is being made to ensure that discussions between different government departments, including the Treasury, will meet that contractual requirement?
Lord Wigley
My Lords, I support Amendment 11, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. Amendment 23, to which I added my name, is grouped with it. I shall be brief because we have heard many experts who know much more about the subject than I do. In any case, I think we are all on the same side in this particular debate.
Both these amendments address the concern within the nuclear industry and within the communities in which they are located at the possible, perhaps unintended, consequences for the nuclear industry arising from Brexit. My own interest arises not so much from the fact that my physics degree at Manchester University many moons ago had a large element of nuclear physics in it. Fusion, incidentally, was around at that time as well. The ZETA project was the bright new hope that we are still waiting for. My interest more directly arises from the fact that my home county of Gwynedd has two nuclear installations at Trawsfynydd, the decommissioning of which is still in progress 20 years on, and at Wylfa, which is awaiting the go-ahead for new reactors. Indeed, Trawsfynydd has also been identified as a possible location for a new generation of mini-reactors if these are given the go-ahead. I hope that the uncertainty arising out of the Euratom question does not in any way undermine those projects.
Many associated with these plants are very anxious to know that the co-operation across Europe from which they benefit, and sometimes on which they actually depend, will not be undermined in any way by Brexit. They and the whole industry have a right to know exactly where they stand, and I hope that the Government will be in a position to tell us.
Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)
My Lords, I am in favour of this group of amendments. Amendment 39, in my name, follows the position that I suggested at Second Reading. The Euratom treaty is a separate treaty and can be separately amended. It provides options for Euratom other than being part of an all-in-one main deal. There is no doubt in my mind—and I have had reason to look at quite a lot of the EU treaties—that Article 106a, which imports various aspects from the main EU treaties, nevertheless restricts it again in the second paragraph by saying that wherever the EU is mentioned it means Euratom and wherever it mentions treaties it means the Euratom treaty. So I believe that they stand alone. My point also deals later on with some of the entanglements, but some of them go in the sense that the two treaties stand alone. If we were left with any parts of the institutions, again, it would be in a very narrow focus, as has already been explained.
My amendment would not stop this Bill giving the Government the power to trigger Article 50 by way of Article 106a, if that power exists in the Bill, but would delay triggering it at least until the Government lay their final draft of the arrangements for leaving the EU before Parliament. By that stage, I hope that the Government would have settled the institutional arrangements for managing the new partnership with the EU.
It may be that at that stage Euratom could slot conveniently into those arrangements and that Euratom would be part of the deal. It could also be that a suitable transition arrangement would be to stay in Euratom a bit longer at least until the UK had substituted all its arrangements at international level. Or it could even be that a UK position outside the EU but inside Euratom could be an agreed way forward in the longer term, with a Euratom treaty change—and there are good reasons for changing that treaty, given international developments.
Noble Lords could ask why some special arrangement should be made for Euratom when there are many other compelling industry problems. One reason is simply that we have the opportunity because there is the separate treaty. The second and compelling reason already alluded to by other noble Lords is that while loss of trading arrangements in other sectors is economically damaging, it will still be possible to buy things—at a price. But outside Euratom, without a replacement agreement, international trade in fissile material and various other products would be illegal. So exiting Euratom and following up with a subsequent free trade agreement is not a viable option. Nor is crashing out without an agreement.
Presently, there are some 13 EU countries in the UK supply chain of fissile materials, and a similar number in other third countries. As we have heard, some of those will be for medical use and cancer treatments, and others for nuclear reactors with some 20% of our electricity generation being from nuclear. Then there is a whole industry of nuclear components, repairs and auxiliary products, and other more remote industries such as automobile, aeronautics, mining and petroleum, that would be affected. Euratom is a key player in research, including fusion. It is the vehicle for the UK’s participation. Keeping some kind of “same as in” arrangement is important for research both at our atomic energy establishments and at our universities.
Modification of institutional arrangements and Commission permissions will be needed whether we are in or out of Euratom because all EU countries will have to have permission in order to trade with us. Nothing should be dismissed prematurely. Euratom operates on a far more intergovernmental arrangement than the EU, which therefore makes looking for an intergovernmental solution conceivable. The role of the Parliament is smaller—for example, seeking opinion rather than requiring consent—and there are provisions for consulting national parliaments. That could provide openings for negotiating new arrangements.
Finally, not many cases have gone to the European Court on Euratom issues. I found a 2011 post-doctoral paper in the German Law Journal that had managed to unearth only 30 cases that had ever gone to the ECJ, compared with around 700 cases annually for the court. Of those 30, only 15 were Commission versus member-state cases. Most notably, in contrast to the EU treaties, expansion of competence and cross-sectoral applications have not happened under the Euratom treaty to any great extent. For example, when the Commission tried to apply civil rules to the decommissioning of UK submarine nuclear reactors and submarine repair, the court found in favour of the UK on the basis that the matter came under security and defence. The court resisted extending the judgment to civilian aspects, although they clearly existed.
We will never escape the effects of some jurisprudence that comes from the European Court because it governs interpretations that the EU will apply to our new relationship. But Euratom is one area where the court is hardly interfering and could be tolerated for longer, at least in transition. So I urge the Government to think seriously about the additional flexibility that the separate Euratom treaty offers. It would be not only the UK that wished to get some kind of regularisation of the arrangements—but in this we can give ourselves, as of right and under our control, more time, more options and more security.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I support these amendments. As a member of Cumbria County Council I have an obvious interest in the prosperity of the nuclear industry in our part of the world. I will ask the Minister a number of questions that I hope he will be able to answer.
First, what is the Government’s justification for this policy? All that I have heard so far is something like, “Well, the European Court of Justice has some jurisdiction and we therefore have to come out of Euratom”. Frankly, that is facile. The idea that one would be so ideological as to endanger a major British industry for that reason is extraordinary. What actually is the reason?
Secondly, I would like to see a strategy paper on how the Government propose to manage the new relationship if we are to withdraw from Euratom? How does it fit with the great prominence given to nuclear questions and the priority for the nuclear industry in the Government’s excellent industrial strategy paper? Where is the consistency between this destructive proposal and the priority for the nuclear industry that the Government claim is top of their concerns and work?
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, the nuclear industry has been widely mentioned this evening and I should briefly point out that under Euratom and as a nuclear power we have special responsibilities and obligations. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the original Euratom treaty are very closely intertwined. It is not just a question of the nuclear industry. At a point where we are considering building the new generation of Trident, it behoves the Government to give answers on this issue, too.
Lord Redesdale (LD)
My Lords, from these Benches, I was the Lib Dem spokesman on energy for 10 years and was often the lone Peer who was attacking atomic energy as something we should be relying on. Our problem at the moment is that 20.9% of our power—I checked with UK Energy five minutes ago—came from nuclear energy. It is coming from an aged nuclear fleet that is almost past its sell-by date and will be decommissioned. If we are to keep the lights on, we probably will need nuclear power stations. I know that the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, thought that he would never hear me say that.
The Minister will come up with an extremely cogent and persuasive argument for why we should leave the Euratom treaty and how everything will work well. I will ask one question, though. Considering that our new power plants will be designed and built by the French, Chinese, Americans and Japanese, we will need some standards—and, of course, Euratom provides them. The Minister will say, however, that we need to move into the new age and will look at this. Can he say—because work must have been done on this—how much the new standards body will cost to run and set up? I very much hope that he can give me a figure, or perhaps write to me on this issue—or maybe not. If he cannot give me that figure off the top of his head, can he say which department will be responsible for setting up this new body? Will it be BEIS—because DECC has gone the way of many great organisations in the past? If it is BEIS, what new funding will be made available to it to meet its new obligations?
Lord Bradshaw (LD)
My Lords, I live in the shadow of Culham. Like the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, I am well aware of the problems that this debate is already causing. I met a number of people from Culham last Thursday. A number are already discussing the opportunities that exist outside this country to move away, because they are uncertain. Many are married to EU nationals who do not know what their position is.
Also, from my association with Oxford University, I can assure noble Lords that not only are we in danger of losing some of the best scientists in medical science, energy and technology, but applications for post-doctoral fellowships for PhDs are declining because people are afraid of what is going to happen. Reference was made to our shortage of nuclear technologists: if those who are there at present were to go away, we would be even shorter—almost bereft—of them.
Lord Oxburgh (CB)
My Lords, by now the Minister will probably have got the message that this House thinks Euratom is pretty important for the reasons given. I shall not repeat them, but they are very sound. Indeed, sitting yesterday as a member of the Science and Technology Committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, we received evidence on nuclear matters. We raised Euratom. There certainly was dismay among our witnesses at the prospect of the UK leaving it.
Nuclear energy will play an important part in the energy plans of the present Government and, I suspect, any Government we are likely to have in the near future. That said, as my noble friend Lord Krebs pointed out, our expenditure on nuclear R&D is simply derisory by international standards. For that reason, we get enormous benefit from our membership of Euratom—proportionately more than almost any other member.
Probably the most important point to recognise is that Euratom governs not just non-proliferation, but the movement of nuclear materials and, above all, nuclear IP. If Brexit goes ahead on the timetable we have at the moment and nothing is put in place effectively to give us continuing membership of Euratom by some means or other, that occurrence would come right in the middle of the build at Hinkley. It is not impossible that Hinkley would come to a serious and grinding halt unless the Government somehow manage a better arrangement for the future.
Lord Stern of Brentford (CB)
My Lords, we have heard very clear and convincing arguments about the future of Euratom. They are clear and strong. But it is more than that. Science depends on collaboration, mechanisms of collaboration, funding and movement of people. Many of us would see the attitude to Euratom as symbolic of this bigger issue. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, made the point that our academics worry about the mechanisms of collaboration, the funding and the movement of people.
I am a fellow of the Royal Society but I am an economist, so I will give an example from my department. We could replicate them in physics departments and all the others. Half of our professors at the LSE, which has one of the best economics departments in the world and is where I am a professor, are EU non-UK. They come to us because we are outstanding and we are outstanding because they come to us. This could be said about every physics department of the highest quality in this country. Scientists—and I, as president of the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences—will be looking at this kind of example to see whether our collaborations, our funding and the movement of people are secure—or at least as secure as they could possibly be. Through the response on Euratom and more broadly, we would welcome clear statements about the priority of collaboration, the mechanisms of collaboration and the funding.
In putting the question in this way, I salute the Government for the support they have given to research. We are on the way up in terms of funding for research. We have a long way to go, but still, the first derivative is positive. May it keep moving in that direction. But it is not just the funding but the people, the collaborations and the mechanisms. This is why, as well as the arguments in their own right, which are very powerful as we have heard, Euratom is so important.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I do not think I need to declare a particular interest. I happen to be married to a physicist, but he is a low-temperature physicist, whatever that is—he knows. Although his colleagues are at Culham, he is not involved there himself.
A new word entered our lexicon after June, which is Brexatom—the exit from Euratom. I am sure that those of us who campaigned in the referendum had no idea that this would be a result, or of the implication for the nuclear industry and research and technology. However, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, in that lovely understatement, Euratom is “pretty important” for our nuclear industry. Part of its job is ensuring our compliance with the non-proliferation treaty, including inspection, reporting and accounting. As we have just heard, some 20% of our electricity depends on it, as well as 78,000 jobs, a number that is expected to grow.
We have heard some—I hope too alarmist—warnings that power stations could be forced to close if new measures are not in place by the time Britain has to leave Euratom, if we do. In fact, a senior nuclear energy lawyer told MPs yesterday that leaving could see trade in nuclear fuel grind to a halt, as my noble friend Lord Hutton and others said. It is not so much about our standards, but we have to demonstrate that our standards comply with international nuclear standards. That is part of the work that happens through Euratom.
Euratom manages and develops the nuclear co-operation agreements, which we have also heard about, with non-EU countries on behalf of its members. The expectation is we would need our own bilateral agreements with those countries, as my noble friend Lord Hutton and the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Rees, mentioned. To go back to the negotiations, I understand that these would take rather longer than two years.
One of the benefits of Euratom has been to establish the UK’s credibility and, indeed, acceptability within the nuclear community. That enables us to have a number of co-operations that we otherwise would not have because they are predicated on us abiding by these standards.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Office for Nuclear Regulation also rely on Euratom as it has responsibility for the overarching framework for standards. Unsurprisingly, the Nuclear Industry Association is keen that we remain in Euratom or, if it really proves impossible legally, that there should be some transitional arrangement; otherwise, as we heard from my noble friend Lord O’Neill, it is possible that trading not only in nuclear goods but in material and people, and, as we just heard, the new build at Hinkley, could if not grind to a halt be held up. I assume we would also need a whole lot of new staff to do the monitoring, or an intervention from the UN’s IAEA.
On JET, I understand that the funding that comes via Euratom is guaranteed only until 2018. The new work programme has not yet been agreed, but without that funding the whole future of JET is at risk. As we have just heard, that is a great threat to a great swathe of scientists, engineers and experts, not only those who are based here but those come through during the year to work there. I understand that there is also a risk also to our ongoing participation in ITER, which may be one of the places that our scientists move to if there is any question over the future of JET.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie) (Con)
My Lords, when one lawyer comes face to face with many scientists and nuclear experts and the issue is one of science, I know where my money would be. However, the issue is not one of science at this stage; it is essentially one of legal competence in the context of the treaty provisions that we have to face up to.
I thank all noble Lords for tabling these amendments and enabling a debate on our withdrawal from Euratom. I thank them, too, for raising the critical issues that surround Euratom and our participation in it. We share those interests and we share concerns about our position in Euratom. If nothing else, the amendments give me the opportunity to offer some reassurance—indeed, complete reassurance—that the Government are committed to maintaining the highest standards of nuclear safety and safeguards and to make clear that our aim is to maintain our mutually successful civil nuclear co-operation with Euratom. The issue is how we do that.
Amendments 11 and 23 would exclude Euratom from the parliamentary authorisation to trigger the Article 50 process. The noble Baroness has proposed an amendment that would separate withdrawal from Euratom from that from the EU so that the two could run, effectively, on different timescales.
The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, asked whether any of this was required, to which my response is that we consider that it is. Clause 1(2) of the Bill deals with the disapplication of the European Communities Act 1972, which would be required pursuant to the decision of the Supreme Court in Miller. Section 3(2) of the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008 deals with an interpretive issue and not with an operative issue so far as the European statutory provisions are concerned. It makes the point, as is underlined by other matters to which I will come in a moment, that references to the EU include references to Euratom. As has been noted already, the provisions of Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty were then incorporated into the Euratom treaty by Article 106a, so that we have those side-by-side mechanisms.
Let me seek to explain why, when we trigger Article 50 and start the process of exiting the EU, we will also start the process of leaving Euratom. We clearly recognise that Euratom provides the legal framework for civil nuclear power generation and radioactive waste management for members of the Euratom Community. All Euratom member states are EU member states, and vice versa. Of course, Euratom has relationships with other countries such as the United States, Japan, Canada and so on through the medium of international nuclear co-operation agreements. At the present time, Euratom is a party to those agreements, but it means that that there is an international family of countries interested in maintaining essentially the same standards with regard to civil nuclear generation and related matters concerning trade.
Although Euratom is a separate treaty-based organisation, one that came into existence in 1957 and which we entered in 1972 when we entered the European treaty pursuant to the 1972 Act, it shares a common institutional framework with the European Union. This makes the European Union and Euratom uniquely legally joined. For example, the Euratom Community relies on a common set of institutions provided for under the EU treaties, including the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the Court of Justice. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, asked whether it was just that we did not want to be associated with the European Court of Justice as a matter of ideology, but that is not the case at all. The two treaties have institutions which are common. The United Kingdom’s participation in these institutions, either as Minister, Commissioner, MEP or judge, currently makes no distinction between EU and Euratom matters.
Reference was made to the referendum—
Lord Lea of Crondall
On the point, often made, that X, Y or Z is not what people voted for in the referendum, did people consciously vote to leave Euratom?
Lord Keen of Elie
I am most obliged to the noble Lord for his second sight, because I was about to address that very point.
In the context of the referendum, people voted to leave the European Union institutions. They voted to leave the European Parliament. They voted to leave the European Commission. They voted to leave the Council of Ministers, and they voted to leave the European Court of Justice. They spoke in terms of reshoring their sovereignty and the supremacy of UK law. You cannot leave those institutions if you remain within Euratom.
It is the Government’s view that, once we have left the European Union, we will seek to engage with the members of Euratom, just as do many other nuclear-enabled countries around the world, by way of nuclear co-operation agreements. However, once we have left the EU, substantive negotiated changes to the Euratom treaty would be needed if we were to continue participating in Euratom, whether on a permanent or temporary basis. Not only is it difficult to see how that can be done given the commonality of the institutions, but it is extremely doubtful that the remaining 27 member states would be willing to take on such negotiations, particularly for a temporary change. Therefore, when we formally notify of our intention to leave the EU, we will also commence the process for leaving Euratom.
Let me be clear: the United Kingdom supports Euratom and wants to maintain continuity of co-operation and standards. As many of your Lordships have quite rightly stated, the nuclear industry is of key strategic importance to the United Kingdom. Therefore, we want to maintain our mutually successful civil nuclear co-operation with Euratom and, indeed, with all of our other international partners, which we do by means of nuclear co-operation treaties.
We maintain that the UK remains a world leader in nuclear research and development, and there is certainly no intention to reduce our ambition in that area. We fully recognise the importance of international collaboration in nuclear research and development, and we will ensure this continues by seeking alternative arrangements for our collaboration in international fusion research and development projects.
Reference has already been made to the JET project, which is based in Oxfordshire. At present, the financial commitment to JET runs to 2018 and there are proposals that that should be extended to 2020. We are committed to seeing that extension.
There is also the ITER project, which is to be based in France and is not limited to Euratom members; it is hoped that that will be operational by 2025. Again, we can foresee a commitment to further fusion research in that context.
Lord Hutton of Furness
I really did not want to interrupt the Minister; he has been very candid and helpful. Is it the Government’s intention to seek associate membership status of the Euratom treaty in order to continue to participate in the research programme at Cadarache?
Lord Keen of Elie
It is not at present, as I understand it, our determined intention to seek associate member status, but that will be a matter for discussion in negotiation.
Let us be clear: this is an area where there is enormous mutual interest. It is not just the UK as a supplicant, putting its hand out. We are one of the world’s leaders in nuclear research and development. We have something to offer our partners, just as they have something to offer us. That is how we see it: a continuing partnership, albeit one in which we cannot credibly continue with the institutions of the EU, which are central to the operation of Euratom itself.
Lord Hutton of Furness
But the only way that non-EU members of Euratom have been able to contribute and participate in the research programmes has been through associate membership.
Lord Keen of Elie
I fully appreciate the noble Lord’s point. That is why we will engage with Euratom and its members in order to determine continuity. Whether it will be by associate membership or by means of some additional agreement has yet to be determined.
A number of points were raised about whether we can maintain trade and standards. We trade, we have safety standards and we intend to maintain them. We had the opportunity to secure mutual recognition of our standards and trade by means of international nuclear co-operation agreements.
I have been asked by a number of noble Lords about the question of strategy and consultation. Let me be clear: we are at the beginning of this process, not at the end of it. We appreciate the need to develop a clear strategy in order to implement our desire for continuing co-operation with Euratom going forward.
A number of particular questions were posed with regard to where we were on certain issues of strategy and relationships with other international nuclear partners and how we intended to demonstrate the development of our forward strategy for nuclear research and development. The noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, raised the question of how important this was in the context of the proportion of our energy that is actually provided by nuclear installations. I understand that the figure is 17%, rather than the figure he quoted.
Lord Redesdale
If you look at Energy UK, which gives it by the half-hour, it is about 17% at the moment, but it goes up to about 22% and down to about 14%.
Lord Keen of Elie
I am most obliged for that clarification. It will elide the need for me to write any letters.
BEIS has a very direct interest in how its strategy is going to be developed, and here I commit not myself but my noble friend Lord Prior, because, going forward, he would be pleased to meet with any of your Lordships who have particular issues that they want to raise in the context of developing strategy and consultation on this point. At this stage, however, I do not consider that it would be appropriate for me to become engaged in that detail.
However, we have come to the very firm conclusion that, if we are to give an Article 50 notice that is effective going forward and that reflects the will of the people of the United Kingdom as expressed in a referendum, it must involve us withdrawing from the institutions of the European Union. Given the inextricable link between the European Union, as properly defined in some quarters, and Euratom, so far as those institutions are concerned, it will be necessary that that notice applies both to the EU as it is generically termed, and to Euratom itself, as defined as part of the EU, pursuant to Section 3(2) of the 2008 Act.
I hope that in these circumstances, the noble Lord will consider it appropriate to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Oxburgh
Twice in his speech, the Minister has commented that the UK was an international leader or a world leader in nuclear energy—I am not quite sure of the words he used—but it would be very unfortunate if our Ministers or officials entered any negotiations in this general area with that belief. There are certain areas in which UK achievements are considerable, but to describe it as such or imply it across the board would, sadly, be misleading.
Lord Keen of Elie
I am most obliged to the noble Lord, because it gives me the opportunity to refine the statement that I made. Essentially, we are world leaders in the area of nuclear fusion.
Baroness Young of Old Scone
I should say that I am also a member of the Science and Technology Committee, which is looking at this issue at the moment. I am also a former nuclear waste regulator. Is it true to say that this caught the Government on the hop as an unintended consequence of leaving the European Union? Will he tell us how many more of these unexploded bombs there are in there?
Lord Keen of Elie
I am obliged to the noble Baroness. This Government are never caught on the hop.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I thank everybody for their contribution to this extended meeting of the Science and Technology Committee of the House. I hope that the noble Earl will make sure that we are all on the attendance list next time it meets. Again, I thank the Government and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Prior, who is in his place, for the conversations that we have had.
However, what this debate shows us is that this is a hazardous route to go down. It has risk. In my corporate life, we have risk registers, and I suppose that coming out of Euratom would be somewhere up in that top, right-hand red box. It would be right up there. The board of the company would then say, “How do we mitigate this risk?”. The obvious answer would come from the newest non-executive director who had not yet got into groupthink. He would say, “We actually don’t do it”. For the moment, it might be the strategy and objective that we have as a nation and as a Government, but actually, doing this while we are doing all the rest is not a very good idea at the moment.
Furthermore, I was disappointed with the Minister’s response; I find it very difficult tonight and I want to come back on some of the legal arguments, but I do not agree with them. The two are separate institutions.
More importantly, he mentioned the question on the ballot paper. The question was very clear—it gave me no movement to get out of it, as someone who regrets the decision—because it said, “Shall we leave the European Union or shall we remain in the European Union?” Euratom is not the European Union. I take his point about the institutions, but the public did not vote specifically about the institutions; they voted about getting out of the European Union. Using that argument devalues the direction that that argument goes in.
Lastly, sure, staying in Euratom even for just another two years has its challenges organisationally and in trying to make that work, but the point is that those challenges and risks are absolutely nothing in comparison with coming out altogether.
I will withdraw my amendment and thank everybody for debating this issue. I will engage more with the Minister and other colleagues who put forward amendments —in many ways, they are better than mine. I suspect that, together, we will consider bringing this back on Report, but at this stage I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“( ) A notification may only be given under subsection (1) once—(a) Her Majesty’s Government has laid before each House of Parliament a White Paper setting out its approach to any transitional arrangements with the European Union following the expiry of the two-year period specified in Article 50(3) of the Treaty on European Union; and(b) the approach set out in the White Paper has been approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
My Lords, Amendment 12 is about transitional arrangements. It would require the Government to set out, prior to triggering Article 50, a detailed plan for transitional arrangements with the EU covering from the end of the two-year Article 50 notification period to the coming into force of a final treaty on the UK’s new relationship with the EU. It would further require that that plan be approved by Parliament.
I very much welcome the White Paper’s recognition that if a final deal with the EU can be successfully secured within the two-year Article 50 negotiation period there will need to be a gradual transition from what we have now to the trading relationship set out in the final agreement. In other words, we will not leave the single market overnight and there will be a phased implementation to give businesses the chance to adapt as necessary. However, that is not the same thing at all as needing a period of transition should, as most experienced observers expect, the two-year Article 50 negotiation period proves insufficient to reach a final agreement.
This simple amendment seeks to guarantee a meaningful transition arrangement to govern UK-EU trade relations during the period, which could of course be as long as a decade, between the UK leaving the EU at the end of the two-year Article 50 notification period and whatever longer-term agreement on the future UK-EU relationship is concluded. Currently, when we hit the two-year mark, which in reality could be as soon as 18 months given the requirement to bring the deal before this House, the other place and the European Parliament, the only option if a deal has not been secured is to send Britain over a cliff edge. We face having to leave the EU effectively overnight, crashing out of the EU on WTO-only terms. The Government stated clearly in their White Paper that they want to avoid cliff edges but it seems at the moment that they have done nothing to stay away from this one. In short, my amendment is a safety net.
Amendment 16 is about employment and equality protections and was drafted in collaboration with the Women’s Equality Party. It would ensure that once the UK had withdrawn from the EU any changes to workers’ rights or equality legislation derived from EU law would be subject to full parliamentary scrutiny. In recent weeks we have heard repeated very welcome statements by Ministers, most notably the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, that EU-derived workers’ rights are not at risk from Brexit. The White Paper states that the,
“Government will protect and enhance the rights people have at work”.
That is obviously good news. However, the White Paper also says that the forthcoming great repeal Bill —or whatever we will call it—will enable changes to be made to such vital EU-derived law by secondary legislation. Perhaps that would not be by this Government but by a future one.
My amendment simply seeks to write those welcome ministerial assurances into the Bill, with particular regard to equality and women’s rights. Even half a century after the passing of the Equal Pay Act, women working full time still earn 14% less on average than their male counterparts. That is a cause for concern given the segregation of our labour market, the systemic undervaluing of work traditionally done by women and the unfairly shared burden of childcare. According to the disgracefully underfunded Equality and Human Rights Commission, pregnant women and new mothers are now twice as likely to face workplace discrimination as 10 years ago, yet the number of employment tribunal claims for sex or pregnancy discrimination has fallen sharply because of the introduction of hefty fees. We definitely need to retain and indeed work to enhance the legal protections against pregnancy, maternity or sex discrimination currently provided by EU-derived law, as well as similar protections against race, disability, age, religion or sexual-orientation discrimination.
I also support Amendment 29 from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. It is clear that on 23 June last year the British people did not vote to cut the number of EU students in the UK. Why on earth would they? Those EU students bring benefits to our universities, economy and culture. The point of these amendments is to make the Government think again on all sorts of issues and I hope that they will. I beg to move.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, I have my name down in support of Amendment 16, which the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, just spoke to. It addresses the key question of ensuring that after Brexit and the repatriation of EU law—whether to Westminster or the devolved Administrations, as the case may be—there is not any erosion of the safeguards in law protecting the rights of workers and the interests of those protected by equality legislation.
My concerns are threefold. The first is the interests of disabled people, for which I worked for four decades and was involved directly in many of the key legislative steps, particularly the Disability Discrimination Act, which, incidentally, Sir John Major did much to facilitate as Prime Minister. Secondly, I am concerned about the safeguards for working people. Much progress has been achieved over the past 40 years and we must not let it be washed away by the Brexit tide. Thirdly, if we are to have unfettered access to the single market for our manufacturing products, as the Government hope, despite their unwillingness to include this in legislation, we must maintain equivalent standards to those on mainland Europe. We cannot allow these groups to suffer in a race to the bottom of that sort.
Amendment 29, in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, focuses on the paramount need to safeguard the whole higher education sector before committing to Brexit. In particular, the amendment refers to tuition fees, Horizon 2020 and other EU research programmes, Erasmus+ and,
“continued participation in the Bologna process”.
I hope the Minister will give the Committee some categorical assurances on these important matters, which are all fundamental to our higher education sector. If the Government are not forthcoming, these issues are not going to go away. They may well be addressed by a further amendment on Report for the Higher Education and Research Bill. An amendment has already been tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, and others. In other words, one way or another, I am certain that this House will not allow our higher education sector to be undermined by Brexit. I would be very glad to have some assurances along those lines from the Minister.
Baroness Drake (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 33 is in my name. Many women voted in the referendum but few will have done so in the belief that the result could prejudice their rights. Despite assurances from Ministers on employment rights, real concerns remain about the potential negative impact of Brexit on women’s rights. Concerns have been expressed by the Fawcett Society and many other organisations that the commitments from the Government are of a general kind and, when it comes to it, may not be honoured.
Amendment 33 seeks that before issuing any notification under Article 50,
“the Prime Minister must give an undertaking to have regard to the public interest during negotiations”,
in three areas: employment rights derived from EU legislation; violence against women and girls; and protection orders. The EU has proved an important source of rights for women. The rights of part-time workers and pregnant women at work and to equal pay for equal value derive from the EU. The White Paper argues that the UK maternity leave system is more generous than the EU requirement—yes, it is; a Labour Government introduced it—but we cannot assume it is secure.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, I speak to the amendment in my name and that of my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness. It has the simple objective of ensuring that the Government give high priority to making sure that our fishing industry gets the best possible deal and is not traded away on the basis of some other priorities for the Government. The important thing about the fishing industry is not only its location, obviously, but also the communities that it affects. Its value is about £750 million, but we import about 50% more fish than we produce and export—we are far from being self-sufficient in our fish consumption.
We have to be realistic and say that a lot of our fishing communities voted to leave in the hope that they would get a better deal, and certainly not a worse deal, than they currently have. The point that I would make, coming as I do from Aberdeenshire, is that fishing may not be a large part of the national economy but it is an important part of many communities. In a county such as Aberdeenshire, with the ports of Aberdeen, Peterhead and Fraserburgh, as well as the small ports along the Moray Firth, the future of the industry is a great local concern, as the industry has a significant impact on its economy, its future and its expectations.
We recognise that before we joined the Common Market we were in an era of 12-mile limits and had not moved to adopting the 200-mile economic zones, which have effectively been jointly negotiated and policed by the European Union. It is a major undertaking for the UK, post Brexit, to be able to define its area for fishing and to secure the right balance of protection and conservation to ensure sustainability. Indeed, I am sure that Ministers will still have to negotiate with the UK fishing industry to ensure that the deal that emerges balances those interests.
Given the importance of the industry from Shetland to the Isles of Scilly, communities there and in places in between are highly dependent on it. On that basis, we think that it is also important that any agreement secures the consent of the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, because the impact on those areas is disproportionately large, although that does not in any way mean that this is not of significant importance to the fishing ports of England too—it absolutely is.
I seek an assurance from the Minister that he recognises that the fishing industry has a clear and legitimate interest. The industry has a real expectation that the Government will secure a deal for the future that enables it to thrive and survive and that they will not trade away any existing rights in a way that diminishes the impact of the industry, but if possible get a better opportunity for it across the board.
Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to the last amendment in the group—in fact the last amendment on the order paper, although there is one more that still needs to be addressed. Then we will get into a general debate, when I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, will be given his opportunity to speak. I note that the Minister is looking a little weary after a long afternoon, and he is not there yet.
All the amendments address what the priorities should be in negotiations. Amendment 44, in my name, seeks to establish that in negotiating and concluding any agreements in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the Government should have as a negotiating objective continued participation in the EU common foreign and security policy. This was established to seek,
“to safeguard the common values, fundamental interests, independence and integrity of the Union in conformity with the principles of the United Nations Charter … strengthen the security of the Union in all ways … preserve peace and strengthen international security … promote international cooperation … develop and consolidate democracy and the rule of law, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”.
It recognises that armed conflict, destruction and the loss of human lives in the EU’s neighbourhood calls for such collective action. So of course does the UN, but this brings our geographically close group much closer together to seek to achieve these extremely difficult goals.
The right honourable Malcolm Rifkind, former Defence Secretary and former Foreign Secretary, put it this way in the Foreign Affairs Select Committee last year:
“The irony is, if we were not in the European Union, such are the common strategic interests between Britain and the rest of Europe that a lot of our foreign policy effort would have to be devoted to trying to influence the European Union … There is no geostrategic threat to France or Germany or continental Europe that would not also be a threat to Britain, as we found both in 1914 and in 1939. So we would be in the extraordinary situation of having given up the power to either control or influence policy, but seeking as outsiders nevertheless to influence it anyway, because the outcome would be very important to us”.
Surely, therefore, it is vital that continued participation in the common foreign and security policy should be our aim. The UK Government’s balance of competences review in 2013, in which my noble friend Lord Wallace played a key role as a Minister within the Cabinet Office, concluded that it was,
“in the UK’s interests to work through the EU”,
in foreign policy.
The election of President Trump makes this even clearer. As one former diplomat recently put it to me, “The most important element of the common foreign and security policy is, of course, the unquestioning, underlying support for NATO. And NATO itself is now questioned by President Trump. Uncertainty pervades today’s world with this new US Administration”. Working together on foreign, defence and security policy is now more important than ever, with the rise of isolationist, nationalist populism not only in the US but in continental Europe.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 20, in the names of my noble friends Lady Hayter and Lord Lennie and the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, and also to comment on the other amendments that have been spoken to already. This amendment is on the conduct of negotiations and the key issues on which we believe the Prime Minister should give an undertaking to have regard to the public interest as she negotiates. Those issues are,
“maintaining a stable and sustainable economy … preserving peace in Northern Ireland … trading”—
and tariff-free trading—and co-operating on a number of issues, including,
“education, health, research and science, environmental protection … domestic security, and … crime and … maintaining all existing social, economic, consumer and workers’ rights”.
I suppose it was inevitable that, during the week of the Oscars, there would be one group of amendments that would remind us of a famous film. As much as I would like to cheer the Minister up, I am afraid that I am not going to cast him as some dashing hero in a “Superman” film—I can see the disappointment on his face—but instead refer to the political and satirical comedy, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”, specifically the “Before the Romans” sketch, which some noble Lords will recall. We can all picture the scene: the People’s Front of Judea is meeting to plot its campaign against the Romans. In a rhetorical question, Reg—otherwise known as John Cleese—shouts, “What have the Romans done for us?” After numerous suggestions of what the Romans had done, he has to conclude, in some exasperation,
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”.
One lone hand goes up: “Brought peace”.
So, having listened carefully to our debates so far on this group of amendments, perhaps we should film a new scene: “What has Europe done for us?” We have heard from noble Lords who have spoken and in other debates that we have had on the Bill about the benefits that have been gained through our participation in the Europe Union in education, employment rights, the economy, consumer protection, science, the environment, women’s rights, business, trade, tackling organised crime, and of course—as in Rome—peace and security. But perhaps we will leave filming the scene for another day—I can ask the Minister which character he would like to take the part of.
One aspect of the referendum campaign that always concerned me was the notion that somehow Europe was something that was done to us, almost as if it were without our consent and that somehow we had no say. Yet in so many of these issues, it has been UK negotiators, UK commissioners and UK Members of the European Parliament who have taken the lead and at all times have been fully engaged.
We have already heard some articulate and persuasive speeches on the impact that our participation has had on our citizens, and on wider Europe. Our amendment and the others in the group seek to ensure that in the negotiations that follow invoking Article 50 we do not, as my grandmother would have said, throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is all very well for those who have campaigned for our withdrawal from the EU to claim that we can maintain those protections, but we all heard the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, when, speaking of the consequences of leaving the EU on Second Reading, he said:
“First among these is the consequence of the promised great repeal Bill, which will enable us to repeal or amend damaging EU regulations, which is of particular importance to our smaller businesses. I know that the party opposite”—
that is us—
“is concerned that this may adversely affect workers’ rights but less than 10% of the vast corpus of EU regulation concerns workers’ rights. It is the other 90%-plus that needs to be judiciously culled”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col 45.]
Those are chilling words.
I do not ascribe those motives to the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State or even the Minister here, but he will know that that is exactly what many of those who advocate the hardest and fastest form of Brexit seek. When we get to the great repeal Bill process, I trust that the Government will hold to their promises and not seek to weaken existing EU legislation that applies in the UK, including in the areas I have mentioned and all those listed in our Amendment 20. If in the future the Government want to bring forward any such changes, that should be done only in the normal way, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, outlined, through primary legislation allowing appropriate parliamentary scrutiny.
Meanwhile, alongside that process, the Government will be negotiating with the EU and the other 27 countries, and will need to, in the words of our amendment, “have regard to” these key issues. That is the undertaking that we seek from the Minister. I am not asking for detail at this stage, because all the amendments, like the Bill, are concerned with the process. That is why we are seeking undertakings from the Minister on behalf of the Prime Minister.
Let us look specifically at some of the issues raised. Consumer protection is not even mentioned in the White Paper; it has not been highlighted in any way as a priority for the Government. Yet it is a key issue for many—probably most—of our citizens. It has also been clear since the referendum that trade is a concern. Then there is environmental protection—clean air, clean rivers, clean waters. There is a huge issue about air quality. We appreciate that the Government are not achieving the appropriate standards—but it is not the standards that are wrong, and the answer is not to reduce those standards, or to cease being committed to them, but to do more to meet them.
Another issue mentioned in our amendment is security and peace. On Monday we had a long and fruitful discussion on Northern Ireland, also on one of our amendments. Now we are talking specifically about UK domestic security and tackling serious and organised crime, including terrorism. In some ways, I am surprised that we even need to have a debate on this issue. Some noble Lords will recall—I see the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, in his place, and he will recall this as well as I do—the many hours that we spent debating this subject in your Lordships’ House, when the coalition Government made great play of the idea that they were opting out of all EU police and criminal justice measures, and would opt back in only to those that were effective and useful.
I thought that was quite a bizarre exercise, and it caused enormous concern—but in the event, quite rightly, we did not opt out of anything that applied to the UK and was in effect. All we opted out of were defunct and non-relevant measures. That is relevant to this debate because even then, the Government’s conclusion was that those measures were important to tackling serious and organised crime, to protecting our national security, and to our role in doing so, both within the EU and more widely.
My noble friend Lady Drake made some powerful comments about violence against women and girls, particularly with regard to trafficking. Those are exactly the sort of reasons why we needed those measures then, and we need them now. We need some assurances about how the Government are going to approach this matter. It has to go beyond mere co-operation.
I do not know whether the Minister has had the opportunity to speak to Rob Wainwright, who I heard on the radio a few weeks ago. He is the director of Europol and was formerly head of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. He has a lifetime’s experience in wider security issues as a civil servant and with the agencies. With his leadership, the UK has been taking a lead on these issues; we have an extraordinarily important role here. In the interview, his comments from a measured and professional position made a powerful and irrefutable case for continued co-operation and engagement, as close to the level we have now as possible. Any reduction of or drawing away from that only goes against what, two or three years ago, the Government said was essential and in British interests.
My noble friend Lady Drake covered the issue of women’s rights particularly eloquently and powerfully. Her speech explained why there are concerns about employment and social protection for women. I hope the Minister will be able to address her questions. In her remarks on transitional arrangements, particularly for trade and business, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, took a reasonable and measured approach. She wisely described a safety net so that we do not have the cliff-edge fall which noble Lords have spoken about in other debates. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on that.
I know that the Minister and his ministerial colleagues do not like to refer to “transition” and that the preferred term is “implementation phase”. I do not really care what we call it, but I have an image in mind. Noble Lords of a certain age, like me, may recall the Road Runner cartoons. “Beep beep”, he goes as he runs, hurtling towards the cliff edge. Only when it is too late does he look down and find there is nothing there. At that point, he plummets hard and fast to the ground. I do not believe that the Government want us to replicate Road Runner, but if we are not going to do so they have to have a plan. Whether it is called “transitional” or an “implementation stage” that plan must be brought before Parliament. The Minister may recall that my noble friend Lord Liddle asked a similar question on Monday evening about arrangements for trade. The Minister may not want to respond on this immediately, but I ask him to reflect on it. The consequences of a cliff-edge Brexit—the Road Runner Brexit as it should now be known—are real and dangerous.
To summarise, I have made two key points. First, we need an assurance that, on the key issues in this group of amendments, there is no attempt to use Brexit in any way to water down or reduce benefits and protections for UK citizens. Secondly, that cliff-edge, Road Runner Brexit is to be avoided at all costs.
Lord Balfe
My Lords, I declare an interest as a former Member of the European Parliament and all sorts of other things that the Daily Mail gets very worked up about us not declaring. We are debating the negotiating priorities and it is becoming very clear how absolutely complex that exercise is. Whatever people were supposedly voting for, I—who was strongly for remain—interpreted it as voting to take back control. I do not agree with them, or with their definition of control, but apparently that was what was happening. The Bill takes back control because it puts it back into the Government’s hands to negotiate a sensible settlement. Taking back control does not mean repudiating every single international institution and body connected with the EU. Quite apart from the Commission, the Council, the Court of Auditors and all the rest, there are 22 different agencies listed in the amendments, all of them providing specialist functions of one kind or another.
Two of those agencies are based in the United Kingdom and I want to speak about them tonight: the European Banking Authority and the European Medicines Agency. They are different institutions in different fields, but what they have in common is that both of them are here and are EU institutions. I was involved very much—at the margin—with the European Medicines Agency, which was an achievement of John Major. It was not quite as big an achievement as getting written into the treaty that the European Parliament would always meet in Strasbourg—which also came out of that package—or that the Patent Office would move to Munich.
Lord De Mauley (Con)
I am grateful to my noble friend. Is he going to address the amendments?
Lord Balfe
I take the amendments as being about our negotiating stance and, as such, I consider that I am addressing them. Article 75 provides for third countries with concluded agreements to take part in the agencies. I would like to know from the Minister whether we are going to seek to be a third party. If we do, we can contribute to the budget but we will then have to be subject to the rules under which they operate, which, incidentally, are also basically the rules of the ECJ. The point I am making—I am coming near to the end—
Lord Balfe
Thank you very much. I ask noble Lords to understand that we are talking about the future of human beings. This is not something to jeer about. Because of my role in the trade union movement, I have met these people and they are very upset. A few of them will be tuning in to the broadcast of this debate and will hear the jeers.
I just say that we have to be sophisticated in the way we treat these agencies, and we have to be humane in the way we treat their staff. A thank-you would not go unmet by some of the agencies. We have to look at the employment, welfare and pension provisions of these staff. These are people who went to work for Britain. They are British nationals and they deserve our support.
Finally, I ask the Minister two things. First, will he appoint a dedicated civil servant to deal with these agencies so that they have a point of contact, and, secondly, will he meet them, or at least representatives of their staff associations, to hear at first hand what I have reported only as an intermediary?
Lord Bilimoria
My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Balfe: we are talking about people. The greatest issue arising from the European Union referendum is the uncertainty that it is causing, in every aspect of our lives. Amendment 29 talks specifically about the priorities of the UK’s higher education institutions, students and academics. Our universities are the jewel in the crown of Britain. They are the best in the world, along with those of the United States of America, and international students contribute up to £14 billion to our economy. Yet Cambridge University has just announced a 14% drop in students applying from the European Union. I declare my interests as a chancellor of the University of Birmingham and as chair of the advisory board of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. I am also president of UKCISA, the UK Council for International Student Affairs, which represents the 450,000 international students in this country, of which 180,000 are from the European Union.
This is not just about the money; it is about what these students contribute to our universities. They enrich the experience of our domestic students and they build lifelong bridges between our country and their countries around the European Union, with friendships that last for generations. Our international students and universities are one of the strongest elements of soft power that exists in this country. It is not only the students but also the academics at our universities, up to 20% of whom are from the European Union.
When it comes to research, the amendment speaks about Horizon 2020 and European research area programmes. A lot of funding comes into our universities from the European Union. For example, the University of Cambridge—at the top of the list, I think—took about £100 million of funding. But again, it is not just the funding that is in jeopardy. The Government might say, “We will replace that funding”. But what is at stake are the collaborations we might lose out on. The power of collaborative research is extraordinary. At the University of Birmingham, our field-weighted citation impact is 1.87 when we do our own research; Harvard University’s is 2.4 when it does its own research. But when we do combined research with Harvard University, the figure is 5.69. That is the power of collaborative research—and I am proud to be an alumnus of the Harvard Business School.
When you put all that together—the students, academics and research funding from the European Union, as well as our collaborative research with the European Union—it is all in jeopardy, all under threat and all uncertain. Could the Minister give us as much certainty as possible about this vital area of our economy?
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I very much support what the noble Lord just said, but I am speaking in support of Amendments 16 and 33. My main focus will be women’s rights—covered by Amendment 33—but first I want to mention briefly the rights of disabled people, with reference to Amendment 16. Concerns have been raised by groups such as Disability Rights UK and the Papworth Trust, concerning, in particular, issues around employment, personal mobility and transport, accessibility and health and social care. On this last point, there is a very real concern that, apparently, a disproportionate number of personal assistants to disabled and frail people are from other European Union countries. There is a real worry about what will happen to the caring services. These issues were raised in the recent Lords debate on Brexit and disabled people, but I do not think they were satisfactorily addressed by the Minister responding to that debate.
On Amendment 33, while I value the Government’s commitment to preventing the erosion of equalities protections at the point of leaving the EU, I hope they will take on board a broad warning of the Women and Equalities Committee report, published yesterday, that the process will be complex—as has been said—and that there could be an unintentional regression if the greatest care is not taken. The committee advises on how this could be done and how to embed principles of equality in our own law, mirroring, for example, the Human Rights Act 1998.
It also makes a point I made at Second Reading about what happens in the future. My noble friend Lady Drake pointed out that the EU has been the driver of many women’s rights, not just the principle of equal value but, for example, opposing direct sex discrimination in social security law. I spent many hours campaigning in the 1970s against the very real discrimination that married women faced in social security law and it was thanks to the EU that we got rid of it. It would have taken us a lot longer if it had not been for the EU. At present there are discussions in the EU about, for example, strengthening leave for fathers and for carers. It is important that we are not left behind as the EU itself progresses, particularly—again echoing what my noble friend said—given all the talk about the possible move to a radical enterprise economy if there is no deal. I note what Sir John Major said about the implications of this for our welfare state.
At Second Reading I cited the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which has called on the Government to commit to taking on board future rights-enhancing laws emanating from the EU where appropriate. I asked the Minister to clarify the Government’s position on this. I do not know whether the Minister is listening. I understand that he did not have the time to respond then, but I would very much appreciate a response now.
Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)
My Lords, I shall speak very briefly to Amendment 16 in my name and that of others and support all the amendments in this group. I will not delay the Committee for long, but it is important to explain and emphasise why I and parliamentarians across parties and across both Houses wish to pursue this amendment. As previous speakers have explained, the amendment covers protections for groups with protected characteristics who are covered by secondary legislation that arose in the EU. We need these protections built in before Article 50 is triggered because otherwise they could be altered by the Executive and might not be subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
We are simply asking for oversight by one Parliament, the European Parliament, to be replaced by that of another, the UK Parliament. We believe that women will be disproportionately affected and at risk. Protections already mentioned include: preventing less favourable terms for part-time workers, under the part-time workers’ regulations; the duty of employers to assess health and safety aspects of work for pregnant workers afforded under the pregnant workers directive; the right to return to work to an equivalent post or equally favourable conditions after maternity leave, in the maternity and parental leave regulations; and, perhaps the most at risk—and one over which the Government dragged their heels for two years in implementing—the working time directive, which protects rights to rest breaks, annual leave and not to be required to work excessively long hours.
We are not saying that the Government would use the opportunity to get rid of worker protections in this way, but it would reassure this House if they were not able to do so without scrutiny from both Houses of Parliament. We must not wait until Article 50 is triggered. As soon as it is triggered, these rights become exposed and unprotected. If the Government have no intention of taking the opportunity to change some of these protections without benefit of parliamentary scrutiny, there is no reason why they should not accept this amendment.
Baroness Crawley (Lab)
My Lords, I support these amendments. I particularly support my noble friend Lady Drake’s compelling case for preserving and improving workplace rights for women after we leave the European Union. That is not least because I, as a former MEP, like the noble Lord, Lord Balfe—or “another obscure MEP”, as the Daily Mail put it—played a modest part in the creation of the maternity leave directive 25 years ago. As my noble friend Lady Drake said, so many British women—hundreds of thousands—have benefited from that EU law in the intervening years.
Maternity rights for British women have indeed progressed—in that sense the Minister is right—and we should be proud of that. But in the early 1990s, they came from a very low base, much lower than the rest of the European Union, and we do not want to go back to that low base. Therefore I call on the Minister to give us what guarantees he can that we will not go back to bargain-basement rights.
In this debate on the importance of securing transitional arrangements, as my noble friend has said, I ask the Minister whether he agrees with his noble friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie—he was in his place but I do not see him now. In our debate on this Bill on Monday, in answer to a question on the EEA from my noble friend Lord Liddle, the noble and learned Lord said,
“I do not accept that we face a cliff edge—there is no cliff and therefore no edge”.—[Official Report, 27/2/17; col. 588.]
Does the Minister agree? That was certainly not the message that the Prime Minister took to the CBI last autumn when it was extremely worried, and it continues to be worried about the need for transitional arrangements.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)
This has been a wide-ranging debate. I put my name to Amendment 34. The fishing industry is important; part of the problem is that people have too often tried to shut the fishing industry up, when it has had genuine concerns about the way the common fisheries policy has operated over many years. Indeed, there are concerns now that in the Brexit negotiations it might yet be forgotten about.
I had the privilege of representing for 18 years in the House of Commons and for eight years in the Scottish Parliament a constituency which had many fishing communities. I am aware that there was a concern as to what happened when Britain entered the European Union and that the interests of the fishing industry were sold short. It was a belief that, when the papers were subsequently released under the 30-year rule, was proved to have some substance. A briefing note from the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland in the early 1970s warned:
“In short, at present it is much easier to see the drawbacks for our fishermen likely to be involved in the Common Fisheries Policy than to be at all positive that there will be benefits to offset, let alone outweigh them”.
The amendment that my noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie and I have put forward is intended to try to ensure that some way or other there will be an engagement of the devolved legislatures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to help allay some of these concerns.
The House has had the benefit of a very good and well-informed report on Brexit and fisheries from the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee, chaired by my noble friend Lord Teverson. It makes clear the complexities of untangling the United Kingdom from the common fisheries policy and the need for agreement. For example, my noble friend Lord Teverson said in Grand Committee on 16 January that,
“the moment we leave the European Union, the EEZ will become our exclusive economic zone, exactly as it says on the tin. There will be no automatic right for us to fish in other people’s EEZs; nor will there be any automatic right for other nation states to fish in ours. We will be excluded immediately, if we have not renegotiated access, from agreements with Iceland, Norway and the Faroes, which are particularly important to our Scottish fleets”.—[Official Report, 16/1/17; col. GC 1.]
It is not academic. Important negotiations will have to take place about the future of our fisheries, not only in terms of fishing opportunities but in terms of our trade in fish. It is said that we export the majority of fish caught by our UK vessels and import the majority of fish that we eat. Measured by volume, 49% of our domestic production is exported to the European Union and 32% of the imports that we eat are from the European Union. Fishing will be an important part of these negotiations in terms of catching opportunities and in terms of trade, not only for the fishermen in the immediate area but for the fish processors and all who are dependent on the fishing industry.
In terms of our total United Kingdom GDP, the fishing industry does not loom very large, but in terms of the many communities around our coast in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and many parts of England it is important. I remember taking part in the annual debate on fisheries in the House of Commons where it was clear from the wide range of people who took part the importance to many communities of the fishing industry. Therefore, it is important we focus on this and that we give the devolved Administrations, Parliaments and Assemblies an opportunity for involvement.
In replying to the debate on 16 January, the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, said:
“Obviously, we must work—and are working—as closely as we have always done with our colleagues in the devolved Administrations and Crown dependencies as we develop our positions, and will ensure that their views are fully taken into account as negotiations move forward”.—[Official Report, 16/1/17; col. 29.]
I do not expect the Minister to have the answer tonight so he can write to me, but can he tell us up until now what discussions have taken place at official and ministerial level on fisheries with the respective devolved Administrations? As I said, it is a small part of our GDP but vital for our many coastal communities and it is vital that their interests are advanced and safeguarded as we go forward into these negotiations.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I think that the view of the Committee is probably that we should continue and that I should try to wrap this up.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I think that there is a consensus that we should allow the Minister to address the Committee.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I thank the noble Lord and I call on the Minister to speak.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, we have discussed a veritable cornucopia of issues over the past hour and five minutes. Trying to sum up and string them together is something of a challenge, but I will attempt to do so. I fear that I may at this late hour incur the frustration of those noble Lords who put their names to these amendments. I will gently say that while I absolutely agree that we should debate these issues and that they are worthy of debate and scrutiny, the amendments themselves have no place in the Bill. I stress that I am sure that my noble friends on the Front Bench and I will return to the House on many occasions in the weeks and months ahead to discuss these issues in more detail.
A number of the topics that were raised have been touched on and were covered in the White Paper and other announcements that were made before and since the publication of the White Paper. A number of the points raised, especially in Amendment 20, were covered. The Government’s wish to seek a new agreement to enable free and frictionless trade has been made clear, as has our wish to continue to co-operate with Europe where it is clearly in our national interest to do so. On combating crime and terrorism, one of our stated negotiating objectives is to establish a new relationship with the EU to preserve UK and European security— I will return to that point later.
Before I move on, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, will forgive me for picking her up on a very small point. I am going to sound pedantic but consumer rights and consumer protection are mentioned. The words, “consumer protection”, are featured in the White Paper, at paragraph 8.36.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
The point that I was making was that they are not in the list of priorities. They may feature down the list, but consumer protection is not one of the Government’s 12 priorities.
Lord Bridges of Headley
The rights of consumers are very high in our minds. My noble friend Lord Balfe made an eloquent and passionate speech about the position of UK nationals in EU agencies and about the role of the agencies themselves. I absolutely repeat what I said at Second Reading: the Government would indeed like to thank all those UK nationals for the contribution that they have made and continue to make. I hope that my noble friend will forgive me if I do not go into great depth and detail now on each of the agencies—there are 16 of them. They are important and are referred to in the White Paper. We will be looking for ways in which our relationship with those agencies might continue in some shape or form.
Ireland was mentioned but not discussed in this debate. Obviously, it was debated on Monday. I shall simply repeat that we will stand by the commitments in the Belfast agreement and its successors.
I will turn first to the issue of higher education and our world-class universities, which is the subject of Amendment 29. In the White Paper, a priority is indeed for us to ensure that the UK remains the best place for science and innovation. With regard to student fee support, we of course recognise the significant contribution that EU students make to the UK’s world-class universities and have already made commitments that we will give existing EU students and those due to start courses in 2017-18 certainty with regard to both their student loans and their home fee status. This is not just for the short term but for the duration of their courses. I can also confirm that research councils will continue to fund postgraduate students from the EU whose courses start in 2017-18. It is worth noting in passing that no similar commitment has been made to UK students currently studying in other member states.
A number of noble Lords referred to collaboration and co-operation in higher education. I entirely endorse the importance of this in the years ahead. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, who is not here, spoke about this. I should like to say for the sake of the entire Committee, though, that as regards Horizon 2020 and Erasmus, the Prime Minister has made clear that we will continue an agreement to continue to collaborate with our European partners on major science research and technology initiatives. There may be specific EU programmes that we want to participate in.
With regard to the Bologna process, it is important to underline the fact that this is an intergovernmental agreement among countries in the European region and, as such, it is not tied to EU membership. I can therefore assure noble Lords that UK participation will not be part of our negotiations as it will be unaffected by our departure from the EU.
Next, a number of your Lordships spoke about rights, especially on employment and equalities. In a number of areas, the UK Government have already extended workers’ rights beyond requirements set out in EU law. For example, women in the UK who have had a child can enjoy 52 weeks of statutory maternity leave and 39 weeks of pay, not just the 14 weeks under EU law. That said, and importantly, we have already made—as a number of noble Lords have noted—a clear commitment that there would be no erosion of workers’ rights as a result of the UK leaving the EU and to ensure that those rights keep pace with the changing labour market. The great repeal Bill will make provision for this legislation.
Baroness Drake
The hour is late but this is an important point. I have chapter 7 of the White Paper in front of me. I seek clarity because the words in the document are quite general. Can the Minister give an assurance that each and every existing equality and employment right will be protected, not weakened, whatever the outcome of the Brexit negotiations? Can he give absolute clarity that each and every employment and equality right will be protected and not weakened as a consequence of Brexit?
Lord Bridges of Headley
I totally understand the noble Baroness’s concern and interest in this issue. I will pick my words carefully. The Government’s position is that, through the great repeal Bill, EU law and regulations will be ported into UK law. I will come on to equalities in a moment. If the noble Baroness feels that that does not address the point, I will be happy to discuss this with her more directly. As I said, the great repeal Bill will make provision for this legislation to continue to stand once the European Communities Act is repealed, so the same protections for workers as are currently in place will remain after we exit the EU.
On equalities, as I said on Monday, the Equality Act already provides a strong framework to ensure that the UK is well placed to continue driving equality forward. I assure your Lordships that all the protections covered in the Equality Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2010 will continue to apply once the UK has left the European Union.
On the issue of violence against women, the Government are committed to tackling domestic violence, modern slavery and human trafficking. The UK already has some of the most robust protections in the world to tackle violence against women. To address one of the points that noble Lords made, after we leave the EU the UK will maintain its place as a prominent international actor. We will continue to work with our European partners and globally to promote women’s rights and work towards ensuring the safety of women everywhere.
I turn now to fishing, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, just spoke about. I entirely agree about the importance of the fishing sector and the fishing industry. It is also referred to in the White Paper. It is a matter that my department and other ministerial colleagues across Whitehall are very focused on. I totally heed the points he made about the issues raised. I hope he will forgive me if I do not go into great depth and detail, but there is one point I will focus on, which is the approval mechanism for the negotiations—again, a very valid point.
The Government have made it perfectly clear that we want to come to an agreement that works for the whole of the United Kingdom. We have a created a process to work with the representatives of the devolved Administrations to ensure that their views are taken into account. I certainly commit to write to the noble and learned Lord to set out in more detail what that means, but I need to make clear to him and to the Committee, and to repeat, that no part of the UK has a veto on fishing or anything else.
I turn to another topic of the amendments that is covered in the White Paper—the potential transitional period following negotiations. As noble Lords will know, the White Paper states that we want to reach an agreement with the EU within the two-year Article 50 period. Article 50 states that the process for withdrawal will take account of the framework of the leaving member state’s future relationship with the EU, and there is a clear connection between the terms of our withdrawal and the future relationship we wish to establish.
