European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard continued) & Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard continued): House of Lords
Thursday 16th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I entirely accept what the noble Baroness says but the key principle here is that we cannot offer a blank cheque in the withdrawal Bill to say that we will automatically join a new programme where the details have still not been agreed. However, none of the mood music coming out, including what the Prime Minister said only 24 hours ago, suggests that we are going to turn our backs on the educational institutions of Europe. We want to be part of it. We are in a rapidly globalising world but the point that I want to make to everyone is that we cannot continue to slavishly focus on the EU. This is why we had the referendum and why, at the 2017 election, the manifestos of 85% of MPs supported leaving. We then had three years of chaos in Parliament and now we finally have a decent mandate to do it. That does not mean that we flounce out of Europe, or that we leave the culture and institutions of Europe. I am sure that we will work proactively to maintain close links.

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

Does the Minister accept that the Chevening scholarship scheme has absolutely nothing to do with Erasmus? As a former Minister responsible for all post-school education, I am familiar with these schemes. The Chevening scheme is for master’s degree-level programmes and for students coming to the UK; it is not for British students going out to other countries, whether in Europe or elsewhere. Why the Minister’s officials have put this in his speech, and why he does not realise that it has absolutely nothing to do with Erasmus, I simply cannot imagine.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I can answer that. The point is that nearly every Peer who joined the debate on this amendment was mourning the leaving of Europe. Many of them just said, “We are very sad to be leaving the EU”, but we have got to get beyond that. In two weeks’ time, we are going to be an outward-facing country looking to the rest of the world. The reason that I mentioned Chevening—I put it into the speech, not officials—is because I had direct experience of it recently. I was sent to the OECD conference on education in Argentina about 18 months’ ago. I met the Education Minister, and it is those sorts of contacts which will help the future of this country. I accept that Chevening is a master’s degree programme and that it is for high-potential future leaders, but it is about the connection between institutions in our country and other countries.

European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister has promised former Labour voters in the north and the Midlands who voted Conservative for the first time that he will look after their needs and that he will increase their prosperity. To keep to his promise, he must negotiate a deal with the EU that retains as much as possible of the UK’s trade with EU countries on the best possible terms and which commits us to EU standards on the rights of workers and on the environment. He must also ensure that our economy produces sufficient revenue to improve the public services on which these voters depend and indeed hope desperately will meet their needs.

This Bill falls short in many respects of what is required to achieve all that, including proper scrutiny by Parliament. In a parliamentary democracy, taking back control, which many of these voters saw as an outcome of Brexit, means, as many speakers have emphasised, that Parliament, which represents the people, must be able to scrutinise the process of implementing Brexit and to hold the Government to account. Brexit will not be done, as Mr Johnson would have us believe, when this Bill becomes law on or around 31 January. There will be many months of complex negotiations before it is implemented and therefore done.

Like other speakers, I ask why on earth we are setting an unrealistic target of 31 December of this year to complete the negotiations when both Michel Barnier and Ursula von der Leyen in Europe have made it clear that it will not possible, as have many experts on trade negotiations in this country. The work entailed requires patience, pragmatism and attention to detail, not silly and unrealistic deadlines. Allowing only 11 months to negotiate a deal on both trade and security makes no sense and once again we risk crashing out because that artificial deadline, written into legislation, will not be achieved. By all means have a target date, but do not legislate for one.

Will the Minister tell us a little more about the content of the negotiations? Does he accept that they must cover not just tariffs, quotas and rules of origin, but our enormously important service sector on which so much of our economy depends? That includes access to databases, in particular those relating to terrorism, international crime and other security issues, as well as aviation, the safety of drugs vital for the NHS, co-operation on consumer rights and climate change, to name but a few.

I turn now to climate change. I hope that the Minister will agree that there should be no lowering of environmental standards or protection. We must protect both current and future standards so that future generations will benefit not from any kind of weakening but, indeed, strengthening. In that way we will meet the aspirations of young people. To prevent any regression through, for example, second legislation at a later date, there needs to be a non-regression statement set out in primary legislation.

