Brexit: UK-EU Relationship

Debate between Baroness Goldie and Viscount Chandos

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Chandos (Lab)]

My Lords:

“The UK will intensify its relationship with its friends across the channel at an inter-governmental level”.

Those are not the words of a diehard supporter of remain but of the newly appointed Foreign Secretary on 14 July this year, fresh from his leadership of the campaign that secured the referendum vote to leave. What, then, should that relationship be? Five months after the referendum, as other noble Lords have said, the Government have offered no clue as to the nature of the relationship that they would like to achieve. There has been much talk of not compromising our negotiating position by showing our hand but, in reality, the truth is that the Conservative Government were totally unprepared for the outcome of the referendum.

In January 2013, the Conservative Government committed to a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU by the end of 2017 in the event that they won the next general election, and to its inclusion as a condition for any new coalition. They committed to honouring the outcome of the referendum and the then Prime Minister committed to staying on to implement whichever decision the referendum mandated. The Government may ultimately have campaigned for a remain vote, but it was still their responsibility to prepare for either eventuality. Three and a half years after committing to the referendum—nearly twice the length of the negotiating period provided for under Article 50—the Conservative Government had made no preparations of any sort. This casual and negligent arrogance made the Royal Bank of Scotland look by comparison well prepared for the great financial crisis. This is the vacuum that needs to be filled and in the circumstances the Government should welcome and constructively engage with the ideas of others both within Parliament and elsewhere.

I should like to use my remaining time to draw your Lordships’ attention to one such idea—a proposal for a continental partnership put forward by Sir Paul Tucker, the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, and his co-authors, under the sponsorship of the economics think tank Bruegel, and described by the economics commentator Hamish McRae as,

“the most convincing sketch yet of how this relationship might look”.

I believe that the importance of this proposal is not so much its specific suggestions—although they are pretty compelling, in my view—as the signal given by the identity of Sir Paul’s co-authors. They include, writing in a personal capacity, Jean Pisani-Ferry, the Commissioner-General for Policy Planning for the French Prime Minister, and Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Bundestag. The proposal envisages membership of the single market for,

“an outer circle of countries involved in a structured intergovernmental partnership”—

words that echo those of the Foreign Secretary, and an—

“intergovernmental form of collaboration, with no legal right to free movement for workers but a regime of some controlled labour mobility and a contribution to the EU budget”.

Time does not allow for a more detailed summary, and as Hamish McRae suggested, we should perhaps regard it as a good sketch rather than a finished picture. I do not pretend either that the personal views of the authors can be interpreted as a fast track to a done deal, given that we are facing, as the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU has said in his characteristically understated way, the “most complex negotiations” of all time. However, I am more optimistic than my noble friend Lord Livermore that behind the hard-line initial positions taken by EU leaders, mirroring and indeed responding to our own leaders’ rhetoric, there is among the key thinkers at the heart of the EU an understanding of the concerns lying behind the referendum vote and a desire to find a constructive solution of potentially wider relevance. I have no doubt that the Government have this proposal in their in-tray, not least as a founding member and funder of Bruegel.

My honourable friend Keir Starmer has asked the Government 170 excellent Questions but I will ask only two. Do the Government regard the model set out in the proposal as a good sketch from which a final picture could be derived, and will they engage, perhaps through Sir Paul Tucker, in discussions about it?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My Lords, I have to point out that we have a fairly serious overrun. Perhaps I may respectfully remind noble Lords that when the Clock shows “four” they are over time. It does not matter how anxiously noble Lords continue to glance at the Clock, that will not minimise the time by which they run over, it will simply defer and exceed the run-over. I ask for your Lordships’ co-operation so that the moment the Clock shows “four”, they conclude their remarks.