We do not want to get ahead of the negotiations or set out unilateral positions. How we take the process forward will be a matter for discussion with the European institutions and our European partners. But, given the language in Article 50 and the connection between our withdrawal and our future relationship, it is our intention to seek to deal with both sets of issues together wherever possible—something we believe would clearly be in the interests of the European Union as well as the UK. We believe that both sides would benefit from a phased process of implementation that would allow the United Kingdom and the European Union to adapt to and prepare for any new arrangements. It is in nobody’s interests for there to be any disruption. The implementation arrangements we may rely upon will be a subject for negotiation and their nature will vary considerably depending on the agreement we reach with the EU.
I turn to the common foreign and security policy, picked up in Amendment 44. As I have said before, after we leave the European Union we will remain committed to European security and aim to add value to European Union foreign and security policy. Our objective is to ensure that the European Union’s role in defence and security is complementary to and respects the central role of NATO.
More broadly, although we are leaving the European Union, the UK will continue to be one of the most important global actors in international affairs. Indeed, along with France we are the only EU member state with an independent nuclear deterrent and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Again, as with other amendments in this group, our participation in the common foreign and security policy cannot be resolved through unilateral action. Instead, it must be addressed through discussion with the other 27 members.
This topic and all the other issues that have been raised are worthy of debate—I do not dispute that for one moment. Where I differ from noble Lords who have tabled the amendments is on whether they should be in the Bill, the core purpose of which—indeed, the only purpose—is to enable the Government to deliver on the referendum and trigger Article 50. Therefore, with great respect, I ask that the amendments not be pressed.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. It has been an interesting debate, ranging widely from women’s rights and the protection of minorities to education, medicine, foreign policy and fishing. We understand about the movement of all such protections straight into UK law. At the same time, we also understand that there could be a steady erosion afterwards by various means. That is why we are asking for corroboration that this simply will not happen. We want to be better than we were in the EU, not worse. A noble Lord on the opposite Benches said that this is very complex. When you do something for the first time, it is always much harder than doing it subsequently, so we are bound to make mistakes. One role of this House is to make sure that we raise issues that we feel will cause problems—and it is for the Government to respond appropriately. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Pannick
“Parliamentary approval for the outcome of negotiations with the European Union
(1) No Minister of the Crown may agree to arrangements for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union until—(a) Her Majesty's Government has laid a copy of the final draft of the proposed arrangements before each House of Parliament, and(b) each House of Parliament has passed a resolution approving the final draft of the proposed arrangements.(2) The requirements under subsection (1)(a) and (b) must also be met where a Minister of the Crown proposes any separate arrangements pertaining to the future political and economic relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.(3) In the case of a proposed agreement with the European Union setting out the arrangements for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, any resolution under subsection (1) must have been passed by each House of Parliament before the proposed terms are agreed with the European Council, with a view to their approval by the European Parliament.(4) No Minister of the Crown may agree to the termination, or terminate unilaterally, the negotiations regarding the arrangements for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union without the prior approval of each House of Parliament by resolution.”
Lord Pannick (CB)
My Lords, Amendment 17 is in my name and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Oates. It would ensure parliamentary sovereignty at the end of the negotiating process for our withdrawal from the EU. Noble Lords will know that the Prime Minister has promised that any draft agreement with the European Union on the terms of our withdrawal and any draft agreement on our future relationship with the EU will be put to both Houses of Parliament for their approval and that, in relation to the withdrawal agreement, this will occur before any such agreement is sent to the European Parliament for its consent. That must be right. This Parliament must have at least the same powers as the European Parliament to disagree with the terms of any draft agreement.
However, the Government are refusing to include that commitment in the Bill. I say that a political promise made by the Prime Minister in good faith is no substitute for an obligation in an Act of Parliament. On a matter of this importance, it is vital to ensure that there is a clear, binding obligation on the Government to return to Parliament at a defined time.
The amendment also addresses what happens if this country and the EU cannot agree on the terms of our withdrawal from the EU. Parliamentary sovereignty should also apply in those circumstances. The Government should be required to seek and obtain the approval of both Houses of Parliament if they decide to reject a withdrawal agreement offered by the EU and to leave the EU with no deal. It must be for Parliament to decide whether to prefer no deal or the deal offered by the EU.
This amendment will not delay the Article 50 notification; it does not constrain in any way the substance of the negotiations. All it does, importantly, is to guarantee parliamentary sovereignty at the end of the negotiating process. I look forward to hearing from the Minister why that is resisted by the Government. I beg to move.
Lord Spicer
My Lords, I am going to be very brief, because I have forgotten most of what I wanted to say. This is part of a group of amendments purporting to strengthen the role of Parliament in our affairs. Like other groups, it is pretty well irrelevant to this Bill, but it is there. It is ironic that those who most object to the Bill are also those who are pressing for greater sovereignty for Parliament. It is ironic because the whole purpose of the Bill—of leaving the European Union—is to give sovereignty to Parliament. It is the essence of the whole process. Therefore, it is very ironic that those who do not particularly like this objective are those pressing most for increased sovereignty. One has to assume, therefore, that they are doing it out of some sort of ulterior purpose.
Lord Pannick
I am sorry, but the noble Lord is suggesting that I am bringing forward this amendment for some ulterior purpose. I voted to remain in the EU, but I entirely agree with the Government’s position that in the light of the referendum result, this country has to notify and has to leave the European Union. I am not bringing forward this amendment with any ulterior purpose: my purpose is to ensure parliamentary sovereignty.
Lord Spicer
Of course I trust the noble Lord, but what he is doing is slowing down a process that we should get on with as quickly as possible in order to increase the sovereignty of Parliament. That is the whole purpose. It is the main purpose for those of us—
Viscount Hailsham
The purpose of the new clause that we are discussing is simply to ensure proper parliamentary control at the end of the negotiations. That does not slow down the negotiations; it merely ensures that at the end of those negotiations, Parliament has a proper say as to the outcome.
Lord Spicer
I personally agree totally with anything that increases the sovereignty of Parliament. I only make the point that this is totally unnecessary, because if we got on with this Bill, we would end up having a much more sovereign Parliament than we would have without it. That is the whole purpose of what I am saying. Indeed, it is necessary that we should have greater sovereignty because the powers of Parliament have been eroded ever since the Maastricht treaty, with which I was associated. That has been something that has been going on for some time—ever since there was a single currency. The powers of Parliaments have been reduced because the single currency is irrevocable, and we have a system in this country whereby no Parliament can bind another Parliament. There is no doubt in my mind, at least, that had we not started the process of leaving the European Union, the European court, which the noble Lord will know a lot about, would have moved in on us for not joining the single currency at some point. There is no question in my mind about that.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I am not sure what is in the noble Lord’s mind. If he just tries reading the treaty, he will see that there is no basis for proceeding against the Government of the United Kingdom for not being a member of the euro. It is actually written in the treaty that we do not have to be, so perhaps he will clear his mind.
Lord Spicer
I am also sure that the European court would have found a way into this at some point. I have no doubt about that at all. If one really is concerned with the sovereignty of Parliament, we should get on with passing this Bill as quickly as possible and begin the task of unwinding the historic process of eroding the powers of Parliaments, including our own. We should not take too much notice of the amendments coming up: most of them are irrelevant to the Bill.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, I support Amendment 17, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, which is linked to Amendment 35, standing in my name. Amendment 17 is critically important. If there is no clarity tonight, we should certainly return to this subject on Report next week.
In fact, the amendment arose from the end of one of the banks of debates on Monday night, when I asked the Minister—this is in Hansard, col. 641—what will happen if, at the end of the negotiations, we reach a position where both Houses of Parliament refuse to endorse the basis for Brexit recommended by the Government. Will the Government accept the decision of Parliament as binding or will they under those circumstances allow the voters to decide, either by general election or further referendum? The Minister refused to respond or give any indication of the Government’s intentions. He now has a chance to make clear beyond doubt the Government’s position, which the House has the right to know. The best way to achieve this would be to accept Amendment 17 or, if that cannot be carried, by insisting on Amendment 35 which provides that if the UK Government fail to reach agreement, the status quo would remain in force.
Lord Howard of Lympne
My Lords, I oppose this amendment on grounds that are rather different from those advanced by my noble friend. I submit that this amendment is wrong in principle, constitutionally improper and unnecessary. Your Lordships might think that given that it was proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I am being rather courageous and perhaps foolhardy in suggesting that it is constitutionally improper but I hope to explain to your Lordships why I take that view.
My view is based in particular on subsection (4) of the new clause. That would make possible—indeed it encourages—a never-ending situation in which the Government reach an agreement with the European Union and brings it to Parliament, Parliament rejects it, sends the Government back to the European Union, the Government come back to Parliament and Parliament rejects it again. The only way that process can be ended is by the Government having the power to bring the negotiations to an end. What would happen if the process envisaged by subsection (4) were to take place is the intrusion of Parliament into the negotiating process. That is why I say this amendment is constitutionally improper.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
I wonder if the noble Lord is familiar with Article 50, where it is clear that if no agreement is reached within the two-year period the state that intimated its intention to withdraw, if it has not withdrawn that intimation, leaves the European Union at the end of those two years. The idea of the never-ending negotiation is a fantasy. The article is completely clear.
Lord Howard of Lympne
It is hardly a fantasy if the negotiations are brought to an end speedily, as we all hope they will be. If they are brought to an end six months before the end of the two-year period, the process I identified as being made possible by new subsection (4) could well take place. Parliament should not intrude itself into negotiations. It is not the job of Parliament to negotiate. That may seem self-evident but since this amendment was moved by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I thought I had better look for some authority for the proposition I am advancing and went to the supreme authority on these matters— I went to Dicey. Dicey says that Parliament,
“should neither directly nor indirectly take part in negotiating treaties with foreign powers”.
That is what subsection (4) of this amendment would make possible, which is why I suggest that it is constitutionally improper.
Lord Tyler (LD)
I do not think that the noble Lord has followed the process of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, which specifically gives both Houses of Parliament a role in the ratification of treaties. That completely updates where Dicey got to.
Lord Howard of Lympne
I am afraid that it is the noble Lord who misunderstands the position. I am not disputing the role of Parliament in ratifying an agreement. That is perfectly proper, but that is different from Parliament refusing the ability of the Government to terminate the negotiations. That is what intrudes Parliament into the negotiations and that is why, in my view, the amendment is constitutionally improper.
The amendment is also unnecessary, for one very simple reason. If at the end of the negotiations—I devoutly hope that this will not occur; I do not believe that it will occur; I do not think that there is much chance of it occurring—the Government find themselves completely at odds with Parliament, in particular with the other place, it is always open to the other place to pass a Motion of no confidence in the Government. Clearly, that would bring matters to a head and perhaps achieve the result that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, seeks to achieve. Parliament is always supreme in that respect. Parliament can always pass a vote of no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.
Lord Pannick
If all this is unnecessary, why was the Prime Minister asked for, and why did she give, a specific undertaking that this matter will be brought before both Houses of Parliament at the end of the process? Surely that shows that in relation to this vital constitutional issue it is not enough to rely on the possibility of the House of Commons exerting its power and, if an undertaking is given, why is it not in the Bill?
Lord Howard of Lympne
I think that I have already answered that question. I quite accept, as I said to the noble Lord, that it is proper for Parliament to ratify an agreement that has been reached—or, indeed, reject it. That is what Parliament’s role should be. That is in accordance with what the Prime Minister has said. What I am objecting to is subsection (4) of the proposed new clause, which could have the effect that I have identified and would lead to an extremely unsatisfactory and unconstitutional position.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Has the noble Lord given proper consideration to a circumstance in which the Prime Minister and the Government wish to throw in the towel in the negotiation? It cannot possibly be ruled out because, as I understand it, his right honourable friend the Minister responsible for Brexit has just told the Cabinet that it might well happen. So why on earth is it wrong to put in the Bill that Parliament should have the right to say yes or no to such a decision?
Lord Howard of Lympne
Well, for all the reasons that I have given. I do not want to repeat my speech to the noble Lord. The effect of the proposed new clause, the effect of giving Parliament the ability to say, “You cannot bring the negotiations to an end”—not just once, but twice or three times, or four times or any number of times; that is all in the proposed new clause—is to intrude Parliament into the negotiating process. It is wrong, it is improper and it should not be in the Bill.
Lord Oates
My Lords, I support Amendment 17. Given the late hour and the clarity of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in moving the amendment, I will not detain your Lordships for too long, although I must say that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, has shown very little faith in the sense of Parliament, which slightly surprises me, from the side of the argument that has stressed parliamentary sovereignty so much.
At Second Reading I expressed my concern that the Bill, unless amended, would provide a blank cheque to the Prime Minister to negotiate an exit deal on any terms whatever or, indeed, to return with no deal at all. The Government intend that at that point—when the PM returns with a deal or no deal at all—both Houses of Parliament will be given a vote. The Prime Minister made that pledge in her Lancaster House speech. Effectively, Parliament would be given a choice of the deal or not the deal. But I think that noble Lords do not have faith in the Government, given some of the undertakings that they have made in the past, not least, as was mentioned in an earlier debate, in relation to the noble Lord, Lord Dubs.
We want something more secure in the Bill. The purpose of the amendment, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has pointed out, is to ensure that both Houses of Parliament are able to have a meaningful say once the final draft of the proposed arrangements for withdrawal from the European Union is produced and that this must be before the proposed arrangements are agreed with the European Council. As we have heard, it would also prevent the Government from terminating negotiations for withdrawal from the European Union without the express consent of both Houses of Parliament. In short, the amendment will ensure that with regard to the most—
Lord De Mauley
If what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said earlier is correct, and I think it is, how does subsection (4) work?
Lord Oates
I am not quite clear to which point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, the noble Lord is referring.
Lord De Mauley
If at the end of the two-year period we are out anyway, what is the impact of the Minister’s decision on termination?
Lord Oates
The point of subsection (4) is that,
“No Minister … may agree to the termination”,
prior to that point. Clearly, that is the point of it.
Lord Pannick
The answer to the noble Lord’s question is that surely Parliament should decide, not the Government. Parliament should decide whether we leave the EU with no agreement or whether we leave the EU with whatever agreement is being offered to us by the EU that the Government think is unacceptable. That will be the choice and Parliament should make that choice.
Lord Oates
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for his clarity on that matter. In short, the amendment will ensure that Parliament will have a proper and meaningful oversight of the most important decision that the United Kingdom Government will have made in my lifetime.
Lord Faulks (Con)
The noble Lord will probably remember that at Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, indicated that he thought that the Europeans negotiating would give us an extension of the two-year period and, furthermore, that they would probably allow us to withdraw the Article 50 notice altogether. If that is so, would he agree that subsection (4) together with the extension would result in our negotiators being locked for ever in a room labelled Article 50 until we give up?
Lord Oates
No, I would not agree with that. Fascinating as it is for me to comment on what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said at Second Reading or otherwise, I will leave it to him to comment, but I do not agree that that would be the case.
Those who argued that the purpose of Brexit was to take back control and restore parliamentary sovereignty should have no problem with this at all. I would say with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, that the real irony is that people who talk so much about parliamentary sovereignty want to surrender it so easily to the Executive.
As the House will be aware, while the Liberal Democrats fully support this amendment and its objective of giving Parliament a real and meaningful say, we believe that, once Parliament has spoken, the people should have the final word in a national referendum. Noble Lords have different views on this subject but, whatever one’s view on the referendum, this amendment will ensure that we make real the promise to take back control and that our Parliament has real and meaningful oversight of the outcome of negotiations. I am very pleased to support the amendment.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
My Lords, perhaps I can make my position clear. I think that we have four different attempts to find a solution to a problem that we are all looking for. For me, it would be neater if I made my points on Amendment 17, before others introduce their solutions. I am very much in sympathy with most of what appears in Amendment 17, but I share quite a lot of the difficulties that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, expressed, although perhaps not exactly for the same reasons. I will explain myself a little more.
At Second Reading, I made the point that there was a respectable argument that only Parliament has the constitutional authority to authorise the act of concluding an agreement with the EU or the act of withdrawal, if that is what the Government seek to do. For that reason, I respectfully suggest that it is in the Government’s best interests, for their own protection, to look for a form of words that will provide them with the answer to any possible challenge that might be made along lines that would impede progress towards a final agreement. It was with that view that I was searching for some kind of solution to the problem. I said at Second Reading that I would not seek to put forward an amendment myself and that it was more for the Government to try to find a way of doing it, which it is perhaps still open to them to do.
I will explain my views on proposed new subsections (1) to (3). As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has explained, the Government have given an undertaking. David Jones said in the House of Commons:
“First of all, we intend that the vote will cover not only the withdrawal arrangements but also the future relationship with the European Union. Furthermore, I can confirm that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement, to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; col. 264.]
There are three elements in that undertaking, all of which find their place in subsections (1) to (3) in the proposed new clause. However, I have to say that I have a quarrel with the wording. Clause 1 of the Bill, as I mentioned at Second Reading, is beautifully crafted in the simplest possible language. I am troubled by the fact that, if you cast the undertaking in the framework that you find in Clause 1, you can produce that undertaking in four lines instead of 16. Just from the point of view of the aesthetics of drafting, I would have thought that it would be proper to try to use the undertaking as a basis for an amendment. The amendment would be very simple: another four- line amendment, which would fit neatly into the character of the Bill. It would provide the Government with the protection that I suggest they need and would produce the answer to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, with which I entirely agree, about the sovereignty of Parliament. I believe that the sovereignty of Parliament is absolutely paramount in reaching an agreement.
I do not want to elaborate on this point because I agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, apart from the wording, which I suggest might be more attractively put. As he might recognise, I am adopting a tactic that advocates adopt in court: if you are addressing a judge, trying to find a way of formulating your proposition, and the judge comes out with some form of words that is not exactly in accordance with it but is in accordance with what you are driving at, it is quite a good tactic to pick up his words, as it is more likely that he will accept your answer. I am just adopting that tactic, as we have this there on a plate before us. You draw together the two things: the language of the undertaking and the interest that the Government have in getting the thing in the Bill for their own purposes. The undertaking that the Minister gave in the House of Commons was not given lightly. We can all understand that it would have been carefully worded and approved by somebody a good deal higher up the line of government than the Minister who was giving it. It really is a gift to adopt those words and get it into the Bill in that language.
I respectfully suggest that it would be wiser to detach subsection (4) from subsections (1) to (3), because we can grapple with subsections (1) to (3) for the reasons that I have given, but subsection (4) raises problems. I do not want to go over all the ground but, through a simple reading of the wording, you can see immediately the difficulty that it runs into. First, it tries to combine two different situations, in that it talks about “the termination” or termination “unilaterally”. I presume that when it talks about termination the first time, this is where both sides are unable to reach an agreement and there is a complete breakdown between both sides. If that is the situation, I, for the moment, cannot understand what can be done. There is no point in coming to the Government and asking for it to be approved, because you cannot get back to the negotiation table. It is a Humpty-Dumpty situation: Humpty-Dumpty has fallen off the wall and you cannot put the bits together again. So I cannot understand that part of the amendment.
The second part talks about terminating unilaterally. Although I can understand what that situation might be, the problem is that subsection (4) requires the Government to come to both Houses for prior approval before they can do that. You can imagine a situation where the Houses say, “We are not satisfied, go back and have another go”, and then we have the neverendum situation that has been referred to—going round and round in a circle with no way out.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way. I was following with great interest his ratiocination until he got to the point about neverendums. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has made clear, there cannot be a neverendum, because the two-year guillotine comes down. The only way to get beyond the two-year guillotine—and this answers the point that the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, made—is by the agreement of all 27 member states and the United Kingdom. If the United Kingdom refuses a prolongation of the two-year period, then it cannot be prolonged. So can we please drop the references to neverendums and just address whatever problems the noble learned Lord has with the wording of subsection (4)?
Lord Hope of Craighead
I entirely understand the point that the noble Lord is making, but the trouble with subsection (4) is that it does not mention the two-year period—we do not know what period we are talking about. That is one of the problems with it. It does not think through to the factual situation that would arise in the situation that is being addressed.
I do not at all underestimate the importance of finding a solution to the point that this subsection seeks to address; I am in sympathy with it. I just say that it is not suitably worded and it should be rethought. It is for that reason that I suggest that we should not try to struggle to put the two things together. We should separate out subsections (1) to (3) and adopt my solution, which I need not repeat, as to how they might be simplified and made more attractive and then think again about subsection (4). We can find a way to address exactly the particular situation that it seeks—of separating out the unilateral termination from the bilateral situation—and then try to find ways of meeting that. I do not need to elaborate, but these are the points that I wish to make in broad sympathy with what Amendment 17 is seeking to achieve.
Baroness Goldie
My Lords, I am aware that we have not heard from the Labour Benches at all in respect of this group of amendments and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, has her name attached to one of the amendments.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
I am grateful to the Minister and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, will not mind my stepping in here. I have my name attached to Amendment 31, but I really support Amendment 17 as it has been described by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. As an advocate, I would always follow the indications given by a judge such as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, whose advice is very useful, given that he is by and large in sympathy with what is being sought here.
I remind the House of a question that was asked previously by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill—I can see her sitting on the Cross Benches—on what happens if there is an agreement that is really a bad agreement, a bad deal, or what happens if there is no deal at all. We did not hear a proper answer to that question, and I think that it is one that we sought to answer in Amendment 31. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and—to spare his blushes—he did not make mention of the judgment in the Miller case, in which he was counsel. In that case—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, said something about this on Second Reading—a very important matter of principle was involved. It was not just that the Supreme Court made the decision that Parliament’s approval was necessary for the triggering of Article 50. What was also dealt with there was the principle at the heart of this—the principle that when it comes to fundamentally changing law, or removing rights from our domestic law, Parliament has to be the place that authorises and approves such matters.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, I shall come at the amendments from a slightly different angle. It seems to me, listening to the debate, that those who have tabled them may not fully understand what goes on in the House of Commons, or what the nature of parliamentary sovereignty really is. As we know, and as Bagehot reminded us 150 years ago, it is actually the majority in Parliament at the time—or whoever can muster a majority—and the managers of the party or parties behind that majority, who seek to maintain the majority, get the Government’s business through and carry out the Government’s intentions.
I am totally in favour of maximum parliamentary involvement in this process, and I have been from the start. I am sorry that it had to go to the Supreme Court; I thought the Government made a mistake in not putting it openly and fully to Parliament from the beginning. I am glad the case went as it did and, peering into the next two or three years or however long it takes, I welcome the fact that all along the way Parliament will be heavily and continuously involved—particularly the Commons, but ourselves as well, of course. That is my forecast.
People say that Parliament should not involve itself in negotiation. I hear my noble friends say that, and it sounds very sensible. In practice, the daily newspapers, the media and Parliament will all involve themselves in negotiations. There will be leaks in every direction and constant debates. Motions will be moved in the House of Commons. The Government may deplore that or try to avoid it; the Whips may manoeuvre to try to suppress it but that will not happen. There will be a massive and continuous debate about this matter over the next two years. When we eventually get to the point where there is some kind of resolution—whether it is the divorce papers; the new relationship; a bundle between the two; or a single core of views with a long trail of dozens of different sectoral views and arrangements and complex and numerous regulations—Parliament will be deeply involved. Whoever has the majority in Parliament will be in a position to assert their will over it, to reject or accept it. It needs no statute law whatever in practice and Parliament will not need to authorise, criticise or reject any arrangements for the divorce and new relationships that Her Majesty’s Government seek to put before it. They will have to do that; the Prime Minister has undertaken to do so and it will happen. The arrangements will be extensive and complex and will have numerous bilateral elements.
This is where the puzzle grows greater. If, at that point, the Government cease to have a majority, lose control or there are too many rebels and a majority is formed against the proposals, which are then rejected, arrangements leading to a general election will be triggered. I am not sure how that works with the five-year rule but the rejection would be a vote of no confidence in the Government and would trigger, one way or another, a general election. So the people would have their say and that is what will happen. The supporters of the amendment seem curiously unaware that MPs, including Back-Benchers in all parties—both official and minor opposition ones—are perfectly capable of bringing whatever the Government agree to the Floor of the House of Commons and voting on it. Votes can be engineered on crucial aspects which, if they were central enough, could destroy the Government. They can bring matters to Parliament by well-tried procedural devices at any time during the negotiating period.
The elaborate amendments, which distinguished lawyers around me are discussing, are totally unnecessary and do not fit in with the way in which Parliament has evolved and worked over the last 200 years. We have the doctrines of Bagehot, the realities of parliamentary manoeuvres and Governments being brought down by people switching sides. All this has happened and may well happen again. To put it on the statute book is to create an absurdity. There is no need for any statutes to tell Parliament how to behave.
Lord Hope of Craighead
One of the points made by the Supreme Court is that it is legislation that provides the authority for the kind of exercise we are talking about. It is all very well having Motions on the Floor of the House, but legislation is the key. That is why I suggest the Government need legislation for the protection I mentioned at Second Reading. If it is in the Bill, we get legislative authority.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, if Parliament voted to bring down the process—the whole confection the Government had worked on and negotiated over two years—it would not need a law, just a majority. Three or four years ago, Parliament voted against the Government’s wish to mount military action against Syria. No one wrote a statute saying that we must not fire cruise missiles at Bashar al-Assad and no one needs a statute here. A majority may well move against this. It is quite possible that, over the years, the media view may build up that this is unacceptable, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and others have rightly reminded us. Some reversal may happen half way through. The Governments of France, Germany and Italy are all likely to change and turmoil is about to take place in the European continent. The people we are negotiating with may well change completely in the next 18 months. All this could happen and would change the approach totally. At that point, whoever can muster a majority in Parliament and form a Government—until they are overthrown—can and will have their say. That is called the sovereign role of Parliament. That is the reality. We are moving around ideas of statutes, which belong nicely in the world of law but not in the world of reality—of parliamentary procedure, parliamentary history, parliamentary action or parliamentary will when MPs really get going. It is a different world down there and that should be understood by the supporters of these amendments, which are unnecessary.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, this is not a debate which will be solved on the basis of this group of amendments. It is quite clear that we have to make an amendment to ensure parliamentary sovereignty. I remind your Lordships that we are only having this debate now because we had to go to court to insist upon having it. I remind your Lordships that it is not a proper way for Parliament to proceed via the courts. This happens in other countries without our history and without, I am afraid, the intrusion of Parliament. That phrase should be remembered. Parliament does not intrude when it makes a decision about the future of this nation.
We need to say to the Government that they cannot make a decision without it being put before Parliament in circumstances where Parliament is empowered to make that decision. It is perfectly happy for my noble friend to say, “Well, Parliament will do that anyway”, and “My goodness, we have been doing it all over the years” and all the rest of it—but we have not made a decision of this kind in these circumstances which can possibly be brought forward as a parallel. We have for the first time invented a system whereby we have asked the people for their decision. They have made a decision, but we do not really have a system by which we can naturally enforce and carry it through.
It is therefore perfectly proper for this House to seek the way that most defends parliamentary sovereignty. We do not work on the basis of “one man, one vote, once”. We try to accept what happened in the referendum. I admit, as this House knows, that I am a fierce opponent of Brexit—but that is not the point of this debate. The point of this debate is to stand up again for parliamentary sovereignty. My noble friends can say what they like about the details of the law, but they have to accept that we had to go to court to have the discussion. Therefore, they must also accept that this House ought to ensure that there is a copper-bottomed statutory protection for what the Prime Minister has promised in all good faith.
We also have to take seriously the issue of what happens if the Government decide that they do not like the solution that they have come to and therefore want to relapse into a WTO arrangement, or whatever it may be. If that happens, we will have to have a procedure by which both Houses of Parliament are able to make the decision. Why do the Government not want to do it? I do not understand this. I would have thought that the Government would have wanted to make sure that everybody accepts that this very difficult decision, based on a 52-48 vote and a good deal of misunderstanding on both sides, needs to have proper parliamentary procedure.
The only people who really oppose it—it is very difficult for me to say this, because I am always against lawyers, but I am much attracted to the proposals which we have just heard—and are really pressing for this not to happen are those newspapers that are determined to press their case, irrespective of what we will think in two years’ time. All I want to say is that I do not want to reverse, or fight, or stop what was in my view an entirely wrong decision. It has been made. But I remind us all that we are a parliamentary democracy and that it is necessary for Parliament to be sure that it has a proper say.
Finally, if we insist on this, we will also strengthen the hand of those who are trying to reach a solution which we can all accept and win the best solution for Britain, and will strengthen the hand of those who get up in this House and argue the case for it. We strengthen the hand of moderate, sensible people against those who appear to think that it does not matter how you do it as long as you do it. In that sense we will be asserting not only parliamentary sovereignty but the right of Parliament to insist that the case is put to Parliament and that Parliament is enabled to answer it.
Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)
My Lords, I hope that this is not too legalistic an intervention but I wish to seek some clarification. There have been a number of references to the Miller case. In paragraph 36 of its judgment, the Supreme Court said:
“The applicants’ case … is that when Notice is given, the United Kingdom will have embarked on an irreversible course that will lead to much of EU law ceasing to have effect in the United Kingdom, whether or not Parliament repeals the 1972 Act. As Lord Pannick QC put it for Mrs Miller, when ministers give Notice they will be ‘pulling … the trigger which causes the bullet to be fired, with the consequence that the bullet will hit the target and the Treaties will cease to apply’”.
I may be being obtuse, and of course there is an important difference between the role of the applicant and the role of the legislator, but I am curious to know whether the amendment would, if enacted, provide a bullet-proof jacket to the bullet which my noble friend Lord Pannick so effectively deployed in argument in the Supreme Court.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
My Lords, I support Amendment 31. I realise that I am feeling a bit fractious, which is probably because I have not had my dinner. I cannot answer for other noble Lords’ fractiousness this evening but I imagine that it is for similar reasons.
I have no legal training but I think that the situation is perfectly logical. We had to have an Act of Parliament to go into the EU, and therefore surely it is completely logical to have an Act of Parliament to enable our withdrawal. To those people who keep on about taking back control, I say that if we do not have that Act of Parliament and that scrutiny, we will be giving the European Parliament or the EU more control over the terms than we have ourselves. So I commend Amendment 31.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I have a slightly different point to make. I do not want to repeat what I said to your Lordships on the first day of Committee but perhaps I may again read the Long Title of this legislation. It is a Bill to:
“Confer power on the Prime Minister to notify, under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU”,
and that is followed by one clause.
We have had a most entertaining disquisition and a whole series of teach-ins on various aspects of what the nation will be debating over the next year, including tonight from some extremely eminent lawyers and diplomats. It is clear to me as the Bill advances that the noble Lords, Lord Hannay, Lord Pannick and Lord Kerr, are emerging as the Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and St Bonaventure of the details of this argument—the scholastic philosophers of what is before us. Unfortunately for the scholastic philosophers, the Christian communities involved did not accept that they had a monopoly of wisdom, because brilliance has to be tempered by practicality and practical wisdom. The problem that Parliament in its entirety has to wrestle with is how we respond to a vote by the British people with a majority of one and a quarter million to leave the European Union. That will exercise us for some time, but I do not think this is the time for scholastic argument. I take the same view on this amendment as on many others: it is an unnecessary obstruction—not in time or in practice, but we should focus on the purpose of this Bill.
I make a further point, which we should wrestle with over the next few months with some care. A great deal has been said about parliamentary sovereignty. I agree with the comments made by my noble friend Lord Howard and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, on subsection (4). But there is a deeper difficulty in this talk—and it is good talk; I am a devout parliamentarian—about parliamentary final say. In our parliamentary system there are two Houses. There is a House of Commons, which is elected and which can ultimately enforce its will, if need be through the Parliament Act—as is envisaged in one of these amendments—and there is another House, your Lordships’ House, which is unelected.
Today we established a new fact. We had a vote. In that vote, which is the second highest vote ever recorded in the House of Lords, 614 Peers voted. The result was, I believe, 356 to 258, or it might have been the other way around—
Lord True
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. So it was the other way around—358 to 256—which strengthens my argument. There is—if those 358 care to unite again and again—an insurmountable wall in your Lordships’ House, an unelected House, against the will of the other place, Her Majesty’s Government. I will not use the phrase “the will of the people”—we are acting on the instructions of the people, but I know it offends some. There is an insurmountable wall. It is inconceivable that the Government could form enough people in this place to overcome it. So when I read these amendments, which, effectively, have said that nothing can proceed and nothing can be terminated without the consent of your Lordships’ House, I see them as effectively giving your Lordships’ House—an unelected House, with a force that the world out there sees today—a veto on the procedure to take this forward. I give way to the noble Lord—
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I am grateful to the noble Lord. I wonder whether he has had a word with the Prime Minister, who basically coined this approach. She put in the Lancaster House speech a statement that both Houses should have their say. She then replicated it in the White Paper. So, rather than addressing people like myself and the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Pannick, about this, could he perhaps have a word with his right honourable friend?
Lord True
It may be that the noble Lord has more access to my right honourable friend than I do. My right honourable friend is perfectly capable of forming a judgment and I have no doubt we will hear from my noble friend on the Front Bench. I do not resile for a moment from the advice that I am giving. I would give that advice to my right honourable friend as well. But it would be a strange place to put this country, at this time, on this Bill, at this stage of these proceedings, if we pass legislation that effectively gives a veto to a House that has voted with 358 Members against the request of the Front Bench to allow this Bill to proceed unamended as the House of Commons did. This is a major issue that needs to be addressed and it is one to which I hope the country and this Parliament will turn its mind.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, I have now served in Parliament for over 25 years—roughly half that time in each House. I do not think the noble Lord who has just spoken has had experience of the House of Commons.
I want to address two insidious arguments. One argument—which we have heard often over recent days and the noble Lord has repeated it—is that somehow, the House of Lords should not intervene because the House of Commons has already spoken. If we take that argument to its extremity, there is no point in your Lordships’ House. It is simply giving ammunition to those, who are now increasing in number, who want a unicameral Parliament, who want to abolish this House, not just to reform it or to make it an elected Senate, as I do. I am very firmly in favour of a bicameral Parliament, as are my noble friends on these Benches, but there are now more people, many more people, who wish to abolish this House than want it to retain its present, appointed basis. That is very dangerous. If the noble Lord, Lord True, wants to persuade your Lordships’ House that we do not have a status on an issue as important as this, that we do not have a perfect right to tell the other place to think again, then I do not agree with him. It was evident from that very considerable vote on the earlier amendment that that is not the majority view in your Lordships’ House.
The other insidious argument which I think is really dangerous is to say, as many Members of your Lordships’ House seem to be saying, “Yes, we are very keen on the sovereignty of Parliament, but we are not prepared to reiterate that point now”. If not now, when? The Minister has on several occasions—he is persistent and sometimes persuasive—made a good point about some of the amendments that have come before your Lordships’ House about the process of negotiation; there will be other opportunities. There will not be another opportunity to set out a simple and sensible process within Parliament —both Houses—for the way we decide the outcome of the negotiations.
I was very impressed by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Deben. He and I used to have discussions in the other place; I used to have to try to shadow him. He and the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, are the true Thatcherites, because they helped the great architect of the single market to make real sense for Britain of the single market, as, indeed, did the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, who was here earlier. But I do not think that we can really wait for the end of the process to decide how Parliament is going to take the process. That is why I thought the contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, was so helpful. If the Government cannot, between now and Report, find a way of setting before our House and, in due course, the other place, a process that we can all agree is one that defends the sovereignty of Parliament, defends our rights, in both Houses, to take these important decisions, then the Government are seriously at fault and may well find themselves losing a vote in your Lordships’ House, albeit perhaps not with the same majority as on Amendment 9B.
This is an extremely important moment, not just for the future of our country—of course it is—but for the future of our Parliament. If we effectively tie one hand behind our back, in either House or both Houses collectively, then we are doing a great disservice to the whole principle of the sovereignty of Parliament. I do not know whether the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, is going to follow me but he is the ideal person to spell out the importance of defending Parliament against an elective dictatorship. It is clear from the attendance at this late hour, nearly 10.45 pm, that many in this Committee share these concerns about how we are approaching this issue. We have not got it right yet. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, made a very valid point about the way these amendments have come forward. It is the Government’s responsibility to find a better solution to what I think we all agree is a very serious problem.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I think we would serve ourselves a little better if we did not focus on this as an issue between this House and the other place, or, indeed, between the Executive and Parliament. We need to think about this as a matter which is between all of us, whichever House we sit in, whichever side of the argument we were on during the referendum campaign, and the people who are outside. It is important that we reflect on something that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said on Monday during the debate on the single market. She quoted Lampedusa, saying that for things to stay the same, we have to change.
Lord Higgins (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 17 is tremendously important because it seeks to assert that the decisions on these matters should be taken by Parliament. I have great difficulty understanding why the Prime Minister and, apparently, the Government have seemed so determined to avoid that happening, to the extent of bringing a totally unnecessary court case. They could have gone back right from the start on the procedure we are now going through at considerable public expense. Against that background, it is very important that we should get this amendment right. We must have an awful lot of thought between now and next week to ensure that the amendment we actually pass is the right amendment.
The other point that one needs to take into account is the situation likely to arise towards the conclusion of the negotiations. It seems to me essential that Parliament should decide whether it does or does not accept those negotiations. The difficulty is that if no deal is reached, the whole deal is off and we are back to the situation before we joined the European Union. The interesting question is: if the deal is clearly worse than remaining in the European Union, what happens then? At that point, Parliament needs to consider whether it has accepted the result of the referendum. If it has done everything possible to bring it about but now finds itself in the situation where it is blatantly obvious that the deal is worse than remaining in, it ought to make that decision. Those who voted in the referendum in favour of leaving should realise that that is a sensible solution for us to adopt.
There is one further point that we need to consider before next week and we will need to read very carefully everything that has been said this evening. We may find at the end of negotiations that we would like to change our minds and it would be better to go back to the situation before the referendum. A committee of your Lordships’ House dealt with that issue very clearly having taken expert advice from, I am assured, some very good lawyers, who said that we could change our minds. That possibility was disputed by a number of other lawyers, not least international lawyers. It would be extremely helpful if we could have a definitive view from the Government next week on what the situation is.
We have a lot of work ahead of us for the next few days, but this has been an immensely helpful debate. There is a problem with proposed new subsection (4) of the amendment. I interpreted that as being enormously pro-Brexit. It states that Ministers are not allowed to stop the arrangements if they want to. Having said all that, it has been helpful to have this debate this evening and I look forward to hearing my noble friend Lord Hailsham, who was kind enough to give way to let me speak before him.
Lord Lisvane (CB)
My Lords, I hope that the noble Viscount will be kind enough to allow me to interpose very briefly. I support the thrust of Amendment 17 and certainly the aim that it seeks to achieve, but I have a couple of questions about the mechanisms that it proposes to do that. It proposes proceeding by resolution of each House. There are two issues. First, what happens if a straightforward approval Motion is amended and the final result is a resolution that overall approves an outcome but contains some sort of rider or condition? Regulating parliamentary proceedings by statute, in my experience, generally ends in some sort of tears. A question of whether the outcome met the requirements of the legislation could be resolved only by the courts, and that might not be a welcome result.
Secondly, what happens if one House comes to the required resolution but the other does not? Perhaps the solution is one that would endorse the sage advice given earlier by my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead which is to employ primary legislation, because that contains very well-understood mechanisms for securing agreement between the two Houses.
Viscount Hailsham
My Lords, I know the hour is late so I will be very short; I will confine myself to making three points. The first is to adopt the language of my noble friend Lord Deben. This House must recognise that, ultimately, the decision has to be made by Parliament. Historically, there has always been tension between the Executive and Parliament and I happen to be a Roundhead on this matter. Let us not forget, as my noble friend pointed out, that we would not be debating this Bill had the courts not intervened. The truth is that Governments always seek to advance ministerial power at the expense of Parliament and we must push back. The historians among us will remember John Dunning saying that,
“the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished”,
and, with suitable alteration, that is where I stand.
My second point refers to what the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, said a propos the risk of there being no agreement. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, assessed that risk as being higher than 30% and I entirely share that view. We need to address that in statutory language. That is what I tried to achieve in the new clause that would be introduced by my Amendment 32.
My final point, turning to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—I know it is the view of the noble Baroness as well—is that assurances are well and good and I do not at all doubt the good faith of the Ministers who give them. But I prefer to see assurances in statutory language. Prime Ministers can go, Ministers can be sacked, Parliaments can change and Governments can cease to exist. One needs to enshrine assurances that stand against those changes in circumstances. Therefore, whenever we come to divide on this group of amendments, whichever is chosen, I shall support it because I stand in favour of parliamentary government.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)
My Lords, it is very late. We are tired. I do not know about the rest of your Lordships but I certainly am. I have sat here for four hours, a speech burning in my head, but listening to the speeches that have been made, I would not make any point that has not been made already, particularly in regard to the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, which were probably better than any I could ever have made. I am content to leave their words as mine on the record, in the hope that we may hear from the Minister fairly soon.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
Noble Lords will be pleased to know that I, too, am not going to repeat the arguments put so succinctly by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, nor the wise words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope—although my noble friend Lord Lennie said at one point, “Oh dear, it sounds like a redrafting of Clause 4”. A certain group would understand that.
The agreement that the Government negotiate, or fail to negotiate, has enormous implications for this country. As has been said from the Dispatch Box many times, the referendum gave the UK a final say: that we should leave the European Union. That is the destination. However, it said nothing about the route or the pace of that change. As someone said to me, it is a bit like deciding to jump out of an aeroplane. You know exactly where you are going, but doing it before you have learned how to use the parachute could be troublesome. You could have a hard landing—that was the wrong phrase—if you do not know about the wind, the altitude and particularly the position of the ripcord.
The referendum gave no hints about any of the trade-offs that will come in what I hope will be a harmonious partnership that we will be able to negotiate with the EU 27. The Government will negotiate that, but Parliament must agree it. The agreement will have to go to the Council and the European Parliament; that is written in law in Article 50. It is therefore mandatory in law that the European Parliament will have to give its consent. But there is nothing in law that states that this Parliament must give its consent.
Although assurances have been given and the Prime Minister has said that there will be a vote in both Houses, it is not good enough. That is partly because it is a vote rather than legislation and partly because the same protection that the European Parliament has is not written in statute. That is all we are asking for. There must be equal legislative requirement on the exit deal for this Parliament to cover all eventualities. The debate has been on whether we have just the divorce, the withdrawal, or we have the withdrawal plus the framework, or the withdrawal and even a treaty—I doubt it will be within two years—or whether we get nowhere. Surely, as has been said by my noble friend Lady Kennedy, only this Parliament can decide on that. That is all that we are asking. The drafting can improve.
The most interesting questions were asked by the noble Lords, Lord Deben and Lord Higgins: why do the Government not want to do this? What is troubling them? They are going to have to do it at some time. They can either bring forward another piece of legislation later, which I think was the advice of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, or they will be taken there by a court—but get there we will. That is another part of the destination; there will have to be legislation and this sort of amendment, tweaked if necessary, is one that this House will want to support.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, this has been an excellent and interesting debate, and I am slightly wary at this late hour to be inserting myself between the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who, as I said at Second Reading, is such a worthy adversary.
What everyone, myself included, clearly shares is the sentiment and perfectly legitimate intention to ensure that Parliament is able to hold the Government to account as we leave the European Union. But there is one fact of brutal simplicity that towers above this whole debate. Much though it may bore or irritate some noble Lords, I fear that it is one we cannot and must not ignore. It is simply this: the majority of people voted to leave the EU. I know that a number of your Lordships have argued with great passion that this was the wrong decision, but the decision has been made and we are going to withdraw from the EU.
Lord Pannick
I am grateful to the Minister, although I am disappointed that he did not give the undertaking that the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, asked of him: that he answer definitively by next Tuesday complex questions of EU law. I look forward to seeing that.
The mood of the Committee tonight has been broadly supportive of writing parliamentary sovereignty into the Bill. I say to the Minister that Amendment 17 is concerned not with whether we withdraw from the EU but with parliamentary sovereignty over the terms of our withdrawal.
However, valuable points have been made from around the Committee as to the drafting of Amendment 17. I for my part want to reflect on those points before we bring back the amendment, as we will, on Report on Tuesday. I see the considerable force of the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, to whom I am grateful, that the amendment should be kept as simple as possible, mirroring the undertakings already given by the Prime Minister. However, it must also address the real possibility—and it is real—that the Prime Minister may decide that we should leave the EU without an agreement on terms. That also, surely, must be a matter for Parliament to decide. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“Involvement of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
(1) Within six months of exercising the power under section 1(1), the Prime Minister must publish a document setting out arrangements that have been agreed between the Prime Minister and the devolved administrations for the Secretary of State to—(a) consult the devolved administrations on the matters referred to in subsection (2), (b) specify how their views on those matters will be taken into account, and(c) seek to reach a consensus on those matters.(2) The matters are—(a) the terms proposed for withdrawal from the European Union (including the initial negotiating position), and(b) the framework for the United Kingdom’s future relationship with the European Union.(3) The arrangements referred to subsection (1) must make provision for statements to be published setting out the extent to which consensus has been reached.(4) The arrangements may make provision for functions to be exercised by Joint Ministerial Committees.(5) Before concluding an agreement under the process set out in Article 50 with any institution of the European Union, the Prime Minister must consult the devolved administrations on the terms of any proposed agreements, and specify how their views have been taken into account.(6) For the purposes of this section, the devolved administrations are—(a) the Scottish Ministers,(b) the Welsh Ministers, and(c) the Executive Committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly.”
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, Amendment 21 would underpin the involvement of devolved Administrations in the Brexit process. It would both formalise and strengthen the arrangements that the Government have already put in place through the joint ministerial committee, whose terms of reference commit the Government to seek to reach consensus on their negotiating position with the devolved Administrations. The amendment does not ask for the Government to do anything more than they have already undertaken other than to report on what is going on to Parliament, but we need it in the Bill, not least because the undertakings given by the Government have already been honoured more in the breach than in the observance.
Neither the content of the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech nor the White Paper was discussed at the JMC; indeed, the devolved Administrations were given virtually no notice that either was imminent. This is particularly regrettable given that the Prime Minister convened a full JMC at heads of government level on 30 January, just three days before the White Paper. The gentle encouragement and legal requirement in the amendment are, therefore, needed.
Amendment 21 also requires Ministers to consult the devolved Administrations on any agreement, both on our exit from and on our future relationships with the EU, and to report on such discussions. That is the least that this House would expect before we form our own view of those agreements. As the Supreme Court recognised in the Miller case, leaving the European Union has profound implications for the devolved Administrations, because they have direct responsibility for some of the areas—such as agriculture, fisheries, the environment and economic development—that are most regulated or influenced by the EU.
This has been explored helpfully in relation to the environment by our Select Committee on the EU in its thoughtful report Brexit: Environment and Climate Change, which devoted a whole chapter to devolution. While acknowledging Andrea Leadsom’s admission that, in relation to the great repeal Bill, perhaps a third of the environmental regulations will not be easy to transpose, our committee considered that, in the absence of an overarching EU framework, the four parts of the UK could see considerable divergences in their environmental law. As we know, rivers flow, winds blow and the sea covers many shores, so it will be essential that the Government’s negotiations in this area are completely harmonised with the thinking in the devolved Administrations.
Furthermore, changes relating to non-devolved policies will have huge significance for devolved Administrations, particularly if the Government whisks the UK out of the customs union. Needless to say, any such decision could threaten the open border in Ireland, as we discussed on Monday. With the UK Government free to develop their own trade policy, that could undermine key policies of the devolved Administrations. As the Welsh Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs pointed out, a free trade agreement with New Zealand that permitted tariff-free imports of lamb could completely undermine Welsh hill farming and, with it, the environmental well-being of the Welsh uplands. I just realised that I lost my daffodil, today of all days.
This modest amendment, asking the Government to commit to consult the devolved Administrations and report on that, is wholly in the spirit of the Sewel convention, which requires Parliament to consult those bodies on legislation that affects their competences. I understand from the somewhat weasel words of the White Paper that the Government believe that they should take powers currently exercised by the Commission to themselves over areas that are wholly devolved, such as agriculture and environment. Needless to say, that would be absolutely unacceptable to the Scottish and Welsh Governments, as well as inconsistent with devolution legislation, because that qualifies the devolved legislatures’ freedom to act only by requiring them to do nothing that conflicts with EU legislation. Clearly, that is going to be meaningless post our exit from the EU.
This was recognised by the Supreme Court, which said:
“The removal of the EU constraints on withdrawal … will alter the competences of the devolved institutions unless new legislative constraints are introduced. In the absence of such new restraints, withdrawal from the EU will enhance the devolved competence”.
Should the Government, however, wish to introduce such constraints, this could provoke—as it was kindly called in one of the meetings that I went to—a constitutional fracas, which we can ill afford just when Brexit provides the most significant political challenge in a generation.
The White Paper Securing Wales’ Future, issued jointly by the Labour-led Welsh Government, which includes the Liberal Democrat from my home seat of Brecon and Radnor, and Plaid Cymru, sets out an alternative, which would both preserve the devolution settlement and recognise legitimate concerns about potential market distortions if each part of the UK acts independently on things such as farm subsidies, emissions or pollution once they are no longer regulated by the EU. The Welsh White Paper argues for a new set of constitutional arrangements based on voluntary agreements in devolved areas between all four Governments, supported by independent arbitration. There would be similar structures for the non-devolved issues such as trade agreements and state aid, which have major implications for devolved polices.
We on this side have not had time to consider these matters in detail, but the Government should now turn their attention to them. Amendment 21 therefore suggests joint ministerial committees only as one vehicle. Another constitutional settlement looks to be necessary and there may be another way forward. I urge the Government both to prove that they are earnest in their commitment to working with the devolved Administrations on the many complex issues and to look forward to how in future they can all work together. I beg to move.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, as the noble Baroness mentioned, it is still St David’s Day—just. I have my name on Amendment 21 and support what was said about the absolute need to ensure that the devolved Administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are at the centre of reaching a consensus—meaning, of course, some give and take—across the UK on what will be the proposed terms of withdrawal from the European Union and the future frameworks for our relationships with the EU.
As the noble Baroness mentioned a moment ago, the National Assembly for Wales already indicated its good will in this matter by publishing the White Paper, Securing Wales’ Future. It is an excellent and very constructive White Paper and I invite the Minister to endorse the positive approaches taken in it as a basis for the co-operation and consensus the Government pledged to seek. I hope that they can do that either by accepting Amendment 21 or in other ways.
If the Minister cannot or will not do so, that will undoubtedly be seen as an indication that, although warm words may be said about securing a UK consensus, it will not be underpinned by a legislative guarantee. In those circumstances, the provisions of Amendment 36 would be needed, preventing the Government from exercising the powers of this Bill until all devolved Administrations have agreed. However, if the Government can move along the lines of Amendment 21, I would see that as a positive way forward.
The noble Baroness also referred to the powers that, post Brexit, should be transferred to the devolved Administrations. Clearly, if Brexit goes ahead and powers are repatriated from Brussels, some will deal with matters that are totally devolved, such as agriculture. To my mind, these functions should immediately be directed to Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast as appropriate. Clearly, there needs to be some mechanism to resolve any disagreements about what should be passed on to the devolved Administrations. In that context, I await the words of my noble friend Lord Elystan-Morgan, whose Amendment 43 possibly addresses that.
In conclusion—these will probably be my last words in Committee—what matters so much is that, in Edinburgh as in Belfast and Cardiff, there is a feeling that the Government are working with them as partners in this project. Clearly, the power rests in London, but if it is a question of “London knows everything better” and if it does not take on board the objectives and tactics put forward by any of those devolved regimes, and does not give them serious thought, then it creates problems for itself in its relationship with these organisations.
I seriously suggest to the Minister that he please consider this White Paper as a basis. It has cross-party agreement in Cardiff and it is not impossible also to form a cross-party basis here.
Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)
My Lords, in proposing Amendment 43, I accept totally everything that has been said by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and my noble friend Lord Wigley in respect of their amendments. Those amendments are social and political in their nature. They constitute an overwhelming case for why, in order to preserve the unity of the United Kingdom, the reality of devolution and the harmony between the various constituent parts of the United Kingdom, respect should be shown by the mother parliament to the parliaments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Those are political and social considerations; the matter that I wish to propose is in no way contrary to that but runs parallel. It is a constitutional point. It is a marvellously simple constitutional point, and I think I can deal with it in very short compass. It concerns the reserved powers constitution that Wales achieved under the Wales Act which became law a few weeks ago. The purpose of that Act was to change the whole pattern of devolution for Wales from a conferred pattern of devolution—bit by bit over the years, a confetti type of development—to a reserved powers constitution.
It is axiomatic as far as a reserved powers constitution is concerned that two matters should be dominant. The essence of a reserved powers constitution, as we appreciate, is that there is a transfer in the first instance of the totality of power from the mother parliament to the subsidiary parliament, but that at the same time there should be a reservation of a strict number of exceptions and reservations. It is axiomatic, therefore, that two conditions must prevail. First, the mother parliament must be seized of all the legislative power and authority that is relevant to the situation. That is obvious. Secondly, the mother parliament must be cognisant of the powers that it has and must be in a position to know exactly where to draw the line between that which is transferred and that which is reserved. Neither of those conditions exists in this case.
Why is that so? I remember a piece of dog Latin that I learned many years ago when I was a law student in relation to the sale of goods: “nemo dat quod non habet”—no man can give that which he does not have. Nobody can transfer that which they do not have. When it came to the question of deciding what powers Wales should have, the mother parliament did not have a mass of those powers that are relevant to the situation. There is a huge area that is missing. It may be 25%; it may be 30% or 40%. It is massive in relation to the totality of legal authority. That authority was missing from 1 January 1973, ever since the European Communities Act 1972 came into force. It never was with the mother parliament to dispose of. It could not possibly give it to Wales, or to Scotland for that matter—in Northern Ireland, the situation was entirely different, because its constitution goes back to 1922.
What, therefore, is to be done? The following matters have some relevance, broadly. Of course, there is the question of the Sewel convention, which has been written into both the Scotland Act and the Wales Act. That will have its effect gradually over the years. There is also the question of the joint ministerial committee, which meets in confidence and is able to discuss in a situation of total secrecy matters which are of the utmost importance to the mother parliament and the devolved parliaments. There is also the question of protocols, which was greatly promised in the late 1990s when legislation in relation to Scottish and Welsh devolution went through but has been as dead as the dodo, I am afraid, and should be revived.
I think—this is where we have the amendment—there is the necessity for something that is much more focused. That is why I have proposed that the Prime Minister and the First Minister for Wales should be responsible within a period of two months for forming a body that will look carefully at the situation to determine: first, what is the scope of legislative authority that is missing here; secondly, what is the nature of that authority; thirdly, what entrenched rights—what established rights—have come into being in relation to that since 1 January 1973; and, lastly, what situations are there where there has been legislation under the 1972 Act which has been deemed to be incompatible with the European instruments. That is a very substantial job, and I suggest that the period that I have nominated of 12 months is not unreasonable in the circumstances.
Many people will say that this is not necessary and that Wales from Cardiff and the Westminster Parliament from here can negotiate at arm’s length. I do not believe for a moment that that is possible. We have seen exactly over the last few months when we were dealing with the Wales Bill how almost impossible it was to persuade Parliament that much of what had been reserved was utterly trivial and was an insult to the Welsh nation. Things such as sharp knives, axes, dogs, licensing, prostitution, hovercrafts—all those matters which scream for domestic consideration—had been reserved.
Years ago, a very famous Welsh statesman said, “Why look into a crystal ball when you can read the book?”. We know exactly what happens when Wales and England deal with each other in that way. It is not the basis of partnership and equality at all. The cobwebs of colonialism still exist in the relationship between Wales and England, I am afraid. Something better has to be done, and I believe that my amendment can bring that about.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, the first point in my notes is to remind your Lordships that today is St David’s Day. There have been moments in the last couple of hours when I wondered if I would have to scrub that bit, because it would no longer be St David’s Day. However, I maintain that discussing these things here on St David’s Day is the best possible way of celebrating it.
St David’s Day and its celebration emphasise the point that the UK is a voluntary association of four nations bound together by tacit consent. With that comes the obligation to mutual respect. I acknowledge that the Government are grappling with a very complex picture. Scotland voted to remain but has a Government who wished to remain. Wales voted to leave, but has a Government who wished to remain. Northern Ireland voted to remain, but has a pro-Brexit First Minister and faces elections this week. England voted to leave and that vote has dominated and outweighed the size of the votes in all the other nations. The UK Government’s determination to take a strict and harsh interpretation of the Brexit vote has made that more obviously difficult for the other nations to accept.
I added my name to these amendments because they express, in very clear terms, the need for formal structures for consultation with the devolved Administrations. Mere informal assurances of consultation will be totally inadequate; there must be formal structures.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, I will briefly make three points about Amendment 21. I should say that I am a member of your Lordships’ European Union Committee, and that I am a great fan of devolution. I am certainly a fan of onward devolution, such as that of the Crown Estate, which has not taken place yet in Scotland.
Recently, the European Union Committee was in Edinburgh and in Cardiff, and I was part of the delegation. We were taking evidence because we are preparing a report on the devolved Administrations in the context of Brexit. My first point is that interestingly we heard in those meetings, which were only two or three business days apart, different takes on the JMC meetings that had just taken place a few days beforehand. The Welsh take appeared to be very much that it was a good start: there could perhaps be some greater level of detail, but it was a start and they were certainly engaged in the JMC process, were grateful for the investment of time and felt that they had traction.
The Scottish team had a very different feeling, and gave us quite a negative report. The reports were so diametrically opposed that one could not help but feeling it was odd that they were talking about the same meeting. I cannot speak for my fellow delegation members, but I left with a feeling that a lot of the Scottish problem was driven by an SNP agenda and trying to drive a grievance, and that they were deliberately setting off to try to persuade the world that the JMC structure—which I think is a good idea—is not working, right at its birth. I think that is unfair, and should be noted.
Lord Wigley
I am grateful to the noble Lord. Far be it for me to try to defend the SNP; I have no authority to do so and probably no ability or knowledge either. But is not one of the factors that the outcome of the referendum in Scotland was a yes vote and, therefore, any Government in Edinburgh will clearly be coming to it from a different viewpoint from that of a Government in Cardiff or the UK as a whole?
