Brexit

Baroness Altmann Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord King. We are here to take note of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, which of course has not happened. I agree with my noble friend Lord Tugendhat that the divisive rhetoric that blames the fact we have not left on a remainer Parliament is entirely wrong. It is the Brexiters who have blocked Brexit. Sadly, extreme Brexiters have taken this Conservative Government further and further from compromise. After two years of negotiations, the withdrawal agreement negotiated with the EU was rejected by Parliament, but not because of remainers or the Opposition. In the third vote in March 2019, Hansard reports that 286 Members supported the withdrawal agreement, including the backstop, while 344 voted against—a 58-vote defeat for the Government. But 28 Conservatives and 10 Democratic Unionist Party Members voted against their Government. If these 38 had supported the deal, there would have been an 18-vote majority and we would presumably not be facing no deal now.

Since then, the current Prime Minister has apparently changed his mind and, despite voting for it in March, has decided that no deal is preferable to accepting the backstop. I have witnessed good colleagues resign the Whip or leave the Tory party altogether, and 21 brave MPs expelled for voting in the national interest against the no-deal Brexit that many agree would be catastrophic for our country and party. Like my noble friend Lord Cormack, I consider these MPs to be people of high integrity and true Conservatives, who should be part of a party that is traditionally a broad church, not a narrow sect that panders to a group of extremists who wish to override the will of Parliament and dismiss court rulings.

Thus far, I am grateful that Parliament and the courts are protecting normal democratic values against the extremes, but I fear politics is being put above democracy and economic logic. We must respect the result of the referendum, but we have done. Pandering to the Brexit Party or ERG extremists, and going back on one’s previous words, are not the normal Conservative values as I understood them. The Prime Minister, in his victory speech after the referendum, on 24 June 2016, declared:

“The most precious thing this country has given the world is the idea of parliamentary democracy”.


This is not just an idea; it is a reality. Our parliamentary democracy does not consist of pitting the public against Westminster and the courts. Parliament has rejected no deal time and again, and many on these Benches are incredulous at current events. Dismissing an 11:0 Supreme Court ruling as “wrong” scarcely squares with the Prime Minister’s pre-referendum promise to make British courts supreme.

Leaving with no deal has no democratic legitimacy. Michael Gove, in April 2016, assured referendum voters that the UK would continue to be part of the EU’s free trade zone. He stated:

“The suggestion that Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and Ukraine would remain part of this free-trade area—and Britain would be on the outside with just Belarus—is as credible as Jean-Claude Juncker joining UKIP”.


No deal means losing our free trade with the EU. As my noble friend the Minister said in his opening remarks that business should be ready for no deal, I ask him when the temporary tariff regime will be published. How will smaller businesses be supported, given that we are just four weeks from 31 October? Could he tell me if there is any democratic evidence that the British people insist that 31 October must be a hard Brexit deadline?

No deal is not the will of the people. For example, in the general election in 2017, more than 17 million people voted for parties opposed to no deal. In the 2019 EU elections, 54% of voters rejected no-deal parties. How does this square with the Prime Minister’s conference speech today that we must,

“dedicate ourselves again to that simple proposition that we are here to serve the democratic will of the British people”?

In his article after the 2016 referendum, the Prime Minister stated that 16 million wanted to remain, so:

“We who are part of this narrow majority … must reach out, we must heal, we must build bridges”—


at that stage, I do not think he meant from Britain to Ireland—

“because it is clear that some have feelings of dismay, and of loss, and confusion”.

I totally support these sentiments, but what has happened to the man who penned them? Today’s supposed plans for the Irish border are, as many noble Lords have pointed out, not necessarily going to produce a deal. They do not seem to be designed to. Therefore, we are still heading either for an extension or no deal— 40 years of integration discarded.

Burke warned against sudden extreme change, so I finish with his wise words, which have helped me keep going in the face of so much madness:

“Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Callanan]

If there are significant matters—of course we are still currently a member of the EU—then we are attending meetings, but not all EU meetings are to do with legislation. A lot of them are to discuss things that might happen, some of which could possibly impact on Northern Ireland, so we review which meetings we are attending on a weekly basis. I would of course be happy to meet the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, to discuss this further.

In concluding this debate, I remind your Lordships that it has been three years since the British people voted in the referendum to instruct the Government to leave the European Union. A number of noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord Birt, Lord McNally, Lord Taverne, Lord Heseltine and Lord Livermore—spoke of having a second people’s vote. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland, even questioned the continued validity of the 2016 referendum. I remind noble Lords again of the Government’s position that more British people voted in the 2016 referendum than for any other course of action in British electoral history. The message from voters in that referendum and the subsequent general election was clear; we cannot continue to second-guess such a clear instruction and we will never support another referendum.

[Baroness Altmann]

I put on the record that the Minister is not quite right. More people voted in the 1992 general election than in the EU referendum.

[Lord Callanan]

I will check the figures; I am not sure that the noble Baroness is correct on that.

I have laid out the ways in which the Government are working to deliver on that instruction and the way in which we are prepared for multiple outcomes. Today we have presented to Parliament and to the public our new proposals on Northern Ireland and Ireland. As I said earlier, I hope that these proposals can provide the basis of a rapid negotiation towards a deal, which is what we want. This will then allow us to focus on a positive future relationship that is in all our best interests.

This Government are looking to the future beyond our withdrawal from the European Union. We are looking ahead to work on the NHS, violent crime and cutting the cost of living. As the Prime Minister said in his Statement in the other place last week, and as he repeated in his speech this morning, what the British public want from the Government is for us to respect the outcome of the referendum in which they gave a clear instruction to deliver a withdrawal from the European Union and for the Government to move on and move forward.