There are two other areas where this Bill is far less acceptable than the original. The first is the dropping of strong protections for workers’ rights which were in the internationally legally binding part of the deal agreed by Mrs May. Can the Minister say why these have been dropped? We would be naive to accept an assurance that they will be restored in a future trade Bill because they should be in this Bill. The second area is the weakening of protection for child refugees, for whom my noble friend Lord Dubs has fought so hard. If the Minister claims that the Government are still committed to them, why not leave those provisions in the Bill?

I ask the Government to come up with a meaningful role for Parliament along the lines of the amendments passed in this House on the previous trade Bill. There needs to be a framework for post-Brexit trade negotiations. This should apply not only to UK/EU agreements, but to other post-Brexit deals, notably any reached between the UK and the US, about which there is considerable public concern. If the Government reject proper scrutiny through such a framework, it will mean nothing less than contempt for the parliamentary sovereignty that most of us hold so dear.

Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, there have been many failures of leadership in the political process of deciding on what terms and how to leave the EU. By far the greatest has been the lack of any serious attempt at reconciliation by the Government of those in favour of leaving and those in favour of remaining. How many times have we heard the mantra, “The people have spoken”? Yes, they have, but just over half spoke in one way and just under a half spoke in another. In those circumstances, surely it was incumbent on the Government to try to bring a divided country closer together. Surely it would have been right to spend some time listening to remainers as well as leavers and trying to shape a Brexit structure that took into account their views as well. Instead, the Prime Minister rushed into invoking Article 50 and drew red lines, having done little or nothing to promote a consensus. The views of those in her own party who wanted a hard Brexit were allowed to prevail. The Prime Minister’s attempts to reach out to the electorate to persuade them of the merits of the deal, which we are once again debating, were a consequence of desperately trying to conjure up pressure on MPs from their constituents. They were not part of a well thought-out approach to create the more informed debate that should have taken place over the last two years.

We are told that the response of many people was, “Get on with it. We’re fed up with Brexit so we will support your deal, which will bring it to an end”. But are the Government telling them the truth? This is not the end; it is only the beginning. There are months, even years, ahead before the transition period is concluded, which will be marked by yet more bitter argument and in-fighting. The people were told lies when it was claimed that leaving the EU would be easy. We now need honesty about how much more negotiation will be needed, even if Mrs May gets her withdrawal deal.

The choice that the Government are asking Parliament to make between the withdrawal agreement and no deal is dishonest too. I know that there are some people in this House and in another place—whom I will call the Brexit militant tendency—who want to crash out. However, for most of us that prospect is too awful to contemplate, not just because of the economic damage it will do, as the Treasury, the Governor of the Bank of England and the business community have made clear, but because of the threats to our security with respect to terrorism and serious cross-border crime, the huge damage it will do to our world-leading university sector, the chaos at our borders and too many other dire consequences to list in the time available. So we should not be browbeaten to support the Government’s withdrawal deal for fear that no deal might happen. Assuming that the Prime Minister’s deal is rejected, as seems likely, I hope MPs will consider no deal as a matter of urgency, reject it and end any further wasteful and needless expenditure squandered on planning for it.

The many reasons for rejecting the Government’s withdrawal deal have been set out by other speakers, and I shall not repeat them, but two issues are worth re-emphasising. First, it does not allow us to take back control; it actually means losing control. Secondly, the political declaration lacks a clear sense of direction about the Government’s end goals. It is well-meaning, but essentially a list of platitudes.

I am not a fan of plebiscites, but I now accept that if Parliament cannot agree on a way through the current deadlock, it would be right to return to the electorate. I do not accept the argument that that would be undemocratic. By the time of another vote it will be three years since the last one. In those three years, we have learned a great deal that most people did not know before about the many problems posed by leaving the European Union. So many different aspects of the nation’s economic, social and political life after more than 40 years of membership would unravel. In the light of that and with no parliamentary consensus, why is it undemocratic to give people the chance to change their view—or, for that matter, to confirm it?