The Earl of Kinnoull
I am grateful for that point but, as we sit here tonight, we have heard a lot of very different views; it does not mean that we do not sit down, discuss things and try to persuade people to come round to our view. My impression was that there was a lack of engagement on the part of the SNP in the JMC, which is regrettable because, if the SNP does not engage, it cannot represent its own view successfully with the United Kingdom Government. I really wish it would engage; I felt that was a problem.
As I begin to look at Amendment 21 carefully, two areas concern me. The first is in subsection (1) of the proposed new clause, where the words “agreed between” arrive, because if my analysis about a grievance agenda was right, the prospect of there being an agreement between all the parties would seem likely to be bloody difficult and possibly impossible. Accordingly, it is almost like handing a whip to a hostile SNP Government to try to cause difficulties. I do not think that is wise in what will be a jolly difficult set of negotiations with masses of countries; I do not think we need to create another whip.
The second area, on which I have a more general, final point, is to do with the Sewel convention itself. In many ways, we have been quite lucky that the Supreme Court has said that the Sewel convention within the Scotland Act and, I presume, the Wales Act, is exactly that—a convention and not a statutory power. I worry that if we start putting more Sewel convention-type language into statute, we might damage that and end up with a Wallonia-type situation in the UK, which would be problematic. I am afraid I cannot really support Amendment 21 and I, for one, feel that the JMC arrangements should be given a chance to work. I hope that others also feel like that.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, we might still get the opportunity to wish our Welsh colleagues a very happy St David’s Day. As somebody who has a maternal name of Owens and a fraternal name of Morgan, I suppose there might be some fellow feeling there— I do wish noble Lords a very happy St David’s Day. That is probably the departure point of any agreement there might be between the noble Lords who proposed these amendments and me.
Let me say at the outset that I fully accept the principle that every effort should be made to engage the devolved Administrations. Anybody who has been in this House, even for a few years, knows how things across the United Kingdom are terribly London-centric. Indeed, that was part of the reason for the upsurge of negativity at the time of the referendum; people rejected the “London bubble” approach. We have seen that repeated on a number of occasions.
The Prime Minister has indicated that she has been trying to engage, but there is a big difference between making a genuine effort to engage with the Administrations and putting things in the Bill. Amendment 36, for example, states:
“The Prime Minister may not exercise the power under section 1(1) until at least one month after all devolved administrations have agreed a United Kingdom wide approach”.
I can assure noble Lords that we would then never trigger Article 50, because there will never be agreement. Why would there be? Why would Nicola Sturgeon agree to participate in something to which she is opposed? Sadly, in my own circumstances in Northern Ireland, we are on the eve of elections and the Assembly —the Executive—has effectively imploded. The two parties leading the outgoing Executive could not agree on anything except a two-page letter last August, which has been their sole contribution since we took the decision to leave the European Union.
Unless there is a very significant change in voting patterns—which could happen, and I hope it does; there would then be the outside chance of getting an Administration we could work with—things will be the same. We will know by the weekend if that is not true. If patterns are repeated, we know what will happen. The Brexit Secretary came to Belfast in September and instead of meeting an Administration to hear their views, he had to have two meetings in the First Minister’s office, one with one party and a separate meeting with the other party. They could not even meet him together, so how could the Prime Minister conduct any business on behalf of the Government if such an amendment were made?
As for the powers that would be repatriated from Brussels, may I just remind the Committee that in agriculture, for instance, there has been nobody in the United Kingdom with any policy-making capacity for 40 years? There is nobody. We have not been doing it. The policy has been made in Brussels. We do not even have this in Whitehall, never mind in the devolved Administrations. We would have to consider issues such as a national food policy and various other things. These are complicated issues, but they are not for putting in the Bill.
Lord Wigley
I understand that in broad agricultural terms there is a European policy, but the agricultural policies followed in Wales at the micro level have been very substantial. Some of the powers being repatriated from Brussels would undoubtedly fit in with the powers that have been exercised on agriculture in Wales over the past 18 years. It would be ludicrous if they were not there.
Lord Empey
I am not disputing that. We have had agricultural powers in Northern Ireland for even longer, but they are confined within a broad policy set by the CAP. Yes there is micro stuff, and I am 100% for that; I am simply saying that there is a big gap. However, we are talking about putting these amendments into the Bill, and that is a different matter entirely. This is a perfectly sensible discussion to have, and I totally support the idea that there has to be real and meaningful engagement between the Government and the devolved Administrations. I have sat on the JMC, and there are all the players on it that we need—provided that they are prepared to work with each other. Sadly, the evidence is that they have not done so.
I hope that the Prime Minister persists, and however she has to do it—through informal mechanisms, or whatever—I would be 100% in favour of that. However, I come back to the point that we are talking about a Bill to trigger Article 50. The idea of handing things over to devolved Administrations that are hostile to the very concept and expecting them to go along with it is totally unrealistic. I therefore oppose the amendments.
Baroness Ludford
My Lords, I want to add the support of my Front Bench for the amendment and the words written by my noble friend Lady Randerson. Not only do I personally not come from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, but I am a Londoner, and I want to make it clear that it is not just the people represented by the devolved Administrations who care about diversity and plurality in this nation. Frankly, none of us, even Londoners, can be at ease if the union does not work properly.
In discussions on the Bill I have heard a lot of people say that they agree with the substance of what is being proposed, but that it must not appear in the Bill. I think it is about time to put some things in the Bill. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, said something on this subject. Amendment 21 is only about arrangements for consultation and how views are to be taken into account; it is about mechanics. So some of his criticism was not quite justified.
The Earl of Kinnoull
I was referring to subsection (1) of the proposed new clause, where it says that the arrangements “have been agreed”. The word “agreement” surely means agreement.
Baroness Ludford
It is agreeing on arrangements. It does not mean that you agree on the outcome. It is agreeing arrangements for consultation and how views will be taken into account. It does not specify that everyone will agree on the final outcome. All I wanted to do was put down a marker. You do not have to be from a devolved region or nation to support this amendment. Even a dastardly Londoner can do so.
Lord Keen of Elie
I thank noble Lords who have contributed to this part of the debate. The lateness of the hour does not reflect the importance of the issues being considered. I recognise the power of feeling in the House with regard to the issues being debated and the amendments that have been proposed, and acknowledge the interest that various Members have in maintaining and promoting each of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, including London, and the contributions they have made.
As the Prime Minister has said, it is more important than ever that we face the future together, united by what makes us strong: the bonds that unite us. The Government are determined to ensure that the interests of all parts of the United Kingdom are fully taken into account in our negotiations with the European Union. We recognise the importance of engaging closely with the devolved Administrations as we embark upon the forthcoming negotiations with the European Union, and we welcome the input of the Scottish and Welsh Governments and the Northern Ireland Executive. As the Prime Minister has said, consideration of the proposals of the devolved Administrations is an ongoing process. Work will need to be intensified ahead of triggering Article 50 and continued at the same pace thereafter.
We have to remind ourselves that it was a United Kingdom referendum and the United Kingdom that voted to leave the European Union. The legal and constitutional responsibility for the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU lies with the United Kingdom Government and Parliament. We have been clear that no part of the United Kingdom can have a veto over that process. As the noble Lord, Lord Empey, observed, aspects of these amendments could ultimately constitute an exercise of veto by the legislature in one of the devolved areas.
Lord Wigley
We have heard that there are problems in Northern Ireland and, perhaps, an unwillingness to accept some of the attitudes taken by the Government in Scotland. However, the Government have an agreed White Paper from Wales. Will the Minister—and, perhaps, his colleague the noble Lord, Lord Bridges—undertake to study this very carefully indeed to see whether there is a basis here for policy which is not just acceptable in Wales but may also be relevant in other parts of the United Kingdom as a positive way forward.
Lord Keen of Elie
My Lords, I can absolutely assure the noble Lord that we are taking into consideration not only the White Paper from Wales but the submissions prepared by the Scottish Government. All these matters have been taken into consideration in the context of our negotiating position following the triggering of Article 50. All the proposals outlined in these papers will be the subject of keen scrutiny by the Government. What we are considering today is a Bill to implement the referendum result and respect the judgment of the Supreme Court. We are not engaged in considering a vehicle for determining the terms or shape of the broader negotiations that will follow the triggering of Article 50. As has been said on many occasions, that will be a hugely important milestone for the United Kingdom but it is only a milestone, not a cut-off point. It is not the end of the process—it is merely the beginning.
Since the referendum result there has been regular and ongoing political engagement. I noticed that the Prime Minister’s very first visit following the referendum result was to Edinburgh, quickly followed by Cardiff and Belfast. I remind the House that the principles which underpin relations between the United Kingdom Government and the devolved Administrations are set out in a memorandum of understanding. There is the joint ministerial committee which should operate—I say should—by consensus, because as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and the noble Earl have observed, it is not always possible to achieve consensus, but these bodies have that aim.
At the plenary session of the joint ministerial committee in October last year, the four Governments agreed to create a Joint Ministerial Committee on EU Negotiations, chaired by the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU. Under that structure, Ministers and officials from the UK Government and the devolved Administrations have engaged closely in the process of considering our exit from the European Union. That committee has been meeting monthly and a wide range of matters has been discussed on each Government’s requirements for the future relationship with the EU, and the future relationship between the devolved Administrations and this Government.
Over the autumn, we also undertook important work with the devolved Administrations to fully appreciate their priorities and interests. In that context we have taken account of the publication that the noble Lord referred to—namely, the White Paper from the devolved Administration in Wales, and the Brexit papers published by the Scottish Government—which was submitted to us for consideration in the context of that process.
Outside the formal processes that I have described, we have also engaged extensively with stakeholders in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to try to ensure that the interests of all these areas are reflected in our negotiations with the European Union. Ministers have regularly visited the devolved constituent nations of the United Kingdom on numerous occasions for the purposes of those discussions. They have met with a whole variety of stakeholders from SMEs to multinational companies. We have met with MSPs as well. We have tried to engage right across the areas of interest that will be touched upon by our departure from the EU.
A point that was alluded to by a number of noble Lords was how the devolved Administrations will be engaged in determining where repatriated powers should sit in the future. It is a matter of interest to all of us. We must work carefully to ensure that, as powers are repatriated from Brussels back to Britain, the right powers are returned to the United Kingdom Parliament, and the right powers are returned to the devolved Administrations—whether in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
This will be a matter for further discussion. The Prime Minister has been clear that no decisions currently taken by the devolved Administrations will be taken from them. That is not the end point, but the starting point for this form of negotiation, and we appreciate and understand the importance of addressing how we deal with the repatriation of the acquis in due course. It is important to have these debates, but it is equally important not to tie the Government’s hands as they approach the forthcoming negotiations. In these circumstances, I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I thank the noble and learned Lord for his response. My only response is to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, where I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. The only agreement was about the way to talk and that wording is the JMC’s terms of reference at the moment. The Minister said the Government are trying to engage—I say let us try a little harder. The lack of pre-information, before the White Paper, caused a slight frisson, but maybe that is well behind us. I hope that we are marching forward on slightly firmer ground. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
“Report on co-operation with European technical agencies
(1) Before exercising the power under section 1(1), the Prime Minister must publish a report detailing the United Kingdom’s intended approach, during negotiations under the process set out in Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, to ensuring the United Kingdom’s continued co-operation and participation with the work of the European technical agencies listed in subsection (2).(2) The agencies are—(a) Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER),(b) Office of the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC Office),(c) Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO),(d) European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex),(e) European Agency for the operational management of large-scale IT systems in the area of freedom, security and justice (eu-LISA),(f) European Asylum Support Office (EASO),(g) European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA),(h) European Banking Authority (EBA),(i) European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC),(j) European Chemicals Agency (ECHA),(k) European Environment Agency (EEA),(l) European Fisheries Control Agency (EFCA),(m) European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA),(n) European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA),(o) European Medicines Agency (EMA),(p) European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA),(q) European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA),(r) European Police Office (Europol),(s) European Union Agency for Railways (ERA), (t) European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA),(u) European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), and(v) the (European Atomic Energy Community Treaty) EURATOM agencies.”
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, this is a Cinderella amendment—it seems to have been difficult to find the right place for it. This is an interesting list of bodies. It reminds us that Europe, the economy and society have lots of bodies that are in a grey area between public bodies, industrial bodies, research bodies and so on, yet they are very important in making the economy work. There are shades of Euratom as the people associated with all these bodies are increasingly saying, “Where is the template for our future relations?”.
I remind noble Lords that this amendment calls for a report on co-operation with the technical agencies. It contains the words:
“Before exercising the power under section 1(1)”,
so that it can be debated under this Bill. But in practical terms one is looking for the Government to focus on all these bodies. They have something in common. They are all technical bodies and agencies of the European Union of a decentralised character, but it is fair to say that in some way or another UK co-operation on all these subject areas will not cease as soon as Article 50 is triggered.
In the internet age, one sees a privation in our new arrangements, whether in relation to Amazon or Apple or whatever, so here we have what looks like a rather sheep-and-goats sort of list—but all the bodies need to be the subject of some analysis. My noble friend Lord Berkeley, who has very kindly put his name to this amendment, will add a couple of points based particularly on his expertise on railways.
We are looking for some sort of commitment from the Government to think of a process by which there can be a Green Paper on, or some sort of analysis of, the role of these bodies and the options for continuing our involvement with the substance of what they discuss. I do not think that the Government want to give out the message that we are walking away from them with enthusiasm. It is a question of how we can co-operate with them and whether, in some respects, it is necessary to walk away from them at all.
I go back to the beginning. There are lots of arrangements in society where people learn from each other through benchmarking, but in all these various industries and bodies it is not always necessary to rely on public funds to do the work. This is all speculative but we now have the opportunity to say that within a certain timescale—by the summer, for example—there will be a paper of some sort and the Government will then commit to having discussions with people, perhaps beginning with parliamentarians, to see how best this sort of interface can work. With that request I beg to move.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I shall be as quick as I possibly can in supporting my noble friend’s amendment. As my noble friend said, this a disparate group of agencies with different structures. Many of them do not even need funding, but they are necessary for the ongoing business that I hope the UK will continue to do. As chairman of the Rail Freight Group, I attended a meeting today with Brexit Ministers and transport Ministers to talk about how Brexit would affect the rail sector. It was very interesting and very nice of the industry to invite us. They were seeking our advice and our concerns so that they could formulate their policy.
This amendment asks for a report before Article 50 is triggered. It will not happen because they are still looking for ideas—but at least they are asking us. I will give a couple of examples of our concerns. I had three. The first was about what happens at frontiers. Most of our freight these days comes across the Channel from Dover or through the Channel Tunnel and 80% of the drivers are non-British citizens. Will they all have to fill in this 84-page document that we heard about earlier? I hope not—but this is something that has to be recognised.
Secondly, if customs procedures are so long and complicated—I understand that if the port of Dover and the Channel Tunnel were closed for a day, the traffic jam would extend beyond Stansted Airport, which would be a bit of a blockage on the motorway—this, too, must be recognised.
Thirdly, the European Railway Agency sets standards and enforces them. I have worked very hard over the years to make sure the agency does its job properly, because it helps our industry quite dramatically. It means that there is one standard for railways across Europe and, as some noble Lords will know, the railways across Europe are incredibly old-fashioned. It was only recently that they managed to standardise the red lights on the back of trains. Otherwise, when a train got to a frontier, the driver had to walk from the front to the back and change the light—which is ridiculous in this day and age.
The European Railway Agency has stopped all that. We recently had some rail wagons that were manufactured and designed in this country and the company wanted to operate them in France. The French regulators said that they could not come because they did not comply with their regulations—which were probably created especially to keep out other people’s equipment. That kind of thing still goes on until the European Railway Agency gets involved—so if we want to export our equipment to other member states, we will somehow have to remain involved.
I hope we can continue to do so. An awful lot of jobs will be at risk if we do not—in the railways and other sectors. I am sure that a way can be found of doing it—not necessarily in the way that the Minister talked about in the earlier debate on Euratom, but I hope it will happen. I hope that at some point in the summer, as my noble friend said, we will have a report from the Government on their plan for what they intend to do. The industry at our meeting today told us that they needed to plan ahead and needed information. We need to find out what we should do in the future to make sure that we can preserve our jobs here and preserve our export opportunities. I hope that the Minister can give us some comfort on this. I am sure he did not mean to make a derogatory remark on Monday about the Community Plant Variety Office. I do not know anything about that, but some of these other agencies are extremely important for the future of trade with the rest of Europe, however that will be achieved.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
My Lords, very briefly at this late hour, I want to say how grateful we are to the noble Lord, Lord Lea, for raising the list that he has produced for us. On behalf of these Benches, I would say that this emphasises the complexity of what the Government are entering into. We would, of course, like to know exactly how the Government will respond, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.
Lord Bridges of Headley
Good morning, my Lords. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to this amendment again, as I did on Monday night.
Let me start by saying that these agencies are important and I was not wishing in any shape or form to be derogatory about any agency. The Government dispute the suggestion that we have to wait before triggering Article 50 to publish a report on all these agencies, but I think that the noble Lord made that point in his own words.
The list, as the noble Lord, Lord Lea, pointed out, covers a range of different policy areas: aviation, fisheries, justice and home affairs, banking and customs. Our approach to a lot of these policy areas was, of course, covered in the White Paper. There is a lot of analysis going on.
Lord Bridges of Headley
I entirely concede that point. Forgive me: I have obviously not expressed myself well at this early hour of the morning. What I am saying is that those agencies touch on different areas of policy.
I entirely understand the noble Lord’s wish for greater clarity and his need to scrutinise our proposals. As I have said before at this Dispatch Box, and I will go on saying it, when we can provide further information we will.
Consequent to that, the noble Lord rightly says that industry and the sectors look for more certainty. I am very aware of that. I, too, have had excellent meetings with, for example, the freight industry, with those involved in ports and so on. We are fully aware of that. It is in our interests, it is in their interests and it is in Parliament’s interests to provide as much detail as we can when we can. I am very sorry to say that I am not now going to be committing to do so at a certain juncture or in a certain format, but I can assure the noble Lord that we are analysing all these points and we will keep the House fully up to date.
I have very little further to add to this. Given the range of policy areas that this touches on, I could talk for a long time—but I do not think that noble Lords would want me to—about banking, about the chemicals agency or such things. Now is not the time for me to do that, so I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I thank the noble Lord, but I hope that he will reflect on one point. It is not the case that there is legal clarity at the moment about the legal status of some of these bodies and about what is consequential and what is not consequential on our leaving the European Union. That is the de minimis requirement, surely, of HMG in responding to this. There seems to be an extreme reluctance to do what would be normal in any parliamentary Select Committee —just examining the facts on all these bodies, how they are affected and what we are going to do as a model to inform our people in the negotiation.
I am not suggesting that the noble Lord should speak again in the next five seconds, but I conclude by saying that I think there is some work to be done in government with a view to a publication before very long. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Tuesday 7th March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 108-I Marshalled list for Report (PDF, 67KB) - (3 Mar 2017)
13:03 - Division on Amendment 1 - Ayes: 131 / Noes: 336 - Amendment 1 disagreed.
Lord Newby
“( ) No agreement with the European Union consequent on the use of the power under subsection (1) may be ratified unless it has been approved by a national referendum.”
Lord Newby (LD)
My Lords, it may be downhill all the way from this point.
This is a very straightforward amendment, which would require any Brexit deal to be put to the people to approve or to reject. It is based on the principle that, having asked the people whether they wish to initiate the Brexit process, only the people should take the final decision.
In asking the people to do this, we are not sidelining Parliament. Clearly, Parliament should debate and vote on all the options at the end of the negotiating process, as we will discuss later, but Parliament was completely at odds with the views of the people in advance of the referendum. If Parliament took a decision that went against the majority popular view, having given the people the initial decision-making role in the process, we would be faced with widespread and justifiable anger that would be corrosive to our national life for many years to come.
I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, for his drafting advice, which he so generously gave me in Committee. I hope that he feels that, even if he cannot agree with the amendment before us, it at least avoids some of the shortcomings he saw in its predecessor.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
I am grateful for that generous tribute. Will the noble Lord advise us as to whether the referendum he proposes would be an advisory or a mandatory one?
Lord Newby
My Lords, we have already seen the referendum being taken as decisive. Parliament did not decide that it should look at it as merely advisory. I think that any referendum has to be seen as decisive, to the extent that it requires Parliament to act on the basis of it.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
I wonder whether the noble Lord can answer my question in relation to the conduct of the referendum. I was unhappy about the previous referendum because 16 and 17 year-olds were not allowed to vote, EU citizens were not allowed to vote and there was no threshold. In his referendum, which of those three would be included, if any? I would have serious doubts about having a referendum without those three points being taken account of.
Lord Newby
My Lords, the noble Lord will recall the attitude that we took when we discussed the previous referendum. We strongly believe that 16 and 17 year-olds should get the vote, not just in referendums but more generally.
The Countess of Mar (CB)
My Lords, would the noble Lord kindly address the House rather than the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, because we on this side cannot hear what he is saying?
Lord Newby
I apologise. I was saying that, when we discussed this matter previously in respect of the referendum that we have just had, we argued strongly that 16 and 17 year-olds should get the vote, but the details of any future referendum would have to be discussed in the context of a new referendum Bill, which Parliament would have to pass. Perhaps I may make a little progress.
Since Committee, I have had the chance to read the speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and the noble Lord, Lord Bridges. The noble Baroness’s view was that referenda are best avoided and that the deal at the end of the Brexit process would be far too detailed and complicated to leave to the people to decide. However, she went on that,
“if, as time and negotiations progress, there is genuine evidence of a widespread public demand for a second referendum, that should be listened to”.
I suppose that I should be grateful for that willingness to keep an open mind, but I simply do not think that it goes far enough.
The Minister said that a confirmatory referendum should not be contemplated because trust in politicians was so low, and that,
“There is a sense that Parliament is divorced from day-to-day life”.
Well, we know what the Government’s response to that has been: to try to cut Parliament out of the decision-making process altogether and just to take the decisions themselves. Furthermore, the Government have assiduously argued that asking the people to take the final decision on the most important issue facing the country in generations and on which they have already had a say is anti-democratic. That argument simply defies logic.
The Minister then said, quoting the White Paper, that,
“people are coming together to make a success”,—[Official Report, 27/2/17; cols. 638-39.]
of Brexit. It is certainly the case that business is taking decisions based on the assumption of Brexit. That helps to explain why banks are moving thousands of staff outside the UK, why Ford is downsizing its plant at Newport and why Herriot-Watt is cutting staff. But this is not exactly “coming together”.
Nor are divisions within the country reducing. As I said at Second Reading, the anger of those who wish to leave the EU, which was evident before the referendum, is now being increasingly matched by the anger of those who wish to remain—particularly young people, who see their life chances being jeopardised. I am afraid that there is simply no happy consensus emerging about the alleged sunny uplands of being outside the EU—quite the opposite.
Lord Robathan (Con)
The noble Lord was talking about logic. Could he tell us exactly—perhaps he will come on to this—what would happen were the vote to go his way on a second referendum? If it went one way each, would there then be a third referendum, with the best of three?
Lord Newby
My Lords, I am afraid that argument does not do the noble Lord justice. I shall be coming on to the question of the nature of the vote in a moment.
In Committee, the Minister said that a further referendum would jeopardise the “need for certainty” and prayed in aid his concerns for EU citizens living in the UK and UK citizens living in the EU. This really is a desperate argument. The Government have it in their hands to deal with the fears of EU nationals living in the UK now. As we heard in last week’s debate, by doing so it would make it more likely that UK nationals living in the EU receive reciprocal treatment.
The Minister finally talked of a referendum being years ahead on a question we do not know. We are not talking about some point in the far future. A short referendum campaign, no longer than a general election campaign, would hardly impinge on the timetable at all. The Government claim to be confident of getting the negotiations completed within the two-year period, so we know what kind of timeframe we are talking about. As to the issue of what the question will be about—
Lord Dykes (CB)
I agree with those final comments, but does the noble Lord not agree that, bearing in mind that we had the Second World War without a referendum, we joined NATO without a referendum, we had the atom bomb without a referendum and we joined the United Nations without a referendum—we had all those things with no referenda—it is the primordial duty of parliamentarians to restore the true deep sovereignty of the British Parliament, mainly in the House of Commons?
Lord Newby
My Lords, on this issue, Parliament sold that pass when it gave the people the decision about whether or not we stay in the EU. Parliament, having given that decision to the people, should accept in logic that the people should retain that decision-making at the end of the process as well as at the start of it. That is the nub of the argument I am making today.
The noble Lord, Lord Robathan, asked what the question would be about. It would be very straightforward: do you prefer the deal done by the Government or to remain within the EU? I found the Minister’s arguments in Committee unconvincing.
Lord Spicer (Con)
The noble Lord, Lord Robathan, did not ask the question the noble Lord has just said he asked; he asked whether there might be a third referendum. If the noble Lord cannot give an answer to that, why will there not be a fourth referendum to decide which of the previous three referendums was the real thing?
Lord Newby
I would have thought that that is fairly clear. People voted to start the process and we get to the point where there is a deal. At that point, the people should decide, finally, on whether the deal is acceptable. There would be no need, no point, and no issue for having a third referendum after that second decisive referendum.
Baroness O'Cathain (Con)
Surely what we voted on was whether to leave or remain—nothing else.
Lord Newby
My Lords, people voted on 57 varieties of the future of this country. The vast bulk of people, as all the polls show, did not vote to leave the single market; now they are being told they have got to. The idea that the referendum vote reflected the settled will of 52% of the people on what they wanted our future relationship with Europe to be is, in my view, extremely simplistic. It is not borne out by conversations with individuals or the polling evidence. I do not believe that that vote should be the last word.
Lord Cormack (Con)
Is it not at least equally simplistic to assume that, after long negotiations and if we have parted company, our European friends and neighbours would wish to have us back?
Lord Newby
My Lords, that will be part of the consideration at the time. All the evidence to date is that our European friends and neighbours are shaking their heads with disbelief at what we are doing and saying, “For goodness’ sake, why are you doing this?”.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
If all our European neighbours are shaking their heads and wondering why we are leaving, why then should they give us a good deal when they know that it might be overturned by a referendum and the UK might stay in the EU? Therefore, they would have no incentive to give us a good deal at all.
Lord Newby
My Lords, I think that our European friends and neighbours will negotiate in good faith—
Lord Newby
I must say that I find it deeply depressing, when we have been members of the European Union for these decades, that noble Lords on the other side should have such a difficult and unfriendly view of the people with whom we have been co-operating to solve common problems to the best of our abilities and against a background of hostilities in Europe which cost people, across Europe and in this country over the decades and centuries, millions of lives.
I was attempting to say that I found the noble Lord’s arguments unconvincing and the arguments for giving the people a final say compelling, and therefore I beg to move.
Lord Warner (CB)
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment and want to make three simple points.
First, the Government have consistently chosen to attribute to the referendum a wider mandate than the result justified. The majority by which people voted to leave the EU was a small one, and they gave no clues about how the withdrawal should be accomplished. The Government know nothing about the views on the withdrawal of the 28% of the electorate who did not vote. Two other groups—British citizens who live in the EU and 16 and 17 year-olds—were not given a chance to vote, and they are now expected just to accept what the Government negotiate. The latter group will be aged over 18 in 2019 when, on present plans, another cohort of 16 and 17 year-olds will have their views similarly ignored. In 2019, the Government will seek to impose, without any say, a withdrawal deal on a majority of the UK’s population who either voted to remain or who have given no consent to the terms of a deal that will have a huge impact on their futures.
Secondly, as the Government reveal more of their negotiating approach, the public is showing signs of not liking what it sees. This includes many who voted to leave the EU. Dissent is growing over the decision to rule out membership of the EEA and the customs union, despite the views of much expert opinion and promises given earlier by some politicians. The so-called “best deal for Britain” is looking decidedly second best because of the barriers, financial and administrative, to be erected where none exists at present. The refusal to grant those EU citizens working here a prompt right to stay, despite our economic dependence on them for several decades to come, looks to many like another own goal. The Government’s insistence that they can reduce net migration to tens of thousands does not seem to be believed even by the Brexit Secretary, let alone by much of the public. A level of public distrust is building before withdrawal negotiations have even started, and that distrust is being fuelled further by the Government’s reluctance to accept the constitutional need for Parliament to be fully involved in the decision-making process on withdrawal—something that I hope we can rectify with Amendment 3.
My third and final point is about whether the Government really want a deal. I have to say that I thought the cat was let out of the bag last week by the Brexit Secretary when he told Cabinet colleagues to prepare for a hard Brexit so that in 2019 the Prime Minister can walk away from the EU negotiations without any deal at all. This will mean diverting large amounts of public expenditure away from our public services to pay for things such as new IT systems for customs declarations, a new immigration system and new air transport agreements. If that is where we end up in 2019, it seems that the public are entitled to have a say in whether that is a future they want to sign up for, irrespective of any narrow referendum vote three years earlier. The Government simply do not know what the majority of people expect will happen and there is growing public concern over the Government’s negotiating approach. That concern could be much greater when we reach 2019. The British people may well want to change their minds when they realise how adversely they will be affected by leaving the EU. We should provide them with an opportunity to do so by giving them the final say, as Amendment 1 would.
Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, I agree with the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Warner. I have added my name to this all-party amendment and if a vote is called, I will vote for it. What struck me about the referendum campaign as I knocked on hundreds of doors in the south Wales valleys, which are all traditional working-class Labour strongholds, is that the people who were voting leave were voting against something. They were voting against the European Union, but they were not voting in favour of anything. In part that is because they were not told by the leave leadership what the alternative would be. In fact, the leave leaders were deliberately unclear and disagreed with each other as to what it would mean. Some argued that it would be a future like Albania while others argued that it would be in the single market, which was again denied by others. In that sense, the leave campaign left the alternative deliberately ambiguous and now we are in a position, or we will be in the coming months, where that alternative will become clearer.
In every other referendum, including the Welsh referendum in 1997, which as a Minister I helped to organise and lead on behalf of Welsh Labour, it was very clear that you were voting either to establish a Welsh Assembly or for the status quo. The same applied in Scotland in 1997, as it did to the electoral reform referendum in 2011—you were either voting for the alternative vote or to keep the status quo, the first past the post voting system. It was similar in the Scottish independence referendum held in 2014. Everyone knew that, whichever way they voted, it was absolutely crystal clear what they would get. What was different about the referendum held on 23 June last year is that that was not the case. It was unlike any other referendum we have experienced where the consequences of voting for or against were clear to voters; this was not, so we are in a very different position.
I am not disputing the outcome on 23 June. This is not about re-running that referendum. This is about making sure that the democratic process remains democratic and that voters have the final say on the eventual negotiated outcome. It seems to me that a process which is started by a referendum should be completed by a referendum and voters should have a final say on the deal that is negotiated, if indeed any deal is negotiated, although the Prime Minister has made it clear that perhaps none will be and we will move into an even more uncertain future.
Perhaps I may quote in support of my remarks from the last Labour Party conference. Composite 1, moved by the TSSA union and seconded by Newcastle upon Tyne Central Constituency Labour Party, stated this—by the way, it was passed unanimously. I speak from the Labour Benches and I intend to remain on these Benches in the future, unless anyone questions that. The composite says that it,
“recognises that many of those who voted to leave the EU were expressing dissatisfaction with EU or national policy and were voting for change, but believes that unless the final settlement proves to be acceptable then the option of retaining EU membership should be retained. The final settlement should therefore be subject to approval, through Parliament and potentially through a general election, or a referendum”.
That is Labour Party policy and I am speaking in favour of that policy.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hain. I remind him of one or two aspects of the Welsh devolution referendum. I was the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats from 1992 to 1997 and strongly supported devolution to Wales, as he did. It has worked extremely well. However, I remind him that nobody—certainly no Liberal Democrat I knew in Wales—envisaged that, if we did not like the way devolution was set up, we would have a second referendum. We would have considered that view completely idiotic and unconstitutional.
I have been on this side of the House for only the last two or three months, so my memory of being a Liberal Democrat is reasonably fresh. It is clear in my mind that at the time of the European referendum last year the starting point for Liberal Democrats was as follows: there would be one referendum. It was not suggested for one moment that there would be two, three or even four referenda. I see the logic of what the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, said earlier and think he was rather wrongly put down by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, because he made a perfectly fair point. It was envisaged by Liberal Democrats that there would be one referendum and that it would be in accordance with the law. The law provides that referenda are advisory and subject to parliamentary procedure thereafter. If a referendum result, for good reason, is rejected by Parliament then the result is rejected by Parliament. That is what Liberal Democrats expected—namely, the normal process. We would have heard had it been otherwise.
I want to make two particular points, one tactical and the other constitutional.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)
As I remember, to my cost, the noble Lord’s recollection of what positions Liberal Democrats took in the past has not always been entirely accurate. On this issue surely the difference is this. When the Wales referendum was put, it was put on a specific proposition, fully backed up with policy and detail. On this occasion, the proposition put to the British people was to leave or not. They decided to leave. That mandate is clear and the Government are entitled to enact it. But, unless the noble Lord might like to suggest what the mandate is for the particular form of exit the Government choose, there is no mandate to leave the single market, nor to leave the common customs union. Therefore, if there is no mandate for that, why have the Government chosen to use it and follow the most hard-line Brexit possible? If the noble Lord believes that there is a mandate for that, will he describe what it is, given that the majority of the people in this country in opinion polls have made it clear that they do not support this and the Conservative—
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
I do not wish to stifle debate but the noble Lord should know that we are on Report, and the opportunity to interrupt a speaker is not an opportunity to make a speech.
Lord Carlile of Berriew
My Lords, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, knows, I have enormous admiration for his skill and ability. He is at his best when he makes points with simplicity, but that point was not made with simplicity. I am totally confused by what he sought to say and I reject his argument completely. He knows perfectly well, as all the Liberal Democrats know, that what was put to the country was a referendum in the normal constitutional and legal form. No Liberal Democrat, least of all the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown—perhaps he was too busy eating his hat as a result of his comments on television during the general election—suggested for one moment that there was something different about the referendum that we faced last June. However, I am sure that noble Lords will want me to move on.
The truth of the matter is that we are facing this proposal for the second time—now rather better drafted, thanks to the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott—because unfortunately the Liberal Democrats do not like the result of last June’s referendum. Nor did I, but my advice to your Lordships’ House, for what it is worth, is: be careful what you wish for. The Liberal Democrats’ record on referenda ain’t so good. Noble Lords will recall the alternative vote referendum, as well as what happened in June. Indeed, I would say that Amendment 1 seeks to compress a huge quantity of extremely complicated issues into a simplistic binary question. It just will not work, and the Government do not need this kind of patronising advice in order to get on with the negotiations.
I now turn briefly to the constitutional issue. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, failed to answer the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, as to whether it would be a binding or an advisory referendum. He sought to answer it by saying that he thought that, on balance, it would be a binding referendum. If that is the basis of this amendment, it is ridiculous, because there is no provision in the law for a binding referendum.
The whole debate we have been having in your Lordships’ House has been about how much respect we should pay to the referendum that took place last June. My answer is that we should pay a lot of respect to it. I do not want to leave the European Union, but I recognise that the referendum has taken us to Article 50, which we must get on with triggering as soon as possible. The Government know perfectly well what they have to do. They know that, if they produce a completely unsatisfactory result, they will face a Motion of no confidence in the other place and will fall. We can well do without messing around with the arrangements which should now be in action.
Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)
My Lords, I have no wish to get involved in Liberal Democrat internecine warfare but I put my name to this amendment and I support many of the speeches that have been made in support of it.
My noble friend the Minister has done a very skilful job in getting the Bill to this stage in this House, but in Committee he told us to be in no doubt that this country was leaving the EU—no ifs, no buts, and with no idea of the terms. I admire determination but not when it is blind to changing circumstances. I cannot see why any Government would be so adamant about a course of action with no knowledge of the circumstances in which they might take that course.
We do not know what the world will look like in two years’ time. Economically and politically it is at some of the most uncertain stages that I have ever seen in my lifetime. In two years’ time, the EU, the world and our economy could look very different—and, I suspect, not for the better. At that stage, we will be able to look at the deal that our Government have negotiated or, as others have pointed out, at the no deal that they have been handed. Although I am not an advocate of government by referenda, in this situation, having started the process with a referendum, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, pointed out, it seems to me that the only sensible way to bring the process to an end is to put the terms to the public. I have listened to the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and I do not dismiss the patronising advice that he gave the Liberal Democrats or those supporting this amendment, but I believe that the public need to see what is on offer.
During the course of this Bill, we have heard that, whatever people voted for on 23 June last year, it was not to get poorer. I cannot see that in the end the Government will be presenting them with a deal which does not mean that they get poorer. I believe that at that stage they should have a chance to vote on whether, having seen the future, it is the future that they really want.
Lord Morgan (Lab)
My Lords, there was a previous referendum on Europe in 1975. On that occasion, it was not taken as holy writ and as something that it was almost obscene to vote against. On the contrary, in 1979 the Labour Party said that it would ignore and vote against the referendum result—there were no difficulties there—and so did a very large number of Conservatives, headed by Mr Enoch Powell. Therefore, I cannot see why the advisory referendum of 1975, where the majority was 33%, should somehow be treated so casually, whereas this referendum, with a majority of, I think, 3.8%, is somehow treated reverentially, with the view that we should all genuflect before the will of the people.
I link this amendment with Amendment 3, which I shall also support. Amendment 3 confirms the view so wisely put by the Supreme Court that sovereignty in this country resides in the two Houses of Parliament. That was the view taken and it is the view that will be proclaimed in Amendment 3. Referendums are always advisory—they are to help Parliament in reaching a view. It is best to have an informed referendum. The last one was not in the least informed; it was a process of serial lying and deception, which added nothing to public understanding. As the facts emerge, I think that public understanding will change substantially.
We need to ask the view of the people again to assist Parliament when the facts are known—when the car workers at Vauxhall, the steel workers at Port Talbot and the car workers at Sunderland will be forming a view on employment, trade and Britain’s economic relationships with a wider world. It would also be when we have had an opportunity to have the views of young people, deprived of voting this time and whose futures are imperilled by this ill-informed, almost non-informed, decision.
Another referendum will not be taken in a one-world universe; it will be taken when the views on Brexit of those other 27 countries, views which are quite important, are also known. As I believe was the Labour Party in 1979 and 1983 in respect of the previous referendum, as well as a growing number of Conservatives, I am in favour of regarding the referendum that we had in June last year as ill-informed, or almost uninformed, guidance. I would prefer informed guidance and that is why I shall vote for this amendment.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, I apologise to the House for not having been present at earlier stages of the Bill, for medical reasons beyond my control. The benefit for your Lordships is that I will not be on my feet for long.
I was disappointed to miss the excellent debates at early stages. What unites us in this House, across all Benches, is how seriously we take our role as scrutineers. On our best days, we approach each question not on the basis of tribe or loyalty, but on the strength of the argument and how it might work for the common good of the whole country. On these Benches, we are not a party, nor do we follow a Whip. Today will see a significant number of Bishops appearing, not because we hold ourselves out as constitutional experts but because we are deeply embedded in every local community in England. We may dress the same, but we have independent minds, as anyone observing church politics recently will be well aware. So I speak today not in a corporate but in a personal capacity.
The referendum campaign and its aftermath revealed deep divisions in our society, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, rightly commented—like him, this feels like the most divided country that I have lived in in my lifetime. Whatever the outcome of the next two years, our nation’s future, particularly for the most vulnerable, will be profoundly damaged if we arrive in 2019 even more divided, without a common vision to confront the opportunities and challenges before us. To meet these opportunities and challenges in every aspect of policy and every level of society, we must find a level of national reconciliation. So how we conduct this process is as important as the outcome. It would be dangerous, unwise and wrong to reduce the substance of the terms on which we exit the European Union to the result of a binary yes/no choice taken last summer, and the Government should avoid any inclination to oversimplify the outcome of the most complex peacetime negotiations probably ever to have been undertaken.
But neither is the complexity of a further referendum a good way of dealing with the process at the end of negotiation. It will add to our divisions; it will deepen the bitterness. It is not democratic; it is unwise. Even if circumstances change, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, rightly said they were likely to do—even if they change drastically—a dangerous and overcomplicated process is the result of a referendum.
It is beyond doubt that those bringing this amendment and others before this House today, and last week in Committee, are moved by legitimate and deeply principled concerns for our country. To challenge that, as has been done in the press, is entirely wrong. Similarly, those who have argued against amending the Bill have done so not from a deficit of care but from a concern for process and a legitimate desire to reach the best outcome.
Division of our country is not a mere fact to be navigated around like a rock in a stream but something to be healed, to be challenged and to be changed. During many years in which I have worked in countries in the midst of deep division—sometimes armed, sometimes merely civil—I have seen two cardinal errors made in seeking to bring reconciliation and building common vision. The first is to complicate the process; the second is artificially to simplify complicated substance. On this amendment, I fear we risk making the process too complex and the substance too simple. Although I fully understand the good intentions of those who tabled the amendment, for these reasons I will be unable to support it.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, I support Amendment 1, but I believe we have Amendment 1 and Amendment 3 in the wrong order. If we pass Amendment 3, as I suspect may well happen, that would give Parliament the final say, which is certainly better than allowing the Government to walk roughshod over Parliament and decide for themselves. We cannot ignore the fact that the people, regrettably in my view, voted to leave the EU, although in doing so they did not have a clear view as to the alternative they were backing. If Parliament—or the Government for that matter—has the final say and the people who voted out last June do not like it, we could easily escalate the situation into an almighty crisis. That could be avoided by a confirmatory referendum.
Let us imagine over the next two years that negotiations get nowhere and the Government resort to the WTO basis with no preferential access to the single market. Car factories start closing, as the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, mentioned. Financial services move to Paris or Frankfurt. The EU insists on a €30 billion payment, or whatever, from the UK. EU nationals start quitting key posts in the NHS and expats find that they have to start paying for their healthcare in the countries they live in, or lose pension increments that arise from the UK. At that point, many who voted out will start bleating, “This isn’t what we voted for”. At that point, the only way for the Government to hold their line is to be able to tell them, “Okay, you will get the final say, so let’s see what happens with the final package”. It is therefore in the Government’s best interest to have a confirmatory referendum. I believe that is a very good reason for backing the amendment.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)
My Lords, I am unable to support the amendment. I say so with a heavy heart, but I am extremely conscious of the economic consequences, not least the ones the noble Lord just mentioned, of prolonged uncertainty. I will briefly sum up why. We have had uncertainty in this country from when the then Prime Minister made his Bloomberg speech, but more so since he started his negotiation. The negotiation took 14 months. We have had the referendum. That took four months to organise. So why are there noble Lords here who believe that it could be done in the space of an election campaign? The Electoral Commission’s role is such that it needs to take its time. We would probably run into a referendum around October 2019. If the result was that the country did not like what it got, there would have to be another negotiation, either to revoke Article 50 or to change the terms. That would bring us into the general election. If there is going to be a general election in 2020 anyway, there seems to me little value in having a referendum in early 2020 or late 2019.
That is just the chronology. To imagine that our EU partners would hang around from 2015 to 2020 without making provisional plans for a 12.5% hole in their budget, or for a potentially dramatic change in the relationship of 65 million people with the single market, is somehow not to understand even the EU’s position. I say that advisedly. We have seen HSBC move 1,000 jobs. We have heard Mario Draghi telling us that euro clearing would have to move. We have heard the Irish Government tell us that they are preparing for companies to move their office space. We know that 1.1 million people are dependent on the financial services sector, and their jobs are in line at the moment. The idea that business will hang around for a further four years was rebutted in the evidence we took for the report of the EU Financial Affairs Sub-committee on Brexit and its impact on financial services. We were told in terms that uncertainty was extremely damaging to the sector and that people therefore wished to have a transition period.
Let me conclude with one or two points that relate directly to some of the remarks made by speakers in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, said that a process which is started by a referendum should end with one. I accept the logic of that. The process started with a referendum in 1975. Until last year, the people of this country who are 60 years old or under had not had a say in our future direction. I have to admit with a heavy heart that they did not go in the direction I wanted them to go in, which was to remain, but they made their choice. So the process did start with a referendum and it will end with one. I suspect that what the noble Lord is alluding to is a third and potentially a fourth referendum.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said that we do not know what the world will look like in a couple of years’ time, and I agree with her completely. That is why I look forward to debating the amendments to come about whether Parliament should make an assessment.
I am in a place where I think that referendums are a dangerous tool. Direct democracy, in my opinion, is dangerous. Referendums should be used with great care and clarity. We cannot explain a complicated negotiation result in a referendum, as Mr Cameron found out to his cost.
Lord Robathan
My Lords, I agree entirely with the noble Baroness that referendums are a bad idea, and I am surprised that everyone else in the Chamber does not agree, especially those on the Liberal Democrat Benches.
Nevertheless, we had a referendum and, as the most reverend Primate said, it was a binary choice: yes or no. People knew what they were voting for, and they voted to leave the EU. It is unbecoming and, if I may say so, patronising of people to attribute to the individuals of this nation the reasons for how they voted. Personally, in 1975 I voted to stay in and some 40 years later, with my experience of the EU, I voted to take back control of this country and put it in the hands of the British people. That is what I have done, and that is what I suspect that most people are expecting from us. It is patronising to suggest that people did not know what they were voting for.
The logic to which the noble Lord, Lord Newby, referred is this: what would happen if in a second referendum the people of this country rejected the Government’s negotiating position? No one has an answer to that, so I would say that there must be a third referendum, but I would not particularly want to get into that.
Finally, perhaps I may direct my friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches—I count them as friends and I hope that they count me as a friend from time to time—to an article published in the Times yesterday by a man called Edward Lucas, who outed himself as a Liberal Democrat—I did not realise he was until then—which suggested that this is part of reinvigorating the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats. I would say the contrary. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, suggested that there might be corrosive and justifiable anger, but the great British people have had their referendum and they do not want another one. So we should just ignore this amendment and carry on.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, I came into this Chamber genuinely unsure about which way to vote and whether to support the amendment. My noble friend Lord Grocott may laugh, but it is a genuine feeling. He and I have known each other for a long time and I hope he will accept that, in relation to this particular amendment, it is a genuine feeling. I support Amendment 3 very strongly indeed.
I am not sure that the debate has helped me, because we have heard eloquent speeches on both sides, by my noble friend Lord Morgan and by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. I intervened on the noble Lord, Lord Newby, because of my reservations about the referendum itself: the fact that 16 and 17 year-olds were not allowed to vote; that EU citizens were not allowed to vote; that there was no threshold; and the uncertainty about whether it was advisory or mandatory. All of that created a huge problem.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I agree. I share that view. However, some people tried to sow confusion and indicated that it had to be accepted. I say to my noble friend Lord Grocott that this is why we need to look carefully at what happens at the end of this long and complicated process.
As I say, I was not sure how to vote, but I am now convinced. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, answered my question. The form of the referendum, its timing, the question, the franchise and all of the other matters will be dealt with in a Bill which will come before this Parliament.
I also support Amendment 3 about parliamentary approval of any deal that is agreed. I envisage—I do not know whether my colleagues agree—that Parliament would then put the proposal to the referendum. That would be the question. So at that time, in that referendum, we would know what we were voting for, unlike the previous referendum. That has convinced me that the way forward is to combine the parliamentary consideration of the deal that is reached and come to some conclusion, and then put it to the people because they will have considered it already. That is the first thing that has convinced me to support this amendment.
The second thing is that I have become increasingly concerned at the tribalism of the Tories on this issue. They are sitting there supporting some kind of concerted campaign to push through the kind of hard Brexit that they want at any cost—and I mean at any cost. The more they do that, and the more they sit there jeering at our partners in Europe, dismissing them as if they were irrelevant in relation to this, the more I will be convinced that we need to make sure that their kind of hard Brexit—
Lord Hughes of Woodside (Lab)
Does my noble friend agree, given what happened in Scotland, that every referendum is greeted with, “We will have to have another one because we do not like the result”? What happens if the second referendum is closer than the last one? Will there be a third referendum and a fourth referendum? It is an abrogation of responsibility.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
No. As my noble friend Lord Hain rightly said, in Scotland and Wales what was put to the people was absolutely clear. It was a specific proposal—there was no doubt about it—to set up a Parliament for Scotland and a Parliament for Wales. What we put at the last referendum was not as clear. We did not know the way forward; we did not know the options before us.
Lord Tyler (LD)
Perhaps I may help. I think I am right in saying that all previous referenda have always been confirmatory. They agreed to what Parliament set before the nation. That was not the case, of course, in June of last year.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I find myself, unusually, agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. Having seen him on television recently, he has taken me by surprise. They have been confirmative and that is what we are talking about in this referendum. I think the noble Lord, Lord Newby, agrees that it will be a confirmatory referendum after Parliament has agreed or otherwise the proposal that comes from the Government in relation to Europe. On that basis I will back his amendment.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
My Lords, there are two scenarios vis-à-vis the attitude of the EU towards our leaving it. One is that it will be absolutely delighted that we are going. A thorn will have come out of its side once the UK has departed and it will be able to proceed with the federal dream it has always had. Therefore, it will want to quickly get on with an agreement and say goodbye to us. The other scenario is that the EU will regard the UK leaving as a hole in the head. As the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, said, it will present it with an enormous budgetary problem. It will probably be contagious and will lead to other countries in the EU wanting to leave as well. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, says that we must trust the EU. Well, hold on. The people who run the EU are not renowned for being overtly democratic. Let us face it: they put the whole objective of the federal dream above all else. Therefore, they will say that we must go to any lengths that we possibly can to ensure that the United Kingdom stays in the EU.
How do you do that? You offer the most appalling deal known to man. Then, knowing that there is going to be a referendum, if this amendment is passed, you can confidently reckon that the British people will vote against that deal and the United Kingdom will stay in the EU. Does that not completely undermine the Government’s negotiating position once Article 50 has been triggered? This amendment should be opposed absolutely ruthlessly.
Lord Taverne (LD)
My Lords, there is one other important reason why the final decision on Brexit should be a national referendum, not the approval of Parliament: Parliament has changed. We have abandoned the main principle that we are a parliamentary democracy and that MPs are representatives, not delegates. Instead, we have adopted the doctrine that the will of the people must always prevail. That is the favourite doctrine of dictators and autocrats throughout history. At Second Reading I gave examples, which I will not repeat now. In that debate the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, pointed out that four-fifths of the MPs who voted to trigger Article 50 had voted to remain and believed that Brexit would be against the national interest. The exercise of their own judgment, based on weighing up the argument and evidence in debate, has given way to the new fashion for populist political correctness. The inescapable logic of this approach means that if MPs, at the end of negotiations, came to the conclusion that the result would be equivalent to falling over a cliff, they would still feel duty bound because of the referendum of 23 June to act like lemmings.
Burke has been ditched; Rousseau rules instead. I have always been a devotee of Burke. I once fought a by-election on his principles. In 1972, I was one of the 69 Labour Members of Parliament led by Roy Jenkins who voted for British entry into the European Community against a three-line Whip. Without our vote, Britain would not have joined. My local, left-wing Labour Party in Lincoln was passionately anti-Europe. It told me that if I voted with the Tories, against the party’s three-line Whip, it would deselect me. I did, and it did. So I resigned and fought a by-election in March 1973 as an independent social democrat. The real issue in that by-election was not Europe, but Burke. I explained my reasons at a mass meeting held in Lincoln. I said that I had always been pro-Europe and as an 18 year-old student—some 70 years ago—I joined a club called the Strasbourg club, which argued that Britain should share some of its sovereignty with other European countries to promote peace and prosperity, and that I was not going to change my views because my party told me to. I was supported at this mass meeting by a famous journalist at the time, Bernard Levin, who put the issue quite simply. He said that the choice in Lincoln was between Dick Taverne and a Dictaphone. I won with an overwhelming majority over Labour and the Conservatives, and it was Burke wot won it.
Burke is popular because people like those who stick to their guns. His championship of MPs as representatives, not delegates, has been a basic part of the strength of our parliamentary system. If referendums determined our laws, we would probably still have the death penalty and flogging in prisons. What would be the point of parliamentary debates if MPs had already pledged their vote irrespective of all arguments?
It may be asked why I support the Liberal Democrat amendment in favour of a new referendum. My noble friend Lord Newby gave a very good answer to that. A referendum is one way in which people would have a chance to change their mind. If the Government’s process is followed, there would be no real choice because the only one would be either to accept or reject the end of the negotiations, whatever their result.
I believe that the decision to leave the single market and the customs union makes a hard Brexit almost inevitable. We will not get a special deal for key industries or the right of our service companies to operate in their biggest market. Mr Trump will not abandon his claim for “America first” and we will face a more protectionist world, not a free trade bonanza. We are in real danger of returning to the nationalism and protectionism of the 1930s. If we leave Europe, we will find it increasingly necessary to rely on Mr Trump’s America: a future of Mrs May and Donald Trump walking hand in hand. We should not travel one miserable inch along that fearsome road.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, at Second Reading I set out an argument for a second referendum based on the principle of informed consent, a standard by which individuals are truly given and granted their opinion. I am not going to repeat that argument now, but it remains my primary reason for supporting this amendment.
Much of what I was going to say has been said, but I wish to make one brief point. We are being asked to have faith in the Government and their officers to secure this deal, but the reason given last week for not securing the fate of EU nationals was not that the Government were not willing, but that a small number of the remaining 27 would not play ball. Similarly, we have already been asked to accept that the Government cannot deliver the single market because the 27 have a red line on free movement. As the negotiation moves on from its visible red lines into the hundreds of thousands of details that will constitute this divorce settlement, the 27 will have a multitude of issues on which they do not wish to play ball. Yet by the Government’s own admission they have to accept, or are currently accepting, whatever is offered by the least interested of those 27 nations.
Meaningful parliamentary oversight and a mechanism by which the much-quoted “will of the people” can be tested are not automatic roadblocks to withdrawal; they are merely an insurance policy against a lousy deal.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, we will hear from the Conservative Benches and then from the Labour Benches, and then from the noble Lord, Lord Pearson.
Lord Lexden
My Lords, my simple point is this. Parliament will pronounce for or against the results of the Government’s negotiations to withdraw from the European Union in due course. It may possibly be that in 2019 or whenever the negotiations are completed, Parliament will feel that it would be wise to test the opinion of the country through another referendum, but that should be determined at that final stage and in those circumstances, not now. It would be wholly contrary to our constitution and traditions to make a binding provision for another referendum at this early point.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, the Government seem confident that they can get a good deal, or, that not being the case and they get a bad deal, that they can walk away and WTO trading arrangements will be good enough for us to operate effectively in the world. If that is the position held by the Government, why should they be in any doubt that a referendum would do anything other than give them an even greater majority in support of what they finally resolve?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
The noble Baroness is drifting to a Second Reading speech. A specific proposal is before this House: the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Newby. I would be grateful if noble Lords could be brief—a lot of people want to speak—and address the substance of that amendment, not other aspects to which they may wish to draw the attention of the House.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
I certainly will not continue to make a speech, but I want to say that the reason why people are asking that this matter eventually goes to the people is that we started with the people. Parliament has said, “We are bound by the fact that people have given us a direction of travel”. When it comes to the end of that journey, they have the right to be heard too.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)
My Lords, I regret that I did not speak at Second Reading or in Committee, owing to previous engagements. I want to speak briefly on this amendment, as it reveals what noble remainers really want: they want a second referendum on the result of the Article 50 negotiations in the hope that the people will change their mind.
I hope to spend a minute or two trying to persuade supporters of the amendment why are they are wrong to do so, and to do that one has to look at the bigger picture. What I cannot understand, and what beats me—
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am sorry. The noble Lord could have made a Second Reading speech at Second Reading. I would be grateful if he addressed the substance of the amendment.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, if the noble Lord wants me to deal with that, I thought I had advice that, as it was a two-day debate and I was not able to be here for the opening speeches on the first day, I could speak on the second. I make no complaint. Owing to a prior engagement, I could not get to the opening speeches and that is why I did not speak. That is really not important or relevant to this debate.
As I was saying, what beats me is why so many noble Lords still fervently believe that the European Union, which is the project of European integration, and its single market, are somehow good things—that is why they support this amendment—when clearly they are not. They have become bad things. As I have said many times in the House over the past 26 years, the project of European integration was honourable when it started: it was to get rid of war in Europe and all the rest of it. As Jean Monnet said in 1956—
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
The noble Lord is very courteous. He listens to what I say but chooses to ignore it. I would be grateful if he addressed the subject of the amendment and then let other noble Lords have a say.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, I am quite happy to sit down, but I am trying to persuade supporters of this amendment that they are wrong, because the whole project has gone wrong. Is that not something that noble Lords wish to hear?
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
Okay, I shall skip over why the single market is a bad thing, I shall skip over the strength of our hand—because they have so many more jobs selling things to us than we do to them—and I shall skip over the fact that noble remainers who support this amendment still think that somehow EU money exists, when it does not. After every penny that the European Union gives us, we are still left with £10 billion a year net, which is—I will give noble Lords a new statistic—the salary of 1,000 nurses every day, at £27,500 a year. Whatever happens, we will go on trading with our friends in Europe, because they need it more than we do.
I end with a word of advice for the Liberal Democrats. I fancy that they are considering supporting this amendment. Their very own policy from the election before last—I do not know what it is now because it is difficult to follow Liberal Democrat policy—was that membership of this House should grow to represent and reflect the votes in the previous general election. In the last election, the Liberal Democrats got 5% of the vote. That should give them 43 seats in this House. Instead, they have 102. I will pass over in silence the fact that we got 8% of the vote, which should give us 69 seats, and we have precisely three. More seriously, however, if the Liberal Democrats use this dishonest advantage—by their own standards and manifesto—to vote down the will of the British people and the House of Commons, they will reveal their contempt for democracy and do your Lordships’ House no good at all.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
My Lords, I disagree with the amendment because I see two defects in it, one of which was highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, a moment ago. It purports to tie the hands of Parliament—which it should not do—unlike Amendment 3, which we will debate later today, which gives Parliament the certainty of having more options. The second defect is that the amendment does not address the increasing possibility that there will be no settlement, no agreement, and that we fall out.
