EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I voted for the agreement reluctantly. I would have preferred a clean break and the time to scrutinise the small print for the myriad traps it contains. However, to give credit to the noble Lord, Lord Frost, this agreement does deliver sovereignty, and that matters. While many in this place sneeringly traduce sovereignty as xenophobic nationalism embraced only by knuckle-dragging gammon, it is historically and now the only basis for democratic accountability. The demos voted to remove the unelected legislature in Brussels, unanswerable to UK voters. Now that is a reality, they may look at unelected lawmakers closer to home—good.

Good also that the Government have nowhere to hide and will need to look the electorate in the eye and own each and every decision they make, including the egregious parts of this agreement. Voters matter. Listening to the hours of contributions last week—I was culled from the speakers’ list—I noted a rather self-congratulatory, back-slapping tone from the Government Benches. It rang rather hollow. In truth, it was the perseverance and steely courage of millions of voters, who used the ballot box and electoral vehicles such as the pivotal Brexit Party time and again to pile on the pressure, that forced the Conservative Party finally to honour the referendum. Let us acknowledge that it is the voters who got Brexit done, against all the odds, against the machinations deployed by the highest echelons of the technocratic establishment and against many in this place who really believed that they had the right to overturn 17.4 million votes and shared with Donald Trump a refusal to give loser’s consent and who even now, today, lack the imagination to see life beyond Brussels or Erasmus or to see Brexit beyond the narrow prism of GDP.

Yes, this agreement has flaws, but its existence is proof that a democratic movement can change the course of history. In the context of lockdown Britain, when we will need every ounce of that democratic spirit, bravery and sovereign freedom to rebuild society, it will do for starters.