I end with young people. I have raised their position once before when debating Europe in the House, and I do so again. The evidence of the pressures they are under is clear. They are the first generation to be worse off than their parents at a similar age, and are faced with housing costs they cannot meet, often in insecure jobs, with incomes that are too low for them to save and, if they are graduates, with huge debts to repay. Why on earth would we knowingly choose to jeopardise their future further? It is they who will bear the brunt of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s depressing economic scenario. They have their lives ahead of them and will be more deeply affected by what might happen than most of us. By June next year, there will be three cohorts of young people who were not old enough to vote in the 2016 referendum. A people’s vote would allow them to do so. Many young people are idealistic about being part of a wider international community in Europe and beyond. They seek common ground on issues that concern them, from climate change to the fight against poverty. They dislike narrow nationalism. That is why well over 80% of them want to remain in the European Union. We should let them have their say.

Finally, I want to ask the Minister, when he replies, to tell the House what the Government plan to do if, as expected, they lose the vote on Tuesday. The Prime Minister’s humiliating decision to pull the vote on 11 December wasted five weeks. I believe that it is the Minister’s duty, when he sums up, to indicate what options the Government are considering for the three-day window they will now have. If he merely repeats that we will leave on 29 March without a deal, which is what has been said in this House so many times before, that will be wholly irresponsible and deeply shocking.

Debate adjourned until Monday 14 January.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, no one voted for insecurity. A very strong and powerful case has been made, particularly by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff. This is a simple issue. Disease is no respecter of persons, boundaries or sovereignty. In chasing this mythical beast of sovereignty we seem to be prepared to lay so many things upon the altar that we need not lay.

It has been said in the course of this brief debate that we have no obligation to opt out of the EMA. My reading would support that. So why does a party that has always prided itself, for as long as I have been a member of it—for the last 60 years—on not being doctrinaire erect a doctrine and then seek every opportunity, regardless of the consequences, to jeopardise what exists and works perfectly well? It is a nonsense. I hope that there will be no vote on this amendment—it is a probing amendment—but I sincerely hope that, if the Government cannot accept the irrefutable logic of what has been said, we will return to it on Report and be well prepared to vote on it.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak on Amendment 11 and in support of what my noble friend Lady Thornton, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said. I do so as the former chair of Great Ormond Street Hospital Foundation Trust, which I chaired for more than eight years until last summer. As many noble Lords know, it treats children with rare diseases and very serious illnesses. Much of its ground-breaking and innovative work, which is internationally renowned, is done as a result of, and based on, its research, much of which is carried out in collaboration with colleagues across Europe.

I will illustrate this in three different areas, which I think will bring home to your Lordships just how important it is that we do not abandon or neglect this issue. I will start with childhood cancer. Some 92% of our most important clinical trials for children with cancer in the UK require international collaboration. In 30%, the UK is the lead country, co-ordinating the international collaborative trials. This leadership role would sadly change rapidly if we no longer followed the same regulatory framework for clinical research as the rest of the European Union.

I turn to childhood epilepsies. Children and young people with epilepsies that are resistant to current therapies represent, as a group, at least 137 rare diseases with seizures as a common symptom. Collaborative European multi-centred trials are, I stress, the only way forward in assessing new targeted treatments. There are simply not enough patients in these categories of the many different aspects of epilepsy to do this work in one country alone.

I turn thirdly to children with HIV infection. Trials in paediatric HIV infection over the last 25 years have all been international. The UK works in partnership and collaboration with trial centres throughout Europe, and in particularly close collaboration with Italy, France and Spain. HIV treatment is very fast moving. It is vital that medicines for children do not get left behind. Our important European collaborations, including EU funding of our network, training and capacity building, have ensured the timely availability of drugs for children, not only in Europe but worldwide.

I cannot overstate the concern of the consultants and research specialists involved in this work about the threat posed for them by leaving the European Union. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that, without such work, the lives of very sick children would be sacrificed. I hope we can think again about this.