What I do not like in this debate—I did not like it at Second Reading or in Committee—is the suggestion that in some way it would be illegitimate for the country to think again. There is a frog chorus behind the Minister. Every time he says, “It was decided”, the chorus behind him chants, “Koàx-koáx, decided, decided”. This is the lemming position. No matter how awful the deal turns out to be, no matter how unlike the promises of the leavers the eventual deal turns out to be, no matter how steep the cliff and stormy the sea, we must go over. There is no time to think again; there is no chance of turning back on any decision.
I find that strangely reminiscent of the Moscow I worked in in 1968, when Soviet foreign policy ran on the Brezhnev doctrine. The House will remember the Brezhnev doctrine, which said that once you have voted Communists in, you cannot vote Communists out. It was a very good doctrine for running central and eastern Europe. That seems to be the position of most of the government Back-Benches today.
I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, will consult his new right honourable friend Mr David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and will come to the conclusion that Mr Davis was right when he said that if a democracy cannot think again, cannot change its mind, it is no longer a democracy. I rather agree.
Lord Faulks (Con)
My Lords, I do not think I am a frog or a lemming, but I was one of the Ministers at the Dispatch Box when we took the European Union Referendum Bill through this House and I think we should have regard to what we decided in Parliament in that Act. A number of amendments were tabled but, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, there was no amendment about thresholds, no amendment to nuance the simple question that was posed, no amendment to say that we would only leave if we stayed within the single market, and, in particular, no amendment saying that there would be a second referendum. Why not? Was it because the alternatives were too complicated? There were only two outcomes of the referendum: either we remained or we left. Was it political negligence by parliamentarians not to table these amendments, or were they content with the Bill and its binary question?
We are having this debate contrary to what was generally considered to be the law, which was that it was the right of the Government, exercising the royal prerogative—
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
These amendments were tabled in the previous Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, as a surrogate for the Government. If they were tabled and defeated or withdrawn on that occasion, some people may have felt that there was no point in raising them at a later stage.
Lord Faulks
I find that remarkably unpersuasive.
As a result of the decision of the people, most thought that there was a power for the Government to negotiate and do the best deal possible. We then had the Gina Miller case, but there is nothing in the Supreme Court judgment, in my view, which either expressly or impliedly endorses the amendment advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Newby.
This is opportunism motivated by the perfectly understandable view, which I share, that we should not have voted to leave the EU. However, if we vote for this amendment, we will be ignoring what we decided in the European Union Referendum Act, we will be ignoring the vote and we will be ignoring the House of Commons. It is time for a little constitutional modesty on our part.
Lord Grocott
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, because he, like me, sat through most of the debate that resulted in this House, without opposition, deciding that we should have a referendum to determine whether to remain in or leave the European Union. I say that perhaps particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, who expressed his strong opposition to referendums. I respectfully say to him that, if that is the case, he should have opposed in this House the Bill that established the referendum mechanism to decide whether we should leave or remain.
I want to make an observation and will then specifically address the amendment. The observation is simply that there has been an awful lot of rerunning of the referendum argument in the discussion so far. I always want to urge this House, above all institutions that I have been able to be involved in, not to ascribe motives to people in elections and to assume that we understand precisely why they voted in the way they did, and then to challenge them somehow on the basis of whether they made what we consider to be the right or wrong decision. Perhaps I have a considerable qualification in this regard in that I have lost an awful lot of elections over the course of my career. Although the motive is always to say that your opponents lied or misled people, or that the people were not bright enough to make the decision, my advice, when they eventually elect you, is to acknowledge that they are a pretty shrewd electorate. That is how we all react to success and failure in elections.
Specifically on the amendment, we still have not had a reply on whether such a referendum would be advisory. I respectfully need to point out to the noble Lords who have spoken that one or two mistakes have been made in arguing this case. I think that it was my noble friend Lord Morgan who said that all referendums are advisory. That simply is not right. The referendum that we held on whether we should have AV or first past the post was based on legislation that this House had passed in the form of the Bill for the AV referendum. That laid out precisely the system that the electorate would put into place, should the referendum be passed.
Lord Morgan
I apologise for interrupting my noble friend. With regard to that referendum and all referendums, this is a constitution based on parliamentary sovereignty. Unlike France, it is not based on popular sovereignty.
Lord Grocott
My noble friend is absolutely right but in this case the Act of Parliament that this House passed to establish the referendum included precisely the mechanism for the alternative vote election that would come into place should that referendum be carried.
Lord Lang of Monkton (Con)
My Lords, I am in no doubt that the referendum of 23 June was technically advisory but the Government of the day and the leaders of the campaigns had made it absolutely clear that the Government would implement its findings without qualification. It also featured in the governing party’s manifesto in the last general election.
Lord Grocott
I do not disagree with that at all. The debate when the referendum campaign was under way was clearly on the basis that this was a once-in-a-lifetime decision, and we need to acknowledge that as well.
My main points are in respect of the validity of the decision and whether it should be replaced with a second referendum. As the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, said, at the time of the referendum it was never said that there would be a second referendum. I hate to disagree with my noble friend Lord Foulkes—particularly not on matters relating to Scotland; I have never done so in the long parliamentary careers that we have shared—but I think he said, and he will no doubt intervene and I will be happy to give way if I am wrong, that the choice in the Scottish referendum was absolutely clear. However, it did not come over like that in the way that it was reported in England. There appeared to be a great lack of clarity about things such as the currency that would be used and whether an independent Scotland could reapply, or would successfully be able to reapply, to join the European Union. There is a whole host of uncertainties around all referendums, and I have never heard of one where there were no uncertainties or difficulties to address.
That brings me to the only really substantial point that I think has not been made so far: that somehow or other—this, according to its proponents, is the whole basis of having a second referendum—circumstances will change in a very fundamental way, making it absolutely essential that we again test the opinion of the British people. I cannot avoid a trip down memory lane at this point because this is not the first referendum on whether we should be a member of the European Union; it is the second. The first one was held in 1975 and the overwhelming decision was to remain in the European Union.
Lord Grocott
Please can I finish my point? A lot of people said thereafter that perhaps we should have another referendum, and of course we did. The only problem from the perspective of those who voted no in the first one in 1975 was that we had to wait 41 years to be given the choice. Several generations of 16, 17 and 18 year-olds had become pensioners, so on that occasion there was a long gap between the decision taken in the first referendum and the second one, whereas it is proposed that there should be two or perhaps three years in the gap between referendums on this occasion.
The point I want to make is this: no one voting in 1975 could possibly have anticipated the consequences of a yes vote in that referendum. It was not the European Union then because it has changed its name several times since. It was the Common Market that people voted for or against in 1975.
Lord Grocott
I am sorry and I stand corrected. It was the Common Market, then the European Community, then the European Union and no doubt it will be something else in due course. The people who voted yes in the 1975 referendum did not know that it would triple in size over the ensuing 41 years, that qualified majority voting on all related matters would develop and that we would get a European foreign ministry, 150-odd offices of the European Union around the country, a European foreign affairs spokesman and so on. I am not necessarily criticising that, but I would say that no one who voted yes in 1975 could conceivably have thought that that would be the way in which the European Union would develop. Correct me if I am wrong, but do I recall anyone who voted yes in 1975 saying, “No, the circumstances have changed dramatically and we need to have another referendum to check whether the people agree with what they voted for”? The answer of course is no, that did not happen, and we waited 41 years between the first referendum and the second.
If we adopt the same principle in this respect, we shall have another referendum in 2057. I am a generous man looking for compromises and I think that would be an unreasonable gap between this referendum and any subsequent one. However, it is inevitable that after any decision, whether in a referendum or at a general election, some people will be dissatisfied with the result and will want to have it checked—correction, they will want to have it reversed. That is precisely the motive behind this proposal for a second referendum— unacknowledged in the Bill and unacknowledged during the referendum debate, and now being demanded as an entirely novel proposal. I hope that the House will agree with me that that is not acceptable.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I think that it would be sensible to hear from the Front Benches now. Perhaps we may hear from the Labour Front Bench and then the Minister.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, this has been an interesting and long debate on a short amendment to a short Bill. While I appreciate that the amendment refers to a ratification referendum, in his opening comments the noble Lord, Lord Newby, referred to this being an issue about people being able to change their minds. However, there has been a much broader discussion than just the amendment.
As someone who campaigned strongly to remain, and remains bitterly disappointed at the result, I agree with many of the comments that have been made but I am not sure that they bring much to bear on whether a second referendum is appropriate. The demands for a second referendum started even before the ink was dry on the ballot papers of the first referendum. We know that it is rare for us to have a national referendum. In 1975, the incredible Labour Party leader and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, held a referendum on whether we should remain in or leave the European Community. I think that I am in a minority in your Lordships’ House, but not alone, in that I was not able to vote in that referendum, being far too young, and the Minister probably could not vote in that referendum either. In 2011, the coalition Government held a referendum on whether to change the voting system where Parliament, via legislation, ceded sovereignty to the public, and in 2016, last year, we had the EU referendum.
There is clearly public interest in the EU because both referenda had high turnouts. It was a little lower in 1975, but no one really thought we were going leave and the margin of difference in favour of retaining EU membership, as the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, reminded us, was significant at 33%. However, last year the polls were so close that it probably encouraged the high turnout of 72%. Yet the referendum on changing the voting system motivated fewer than half of our fellow citizens, just 42%. There was never any real public demand for such a change and to most people it appeared politician led.
When we debated this amendment in Committee, I expressed my natural caution about politicians calling for a referendum on any issue. Usually it is called because we think it will endorse the result that we want. I accept that there have been exceptions today and that some noble Lords have made a case for direct or popular democracy, but the noble Lord, Lord Newby, has made clear what his reasons are for bringing forward this amendment. However, there is clearly a difference in the case of a public demand for a referendum, as we have seen, but politicians have to take care in how we respond to that public demand.
I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and others, when he opened the debate and I have read his article in the The House Magazine on this issue, in which he was totally honest about his amendment proposing a further referendum. Despite comments from a number of your Lordships that this is merely about giving the public a say on the exit arrangements, he was very clear that he took the view that the public would change their mind. In The House Magazine he said that it would be “implausible” not to grant a second referendum if public opinion shifted in favour of the EU.
However, there is no significant public demand for a second referendum and, at this stage, there is no significant shift in public opinion. This is being seen by many as merely a campaign to challenge the result of the first referendum. That was reinforced last week when the noble Lord spoke about the purpose behind his amendment. That is exactly the point. A second referendum would not be on the deal or the arrangements but yet again on a principle—or, rather, a mood—of how people felt about the EU the last time.
Before the last referendum—indeed, before the last elections—the Liberal Democrats campaigned for what they called a real referendum, an in-out referendum, on principle. They criticised both my party, the Labour Party, and the Conservatives for not going far enough in agreeing with them. I have a copy of their leaflet with me today. It urges people to “Sign our petition today” and says:
“It’s time for a real referendum on Europe”.
However, nowhere in the leaflet calling for this “real referendum” does it say, “But if you do not agree with us we will try and have another one”.
My understanding from those who were there at the time is that the Liberal Democrats considered—this is absolutely crucial—that, although their policy was to have a referendum limited to the Lisbon treaty, their campaign literature should not say it because they felt that it would not be clearly understood and that any referendum would inevitably turn into “Do you like the EU or not?”. I think that is right, because it is what we saw last year. It is also why the noble Lord’s confidence in having a referendum to show that people have changed their minds is flawed, because after two years of what could be very difficult negotiations it could well become a referendum—in effect—on whether we like, or are happy with, our European neighbours.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, this has been another good debate. I suspect that it confirms what many of us already know: that there are a number of your Lordships who passionately believe that the people have made a grave mistake by voting to leave the European Union and that there needs to be a referendum at the end of the negotiations. As I said before, I respect their views and I repeat my wish to bring together those on both sides of the argument—leave and remain—as we continue. But the Government are very clear that the amendment before us is misguided both in practice and in principle. Our reasons are very clear and they start with the democratic path that we have followed so far.
On 7 May 2015, the Conservative Government were elected by 11.3 million people, committed to a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union and committed to honouring the outcome. On 7 September 2015, 316 members of the other place voted in favour of holding a referendum by a majority of six to one. No condition or caveat was attached to the referendum, as my noble friend Lord Faulks pointed out. Parliament agreed on the question, which was simple: leave or remain? On 23 June 2016, 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union. On 8 February this year, the other place passed this Bill unamended—a simple Bill to trigger the process of leaving the European Union —by a majority of 372. This is the democratic path that has been followed, a path that will lead this country to leaving the European Union.
Some argue that we need another referendum, on what I consider to be somewhat peculiar and weak arguments. I refer to the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford, who said that,
“however it is dressed up, it will be seen as a second referendum. I cannot support that. Our people have already spoken”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 134.]
How right he is. Listen to Mr Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for North Norfolk, who said that the second referendum would raise,
“the question as to whether we’d remain in the European Union”.
But it was made abundantly clear that the referendum in June was, to quote the leaflet sent to all households in the UK,
“a once in a generation decision”.
There was nothing on the ballot, and no suggestion from Parliament, that there would have to be another referendum if the UK were to vote to leave. During the campaign, the then Prime Minister said:
“I am absolutely clear a referendum is a referendum, it’s a once in a generation, once in a lifetime opportunity and the result determines the outcome ... You can’t have neverendums, you have referendums”.
The next bogus argument is that people did not know enough to make an informed decision. I do not see that approach and argument as particularly liberal or democratic; I see it as somewhat patronising. It is as if we are saying, “We trust the people, but not quite entirely”. That Government leaflet spelled out the consequences and on many occasions during the campaign those on both sides of the argument made it clear that a vote to leave meant leaving the single market. For example, Mr David Cameron said:
“The British public would be voting, if we Leave, to leave the EU and leave the Single Market”.
Mr George Osborne said:
“We’d be out of the single market, that’s the reality”.
Mr Michael Gove said that we should be, “outside the single market”. The noble Lord, Lord Darling, said:
“Those wanting to leave the EU want to pull Britain out of the single market”.
My noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford said:
“The Leave campaign has … been clear what Leave means: it means leaving the Single Market”.
These politicians were right to point this out, for if we were to remain in the single market it would mean complying with the EU’s rules and regulations without having a vote on what those rules and regulations are. It would mean accepting a role for the European Court of Justice that would still see it having direct legal authority in our country and it would mean not having control of our borders. It would to all intents and purposes mean not leaving the EU at all.
The next peculiar argument is that a second referendum is needed to bring the nation together. Here I agree entirely with what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. If the argument is that the first referendum divided the nation, a second referendum is hardly likely to unite it—quite the reverse. Rather than bring people together, it would merely encourage divisions to fester.
Let me say a word about the need to come together. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury made a thoughtful and powerful speech. He is right about the need to heal our divisions and to work together to tackle the challenges we face. I would like to put on the record once again my thanks to the Church of England for hosting round tables to do just that. Moreover, others agree that we need to come together by saying:
“If we have to be out then let’s make the best of it”.
Those are the words of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, who on the question of a second referendum, said:
“Politicians should stay out of that”,
and the report of the event at which he said this—which I assume to be valid and not some form of fake news—continues as follows. Lord Ashdown,
“did not call for a second referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU saying it would be ‘foolish and wrong’ for Parliament to do that”.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
My Lords, let me see if I can make a rather better hash of it this time than I did with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. Is the Minister embarrassed by the fact that he keeps on answering the question by referring to an issue that is not addressed? We are not saying that there has to be a second referendum on European Union membership. That is done and we accept that the Government have their mandate. What we do not believe the Government have a mandate for is a brutal Brexit that will take us out of the single market. Can he explain why he believes that he does have that mandate, given that it was set out specifically in the Conservative Party manifesto that they would not do this?
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, the Conservative Party manifesto made it absolutely clear that we would respect the outcome, a position that the noble Lord himself took on the night of the referendum. It is absolutely our intention that the Government will deliver on the results of the referendum. I know that the noble Lord is spending Lent eating his own words, but I am sorry to say that he is wrong on this point.
Then there are the consequences of such a referendum. Would it bring certainty? Will businesses clap their hands with glee at the thought of a referendum some years off, the basis on which it would be held unclear, but the consequences of which could be to throw the entire negotiated settlement up in the air? We know the answer. As I have said, the Institute of Directors have called for:
“A commitment across all major political parties … not to undertake a second referendum on either EU membership or the Brexit deal to reduce uncertainty”.
What would happen, even after all this, if the result of the second referendum is still to leave? As some noble Lords have pointed out, would we once again be subjected to people saying, “Actually, we don’t like this answer. Please try again”? Where does it end? Will we continue to hold the same referendum until we get the result that those who support this amendment prefer?
Lord Liddle (Lab)
If, as the Prime Minister said in her Lancaster House speech, no deal would be better than a bad deal, is the Minister really telling us that in the circumstances of no deal he would absolutely rule out a referendum in the future?
Lord Bridges of Headley
Yes, my Lords. It is very clear: we are leaving the European Union. That is the pure and simple answer to the noble Lord.
Lord Bridges of Headley
No, I am sorry, my Lords; I am going to finish. I know that we will come back to this. Forgive me but I will not give way. I know that we will have a lot of debate after lunch about the meaningful vote that we will have, and I am sure that the noble Lord will have a chance then to have his say.
The noble Lord, Lord Newby, said on Wednesday that the rejection of a second referendum would be the antithesis of democracy. With respect to the noble Lord, I totally and utterly disagree. The referendum itself was democracy in action. We were also told that,
“a second referendum entails risks for which the price is too high”—[Official Report, 21/2/17; col. 160.]
and that:
“A further vote will prolong the uncertainty and cause uproar in the country, or worse”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 134.]
Those are the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, and the noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford, and I entirely agree with them. Calling a second referendum, as this amendment seeks to do, would undermine the will of the people as expressed in the EU referendum. The people have voted to leave the European Union and leave we will. Therefore, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Newby
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, which boils down to a single question: is it Parliament or the people that take the final decision on our future in Europe? The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said that it should be Parliament but that if Parliament rejected the deal, there might be a confidence vote. There would then be a general election, but a general election is an extremely imperfect way to debate a single issue. I think all parties have found that, as did Mr Heath. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, says that the Liberal Democrats might have found that, but with the current leaderships of the two main political parties, does he genuinely believe that a general election would be solely or even mainly on the issue of Brexit? No, my Lords; the general election is a very imperfect tool for dealing with such a specific question.
I have the highest regard for the most reverend Primate, but I am afraid that when he says that a further referendum is not democratic, I simply cannot agree. I cannot see the logic of that and I am sorry to say that I really cannot follow that argument at all.
It has been argued that the people cannot take a decision in these circumstances because it would be a binary choice. It is quite unclear to me why it is perfectly reasonable for Parliament to take a binary choice but not the people. Finally, it has been argued by a number of noble Lords that it is all too complicated for the people to take a final decision on this matter. That is the antithesis of democracy.
I ended my Second Reading speech by quoting Gladstone and, indeed, the Brexit Secretary: “Trust the people”. That was our stance a fortnight ago and it is our stance today. I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
It may help noble Lords if I explain that we hope to complete this amendment before we adjourn the Report stage for Questions. I hope noble Lords will be able to have some refreshment before 2.30 pm.
Amendment 2
“( ) Once a notification has been given under subsection (1), Ministers of the Crown must make a quarterly statement on the negotiations to each House of Parliament, with an accompanying report to be made available to relevant parliamentary committees.”
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
I have always thought the Government Chief Whip was a very nice man. I do not think he was offering us lunch today but he was offering us time for lunch.
This is a short and, I hope, sweet amendment. It is about the cement between Amendment 1 and Amendment 3. Amendment 1 has been defeated and therefore we are not talking about a referendum at the end of negotiations, but Amendment 3, which I trust will be carried, is about putting the decision at the end to Parliament. Amendment 2 basically states that, in order to make that as good a way of moving forward as possible, we will need to have from the Government—not as a running commentary, or even as a walking commentary, but as a dialogue with Parliament—some feedback about how the negotiations are going.
This is not only about what we are offering as a Government, as a country, but also about what is happening on the other side. We think we will be negotiating with just one bloc—the European Union—but there are 27 countries on that side and there will be ups and downs, elections, changes of personnel and all kinds of things happening within those 27 countries.
Charles Grant of the CER, who is usually correct, has said that in all of this, politics matters more than economics. Therefore feedback from the Government about how the other countries and the European Union are responding will help us to understand the negotiations. As I said in Committee, it would be terrible if we come to that final vote in this House and there are surprises because we do not know what has been happening and how discussions have been going and, even worse, because the Government have not taken the time to listen to our EU committees.
Lord Dykes
What would be the provision for an expression of opinion in both Houses on the later stages of those quarterly reports and negotiations? If people wanted to express an opinion, it might be legitimate for them to do so with a formal vote.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I will leave that to the usual channels, who will discuss it at the time. I deal with content not process. That is why I will be pleased when this Bill is over and we get into the real meat of the negotiations, with which I wish Ministers luck. The task of negotiating will be extremely hard and that is why they could benefit from discussions in the House.
It is important that we should hear back almost the mood music of what is going on. We should hear some detail so that it will not be any surprise. If people think this will all be done in secret then they have not worked in Brussels for very long. It is as leaky as a sieve and we will be reading a lot about the negotiations. It will be more like a colander than a bucket about the things that are going on in there and taking stock will be important. We have already stressed the importance of the devolved Administrations also being involved and to check that they are. We can talk on this.
Therefore, with a nod to this afternoon’s debate and what I hope will be its outcome—that Parliament will get the final vote—if the final deal is to win the consent of Parliament there should be no surprises and a grown-up conversation should go on. I am sure that the Government will not veer off in ways that surprise us, because we do not want to vote down something because it is a surprise. We will want to have a proper vote at that time. To make the final vote a proper one, we ask for these reports to be quarterly, and if the Minister thinks that means only quarterly he needs to think again: there needs to be a minimum of quarterly reports, so that we can discuss how it is going. I beg to move.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. It is important to have a structured schedule and framework for reporting back to Parliament as part of the whole scheme that we are trying to set up, including a meaningful vote, which we will discuss this afternoon.
The European Parliament example has been much prayed in aid. Those of us, like myself, who were in the European Parliament, and others, will know that one of the incentives for making sure that the European Parliament was kept informed throughout the process of negotiating external agreements was that it had the power to reject them at the end. After the European Parliament had rejected several international agreements, the European Council, the Council of Ministers and the Commission finally came to their senses and realised that it was much better to front-load the system so that the European Parliament was kept informed along the way, instead of getting a nasty surprise at the end. In the jargon, that accounts for the “inter-institutional arrangements”, which include reports and the making available of documents throughout the process. It is a much better way of managing it and making sure that the Council’s negotiating objectives are delivered in a “smooth, orderly way”, which, I think, is the phrase often used by the Government about Brexit. There are, therefore, good practical reasons for having a very structured system of reporting back.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, talks about everything happening in a smooth, orderly way. I rather agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. Everything will leak. The EU Commission is obliged to report to the European Parliament and the whole idea that the European Parliament will say, “This is all secret information, we should not let it out”, seems to me to be for the birds. Everything will leak and we will hear rumours about how far the negotiations have got, or what has happened. At that point, Parliament will demand a debate. The Government will get up, if this amendment is passed, and say, “No, you must wait for the quarterly review in two months’ time”. I do not think so. I think that the House of Commons will say, “Come on, get on with it, we want a response. Why have we heard these rumours? The Government must put us straight on all of this”.
This amendment, therefore, would achieve nothing. Everything will leak from the negotiations. When things of substance leak, Parliament, particularly the Commons, will demand a debate, and your Lordships’ House will no doubt do the same. This amendment is otiose.
Lord Spicer
My Lords, I made the point in Committee that if you want sovereignty of Parliament you should vote as quickly as possible for this Bill and subsequent Bills to get us out of the control of the European Union. I make the point now—it is rather similar to that of my noble friend—that it is highly unlikely that the Government will accept this amendment. If it prevails, we will potentially be into a constitutional issue.
Therefore, one has to ask what options are likely to occur in the event of this House passing this amendment and, as my noble friend has just suggested, the other House passing it back to us, with the Government standing firm. There are three options. First, the Government could do nothing and concede the situation, but I think that that is highly unlikely. To lose control of the Bill at this stage on this issue would be very questionable wisdom on the part of the Government. Secondly, they could create 100 Peers. That is unlikely as well and would be rather dramatic at this stage. Thirdly, they could call a general election. That option should be under strong consideration by the Government at the moment. Through a vote of confidence in the Commons or whatever, they could have it out in the well-known democratic way of doing things—through a general election. I want to put on the record that there should be one round of ping-pong and then we should call a general election.
Lord Warner
My Lords, I wish to speak in support of the amendment. I tabled a similar amendment in Committee which was rather less demanding than this one, but the Government dispatched it extremely briskly.
I suggest that this amendment might be helpful to the Government. The idea that all the special interest groups affected by these negotiations—the different sectors, companies and pressure groups—will sit still, while stuff comes out of the EU about the possibility of doing damage to their particular interests and concerns, is fanciful. If the Minister and the Government do not have any structured way of reporting back to Parliament, we will find that many of those people will lobby your Lordships’ House and there will be a demand for a huge number of Parliamentary Questions, as well as demands for debates, to deal with the latest set of rumours about a particular sector, industry or agency which may be being transferred back to Europe. The EMA would be a good example and Euratom is another. Therefore, the Government might find that their life was made a bit easier if there was a structured way of reporting back to Parliament about the progress that was being made, especially if it was reasonably detailed and told some of these interest groups what was going on in the negotiations.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Does the noble Lord think that Parliament will be happy if they are given the response that, because the quarterly review is coming up and it is two months away, the question cannot be answered today; it will have to be answered in two months’ time when the clock next ticks round?
Lord Warner
The noble Baroness’s amendment is very flexible. It refers to a period of at least three months. There is nothing in the amendment to stop the Government serving their own interests by being more forthcoming more frequently. I am sure that the noble Baroness would not mind having reports made on a more frequent basis.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
My Lords, I am sure that the Government share the sentiments expressed from the Front Bench opposite—indeed, from both Front Benches opposite. The proposal would be entirely in the interests of the smooth development of policy in this difficult area, which I am sure we all understand is extremely difficult. The more help the Government can get, the better, and I think that they are sufficiently humble to know that.
If there were any slackness on the part of the Government, we would have plenty of means in this Parliament for getting them to respond, but I do not agree with putting that into an Act of Parliament, and the reason for that is simple. If something is put into a general Act of Parliament, the idea is that the courts are the enforcers, but one thing that the courts cannot do, in view of the Bill of Rights, is to interfere in proceedings in Parliament. Therefore, this is useless as a formal amendment, but the spirit of it is first-class. I feel almost certain that my noble and learned friend will be able to accept that, because the Minister in the Commons said just as much in a passage that I may refer to later.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Keen of Elie) (Con)
My Lords, I am obliged for the contributions that have been made to the debate. This short Bill has already invoked many hours of debate, so I intend to keep my remarks very brief.
I endorse the observations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, both as to the appropriateness of this amendment and as to the spirit in which it will be and is being received by the Government. As noble Lords will be aware, the Prime Minister gives a Statement to the other place following European Councils. We know that there will be a Council this month, and indeed quarterly thereafter. That means that a Statement will be made to Parliament at least once every quarter on European issues, and it will be repeated in this House. Of course, that is just the beginning of a much wider process over which this Parliament has control at the end of the day.
DExEU Ministers have responded to more than 600 parliamentary Written Questions, appeared at 13 Select Committees and given six Oral Statements to the House on developments regarding our exit. The Secretary of State has agreed to give evidence to the Exiting the EU Select Committee on 15 March, alongside the Permanent Secretary at DExEU, and will shortly afterwards give evidence to the Lords EU Committee on 22 March.
The Government are committed to parliamentary scrutiny, and Parliament will play a key role in scrutinising and shaping our withdrawal. As my noble friend Lord Bridges observed last week, we have had take-note debates, debates on Select Committee reports, debates in government time and Select Committee appearances. All this will continue in order that Parliament can scrutinise the development of negotiations in so far as is possible to put those in the public domain and in so far as they come into the public domain.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, referred to secrets, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, referred to nasty secrets. This may reflect a difference of approach, but at the end of the day there will not be any secrets. You cannot conduct such a process in secret, ultimately, and then expect Parliament to consider that it is being kept properly informed, as it should be, if you have what are termed secrets. We are committed to keeping Parliament at least as well informed as the European Parliament as negotiations progress.
A Bill to repeal the European Communities Act will follow. There will be primary legislation on issues such as immigration and customs, and a vote at the end with regard to the process on the final deal to exit.
With all that in mind, I will pose a few questions. Is the Prime Minister already bound to give a Statement to Parliament after every quarterly European Council? The answer is yes.
Have the Government been willing to give frequent Statements to Parliament? The answer is yes.
Have DExEU Ministers and other government Ministers appeared in front of Select Committees? The answer is yes.
Have the Government listened to Select Committee reports? The answer is yes; we published a White Paper in February this year.
Do the Government aim to respond to the Select Committee reports about Brexit within two months? The answer is yes.
Have the Government said they will give more information to Parliament, so long as it does not undermine our negotiating position? The answer is yes.
Then there is the core question: what is the present Bill about? The Bill is about giving the Prime Minister the authority to give notice of withdrawal from the European Union.
With great respect to the House and to all noble Lords, let us proceed and pass this Bill. It will not be improved by unnecessary decoration and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, has already observed, it is not appropriate that this amendment should proceed. As I believe all Members of your Lordships’ House who have spoken would acknowledge, it is not necessary that this amendment should proceed in these circumstances. Therefore, I invite the noble Lords to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I thank the Minister and other noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. The most helpful exchange—I mean no disrespect to the others—was to hear the noble and learned Lord Mackay support the spirit of the amendment and then the Minister say that he agreed. If I could just bottle that, that will do me nicely.
I want to make only two other points. Although there are of course report-backs after the European Council, the UK will not be there when the European Council discusses our departure. Therefore, it is the other meetings that we are interested in.
My other comment is in response to the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, who said that if we dared to suggest that Parliament rather than the Crown should take the final decision, Mrs May might call an election. I am much older than my noble friend who spoke earlier and not only did I vote in 1975 but I remember the February 1974 election very well. Edward Heath basically called an election on who governs Britain. Mrs May would not be well advised to go to the country on, “Do you want the Government or Parliament to govern Britain?”. However, that is beside the point. I thank the Minister for the tone of his response and, on that basis, beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Tuesday 7th March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 108-I Marshalled list for Report (PDF, 67KB) - (3 Mar 2017)
18:16 - Division on Amendment 3 - Ayes: 366 / Noes: 268 - Amendment 3 agreed.
Lord Pannick
“Parliamentary approval for the outcome of negotiations with the European Union
(1) The Prime Minister may not conclude an agreement with the European Union under Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union, on the terms of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, without the approval of both Houses of Parliament.(2) Such approval shall be required before the European Parliament debates and votes on that agreement.(3) The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament shall also be required in relation to an agreement on the future relationship of the United Kingdom with the European Union.(4) The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament shall also be required in relation to any decision by the Prime Minister that the United Kingdom shall leave the European Union without an agreement as to the applicable terms.”
Lord Pannick (CB)
My Lords, Amendment 3 is in my name and the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham. The purpose and effect of Amendment 3 is very simple. It would ensure that at the end of the negotiating process, the approval of Parliament would be required for the terms of our withdrawal from the EU. The Prime Minister has accepted that principle: she has undertaken that any agreement with the European Union on the terms of our withdrawal, and any agreement on our future relationship with the EU, will be put to both Houses of Parliament for their approval. She has also promised that this will occur before the withdrawal agreement is sent to the European Parliament for its consent. That must be right: this Parliament must have at least the same opportunity as the European Parliament to disagree with the terms of any draft agreement. The Prime Minister has given an undertaking but the Government are refusing to include the commitment in the Bill. Given the importance of the decision to leave the EU and the importance of the terms on which we are to do that, the role of Parliament must surely be written into the Bill—no ifs and no buts.
The amendment has been revised since the very helpful debate in Committee last Wednesday evening. As suggested by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, during that debate, proposed new subsections (1), (2) and (3) in the amendment set out the undertaking given to the House of Commons by the Minister, Mr David Jones, on 7 February at col. 264. The only alteration to what Mr Jones said is that the amendment does not commit the Government to proceeding by way of a Motion in both Houses. The amendment allows the Government to decide what would be the best means of seeking and obtaining approval from both Houses. That is because of the point made in Committee last Wednesday night by the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, with his enormous knowledge and experience of parliamentary procedure.
Proposed new subsection (4), which has also been revised since the debate last Wednesday, requires the “approval of both Houses” if the Prime Minister decides that,
“the United Kingdom shall leave the European Union without an agreement”,
as to the terms. Parliament must also have a role in those circumstances. It must be for Parliament to decide whether to prefer no deal or the deal offered by the EU.
I will also address a point that has been raised with me by some noble Lords, about what happens if the two Houses disagree when the agreement, or lack of agreement, is put to Parliament. It is of course the Prime Minister who has decided that the terms of our withdrawal are so important that the approval of both Houses of Parliament should be required. The White Paper says, at paragraph 1.12:
“The Government will … put the final deal that is agreed between the UK and the EU to a vote in both Houses of Parliament”.
The Minister, Mr David Jones, stated in the House of Commons in Committee that,
“the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement, to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; col. 264.]
In any event, if this House were to agree this amendment today, it is open to the Government, if they are concerned about this issue, to seek to amend this proposed new clause in the Commons next week to address what happens if the two Houses were to disagree.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
This is a very important point, and I am glad that the noble Lord is addressing it in such detail, but we cannot make our judgments on the basis of what the Government have said they might do. The judgment today must be on the basis of what is in this proposed new clause. I therefore ask the noble Lord, from his perspective, given that the proposed new clause repeatedly says,
“the approval of both Houses of Parliament”,
what, in his judgment, would the solution be if one House said yes and the other said no?
Lord Pannick
As I have said, this is the Prime Minister’s undertaking, but since the noble Lord has asked me—I do not have to tell him this, given his enormous experience—if the House of Commons were to give its approval, this House would, in my judgment, rightly be told that it should be very slow indeed to take a different view from the elected House. If we were to disagree with the Commons, I understand that it would be open to the Government immediately to take the matter back to the Commons for a further confirmatory resolution, which, if agreed, would lead to a further approval Motion in this House. I expect, at that stage, it would be exceptionally unlikely that this House would stand its ground. I repeat, however, that if the Government were dissatisfied with that, which is the consequence of the undertaking given by the Prime Minister, it is open to the Government to bring forward an amendment in the other place. Indeed, it was open to the Government in this House to bring forward an amendment to this amendment to deal with the matter.
Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)
I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He says that it is “exceptionally unlikely” that this House would insist in those circumstances on having its way, but that falls some way short of dealing with the point raised by the noble Lord opposite. Does the noble Lord not agree that this proposed new clause, in effect, gives this House a statutory veto on the decision made by the Prime Minister with the support of the other place to implement the decision of the British people to leave the European Union?
Lord Pannick
The noble Lord will form his own judgment; I am putting to the House that this amendment implements the undertaking given by the Prime Minister. She has recognised—in my view rightly—that so important are these matters that it is necessary, and imperative, to obtain the approval of both Houses of Parliament. The constitutional realities, as I understand them, are that this House is exceptionally unlikely to stand its ground against the view of the elected House. However, noble Lords will form their own judgment.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, does the noble Lord also agree that there is nothing in this proposed new clause that precludes the approval of both Houses being expressed in an Act of Parliament? If that is correct, the Parliament Act stands behind it.
Lord Pannick
I am grateful to the noble Viscount. As I have already said, this amendment is different from the amendment that we had in Committee because it does not state by what the means the Government must seek the approval of both Houses. The noble Viscount is absolutely right: it is open to the Government to proceed by way of emergency legislation.
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord is an exceedingly distinguished lawyer, as we all know. I recognise that, normally, the legal profession seeks precision. The noble Lord is laying before the House an amendment that is imprecise, and he has admitted that; it has been pointed out by my noble friend Lord Howard. He uses the term, “extremely unlikely”. Section 20 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 has a clear device for breaking a disagreement. Why is the noble Lord, as a lawyer concerned with the precise, not putting before Parliament precise legislation that deals with the matter he recognises needs to be dealt with?
Lord Pannick
I repeat to the noble Lord: I have put in the amendment precisely the undertaking that the Prime Minister has given. If the Prime Minister takes the view that it is appropriate to address specifically in the amendment the means by which any division of view between the two Houses can be broken, it is entirely up to her, when the matter returns to the Commons—if it does—to amend this provision to specify, for example, Section 20. If I had put in the amendment a particular means of breaking a deadlock between the two Houses, I would have been told by the noble Lord and others that that was not the solution we welcome.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
Can the noble Lord explain? He has repeatedly said that what he has put in his amendment and wants to put in the Bill is no different from what the Prime Minister indicated to the House of Commons. Surely the difference is that the Prime Minister’s undertaking was that there would be a vote in both Houses on the issue of a deal or falling back on WTO. Reading his amendment, his difference is between no deal and what? What happens? Can he explain?
Lord Pannick
What happens? Nobody knows what will happen: that is the whole point of the difficulty that we face in 21 months’ time. I do not know what will happen. The noble Lord does not know what will happen. I am saying to the House that it is essential that Parliament has an opportunity, guaranteed by legislation, to address the circumstances at the time.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I know that some people in the House do not want to see the flaws in this, but the answer to my question—no deal or what?—is that we end up rejecting the view that the British people voted for: that we should leave the European Union. That is the hidden agenda behind the amendment.
Lord Pannick
If by referring to a hidden agenda, the noble Lord is suggesting that I have some motivation, I assure him that my only motivation is to ensure that Parliament has a guaranteed opportunity at the end of the negotiating process to decide whether the terms of our withdrawal are acceptable or not. That is a basic question of parliamentary sovereignty.
The amendment will not delay notification of withdrawal from the EU. It does not commit the Government to adopt any specific approach in the negotiations. It does not impede them in the negotiations any more than the undertaking already given by the Prime Minister. Crucially, it will guarantee that the Government must come back to both Houses to seek approval for the result of the negotiations.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill (LD)
I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way and wish him a happy birthday. Would I be right in thinking that the difference between what he is advocating and what some other noble Lords are advocating is the difference between parliamentary authority and the royal prerogative? Is he not doing exactly what the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom said in Gina Miller’s case, which he won?
Lord Pannick
I am very grateful to the noble Lord. I was worried for a moment that he was going to sing at me, but I entirely agree with his point. We are considering the Bill because, and only because, as he reminds the House, the Supreme Court ruled as a matter of law that parliamentary sovereignty is required at this stage of notification of withdrawal. I say, not as a matter of law—because I am not arguing a legal case—but as a matter of constitutional principle, that parliamentary sovereignty is as important at the end of the negotiating process. I beg to move.
Lord Heseltine (Con)
My Lords, many of your Lordships have made the point that we are not here to refight the referendum campaign; there is a clear mandate to trigger Article 50. My own personal position has been clearly established since I first joined the Conservative Party in 1951. I believe, and always have, that Britain’s national self-interest is inextricably interwoven with those of our European partners. I deeply regret the outcome of the referendum.
That said, within three days of that outcome, I publicly made three points. First, I urged the Government to get on with the disengagement process, not only because they had a clear mandate to do so but because I thought that delay would only add uncertainty to the damage that the result itself had produced. Secondly, I urged the Government to appoint Brexiteers to the three Cabinet positions that would front the negotiations. It was clear to me then that failure to do so would open the door to the allegation that if only “the right people” had been put in positions to lead the charge, a much better deal would have been done. I also took the view, perhaps naively, that as campaigners for Brexit, it was not unreasonable to assume that they might have answers to the numerous questions that we faced. Your Lordships will be aware that both of these events have now taken place and I am very pleased to say how fully I support the Prime Minister in what she has done.
That leaves only my third point—the most controversial of the three. I said then that the fightback starts here. Like so many of your Lordships, I enjoyed the privilege of many years in another place—in my case, 35 years. I learned the limitations of government in a parliamentary democracy and I learned the role of opposition in such circumstances. Time and again I have been involved, along with many of your Lordships on these Benches, in opposing by every constitutional means in our power the mandate of the elected Government. Not only did we oppose their mandate from the very first day that Parliament met, we began the long process of repealing the Acts of which we disapproved.
In the end, it came down to a belief in the ultimate sovereignty of Parliament. I must make it clear that, in accepting the mandate to negotiate our withdrawal from the European Union, I do not accept that the mandate runs for all time and in all circumstances—48% of our people rejected that concept last year. They have the same right to be heard, as I hope so many of us recognised in those long years of opposition in another place.
We now face a protracted period of negotiation. No one has the first idea what will emerge. No one can even tell us what Governments in Europe will be there to conclude whatever deal emerges. No one can say with certainty how British public opinion will react to totally unpredictable events. To give just one example, I am told that it took 240 regulations to introduce the single market in the late 1980s. I remember the resentment that caused, particularly to small and medium-sized companies. I understand that it may take 1,600 regulations to unravel more than 40 years of closer union—and no one can say how the vital small and medium-sized sector of our economy will react to the circumstances that it will then face.
Everyone in this House knows that we now face the most momentous peacetime decision of our time. This amendment, as the noble Lord so clearly set out, secures in law the Government’s commitment, already made to another place, to ensure that Parliament is the ultimate custodian of our national sovereignty. It ensures that Parliament has the critical role in determining the future that we will bequeath to generations of young people. I urge your Lordships to support the amendment.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I will not take up too much of the House’s time, not least because I think the issue at stake is really rather simple. On 17 January this year, the Prime Minister confirmed in her Lancaster House speech the Government’s intention to,
“put the final deal that is agreed between the UK and the EU to a vote in both Houses of Parliament”.
As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, on 7 February the Minister of State for Exiting the European Union stated that,
“the vote will cover not only the withdrawal arrangements but also the future relationship with the European Union”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; col. 264.]
This amendment merely gives legislative effect to the Government’s pledge. In doing so it will assist the Prime Minister in upholding her intention, should she or any successor be tempted to resile from it. The amendment will also provide clarity that the Government will require the prior approval of Parliament should the Prime Minister decide to leave the European Union without any agreement at all.
In Committee, some noble Lords on the Benches opposite questioned the need for legal underpinning of the commitment given by the Government to a meaningful vote. The reason is simple. We do not trust the Government on this matter—not because we do not trust the integrity of individual members of the Government but because, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, pointed out in Committee, we are only discussing this at all because the Government were forced by the courts and the arguments made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, to come to Parliament and hear its voice on the matter.
If we want to ensure that our sovereign Parliament, so often championed by the leave campaigners, has a clear and decisive role in scrutinising the final outcome of this process, it must assert its rights in legislation. If the Government are genuine in the commitment they have given on these matters, they should have no problem accepting the amendment. If they are not willing to do so, it will call into question the sincerity of their commitment and only strengthen the argument to pass this amendment into law.
The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, reminded us last week:
“Prime Ministers can go, Ministers can be sacked, Parliaments can change and Governments can cease to exist. One needs to enshrine assurances that stand against … changes in circumstances”.—[Official Report, 1/3/17; col. 921.]
I wholeheartedly agree with the noble Viscount. That is why I support the amendment. I hope that your Lordships’ House will do so, too.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, on the noble Lord’s latter point, it is perhaps worth recalling to the House what the Minister, Mr David Jones, said in the other place:
“The Government have repeatedly committed from the Dispatch Box to a vote in both Houses on the final deal before it comes into force. That, I repeat and confirm, will cover not only the withdrawal agreement but the future arrangement that we propose with the European Union. I confirm again that the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement … to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded, and we expect and intend that that will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; col. 269.]
In the course of the debate, the Minister repeated those sentences three times, and the shadow Secretary of State, Keir Starmer, to whom I paid tribute in the Second Reading debate, said:
“Minister, I am very grateful for that intervention. That is a huge and very important concession about the process that we are to embark on. The argument I have made about a vote over the last three months is that the vote must cover both the article 50 deal and any future relationship—I know that, for my colleagues, that is very important”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; cols 264-65.]
Both Houses will get a vote on the final draft deal, and we do not need any of these amendments. It is a complete distortion to suggest that the amendments before us today—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I shall give way to the noble Lord if he sits down and lets me finish my sentence.
It is a complete distortion to suggest that the Government are likely to renege on those promises or that the amendments that we are discussing today put on to the statute book exactly what was said by the Prime Minister and the Minister in the House of Commons. They do something completely different.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but having read out three times what the Minister said in the House of Commons he has revealed that the Minister failed to answer the question that he and the noble Lord, Lord Howard, and others put to my noble friend on what happens if there is a disagreement between the two Houses. Perhaps he could address that, and perhaps he could also put that question to the right person to put it to, which is not my noble friend but the Minister who is going to reply to the debate and who will have ample opportunity to reply to it.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I know that the noble Lord is very experienced. If he does not know the difference between a resolution in the House of Commons and putting in statute a power of veto for the House of Lords, I am very surprised to hear him making that point.
The point about the amendment that we are discussing, Amendment 3, is that it is a wrecking amendment.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I am not going to give way; I am going to make some progress.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
How can it be a veto since we cannot in fact impose our will on the House of Commons?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
The noble and learned Baroness is very experienced, and she should know that this House is able to impose its will on the House of Commons. By convention, we do not do so, and, if we sought to do so, we would be in very deep water. This amendment is taking us into deep water.
I return to the issue under discussion, which is the amendment. Proposed new subsection (1) says:
“The Prime Minister may not conclude an agreement with the European Union under Article 50(2) … on the terms of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal … without the approval of both Houses of Parliament”.
So we get to the final hour, at midnight, when the deal is being done, and the Prime Minister says, “Hang on a second, I cannot agree a deal—I’ve got to go and consult the House of Commons”. It is a ridiculous proposal—
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
It is not the Prime Minister’s proposal. It is a ridiculous proposal to say that the Prime Minister may not conclude an agreement until this has been sorted.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
No, I am not going to give way to my noble friend.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I promise to give way to him once I have actually made my points about the amendment.
It is a first rule of negotiation that you never negotiate with someone who does not have authority to conclude the deal. The effect of these proposals is to put Ministers in a position where their authority is in doubt and where, in effect, this House and the House of Commons are parties to the negotiation, which has to be conducted between Ministers and people from the EU.
Lord Heseltine
I wonder whether the noble Lord realises that the Ministers or European officials with whom this will be negotiated have all got to go back to every European parliament and the European Parliament before they can conclude a deal.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I do realise that. I have the utmost respect for my noble friend, who helped to get me elected in 1983, which may not be one of the most important things on his escutcheon. He has served the party with great distinction. But I have to say to him that it is not the moment for this House to grab the mace and challenge the authority of the House of Commons.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Subsection (2) of the proposed new clause states that:
“Such approval shall be required before the European Parliament debates and votes on that agreement”.
How are Ministers supposed to deliver that? They are not in control of the timetable for when the European Parliament debates these matters. It is an impossible condition for them to meet.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
I beg the noble Lord’s pardon and am grateful to him for giving way. The phrase,
“this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement”—[Official Report, Commons, 7/2/17; col. 264],
is set out in Hansard in the undertaking given by David Jones on 7 February. The more the noble Lord makes his points, the more important it is, it seems to me, to pass this amendment.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
If the noble and learned Lord accepts my point then the more important it is not to seek to put it in statute. He did not actually deal with my point. How on earth are Ministers able to ensure that,
“approval shall be required before the European Parliament debates”,
when they are not in charge of the timetable for those debates? I would happily give way to him if he would like to answer that point. He is arguing that this should be put in statute and he should be able to explain how it could be achieved.
Lord Hope of Craighead
My Lords, I would love to continue this discussion until we reach an end of it, but all I am doing is referring to the words of the Minister himself. It is for him to work out how this undertaking, which he gave to Parliament and which fits exactly with the wording of the White Paper, should be conducted. It is very important that we make this matter clear. The best way of dealing with it is to use the Minister’s words in proposed subsections (1) to (3)—as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has done—and pass the amendment. The House of Commons can look at it again if it wishes.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
The noble and learned Lord is normally very careful and precise. At the beginning of my speech I read out the words that David Jones used in the other House. He said: “We expect and intend” that that will happen before the European Parliament debates. This says that such approval “shall be required” before the European Parliament debates. There is a big difference between “expect and intend” and “shall be required”.
Lord Callanan (Con)
Does the noble Lord agree that the vote in the European Parliament will be about whether the deal that is negotiated will be acceptable, not about whether the UK actually leaves the EU or not?
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My noble friend is absolutely right on that point. Subsection (3) of the proposed new clause states that:
“The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament shall … be required in relation to an agreement on the future relationship of the United Kingdom with the European Union”.
I put that point to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in my intervention. This effectively gives this House, and the House of Commons, a veto on Brexit. It gives it the ability to prevent us from leaving the European Union, despite the fact that we have had the biggest vote in our history from people requiring that. It would be immensely destructive to the reputation of Parliament and of this House.
Subsection (4) states that:
“The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament shall also be required in relation to any decision by the Prime Minister that the United Kingdom shall leave the European Union without an agreement as to the applicable terms”.
That means that Ministers are unable to walk away. This was the mistake that David Cameron made. If he had walked away he might have been able to get a proper deal—who knows? He did not walk away and they knew he was not going to. That is why he got such a useless deal. This ensures that Ministers cannot walk away. For the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, to suggest that the amendment is simply implementing the Prime Minister’s promise is a complete misrepresentation.
Lord Pannick
I am sorry; I did not say that. I made it very clear to the House that proposed subsections (1) to (3) implement the undertaking. That is not the case in relation to subsection (4). I take the view—noble Lords will form their own judgment—that it is absolutely vital for this House and the other place to have a say on whether we should leave with no deal or the one that is being offered. I made that very clear.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I have to say to the noble Lord that we know what he is up to, and we know what is going on.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I appreciate that I am in a minority in this House, and not just because I am a Scottish Tory. I am in a minority because I support the views of the majority of people in this country. This House is absolutely full of people who still have not come to terms with the results of the referendum. This is a clever lawyer’s confection in order to reverse that result. That is what we are debating. That is what it is about.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I have already given way to the noble Lord. He can make his own speech.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Well, all right. I will give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I am most grateful to the noble Lord. I am sorry that I am causing him such frustration this afternoon.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
Normally in this House we do not speak from a sedentary position.
Lord Naseby
My sedentary comment was that the noble Lord is annoying the House, not just an individual Member.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I am most grateful to the noble Lord for having arrogated to himself the decision as to what the hundreds of people around this place believe.
The point I was going to raise, and ask the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, to address, is this. Of course the Prime Minister of this country has the ability to ensure that we leave the European Union without an agreement, because of the two-year time limit in Article 50, which the noble Lord has not addressed. That time limit is absolute. It will be triggered within the next few days and, sometime in 2019, it will reach its conclusion. It takes two to negotiate. Since the Prime Minister will be one of them—and the 27 and the institutions of the European Union will be the other—she has the ability to ensure that we leave without an agreement. That is the eventuality that is being dealt with in this amendment.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
The noble Lord makes my point for me. If, after two years, we have no agreement, then we will have left the European Union. I need to conclude my remarks.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
This place is beginning to be like the House of Commons.
What is going on here is like Gulliver. These amendments are trying to tie down the Prime Minister—by her hair, her arms and her legs—in every conceivable way in order to prevent her from getting an agreement and us from leaving the European Union. The House should reject this amendment for what it is—which is an unelected Chamber trying to frustrate the will of the democratically elected Government and of the people, which has been expressed in a huge vote in a referendum.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, one of the main reasons why we are where we are now is that the Prime Minister and the Government wanted to go ahead and use the prerogative, and it is only because of the ruling in the Supreme Court that we are debating this here.
In this amendment, we are asking to have something put in statute to protect against uncertainty in the future. We have heard so far in the discussion that questioning why voters voted—remain or leave—would be an insult to them. However, this was not a general election. In a general election, you have the party’s manifesto—or an “Ed’s stone” and its commandments. If the people do not like the Government and say that they have not lived up to their manifesto, or have not delivered, in five years’ time they can throw them out. The difference here is that this decision is permanent. The last referendum was in 1975—over four decades ago. Then, there was a majority of 67%. A supermajority was achieved. The decision was decisive. There was certainty. This time, we were told that it was a binary decision—remain or leave—but the outcomes are anything but binary. One of the outcomes is a hard Brexit.
The main issue here is that people are allowed to change their minds. Whether it is the Prime Minister, her Ministers, Members of the other place or Members of this House who want to change their minds, it is their right to do so. In fact, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, said that changing your mind was a sign of intelligence. As Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind”. As the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said, many facts and many outcomes of this negotiation are completely uncertain. The Dutch elections, the French elections and the German elections are coming up. The eurozone might collapse. Europe might even reform its immigration rules, which we would like. Therefore, it is only right that Parliament has a full say on the road ahead. This amendment would protect us from the potential outcomes.
I concluded my Second Reading speech by quoting Professor Deepak Malhotra of the Harvard Business School, a world expert in negotiation. He told me to make sure that I read a book called The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman about the beginning of the First World War. He said that reading that book was like watching a train crash in slow motion. That is what we are seeing right now with Brexit. I conclude that we need to support this amendment more than anything in order to protect the future.
Lord Tebbit (Con)
I wonder whether in 1975 the noble Lord knew about the Maastricht treaty?
Lord Bilimoria
My Lords, in 1975 I was barely a teenager.
I conclude by saying that the main reason why we need to support this amendment is for the sake of future generations and to protect them. I am sure that noble Lords have received several tweets, emails and letters from individuals. Just this morning I received an email that said, “Please support parliamentary democracy and our young people’s future”. One of our doorkeepers reminded me of an ancient Gaelic saying: “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”.
Lord Finkelstein (Con)
The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, seemed to suggest that we should support this amendment because Article 50 was not unilaterally irrevocable and that we would have to leave the EU. The argument used by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, just now was that we should support the amendment because it is unilaterally irrevocable. Which is it?
Lord Bilimoria
Whether it is irrevocable has not been tested legally. The expert on this is the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, who wrote Article 50 and who claims that it is revocable. However, this amendment would cover all potential outcomes, and that we should have.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I speak briefly to Amendment 4, which stands in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool. It is similar in intent to the amendment moved very eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, but it is shorter. I have sought merely to put in the Bill the remarks of Mr Jones and other Ministers: namely, that Parliament will have an absolute legal right, and that it will exercise its right before the European Parliament has exercised its. I say in parenthesis that we have to remember that whatever is agreed will go round every parliament, and indeed around some regional parliaments among the 27 nations, and it will go to the European Parliament, of course.
We have a system of parliamentary democracy in which I take enormous pride. I shall always be glad that I spent 40 years at the other end of the Corridor, not one of them in government but always trying to play a part in holding government to account. That is the supreme task of Parliament, in both this House and the other place. Of course, as I have repeatedly made plain in my interventions in the debates on this Bill and on many others, the ultimate power, authority and supremacy is with the other place. We neglect that fact—and it is a fact—at our peril. Nevertheless, we have not only a right but, I believe, a duty to ask the other place to reconsider if we think that it has not got it right. While I had no hesitation this morning in voting against the referendum amendment, I equally have no hesitation in speaking to this one, because all we are saying in this amendment and in the amendment moved so well by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and supported by my noble friend Lord Heseltine and others is that Parliament’s right and duty must be in the Bill.
It is not a question of the integrity of those who have made statements. Of course I accept that without question. But there is a difference between a statement expressing intent and a legal obligation. That is what we seek to insert in the Bill—a legal obligation that should be recognised. I very much hope that even at this late stage my noble friend the Minister will feel able at least to acknowledge that there is some validity in what we seek—and I very much hope that in the other place they will reconsider.
That would not delay the passage of the Bill by more than a day. We could get it through this House in all its remaining stages next week. It would in no sense alter the intent or purpose of the Bill, because it would give the Prime Minister what she has asked for. I sincerely hope that she will be in rude and vigorous health for many years to come and will still be in office long after the sad day when we have vacated the European Union. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee that that will be the case, and one Prime Minister cannot necessarily bind her successor. Look at the changes that took place in June and July last year. How were the mighty fallen.
Unless my noble friend can give us the assurances that we seek, when we come to vote I urge your Lordships that we vote to put Parliament in its rightful place: the House of Commons first, but the House of Lords, this noble House, in its proper position, able to say, “Please reconsider”, and, “We genuinely do not think you’ve got this right”—
Lord Cormack
I am just about to finish.
The House of Lords should be able to say, “We do not think you’ve got this right”. Of course, if the other place takes a different line we recognise the limitations on our power. But let us send a message to the other place tonight.
The Archbishop of York
My Lords, I hope you will permit me to think aloud; these are not yet crystallised thoughts. I heard the exchanges between the noble Lords, Lord Pannick, Lord Hannay and Lord Forsyth, and I still want to work out some of the complications. For me, Amendment 3 provides for the intrusion of Parliament into the negotiation processes—which I do not think should happen—in such a way that it could prevent any deal ever being reached, because we would be involving ourselves in the processes.
There is a question that has not been fully answered. The amendment mentions the approval of Parliament three times. It says,
“without the approval of both Houses of Parliament”,
once, and:
“The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament shall also be required”,
twice. The question that has to be answered is: what happens when this House does not agree with the other House? The amendment says that both must agree, but if we did not agree with the other place, that would give the unelected House almost a veto on the procedure for reaching an agreement with the EU, which in turn would thwart the decision made by the electorate in the 2016 referendum. So that question has to be answered.
I think that the commitment made by the Prime Minister in January 2017 as to the role of Parliament goes above and beyond what is in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. I invite your Lordships to look at that Act, because I think she said more than it allows. I suggest that it is not in Parliament’s gift to make this a condition, as the European Union might well refuse to negotiate, or it might agree not to extend the negotiations. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said yesterday that,
“we should not commit to any process that would incentivise the EU to offer us a bad deal”,
and that any deal that could be rejected by MPs would,
“give strength to other parties in the negotiation. We believe it should be a simple bill in relation to triggering article 50 and nothing else.”
For me, and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was trying to say the same thing, triggering Article 50 is an irreversible act. Two years after triggering Article 50 the UK will leave the EU. It will do so with or without a deal, but either way it will leave. Article 50, paragraph (3) makes it clear that the treaties will cease to apply two years after notification has been made. It is possible that the 27 EU members might unanimously agree to extend the negotiating period beyond the two years, but this cannot be taken for granted, nor should it be assumed that anything but a brief extension would be offered. This amendment shows no awareness as to the realities presented by the Article 50 timeframe. It may sound like rubbish, but an answer has to be given to the questions raised by paragraph (3). The amendment also overlooks the fact that the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill is about the triggering of Article 50 and the formal divorce settlement. Neither the Bill nor Article 50 is about negotiating a new agreement with the EU.
Faith seeking understanding: fides quaerens intellectum. Could somebody explain? If I cannot get a clear answer to the questions I have posed, I may find myself voting no. But if I am helped to understand then I may vote yes.
Lord Turner of Ecchinswell (CB)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, I arrived this morning for the debate on Amendment 1 not sure which way I would vote, but very clear that I was going to be a strong supporter of this amendment. Also like the noble Lord, I thought there was a link between the two. However, my resolution is somewhat different, in that I did not vote for this morning’s amendment but I still strongly support this one.
One of the difficulties with these debates as to how we should think about the finality of the vote on 23 June last year is that I find myself disagreeing with arguments on either side. On the side of those who, like me, voted remain, it is often suggested that there was something about the vote that was less legitimate than other votes—perhaps because 16 to 18 year-olds did not have the vote or because the leave side lied. But I do not consider those to be reasonable arguments. You may or may not be in favour of 16 to 18 year-olds having the vote, but in our present system voting starts at 18 and that does not change the legitimacy of a general election or referendum result. As for the argument that the leave side exaggerated or, perhaps with the NHS claim, lied, I think there were some exaggerations on the other side as well. In every general election that I can remember, there have been exaggerations on either side, some of which have verged on the mendacious. But they have not invalidated the result of the general election. Democracy is scrappy and imperfect but it is the best system we have. So I accept the result of what happened last year as no more and no less legitimate than any general election. However, that means that as well as being no less legitimate, it is also no more.
It is the case that, on the day after a general election —the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, has said this already—Members of the opposition party, be they Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat, devote themselves to arguing against what was just agreed by the majority of the population. They put down amendments in the Commons or the Lords, try to delay things in the Lords and work, day after day, to win the next general election. In some cases, they work very hard to bring it forward if they possibly can—there is a very fine play here in London now which records that happening in the Commons in the days of several people currently in this House.
Viscount Ridley (Con)
I wonder whether the noble Lord has picked up his notes for the wrong speech. He seems to be talking about a second referendum.
Lord Turner of Ecchinswell
I am going to come very shortly and briefly to why I think these arguments mean that we should have a parliamentary debate. I do not think it would be appropriate to commit now to a future referendum, because I do not think we can know now what the meaning of a no vote in a future referendum would be. Would it be a vote against a result that was too soft or too hard?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
I am sorry; I know that the noble Lord wanted to speak to Amendment 1 and perhaps it is a bit frustrating that he is actually now dealing with Amendment 3, but it is important that he addresses his remarks to Amendment 3, not to Amendment 1, which is a matter this House has already decided.
Lord Turner of Ecchinswell
The very argument as to why we should not commit to a future referendum, the uncertainty of the situation we will then face, is, however, the argument why it is appropriate for us to come back for a detailed debate in both Houses of Parliament at that time to deal with the uncertain circumstances that will then exist. Like others around this House I would in some ways prefer that this referendum more clearly identified the relative powers of the Commons and the Lords in that process. I would have preferred the earlier version of the amendment, which proposed that a legislative process should be brought forward at that time. The most important principle is that we should not treat 23 June as providing answers for ever or the answers to everything. It is therefore absolutely appropriate for us to assert that there should be a process of parliamentary sovereignty, where the details of what is proposed are brought back to both Houses of Parliament for detailed debate at that time.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My noble friend Lord Hailsham is a signatory to this amendment and it is right that the House hear from him. Perhaps we can then hear from the Labour Benches, and then from one of my noble friends on the Conservative Benches.
Viscount Hailsham
My Lords, those who have put their names to the proposed new clause are not seeking to stand in the way of the Bill. Our sole purpose is to ensure that the outcome—agreed terms or no agreed terms—is subject to the unfettered discretion of Parliament. It is, in our view, Parliament and not the Executive which should be the final arbiter of our country’s future. Ironically, in this sense we stand with the campaigners for Brexit who wanted Parliament to recover control over policy and legislation. Incidentally, too, we stand in that long tradition of parliamentarians who have stood for the primacy of Parliament against ministerial fiat. In the old days, that was a contest fought on the battlefields; happily, more recently it has been fought in public debate. Of course, most recently of all it was fought in the law courts. This is a conflict that never ceases. Let us not forget that, had it not been for the judiciary, we would not be debating this Bill—oh no. It was the Government’s intention to trigger Article 50 under prerogative powers; that is, under the residual powers of the Crown.
It is absolutely central that we should determine the proper interpretation to be given to the referendum of last June. I acknowledge at once—albeit I was a remainer—that the referendum was much more than merely the advisory expression of public opinion. However, I do deny that it gave authority to this Government to leave the European Union whatever the cost, whatever the terms and whatever the prejudice. That cannot be the case because when the public voted last June, they did not—could not—know the outcome. In any event, the Government’s commitment to subject the ultimate decision to a vote of Parliament undercuts that very proposition.
I believe that the proper interpretation of the referendum is this: it is an instruction to the Government to negotiate withdrawal on the best terms they can get. But that raises an absolutely fundamental question to which this proposed new clause is directed. When the negotiations have crystallised and there are agreed terms—or, perhaps, no agreed terms—who determines the way forward: is it the Executive or is it Parliament? That is the old question we have to resolve. In my view, any believer in a democratic state has to say that the authority lies with Parliament.
In very brief reference to a second referendum, it may be that Parliament, two years down the track, will decide that it is necessary. It may be justified in doing so; the circumstances may well change. Say, in two years’ time, there is a clear change in public sentiment. Say, too, that Parliament recognises that fact. Is Parliament not then under a duty to test public opinion? I quote the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, who spoke earlier today. At Second Reading he said that only dictatorships,
“do not allow people to change their mind but in a democracy no decision is ever irreversible”.—[Official Report, 21/2/17; col. 243.]
I want to turn to the argument that has been advanced by my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, who is indeed a very old friend of mine. I say at once that I acknowledge his experience and authority, which are recent. His view, which I am sure will be adopted by the Government, is that if you give Parliament the kinds of powers contemplated by the proposed new clause, you will undercut the negotiating position of the British Government. I do not agree with that view. I share the view expressed by the noble Lords, Lord O’Donnell and Lord Kerr, both citing their own very considerable experience, that the existence of the argument that Parliament will never wear this reinforces rather than undermines the position of the negotiators.
Lord Hill of Oareford (Con)
One of my noble friend’s most endearing characteristics is that he cannot walk past a wasps’ nest without wanting to poke it with a stick. He has just succeeded. There are two points that I would ask him to reflect on, which we have already touched on in this debate.
The first—which my noble friend and, I think, all noble Lords, with a few exceptions, would agree with—is that this is going to be an extremely complex negotiation. Anything that adds to that complexity is strongly to be avoided, in my opinion. I do not agree with those who say that this is going to be very simple and we can sort it all out in a matter of time. This is going to be complicated, so we should keep things as least complex as we can make them. When I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, set out this amendment, it added to my sense that complexity and uncertainty is contained in it.
Secondly, regarding the effect this might have on the negotiation, does my noble friend agree that the argument some people use—that having a Parliament or a board behind you in a negotiation enables you to have a stronger position—normally applies when the board or the Parliament is adopting a harder line than the person negotiating? I have to tell your Lordships that our friends in Europe do read our debates and our media. They are highly intelligent, sophisticated negotiators. They know where people sit. When my noble friend says that it would not weaken our position, can he not see that there are indeed instances where it would weaken our position because it would make Parliament a player in the negotiation and add complexity to what is already going to be very complex?
Viscount Hailsham
My Lords, my noble friend has made a very serious point, which enables me to cut directly to the chase, to one of the points I was going to make. It is possible that my noble friend Lord Hill is right about this. There is sometimes a price to be paid for democracy. Indeed, that is the argument that underpins many of the assertions made by the Brexiteers. They argue that, yes, there may be a cost involved in withdrawal but it is more than compensated for by the recovery of democratic control. That argument also applies to the process of negotiation.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)
In answer to that very question, I ask the noble Viscount to cast his mind back to 1991, when he and I were both in the other place. He was a member of the Government, as I recall. On that occasion the then Prime Minister, John Major, brought the Maastricht treaty to the House for its approval twice; first, in seeking a mandate for negotiation; and, secondly, afterwards in seeking the House’s approval for what had been negotiated. If that did not weaken his Government at the time, why should this weaken this one?
Viscount Hailsham
My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Lord has said. Of course, it is also consistent with the principles that underpin Section 20 of the 2010 Act, because that requires all treaties to be ratified by Parliament.
If I might make a little progress, the Government have in the course of the Bill made a very large number of concessions. It would be churlish not to welcome that fact. Indeed, I rather hope for more. But I agree with the views expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. It is better by far that the assurances and concessions of Ministers be expressed in statutory language because, as the noble Lord, Lord Oates, has reminded the House, political circumstances may change. Ministers may move on; Governments may fall. Statutory language is always to be preferred to the comforting words of Ministers.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I think it is the occasion for the Labour Benches. I remind the House that the Supreme Court gave us the benefit of its wisdom on constitutional matters in the case of Gina Miller, which we have heard about. In that case, the Supreme Court’s principal conclusion was that primary legislation is required to authorise the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. I make it clear that this Bill is a notification Bill; it is not an authorisation Bill. It does not authorise withdrawal from the European Union. What it does is to notify other European Union members that we are in a process of negotiation. The withdrawal must come back before this Parliament.
I also remind the House what the Supreme Court judges said. They said that the reason why this was a matter for Parliament—both the notification and, finally, withdrawal—was because any fundamental change to our laws that inevitably amends or abrogates our individual rights requires the approval of Parliament. That is one of the essential constitutional principles under which our system operates: that anything involving our rights—whether they are to trade with, to live in or to travel to the European Union—we have introduced into domestic law. Because that therefore involves the rights of citizens, Parliament is the place that has to make the decision and approve any changes to that law.
The concern that I raised in Committee late at night, when most people were no longer here, was that I had heard repeatedly from Ministers that if there was not a deal, or if Parliament decided that the deal was not good enough, we would walk away and that there was therefore authorisation from the people, having taken part in the referendum, to walk away. That flies in the face of what was said by the constitutional court of this country—the Supreme Court, which deals with constitutional issues—because walking away and embarking on an engagement in trade worldwide under the WTO rules also involves an amendment or abrogation of some of the rights that citizens in this country have. It has implications. That is why it is a constitutional matter and why this House has a particular role to play.
Lord Faulks (Con)
Perhaps I can remind the noble Baroness of the limits of what the Supreme Court decided. In paragraph 3, it said:
“It is also worth emphasising that this case has nothing to do with issues such as the wisdom of the decision to withdraw from the European Union, the terms of withdrawal, the timetable or arrangements for withdrawal, or the details of any future relationship with the European Union”.
There is a distinct limit to what it decided. Does the noble Baroness agree?
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
In reaching that decision, the Supreme Court laid out the principle that the reason why it was engaging with the case at all was not because it had a view on Brexit but because of the constitutional principle. The principle is very straightforward. It is that when it comes to our rights, Parliament makes those decisions. That is why when the process comes to the end and there is a deal on the table it has to be voted upon by Parliament but, if there is no deal, that too becomes an issue. It is not good enough for Ministers of Government to say that we just walk away as though that has no consequences. Walking away also has consequences for the rights of citizens in this country. That is why it is a matter for Parliament. That is why this proposed new clause is so important.
Viscount Ridley
The noble Baroness said at the beginning of her remarks that this is a notification Bill, not an authorisation Bill. Will she therefore explain what an authorisation amendment is doing in a notification Bill?
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
At the end of the process, there is going to be a need to come back before Parliament. That has been acknowledged by the Prime Minister and other Ministers and I understand that an undertaking has been given. Like the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, I believe that having it in statutory form is the best way for us to know exactly what is on offer, but I have heard repeatedly from Ministers that the option of walking away involves no need to come back before Parliament. I asked the question directly of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, and I have heard it said by other Ministers in Select Committee. All I am saying to this House is that that is why this amendment is so important, even if no negotiation deal comes back before Parliament because no deal means WTO and WTO has implications for citizens of this country with regard to their rights.
Lord Finkelstein
Did the noble Baroness finish? I wanted to intervene on her.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
I think the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, wants to come in on the points that I was making. I had actually more or less completed my speech, but if he wants to raise an issue—
Lord Finkelstein
Was the court’s judgment not based on the idea that this was authorisation? The court would have not have ruled as it did if it had not assumed that this was not unilaterally revocable. Both sides in the court case, including the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said that it is not unilaterally revocable, and the court ruled specifically because of that that authorisation is delivered by triggering Article 50. If it had not done so, it would not have ruled as it did; therefore, it is crucial to the understanding that this is authorisation.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
It is notification of withdrawal; it is not a withdrawal Bill.
Lord Lawson of Blaby
My Lords, as I was saying, as my noble friend Lord Hailsham, whose father I greatly respected as a colleague of mine in government, has reminded us, the reason we are debating this proposed new clause today is that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who moved this amendment, convinced first the High Court and subsequently a majority of the Supreme Court that a Bill is needed and that the Government’s intention to rely on the prerogative will not do. His argument was clear, and I think it will be helpful if I remind the House of it by quoting his words before the High Court:
“my case is very simple. My case is that notification is the pulling of the trigger and once you have pulled the trigger, the consequence follows. The bullet hits the target. It hits the target on the date specified in Article 50(3). The triggering leads to the consequence, inevitably leads to the consequence, as a matter of law, that the treaties cease to apply”.
In short, the very act of invoking Article 50 inexorably leads to Brexit two years later. This was the principal basis on which the courts decided that the Government were wrong to rely on the prerogative, yet the proposed new clause appears to say exactly the opposite. It says that there is no inevitability at all. Triggering Article 50 does not “inevitably”—in the own word of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick—lead to Brexit, for the explicit purpose of the proposed new clause is to ensure that even when Article 50 has been invoked, if Parliament disapproves of the outcome of the negotiations it can stop Brexit happening. Indeed, as a number of speakers have pointed out, on the strict interpretation of the proposed new clause, your Lordships’ House alone can prevent Brexit since the approval of both Houses is required. I do not want to go down that avenue because I have not time.
I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, as an exceedingly clever lawyer who deploys his cleverness with considerable charm. However, is it possible for even him to have his cake and eat it? Might this not be too clever by half? The real mischief—
Lord Lawson of Blaby
I should like to develop my argument. The real mischief in this proposed new clause lies in subsection (4). As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, effectively conceded, without subsection 4 there is a possible reconciliation with his original thesis, since without subsection (4), Parliament would be faced simply with the decision of whether to approve the agreement that the Government had putatively reached with the European Union. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and one or two others, have already pointed out, the Government have pledged to put this before Parliament when the time comes.
The Government might, for example, have agreed to pay the Barnier ransom demand which our own European Union Committee has recently confirmed that we are under no legal obligation to pay. In that case, Parliament might have found that unacceptable. However, if, for whatever reason, Parliament refused to approve the agreement that the Government had reached with the EU, that would not prevent Brexit. It would mean simply that we would leave the European Union without an agreement—and, as I explained at Second Reading, that is nothing to be scared of. Far from jumping off a non-existent cliff into the unknown, trading under WTO rules is the very satisfactory basis of most of the trade that we do throughout the world today. I give way.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill
I am grateful. Does the noble Lord accept that at this stage the key question before the House is: who is to be master? Is it Ministers or Parliament?
Lord Lawson of Blaby
If the noble Lord allows me to develop my argument he will see exactly what the problem with what he is saying is, because no agreement is by far the most likely outcome. As the Prime Minister made clear in her excellent Lancaster House speech and as the subsequent White Paper reiterated, no agreement would be better than a bad agreement. Sadly—and it is sad—a bad agreement is all that is likely to be on offer. However, the mischief of subsection (4) of this proposed new clause is that it would not merely give Parliament the power to reject a bad deal but enable it to prevent Brexit altogether by refusing to allow the UK to leave the European Union without an agreement. This not only is in diametric opposition to the Pannick thesis on which the Bill rests but, more importantly, would be an unconscionable rejection of the referendum result that would drive a far greater wedge between the political class and the British people than the dangerous gulf that already exists.
Lord Lisvane
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend; no doubt she will have her opportunity in a moment. After more than four decades in which I sought to make the most modest of modest contributions to parliamentary effectiveness and reputation, I hope that my credentials as an advocate of parliamentary sovereignty will not be challenged. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Pannick not only for his kind words but also for his recasting of Amendment 3. I agree with him that, if this amendment were to be agreed, the means of approval would be in the hands of the Government. So I hope that he and noble Lords will forgive me if I repeat some of the issues that, in that case, the Government should have in mind.
So far, ministerial language has been in terms of “a vote” and “a Motion”. That rather suggests proceeding by resolution—and, if so, the concerns I expressed in Committee are unallayed. What happens if one House votes one way and the other House votes the other way? Does qualified approval, perhaps with a conditional rider, count as approval? Would it be acceptable in those circumstances to give this House an effective veto over the process?
If, on the other hand, primary legislation is contemplated, the issue of interpreting some sort of qualified approval, or the terms of approval, remains. Even in the unloved Fixed-term Parliaments Act, specific wording for a Motion of confidence or no confidence was inserted to avoid the possibility of recourse to the courts. In matters of the present gravity, recourse to the courts would be even more unwelcome. My father had a ghastly warning about the dangers of overspecification in legislation. He quoted what was alleged to have been a rule at Heidelberg University, which stated: “No one shall tie anything, whether a nightwatchman or not a nightwatchman, to anything, whether a lightning conductor or not a lightning conductor, at any time, whether or not during a thunderstorm”. I do not ask for that degree of specification—but, if primary legislation is contemplated, the terms of approval need to be considered very carefully indeed.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I am genuinely torn on how to vote on this amendment and turn to my noble and very able friend the Minister to guide me in this respect. I listened very carefully to all the speakers this afternoon, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, who I think comes at this with the same approach that I do. These amendments seem based to me on a very simple proposition, which is that rights given to British subjects by statute can be removed only by statute.
Of the two alternatives available, particularly in Amendment 3, which I am tempted and minded to support—a resolution to be passed by both Houses or a Bill to be passed by both Houses—the amendment neatly leaves it to the Government to determine the means to choose. I would like to know—and I seek guidance from the Minister and very powerful arguments against—why it would not be appropriate to include the amendment here on the face of the Bill. I say this because this is the last procedural stage before we embark on the substance. We are told that there will not be just the great repeal Bill but a number of substantive primary pieces of legislation as well as, no doubt, multiple pieces of secondary legislation to repeal some of the acquis that we might wish no longer to apply.
Why is it important to write it on the face of the Bill? It is for so many reasons: times change; politics change and personalities change. We are being asked to take an awful lot on trust here, both in terms of a commitment from the Government and in terms of a commitment given on the Floor of the House of Commons that Parliament and the Government would hope to follow through. Surely it is only right and proper that it should be put on the face of the Bill.
I remind the House that we spent about two hours and 30 minutes talking about the rights of EU nationals going forward. If the referendum had been held on the same terms as the European Parliament elections, all the EU nationals living here for the required length of time would have been able to vote. As I understand it from memory, an amendment passed in this House deprived those 1 million EU nationals living in this country of the right to vote. In fact, that 1 million number could have changed the outcome of the referendum overnight.
I refer to the words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, in summing up on Second Reading. He expressed to the Government, in a helpful way, that the Supreme Court’s decision in Miller went further than just this Bill before us today, which embarks on the negotiation procedure. A majority of the House would not wish to stand in the way of the triggering of the process. By the same token, the noble and learned Lord went on to say, in respect to not writing into the face of the Bill—I do not want to press him too hard, but I think that the noble and learned Lord was saying the same—that,
“obtaining approval by resolution in Parliament is not the same thing as being given statutory authority”.
That is why he cautioned the Government against thinking that this Bill before the House today,
“on its own will give them all the authority they need, or that obtaining approval for an agreement by resolution is the same thing as being given statutory authority to conclude that agreement”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 23.]
I will refer also to an article written by five eminent QCs, including three knights, who gave their opinion on the matter and stated:
“Meaningful Parliamentary decision-making cannot be achieved by Parliament authorising exit from the European Union, two years in advance, on as yet unknown terms. Equally, it cannot be achieved by a single ‘take it or leave it’ vote at the end of the process”.
The article argues very straightforwardly:
“The constitutional requirements for a decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union include the enactment of primary legislation consenting to give legal effect to the terms of a withdrawal agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union”.
Therefore, rather than being a wrecking amendment, I see this amendment as being potentially helpful to the Government, responding to a situation that we found ourselves in, having now lost three to six months through a court case and then an appeal, by writing on to the face of the Bill that Parliament—these two Houses —will have the final say. It will be of the Government’s choosing what the mechanism will be—whether a resolution of both Houses or an Act of Parliament. Otherwise, there will be a complete lack of clarity over what remaining rights already extended to British subjects can continue to be relied on. I will go further and say that, when we come to the great repeal Bill, there will be a complete lack of clarity over the court on which we should rely to make sure that those outstanding rights can be enforced.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I think we will hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, then from the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, and then from my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay.
Baroness Deech
My Lords, I wish to say a few, brief words about sovereignty and the likely outcome if Parliament disapproves a deal at the end of the negotiations in two years’ time. The sad fact is that because of the construction of Article 50, we will not recover our parliamentary sovereignty in European matters until the whole process is over. If we contemplate what might happen in two years’ time, we see only too clearly that sovereignty lies with Europe. If this House or the other House were to reject the deal, we would end up as puppets in their hands. Can it honestly be imagined that if one or other House, whether through approval or an Act of Parliament, goes back to Europe in just under two years’ time and says, “We don’t like the deal”, the other 27 will say, “Oh dear. Here is a much better one”, or, “Let us, all 27, now agree to extend the negotiation time”? I do not think so.
The noble Lord, Lord Oates, indicated that he did not trust the Prime Minister. I am sorry to say that I do not trust the other 27 members of the European Union to give us a good deal, or indeed to care very much about what happens to us or our nationals, because their only declared intent since last June has been: “You must be punished. The Union must survive, no matter what the cost. We will not accommodate you, we will not be kind to you”. There is no vision. There is no mission.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
Can the noble Baroness give us chapter and verse on who said that?
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
Perhaps the noble Baroness would quote to the noble Lord, Lord Lea, exactly what President Hollande said: “There has to be a price. There has to be a threat. There has to be a cost”.
Baroness Deech
Thank you.
Much of our argument turns on whether Article 50 is revocable or not. The Supreme Court judgment in Miller did not go that far. The judgment was based on the fact that triggering Article 50 would be the no turning back moment at which the two years would start and inevitably run their course. Indeed, I know that there has been a legal opinion from three knights that Article 50 is revocable, but I know from my dealings with lawyers that you can find another three knights who will tell you something quite different. Although I have heard it said that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, drafted the article, so he knows what it is about, in our system, it is not the draftsman who in the end declares what the article means.
If parliamentary approval were needed at the end of the deal, what might it look like? Some parts of it might very well deal with European nationals. Only a few days ago, we were expressing our shock and dismay that the position of European nationals might not be taken care of. Would we be throwing them all into disarray in two years’ time if, among probably thousands of pages of deal, there was something about European nationals?
I am sorry to say that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has departed from his usual clarity in legal matters. He has tied himself and the House in knots. On the one hand, he says that we always defer in the end to the Commons. I wonder whether we will hear that this evening or next week if there is a head-on clash between our decision, if we approve the amendment, and what the House of Commons says. On the other hand, he has also said that approval is better than having an Act of Parliament: it leaves it open to the Prime Minister to decide what to do. But with an Act of Parliament expressing what is in the amendment, the Commons would prevail because of the Parliament Act. You cannot really have it both ways. The only other possible outcome at the end is no deal. The two-year shutter comes down and we are off the cliff—that is the general outcome. Others know just as well how difficult that would be.
Our lack of sovereignty means that if at the end of two years the rest of the European Union does not give us what we want and either House rejects that deal, the European Union will, for sure, not welcome us back with open arms, will not necessarily accept a revocation of Article 50 and not necessarily give us a better deal. That is the reality of the situation. We will have to take what comes our way in two years’ time.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, I do not know what people will feel like in two years’ time. We know that the demographics will have changed and that young people will be coming on to the electoral register and, as we all know, young people have taken a very different view about our leaving the EU to that taken by older people who will no longer be able to vote.
I have two specific questions to ask the Minister. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said that the Supreme Court’s judgment was that Article 50 was irrevocable—a view just reiterated by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I thought that the Supreme Court judgment was rather more nuanced than that: that because the parties to the action were prepared to use that as the basis for forming their judgment, they had not tested the arguments on the irrevocability or otherwise of Article 50. So there was a clear statement that they had not tested that argument.
On Second Reading, I asked the noble Lord what the Government’s views were on that. In a very skilled response at the end of the debate, he said that it was the firm policy of the Government not to turn back having triggered Article 50. The noble Lord knows that that was not the question I asked. We are not asking about the firm policy. What we need to know is the Government’s legal view on the revocability or otherwise of Article 50. That is a crucial question because if the issue does come back to Parliament, we will be in a very different position if it is revocable. I ask the question, and hope that this time I might have the answer.
My second question is about the position whereby the Government have sought to bypass Parliament, as indeed they did, by saying that the prerogative powers were sufficient to trigger Article 50. It did indeed take private individuals, represented by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, to go to court to prevent the Government going beyond their powers and bypassing this Parliament. The Government had assumed they had powers by using the prerogative, and the Supreme Court was able to disabuse them of that.
Lord Finkelstein
Does the noble Baroness accept that the reason the court made that judgment was that both parties had agreed that it was not unilaterally revocable? That is the reason why both parties had to agree, otherwise the court would have ruled differently. It ruled that this was a parliamentary decision of authorisation. That is the reason why it had to come back to Parliament. It would change the law.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
The point that the Supreme Court made was that it had not tested the point about revocability. I say to the noble Lord, who knows what the outcome would be if it were asked to do that? The political position now is that the Supreme Court has not made that judgment, and it took going to the court to get the views that we have.
When we get to the end of this whole discussion, I wonder what the Minister will be able to say about our ability to trust the views of Ministers. I am not saying that we do not believe that Ministers really want to come back to Parliament, but the only assurance we will have is putting it in the Bill. The Government do not have good form over this. They foolishly went on to the Supreme Court after the High Court had told them what the judgment should be. We need this in the Bill because the Government have form for bypassing Parliament, and we need to know that that will not happen again.
We need the best legal checks and balances we can get—not to stop Brexit but to make sure that we obtain the best this country can get from it. That is why we need to vote for this amendment today. It is also why, if the amendment is successful in this House, I hope it goes on to be successful in another place. Britain relies on parliamentary sovereignty and now is the moment for it to be fully asserted by this House—not in six months’ time, not in 18 months’ time, not at the end of the period of negotiation. We have to make sure legally that Britain’s best interests are protected and safeguarded. That is the job of this Parliament. It is our job here today and I urge this House to vote for the amendment.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)
My Lords, I will first take up the point that the noble Baroness has just mentioned about the judgment of the Supreme Court. Naturally, I have studied it with a certain amount of care. Both sides, the Government and the applicant, agreed with the basis that they should treat the Article 50 notification as irrevocable. Lord Justice Reed pointed out clearly that that had not been the subject of a decision by the court but that, from the point of view of the judgment, it did not matter so long as it was possible that it was irrevocable. If that was the case, the danger to Acts of Parliament existed even if it turned out that it might be revocable. If it was possible that it was irrevocable, once it was triggered, these Acts of Parliament came into danger. It was as simple as that. I think we must assume—I am prepared to anyway—that the government lawyers took the view that Article 50 notification was irrevocable because they took the case on that basis. Of course, some doubt about that might have helped them if they thought there was a real argument that it was revocable—the bullet and all the rest of it that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, talked about in the decision would maybe not have occurred. The Government’s lawyers definitely took the view that it was irrevocable.
The point tonight is different. The Prime Minister and the Minister in the Commons both gave an undertaking that a Motion would be put before both Houses of Parliament for approval of the final deal and for the way in which we might leave the European Union. They both gave that undertaking but they did not say that the Prime Minister would necessarily be bound by the decision of both Houses.
The difficulty in this amendment is that it formally requires the approval of both Houses. There is no question—it is as clear as can be. I do not claim to be a prophet, so exactly what will happen after two years I do not know, but I feel absolutely certain that the negotiations will be difficult and that it will be very difficult at this stage to tell what sort of outcome we may get. If we can get such an agreement in relation to economics as the Prime Minister indicated in her speech, that might be very good. On the other hand, some people who know more about it than I do think that may not be likely.
As I said, I do not know what will happen. The Prime Minister and the Minister have agreed that both Houses of Parliament should have a Motion put before them for approval, but neither said—I believe that may be why they phrased it as they did—that the approval of both Houses would be necessary.
I want to point out the danger of not getting this right. I see no reason why it should not be put right, if people agree that it is not quite right. The House of Commons should be the prime source of authority on this matter. Your Lordships will remember, if you read the newspapers—I am sure most of us do, although perhaps selectively—the suggestion that this was all a scheme for this House to try to defeat the Brexit vote. I do not want it to be said unnecessarily, in any circumstances, that we give colour to that, because I feel certain that nobody in this House wants to engineer a blockage of the Brexit vote as the Prime Minister goes ahead. I feel sure of that, and I think I am right. Somebody this morning mentioned the word “tribal”. I do not feel myself part of any particular tribe, but I want the matter to be right. If the amendment is sent back to the Commons, I would like it to be correct, so that nobody could suggest that we were trying to create a scheme that might block Brexit, because we refuse our approval and the House of Commons approves it.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill
As I understand the noble and learned Lord’s speech, he is saying that, provided the primacy of the House of Commons is made clear, he would support the amendment. Is that right?
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
I am saying that I think it would then simply incorporate the Prime Minister’s and the Minister’s undertaking.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
Of course, the bit at the end is a separate matter, and on the whole I do not feel very inclined to get into it. There is the problem that, as was said, Brexit, once initiated, may go out of hand and terminate without any voluntary agreement on the part of the Prime Minister. The amendment does not really deal with that—but I do not see too much harm in the amendment. I cannot foresee exactly what will happen, but I sincerely hope that it is the first two parts of the amendment that will come into play in the end and there will be an agreement that can be put before the Houses of Parliament. Nobody knows—I cannot tell—and we can only hope. But it would be very desirable for any amendment of this kind, going from this House, to recognise the supremacy of the House of Commons.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I think my noble friend will find that my noble and learned friend has sat down. There will be an opportunity for him to speak, but I indicated earlier that I thought we should hear from the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, at this stage.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard
I am grateful to the noble Lord. The first of my two quick points is to clarify the issue of irrevocability raised by the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein—and I am glad that he did so. We discussed the issue extensively at Second Reading and he told his readers in the Times that we did not mention it at all, so I am glad that he is here this time. I also pay tribute to the skill of the Lord, Lord Pannick, both in court and in this House. When he won his case in the High Court—not the Supreme Court—the No. 10 spokesman was asked about revocability and said that,
“as a matter of firm policy, our notification to withdraw will not be withdrawn”.
After our extensive debate at Second Reading, the Minister was put on the spot by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, about whether it was revocable or not. The Minister is a very clever man and replied:
“As a matter of firm policy, our notification will not be withdrawn”.—[Official Report, 21/2/17; col. 320.]
That is very similar to what was said by the No. 10 spokesman, which is always wise in a Minister. Last Wednesday, in Committee, the same issue of revocability was raised. When the Minister replied to the debate on the amendment, he said that,
“as a matter of policy we will not withdraw our notice to leave”.—[Official Report, 1/3/17; col. 923.]
The wording was slightly wrong there, but I am sure they will forgive him.
Every time the Government say that,
“as a matter of policy”,
firm or infirm, they will not withdraw the notification which the Bill authorises, they implicitly confirm that, in law, they could withdraw it—and they could. If you want a definitive source, do not look at me, listen to the President of the European Council, who has said so on the record. If you want a definitive EU legal view, and this would be an EU legal question if it were ever tested, try the present head of the Council’s legal service or the one who advised me when I was writing the wretched thing. Just a point of clarification: it is revocable.
My second point relates to the discussion of subsection (4) of the new clause proposed in the amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, detected deep evil in it. What is being said there is that it is for Parliament to decide whether no deal is better than a bad deal and to make a judgment on whether the deal is bad and that the chaos and disruption of leaving with no deal is preferable. I struggle to think of a deal which could be worse than no deal. Last week, the president of CBI said that the worst possible scenario was leaving with no deal. However, that is not the point: the point is about parliamentary sovereignty. The issue of whether no deal is worse than the deal which is available on the table on that day is for Parliament to decide. That is what subsection (4) of the amendment says, and I support it.
Lord Grocott
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, quite rightly—and entertainingly as always—referred to the crucial element of parliamentary sovereignty. We have heard from top lawyers and diplomats and I only offer some thoughts as a run-of-the-mill parliamentarian. I could not possibly vote against parliamentary sovereignty. Voting against an amendment such as this would be like voting against motherhood and apple pie. It is something in which I passionately believe. It was one of the reasons why many people—and I was one of them—were concerned during the course of the European referendum because it seemed incontrovertible that the way in which the European Union had developed involved a steady erosion of parliamentary sovereignty. It would be quite difficult to disagree with this proposition.
When addressing this amendment, we have to decide what a decision by Parliament actually comprises. I am forced to read the amendment. Proposed subsection (1) refers to,
“without the approval of both Houses of Parliament”.
Subsection (3) requires:
“The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament”,
Subsection (4) refers to:
“The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament”.
With great respect to the weight of legal opinion being offered, to propose this amendment without being clear as to what is involved in the approval of both Houses of Parliament is to leave an ambiguity at its heart. It is hardly necessary to add to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, has already said.
I was concerned about this from the start. I raised it in Committee. There has been an attempt to move towards answering the question, “What happens if the Commons say ‘yes’ and the Lords say ‘no’?”. The solution is certainly not contained within these amendments.
I made an, admittedly inadequate, attempt with the Public Bill Office to see if there was any way in which I could put down an amendment which would satisfy, or at least address, this problem at the heart of the Bill. If the House will forgive me—as I will conclude shortly afterwards—I will read out the terms of the defunct amendment. It would have said:
“(5) If, under the provisions of subsections (1), (3) or (4), there is disagreement between the House of Commons and the House of Lords as to whether or not the agreement or decision should be approved, the view of the House of Commons prevails over the view of the House of Lords”.
That makes an attempt to explain precisely—or, I hope, resolve precisely—the ambiguity at the heart of the Bill.
Lord True
I was following the noble Lord’s argument, and I agree with it in terms of the imprecision and lack of clarity as to what happens if both Houses disagree. Does he agree that there is a further issue in relation to the different procedures of the two Houses? In the House of Commons, the Government control the agenda. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, that what happens in this House will be up to the Government. But am I not right in saying that any noble Lord can put down an amendment at any time to disapprove a resolution and this House will vote on it? Surely there cannot be any circumstances in this House in which the Government control what might constitute approval or disapproval. Is this not a further difficulty with the amendment?
Lord Grocott
Yes. I can understand that point. I want to emphasise the central problem, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, has identified. I ask the House—or, more specifically, the mover of the amendment—whether something like that, included at Third Reading, would solve the difficulty which I think even he would acknowledge was expressed in the various interventions that he dealt with.
There is one thing that I can influence to some degree—something which, if not within the control of this House, is within the control of my beloved Labour Party. For as long as I have been in it, it has been absolutely clear about the primacy of the elected House over the unelected House. I say this to my Front Bench and to my very good noble friend Lady Hayter, who will be winding up. Should we pass this amendment as written and, in two years’ time, find ourselves in a situation where there is a clash between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and if all the normal attempts at agreement and solutions to the differences had been tried, this party, at any rate, would assert clearly that, ultimately, the primacy of the House of Commons must prevail.
Lord Howard of Lympne
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, and I agree with much of what he said—
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I apologise. A lot of noble Lords want to speak. I have tried to construct a speaking order. I suggest that my noble friend Lord Howard speaks at this stage. I see that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, also wants to speak. It might be sensible then—
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
Yes, indeed. I will let my noble friend Lord Higgins speak next and include my noble friend Lady Altmann in the list to speak later.
Lord Howard of Lympne
I am grateful to my noble friend. I long ago came to the painful recognition that many Members of your Lordships’ House think that to serve in this place without having served down the Corridor in the other place is an absolutely enormous advantage. Therefore, it is with some temerity that I seek to draw on my 27 years’ experience in the other place—not as long as my noble friend Lord Heseltine—to make a preliminary observation. At the end of the negotiations, there will be either an agreement or a decision by the Government to leave the European Union without an agreement. Whichever of those scenarios comes about, the other place will have its say. Not only will it have its say, it will have its way. If the agreement that is reached by the Government is unacceptable to a majority of the Members of the House of Commons, they will vote accordingly. If the Government propose to leave the European Union on terms which are unacceptable to a majority of the Members of the House of Commons, they will vote accordingly. They do not need the authority of Mr David Jones to do that. They do not even need the authority of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister to do that, and they certainly do not need this proposed new clause to do that. They do not need any authority to do that. They will have their say. They will have their way. For those of us who believe that parliamentary supremacy rests with the House of Commons, that is the ultimate safeguard.
I make a couple of observations about the proposed new clause. In the end, the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, admitted—not quite explicitly but in effect—that, in its present form at any rate, it provides a veto for your Lordships’ House. He said that it was extremely unlikely that your Lordships would exercise that veto. In the end, he was obliged to accept a lifeline from my noble friend Lord Hailsham. However, as is so often the case when you examine a lifeline in detail, it proves not to be quite as effective as at first sight it appeared. The lifeline offered by my noble friend was that the Government might enshrine the Motions necessary by virtue of the proposed new clause in an Act of Parliament so that the Parliament Act could be activated. I ask your Lordships to consider that situation. The Government will have agreed the terms on which they are going to leave the European Union. The House of Commons will have approved those terms but this House will have rejected them and we will have to hang around for a year until the Parliament Act can be used to ensure that the House of Commons gets its way. That was suggested by my noble friend Lord Hailsham. Even my noble friend Lord Heseltine acknowledged the need for the minimum of delay. We all want the minimum of delay. The notion that the nation should stand around for a year waiting for the Parliament Act to be invoked for the House of Commons to get its way illustrates how unnecessary this amendment and proposed new clause are.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I am sorry, but I did indicate that I was going to call the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I am trying to compile a speakers list; I hope your Lordships will understand that that is a reasonable way of carrying on, as so many people have indicated to me that they wish to contribute to this debate.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Howard, with whom I shared a platform during the referendum campaign—but on this matter I am afraid I have to disagree with him. I support Amendment 3. There is a lot of merit in Amendment 4, but it seems that the House is probably going to go for something written by lawyers, because apparently some of us still trust lawyers—which is sometimes a good move.
I shall be brief and to the point: I am taking a rather simplistic attitude to this whole debate. During the referendum we voted for taking back control. However, taking back control does not mean giving such a momentous decision for the future of the UK to a tiny cohort of politicians. As we have said, the Government and the Prime Minister committed themselves to a vote in both Houses. They must have thought that was an appropriate thing to do. Therefore I see no problem with a commitment from this House.
People change. Governments change. We cannot be sure that the same people will be in power when this finally happens, so it is important to get a commitment. Parliament has to have scrutiny, and a say in something so incredibly important—a deal that is being thrashed out between the UK and the EU that will affect our future for ever. I also think it is a mockery if the European Parliament gets a vote on this and we do not. That again is not taking back control.
One of the other commitments made during the referendum was the £350 million to the NHS. I look forward to seeing that as a line in the Budget tomorrow. Quite honestly, that was one of the things that I voted for when I voted leave.
Lord Higgins
My Lords, I sought to intervene earlier far more aggressively than I would ever normally do, simply because I wished to pursue the point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay and the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, which was of considerable tactical importance in relation to this debate. There is widespread agreement that there should be parliamentary approval for the outcome of the negotiations. The Prime Minister herself has made it clear that she believes that should be so, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has sought to incorporate that undertaking in the Bill. Again, I believe that that is the right thing to do.
The problem, however, is in the drafting of the amendment. In opening the debate, the noble Lord said he realised there were problems because it seemed to give a veto to the House of Lords—that would not be acceptable. Also, he said that it failed to recognise the relationship between the two Houses, whereby, at the end of the day, the House of Commons must be supreme. He suggested that we should agree to the amendment before us and then the House of Commons would sort it out. I think there is a very simple problem with that: people are less likely to vote for his amendment on that basis than would otherwise be the case. Therefore, it may never get to the House of Commons and its Members will not be able to put the matter right.
As we now stand, we have a very difficult situation as to whether or not we should support the amendment. My inclination is still to do so, subject to what may be said subsequently, because it is important to have the undertaking in the Bill. However, we have to resolve the problem of ensuring that the House of Commons remains supreme. We cannot have a veto on what is being negotiated; it would be wholly inappropriate if the House of Commons took the opposite view.
One possible solution is to try to draft a manuscript amendment or to amend the Bill at some later stage in the proceedings. I fear that may be very difficult, although perhaps we might try. In any case, we should agree the amendment, but I understand that many people will feel it is defective in the respect I have mentioned. It would be very unfortunate if, as a result of these debates, we do not have anything to ensure that the undertaking given absolutely clearly by the Prime Minister is in the Bill and that there is no uncertainty about the situation in the future.
Baroness Altmann
My Lords, I preface my remarks by expressing my belief that speaking in favour of any amendment to the Bill does not amount to trying to frustrate the referendum result or to deny the will of the people. I respect the result, and we are trying to implement it as responsibly as we can in the interests of our great country.
The referendum was about taking back control and ensuring parliamentary sovereignty. That is vital to safeguard our democracy and protect our national interests. The people want to be able to trust our Parliament to look after their future. But in the context of the Bill, it seems to me that Parliament is in danger of abrogating its responsibility.
I have heard the arguments to suggest that parliamentary oversight somehow makes it inevitable that the EU will only offer us a bad deal. However, I respectfully disagree. Indeed, I believe that the likelihood is the other way round. If the negotiators and Ministers know that at the end of the day they will have to sell this deal to Parliament, I believe they will be properly incentivised to be more likely to achieve a deal that is acceptable.
As currently proposed, the Bill will effectively hand responsibility for our future to a group of negotiators and Ministers who apparently countenance with a measure of equanimity the idea that no deal is better than a bad deal. If we enter negotiations with a view that the EU will not give us a good deal and that we will just have to leave the single market, the customs union, Euratom and so many other fundamental parts of our current economic security, then we must surely ask ourselves whether those negotiators will be sufficiently incentivised to actually get a good deal for the country.
A no-deal scenario was never put to the British people. The White Paper and the referendum campaign have not considered the consequences either. Leaving the customs union, the single market and Euratom are recent decisions with significant implications for people’s jobs, for standards of living, for national security, for the nuclear industry, for Northern Ireland and so much else. Yet the risks have been skirted over, almost as if they do not really matter. They do matter. In normal negotiations, corporate negotiators would reserve the option of taking an offer back to their board; a lawyer would reserve the option of referring back to their client.
Viscount Ridley
Will my noble friend explain how what she is saying now squares with what she said at the start of her speech about not challenging the result of the referendum?
Baroness Altmann
I am not challenging the result of the referendum. We are here to debate and discuss how best to safeguard the interests of our country and to discuss what might happen at the end of the negotiation, in light of the referendum, to make sure that we have parliamentary sovereignty. That is what this debate and this amendment are about. Why would we deny Parliament, the heart of our democracy, the authority to approve or push for a better deal, rather than accepting no deal without a proper say? This parliamentary route, giving Parliament, not the Executive, a meaningful final vote is my preferred option, not a referendum. Such a safety net, written into statute, would seem to me to be the most responsible course to take as we negotiate our EU exit.
I believe it is my duty, given the very serious concerns that I have expressed, to ask the other place to reconsider the need for elected MPs to take responsibility for the future of their constituents. I believe that they must have the final say on the Bill and I want to ask them to think again.
Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers
My Lords, I have listened to this debate with a question that was unanswered at the beginning and, to me, is still unanswered. It is this. Subsections (3) and (4) of the proposed new clause read:
“The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament shall also be required in relation to an agreement on the future relationship of the United Kingdom”,
and:
“The prior approval of both Houses of Parliament shall also be required in relation to any decision by the Prime Minister that the United Kingdom shall leave”.
Assume that the House of Commons and the House of Lords are in agreement. They say, “We do not approve of the terms of the agreement. We do not approve that the Prime Minister shall decide that we leave without an agreement”. My question is: what then? Is it implicit in this amendment that Parliament may then decide to withdraw the Article 50 notification?
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, whether Article 50 notification is revocable or irrevocable is a matter of policy or law. I believe that we could interrupt the process of leaving the EU only by another referendum. I think this is the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, touched upon. In fact, the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, made the same point at the beginning of her speech. If in two years’ time Parliament were seen to be blocking the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union without another referendum, there would be a serious political situation in our country. While we have talked about conflicts between the Executive and Parliament and between the Executive and the two Houses, I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that as it stands it should be the House of Commons that has the decisive vote. There is real potential for conflict here. We decided to have a referendum and its outcome can be reversed only with another referendum, which this morning we decided in a sense that we did not want—I admire the Liberal Democrats, who are consistent on this point and who I noticed have their amendment down for Third Reading. At the end of the day, in two years’ time we could be in a very serious, difficult and sensitive political situation. I am not sure the proposed new clause would help handle that.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, not for the first time I wholly agree with the analysis of my noble friend Lord Heseltine, with whom I think I entered the House of Commons on the same day over 50 years ago—I agree with his analysis but I am afraid I do not agree with his conclusion. The amendments have clearly been tabled with great sincerity and I appreciate all their aims and concerns. They are trying to impose statutory precision on a Bill that happens to be going through this House in order to make provision for a very uncertain future and for events that are completely unforeseeable. As my noble friend and others have said, we have absolutely no grasp of where the world or this issue will be in two years’ time.
Any commentary one looks at from the other side of the channel shows clear uncertainty as to who is taking the lead. There are daily quarrels between national capitals and Brussels, and there is infighting inside the European Commission—the Visegrad four are already talking about a different treaty. This very hour we have a blog saying that Spain and Poland want to join together on a completely different approach to the negotiations from that offered by the European Commission. What will happen is uncertain. The additional point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, with his usual eloquence, that under certain circumstances—although this is almost inconceivable except under a different Government on this side of the channel—the whole project could be aborted and withdrawn.
The truth, which my noble friend Lord Howard stated with great frankness and eloquence, is that in the Commons the parliamentary majority can do what it likes. I say “majority” and that is different from “Parliament”, which flows from legal lips as though it were an entity—of course, it is not. Parliament is actually the people controlling the majority; that is, the managers of the parties or coalitions that have a majority in the Commons. That is what comes out if you press the button marked “Parliament”.
I say to the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, whose speech I greatly enjoyed, and to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that I am certainly more Burke than Brezhnev. But I am also a disciple of Karl Popper, who spent a lot of time warning us—as did Isaiah Berlin and others—about the dangers of making things too inevitable and the poverty of determinism. Telling the Commons what to do by statute law about a situation that may be completely different from anything we presently envisage seems a noble but really futile project. The Commons will decide by parliamentary majority. It has not always been able to do so and in past centuries there have, of course, been fights against the royal prerogative. But since Parliament has won that battle, as it did in our history, the parliamentary majority will decide—if its managers can control it, the Whips can keep it in place and it is big enough then it will be the will of Parliament.
The bundle containing the divorce papers and the mixture of new arrangements will be vastly complex and there will be all sorts of uncompleted aspects. That document will be the work of two years of Ministers slaving away, of vastly difficult negotiations and private deals ensuring mutual equivalence and mutually beneficial arrangements between sectors and industries—and heaven knows what else. If after all that there is a vote in Parliament and the Government lose because the majority moves against them and fails to give its approval, I do not see how there can be any doubt about what will happen. That is a declaration of no confidence. We have a five-year rule for Governments but that would not need to be changed if the no-confidence vote was in ringing terms, as it almost certainly would be. That would mean we would arrive at a general election. That seems so obvious and so certain that I cannot understand those who are talking mysteriously about a world beyond rejection. It is inconceivable that Ministers would be sent back to Brussels saying, “Our Parliament has looked at this and does not like it but we will carry on”—it would not be the same Ministers, it would not be the same Government and it would not be the same deal. It would be a completely different situation, regardless of what is written on any piece of paper and regardless of any statute, however beautifully it had been drafted by all the learned people sitting in this House and however firm it was. In reality, it would make no difference to what would actually happen.
I do not want to stray beyond the confines of Report but I realise that behind the longing to get this into statute—to pin it down on paper—is a real concern. It is the concern of those who fear that the deal, when it comes back, will not include membership of the single market and of the customs union. For them, that will brand it a bad deal and it will lead a lot of people in the Commons, but I suspect not the majority, to think about voting it down—they will not succeed but they will think about it. I say to my noble friends in this House and particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that there is room for considerable doubt as to whether being in or out of the single market as it exists today is really the end of the world. In an ocean of digital change, in which there are vast new supply chains travelling in every direction, which are perforated with low tariffs, tariff wars, and special arrangements and regulations on every side, as well as a completely new pattern of trade, totally different in character from even 10 years ago, there is room for doubt as to whether being outside the single market is really a catastrophe. The chief economist of the Bank of England, Mr Haldane, actually said last week that it does not matter and that over the next three years it is of no material difference to the growth of the British economy whether it is in or out of the single market.
I put that in as an aside. I appreciate that it moves away from the amendment, but the amendment expresses a genuine fear about being excluded from the single market. All I say is that if you look at the facts and details of what is actually happening, you will see it is very different from what is being said by those who argue that leaving will be a disaster and that we are bound to pay a colossal price. They say that trade will effectively halve because goods will have to travel double the distance but these sort of generalities belong to the past century and to a world that no longer exists.
The whole idea of sending Ministers back to Brussels to get us back into the single market if the deal arranged takes us out is a fantasy; in reality no such situation could ever arise. It is worthy of an animated cartoon but highly disadvantageous. There is a new pattern emerging—a new world governed by the WTO—which many people feel has all sorts of advantages, which have not been discussed at all by this House.
For this House to tell the House of Commons what to do two years hence, in a completely different situation from anything we presently envisage, is to make fools of ourselves twice over. If that is what noble Lords opposite want, so be it, but it will have to be without me. My hope remains that we in this House can contribute not division but unity to a very difficult challenge and a major new situation emerging for this country in the near future. Perhaps we cannot deliver the unity in this amendment but we can at least agree on the facts. At present the full facts are not being presented to us.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, I remind noble Lords that it is Report and we do not want Second Reading speeches. It is not appropriate for Members to give Second Reading speeches. I apologise to my noble friend.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
No, I am afraid there are still some more people who have indicated that they want to speak.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I will make just a couple of simple points because I can see that the House is ready to hear from the Front Benches. I want to pick up on a phrase that my noble friend Lord Hailsham used, although I disagree with him and his amendment. He talked about there being a price to pay. What we have to reflect on as a House is that if we support these amendments, particularly an amendment which gives us power ultimately to overturn the referendum result, there is a price that comes with that, too. We have to decide what is most important to us. Do we want to influence the Prime Minister as she goes into these negotiations, or do we want to say now that we want the power to overturn the referendum result? As I said in Committee, I feel very strongly that among people in both Houses—and policymakers and leading businesspeople outside—there is a lot of expertise and experience that needs to be heard by the Prime Minister and the Government over the next two years and needs to be influential in the negotiation period. I worry that we will start to undermine the right for us to be heard in that way.
I will say one final thing. The noble Lord, Lord Turner, referred to some of us as tribal party politicians. Somebody else mentioned that this morning. We have to reflect very carefully on what has changed since the referendum and on how we are seen by the electorate. I do not think they see us in party terms in the same way they used to. There are two clear sets of politicians whom people consider and listen to: those they feel understand them, and those they feel are against them. I know that most of those who are participating in these debates and working very hard to get the best result for this Brexit deal are not against the people, but we need to understand that they think we are. We have to reflect on what it is we need to do differently. That is why I caution against supporting these amendments which give Parliament power—not just this House, not just the other House, but Parliament. I urge noble Lords to really reflect on that.
Lord Cashman (Lab)
Does the noble Baroness agree with me that we should not ditch the principles of this House in order to please or pander to public opinion?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, we will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, and then from the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat. Then, unless anybody else wishes to speak, we will move on to the Front Benches to conclude this debate.
Lord Naseby
My Lords, I shall be brief. I concur with what my noble friend has just said. We forget the effect this is having on the ordinary people outside. They knew what they were voting about when they voted at the referendum. Both individuals and businesses were fed up with the way that restrictions were put on their lives and regulations imposed. We have to recognise that fact.
It was my privilege in the other place to be Chairman of Ways and Means. There were 500 amendments to the Maastricht Bill. Many more were chucked out. The ones that were not successful were thrown out because they were out of order. They were wrecking amendments. They were defective. I find it quite extraordinary that your Lordships’ House is spending several hours on what is basically a defective amendment. There are better ways. If the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is not capable of tabling an amendment that is in order, so be it, but he is a highly creative lawyer and there are other lawyers on the Liberal Benches who perhaps can produce an amendment that is not defective, in which case this House should rightly debate it. But as it stands, this amendment is defective in all four elements. Noble Lords should bear in mind that it is not wise for our House to vote on amendments which have huge implications and are defective. It would be much more sensible to take it back and maybe on another occasion find some means to move forward.
Ultimately, I trust our Prime Minister. I trust the right honourable David Davis to negotiate well. I trust them to do their very best for the ordinary people who have voted for it all. Frankly, what we are doing this afternoon—if we are doing anything—is undermining the public’s confidence in this House. Confidence is a very delicate flower and it affects not just us here or the public; it affects all the nation, all the businesses, all commerce, and we should not be undermining that confidence. I will certainly not be voting for the amendment.
Lord Tugendhat
My Lords, as the House knows, I speak as one who very much regrets the result of the referendum but who now feels that we must put it behind us and work to create the best possible relationship we can with the European Union. I feel that this amendment muddies the waters. I remind the House of the words of that very wise woman, George Eliot, who said:
“Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous”.
The amendment goes down the road of prophecy. We can have no idea how the negotiations are going to unfold. Personally, I feel more optimistic about them than some people but we can have no idea how they are going to unfold or what the parliamentary situation or the situation in the European Union or anything else will be in two years’ time.
We can be certain of only one thing, and that was the point made by my noble friend Lord Howard. Generally speaking, my noble friend and I disagree on matters relating to Europe but he is quite right that the Government will stand or fall by the way in which they conduct these negotiations. Whether or not there is a deal, the House of Commons will pass judgment on the Government’s performance. It will either support the Government or reject them but either way, its will will prevail. That is a very simple matter. The amendment would put in place a complicated structure which would make it very much more difficult for the House of Commons to assert its authority. I quite understand that the purpose of the amendment is to enhance the authority of Parliament but its effect would be to diminish the capacity of the House of Commons to hold the Government to account. For that reason, I hope very much that the House will reject it.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I think I made it clear, and the House has certainly made it clear, that is it time for the Front-Bench speakers.
Baroness Ludford
My Lords, we have gone via all kinds of highways, by-ways, Aunt Sallies and red herrings—mixing my metaphors, no doubt—but the central issue of this amendment is, in the words of my noble friend Lord Lester: who is the master, Ministers or Parliament? The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, insisted that this was about taking back control for Parliament. It should not be the taking back of control for the Executive: Parliament should be in charge and in the driving seat.
The various criticisms of the amendment seem to me to be more properly directed at the Prime Minister’s assurance in the White Paper because—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, originally used this phrase—it gives the Prime Minister what she asked for. The noble Lord, Lord Hill of Oareford, said that it adds to the complexity and the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, said that it made it more complicated and muddied the waters. Well then, why did the Prime Minister pledge approval by both Houses of Parliament? As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and I think the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, this would put an assurance—an undertaking given by the Prime Minister—into a statutory obligation, and it is wise and sensible so to do.
There is no basis whatever for the assertion, made variously by the noble Lords, Lord Lawson and Lord Forsyth, and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York that it would give this House a veto. Given that the Prime Minister offered to give approval by both Houses of Parliament, presumably she knows how that would work and has shared it with the Government. It is for the Government to deal with that process, which could, as other noble Lords have mentioned, be avoided if there was primary legislation because then the rules would be clear.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, counselled against an amendment that gives Parliament power, which I found a strange piece of advice. Surely Parliament has the right to such a power as we possess under the constitution, but it seems that it is not normal to have parliamentary power in the kind of parallel universe that Brexit has created. The amendment does not weaken the Government’s bargaining position. The statement, “I’ve got to get it past my legislators”, is perfectly good enough for a US president or EU negotiators. It should be more than good enough for the British Parliament.
The noble Lord, Lord Hill, said that our EU partners read our debates. Yes, they may well do, and they will in this case, but they know that we in this Parliament want really substantial content in a future relationship. We might even stiffen the Government’s backbone in the negotiations. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, that far from being in conflict, getting the best deal and parliamentary sovereignty go hand in hand.
Finally, Brexiteers seem to claim that this is a wicked plot by remainers but, in fact, some of them seem to find Parliament an inconvenient obstacle to their dream of crashing out of the EU altogether. They want the Government to be able to action no deal; they do not want Parliament to be able to say, “Hang on—is that actually a good idea?”. That is why this amendment is extremely valid.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, this afternoon we have heard a really compelling case for quite a simple demand: the right of Parliament, rather than government, to authorise the arrangements whereby the Article 50 negotiations conclude. Indeed, probably no additional words are needed to strengthen the case made by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, or many of the others who have spoken. I will not mention them all but the House will forgive me if I mention my noble friends Lady Kennedy of The Shaws and Lady Symons and the noble Baronesses, Lady Altmann, Lady McIntosh and Lady Ludford. What do they have in common? So I must also mention the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, although sadly she was not able to support the case.
Essentially, Amendment 3 is about implementing the Supreme Court’s view that withdrawal would require parliamentary authorisation. The argument is straightforward. As the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said, it would secure in law the Government’s commitment that Parliament is the ultimate decider. Very shortly, maybe even next week, the Prime Minister will trigger Article 50 of the treaty. But neither that treaty nor any UK law states how the arrangements made by our Government should be made into law. What is written in the treaty—in EU law, in other words—is that the final agreement will go to the Council and to the European Parliament, so it is mandatory for that Parliament to give its consent but there is no similar requirement for this Parliament to give its consent.
The Prime Minister has said that she will allow a vote in both Houses and the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, quoted Mr Jones saying that that was the intent. That, to me, is not a very firm commitment, no matter how sincerely it was given. Indeed, when the Minister said in Committee that the Government’s oral,
“commitment mirrors the powers of the European Parliament”,—[Official Report, 1/3/17; col. 923.]
he was not exactly right because its power is written in law. All we are asking is for an equal legislative requirement for the exit deal to come to this Parliament. It is basically about the Crown’s prerogative against Parliament’s.
I turn to the West Lothian question—no, not that but the Grocott question. We will have to call it the Grocott question as he no longer has a constituency. This was raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. It is true that whether we look at the undertaking given by the Prime Minister or at this amendment, there would be a problem if the House of Commons were to vote one way and your Lordships’ House another. I hope that will not be the case for lots of reasons. Particularly, I hope that by then not just the country but Parliament will have come together, and that we are of one view. But I make it clear from these Benches that if that were to be the outcome, we are absolutely clear that ultimately the will of the Commons must prevail.
Furthermore, if that is the only argument given against this amendment, there are two ways of answering it. One is that we do a bit of hurried work this evening to table an amendment and, if the Government were willing to accept it, that might be the easiest way. Keeping all my friends here late into the night, however, may not be the best way of achieving that end. We would not want to risk voting down the idea of Commons supremacy just because, very sensibly, everyone was back in their beds. The real issue is to get this principle into the Bill and down the road into the Commons. On behalf of the Opposition, I say that if that is the only point of dispute between us, given that we want the supremacy to be down there rather than here, we will happily work with the Government on the form of words to make that absolutely crystal clear.
Lord Dykes (CB)
Bearing in mind the emphasis the noble Baroness has quite rightly put on the two Houses coming together, would it really be intrinsically so nerve racking, fearful and awesome for the Commons, for once, to accept a Lords amendment such as this?
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
The Commons should certainly accept this amendment, albeit I am happy with the tweak to make certain the supremacy of the Commons. The most important thing is to get this amendment in the Bill so that we are absolutely clear about that.
It is so simple. Whatever the outcome of the negotiations with the EU 27, it is with Parliament, not simply with the Government, that authority lies, deal or no deal. I am afraid I did not follow the Minister’s response on this last week in Committee, questioning what would happen if the EU terminates the talks and refuses to extend the negotiations. He asked: what then? It is pretty simple: the Government come back to Parliament.
Stranger still than that is the briefing coming out of No. 10, with advisers arguing that giving legislators the power to veto the final Brexit deal and send the Premier back to the negotiating table would undermine her and limit the possibility of a good deal and, indeed, might even push the EU into giving a bad Brexit deal, incentivising it, it seems,
“in the hope it stops us leaving”.
That was what Downing Street apparently told the Financial Times, and I always believe the Financial Times.
I again remind the House that it was Mrs May who said that the deal would be put to a vote in both Houses, so all this is real nonsense. The only issue is whether it is an undertaking or in the Bill. All we are doing in this amendment is putting her pledge, which I am sure was absolutely sincerely given—I do not question that—in the Bill. It is hardly starting a revolution. It is certainly not upending the referendum, and any such arguments are in bad faith because we are trying to put the Prime Minister’s undertaking in the Bill. We do not want the Government’s hand to be forced by the courts. We want the vote to be clearly in the Bill, ideally with the Government’s blessing, without even the need for us to divide. They need to provide certainty at this stage so that we are not back having this debate in 18 months’ time. The amendment is about authorising Parliament. It is to put wheels on the outcome of the referendum.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, this debate has shown this House at its very best, and I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. Forty-four, I think, hours of debate on these 137 words show how sprightly your Lordships are.
Before I discuss the amendments, I shall briefly set out three core principles governing our approach to this country’s withdrawal from the European Union. First, the Government are determined to honour and deliver on the result of the referendum: the United Kingdom is going to leave the European Union. Secondly, everything we do will be determined by our national interest, and we shall do nothing to undermine it. Thirdly, parliamentary sovereignty is key. Parliament will have a role in scrutinising the Government throughout the negotiations and in making decisions, a point to which I will return.
Given this, I turn now to the rationale and motives behind the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Cormack, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. One basic intent is that the Government should be legally bound to deliver on their commitment to give Parliament a vote on the agreement. That government commitment is crystal clear, and I shall repeat it: the commitment is to bring forward a Motion on the final agreement to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final agreement.
The need for my noble friend Lord Cormack’s amendment, and the first three proposed new subsections of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, really comes down to a judgment about whether Ministers and the Government can be trusted and to considering the consequences if the Government were not to deliver on this commitment. All I can say is that of course we will honour our promise and Parliament will hold the Government to account for doing so. Let me go further and echo a point very well made by my noble friend Lord Howard: at any point throughout this process, Parliament will be able to express its view. Given this, the other place was happy with this state of affairs. It considered and rejected similar amendments.
Furthermore, Parliament will not be providing scrutiny in the dark. After all, this Government have committed to keeping the UK Parliament at least as well informed as the European Parliament as negotiations progress. The Government will continue to be accountable to Parliament via regular Statements—which I so enjoy—debates and Select Committee appearances. Crucially, Parliament’s role will not just be one of scrutiny. It will make decisions and shape the legislation required to give effect to our withdrawal from the European Union: the great repeal Bill to repeal the ECA and the legislation that will be required for significant policy changes, such as on immigration and customs. With the greatest of respect to my noble friend Lord Cormack and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, any amendment that attempts to transcribe the Government’s commitment into legislation is unnecessary. More than being unnecessary, an amendment that sought to put this commitment in the Bill could have unintended consequences and create, as has been said, a lucrative field day for lawyers. I do not want to single out any particular lawyer, but I have one in mind. As the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, put it so well in Committee,
“regulating parliamentary proceedings by statute ... generally ends in some sort of tears”.—[Official Report, 1/3/17; col. 920.]
Other noble Lords have asked whether someone might argue that we need an Act of Parliament to authorise our exit from the European Union and whether the Bill is sufficient for our withdrawal. The requirements of the Miller judgment are entirely fulfilled by the Bill. The Supreme Court ruled that because withdrawal from the EU involves removing a source of domestic law in the UK, and because of the far-reaching effects of the European Communities Act, the authority of primary legislation is needed before the Government can decide to give notice under Article 50. The Supreme Court did not rule that anything further is required to satisfy our constitutional requirements.
Let me now turn to subsection (4) of the new clause proposed by Amendment 3, which was tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. I have to say there is something about Labour and Clause 4, but we will put that to one side. The motive behind this subsection was summarised by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in Committee and he repeated it today. He said:
“Parliament should decide whether we leave the EU with no agreement or whether we leave the EU with whatever agreement is being offered to us by the EU that the Government think is unacceptable”.—[Official Report, 1/3/17; col. 907-8.]
As he said, proposed new subsection (4) goes beyond what the Government have committed to in the other place and there are several problems with it. The first concerns the Government’s role as negotiator and one of my first principles, which is protecting our national interest. When considering this amendment, we must ask ourselves whether it will strengthen or weaken the Government’s hand at the negotiating table. Remember the wise words of this House’s Select Committee:
“The Government will conduct the negotiations on behalf of the United Kingdom, and, like any negotiator, it will need room to manoeuvre if it is to secure a good outcome”.
Let us not forget the Motion passed by the other place that nothing should be done to undermine the negotiating position of the Government. This proposed new subsection in this amendment would do just that—
Lord Bridges of Headley
Let me continue please. Denying the Prime Minister the ability to walk away from the negotiating table, as proposed new subsection (4) would do, would only incentivise the European Union to offer us a bad deal. The European Union is bound to see that there are a number of people in Parliament who think that any deal is better than no deal. We heard some noble Lords argue just now that to go to WTO terms would be bad for Britain. Therefore, this amendment simply makes the negotiations much harder from day one for the Prime Minister, since it increases the incentive for the European Union to offer nothing but a bad deal.
Some have argued that the proposed clause would strengthen the Government’s hand. They say that this is like a CEO saying, “My board will not agree to that deal”. However, this analogy is not correct in this case. Most boards would say, “We want to do a deal, but not at any price”. In this case, a number of parliamentarians are saying, “Any deal is better than no deal”. This approach would therefore weaken the Government’s position.
However, that is not the only problem with this amendment. The amendment is clear—
Lord Bridges of Headley
Forgive me. The amendment is clear on one thing, and one thing only: namely, that if Parliament agrees with the Prime Minister that no deal is better than the terms on offer, the United Kingdom will leave the European Union without a deal. However, it is unclear—totally unclear—what happens if the House says no to walking away. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, and my noble friend Lord Forsyth asked, what path must the Prime Minister then take? Is she to accept the terms on offer? Is she being told to secure a better deal—and, if so, what would happen if that cannot be achieved before the end of the two-year period? Alternatively, in the silence of the amendment on this matter, is she to find a means to remain a member of the European Union?
We do not know the answer to any of these questions. My noble friend Lord Forsyth was entirely right to highlight this omission. The Government cannot possibly accept an amendment that is so unclear on an issue of this importance: what the Prime Minister is to do if Parliament votes against leaving with no agreement.
With regard to that risk, let us remember the first principle that I stated: the Government are intent on delivering on the result of the referendum as a matter of firm policy. I almost turn to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, to repeat the words after me. As a matter of firm policy, a notification under Article 50 will not be revoked. Therefore, for the Government, any question of whether notification under Article 50 is legally reversible is irrelevant. The parliamentary vote that we have promised will be very meaningful: we will leave with a deal or we will leave without a deal. That is the choice on offer. However, the choice offered by this amendment by proposed subsection (4), is unclear.
I will end by repeating the first line of the White Paper:
“We do not approach these negotiations expecting failure, but anticipating success”.
Our clear intent, as I said, is to negotiate a new partnership with the European Union that will enable us and Europe to continue to trade freely together and to co-operate and collaborate where it is in our interests. Parliament will decide on whether to accept or reject the agreement. The purpose of this simple Bill is to deliver on the result of the referendum and to leave the EU. These amendments are unnecessary. They are damaging to our national interest, they would create uncertainty and they may be used by some to block the wish of the British people to leave the European Union. For these reasons, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Pannick
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this very full debate. I am particularly grateful to the Minister. The whole House recognises the skill, expertise and indeed patience with which he has piloted this Bill through the House. He will need all those qualities over the next two years. I am sure that the whole House wishes him the best of luck.
The essence of this amendment is clear. It has been clear from the start. It simply seeks to ensure that Parliament, not Ministers, has control over the terms of our withdrawal at the end of the negotiating process. I find it disappointing that those who most loudly asserted the importance of the sovereignty of Parliament during the referendum campaign are now so alarmed by the prospect of the sovereignty of Parliament at the end of the process.
Lord Pannick
No, we have had a full debate. The Minister says that an undertaking has been given on proposed subsections (1) to (3) and therefore that this amendment is not needed. On a matter of this importance, an undertaking is no substitute for a commitment in legislation. On proposed subsection (4), it surely must be for Parliament, not Ministers, to decide whether we leave on no terms or on the terms that have been offered.
The Minister repeated that the approval of both Houses of Parliament will be needed and in no part of the argument advanced by the Minister in his winding-up speech did he express any concern about the primacy of the House of Commons not being recognised by this amendment. If the Government do believe that that is a problem—and if we pass this amendment—the Government will be perfectly able to put a revised amendment before the other place next week.
Your Lordships have heard the arguments. It is now time to test the opinion of the House.
“Maintenance of citizenship rights set out in the Belfast Agreement
Before a notification can be given under section 1(1), the Prime Minister must give an undertaking to negotiate under the process set out in Article 50 to support the right of Northern Irish people to claim Irish citizenship, as set out in the Belfast Agreement.”
Lord Hain
My Lords, Amendment 5 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Murphy of Torfaen, who was my predecessor as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. I reassure your Lordships that this is more of a probing amendment, and I certainly do not intend to even consider dividing on it. That should be a relief.
The Belfast/Good Friday agreement of 1998, endorsed by a referendum in Northern Ireland, included the rights of people who were born in Northern Ireland to choose to be Irish or British, or to choose to be both. Some choose to exercise, exclusively, one of them. Indeed, a British citizen whose parents were born in Ireland could—as many have done since the referendum—apply for an Irish passport without giving up their British citizenship, because British citizens are also allowed to hold dual citizenship. This means that you do not have to renounce your British citizenship if you apply for an Irish passport.
However, for those who choose to be both British and Irish or just Irish, will they also be citizens of the European Union as they are now? I presume that they would: the Minister will, I hope, confirm that Irish citizenship automatically confers EU citizenship rights, so that right to be a citizen of the European Union would remain. Can we assume that the EU would not object to EU citizen status for Irish citizens, not only those living in the Republic, but also those living in Northern Ireland, in what will be, after Brexit, part of a non-member state, the United Kingdom? Will those born in Northern Ireland claiming Irish citizenship remain EU citizens, albeit living outside the EU?
Can we assume that the position would be analogous to someone being able to apply for dual French and British citizenship—for example, if they were British, but had French parents? As long as France remained in the European Union, the French citizenship would confer the right to EU citizenship by extension; in the case of Northern Ireland, however, it will apply to a whole society—Northern Ireland’s—and not just individuals claiming European citizenship through relatives. Can the Minister give a guarantee that this right is maintained for people from Northern Ireland? After all, a common EU identity has helped both nationalists and unionists to focus on what they have in common rather than what has, for centuries, divided them. Irish citizenship may of course also be available for those with grandparents who were born on the island of Ireland, which includes Northern Ireland.
I note the report of the House of Lords European Union Committee, which stated on page 32:
“We also considered the impact of Brexit on the current reciprocal rights for UK and Irish citizens to live and work in each other’s countries. Such rights are underpinned in domestic law by the treatment of Irish nationals as non-foreigners under the Ireland Act 1949, and the acknowledgement of their special status in subsequent legislation including the Immigration Act 1971, as well as by the provisions of the British Nationality Act 1981 ... In addition, under the terms of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, the people of Northern Ireland have the right to identify as British, Irish or both, and to claim citizenship accordingly. Those who claim Irish citizenship would, by extension, be able to claim EU citizenship”.
Last week, I raised the thorny issue of the border in the context of Brexit. Nationalist and above all republican buy-in to the peace process has been cemented by an open border, as it normalises relations between both parts of the island. For them, it is iconic; and for unionists, either doing business or going about their daily lives, it is also extremely valuable. Similarly, the right to be Irish has been for nationalists and republicans a key part of the Northern Ireland peace process. Furthermore, do the Government agree that it is vital to retain and guarantee that right, not just for those who currently enjoy it but for future generations? Categorical reassurances on all of these are especially important after, first, a collapse of the power-sharing Executive into an election, and then a seismic result in which for the first time since 1922, unionists do not have a majority in the local legislature. Is there hope that two charismatic new women leaders, Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill and Alliance’s Naomi Long, can broker common ground with the DUP’s leader Arlene Foster to rescue devolved government?
Meanwhile, the issue of how to deal with Northern Ireland’s troubled and tangled past remains toxic. Long-retired British soldiers are being prosecuted, provoking outrage among both their families and unionists who perceive it as an unjustified focus on the state’s role in the conflict. “What about prosecutions of former IRA assassins?”, is their question? Both magnanimity and mutual respect is needed, otherwise Northern Ireland will get completely bogged down in its gruesome past, instead of properly supporting victims and building a new future.
To conclude, I ask that the Minister gives a proper and full explanation and guarantee about the entitlement to Irish and therefore European citizenship of people from Northern Ireland. The EU has in the past been very supportive in recognising Northern Ireland’s unique status, and it will almost certainly have to be supportive in the future.
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
My Lords, I am very pleased to follow my noble colleague and fellow former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Lord Hain, in support of the amendment. I merely point out that I am the third former Secretary of State from these Benches to have supported the sentiments of the amendment, as my noble friend Lord Murphy also spoke on the matter last week.
I do not intend to address the amendment in such detail as my noble Friend Lord Hain; I will confine my remarks to a focus on three or four strategic issues of vital importance. We have spent a great deal of time thinking and worrying—correctly—about the implications of Brexit for Scotland and, in my view, not nearly enough time thinking about the implications not only for Northern Ireland but for the whole of Ireland and a relationship which we have built over the past 20 years, in contrast to centuries prior to that of animosity and antagonism.
Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve (CB)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for tabling this amendment although I think that things may not be quite as difficult as he imagines. For many of us—I declare an interest here—our right to Irish citizenship is not contingent on the Belfast agreement. It goes back much further to the establishment of the common travel area. In order to set my own mind at rest, I checked with the Irish embassy after the Brexit vote to make sure of my own status. I was born in County Antrim during the war years and the answer was, “You are a citizen. You have birthright”. That did not continue indefinitely but many of us in the north have citizenship by virtue of being born, I think, when there was still a territorial claim to the entire island. I see the noble Lord, Lord Empey, nodding. That is very important to us. The numbers we are talking about are rather different from the suggestion that this is a Belfast agreement creation.
However, the underlying problems are every bit as severe as noble Lords have suggested. There are three. One is obviously the movement of people. I know that many in the Conservative Party think that ID cards are a no-no, but many noble Lords carry mobile phones which constantly give away far more about their identity. We should grow up and realise that in the present age identity and identification is absolutely routine. We need to get it right and enable people to travel. However, the issue is not only to identify the persons who have, under whatever dispensation we reach, no right to cross into the UK. I am afraid that this duty to identify ourselves would fall on all of us—probably when we do crucial things, such as register with a GP’s surgery, start a company or buy a property, and not merely when we travel. That topic really needs to be explored in full.
The second topic, which I believe is the most awkward, is the question of tariffs. Of course it depends on the negotiation that we have been talking about at some length today—what sort of issue that has to be, and how much of it can be electronic—but make no mistake: the economies are interwoven, and it cannot be thought that we will have a long queue at 260 border crossings across 300 miles. That is not a solution.
Thirdly, and I think this is a neglected but important topic, we may expect in the event of a negotiation that the agricultural support systems north and south of the Irish border will diverge. That creates new incentives to do something that has long been done—about which amusing stories can be told, because it is not only oil tankers that were put into fields but, of course, beasts. It is extraordinarily important that we address issues of biosecurity very early on in the negotiations. The economies of both the Republic and the north are highly integrated in some respects, particularly dairy, and it is very important that those supply lines can be maintained without any risk to biosecurity. Of course, it is not just the looming possibility of foot and mouth but also other horrible diseases that animals get, such as swine flu and Asian flu. You name it, it is possible. I hope that we can address that one soon.
Lord Eames (CB)
My Lords, it is an opportunity, because of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, to once again concentrate our minds on an aspect of our long debates on the EU and Brexit, and to realise the significance of a cameo within the bigger cameo. It is a question not just of addressing the issue of the United Kingdom and the EU; within the United Kingdom is a border that will become the frontier between the United Kingdom and the EU.
The border, which is a part of folklore as well as part of the political story of Ireland, is much more important, as I said at Second Reading, than a line on a map. It represents something in people’s minds, aspirations and memories of the past. I believe that the value of what the noble Lord, Lord Hain, has said to us this evening is this: the border represents perhaps the most important facet for the people of Northern Ireland that is represented by Brexit. Northern Ireland will be affected by Brexit more than any other part of the United Kingdom simply because of geography. However, more than geography, it will be affected by cultural and economic changes and, of course, the security question.
It is important to emphasise what lies behind the words of the amendment; I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hain, will not press it to a Division. It is a reminder that this part of the United Kingdom will be the first to feel the effect of Brexit. The second part will be the ongoing consequences. As the noble Baroness has reminded us, there is the tariff question, the economy and the proverbial oil tankers, and horses and cows in the field.
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
The whole House always listens to the noble and right reverend Lord with the greatest respect on these matters. I have known him for about 20 years and have spoken to him on the subject over that time and feel the same degree of respect. I wonder whether he would like to tell the House—I do not know what answer he will give—whether he feels that one possible solution to the difficult, dire problems he has just outlined might be to allow for the negotiation of a special status for Northern Ireland which might leave it, at least in some respects, within the European Union.
Lord Eames
My Lords, I feel that the question that the noble Lord has raised takes us far beyond the points I was trying to put over because we must not tie the hands of the team that is going to speak for us all in the negotiations. I say to the noble Lord, please keep an open mind on the possibilities, but it is not for us to concern ourselves with.
The Archbishop of York
My Lords, it is a real delight to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames. When he was Archbishop of Armagh he invited me endless times to visit Northern Ireland, even during the terrible Troubles. As a result we ended up spending a lot of holidays in that particular part of Ireland. It is a very beautiful, wonderful place. The noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Reid, spoke with insight. I would like to follow in their footsteps on this wonderful probing amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Hain, says he is not going to put to a vote.
I want to say three things. First, this amendment, as I understand it, touches on sensitivities that Brexit risks putting Northern Ireland’s peace process in jeopardy by not taking account of the fact that under the Belfast/Good Friday agreement citizens in Northern Ireland have a right to Irish citizenship and therefore EU citizenship. This makes Northern Ireland unique post Brexit as the only jurisdiction outside the EU where every person living there is legally entitled to be a citizen of the European Union, simply by applying for an Irish passport. While these considerations are high on the agenda in Dublin and Belfast, they are not receiving, as I understand it, the attention they deserve in London, Brussels or other EU capitals. The amendment seeks to reverse that situation, hence its probing nature.
Secondly, this issue and other matters relating to the impact of Brexit on UK-Irish relations were explored in a report published in December 2016 by the House of Lords European Union Committee. The committee concluded that the unique nature of UK-Irish relations needs a unique solution. It recommended that the best way to achieve this would be for the EU institutions and member states to invite the UK and Irish Governments to negotiate a draft bilateral agreement, involving and incorporating the views and interests of the Northern Ireland Executive, while keeping the EU itself fully informed. Such an agreement would then need to be agreed by the EU partners as a strand of the withdrawal agreement. I will be interested to know what the Minister will say about that.
Thirdly, this amendment does not go as far as the committee suggested but it holds that the right of the people of Northern Ireland to Irish and therefore EU citizenship should be upheld in any agreement negotiated following the triggering of Article 50. To me, that is important. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, reminded us of the importance of the border. There is no wall there but it is a border. It seems to me that the rights of those people need to be upheld otherwise we are going to put in jeopardy this wonderful decision under the Belfast/Good Friday agreement that citizens in Northern Ireland have a right to Irish citizenship and therefore EU citizenship.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
My Lords, I pay tribute to the wonderful, heartfelt speech from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames. I think I speak for many in this Chamber by saying that his speaking with such emotion makes us realise how important this issue is. The right of Northern Irish people to claim Irish citizenship is, as other noble Lords have said, set out in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, the Irish constitution and, as has also been said, the common travel agreement. It should be stressed that this right will remain and will not be changed by Brexit. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise.
However, there remain many unanswered questions and it will be useful, in debating this probing amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hain, to push the Government for clarification on several issues. As has been said, Northern Ireland is unique in the United Kingdom in that citizens can choose to have Irish citizenship, British citizenship or both. Since the Maastricht treaty, citizens in both Ireland and the United Kingdom have also been entitled to European citizenship. However, following Brexit, in Northern Ireland there will be a situation in which, unlike in the rest of the UK, people will be able to remain EU citizens by virtue of their Irish citizenship. Will the Minister say how he believes UK citizens also being able to maintain EU citizenship will work in practice?
Last week, your Lordships’ House voted overwhelmingly to maintain EU citizens’ rights in the United Kingdom. If this is overturned by the House of Commons next week, can the Minister clarify whether he believes this will have any impact on the Northern Irish people who have opted to have Irish citizenship? If there is no change to the current situation, does the Minister believe that this would entail special status within the European Union? Finally, can the Minister confirm that resolving these issues will be a top priority for the Government, and does he agree that any continuing uncertainty or lack of clarity about future citizenship rights for Northern Irish people is clearly unacceptable?
Viscount Slim (CB)
My Lords, how pleasant to have a meaningful and good, short debate. I so agree with what has been said. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, was kind enough to mention the bad feelings caused by the hounding and prosecuting of British soldiers over matters of Sinn Fein and Ireland. I remind noble Lords that our Armed Forces are full of good Ulstermen and good Irishmen, and they need looking after and defending. The false prosecuting of British soldiers and airmen and the constabulary in Northern Ireland should not be allowed. The Minister may not recall that previous Governments have given dispensation to IRA/Sinn Fein murderers of British troops and the constabulary. This false prosecution and hounding of the Armed Forces has to stop. It is a law thing, and maybe the Minister has some views on it. I raise it because the noble Lord was kind enough to bring up the question of a British soldier being prosecuted.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
I put it on record that my noble friend Lord Hain, who is perfectly capable of speaking for himself, my noble friend Lord Murphy and I tried, unsuccessfully, to draw a line against all prosecutions before 1998. We did it in retrospect in 2002, 2005, 2006 and so on. We could not get common agreement among parties in Northern Ireland—or, indeed, in the British Parliament—so to do. We said at the time that we would regret that decision as the years went on and prosecutions were pursued against the British Armed Forces, the RUC and, indeed, people from the loyalist and republican communities. I put it on record that the three of us all made an attempt to solve this problem, but we could not get consensus in the British Parliament or among the parties in Northern Ireland.
Viscount Slim
I am fully aware of that and of what other noble Lords, Ministers and Secretaries of State have done, and I thank the noble Lord.
Lord Empey (UUP)
My Lords, I believe that citizenship is not threatened by the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Indeed, I am absolutely certain that people of whatever outlook can be confident that the undertakings given to them will be honoured. I refer to the Good Friday agreement, where in the section under constitutional issues, paragraph vi of Article 1 refers to recognising,
“the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland”.
We can link that to the matter that I brought to your Lordships’ attention in the debate last week. We go back to our friends in the Supreme Court, who said that the Supreme Court has now unanimously endorsed the Belfast ruling without caveat, which was to say that the rights of people in Northern Ireland were not affected by Brexit—but the Attorney-General John Larkin decided to put the case to the Supreme Court for clarity, and it is a good thing he did. That included the three judges who were dissenting from the final judgment in Miller. Furthermore, because there will now be a UK Parliament vote on Article 50, the court added that nothing about Northern Ireland’s removal from Europe breaches any law, treaty or part of the constitution.
Therefore, I contend, though not being a lawyer, that the position of citizenship is secure. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, clearly indicated, that goes back way before the Belfast agreement ever existed. In fact, the Irish constitution, before it was amended in 1998, made it absolutely clear that any person born on the physical ground of the island of Ireland was an Irish citizen, which has pertained ever since. It was reinforced in the Belfast agreement, but it says that it shall,
“not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland”.
In other words, people argue that leaving the European Union changes the status in some way, but the Supreme Court says that no injury is done to any treaty, law or the constitution.
Baroness Altmann
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for raising one of the issues that has troubled me most about leaving the European Union. It is not just about citizenship, from my perspective. So many companies across Ireland are deeply concerned about the possibility of leaving the EU with no deal, falling back on WTO rules, and the effect on the economy of the north and the rest of Ireland. In the context of us having responsibility for the whole of the United Kingdom, I urge the Minister to reassure us that it is possible to leave the customs union and still provide significant comfort to corporations and others engaged in economic activity in Northern Ireland.
Lord McAvoy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lord Hain and Lord Murphy of Torfaen for tabling the amendment, which gives us a chance further to emphasise the importance we place on the issue it deals with. It has been for the most part an extremely positive debate. Contributions from my noble friends Lord Murphy of Torfaen, Lord Reid of Cardowan and Lord Hain, as former Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, have weighed heavily on the discussion, as well as the contributions of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve, and the noble Lord, Lord Empey, who brought a commendable spirit of tolerance into what can be on occasions a tight subject.
It has been almost 20 years since the people of Northern Ireland turned out to vote for the Good Friday/Belfast agreement. Last week, Northern Irish voters turned out in the highest numbers since 1998 to vote for representation and progress in the devolved Assembly. The negotiations in the coming days and weeks are vital to the future of Northern Ireland to ensure that victims are supported and communities are able to move forward. There is so much at stake here.
The UK and Irish Governments are co-guarantors of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement and must live up to this responsibility. This is vital, not only to immediate negotiations on devolution but, focusing on the amendment, to long-term Brexit negotiations. On the issue of British-Irish relations and the role of the European Union, it is worth noting that the Prime Minister and Taoiseach are meeting to discuss Northern Ireland while they are together at the EU Council summit in Brussels this week. That can only be a positive development.
There is a body of opinion that, when he decided to call the European Union referendum, the former Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, had not given proper thought to the implications for Northern Ireland if UK voters opted to leave. I pay tribute to all noble Lords who have worked so keenly during the passage of the Bill to focus the Government’s mind on these key issues, particularly my noble friend Lord Murphy of Torfaen, who has brought considerable expertise to these discussions. The Good Friday agreement has been the cornerstone of two decades of progress in Northern Ireland. This House has asked for an absolute guarantee from the Government that the provisions of the agreement will remain in place and be respected in both letter and spirit. These questions were also raised last week when other matters were discussed. We had no hesitation in fully accepting the Minister’s assurances when he responded to the debate. He went a long way toward guaranteeing the House’s acceptance that those assurances would hold. I have every confidence that he will again give assurances on the responsibilities of the UK Government that will satisfy most genuine, open-minded people.
The passport arrangements recognise,
“the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both”.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Empey, I have not heard any great objection to this. As he said, how can anyone object to someone else’s identity? Surely we accept that. We know that the Government accept this situation and it should not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland. We in this House have a shared duty to guarantee the future of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement and the rights of Northern Irish citizens. As noble Lords on all sides have said, we must respect the will of the people and, in doing so, we must continue to respect, protect and uphold the result of the referendum which took place in May 1998.
I thank noble Lords for a very positive discussion and restate my belief that the Minister will repeat his assurances of last week, which greatly reassured the whole House.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office and Scotland Office (Lord Dunlop) (Con)
I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate on this amendment, relating to the right of the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves as British or Irish or both, under the Belfast agreement. It is always a pleasure to follow two former Secretaries of State who have so much experience of this issue. I also mention the eloquent contributions from, among others, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York.
The noble Lord, Lord Hain, referred to the current political context. The whole House is very conscious of the political situation in Northern Ireland and the need to provide support to the parties there. The recent Assembly election produced a high turnout, and my right honourable friend the Northern Ireland Secretary said in a statement on Saturday:
“This election has demonstrated the clear desire by the overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland for inclusive, devolved Government … Everyone now has a shared responsibility to engage intensively in the short period of time that is available to us, to ensure that a strong and stable administration is established”.
I make it absolutely clear that the Government take that responsibility very seriously and are totally committed to the resumption of strong and stable devolved government, which is so much in the interests of the people of Northern Ireland. We all want to see the forward momentum of the peace process maintained.
The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, seeks an undertaking to support the right of the people of Northern Ireland to claim Irish citizenship, as set out in the Belfast agreement. The Government’s commitment to the Belfast agreement is absolutely rock-solid, including to the principles that recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they so choose, and their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Empey, made clear, this birthright predates the Belfast agreement. The United Kingdom’s departure from the EU will not change this commitment. However, the question of who can or cannot claim Irish nationality and citizenship is not something that would be dealt with through the Article 50 process.
Citizenship and nationality are matters of exclusive member state competence. The right to Irish nationality and citizenship is therefore a matter for Ireland, in line with its own commitments under the Belfast agreement. The Taoiseach has repeatedly made clear that the Irish Government remain committed to this agreement. In response to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, EU citizenship is enjoyed by the citizens of all EU members. Therefore, any Northern Ireland resident who takes Irish citizenship will have EU citizenship. This is a matter of EU law, so no guarantees are required from the UK. It does not require special status. There are, after all, 3 million EU citizens currently in the UK. The noble Lord, Lord Reid, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, raised the issue of the border. The Government are committed to a frictionless border. How that is achieved is a matter for negotiation.
In conclusion, although the Government agree with the core sentiment behind this amendment—namely, unwavering support for the Belfast agreement—there is no need for its inclusion in the Bill in order to achieve the effect the noble Lords are seeking. Therefore, I respectfully ask the noble Lord not to press his amendment, as he indicated he would not.
Lord Hain
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister and will respond briefly to him in a moment. However, the happy consensus which we have enjoyed this evening will be destroyed over the weekend when Wales play Ireland—at least in the case of my noble friend Lord Murphy and me.
My noble and right reverend friend Lord Eames spoke, as always, with moving eloquence. I am grateful for his generosity to me and to my noble friends Lord Reid and Lord Murphy. He said, very aptly, that Northern Ireland was affected by Brexit more than any other part of the UK. Scotland may be making the most noise but he is right that Northern Ireland, potentially, will be more seriously affected.
The noble Viscount, Lord Slim, referred to my mention of soldiers being prosecuted. To ensure that he understands my point of view, which is shared by my noble friends Lord Reid and Lord Murphy, we did indeed try to draw a line under the past. I introduced the Northern Ireland Offences Bill, which fell because its principle was that it applied to everybody. You had to treat people equally, whether they were a British soldier or a former paramilitary: that principle is vital. I can well understand why the families of soldiers who are now in their 70s and are being prosecuted for offences that they are said to have committed have a grievance that this may be one-sided.
You have to do these things even-handedly—and I return to what my noble and right reverend friend Lord Eames said. I do not wish to detain the House because it is not strictly appropriate to this amendment, but it is part of the context. You have to deal with this whole question in an entirely different way from pursuing continuous prosecutions going back 30, 40 and more years. Forensic evidence in those cases is either non-existent or, if there is forensic and other evidence, it is often more easily captured under former serving soldiers, where records were kept, than it is under former paramilitaries. So long as the parties turn their backs on an even-handed approach and so long as government is unable to pursue that matter, we will continue to have these grievances and they will multiply.
My noble and right reverend friend Lord Eames was the co-author, with Denis Bradley, of a very authoritative and excellent report on the past. There was one particular recommendation on compensation which perhaps was not ideal and attracted a lot of controversy. However, the rest of the report showed how it was possible to address this issue. The people of Northern Ireland and their politicians should return to it.
Lord Empey
I am obliged to the noble Lord. Would he not confirm that, even going back to 1998, one of the principal objectors to drawing a line or trying to treat everybody equally was the Army? It did not wish to be treated in the same way as terrorists who were being prosecuted. It wrote to the Government at the time, objecting strongly to being treated in the same way as ex-paramilitary prisoners. I understand that the security forces still object to that. It is an issue that needs to be addressed. I hope that the noble Lord is at least aware of it.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
What the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said was true—but, at a certain point, the chiefs of staff actually changed their mind. They could see the difficulties of paramilitaries having been released and the precise difficulties that have been pointed out tonight of British Army soldiers being prosecuted. While I was Secretary of State, they agreed that, if any member of the Armed Forces wished, in the event of such legislation being passed, to have recourse to and defence through immunity, they would not object. So, historically, although they had taken one view, they were prepared to countenance that on behalf of the Armed Forces.
Unfortunately, the parties in Northern Ireland would not permit an agreement at any given time—and nor, indeed, to be fair, would the British Parliament. We said consistently, “You will regret this because it will be a running sore for decades”. While we accept that there is a contradiction between justice for the families of those injured or killed in the past—which I understand perfectly—and peace and security for the future, the overwhelming case was to assure peace and security for all families in future by drawing a line at 1998. This has been the position of the British Armed Forces since 2003, as I understand it.
Lord Hain
I am grateful to my noble friend. I will not prolong this discussion too much except to say that, following the impasse that the Minister, the Secretary of State and their colleagues are grappling with, we hope that negotiations will bear fruit. It may well be that the British Government have to give something on this. I would just mention in passing that there is, for example, a demand from the WAVE trauma group to have a pension for innocent victims—not perpetrators of atrocities. I presume this could come only from the Government. I will briefly give way.
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend. Thanks to the initiative of the noble Viscount, Lord Slim, we are talking about a desperately important matter. As the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said, there are still some serious reservations about granting amnesty to British forces. I share some of those sensitivities. Without getting into this complicated ground, is it not the case that the prosecuting authorities always have the option to decide whether or not to prosecute not just on the grounds of whether there is a chance of a conviction but also on the grounds of national interest? Is it not to be hoped that the prosecutor in Northern Ireland will take advantage of the opportunity for a judgment with the greatest degree of sensitivity?
Lord Hain
We are opening up a whole new debate. I am not sure I fully agree with my noble friend. I will end by saying that I welcome the fact that the Minister said that the commitment to the option of Irish citizenship is rock solid, as is the commitment of the Government to the Good Friday Belfast agreement. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Tuesday 7th March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 108-I Marshalled list for Report (PDF, 67KB) - (3 Mar 2017)
21:25 - Division on Lord Newby's amendment - Ayes: 95 / Noes: 340 - Lord Newby's amendment disagreed.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)
My Lords, I have it in my command from Her Majesty the Queen to acquaint the House that Her Majesty, having been informed of the purport of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill, has consented to place her prerogative, so far as it is affected by the Bill, at the disposal of Parliament for the purposes of the Bill.
Motion
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, sometimes statistics say more than words. Here is a simple fact. We have spent 44 or so hours debating a Bill that started off as 137 words. That works out at about 20 minutes per word, but that amount of time and scrutiny is hardly surprising, given the importance of the issues that swirl around those words. In the debate, we have seen the very best of what this House is here to do. As I said at Second Reading a fortnight ago—although I have to say that it feels a lot longer than that—scrutinising legislation is not an unpatriotic act. Whatever our differences, we all share a basic wish: to see our country prosper in future. Everything that has been said has been motivated by that basic wish.
I am sure that the House will be grateful that I shall not name everyone who has spoken, as that in itself might take some time, but I thank each and every one of your Lordships who has spoken, even where we have disagreed, and I apologise if I deprived anyone of the chance to speak, although I have a sneaking suspicion that we will meet again very soon, and on numerous occasions after that. For we are, as I have said before, just approaching base camp in terms of the parliamentary process of our withdrawal from the European Union. So while I thank my excellent Bill team and my noble friends Lady Goldie and Lord Dunlop, and my noble and learned friend Lord Keen, for all their help in getting me this far, I add only: please keep going.
I am of course obliged to the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayter and Lady Ludford, for their diligence in sitting on the Front Bench through the long hours of these debates. I must admit that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, somewhat set back my efforts to build a national consensus on our withdrawal from the EU when she mentioned my youngest daughter in her Second Reading speech, but failed to mention my twins. As you can imagine, this caused some consternation at the Bridges breakfast table the next morning. My twins expressed loud demands for a meaningful mention. They wanted reciprocity now, not at some unknown point in future. They were not prepared to take it or leave it: Bridges means Bridges, I was told. I am very grateful that she has since addressed this imbalance.
The Bill simply seeks to honour the commitment that the Government gave to respect the outcome of the referendum held on 23 June last year. During the course of our debates on this issue, a number of noble Lords have questioned the formulation of the Bill or sought to expand it beyond its straightforward aim. While I have disagreed with them on a number of occasions, the one point on which I thought we had all agreed was that we must respect the outcome of the referendum and that neither the Labour Party nor the Liberal Democrats would block the Bill. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Newby, is indeed a very honourable man, so I look forward with great interest to hearing why he has tabled the amendment to the Motion, which appears to contradict everything he has said, and why his party will now block the UK’s exit from the European Union. I beg to move.
Amendment to the Motion
Lord Newby
Leave out from “that” to the end and insert “this House declines to allow the bill to pass, because the bill does not provide a mechanism for the people of the United Kingdom to have a vote, prior to the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, on the terms of the new relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.”
Lord Newby (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister and all who have spoken in debates on this Bill to date. It has been a great privilege to take part in such debates, which have been conducted with grace, erudition and great passion in equal measure.
The Companion enjoins those who move amendments at this stage to speak briefly to them, so I shall be brief. Amendments to the Motion that the Bill do now pass are rare, and on these Benches we have not initiated such an amendment in recent times. We do so only because of the importance of the issue before us and the strength of our opposition to the way in which the Government have approached this Bill and the Brexit process.
We on these Benches have argued, as we did in the Commons, that while it is perfectly proper for the Government to be triggering the Article 50 negotiations, they should do so only if the process to be followed throughout respects the principles of both parliamentary sovereignty and democratic accountability. In reality, the Government have shown disdain for both. Parliament must clearly play a full part in the entire process, but we also believe it is essential that the people take the final decision, for reasons which we fully debated in recent days.
The Government’s view is that they not only oppose giving the people the final say, but oppose in principle any amendments to the Bill. The noble Lord’s enthusiasm for scrutiny is rather tempered by the idea that such scrutiny might actually lead to amendment. Why is this the case? It is not in reality that it is somehow inappropriate, far less improper, to amend this Bill; it is simply that it is inconvenient for the Government. Their whole attitude is one of lofty disdain for Parliament and the people alike.
In moving this amendment, and voting on it, I do so in the certain knowledge that this Bill will now pass this evening back to the Commons. We on these Benches could not allow this to happen without registering our opposition to the brutal Brexit that the Government are now pursuing, whether in making the country poorer by leaving the single market, or by using more than 3 million EU nationals living in the UK as bargaining chips. These decisions will exacerbate our long-term economic problems—fiscal imbalances, balance of payments deficits and low productivity, as well as our reputation as a welcoming and tolerant country.
However, the Government now seem set on this course towards this brutal Brexit. This is a deliberate distortion of the mandate they received from the British people, and we on these Benches cannot in all conscience support it. At this historic moment, we wish to record again our opposition to the damaging course on which the Government are set, and our opposition to the Government’s refusal to allow the British people, who will feel the consequences of Brexit for generations to come, the right to decide their own future. I beg to move.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, this Bill is a direct result of two things: the outcome of the referendum and the decision of the Supreme Court. In all of this, countless behind-the-scenes hands have been at work. Wherever we stood as we voted on 23 June, all of us know that the tasks since then has been unprecedented. Civil servants have had to devise new structures and work teams to prepare Parliament for this. This is just our first Bill; others will come our way.
So it is appropriate to take a moment, as the Minister did, to acknowledge the work that has been done and to thank all those who have contributed, within the Department for Exiting the EU and within your Lordships’ House. As an Opposition we have been well supported by Dan Stevens, Ben Coffman, Ian Parker and their colleagues—and, while I recognise that the work on the Bill is not yet done, if I thank them now it might give them the energy for all the work yet to be done.
Thanks are also due to the Minister, for whom we have considerable sympathy. I apologise to his family. We have probably taken up far too much of his time and we would be very happy for him to spend more time with them in the months to come. We also thank the Minister’s colleagues and the noble Lord the Chief Whip for their help in dealing with the mechanics of the timetabling of the Bill. I concur with the Minister’s comments and thank all noble Lords who have spoken.
The debates we have had at Second Reading, in Committee and on Report have been a great credit to your Lordships’ House, both in the range of expertise we have been able to show and the quality of debate. I also thank my colleagues, my noble friend Lord Lennie and especially my noble friend Lady Hayter. She has worked tirelessly on this Bill and I have to say that she is lot more even-tempered than perhaps I am. It is a pleasure to work for her and I look forward to seeing her continued work on this Bill. She recalled how she was volunteered to wind up at Second Reading. She will be volunteered again in the future. I give sincere thanks to those noble Lords and all my colleagues on different sides of the arguments. I think we have conducted ourselves with great integrity and strong belief.
That is why I am rather puzzled in many ways by the comments today from the noble Lord, Lord Newby. As somebody who, alongside many of my colleagues, campaigned extraordinarily hard to remain in the EU, I regret the decision that has been taken. I think it has to be not just the 52% who are represented but the 48% as well. It has to be recognised by all in your Lordships’ House that we have a duty to perhaps try to heal and unite where there has been division—and the Government must recognise that they have to act in the interests of the whole country.
During this debate we have voted on two extraordinarily important amendments. The first, on EEA and EU nationals in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, aims to remove some of the uncertainty regarding their position. That was one very serious amendment. The second one was debated tonight on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty. In that case there was a majority of 98.
Both amendments fulfil the criteria of the role of your Lordships’ House in asking the other place, the House of Commons, to reconsider. The quality and content of those debates provide considerable material for MPs to do so. We passed those amendments not as some kind of vanity exercise or just to make a point—we are not a debating society where we have our debates and then afterwards shrug off home or off to the pub because we have made our point and have no thought about what happens next.
What happens in this House is really important. We passed those amendments for a very serious reason, as part of our constitutional responsibilities. I want to hear the House of Commons debate those issues. I want elected MPs to reconsider, and I hope that they will accept our amendments and the principles behind them. I would be very happy to see the Government, who have offered co-operation and help on this one, bring forward similar amendments to give effect to them. These amendments matter. That is why I find the Liberal Democrat Motion tonight absolutely incredible.
The noble Lord, Lord Newby, stood in your Lordships’ House today and told us that he accepted the result of the referendum and the vote in the other place—but he failed to convince this House that a second referendum was the right course of action at this time. On the basis of that, as outlined in his Motion—not about anything else, not about all the issues he talked about surrounding a hard Brexit but on the one issue of that vote—Liberal Democrats are now prepared to vote against this whole Bill to stop Members of Parliament considering our amendments. I find that irresponsible.
It may be that he feels okay, as he said, about making a point about Brexit as a whole because they are not going to win the vote. But responsibility is not just about winning—it is about taking responsibility for our actions. As I heard him tonight, he failed to convince me that he is serious about these amendments that we have voted on.
If the Motion from the Liberal Democrats were passed tonight, it would stop the other place considering the amendments on EEA and EU nationals and on parliamentary sovereignty. Your Lordships’ House was never told when voting on these amendments that at the final hurdle the Liberal Democrats would say that they would not support the very amendments that they have asked your Lordships’ House to vote for. I am very much committed to those two amendments, and the Motion shows a lack of commitment to these two amendments and issues which have been voted on in this House.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
I can hear some chuntering from the Liberal Democrats. I am not taking heckling—stand up and intervene if you want to, but do not heckle. If we really care about these amendments, we want them to go to the other place and we want the other place to debate them. So how can we possibly ask MPs to vote for these amendments if this House is not prepared to pass the amendments and let the Bill pass and go to the other place?
We believe in the amendments that we supported. We respect the decisions taken by this House, and we respect and thank our colleagues from all parties who supported them. I have no hesitation in asking your Lordships’ House to reject this Motion.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
I very much support what my noble friend has just said about the value of the amendments that this House has carried, but does not she agree that her plea to the Members opposite to heal and unite rings pretty false when they are pursuing the hardest of hard Brexits? Does not she also agree that, whereas in June it would have been reasonable to hope that you might have had a national consensus around a soft Brexit, this Government have done nothing of that kind? The policy of the Lancaster House speech is la-la land as far as the possibility of a reasonable negotiation in the national interest. These things are very important, and I hope that the Opposition will continue to fight with vigour this hardest of hard Brexits.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, I do not think that I have ever been accused of not having vigour. Yes, I agree with my noble friend that the response from the party opposite—not from all noble Lords, I have to say, but from those who particularly want to pursue a hard Brexit—is disappointing. However, not for one moment will I or my colleagues on this side of the House give up trying to get the best deal that we possibly can for the people of this country. Yes, I am very disappointed that before we had even finished voting some Ministers rushed out to tell the cameras, “We’re going to hold back—we’re not going to support this”. We need a responsible, grown-up response—a mature response—and just saying that we are going head-on for a hard Brexit does not do it. But there is a role for this House; when we pass amendments, we do not just put them in the bag and give up—we send them to the other end. I have no hesitation in saying that we should reject this Motion because our responsibility, as my noble friend agrees, is to ensure that the work that we have put into the amendments, the debates that we have had on them and the issues we have raised on them are considered by the other place.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, to echo the noble Baroness’s remarks, I very much hope that as a House and as a nation we can put the divisions of the referendum behind us, accept the result and turn our minds to how we can together overcome the challenges that we face as a nation. As I said at Second Reading, I voted remain, so I certainly do not dismiss concerns lightly or complacently. However, I genuinely believe that this House must respect the will of the British people and deliver on their wish to leave the European Union.
With that in mind, I am more than a little disappointed by the approach of the Liberal Democrats. It is one thing to vote for an amendment to this Bill, quite another to try and block it entirely. What of the majority of MPs who voted to give the country a referendum? What of the 17.4 million people who voted to leave the European Union? What of the majority of MPs who voted to pass this Bill without amendment? I find it pretty strange that a party that has “Democrat” in its name votes against delivering the will of the people. However the Liberal Democrats dress this amendment up, it would stop the Bill from passing, which means we cannot start the process of negotiating. I find the logic very difficult to grasp. The noble Lord seems to be saying, “Because we are not going to have a second referendum, we should not respect the views which the people expressed in the first”.
The noble Lord made commitments to this House and the nation on 20 February. He said that:
“No significant body of opinion in this House is seeking to prevent the passage of the Bill, but there is a world of difference between blocking the Bill and seeking to amend it”.—[Official Report, 20/2/17; col. 20.]
He went on to say that no one is suggesting they want to stop the Bill, and that they are not saying they want to block the Bill. Furthermore, just this morning, the leader of the Liberal Democrats said on the BBC:
“But, in the end, the majority of people voted to leave the European Union. It would be quite wrong for the Lords, the Commons or the courts to try and frustrate the will of the people. I am against that”.
I therefore find this baffling. I could go on and recite all the steps that Parliament and the Government will take to ensure that Parliament does not merely scrutinise the process of our leaving the European Union but takes major decisions. I have done so several times, but to do so misses a much bigger point on this amendment.
There are two very simple issues here. First is the integrity of a party whose Leader in this House says it will not block this Bill, then tries to do so. Second is the belief in democracy which the party claims to champion. If the noble Lord presses the amendment it will, sadly, show that the Liberal Democrats are willing to do anything to give the kiss of life to their political fortunes. I very much hope that this is not the case and that the Bill will go to the other place without further delay.
Lord Newby
My Lords, the idea that by speaking and voting, as we will now do, we will block this Bill is, of course, fantasy. It has been abundantly clear that the Opposition in your Lordships’ House will vote for the Bill, as will the Government. I simply repeat—
Lord Grocott (Lab)
It cannot possibly be honourable for the noble Lord to say that he is going to vote against the implementation of—to kill—the Bill, which has been overwhelmingly passed by the Commons and which is, of course, the result of a referendum, in the full, secure knowledge that the Bill will in fact pass. If he is voting on his amendment I hope he can assure the House that it is with the full intention of trying to kill the Bill. Anything else could be interpreted only as complete cynicism.
Lord Newby
Like everybody else, I have got to live with my conscience on this Bill, and I am going to sleep easy tonight. I repeat what I said earlier. We are voting now to record our opposition to the damaging course on which the Government are set and their refusal to allow the British people—
Baroness Smith of Basildon
I apologise to the noble Lord. He is again coming back to the point that the reason he is voting for his amendment tonight is because of his fears of a hard Brexit, which are shared with many across the House. However, that is not what the amendment says. It says that they want the Bill to not pass because they did not get their way on a second referendum vote.
Lord Newby
My Lords, unfortunately, the noble Baroness did not allow me to finish my sentence. Our opposition is to the Government’s refusal to allow the British people, who will feel the consequences—ie, costs—of Brexit for generations to come, the right to decide their own future. I wish to test the opinion of the House.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Monday 13th March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 111-I Marshalled list for consideration of Commons reaons (PDF, 72KB) - (13 Mar 2017)
21:06 - Division on Motion A1 - Ayes: 135 / Noes: 274 - Motion A1 disagreed.
21:58 - Division on Motion B1 - Ayes: 118 / Noes: 274 - Motion B1 disagreed.
Lord Bridges of Headley
That this House do not insist on its Amendment 1, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 1A.
Commons Reason
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, now we are past the 70th hour of parliamentary debate on these 170 words, I begin by saying this. The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union is obviously one of the most momentous steps that our nation will take in our lifetimes. I believe that significant opportunities lie before us but, as someone who voted to remain, I am not deaf to people’s concerns and I do not dismiss them as somehow portraying a lack of patriotism. However, that decision to leave the European Union has been made, and this very simple Bill delivers on that decision.
The debate has been one of conviction and passion, and displayed some of the very best qualities of your Lordships’ House but, despite my best efforts to convince your Lordships otherwise, this little Bill was amended twice. We all agree that this House is perfectly entitled to ask the other place to think again. The other place has now done that and debated this again. Once again, it has decided to pass the Bill without amendment.
The issue at stake in the amendment is very simple. We all agree that we want to give certainty to those EU nationals who made the United Kingdom their home and to those UK nationals who live in the EU. The disagreement is over how we do that. The Government’s position has been clear from June. We have always said that we want to secure the status of EU citizens here in the UK, as long as we get a similar guarantee for UK citizens in the EU. We believe that this approach is fair, and reflects the duty of care that we have as a Government to the 900,000 UK citizens in the EU.
We need an agreement on this issue quickly, and we have tried to get one. However, a number of EU member states are not willing to discuss it until we have begun formal negotiations. That is why my right honourable friend the Secretary of State confirmed over the weekend that we intend this issue to be one of the first that is dealt with. That is why we want to pass this Bill as soon as possible, so we can start negotiating and set about reaching that agreement.
Given that the other place has done as we asked and thought again, and decided to reject the amendment by a majority of 48, I argue with respect that this evening is not the time nor the place to return to the fray and insert terms and conditions to our negotiating position, still less to force the Government to make a unilateral move on the status of EU nationals in the UK.
The Bill has only one purpose: to implement the outcome of the referendum result in June and respect the judgment of the Supreme Court, nothing more, nothing less. I urge the House to pass the Bill unamended, and I beg to move.
Motion A1 (as an amendment to Motion A)
Lord Oates
Moved by
Leave out from “House” to end and insert “do insist on its Amendment 1”.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I move this Motion for the following reasons. First, despite the large majority that voted for the amendment to the Bill in this House, the Government have failed to make any concessions and not even attempted to address the many issues raised by noble Lords in Committee. Secondly, the profound nature of the issue at stake should make us think very carefully before we concede. This debate is not over some arcane technicality or some petty, partisan disagreement; it is about people’s lives. It is about whether people will be allowed to live in the country that they have made their home with the people for whom they care, whether they can stay in a job or plan a career, and whether their children can remain in the school they know and study with the friends they have made. It is about their futures, their homes and their families, and it is about the fear and misery being caused by every further day of uncertainty.
Thirdly, we should weigh our decision very carefully, because this debate is also about the integrity of our country. It is about whether we will honour the unequivocal commitment made by the official Vote Leave campaign that, if the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, the rights of all EU citizens in the UK would be guaranteed. Unlike most other issues arising from the referendum, there is absolutely no dispute about what was promised to EU citizens. The Vote Leave campaign, which was supported by a number of noble Lords, made the following categorical statement:
“There will be no change for EU citizens already lawfully resident in the UK. These EU citizens will automatically be granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK and will be treated no less favourably than they are at present”.
There were no caveats; there was no issue of reciprocity or talk of negotiations—just a categorical commitment unilaterally given.
Finally, this debate is about the role of this House. Precedent indicates that, when the rights of individuals have been threatened, this House has always been robust in its defence of them. I hope that we will live up to that precedent today. The facts are clear: a firm and explicit commitment was made by the Vote Leave campaign that the rights of EU citizens in the UK would be protected. Parliamentary committees of both Houses agree that a unilateral guarantee should be provided now, and all the bodies representing British citizens in the EU who have contacted me and many other Members of this House have supported that position.
It is clear that, if we do not insist on our amendment, there is a real possibility that EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU may not have clarity as to their status for another two years. The House of Commons Exiting the EU Committee rightly described such a situation as unconscionable. I understand the nervousness of some noble Lords about challenging the elected House on this matter, but to those who argue that it is not the right time for us to insist on our amendment, that this Bill is the wrong place for us to insist or that precedent tells us that we should not insist, I respectfully argue the contrary. Your Lordships’ EU Justice Sub-Committee and the House of Commons Exiting the EU Committee unanimously agreed that the UK should act unilaterally and that the time to act was now. This Bill is the only place to act if we are to end the debilitating uncertainty that is causing so much distress.
The Minister says that we have the right to amend the Bill; we also have a right to insist on our amendments, and precedent tells us that we should—that when issues of important principle or individual rights are at stake, your Lordships’ House can and does insist on its position and, if necessary, repeatedly pushes the issue back to the Commons. It did so on the 2014 Criminal Justice and Courts Bill, and on the 2012 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. It did so no fewer than three times over the 2007 Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, no fewer than four times over the 2006 Identity Cards Bill and no fewer than five time over the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Bill. It has regularly insisted on amendments to Bills when far less was at stake than today: on the powers of the Learning and Skills Council; or the means by which the chairman of the Legal Services Board is appointed; or even on the fitting of retro-reflective tape—whatever that is—on heavy goods vehicles.
How then, when the rights of millions of people are on the line, could this House give up at the first attempt? How, when clear and unequivocal commitments were made to EU citizens in our country, could this House fail to insist that they are upheld? How, when the integrity of our country is at stake, could this House fail to insist that it is upheld? Many people will be watching us tonight: we cannot please them all, but we can show them that no matter what the pressures from the media or the threats from the Government may be, we are prepared to do what we know to be the right thing. I have no doubt that the right thing is to insist on this amendment to protect the rights of EU citizens in the UK and, in doing so, to uphold the honour and integrity of this country. I beg to move.
Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, it is not in any way my intention to repeat the arguments I have used about Brexit in the various debates in this House over the last few weeks. But there is a question I must ask the Minister, the answer to which is very important to all of us. It goes to the heart of the earnest intention of the Government to be quite transparent with the House and the public as the Brexit negotiations, which will presumably start in a few days, continue—as they will for a long time.
I have not been very successful in getting answers to questions I have asked the Minister in previous debates. I console myself by thinking that that may be because I have touched on some rather delicate points that are potentially embarrassing for the Government. But it is not a great consolation: I would rather have full and frank answers and I hope that I will have one tonight—not at all in my interest but in the interest of the issues that I have just raised.
The Minister has just told the House, and the Prime Minister and Minister for Brexit have both said on many occasions, that it was their original hope and intention to negotiate a deal on the future residency rights of EU citizens here and of British citizens in the remaining part of the EU in advance even of giving notice under Article 50. That unfortunately proved impossible because some of the continentals were not willing to do it. The Government would now like to negotiate on that matter and resolve it in advance of negotiations on difficult economic and other subjects, so that those negotiations can start very quickly.
My question is: how can that possibly be? A negotiation on the future residency rights of British citizens in the EU or of EU citizens here is nothing whatever to do with the Commission. It is not a negotiation that can be pursued with Monsieur Barnier; it is not a matter for Mr Verhofstadt or Mr Juncker, either. Residency issues, requirements and regimes throughout the European Union concerning persons who are not citizens of a member state or another member state but citizens of a non-EU state are not a matter for the treaty: they are a matter for each individual member state. Every member state has its own different residency rules. What is more, the arguments and forces which will be brought to bear if there is any suggestion of changing those rules will be different in each country. So if you want to negotiate on that—as the Prime Minister says, and the Minister has said this evening—you will have to conduct separate, bilateral negotiations with 27 different countries.
Eventually, the result of that negotiation will have to be ratified by 27 different countries—28, actually, because it will have to be ratified here, I hope. That is not something that can be done in a few weeks, or even, I think, in a short number of months. If it had been attempted before notice was given under Article 50, it would have delayed by many months the issuing of a notice under Article 50, quite contrary to what the Prime Minister said her intention was. That is something which, if it is undertaken immediately we issue notice under Article 50, will itself delay the procedures for a very long time. How can the Government have thought that this was a way of accelerating progress on the Brexit negotiations? I think that is a question which nobody has asked. I tried to ask it the other day but I was not able to capture your Lordships’ attention. I ask it now because it is absolutely essential if the House is to achieve a complete picture of what is going on in this very important area.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, I shall speak on an issue tangential to that raised by my noble friend and ask a couple of simple questions. They are essentially the subject of an amendment that I tabled to the Bill last week and which I subsequently withdrew when it became clear that the amendment on these matters moved by my noble friends on the Front Bench was likely to be carried by the House.
First, under a mixed agreement negotiation, does a negotiated settlement in the Council remain valid as far as the rights of United Kingdom citizens living in Europe are concerned even if such an agreement was not supported in either the European Parliament or in the parliaments of the nation states? Does it stand alone? Secondly, in the event that we were to take this whole debate on EU and UK citizens’ rights outside the Article 50 process, which is essentially what my noble friend appeared to be alluding to, whereby the hurdles of qualified majority voting, a European Parliament vote and approval by nation states were to be avoided, if they are required; and, if we hit problems, and in the event that a number of European states outside Article 50 were to indicate their support for upholding the indefinite rights of UK citizens living in the EU, would the Government in those circumstances be prepared to concede the rights of EU citizens from those same states living in the United Kingdom? That would mean that some states which did not agree would be excluded. If the Government were to do that, it would remove the hurdles of QMV, the European Parliament vote or votes in national parliaments, if they are needed. That approach would lead to a far earlier closure of the whole debate, which Members are concerned will be dragged out over years.
It is all right for the Prime Minister to say that UK citizens’ rights will be top of the Euro agenda, but what worries some of us is that a victory—or a so-called victory—in the Council of Ministers may be pyrrhic and not provide the assurances that people want; and that, despite assurances given in private to David Davis, some countries may seek to carry their decisions on citizenship into arguments over the contribution that the United Kingdom must make to wind-up costs. At the end of the day, despite all these assurances, Governments and nation states in Europe may say, “We are going to turn this into an argument about the contributions the British make”. In that light, I wonder whether the Minister might be prepared to give me a response this evening.
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)
My Lords, I have no doubt whatever that Article 50 must be triggered, and triggered sooner rather than later, but equally I have no doubt about the merits of Motion A1. I supported it before, as did 358 Members of this House—a majority of 102.
Most of the decisions that we take in this House are nicely balanced. This one, I suggest, is perfectly clear and the arguments are compelling. No one doubts the need for the EU nationals who are already lawfully here to remain here for the sake of academia, the health services, the care services, the building industry—note what my noble friend Lord Kerslake said in Committee—and so forth, and no one doubts that those whom we most need to stay are starting to bleed away. We should remember what the noble Lord, Lord Winston, said in Committee about the medics, and read the letter in today’s Times from the academics at Oxford.
The Government say that this assurance is unnecessary and that in fact there is no possibility of our ever wanting to deny these people their present rights, let alone deport them. Of course, logically that is indeed so but, as the haemorrhaging of this group shows, the perception among those affected is, perhaps unsurprisingly, different. Then it is said—it was said by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, in Committee—that fairness demands that all expatriate EU nationals are treated identically and that no assurance should be given to those here until reciprocal assurances are given to our citizens in the other member states. I would give three answers to that suggestion.
First, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and others pointed out in Committee, those representing UK nationals in other EU states positively support our giving this assurance, and they believe—rightly, I suggest—that their case will be strengthened, not weakened, by our now taking this initiative. As the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, said in Committee,
“a generous gesture, freely given”,—[Official Report, 1/3/17; col. 835.]
will assist in creating a good climate for the start of these negotiations with the other 27 nations, difficult though they will be, as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, has again emphasised today.
Secondly, the stronger the Government’s argument that no assurance is necessary because EU nationals here are desperately needed for our economy and health service and so forth, and therefore they face no risk of losing these rights, the weaker the argument that there is an advantage in keeping the future of the EU nationals here in doubt for the purpose of negotiating our nationals’ future abroad. In short, even if other member states chose not to allow our UK nationals to remain there—and we can understand that in some instances the case for that is rather less compelling than our need to keep EU nationals here—we would still want to keep their nationals here.
Thirdly, it is hardly surprising that the other states are refusing to discuss this issue until we trigger Article 50. However, it is the UK’s decision to pursue Brexit—sensible or not, and there are obviously different views on that—that has precipitated this crisis and created the uncertainty and insecurity felt by this group. I suggest that we can and should allay their fears at the same time as we trigger Article 50. This clause would not delay it—
Lord Cormack (Con)
The noble and learned Lord knows that I agree with much of what he is saying but that is not the issue tonight. The issue tonight is whether we recognise our constitutional limitations and whether we fly in the face of what the Commons, having been given the opportunity to reconsider, has now decided emphatically. As a great constitutionalist, which the noble and learned Lord is, I hope he will agree with that.
Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood
In broad terms of course I agree. I have never previously voted against a Government on ping-pong. I do not know how often my noble friend plays ping-pong but is it really so very exceptional to keep a rally going beyond two strokes? I suggest not, and I suggest that we do it here.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, I support Motion A1. The amendment that was carried in this House a few days ago was passed by a huge majority on a near-record turnout of noble Lords in that Division. It appears to me that very little attempt has been made, if any, to meet the points that were made in this Chamber. It seems that the Government have relied totally on their power to get a whipped vote through and to steamroller this through.
The Government could have accepted that amendment or they could have come to meet us, but they have not done so. In view of what the Minister said about the Government seeking other countries in the European Union to agree the status of UK citizens first, what if they do not? Do we then kick out the European citizens who are here? Is that the logic of the argument? If it is, is that acceptable to this House?
The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, said that this was a debate of conviction and passion. Yes, it is a debate of conviction, and convictions do not change just because they have been beaten by a whipped vote in another place. They do not get kicked into touch. My convictions still stand, and whatever others will do tonight, mine will stand in the Division lobby.
Lord Bowness (Con)
My Lords, I added my name to, spoke in favour of, and voted for the original amendment, and I believe that the arguments advanced in support of that amendment were correct and remain so today. The fact that the Government have chosen to force through the Bill in its unamended form does not change my view on that. It is perhaps worthy of noting, as it was noted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, that although one of the arguments put forward by the Government was concern about the status of UK citizens living in the rest of the European Union, much of the support for the amendment has come from those UK nationals living in the European Union who felt that it was in their interests.
I only speak now because I feel that I cannot keep silent tonight in view of all of the communications one has received from people asking one to insist on this amendment. I have to say openly and publicly that I cannot support continued insistence which, in different circumstances, I would have been tempted so to do. To do so is possibly to delay the process of invoking Article 50, which would not be in the interests of the European Union or the United Kingdom. If I accept—and, of course I accept—the advice from the Minister, it could delay the start of negotiations to safeguard the interests of EU citizens here and UK citizens in the European Union.
I will, however, make one further comment, which is applicable to the amendment to the second Motion that is to be moved tonight. I hope that the Government and those within it who favour a quick, hard Brexit, appreciate that the referendum, while expressing the will of the people, did not give the Government a blank cheque as to how to implement it. They should also accept that the answer to any question or criticism cannot be an allegation that the questioner is trying to thwart the will of the people and is somehow acting undemocratically. It is neither an answer to the question, nor is it true.
Many of us who, this time at least, will have to accept the inevitability of the referendum and Brexit, want to maintain the closest possible links to the European Union. There are many ways to exit the Palace of Westminster: all take you out into the street. It is perfectly possible to want to be nearer to Millbank or to Westminster Underground. There are valid reasons for choosing either, but there is not much wisdom in choosing to leap out of the nearest first-floor window. Those of us who believe that we were correct in passing this amendment and asking the other place to think again will not be pressured into acquiescence by continued allegations that our actions are undemocratic, ignore the people or are disloyal. From these Benches and from my point of view on the European Union, we do not need lessons in loyalty from some—not all, I accept—whose history on the issues of Europe makes them experts in disloyalty.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, I put my name to the amendment that has been rejected by the Commons and which we are now debating another amendment on. My position is identical to that of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness. I have not resiled in any way from my belief that a unilateral statement by the British Government would be best for the United Kingdom and our citizens in the rest of Europe. However, like the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, I am not sure that this is the moment to return the ball.
However, I say to the Minister, if I may, that I had many dealings over the years with the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, mainly on budgetary issues which were quite stressful. On one occasion when I persuaded her to follow a tactic that I suggested would be best and she was doubtful about, she looked up and said, “Okay, but you better be right”. That is what I say to the Government. Their choice for a transactional approach could end in tears and then, we will be back here.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, may I very briefly intervene? As your Lordships know, I voted for the amendments in Committee. However, for the reasons advanced by my noble friends Lord Bowness and Lord Cormack, and indeed by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I shall not be supporting this Motion. I think that the time has come to accept the view of the House of Commons.
Lord Cromwell (CB)
My Lords, there has been a great deal of weeping and gnashing of gums on these issues in recent weeks and months. I do not like the government policy on this either. It appears to be: if we cannot help everyone, we will not help anyone. Nevertheless, we have asked the other place to think again. They have thought again and have not taken our advice, and our role now, I believe, is not to insist.
The Archbishop of York
My Lords, I have been listening to what people have said and do not want to repeat anything. However, some of us objected to the amendments not because we lacked sympathy, understanding or compassion. We did it simply because we thought there was a confusion of process with substance. The second reason some of us objected, in particular myself, is point 6.2 of the government paper, which says:
“While we are a member of the EU, the rights of EU nationals living in the UK and UK nationals living in the EU remain unchanged. As provided for in both the EU Free Movement Directive (Article 16 of 2004/38/EC) and in UK law, those who have lived continuously and lawfully in a country for at least five years automatically have a permanent right to reside”.
If Brexit happens, and I am sure that it will, EU law will be incorporated into British law. It would be quite tough for the Government to then argue that those who have lived here for more than five years do not have a right to reside, and your Lordships’ House and the other place would have to argue the case again.
I approach this issue with deep compassion. I came here while running away from Amin’s torture. For almost 15 years, I was living and travelling on a UK travel document. As a student, I was prevented from working. I know the difficulties. But when I sit in your Lordships’ House and hear Members say that the other side is not the only one that thinks it is right, I think that we should all find a language that talks about people as people. They are being used as a bargaining chip, which is very hurtful to me and others. That cannot be right because it casts aspersions on those who argue the other way.
The time has come for us to decide. If we want a quick resolution for the EU citizens who live in this country, I will find it difficult to continue further delaying the triggering of the article. It should be done as quickly as possible.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his rather unfortunate task of having to bring us the regrettable decision of the Commons on the rights of EU nationals living here. Many of them, of course, are married to Brits and have British-born children but possibly will have no right to remain after Brexit day.
This House by a majority of 102 asked the Commons to do two very easy things. It asked for both pragmatic and ethical reasons. One thing was to make it clear that EU citizens, whether Brits abroad or Europeans here, should not be treated as bargaining chips to be traded against each other. The House felt strongly that these families, who had as a result of our forthcoming exit suddenly found their own lives on hold given the uncertainty over their future, should have their rights secured as soon as possible but without holding one group’s interests hostage to those of another group.
Secondly, we called on the Prime Minister to act unilaterally in the one area under her control and to say to EEA nationals, “We will ensure you continue to have the rights you expected when you arrived, even after we withdraw from the EU”. We did it because of the calls of those affected, and of their employers who fear the loss of valuable colleagues—some 25,000 workers in the health service alone are now thinking of leaving. The Government and the Commons have rejected our call. However, I absolve the Brexit committee, which unanimously felt that the Government should act unilaterally on this. The only reason for the rejection is that it is not a matter that needs to be dealt with in the Bill. Presumably the Government have no other rationale for saying to those here, “You must wait to know about your future until the 27 have agreed how they will treat UK nationals”. That could take months, if not years.
We hear from Brussels that although citizens’ rights will be high on the negotiators’ agenda, it could take years for the final deal, as I believe Liam Fox and David Davis confirmed yesterday, reflecting on the normal practice of “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. We regret this delay and lay the blame for this hiatus fairly and squarely at the door of No. 10. We will also campaign for an early resolution to the plight of those caught up in a legal Neverland not of their making. We will continue to press the Government to move on this and provide the certainty our amendment sought, albeit maybe by other—perhaps I should say imaginative—parliamentary routes, a number of which are already under consideration. The people concerned cannot wait until March 2019 to hear their fate.
I turn now to the Liberal Democrats’ Motion. We do not think this is a responsible move. It is not one we could support. This House’s view by a majority of 102 is clear. The Government should act unilaterally on the position of people already among us. As the mover of the original Motion, no one in this House will doubt my support for that. However, our view has been rejected in the elected House of Commons and it is clear that the Government are not for turning. On behalf of the Opposition I say to the people concerned, we are not giving up on you. We will pursue your interests in other ways.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I will take no lessons from the Liberal Democrats, who confessed to me outside the Chamber that this appeals to their core vote and they are piling on members because of it. So we are here to move a Motion to help them gain members. That may be suitable for them but it is not taking this House as a legislative body seriously. More than that, they are falsely raising people’s hopes, when they know that this Government in the Commons, despite my best endeavours and wants, will not change their mind. They should think hard about what they are doing to those people whose expectations they are raising, which will not be fulfilled.
I worry that they are also making a bit of a mockery of the House if they think that we will vote on this, as we did last week, in the safe knowledge that others will vote the other way and it will not be carried. I also wonder what it does to the decision that we took. The Lords majority of 102 is bound to shrink. As we have heard already, we know that the House does not have the appetite to send this matter back given the majority in the Commons, which was higher than before. Instead of our being able to go out from this on the high level of saying, “By 102, we think that the Government are wrong”, we would have either a lower vote or a lower vote an hour later if it ping-ponged. By the way, I say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, that the way I play ping-pong I never get it back even once. Instead of saying that we ended up with a majority of 102 on the side of those EU nationals here, we will have a lower vote either now or later on.
On behalf not so much of this side of the Chamber as of the 3 million people who are looking to us for some help, the Government’s position is a matter or enormous regret to me. I do not think that it is correct; I do not think that it is moral or ethical; I do not even think that it is clever negotiations. However, we accept the view of the elected House. We will not rest after tonight. We will be back, urging the Government to allay the fears of people caught in this limbo.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I thank those who have contributed to this short debate. Once again, many of your Lordships have spoken with great passion. After so many hours of debate, I fear that there is very little that I can say without repeating myself and travelling over well-worn ground, so I will be quick and brief.
I reiterate the point that the Government’s position on this issue is very clear: we want to secure the status of EU citizens in the UK, just so long as we can do so while guaranteeing the position of UK citizens to whom we have a responsibility across the European Union. We cannot and should not seek to do one without the other. All 4 million people matter.
As to assurances given to EU nationals here today, let me repeat what I said previously: nothing changes in their status until we have left the EU. Nothing can change without the approval of Parliament, and the Government will continue to respect their obligations under the ECHR. This position is held by the Government and now by the other place. I remind your Lordships of what our European partners are saying. Many of them have made it clear that they, too, want a speedy agreement, but once we have started the negotiations. Indeed, the Polish Prime Minister has said:
“Of course, these guarantees would need to be reciprocal. It is also important what guarantees the British citizens living and working in other member states of the European Union will have”.
We need an agreement on this issue as soon as possible and I believe that we are in a good position to do just that. Just last Friday, Guy Verhofstadt, the lead negotiator for the European Parliament, told the BBC that the issue of EU citizens’ rights post exit should be addressed,
“before we talk about anything else”.
On the matters raised by the noble Lords, Lord Davies and Lord Campbell-Savours, I want to highlight the words of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State, who said on this subject earlier today in the other place that the Government would aim to get all member states, the Commission and the Council in an exchange of letters to explain what the rights of EU citizens are and will be once the UK has left the EU and once an agreement has been reached in negotiations. As regards the process of ratification of such an agreement, this is a matter for negotiation, but it is the Government’s intention to have this agreement concluded by the end of the two years.
Our commitment to seeking an agreement is clear, but the Government will not be able to set about securing this reciprocal guarantee until we have passed this Bill and triggered Article 50. I urge your Lordships to let this Bill go through unamended and not to prolong its passing, so that the Prime Minister can trigger Article 50 and seek the certainty that we all want to offer both European and UK citizens.
Lord Oates
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for his principled advocacy on this issue, but I must confess I cannot follow the constitutional argument that he and other noble Lords have made that somehow we cannot insist to the elected House. I could understand it if this House never insisted, or if the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, never voted to insist against the will of the elected House, but he knows that is not the case. I wonder why on this issue of such vital importance to so many people we should not.
Lord Cormack
Perhaps I can answer the noble Lord. Yes, we agree on the fundamentals of the issue, but this is a constitutional matter. What is the point of prolonging a time-sensitive Bill, on which the fortunes of so many ultimately depend, merely to have the satisfaction of being soundly beaten in the Lobbies?
Lord Oates
Whether we are soundly beaten in the Lobbies is a matter for noble Lords. It is not, with respect, a matter for the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. I seek to put my argument and I hope to convince people. None the less, I pay tribute to the advocacy he has given so far and to all noble Lords who have made this issue crucial.
I am sorry that the Government continue to refuse to do the right things. I am sorry that they failed to make any concessions, or answer any of the questions that were put to them in Committee. I am particularly sorry that, as a result, they intend to allow the fear and uncertainty of millions of EU and UK citizens to continue. But the Minister, to be fair to him, has been given an impossible job defending the indefensible and I respect the skill with which he does it. What I cannot respect are the seven current Cabinet Ministers who backed the Vote Leave campaign which made an unequivocal, unilateral commitment to EU citizens during the referendum campaign—a commitment that has been betrayed. I hope that all noble Lords who supported and were involved in Vote Leave will think about that commitment, which they made without caveats or conditions.
That is the Government’s position. What I do not understand is the position taken by the Labour Front Bench in the House today, but I recognise that it will be as bewildering to many Labour Members as it is to me. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, that if you want to get the ball back across the net, it is very important not to drop the bat before you get there. The Labour Party has a key role in the way things are decided in this House. If it was prepared to stand behind this and insist, there would be a greater chance of success.
Last Tuesday, the Leader of the Labour Peers, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, made great play of attacking the Liberal Democrats, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, has done. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, asked how we could oppose the Bill given how extraordinarily important the amendment on citizens’ rights was. I voted that the Bill should not pass because I firmly believe that we should not begin withdrawal negotiations until there is a mechanism for the people to have a final say on the outcome of those negotiations.
There were two things also on my mind when I went through the Division Lobby: first, the Government were making it crystal clear, even at that stage, that they would concede nothing in regard to the amendments; and secondly, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, had already indicated that if the Bill was returned to this House, she would concede everything.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
The noble Lord is absolutely wrong on that point. If he is going to quote me, he should do so correctly. I have always said that in this House we respect the primacy of the other place. We said that there should be no extended ping-pong but that we would listen to what the Commons had to say. If the noble Lord really believes that by voting for this Motion tonight he will change the mind of the other place, then he can go ahead but do not give false hope to people who rely on this House to make a point to get the other side to think again. It is no good noble Lords opposite cheering me—you got us into this mess.
Lord Oates
The noble Baroness’s argument makes no sense at all. She has voted in many Divisions insisting on amendments when she knew they had no chance of success. It turns out that many of the amendments she voted for in the past to insist to the Commons when it was not going to give in were more important than this amendment. I am sorry about that and bewildered by it.
I hope that noble Lords of all parties and none will on this occasion pay attention to their conscience rather than their party Whip and join us in the Division Lobby. In view of the importance of this issue to millions of EU and UK citizens, I would like to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Bridges of Headley
That this House do not insist on its Amendment 2, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 2A.
Commons Reason
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, last week I set out the three core principles governing the UK’s approach to leaving the European Union, namely: that the Government are determined to honour the result of the referendum; that everything we do will be determined by our national interest; and that parliamentary sovereignty is key. This last principle was reflected in the Government’s commitment to give Parliament a vote on the final agreement. This House believed that this commitment ought to be enshrined in legislation, and your Lordships sought to go further by giving Parliament the power to say whether the Prime Minister can terminate negotiations with the European Union.
The issue of parliamentary approval had been debated by the other place before the Bill came to this House. It disagreed with amending the Bill then and, having considered this specific amendment, it has now disagreed again by a majority of 45. In essence, and to keep it very short, the Government’s position has not changed. This amendment is unnecessary. It would create untold uncertainty and would undermine our negotiating position. This is why the other place considered this issue again—
Lord Bridges of Headley
Let me just finish this, and then the noble Lord will able to speak. I am sure that once I have sat down he will be able to speak. This is why the other place considered the issue again and rejected this amendment.
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
Before the Minister sits down, will he accept an intervention?
Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
I am most grateful to the Minister for taking an intervention—enfin. I am genuinely puzzled. If it is the case that John Major could seek parliamentary approval for the Maastricht Bill twice without weakening his bargaining position, how is it that this Government cannot allow Parliament to have a say once without weakening theirs?
Lord Bridges of Headley
I am sorry to say to the noble Lord that I am genuinely puzzled by his position. He went on national television and said that he would obey the decision of the British people and now he is trying to get away from those comments. That is what I think will baffle many people. We have made the Government’s position very clear: when an agreement has been reached, we will give this House and the other place the chance to vote on it. That is the Government’s position. I urge noble Lords not to insist on the amendment and I beg to move Motion B.
Motion B1 (as an amendment to Motion B)
Baroness Ludford
Leave out from “House” to end and insert “do insist on its Amendment 2”.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, told “The Andrew Marr Show” yesterday that he was determined to make sure that Britain does not fall off a cliff edge—in other words, does not leave without an agreement. Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told the rival “Peston on Sunday” that it would be perfectly okay if we were not able to get an agreement; while the last in the trio, Trade Secretary Liam Fox told Sky News that not having a deal would be bad not just for the UK but for Europe as a whole—and I agree with Liam Fox.
So the three merry Brexiteers seem to be rather at odds about the prospects. One thinks that no deal is perfectly okay, another thinks that it would be bad all round and a third says that it will not happen. Given that the Cabinet is all over the place, it is perfectly self-evident that Parliament needs to stay in the driving seat throughout the process to prevent a disorderly and catastrophic plunge over the cliff edge—although, Liberal Democrats would add, with the people having the last word.
We have been reminded by the press of the Treasury view that an extreme Brexit, crashing out of the EU without a trade deal and relying only on WTO rules, would cause a major economic shock and is the option with the most negative long-term impact on the economy. The Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, has just now warned of the uncertainty and shock of a hard Brexit, including confusion for EU and British citizens, the sudden return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic and a major hit to the economy.
Government assurances of a vote on a final deal are not enough. First, it is executive arrogance and presumption of the most preposterous kind for the Government to insist that MPs will have to choose only between the deal brokered by the Prime Minister and crashing out of the EU on to WTO terms in a hard Brexit. Secondly, Tory government assurances do not have a good track record. Their broken promises include manifesto commitments on safeguarding the UK’s position in the single market, not raising national insurance contributions and on lifting the 15-year cap on votes for Brits abroad—the very Brits they claim to be looking after, incidentally. This is in addition to unfulfilled assurances in respect of the Dubs amendment on refugee children and pledges on the full implementation of Leveson.
On Report, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, said that of course the Government would honour their promise. But that is five broken promises already, and an assurance now on parliamentary sovereignty may well be destined to go just the same way, given that the track record on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty itself since last June has involved resistance all the way from this Government on any restraint on executive power. So a commitment on a vote wide enough in scope to be meaningful in the event of no deal must be written into the Bill. The Government have given no good reason why that should not be so.
The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, who sadly I think is not in his place tonight, wrote yesterday about how Members of the House of Lords were called upon to vote on an issue involving a critical principle: the supremacy of Parliament in approving or rejecting the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. He said:
“Some say the involvement of parliament will weaken the prime minister’s hand ... I reject this argument as mere blackmail, much of it peddled by extreme Brexiteers”—
some of whom, he added,
“hanker for the hardest Brexit of all, without a deal of any kind with our EU partners”.
So he rejected what he described as,
“the cheap jibes uttered by Brexiteer fanatics, some of them—I regret to say—sitting on the government front bench”.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, last week set the tone for staying the course. She said:
“We passed those amendments not as some kind of vanity exercise or just to make a point—we are not a debating society where we have our debates and then afterwards shrug off home or off to the pub because we have made our point and have no thought about what happens next”.
She issued a rallying cry, saying that,
“responsibility is not just about winning—it is about taking responsibility for our actions”,
and that she was,
“very much committed to those two amendments”.—[Official Report, 7/3/17; cols. 1342-43.]
I very much hope that that commitment will be made evident from the Labour Benches tonight—or at least from many of them. Otherwise, the risk is of facilitating what it is becoming clear is the real agenda of many if not all of this Tory Government, which is to pursue Brexit at any cost, to go over that cliff in what they apparently believe be a winning Tory Party formula for the 2020 election: “We have delivered Brexit”. Maybe—but at what terrible cost? For us in the Liberal Democrats, as well as for the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, last week, this is a matter of principle and conscience.
Baroness Ludford
Not the Government but Parliament must be in charge, for the good of the country. I beg to move.
Lord Pannick (CB)
My Lords, I moved the amendment last week that was approved by your Lordships’ House. I very much regret that the House of Commons has not taken the advice of this House and indeed that the Government have made no effort to move in the direction of the views of this House. We won the vote last week because we won the argument. That is why the amendment was carried by a majority of 98, with the largest number of noble Lords voting, so I understand, in any vote since 1831.
However, it is now time for this House to give way to the House of Commons on this matter. Earlier this evening the Government had a majority of 45 in the Commons. There is no reason whatsoever to think that if this House were to stand its ground, the Commons would change its view later this evening. I have to say to the noble Baroness that for the Liberal Democrats to press this matter is in parliamentary terms—I say nothing about any other consideration—a completely pointless gesture, and I for my part cannot support it.
I also bear in mind that this afternoon the Secretary of State gave a clear assurance that any agreement would be put to both Houses for their approval. I would prefer that to be in the Bill, but we do have an assurance. We have no assurance on parliamentary approval if the Prime Minister decides it would be better to leave the EU with no deal, and I regret that. However, I take some comfort from the point that was made last week by a number of noble Lords who were supporting the Government: Parliament has ample means of asserting its sovereignty in those circumstances.
I have two other brief points. The first is that this Bill has demonstrated the value of parliamentary sovereignty at this stage of notifying our intention to withdraw from the EU. It is only because of the determination of my client, Mrs Gina Miller, and the independence of the Divisional Court and the Supreme Court that we have had the Bill at all. I very much hope that during the negotiating process, and at the end of it, the Government will show more wisdom on the question of parliamentary sovereignty than they have done at this notification stage.
My other point is that for my part, I bear very much in mind that this is only the beginning of the process of withdrawal from the EU, a point the Minister has repeatedly emphasised. A much more complex Bill is going to be brought forward in the next Session to repeal the European Communities Act 1972 in order to maintain rights and duties that owe their origin to EU law.
The Government are on notice that this House will be scrutinising that Bill with especial care to ensure that parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and other constitutional principles are upheld. Your Lordships’ Constitution Committee, of which I am a member, under the excellent chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Lang, has produced an introduction to some of the issues which will arise.
This is just the start of the debate. This House has made known its views on the importance of parliamentary sovereignty. I very much look forward to continuing the debate with the Minister, but not on this Bill.
Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, the best part of 35 years ago, I had a hand in trying to amend what Gerald Kaufman described as the longest suicide note in history. I have played a little part in trying to amend what I think we should now call the shortest suicide note in history.
On the question of how Parliament fits into this, Parliament will be there in two years’ time and there will be plenty of opportunity then—I would have preferred it today—for Parliament to have a decisive say, whatever the small print says, in relation to scenario A, B or any other scenario at the outcome of the negotiations, which I do not think will be a happy occasion.
Lord Taverne (LD)
My Lords, I want to discuss a fundamental question. I think that we are absolutely justified on this occasion, for this amendment, in not giving way to the House of Commons, because it has now in effect abandoned the principle of parliamentary democracy and taken the view that the referendum verdict is sacrosanct and cannot be challenged. That is clearly the opinion of the Government. What does that mean? It means that MPs are delegates, not representatives; it means there is no point in parliamentary government considering the argument, and debates considering the evidence; they have to obey the will of the people. That is now the principle.
I was not the greatest admirer of Mrs Thatcher in all her policies, but she was not someone who said to the electorate, “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them, I will change them”. That, in effect, is what some of those who supported the remain cause and felt deeply that Brexit would be disastrous or very damaging to this country have now accepted. It is a very dangerous step towards the doctrine that the people’s will must always prevail. This is the doctrine always favoured by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin—and by Erdogan at present. It is a denial of the essence of democracy, which we have supported to great effect in this country. Now we are abandoning it.
We are the guardians of parliamentary democracy, and we are right in this. We are the democrats and we are right to support the democratic cause.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)
My Lords, I ask a question of noble Lords who may be thinking of voting against the Commons this evening and in favour of their previous amendments. How do they justify extolling the supremacy of Parliament—the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House—and wanting Parliament to have the last word on the terms of our leaving the EU, when for the past 43 years they have supported our EU membership and still do so?
I ask because perhaps the main achievement of the European Union is precisely that national Parliaments have been emasculated and that much of their former power has been transferred to the institutions of the European Union. Thus, the unelected bureaucrats in the Commission have the monopoly to propose EU laws in secret, which are then negotiated in secret by yet more bureaucrats in COREPER—the Committee of Permanent Representatives—and are then decided in the Council of Ministers from national Governments, not Parliaments, where our Government have about 14% of the vote. EU law, now a large proportion of our law, is then enforced by the Commission and the so-called Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
The point is that our national Parliament, which noble remainers have been praying in aid to keep us in this anti-democratic failure, is excluded from the whole process. We do indeed have EU Select Committees in both Houses of Parliament, which scrutinise very little of the legislation imposed on us by Brussels, but they cannot change any of it and never have—nor can the House of Commons or your Lordships’ House change any of it, nor have we ever. Yet it is this system which those who have tabled this new amendment in truth wish to perpetuate with their newfound faith in parliamentary democracy. The people, with whom ultimate sovereignty resides, voted to leave that system. The House of Commons has this evening again agreed with the Government that the Bill shall become law as originally drafted. I would, of course, be amused to hear the noble remainers’ answer, but I trust that this is the end of the matter.
The Archbishop of York
I shall not detain noble Lords long, but in response to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, who always speaks with such clarity and grace, I must say that the problem with the amendment is with subsection (4). If the Prime Minister does not get an agreement, whatever she does she has to have the rule of Parliament. She will bring it to Parliament, but the problem is this, if I understand it right—that triggering Article 50 is an irreversible act. Two years after triggering Article 50, the UK will leave the EU; it will do so with or without a deal but, either way, it will leave, because paragraph 3 of Article 50 makes it clear that the:
“Treaties shall cease to apply … two years after the notification”.
Of course, it is possible that the EU 27 might unanimously agree to extend the negotiation period beyond two years, but that cannot be taken for granted, nor should it be assumed that they will offer anything but a brief extension.
The amendment shows no awareness of the realities represented by the Article 50 timescale. It overlooks the fact that the Bill is about to trigger Article 50 and the formal divorce agreement. Neither this Bill nor Article 50 are about negotiating a new agreement with the EU. So as far as I am concerned, once we trigger it, it is irreversible; leave we will, with an agreement or without. So why put in subsection (4) of the amendment? For that reason, I hope that we follow what the House of Commons has just done.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)
My Lords, the notes to Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty say that,
“the Council needs to obtain the European Parliament’s consent … voting by a simple majority of the votes cast, before it can conclude the withdrawal agreement”.
That means that all Members of the European Parliament, including of course UK Members, have the legal right to vote on any final agreement, or lack of it, while Members of the British Parliament have no such legal right because the Government refuse to put such a right in the Bill. In that way I am trying to answer the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch—that supporting the European Parliament having legal rights on the withdrawal agreement that our own elected Members of Parliament will not have seems completely inconsistent with why many people voted for Brexit. They voted for Brexit to have better control of our own laws and, by refusing to put this in the Bill, the Government are in effect making our legal rights less than those of the European Parliament. I think that that is a very strong argument on this point, which needs to be aired, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, accepts that that is indeed the legal position.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I will also answer the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch. I have not supported the EU for 45 years, but even I think that this amendment has validity. When people voted on taking back power, they did not expect it to be a Prime Minister with a very small mandate and a small coterie of people who would make these decisions. People imagined that they were voting for our Parliament to have some sort of supremacy. I have listened very carefully to the Government on this and have found that their arguments are not arguments at all. They are actually comments, and rather specious ones at that. This is not a time-sensitive issue: we are not triggering Article 50 until much later in the month. It is not true that a promise is as good as having something on the face of the Bill. Quite honestly, I think that it is time that we accepted that this is a mistake and we ought to support the amendment. I very much regret that it will not pass, but I will be voting for it.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
I have a very simple question for the Minister before the Opposition Front Bench speech, because it may be relevant to what the noble Baroness says. His colleague in the other place has answered the question about what happens if there is a deal on the Article 50 withdrawal agreement: the matter will be brought to the two Houses for approval. I think he has also answered the question about what happens if there is a new partnership agreement: it will be brought to both Houses for their approval. So far, so good. What happens if the Prime Minister decides that no deal is better than a bad deal? Will the Minister please give an answer?
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I was never someone who enjoyed saying, “I told you so”, because I rather expect my advice to be heeded. Never was this more the case than last week, with the highest ever vote in the House of Lords. Of the 634 Peers who voted, 366 advised that the promised vote on the outcome of the negotiations should be inscribed in law. That would make it very clear to the Government—but also to the EU Commission and Council as well as to the European Parliament—that this Parliament is a player in the process of how we extract ourselves from the EU. As my noble friend Lady Symons has said, without our change, the European Parliament, which has UK Members in it, has the right in law to consent to the deal but this Parliament has no such guaranteed right. Our amendment last week gave legal certainty to the promised vote and the legislative authority for the withdrawal agreement, something which the Government may well have to do another way if not in this Bill. There is currently no legislative way of authorising the withdrawal deal ahead of a treaty.
There are challenges ahead. Withdrawal is not simply about the divorce or even just about the potential shape of new trade deals with the EU 27. It will be about forging a new partnership, or concordat, which will cover so much more than trade, vital though that is. We will need a vision of how we should work together after exit, not just on the hard subjects such as security, terrorism and that, but on the whole swathe of our approach to the economy. We will need to negotiate with the EU in a way that shows our openness and willingness to retain our strong bonds, because that will influence our future relationship with the EU as a bloc and with the 27 members individually. It is for this reason that it is important to recognise Parliament’s role in the process, because we will be part of those negotiations with the EU and the 27 countries. We will be working across Europe with all our contacts—in business, trade unions and consumer groups—to help get the best deal for this country. Parliament should be a part of that.
In so far as we heed the polls, they indicate that by 2:1 people are in favour of Parliament having a meaningful vote at the end of the negotiations. This House spoke very clearly last week. Therefore, I deeply regret that the Government and the Commons did not hear our plea. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, their view will not change. We will not make a pointless gesture. I believe that the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, is now tweeting that that is shabby of us. However, that is our view. We have heard, regrettably, that the Commons did not heed the overwhelming vote in this House. However, we will hold the Government to their promise of a vote before that in the European Parliament and will work to devise a parliamentary route to establish that more firmly, not least because having the support of Parliament during the negotiations would be a source of strength rather than a weakness. The Government have made the wrong call on this amendment, but we will seek to rectify that another way.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, we spent considerable time debating this issue in Committee, on Report and again today. I fear that once again there is little I can add to this fulsome debate, especially as I am very much aware that my last attempt to convince the House of the merits of my case did not result in an unalloyed success.
As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, we had the largest vote on record in this House, with a turnout of 634 Members. The fact that 366 of your Lordships did not accept my arguments was, I hope, as they say in Sicily, “Nothing personal, just business”. However, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State did a bit better this afternoon. As has been remarked, the other place rejected this amendment by a majority of 45.
I will briefly remind your Lordships of the Government’s case. First, as I have said, this is a simple and straightforward Bill designed to implement the referendum result and respect the Supreme Court’s judgment. It is the culmination of a long, democratic process started by the people at the last election, endorsed by this House in an Act of Parliament and then voted for by the people at the referendum itself. Parliament will continue to play its part through the scrutiny and passing of future legislation, through questions and debates and, most important of all, through a vote on the final agreement. Therefore, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, said, we are not abandoning parliamentary sovereignty. Our commitment to a vote in both Houses, which we fully expect and intend will take place before the European Parliament votes on any deal, is an absolute commitment and will be honoured.
Furthermore, as my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union said this afternoon in the other place,
“of course, Parliament can, if it wishes, have a vote and debate on any issue. That is a matter for Parliament. It is not for a Minister to try to constrain that”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/3/17; col. 42]
Therefore, as I have said on a number of occasions, proposed new subsections (1) to (3) are unnecessary. However, as I said before, this amendment goes further. It seeks to make it impossible for the Prime Minister to walk away without a vote in Parliament. Article 50 does not give the European Parliament that power. The European Commission would not have to go to the European Parliament if it wanted to walk away from the negotiations. So it is incorrect to say that the amendment would simply put on the face of the Bill the same power as that given to the European Parliament.
Also, as I argued before, it is unclear what the effects of this would be in any case. If Parliament votes against the Prime Minister walking away, is she to accept the deal on offer? Is she meant to try to negotiate a better one? Or is she to try to revoke the UK’s notice to withdraw? We do not know and, as I have said, such vagueness on something so critical is unacceptable.
The people voted to leave the EU in a referendum granted to them by this Parliament. We will respect that result. We are confident that the UK and the EU can indeed reach a positive deal on our future partnership, as this would be to the mutual benefit of both this country and the European Union. We will approach the negotiations in that spirit.
As to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, it is very hard to see what meaningful vote there could be if there had been no deal at all. In the absence of an agreement, I have no doubt that there would be further statements to this House. However, we are leaving the European Union, either through the deal we have agreed or without a deal. So we now need to consider whether the other place should be asked to consider this issue yet again, given that it has considered and decided, twice, against amendments that seek to put on the face of the Bill a vote on the final agreement.
I end by saying that this Bill is to trigger the process of our leaving and to fulfil the Supreme Court’s requirements. As I have said many times before, tonight we might just make it to the legislative base camp in terms of parliamentary scrutiny and debate. There is a lot more to come. The other place is clearly satisfied with this approach and satisfied that the Bill does not merit amendment. I therefore ask noble Lords to be mindful of that and to pass the Bill unamended.
Baroness Ludford
My Lords, the Minister attempts to bamboozle us and produce some of the same Aunt Sallies and red herrings that I mentioned last week. The key point is that, if he pledges that the Government will honour an assurance that there will be a parliamentary vote, why not put that in the legislation? No good reason has been produced why it should not be enshrined in statute. The more he doth protest too much, the more he generates concern that the commitment to honour a parliamentary vote may be somewhat fragile. If there are indeed ample means for Parliament to assert its control, there is no problem in writing them into the Bill.
This issue concerns a fundamental principle. It is the most important decision for this country in over 70 years. The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, referred to this Bill as the shortest suicide note in history. It would not have needed to be so if the Government had given any indication of pursuing a sensible Brexit, but unfortunately they give every indication of hurtling towards an extreme, brutal Brexit. That makes many people inside and outside this building very nervous.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said from the Opposition Front Bench that she wanted to show that this Parliament is a player and she wanted recognition of Parliament’s role. The best way to do that is to follow the advice of my noble friend Lord Taverne not to abdicate parliamentary responsibility. There is a huge onus on us to continue to maintain that principle in the face of considerable bluster and insufficient legislative commitments. I therefore believe that it is justified to press this matter and I ask noble Lords to agree Motion B1. I wish to test the opinion of the House.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Monday 13th March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 111-I Marshalled list for consideration of Commons reaons (PDF, 72KB) - (13 Mar 2017)
18:25 - The House divided: - Ayes: 335 / Noes: 287 - Question accordingly agreed to.
18:40 - The House divided: - Ayes: 331 / Noes: 286 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Davis)
I beg to move, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.
Mr Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendment 2, and Government motion to disagree.
Mr Davis
We introduced the most straightforward possible Bill necessary to enact the referendum result and respect the Supreme Court’s judgment. This Bill has a simple purpose: to allow the Prime Minister to notify under article 50 and start the two-year negotiation process. The House of Commons has already accepted that, voting overwhelmingly to pass this Bill, unamended, last month. The House accepted that the majority of people, no matter which way they voted in June, want the Prime Minister to get on with the job at hand, and to do so without any strings attached. Despite the simple purpose of this Bill, it has generated many hours of debate in both Houses—quite properly, I say to those who debate whether it should have.
Over the past five weeks, we have seen Parliament at its best. Hon. and right hon. Members and peers have spoken on this subject with passion, sincerity and conviction. However, I was disappointed that the House of Lords voted to amend the Bill. The Bill is just the next step in the long, democratic process surrounding our exit from the European Union. That process will continue with future legislation, ranging from the great repeal Bill, which will convert EU law into UK law at the time we leave, to a range of specific Bills that we expect to introduce, such as on immigration or customs arrangements. Parliament will be closely involved in all those important discussions and decisions.
As we embark on the forthcoming negotiations, our guiding approach is simple: we will not do anything that will undermine the national interest, including the interest of British citizens living in the European Union, and we will not enter negotiations with our hands tied. That is not to say that I do not appreciate the concerns that lie behind these amendments. It is not the ends that we disagree on, but the means, and I will attempt to address these individually—
Alex Salmond
The Secretary of State will have heard that many Members in this House, and a huge majority in the House of Lords, want a meaningful vote on the Government’s terms of negotiation, which he defined yesterday as meaning accepting either the Government’s terms or World Trade Organisation terms. When does he expect that vote to come to this place, and indeed to all the other Parliaments that it will come to? When roughly, within the two-year period, does he expect the House to get a vote, even on his terms?
Mr Davis
If the right hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will come to the detail of the answer to that later, but in broad terms, although it is impossible to predict the month, the form of words that I crafted earlier was this: we intend and expect it to be before the European Parliament votes on the same matter. It will fit in at the beginning of the ratification process, as soon as the negotiation is complete. It is too soon to know when that will be.
Lords amendment 1 seeks to require the Government to act unilaterally to bring forward plans within three months to secure the status of European Union and European economic area citizens and their family members living in the United Kingdom. On this matter, the Government have been consistently clear: we want to secure the status of EU citizens already living in Britain, and the status of British nationals living in other member states, as early as we can.
David T. C. Davies
As somebody who is married to an EU citizen without a British passport, may I say that I wholeheartedly support the Government’s approach to this matter? [Interruption.] It is absolutely right that we get reciprocity before we go ahead with any agreement with the rest of the EU.
Mr Davis
I thank my hon. Friend both for his intervention and for warming up the House.
European citizens already resident in the United Kingdom make a vital contribution to our economy and our society, including working in crucial public services such as the national health service. Without them we would be poorer and our public services weaker.
Mr Davis
I will give way in a moment.
However, the European Union has been clear that we cannot open these discussions until the Prime Minister has given formal notification that the UK wishes to withdraw from the EU. That is why we must pass this straightforward Bill without further delay, so that the Prime Minister can get to work on the negotiations, and we can secure a quick deal that secures the status both of EU citizens in the UK and of UK nationals living in the EU, of whom there are around 1 million.
We take very seriously—I take very seriously—our moral responsibility to all 4 million UK and EU citizens. The Prime Minister has been clear that this issue will be one of the top priorities for the immediate negotiations. I also welcome the encouraging words from across the channel, particularly from Poland and Sweden, which fill me with confidence that we will reach a swift agreement with our European partners. Indeed, as Beata Szydlo, the Polish Prime Minister, has said:
“Of course, these guarantees would need to be reciprocal. It’s also important what guarantees the British citizens living and working in other member states of the European Union will have.”
Several hon. Members rose—
Geraint Davies
Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the survey by the General Medical Council that shows that two thirds of EU doctors are thinking of leaving the UK? In general, EU citizens tend to be younger and working compared with their counterparts abroad who are older and retired. Does he not accept that there is an immediate need unilaterally to act in good faith to set the agenda to get reciprocation, rather than holding out until the final moment?
Mr Davis
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. As I have said before, these issues are serious and important, and people hold their views passionately and with good reason, but the simple truth is that the Government have been very plain about what they intend. They intend to guarantee the rights of both British and European citizens and they will do so as quickly as possible.
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)
I am delighted to hear what my right hon. Friend has had to say about prioritising the negotiations as far as EU and British citizens are concerned. He has said that the negotiations could take up to two years, but there is no reason at all why an agreement on those citizens should not come a lot earlier. Will he give a guarantee that, once an agreement is reached, it will be made public to put out of their misery all the people who are going through this trauma at this moment in time?
Mr Davis
My hon. Friend makes a good point. It may well be that we need treaty change to put in law the guarantees that we want in place, but I aim to get all the member states, the Commission and the Council to commit—even if it is in an exchange of letters—so that everyone knows what their rights are and what their rights will be, which, therefore, deals with the issue that has quite properly been raised: people being afraid of things they should not be afraid of.
Mr Davis
Please forgive me for a moment.
That is very dependent of course on the commitment not just of ourselves, but of other member states. As I said, Beata Szydlo, the Polish Prime Minister, has made that point publicly here. Every single Minister of every member state that I have spoken to, either on the continent in their own countries or here on a visit, have reinforced the point that they want this matter to be at the top of the agenda. They want this to be dealt with first, and that is what we intend to do to help to achieve what my hon. Friend wants.
Mr Davis
Forgive me, but I do have to make some progress.
The proposed amendment may well force the UK to set out unilateral plans in any case. Such an approach would only serve to undermine the very attempts that I have just been talking about, and hamper a quick resolution for all those concerned.
Mr Davis
In a second.
I want to reassure people that Parliament will have a clear opportunity to debate and vote on this issue in the future, before anything else happens. The great repeal Bill will not change our immigration system. That will be done through a separate immigration Bill and subsequent secondary legislation. Nothing will change for any EU citizen in the UK without Parliament’s explicit approval beforehand.
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I am very grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. This Government’s track record on contingency planning is as bad as their handling of the Brexit process, so if it is the case that they are not going to protect the position of EU nationals and it therefore becomes the case that the position of EU nationals is not protected, has the Secretary of State given any consideration to a deportation process then?
Mr Davis
That is the point. It is, frankly, incredible to me that anybody would imagine that I, of all people, would sign up to a deportation process. The answer here is simple, and I make the point again: I take as a moral responsibility the future guarantees of all 4 million citizens —European Union and UK together.
If I may move on, I will now address the issues created by Lords amendment 2. Let me be clear from the outset that this amendment does not seek to simply put what we have already promised on the face of the Bill, as was suggested by some. In fact, it seeks to go much further. But let me begin with proposed subsections (1) to (3), which do simply seek to put our commitment to a vote on the face of the Bill. I will repeat here our commitment: the Government will bring forward a motion on the final agreement to be approved by both Houses of Parliament before it is concluded. We expect and intend that this will happen before the European Parliament debates and votes on the final issue. This commitment could not be clearer, so proposed subsections (1) to (3) are wholly unnecessary. Our clear intention—an intention stated more than once at this Dispatch Box—and by far the most likely outcome, by the way, is that we will bring a deal back to the Houses of Parliament for them to approve.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. If he is so confident about this, why can he not allow the rest of us to be confident by agreeing to Lords amendment 2?
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Davis
No, I will not give way.
On the more general point about votes—I say this with some personal interest—we should not underestimate the mechanisms at Parliament’s disposal to ensure that its voice is heard. To paraphrase the wise words of Lord Howard of Lympne during the debate on the amendment in the other place, this place “will have its say” and “will have its way.” We do not need to put this into legislation, and making legislation when none is required only benefits lawyers.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is a Member of long standing in this House, and he recognises—as, I think, other hon. Members do—that Parliament will find a way to have a say, whether a deal is reached or whether no deal is reached. If he recognises that, does he agree that it would be better for the Government officially to recognise that position from the Dispatch Box?
Mr Davis
I reiterate the point: of course, Parliament can, if it wishes, have a vote and debate on any issue. That is a matter for Parliament. It is not for a Minister to try to constrain that, least of all this Minister, who has used those opportunities before this day. But let me get to the point behind this. I agree with my right hon. Friend, but what we cannot have—I am coming to the second aspect of this amendment—is any suggestion that the votes in either House will overturn the result of the referendum. That is the key point.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Is that not exactly the point? It would completely cripple the Government in trying to get a really good deal for the UK. This is the time for Parliament to get behind the country, which made a decision, and to get the best deal. We cannot do that if the EU thinks it can undermine us.
Mr Davis
That point brings me to subsection (4), so let me deal with that in a little more detail. This new clause, effectively, seeks to prohibit the Prime Minister from walking away from negotiations, even if she thinks the European Union is offering her a bad or very bad deal. As I will get on to, the impact of this is unclear, but even the intent goes far beyond what we have offered or could accept. The Government will be undertaking these negotiations and must have the freedom to walk away from a deal that sets out to punish the UK for a decision to leave the EU, as some in Europe have suggested.
Of course, we are seeking a mutually beneficial new relationship, which we believe can and will work for everyone, but tying the Government’s hands in this way could be the worst way of trying to achieve that deal. And let us not forget: in December, this House passed a motion that nothing should be done to undermine the negotiating position of the Government.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
The Minister is asking us to take him at his word—on trust. Given the record of the Conservative party recently on manifesto commitments, does the same principle of trust apply?
Mr Davis
I said before, and I will say it again: I take statements at this Dispatch Box as binding.
The important point here is that the idea that Parliament could force the Government to accept a bad deal will only incentivise those on the other side of the negotiating table to deliver just such a deal. As the Lords European Union Select Committee—hardly a Tory front organisation —said:
“The Government will conduct the negotiations on behalf of the United Kingdom, and, like any negotiator, it will need room to manoeuvre if it is to secure a good outcome.”
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)
No one in this House, as far as I am aware, wishes to fetter the Government’s hands in negotiations, or indeed the Government’s right to walk away from the negotiations; the issue in subsection (4) is whether the Government come back to this House to explain their plan and policy in the event of that happening. I would expect that to be inevitable, and yet, curiously, when we have sought an assurance from the Government—no more than that; not this amendment—that they would do that, which seems to me to be blindingly obvious, we keep being told that they will not give that assurance. I do find that, I have to say to my right hon. Friend, a bit odd, and I wonder whether he could clarify that.
Mr Davis
My right hon. and learned—and old—Friend makes a good point. The simple truth here, however, as I have said before, is that nothing can constrain this House’s right to debate and vote on anything it sees fit, and that meets this.
What I am dealing with here is subsection (4), and there are even bigger problems with it. During the debate on this issue in the other House, the author of the amendment, Lord Pannick, himself admitted he did not know what would happen if Parliament voted against leaving the EU without a deal. This uncertainty is itself a strong argument against putting this amendment into statute.
However, a significant number of Lords supported this amendment—that may not be true in this House—such as Lord Wigley and Baroness Kennedy, and they made their intentions clear: if Parliament were to vote against leaving without a deal, the UK should seek to remain in the EU and reverse the result of the referendum. I should say to my hon. and right hon. Friends that the European Union member states and the European Union institutions read the proceedings of this House very closely; they will have read that, and it will have raised their interest, because that is precisely what they would like to happen. So while this has been badged as a meaningful vote, the reality is that there are some who would seek to use it to overturn the result of the referendum. [Interruption.] “Good idea” comes from across the Floor. That is exactly, I am afraid, what concerns us.
The Government and the Prime Minister have been crystal clear. The people of the United Kingdom have decided to leave the European Union. The Government will seek to implement this decision in the way that is most beneficial to both the United Kingdom and the European Union. What we will not do, however, is accept anything that will put the intention to leave the European Union in doubt.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Davis
Will hon. Members forgive me if I do not give way, because I am coming to the end of my comments?
Any prospect that we might actually decide to remain in the European Union would only serve to encourage those on the other side to give us the worst possible deal in the hope that we will do exactly that. This amendment would not only restrain the negotiating power of the Government but would create uncertainty and complications throughout the negotiating process while lessening the chances of the mutually beneficial deal we are seeking.
I reiterate the three key points. First, the Bill was brought forward to implement the referendum result, respect the Supreme Court judgment, and nothing else. Secondly, these amendments are unnecessary as the Government have already made firm commitments with regard to both of the two issues, and we will deliver on those commitments. Thirdly, these amendments would undermine the Government’s position in negotiations to get the best deal for Britain, and that cannot be in the national interest. Therefore, it is clear to the Government that we should send back to the House of Lords a clean Bill. This House has already expressed its support of this view in Committee, and I ask us all to repeat that support once more.
Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
I rise to support both of the amendments that have been passed in the other place. They started life as Labour amendments at the Committee stage in this House, Labour peers led on them and voted for them in the other place, and they will be supported by Labour MPs here today.
The question is this: are Conservative Members willing to listen to the arguments in favour of the amendments, to which I know many are sympathetic and have concerns about, or will they go along with the Prime Minister’s increasing obsession to pass a clean Bill, unamended, even if that means ignoring amendments that would improve the Bill and provide much better protection?
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
Will my hon. and learned Friend give way?
Keir Starmer
I will make some progress because lots of Members want to speak, and the more I give way now, the more irritating it is for those who want to make their own contribution.
The Government are about to embark on the most complex and challenging undertaking of any British Government since the second world war. The decision the Government make and the deals they strike will have profound consequences for almost every aspect of British life. It is therefore essential that the Government do not fail or take the country down the wrong path. Starting negotiations by guaranteeing the rights of EU nationals and ending negotiations with a meaningful vote will help to guard against that fate.
Let me turn to the amendment on EU nationals. My question for the Secretary of State and for the Government is this: what is the problem? This is not about delay. The way to prevent delay is to accept the amendment and get on with it. The purpose of the amendment is to bring forward proposals
“Within three months of exercising the power”
to trigger article 50. The Secretary of State says that we want an early deal—well, if it is within three months, there is no problem with the amendment. The amendment only affects the Government’s approach if they do not get an early deal. That is why it is so important. To portray this as a delaying tactic is not to read the amendment and not to appreciate what it says: that the purpose is to bring forward proposals “Within three months”.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
I have listened carefully to the argument the hon. and learned Gentleman is making. Four million people are affected by this. I put it to him that all 4 million should be dealt with fairly and on a level playing field, that we can only get that from reciprocity, and that this amendment would not achieve that.
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention: let me deal with it straight on. Of course there is a shared concern about UK citizens living in the EU, but this is a matter of principle. Are we prepared—
Several hon. Members rose—
Keir Starmer
I have not even set out the principle yet. Are we prepared to use one set of people—those who are living here—as a bargaining chip to get the right settlement for people in the UK? [Interruption.] That is exactly what it is. The whole argument about reciprocal rights is about bargaining and saying, “We will not do what we should do by this group of people until we get something in return for it.” That is a bargaining chip.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Secretary of State seeks to persuade us that, simply because he has stated from the Dispatch Box that this will all be fine and dandy, that is the end of the matter. He said several times, quite inaccurately, that a ministerial statement from the Dispatch Box is legally binding. Surely the truth is that saying that something said from the Dispatch Box is legally binding does not make it so.
Keir Starmer
The Secretary of State said that it was binding so far as he was concerned. That is not the same as a legal commitment, and Secretaries of State and Governments can change. That is why we need a commitment on the face of the Bill.
Let me fast forward to the second amendment. If there is really no problem with proposed subsections (1), (2) and (3), why not accept them along with proposed subsection (4) and put them on the face of the Bill? This is becoming an obsession with having a clean Bill: “Our Bill must not be amended, even when it is proper, right and decent to do so.”
Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
How does my hon. and learned Friend answer the Brexit Secretary’s point that if and when we pass the Bill and it is given Royal Assent, the Government’s first priority will be to negotiate the rights both of people here who are from Europe and of our citizens abroad? Does my hon. and learned Friend not accept that if we pass this amendment and give those rights to European citizens here, there will be no incentive whatsoever for other European countries to concede those rights to our citizens?
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention, but it is important to focus on the words of the amendment, which asks Ministers to bring forward proposals within three months. That does not tie anybody’s hands or make anybody’s task more difficult. If the issue is resolved within three months—I hope that it is, for the sake of EU citizens living here and of UK citizens living abroad—the amendment represents no problem. It represents a problem only if the Government do not succeed in an early settlement of the issue.
The Labour party has been pushing the Government for many months to guarantee EU rights. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) first tabled a Labour motion on the issue back in July 2016, just weeks after the referendum, but the Government have refused to take unilateral action. I remind the House that the International Trade Secretary, who is sitting on the Government Front Bench, said last year that to guarantee those rights to EU citizens
“would be to hand over one of our main cards in the negotiations”.
Keir Starmer
I am going to make progress. I have taken interventions on the issue and it would not be fair to take more.
We do not believe that EU nationals are bargaining chips, and I think many other hon. Members agree. There are 3.2 million EU nationals who have made their homes and careers in the United Kingdom. Thousands do vital jobs in the NHS and in our universities and public services. They are our friends, colleagues and neighbours—they are valued members of our communities. It is often said that they make a contribution to our society; they do. They are also our society. This is a matter of principle and decency.
Several hon. Members rose—
Keir Starmer
I am going to make some progress. We should not bring unnecessary uncertainty and distress into those people’s lives, but that is exactly what is happening as a result of the Government’s approach.
The Brexit Select Committee’s report states that it has heard
“a wide range of concerns of EU nationals since the referendum, including stress, and anxiety and feelings of depression to practical concerns about pensions and healthcare, children being abused in the school playground and worries over the ability to work in the UK in the future.”
What have we come to, if we cannot deal with those levels of anxiety and stress? Many Members will have seen that in their own constituency surgeries. I certainly have: families have come to me in tears about the situation in which they find themselves. It is time for the Government to act; increasingly, it is only the Prime Minister and the Government who think otherwise. Trade unions and campaigns such as the3million and New Europeans have made a very powerful and compelling case for this issue to be dealt with, as of course has the Brexit Committee in its report’s conclusions.
Mr Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)
Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Keir Starmer
I am going to make some progress.
Labour supports Lords amendment 1 not only because it is right in principle, but because it would help the negotiations by setting the right tone. We have to make it clear to our European partners that although we are leaving the EU, we are not severing our ties. We want a collaborative and co-operative future with our European partners. We want our closest and nearest allies to be strong, and for the European Union to succeed and prosper. We know that citizens will be richer and happier in the future if we work together with our EU partners to meet common challenges. That message is vital in securing our nation’s future.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that given our Foreign Secretary’s mixed record—both in committing to the £350 million a week for the NHS, and in failing to deliver on that—and the Government’s poor relations with EU partners, it is right that we should show leadership and commitment by standing up for EU migrants and supporting this amendment?
Keir Starmer
I agree. I have said in the House on a number of occasions that the tone that the Government set is very important as we come up to the beginning of the negotiations. From my direct discussions with representatives of other countries in Brussels, I can tell the House that some of the jokes that have been made about the reasons why our EU partners feel so strongly about the EU have not been well received. Agreeing to the amendment would help to set the right tone.
Several hon. Members rose—
Keir Starmer
I am going to move on to the question of the meaningful vote in Lords amendment 2. I remind the House that as recently as December the Prime Minister was refusing to guarantee that Parliament would be able to vote on whatever agreement the Government reach with the European Commission. Under pressure, that position changed early this year, but it was only when Labour tabled an amendment to the Bill in Committee that the Government made a set of commitments on the Floor of the House.
Those commitments, which were set out by the Minister of State and have now been repeated by the Secretary of State, are: first, that Parliament would be able to vote on the final draft agreement; secondly, that Parliament would get a vote not just on the so-called divorce settlement—the article 50 agreement—but also on the agreement on the future relationship with the European Union; and, thirdly, that the votes in this Parliament would take place before any votes in the European Parliament. Lords amendment 2 will simply put those commitments into the Bill, which is why it is so wrong for the Government not to accept it in principle.
Stephen Doughty
Is my hon. and learned Friend aware of the ICM poll for Avaaz, published in just the past two hours, showing that a clear majority of the British public supports a meaningful vote, with 52% supporting such a vote and only 27% saying the opposite?
Keir Starmer
I have seen that poll, which is of course important, but this is a matter of principle. This is a question of whether this House should be able to vote on the deal reached in two years’ time before the European Parliament votes and should be able to have a meaningful say, and that is what it has been, in principle, from start to finish.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
The amendment does not simply give this House the right to vote on these matters; it also gives the other place the right to vote on these matters. Will the hon. and learned Gentleman explain what would happen if this House voted to accept what the Government want to do, but the other place dug in and rejected it? What would happen then?
Keir Starmer
There is a reason why the amendment spells that out in detail: it is precisely what the Minister said at the Dispatch Box should be the position last time this was debated. Lords amendment 2 carefully reflects what the Government say is their assurance, so such a question about the amendment should be put to the Secretary of State.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)
Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that, given the high level of uncertainty, the only sage and proper thing to do is to give us one more chance before the European Parliament has an opportunity to—[Interruption.]
Keir Starmer
I would not put it as “one last chance”. The negotiations will lead first—I hope—to an article 50 agreement; secondly, to transitional arrangements; and thirdly to a final agreement between ourselves and the EU. That will define the future of the UK for generations in Europe and beyond Europe, and it is imperative that this House has a vote on that at the end of the two-year exercise.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for giving way. The discussion so far has been about a parliamentary vote in the event of the Government reaching a deal. Is it his interpretation of the Secretary of State’s speech today that, in the event of no deal, the Government seek the authority to default to WTO rules—which are not used by any major economy alone to trade with the EU—without this House having a say?
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention. That is my interpretation and it causes me great concern. We need to be clear: reaching no deal is the worst of all possible outcomes for Britain. The president of the CBI has described it as the “worst case scenario” for which many firms cannot even prepare because
“the cost of change is simply too high to even consider it”.
Just yesterday, the director-general of the CBI, Carolyn Fairbairn, emphasised that no deal should not be “plan B”, but “plan Z”. I could not agree more.
Research published today by Open Britain warns that leaving the EU without a deal would leave Britain facing greater barriers to trade with the EU than any other G20 country. The cross-party Foreign Affairs Committee warned on Sunday that
“a complete breakdown in negotiations represents a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK. Both sides would suffer economic losses and harm to their international reputations.”
That is why having a vote not only on a deal if there is one, but on no deal, is so important. It represents a check on the Prime Minister deciding to take the country down the most dangerous path. That is why I urge Members, including those on the Conservative Benches, to vote for the amendment.
Keir Starmer
There was one question on the ballot paper, and that was whether we should stay in the EU or leave the EU. There was no second question about the terms of leaving. It is impossible to extrapolate, but I would be staggered if most people thought that this House should not have a proper grip of the available options in two years’ time and hopefully beyond. I expect that they would have said, “Of course we want Parliament to be fully involved. We would expect accountability and scrutiny, and we would expect votes.”
I shall conclude, because we only have two hours and other people wish to speak. These are simple amendments that would improve the article 50 process. They have obtained cross-party support and large majorities in the Lords, they are the right amendments on vitally important issues, and the obsession with the idea of a clean, unamended Bill should not triumph over decency and principle.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)
I agree with what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said about amendment 1, but I wish to speak about amendment 2. The operative provision is subsection (4) which states—I want to remind the House as it is material to what I am about to say:
“The prior approval of…Parliament shall…be required in relation to any decision by the Prime Minister that the United Kingdom shall leave the European Union without an agreement”.
I have already argued in past debates exactly what my right hon. Friend argued today—namely, that if that subsection were to have its intended effect, it would be inimical to the interests of this country, because it would have the undoubted effect of providing a massive incentive for our EU counterparts to give us the worst possible agreement. I agree with him about that. However, I think that the situation is worse—far worse—than he described, because the operative subsection is deeply deficient as a matter of law. The reason for that is not just the one that Lord Pannick admitted, or half-admitted, in the House of Lords, but because under very plausible circumstances this subsection will not have anything like its intended effect. Let me briefly illustrate why that is the case.
Article 50 of the treaty on European Union is, for once in treaties, entirely clear. Paragraph 3 of the article states:
“The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question…two years after the notification…unless the European Council… unanimously decides to extend this period.”
Let us imagine that what the Secretary of State, the Government, all my hon. Friends and, I suspect, all Opposition Members hope will not be the case—namely, that the negotiations for a proper comprehensive free trade agreement break down—actually happens. We all hope that will not happen, but we cannot preclude the possibility that it will happen. If it does happen, I think all Members on both sides of the House must have the emotional intelligence to recognise that in all probability that would be under circumstances of some acrimony.
How likely is it that under such circumstances, with agreement having broken down in some acrimony, the European Council would be able to achieve a unanimous agreement to allow the UK to remain a member beyond the two-year period? I speculate that it is very unlikely. If we assume that that were to occur, we need to ask ourselves what would actually happen under those circumstances. One thing can be predicted with certainty: there would be litigation. The litigation would ask, ultimately, the Supreme Court to decide the question, “What has happened here? Has the Prime Minister made a decision, or has the Prime Minister not made a decision?” That could be decided in one of two ways. I rather think that Members on both sides of the House would agree with me that the Supreme Court must decide either that the Prime Minister has made the decision or that the Prime Minister has not made the decision.
Let us suppose for a moment that the Supreme Court decides that the Prime Minister has not made a decision, because it has been made instead by the European Council—a perfectly plausible outcome of the Court’s proceedings. In that case, subsection (4) is totally inoperable. It has no effect whatsoever, because what it does, purportedly, is to prevent the Prime Minister from making a decision without a vote. If the Prime Minister has, in the ruling of the Court, made no decision, it is impossible for her to have made a decision without a vote; therefore, the law has been conformed with, and Parliament is not given any ability to vote on the matter.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend, and there is a further point. When it comes to the competing legislation at that point, it would be for the courts to consider whether or not the provisions in the Lisbon treaty that dealt with the question of article 50 had somehow been qualified, amended or repealed by a subsequent enactment.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, but it seems to me that for this purpose we do not even need to raise that question, because there is only one other possibility in this Court action—that the Court decides that the Prime Minister has implicitly made the decision. I do not quite know how the Court would get to that answer, but we could speculate that if the Prime Minister had acted differently in the course of the negotiations, the European Council would have acted differently, so implicitly the Prime Minister has made the decision.
Under those circumstances, subsection (4) would, purportedly, come into effect. That is, I suppose, what its authors intended. However, if the European Council has not by the end of the two-year period made a unanimous decision and if the courts decided that the Prime Minister had thereby implicitly decided, the courts would be requiring Parliament to do something that it is impossible to do—namely, to get the Prime Minister to reverse a decision that, as a matter of ordinary language, the Prime Minister would not have made at a time when the Prime Minister could not undo a decision that, as a matter of ordinary language, the European Council had made.
I am perfectly aware that it is of the greatest importance for Members of this House to show due deference to the other place, and I also genuinely admire the skills of the authors of the amendment, but I put it to them that even the House of Lords in all its majesty cannot compel the Prime Minister to do something that is impossible. That is beyond the scope of any human agency.
John Redwood
Is that not evidenced by Lord Pannick himself arguing seriously in court that the letter is irreversible?
Sir Oliver Letwin
I agree with my right hon. Friend, although the Supreme Court went to great pains not to refer the matter to the European Court of Justice, for very good reasons, so we can leave even that argument aside.
My point is very simple. Either subsection (4) would have its intended effect or it would not. If it did, it would be inimical to the interests of this country, because it would induce the worst possible agreement to be offered—as a matter of fact, it will not have that effect in plausible circumstances—and if it did not, it would be bad law. I put it to you, Mr Speaker, that this House should not be passing legislation that either is inimical to the interests of this country or constitutes bad law, and that we should therefore reject the amendment.
Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)
This is a very timely debate about amendments that go to the heart of the situation in which we find ourselves. The Scottish National party has made it very clear that we want much more detailed reassurance—perhaps the odd detail or two from the Government—and that is where parliamentary scrutiny should have been involved. We should also be having a debate about the kind of country in which we want to live, and the kind of country that Scotland becomes and the United Kingdom becomes. That is where the amendment on EU nationals comes in.
The Secretary of State may have caught the First Minister’s statement earlier today, in which she made it very plain that this was not the situation in which we wanted to find ourselves. In fact, the Scottish Parliament voted by 92 votes to zero, across political parties, that we should look at ways of securing our relationship with Europe. It is a critical relationship that we have with our European partners, one that has an impact on, and benefits, each and every one of us; but, nearly nine months after the EU referendum, we still do not have that much in the way of detail from an increasingly clueless Government.
The most detailed response to the referendum so far came in the form of a compromise proposed by the Scottish Government just before Christmas. That compromise—let us not forget this—would have meant Scotland leaving the EU against its will to protect our place in the single market. It was a big compromise, and it took a lot from the Scottish National party to put it forward, especially given that Scotland had voted overwhelmingly to remain part of the European Union. We did it in order to protect jobs, the economy, and opportunities for young people and their environment in the face of a hard Tory Brexit.
The Fraser of Allander Institute has suggested that we could lose up to 80,000 jobs in Scotland alone as a result of the Government’s plans. We have a responsibility to protect those jobs, we have a responsibility to think about opportunities for young people, and we have a responsibility to think about the rights that we receive from our membership of the European Union. We have a responsibility not to just roll over in the face of a disastrous Tory plan.
Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)
Last Friday I met representatives of a major bus company in Scotland, who said that 17% of the company’s bus drivers were EU immigrants. They said that the only reason they were not experiencing the haemorrhaging of talent that their counterparts down south were experiencing was the First Minister’s reasonable, sensible and inclusive message that EU nationals were welcome. Does my hon. Friend agree that the UK Government could benefit by conveying such a message?
Stephen Gethins
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I want to come on to the point about EU nationals shortly. It is not just in Scotland that jobs are threatened.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could tell us, on the same analytical basis, how many jobs would be lost in Scotland if it left the UK?
Stephen Gethins
That is the extraordinary basis on which this is debated. My honourable colleague from the Foreign Affairs Committee forgets that it is his own Government who have already told the people of Ireland that they need not choose between the European Union and the UK, just as Scotland need not choose between trading with the UK and the rest of the EU.
Stephen Gethins
No, I will make progress.
If we pass the Bill today, we will be passing this Government a blank cheque on one of the most crucial issues that this Parliament has ever discussed, an issue that will have an impact on each and every one of us and each and every one of our constituents. Let us not forget that we will be handing a blank cheque to a Government who are forced to deny their own tweets, who corrected a White Paper that had already been published and who are trying to defend yet another shambolic Budget. That is the Government this place would be handing over a blank cheque to. Frankly, I am not sure we could trust them to run a bath, or a bidet for that matter, never mind a complex set of negotiations.
The Secretary of State said that he has seen the best of parliamentary debate in this place over the course of the Bill. It is nice to hear him say that because he spent millions of pounds trying to prevent us from having that debate in the first place. The basis of a parliamentary democracy is that we can scrutinise and do not roll over and acquiesce in the face of damaging plans. That is exactly what we would be doing by handing over a blank cheque.
Stephen Gethins
Not at the moment.
It is the House of Lords, of all places, that has given us another opportunity today to save the House of Commons’ blushes. We will be voting for a meaningful vote today, although of course we would also have wanted a greater role for the devolved Administrations.
Stephen Gethins
Not at the moment.
The lack of respect for the devolved Administrations, and the promises that were made and subsequently broken during the independence and EU referendums have led us to the situation we are in today. During the independence referendum, we were told that the only way Scotland could guarantee remaining part of the EU was to vote against independence. We were told that the only way to bring in powers over immigration was to vote to leave the EU—more costly and broken promises. That is why the First Minister is right to be looking at the electoral mandate that the SNP was given last year to hold another independence referendum.
The Government may not be big on manifesto commitments, but the SNP is. The SNP was returned to power with the largest number of votes since devolution was established, with 47% of the constituency vote, compared with a Tory Government who have brought us to this situation with 36% of the vote in the UK and less than 15% of the vote in Scotland.
Let me move on to EU nationals. This is critical. We must not forget the human element of this.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is talking about the human element for EU nationals. On Friday afternoon, my constituent, Diemanta McDuff, a Lithuanian, attended my surgery in hysterical tears, saying that the uncertainty caused by this Government and this Parliament is making her feel worse about her personal situation in Britain than she did in Lithuania under the Soviets. [Interruption.] Those are the words of a constituent. Does my hon. Friend agree that this Parliament should be ashamed to be causing such uncertainty?
Stephen Gethins
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for raising that point, which is important. Many of us have listened to EU nationals, who contribute so much financially and culturally and who would be a loss to this country—to the whole of the UK. Therefore, I am not sure why the Government cannot give us what we seek.
Mr Nigel Evans
As the hon. Gentleman knows, I feel very passionate about the fact that EU citizens living in the United Kingdom should be allowed to continue doing so; they add so much to our economy and culture, and it would be a human tragedy if they were forced to leave. However, I suspect that hundreds of thousands of Scottish people are living in other EU countries. Does he not believe that they too ought to be given the same guarantee at exactly the same time?
Stephen Gethins
The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me: the Scottish Government are looking to protect Scotland’s relationship with Europe, and, what is more, if EU nationals are as important to Conservative Members as they are to us, they will vote with us tonight, to give them the certainty they need and deserve. I look forward to the hon. Gentleman joining me in the Lobby.
EU nationals who have made Scotland and the rest of the UK their home contribute much: they make this a better place in which to live and work, and they make our communities better. These are people with families and jobs. If the Conservatives care so much about them —and to give these people certainty—there is something very simple they can do: they can join us in the Lobby tonight, for a change. The House of Lords has given them another opportunity.
This goes to the heart of the question of the kind of country—[Interruption.] Conservative Members would do well to listen to the point being made this time. This goes to the heart of the question of the kind of country in which we would like to live. Do we want to live in a country that is open and inclusive, working in co-operation and collaboration with our European partners, or in a UK that is increasingly isolated in Europe and abroad? It now seems like this is a choice that people in Scotland are going to get.
Today, we are sitting on the edge of the abyss with this vote; the question is whether or not Scotland is going to be taken into the abyss with this Tory Government. I am glad that SNP Members have an alternative, and the alternative is clear. It is one that respects the will of the people of Scotland, that seeks to work with our partners on these islands and across Europe, and that will allow us to prosper as an equal and normal partner in the international community of nations. Therefore, we will be opposing the Government tonight.
Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)
I am going to keep my comments as brief as possible so that as many Members as possible can speak. I spoke when we last considered, effectively, Lords amendment 2 in its new form, and I just say this: it is surely perverse that we are in a situation whereby if there is a deal it comes back to this place and we debate it and vote on it, but if there is the worst scenario—which is no deal—we are not entitled to that say that or vote. That simply cannot be right.
This is not a debate about Brexit. We have had that vote; I voted against my conscience in accordance with the promise I made to the people of Broxtowe that I would honour the referendum result, and I voted for us to leave the EU. So we have had that one; we are moving on.
This debate is actually all about parliamentary sovereignty, and there are some uncomfortable truths that need to be said. It took a few brave souls—and they were brave—to go to the High Court and then the Supreme Court to establish parliamentary sovereignty. That is why we now have this Bill—not because we did it in this place, and history will record all these things, but because of what they did. But to the credit of the Government, they accepted that.
I understand that there is a good argument to be made that this is a short and simple Bill, but the difficulty, and the reason why I found myself for the first time voting against my Government, is this intransigence—this inability to accept that in the worst-case scenario this place is not going to be allowed a say. And for this Secretary of State, of all Members of this place, with his fine track record of establishing, and fighting at every opportunity for the sovereignty of Parliament, to be standing up and denying us that on this particular issue is deeply ironic.
Mr Baron
But does my right hon. Friend not accept the simple point that this place made a contract with the British people at that referendum—[Interruption.] The Scottish National party might not like it, but it is true. Therefore, if there is a good deal, we will take it, and if there is not, the Prime Minister has made it very clear that we will not accept a bad deal, so we move on, and we move out of the EU.
Anna Soubry
My hon. Friend forgets that there was just one question on the ballot paper—did we want to remain in or leave the EU—and 52% of the people who voted chose to leave. That is what we are doing. We—some of us—on this side have honoured that result and voted for us to leave. Now, however, we are talking about the sovereignty of this Parliament and about what would happen in the event that our Prime Minister does not strike a good deal. I trust our Prime Minister to do everything that she can, and I will support her in her efforts to get that good deal, but let us be under no illusion that if she does not do so, there will be no alternative but WTO tariffs, regulations and rules, and the people in my constituency certainly did not vote for that—
Anna Soubry
My hon. Friend says “So?” I can assure him that it is not only me but our Prime Minister who takes the view that falling off a cliff edge would be the worst possible outcome for the people of this country. That is the one thing that we must ensure does not happen. In the light of that, we in this place must assist the Government with what happens next.
There is going to be a remarkable set of negotiations to achieve three bespoke deals—on trade, customs and security—in what will actually be an 18-month timeframe. But let us say that that worst-case scenario happens and that there is no deal at the end of that. If I may, I should like to say to Opposition Members, especially those in the north of Ireland—
Anna Soubry
Northern Ireland. The right hon. Gentleman needs no lessons on my support for the efforts and work of Northern Ireland Members. The real danger that we face is the cliff edge and, as a result, the hard border in Ireland that none of us wants.
In two years’ time, things might well have changed remarkably in this country, not just politically but economically. Economically, having had the buoyancy of a devalued pound and people actually spending on the basis of their savings, inflation might then have kicked in and we could find that our economy was no longer in the fine fettle that it appears to be now. Politically, we could be facing great harm in every way possible through the break-up of the Union, with the Scots going their own way following a referendum and, tragically for Northern Ireland, with talk of a united Ireland or a breakdown of the peace that has lasted for some years. In the light of that, all the options must remain open for us to debate and decide upon. We could, for example, decide to restore the free movement of labour and consider the benefits of the single market, which would solve the problem for Northern Ireland and for Scotland.
Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Lady agree that this is not only an issue of principle, in regard to parliamentary sovereignty and having a meaningful say, but an issue of good practice? We should not swallow the argument of an incentive to offer the worst possible deal. Lords amendment 2 would instil discipline and accountability in the Government as well as among our negotiating partners, because at any stage the Prime Minister would be able to say, “I can’t agree to that, because I have to sell it to Parliament.”
Anna Soubry
I want to close by saying this, Mr Speaker. The idea that, by doing the right thing and allowing us to have a vote and a say in the event of no deal, we would somehow be weakening the Prime Minister’s negotiating hand is absolutely perverse. It is as though all these deliberations and all the divisions that still exist in our country are not being reported throughout the whole of Europe. It is as though all this is taking place in some kind of silence. Everyone in Europe knows how divided our nation is. They know about the deliberations in this place and in the other place. They also know that, of those who voted, only 52% voted for us to leave the European Union. I urge the Government, for the sake of bringing unity not only to our party but to the country at large, to allow Parliament’s sovereignty to reign and, in the event of no deal, to allow us to have a vote and a say.
Mr Nick Clegg (Sheffield, Hallam) (LD)
I must declare an interest, because the political is personal for me on the issue of EU citizens in the United Kingdom, as I suspect it is for many other Members in this House. The two most important women in my life—my mother, who is Dutch, and my wife, who is Spanish—are directly affected by this. While they are of course special to me, I none the less think that their fate, and the uncertainty that they have endured, is typical of the constituents of many across the House. My mother has lived here for more than 50 years. She has raised four children. She has worked as a teacher. She has paid her taxes. My wife loves this country—most of the time. She does not love the weather, but she loves this country. She is raising children, paying taxes, and working as a lawyer. It simply beggars belief that people like them and millions of others have had a question mark placed over their status, their piece of mind, and their wellbeing in our great country because of the action, or rather the shameful inaction, of this Government.
John Redwood
The question mark has been placed there by the EU, not by this Government. If the EU said today that our citizens abroad are safe, all EU citizens here would be safe.
Mr Clegg
The right hon. Gentleman would start blaming bad traffic on the EU if he could. It is absurd. We picked the fight, not the EU. His party picked the fight; the EU did not.
I have one observation that I want to press the Secretary of State on. Even if he gets the deal on the issue of EU citizens here and UK citizens there, which I sincerely believe he wishes to seek, and even if that goes as smoothly and quickly as he has suggested today, there is no earthly way that this Government can separate the 3 million EU citizens who are already here from the millions who may, after a certain cut-off date, want to live, study, and work here without creating a mountainous volume of red tape.
Mr Clegg
Remind me, was freeing ourselves from red tape not one of the principal reasons why the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) and so many others told us that we should leave the European Union? Yet this Government are going to create a tsunami of red tape, which EU citizens, including my mum and my wife, will rightly resent just as much as this Government have always resented red tape in Brussels. The particular irony is that the Secretary of State and I worked closely together in this Chamber as Opposition party spokespeople 12 years against the then Government’s attempts to impose ID cards, yet I predict that he and his Government will have to introduce something not identical but strikingly similar to the paper trail behind ID cards.
Mr Clegg
I must make progress; there is very little time.
Turning to the other, perhaps more meaningful amendment, the double standards that we have just heard about red tape are duplicated several times over by the double standards of Brexiteers saying, “We should free ourselves”—at any cost—“from the lack of democratic accountability in Brussels,” when the first thing they do is undermine and weaken the principle of democratic accountability in this House. I have listened closely to the Government’s case for rejecting that amendment, including today, and there is no first principle argument against it, because they concede to the principle of a vote; they just do not like us having the freedom to decide what that vote should be on.
The Government have come up with laughable arguments, which we have heard repeated here today, including that if we have just the bog-standard, plain vanilla accountability exerted by the House of Commons and the other place on any announcement made by the Prime Minister in two years, that will serve as an incentive for the EU to give us a bad deal. By that logic, the only Governments who can successfully negotiate good international agreements are dictatorships. They are not; they are democracies. Democracy can co-exist with good international agreements.
I have come to the conclusion that the reason the Government are digging their heels in as stubbornly as they are is that they somehow think that they will strut their stuff and impress our soon-to-be EU negotiating partners by indulging in parliamentary and procedural machismo here. Who do they think they are kidding? Do they think that Angela Merkel has put everything aside to look at this debate this afternoon? Do they think that she has said, “Oh, look at the way that No. 10 unceremoniously evicted Lord Heseltine and other venerable parliamentarians from their jobs. We had better give them a good deal”?
Does the Secretary of State think that Michel Barnier, whom I know well and know the Secretary of State knows well—a hardened EU negotiator if ever there was one—is saying, “Oh well, we’d better lower the price tag because they are being so tough with their own people”? It is a ludicrous assertion. So I simply say to Government Members, at this last, 59th second of the eleventh hour of this debate on these amendments: stubbornness can be a sign of suspicion and weakness, not strength; rejecting the rightful, conventional role of the House of Commons and the other place to apply democratic accountability to the actions and decisions of the Executive can be a sign of weakness, not strength; and this specious argument that condemns the lack of democratic accountability in Brussels while undermining it here, in the mother of all Parliaments, is a sleight of hand that should not be lightly forgotten.
Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)
It is a particular pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg), as he and I spent a number of years working together in coalition government. I know that was not enormously fruitful for all those on my side, but I thank him for his remarks.
Let me deal with one opening point and then refer to the amendments, rather than making a general speech. One observation to make, which comes back to the right hon. Gentleman’s point about process, is that we sent to the House of Lords a short, well drafted and tightly focused Bill. Usually, the House of Lords argument and its criticism of this House is that we send it long, badly drafted and ill thought through legislation, which the House of Lords then has to improve. In this case, we sent the other place a short, tightly focused, well drafted Bill that does one very specific thing; it then made the Bill longer and reduced the quality of the drafting. We should help their lordships out this afternoon by getting rid of their poorly drafted amendments and sending the Bill back to them in the same expertly drafted form in which it started.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
The simple truth is this: deal or no deal, vote or no vote, positive vote or negative vote, this process is irreversible; we are leaving the EU and that is what the people want.
Mr Harper
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that.
Let me now deal with the two Lords amendments that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is inviting the House to disagree with. The first one relates to EU nationals, and I have listened carefully to the debate we have just had on it. I believe I heard the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) suggest to the Secretary of State during it, from a sedentary position, that he could put people’s minds at rest by accepting the amendment. I fundamentally disagree with that.
If we read what the amendment actually says, as opposed to what people have asserted it says, we find that all it says is that the Government should bring forward proposals within three months to deal with people who are legally resident in Britain. I think this is faulty for three reasons. First, the inclusion of “three months” puts in place an arbitrary time limit, which will be decided by judges if people challenge it. This may happen in the middle of the negotiation process that the Secretary of State is going to carry out to secure the rights of British citizens and it could well disrupt that process.
The second and more important point is about the fact that the amendment refers to those who are “legally resident” in the country today. Two groups are involved here, and I would like to be more generous to one and less generous to the other. The first group comprises those whom we have discovered perhaps did not understand EU legislation, which says, “You are legally resident here if you are a student or you are self-sufficient only if you have comprehensive health insurance.” Many people fail that test; I think it would be sensible for us to take a generous approach when legislating for people to be able to stay here, but the amendment, as drafted, does not suggest we do that. I think the Government could be more generous to EU nationals who are making their lives here than the amendment proposes—I think that would be welcome.
John Redwood
Does my right hon. Friend agree that if we get to the point where all our proceedings, debates and votes have to be put into legislation and are subject to court action, we cannot proceed—we will cease to be sovereign?
Mr Harper
That point is very well made and it leads me on to my next point. There is another group of EU nationals, who are unlike those we have already been talking about, whom we all want to protect and are here working and contributing. A significant number—although they are only a small percentage—of EU nationals in Britain have broken the criminal law. There are 4,500 EU nationals in prison. They are legally resident in this country. Lords amendment 1 would mean that when they were released from prison after they had served their sentence, it would be very difficult for my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, who is sitting on the Front Bench, to remove their right to stay in this country and deport them to their home country, which is what I want us to do. I would like us, as a country, to be more generous to those who come here to work, contribute and study, but to be less generous to those who come here to break our laws and violate the welcome we give them and the trust we place in them. I do not want to fetter the hands of Ministers in doing that. The amendment is poorly drafted and does not provide that reassurance, so I ask the House to reject it.
The final thing I shall say about EU nationals relates to the point made by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). I listened carefully to what she said about her Lithuanian constituent—I hope her constituent will forgive me, but I did not catch her name. I hope that when she was talking to her constituent, the hon. and learned Lady was able to reassure her by explaining the clear assurances that the Prime Minister of her country has placed on the record about wanting to make sure that people like that constituent are able to stay.
Joanna Cherry
I am very happy to confirm exactly what my constituent said, as the right hon. Gentleman has brought it up. She cannot apply for permanent residency because she does not have comprehensive sickness insurance. I advised her that the Exiting the European Union Committee, on which I serve, has asked the Government to rectify that matter and that, as yet, they have not done so.
Mr Harper
I am pleased that the hon. and learned Lady made that point. Had she listened to my remarks, she would have heard me say that there are constituents who thought they were here legally, but who, because they do not have comprehensive health insurance, are not actually legally resident. As drafted, Lords amendment 1 would not provide such people with reassurance. I said that, as a former Immigration Minister, I would be minded to be generous to constituents like the hon. and learned Lady’s, which is why I want a deal and for my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to introduce immigration legislation to sort out the situation. The amendment would do no such thing, and people should not mislead anyone by telling them that it would. My hon. Friends should reject it.
Mr Harper
If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I shall move on to Lords amendment 2, because I am conscious that other Members wish to speak.
Lords amendment 2 is about a meaningful vote. Essentially, the issue falls into two parts. The Government have already said that they will bring decisions before the House if the Prime Minister strikes a good deal both on our article 50 divorce negotiations and on our future trade relationships. There is, though, a good reason for not putting this in statute: as soon as we do, we enable people to challenge the process—to go to court and frustrate the ability of this House and the Government to conclude the negotiations.
On the final part of Lords amendment 2, which my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) set out very carefully, there are two parts to my objection. First, I do not agree with the Labour party. If we say that either the House of Commons or the House of Lords is able to frustrate our leaving the EU in the event of getting a deal that we do not think is a good one, I think they will absolutely do so. I listened carefully to what my right hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) said, and I could not help but think that the conclusion to her remarks was that she wanted us to stay in the EU if we got a bad deal. That seemed to be the conclusion of what she said.
Anna Soubry
I am grateful for the opportunity to make myself clear. I said that if we do not get a deal, the matter should come back to Parliament and we should consider all options, given the circumstances that we would find ourselves in. It may well—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] I am so sorry; I thought we lived in a democracy, but I have obviously got that completely wrong. It is hard to see how we would go back on our decision to leave the EU.
Mr Harper
I listened carefully to my right hon. Friend. As I have said before in the House, the referendum asked an unconditional question: whether we should remain or leave. We did not say to the public—though some people think that we should have done—“If we get a really fabulous deal, we should leave.” I was on the remain side of the argument, but I accept that the people of the United Kingdom made a different decision. It behoves us all to support the Prime Minister in getting the best possible deal, given that we are leaving. Even if there is a bad deal that we cannot accept, we are still leaving the European Union. That is why I urge my hon. and right hon. Friends to disagree with both Lords amendments.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. Only 40 minutes remain. I am keen to call as many hon. and right hon. Members as possible, but I need Members to help each other.
Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)
The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) argued that we should not support the two amendments because they are justiciable; on that basis, we might as well pack up and go home, because everything that we put in legislation is justiciable.
I rise to support the two amendments, and I draw the House’s attention to the unanimous recommendation of the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union, which I have the privilege of chairing: the Government should now make a unilateral decision to safeguard the rights of EU nationals in the United Kingdom. I say to the Secretary of State that the only argument against doing that, and against the Lords amendment, is that someone might be prepared to put the status of those 3 million EU citizens into play in the negotiations. That raises the question of how exactly that would be done, and to what purpose. It is precisely because the Secretary of State, and indeed the Prime Minister, have been so clear in saying to the House “We intend to ensure those people’s status and rights” that no one in the Chamber believes that the Government would be prepared to put those people’s status into play in the negotiations. If the Government are not prepared to do that, why not do the right thing now, and tell those people that they can stay?
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
Is the Government’s position on EU citizens not based on a fiction? If they did not grant EU citizens the right to stay, presumably they would remove those who could not stay from the United Kingdom, but the Minister for Immigration has said that the Government do not know where EU citizens are in order to remove them from the United Kingdom. It is an empty threat, so why cause all this stress?
Hilary Benn
I agree with my hon. Friend entirely. The whole House knows that that course of action cannot be contemplated, so the Government should follow the advice of the Select Committee.
On Lords amendment 2, I listened carefully to the arguments that the Secretary of State advanced, but I say to him gently that I do not think they would have persuaded him in his previous incarnation, before he became Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Let us just pause for a moment on the point that the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) raised about the incentive to offer a bad deal. If that argument holds any sway, it held sway when Ministers said at the Dispatch Box, “Yes, we will give you a vote on a draft deal.” It cannot be the case that if the Government offer a vote on a draft deal, it does not raise the possibility of a bad deal being offered, whereas if we in this House vote to put that vote on a deal on the statute book, it does raise the possibility of a bad deal being offered. The two arguments are wholly inconsistent, and the House is not persuaded.
I also listened carefully to the language used by the Secretary of State, who I see is engaged in earnest conversation. He talked about our being able to act without our hands being tied, and to pass the Bill “without any strings attached”. We in this House are not strings; we are part of our democracy, and we are very attached to that democracy. Lords amendment 2 is not about seeking to reverse the decision of the referendum. Like the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), I and many others voted for this legislation because we respect the outcome of the referendum, but it is about Parliament deciding, in either eventuality, on how we leave the European Union. There is a terrible irony here. We are hearing the voices of those who, in the course of the referendum, used the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty as one of their principal arguments for voting to leave the EU, but whose enthusiasm for that sovereignty disappears in a puff of smoke when the House is asked to put that sovereignty on the statute book.
Finally, I say to the right hon. Gentleman that it is now time to put behind us the matter of who voted leave or remain in the referendum. We should come together and put aside division, including the division that is being urged on us by others in this Chamber. I say to him that having Parliament behind him in these negotiations and knowing that, in the end, the Government must account to Parliament for what they are able to achieve in those negotiations is not a weakness for this country, but a strength, and the sooner the Government recognise that, the better.
Seema Kennedy (South Ribble) (Con)
I campaigned for remain in last year’s referendum, believing that it was in the best medium-term economic interests of my constituents. I did so having stood on a manifesto that promised the British people a vote on our membership of the EU and that promised to honour the result of the referendum whatever the outcome.
We must remember in this place that a record number of people—a massive 72% of electors—turned out to vote on 23 June, bucking recent electoral trends. Many of my constituents, already in their 40s, had never ever voted before because they thought that, until then, their voices and their votes did not count. They voted in June for the first time. Contrary to what commentators on both the left and the right say, these people are not simpletons, and they are not children; they are adults with as much right to vote as any of us. They knew the risks of voting to leave and they did so anyway. We must respect that decision and not seek to undermine it.
Seema Kennedy
No, I will not give way, because there are so many Members who wish to speak.
The Bill before us is the legal mechanism by which the Prime Minister can begin withdrawal negotiations. All Members, on whichever side of the House they sit and whichever nation they represent, must wish that these negotiations are successful. There is no doubt that those negotiations will be protracted and difficult, but it is in the best interests of our constituents that we give our Prime Minister and her team of Ministers the strongest hand possible. Lords amendment 2 hampers that ability.
Seema Kennedy
If the hon. Lady listens, I will elucidate.
The preconditions required would mean that whatever the British negotiating team were to say, our EU counterparts would think that they could frustrate, delay or even veto any deal. Certainty was the No. 1 priority in the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech. How can there be any certainty for our businesses, our constituents or even our European partners if there is a prospect of endless review by this place?
Seema Kennedy
I have already said that I will not give way.
Lord Hill, who is a man of great experience in EU negotiations, said this of our European counterparts:
“They need to know that what our negotiators say our negotiators can deliver.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 February 2017; Vol. 779, c. 32.]
I therefore urge all right hon. and hon. Members to reject the Lords amendments and give the Prime Minister the strongest possible hand in her negotiations.
Alex Salmond
I have only three points to make in the time that I have available.
When my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) asked the Secretary of State whether he would be prepared to deport these European nationals in our midst, he said, rather significantly, “No, of course not, not somebody with my liberal credentials stretching over so many years.” That is the case, and it would be the case for every Member here—with perhaps one or two exceptions whom we shall not name. The vast majority of this House would not countenance ever doing that, which is why, as the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) has just said, those European nationals cease to be any sort of bargaining chip. Even if we thought that the International Trade Secretary was right to say that they were an important card to play—even if we thought that that was acceptable language—they are not a card that we can play. It is like a nuclear deterrent: if we are not going to press the button, it is not a deterrent. If we are not prepared to follow through on deportation or to use people in that way, it cannot be a bargaining chip or a card to play. Therefore, the correct course of action for the Government is, unilaterally, to accept and secure the position of our fellow citizens working and contributing among us. There is no possibility of their being effective as a bargaining chip in negotiations. I call on the Government to do the right thing and accept Lords amendment 1.
Yesterday, the nation was transfixed as we tried to interpret the latest Government policy on Brexit. Should we follow the advice of the Foreign Secretary, who was on one channel, when he said that it would be no problem if we had to resort to World Trade Organisation terms? Or should we follow the advice of the International Trade Secretary, who on another channel was saying, yes indeed, it would be a problem? In fact, we were all watching the wrong people. We should have been watching the Brexit Secretary on the “Andrew Marr Show”, because he was actually getting to the guts and the nub of the problem. Andrew Marr asked, “So what happens if they don’t accept it?”—referring to our voting down the deal that the Government bring to us in a meaningful vote. The Brexit Secretary answered, “That is what’s called the most favoured nation status deal with the World Trade Organisation.”
When this Bill was in Committee, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central and others were trying to tempt a commitment out of the Minister of State when he appeared at the Dispatch Box with a flourish—with as much of a flourish as the Minister’s parliamentary style allows—and told us that the Government intend us to have a meaningful vote. Member after Member asked him what would happen in this meaningful vote if we decided to reject the Government’s terms. We had the answer yesterday from the Brexit Secretary: WTO terms. It is absolutely clear: our deal or no deal; our way or the highway. No vote can be described as meaningful if the alternative is the damage of WTO terms.
Given your injunction to be brief, Mr Speaker, I will come to my final point. We are asked why we do not just accept the word of the Brexit Secretary and these other chaps and chapesses in the Government when they tell us that we do not need to put things into legislation. Can I quote a little bit of history here and show Members what assurances we have been given in Scotland on this legislation? On 15 July last year, The Daily Telegraph said:
“Theresa May has indicated that…she said she will not trigger the formal process for leaving the EU until there is an agreed ‘UK approach’ backed by Scotland.”
I admit that that does not come from Hansard, but surely The Daily Telegraph is the nearest the Tories can have to an Official Report. That promise has been swept away. That commitment has been broken, as indeed was the reaction to the Scottish Government’s argument to keep us all within the single market. It was not regarded seriously, and we were not even consulted before the Prime Minister dismissed that as an alternative.
Then there was the compromise: let Scotland stay within the single marketplace, even if this Government are determined to drag the rest of the UK out of it. That was not even given serious consideration. We have had no substantive reply in the past three months, because, in their arrogance, this Government believe that the views of the 48% across the UK, of the Members of the House of Lords, of the Tory Back Benchers who have their doubts, and of the nations in this country, two of which voted for remain in the referendum, do not matter. They can be swept aside as we proceed headlong to the hard Brexit cliff edge. Today, in Scotland, perhaps the Government were disabused of that notion, because there might not be a meaningful vote in this Chamber, but there shall be a meaningful vote in Scotland about protecting our millennium-long history as a European nation.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. With extreme brevity now from both sides of the House, I call Sir William Cash.
Sir William Cash
First, this is a very simple Bill that is merely about notification and triggering. It is as simple as that. Secondly, the plain fact is that judicial review, which my right hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) dealt with so well, would be a gift to the courts and the lawyers. It really is completely inappropriate. My third point is on the question of parliamentary sovereignty. The fact is that the issue today is not about parliamentary sovereignty. In fact, it is about undermining a decision that has been made by a referendum of the British people that was itself conferred by a sovereign Act of Parliament. That is the distinction and that is what we need to concentrate on.
My last point is simply this: we cannot tie the Prime Minister’s hands. It is inconceivable that we would legislate, make that judicially reviewable and, at the same time, pass amendments the effect of which would be to introduce a Committee of Parliament that would decide on questions that have to be decided on by the Government. Our constitution operates by parliamentary government, not by Committee of Parliament, otherwise we would go back to the 17th century; and I invite people to look at the Barebones Parliament.
Emma Reynolds
I rise to make two brief points. First, if we do not deal, now or in the next three months, with the issue of EU nationals here or UK nationals in the EU 27, those people will get caught up in the negotiations, because the Council is due to respond to the triggering of article 50 in May or June, after the French elections on 7 May. We expect the Council to give Michel Barnier a mandate at around that time. If the Government continue to drag their heels on this issue, which is important not only for EU nationals here, but for our nationals elsewhere, the certainty and uncertainty provoked will affect those people and their livelihoods for two years. What are the Government going to do once the formal negotiations begin on article 50, on the money and on all the things about which there will be such acrimony? How will the Government avoid EU nationals here and UK nationals in the EU being part of those negotiations? The Secretary of State did not provide an answer to that question. We have a short window of time, which will probably start tomorrow and end sometime in May or June.
Secondly, I reiterate something said by the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) in her eloquent speech. Some hon. Members on the Government Benches want us to leave without a deal, but what deal is worse than no deal? I find it difficult—in fact, impossible—to conceive of one. There is not one, and the right hon. Lady said that very clearly. Is falling back on WTO rules, with all the tariffs and obstructions to trade that go with that, better than some other deal that the Government can conceive of? What is this weird deal that they are talking about? There simply is not one. This House needs to have a say, whether there is a deal or not.
The Government have given very little clarity about what happens if—we are told that they are preparing for this eventuality—a deal is not agreed between the UK and our European partners. That would be the very worst situation. The Secretary of State has spent his political career espousing and promoting parliamentary scrutiny and sovereignty—well, he used to, before he got his current position. Could we really leave the EU without a deal and without this Parliament having a say? Of course we could not. Why do the Government not just admit that and put it on the face of the Bill?
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. A three-minute limit on each Back-Bench speech will now apply.
Mr Grieve
I want to support the Government in carrying out an efficient and effective Brexit but, after listening to some of the contributions this afternoon, I think I am living in wonderland.
I will focus solely on Lords amendment 2, particularly subsection (4). The first thing to understand is that, as matters stand, there will be a need not for resolutions of this House, but for primary legislation to complete the process. In fact, there will be a need for primary legislation even if we have no deal at all. I do not know when the Government want to deal with that. They could conceivably try to do it during the course of the great repeal Bill, but they have not suggested that that is what the great repeal Bill—which is, in fact, an entrenchment Bill—is all about. So it seems that if there is no deal at the end of the process, there will have to be primary legislation passed by this House, if that has not already been done.
Interestingly, far from the Lords trying to lead to great litigation, their view—if the Government bother to read Lord Hope’s speech—was that litigation could be avoided by tabling the amendment and providing for a resolution mechanism at the end. I can promise my hon. and right hon. Friends who think that there is some whizzo way of getting around the litigation that, if they do not follow proper constitutional process, there will be litigation, and that litigation will hold matters up.
Now, I am not so concerned about amendment 2. I am concerned about getting an assurance from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union that, if there is no deal at the end of the process, which will be a very significant moment in this country’s history, Parliament has an opportunity to debate and vote on that. Far from that being an obstruction of the process, I would expect it to be part of the normal constitutional process and the Government to seek the endorsement of the House for that very significant act. I worry that my right hon. Friend—who, I think, personally may well agree with me—has been prevented from saying that at the Dispatch Box. I am afraid that I am not prepared to follow processes that appear to be, frankly, deranged.
There is a clear way of doing things. If we follow them, we will come up with the right decisions at each point; if we do not, we will mire ourselves in chaos. I want to support the Government, but I have to say, most reluctantly, that if we persist with this, I cannot support the Government this evening when it comes to amendment 2. I am very sorry about that. I would like to be able to support the Government because the critique of the Lords amendment has some force, but someone has to put down a marker that we have to follow a proper process in the way in which we carry out Brexit.
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
I commend the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) for his speech. Notwithstanding my obvious support for the Lords amendment on EU nationals, I urge Government Members to think carefully about what they are being asked to do by Ministers today. The Lords have already inserted into the Bill the amendment to give Parliament a meaningful vote, and Ministers are asking hon. Members tonight to wrench that out of the Bill and delete it. As the Bill stands, it provides that parliamentary scrutiny and authority. Government Members should ask themselves whether they really want actively to go through the Lobby and delete that from the text of the Bill.
Ministers have asked hon. Members to do a number of things. They say, “Don’t tie the hands of the Prime Minister. Whatever you do, give her unfettered power to negotiate in whatever way she likes.” I say to those Ministers and to hon. Members that we should not be putting power entirely in the hands of one person—the Prime Minister—without any insurance policy whatever. With the greatest respect to Ministers, the Prime Minister decides who is on her Front Bench, and parliamentary democracy is the insurance policy that we need throughout the process. We should not be frightened or shy of that. We should welcome it because it is a strength and it is a part of the process.
The Government say, “Take back control.” Yet at the same time they are asking us to muzzle Parliament for the next two-year period by saying, “Well, whatever happens, Parliament may not have a say on that.” We could find ourselves in circumstances where the European Union offers a really good deal but the Prime Minister, singularly, on her own—or his own, of course, because it depends on who the Prime Minister is in two years’ time—could say, “Absolutely no deal.” This Parliament would have no choice but to accept that. We would have no say on the matter.
Ministers ask us to accept their verbal assurances. Well, Ministers are here today, but could be gone tomorrow. May I speculate that we could have a different Prime Minister by the time we get to spring 2019? Who knows? It is possible that the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson)—the Foreign Secretary, no less—could be Prime Minister one day. He said at the weekend that it would be
“perfectly okay if we weren’t able to get an agreement.”
He could be Prime Minister—Government Members do not know—and that would be the situation we would have to face, with no votes and no rights for Parliament. Verbal assurances are not sufficient.
Mr Duncan Smith
Under your instructions, Mr Speaker, I am going to be brief. I want to deal specifically with the first amendment—I thought the second amendment was well dealt with by my right hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper).
We have heard a lot in this debate, and we heard a lot in the other place, about the emotional end of what it is to give EU citizens some kind of reassurance, and I myself am publicly on the record as saying I would like to have done that by this point. However, I remind people that we also have UK citizens. The ex-leader of the Liberal Democrats, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg), rightly went on about his own family, but I have a sister who has lived and worked in Italy pretty much all her life, and she has retired there. It behoves this place not to dismiss the concerns and worries of such UK citizens quite as lightly as they were dismissed in the other place and have been dismissed here today. I actually heard it said from the Opposition Benches that the reason we should not be so concerned about those UK citizens is that many of them are older and, therefore, pensioners, so they are less important. That is wrong, and I encourage the Government to stick to their plans to deal with the two issues together.
However, the thing about the amendment is that it is not actually what all this emotional argument is about. For those who want to guarantee these rights, this is not the amendment for doing so—it actually does the exact opposite, and that is for two reasons. First, it does not reassure EU nationals over here. I have had conversations with various EU nationals, and they do not feel in the slightest bit reassured by the idea that we are going to call the Government back three months after we have triggered article 50 to ask them what they plan to do. That is no reassurance, and it does not give EU nationals their rights, so we are not voting to reassure them at all.
The second element is that the amendment actually damages the Government’s position in the negotiations. Let us imagine there has been no agreement about what to do with UK citizens. On the three-month mark, the European Commission knows full well that the Government will be dragged back to the House to explain publicly what their plans are, regardless of the negotiations. I can think of nothing worse than to bind their hands in the worst way possible and make sure that UK nationals do not get reciprocal arrangements.
My point tonight is that, whatever the realities of what people want, neither amendment satisfies the requirement to protect EU nationals or to give this Parliament a meaningful vote without damaging the prospects for the Government’s negotiations. I urge the House not to vote for the amendments, and I remind those on the Opposition Benches who talk endlessly about parliamentary sovereignty that, for the 25 years I have sat in this place, all the arguments about the EU have been dismissed on the basis that we were not allowed to amend a single European treaty.
Helen Goodman
I wish to speak particularly to amendment 2, which is very similar to new clauses 99 and 110, which we debated about a month ago.
Conservative Members have complained about Lord Pannick’s drafting. When Ministers make that complaint, I feel it is slightly disingenuous, because they had the opportunity to amend the amendment. If they really felt the other place should not be involved, they could have changed the drafting to say not “both Houses of Parliament” but only “the House of Commons”, or they could have taken out subsection (4), which provides for what we do if there is no agreement with the EU. They have not done that, so they are making the bar higher for their colleagues behind them. In any case, either it is a problem that the House of Lords has a veto, because it is an unelected Chamber, or it is not a problem. It seems the Prime Minister made a promise that the vote would come to both Houses, so she does not seem to think it is a problem, and I do not know why it is being put up as a problem now.
The right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) took us on a long perambulation about what might or might not happen. That was completely unnecessary: if we had the amendment on the face of the Bill, we would, in effect, make it part of the constitutional arrangement, which, under article 50, has to be respected by the EU counter-parties in the negotiation.
Mr Grieve
The hon. Lady makes a very good point, because in the last debate we had, we discussed the possibility of being up against the wire. However, it seems to me on reflection that, in actual fact, if our own constitutional processes are not finished, we could not simply fall off the edge of the cliff until we had finished them, and I believe that to be the view of the lawyers in the European Commission as well.
Helen Goodman
I am very grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for that intervention.
The point I was going on to make was that it is obviously reasonable for us in this House to have a vote, not just because we all believe in democracy, and not just because the campaigners for leaving argued on the basis of parliamentary sovereignty, but because the European Parliament will have a vote. How can Ministers stand at the Dispatch Box and say it is all right to have constitutional arrangements that give Members of the European Parliament a vote and do not give us a vote?
There is one final thing I want to say about the risks of leaving without an agreement. The right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) set out extremely well what the problems are, but I think they could be even worse than leaving on WTO terms. For us to have an agreement with the WTO, we require every member of it to agree that we should have one. After everything that has happened, does the Minister really think that the President of Russia is going to do us that favour?
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. I would like to accommodate a number of other colleagues. It is not compulsory to speak for the full three minutes. There is a prize for anybody who can do it in a minute.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Until the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) spoke, I was afraid I was the only person who was having a bit of a flashback to the endless nuclear arms control negotiations of the 1980s, and there are, indeed, a couple of parallels, to which I will allude very briefly.
The first, on Lords amendment 1, is that the question we are asking ourselves is whether we should make a one-sided gesture, regardless of the fact that it would leave our own citizens exposed. We made it clear from the outset that we would agree to guarantee the rights of EU citizens here if other countries would do the same for our citizens in those countries. Why is it that that suggestion has not been seized with both hands? One has to say that that indicates that there are some problems with the way in which the EU intends to go about its negotiations with us.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Dr Lewis
No, I will not.
The way forward would have been for the EU to say straightaway, “Yes, you’re making this offer. We accept it. No problem.”
However, the second point, on the second amendment, is the more important one. We have heard it said repeatedly from the Opposition Front Bench and from elsewhere in the Chamber that no deal is the worst possible outcome for Britain. Put another way, that is like saying that any deal at all is better than no deal, and I would like to draw a parallel with those arms negotiations in the 1980s. The most successful negotiations were those that led to the treaty in 1987, when we got rid of all the cruise missiles and Pershing missiles on our side, and the Russians got rid of all the SS-20s. It happened like this: we carried out our threat in the negotiations, and the other side walked away from the negotiating table, but when they saw we meant it, they came back, and they gave us a better deal. What we have to remember is this: no deal may lead to a better deal a year or two down the road. If you are determined to take any deal rather than no deal, you will end up with a much worse deal than you might otherwise have had.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
I shall vote against both the amendments on the simple basis that this Bill has one purpose and one purpose only: to give legal effect to the decision of the people on 23 June. Any amendments that go beyond that are inappropriate to the Bill.
However, I look to the Secretary of State to give firm assurances that his top and first priority will be the rights of EU citizens; that he acknowledges that that will require a bespoke EU citizenship right to remain, to accommodate such problems as health insurance; and that we will act on that as our opening gesture in the negotiations, to set the right tone.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)
I will vote against the amendments tonight. I want briefly to address amendment 2 on the final vote. As others have said, it is quite wrong for noble Lords to abrogate for the other place a right of unelected peers to veto Brexit at the 11th hour. But more than that, it would be entirely counterproductive as a matter of diplomatic practice, with Jean-Claude Juncker talking about the possibility of the UK rejoining the EU, to start these negotiations signalling that a lousy deal might lead the UK to reverse its decision. That would be surest way to elicit the worst terms. I understand the legitimate concerns and anxieties in all parts of the House at this very delicate moment for our country’s history, but the truth is that we cannot legislate away legitimate concerns that we have, whether we voted leave or remain, and we cannot legislate for every permutation of these negotiations. We have to trust the Government and support the Government. Yes, scrutinise this, but for heaven’s sake do not weaken it at the very outset of these crucial negotiations. We have debated a one-clause Bill for six weeks.
In summing up, I want to draw approvingly on the view expressed in other place by the noble Lord who headed up the remain campaign—Lord Rose. He made it very clear that in his view the Government should be given the flexibility they deserve and need to get the best deal for the country, and that it is incumbent on all politicians of all parties to rally behind the Government so that they can get the best deal for the whole country. I commend the noble Lord, and I will vote against the amendments.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. The Secretary of State would like a minute to wind up, with the leave of the House. I am bound to say that that seems reasonable, but I require the co-operation of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and of the House.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
We live in very strange times. The campaign to leave the EU was based to a very great extent on the idea of restoring parliamentary sovereignty. Indeed, the Government’s White Paper asserts:
“The sovereignty of Parliament is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution.”
Yet Ministers seem set on opposing any attempt to guarantee a meaningful role for Parliament in the process of withdrawing from the EU. Instead we are being asked to write a blank cheque to give Ministers power to withdraw the country from the EU on whatever terms they like—or worse, on no terms at all. Ministers seem to regard their colleagues as little better than lemmings. Faced with the prospect of falling off the cliff edge, we are apparently meant to suspend all judgment and blindly follow wherever they lead. But to allow Ministers to proceed in this way would be an extraordinary and unforgivable abdication of parliamentary responsibility. The manner and terms on which we withdraw from the EU will have implications for the rights and interests of every citizen and business for many years to come, and Parliament must take responsibility for these decisions.
The final deal on trade with the EU will almost certainly need to be ratified at both national and federal level of each EU member state. Lords amendment 2 simply gives the UK Parliament the same power. Do Ministers really want this Parliament to be the single most underpowered of all European Parliaments during that process?
I appeal to colleagues to defy the whipped-up anger of the anti-European press, and to stand up to the ridiculous notion that any and every attempt to give Parliament a role in the Brexit process is somehow a betrayal of the will of the people. It is no such thing—it is simply the exercise of the judgment that we were elected to bring to this House. We were not elected to be lemmings.
Mr David Davis
With the leave of the House, in 60 seconds, Mr Speaker. I start by thanking hon. Members for their valuable contributions. We have heard some formidable speeches. Perhaps that reflects on me. I liked best the ones that were made at my expense.
I will deal very quickly with some of the more important issues. The right hon. Members for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) and for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg), and the hon. Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins), spoke passionately about the rights of the 3 million. I agree. I care equally passionately about the 4 million. I am afraid that I do not agree with the Chairman of the Brexit Committee or the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) in saying that we are using these people as bargaining chips. We are not. By treating them as 4 million, we are stopping any of them being bargaining chips and getting an outcome that will reflect well on this House and on the European Union.
With regard to amendment 2, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), in a brilliant exposition of the Alice in Wonderland consequences of subsection (4), told us why my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) was right to say that we should stay out of the law in these matters.
The simple truth is that last time round we in this House passed this Bill unamended by a majority of 372. I hope that we will send it back with a similar majority and that the House of Lords respects that rejection of the amendments.
Royal Assent
Thursday 16th March 2017
(7 years, 8 months ago)
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