Leaving the EU: Economic Analysis
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Baker
I have great faith in my hon. Friend, and we of course appreciate the importance of cars, chemicals and food. As I said at the beginning of my response, when the time approaches for us to have a meaningful vote in Parliament, we will put appropriate economic analysis before both Houses to assist the choices that they make. However, we do not expect the European Union to publish all its analysis in a transparent manner, and we do not propose to go into the negotiations having revealed all our thinking.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
I wonder whether the Minister thinks that perhaps the person in the Whitehall establishment who leaked this document would be better off moving, and working in Brussels. Was the methodology used in this report, or whatever it is, the same methodology that said the country’s financial future would tank if we did not join the euro?
Mr Baker
We are carrying out the usual inquiries into who leaked the report. The hon. Lady is absolutely right that past economic predictions have been very poor, and poor for good reasons on which I would love to elaborate on another occasion. I have set out that particular critique of even the Bank of England’s forecasts, and she is absolutely right that, as I said earlier, we should have a healthy scepticism.
Leaving the EU: Implementation
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Walker
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. It is very important that we respect the referendum, which of course Members of this House voted for in huge numbers and then voted to respect. The challenge for the Opposition Front-Bench team is to reconcile its ever-changing positions with that decision.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
Every Minister and Secretary of State, and even the Prime Minister, when asked, has said that we will leave the common fisheries policy at the end of March 2019. Whatever else is happening in this so-called implementation period, will the Minister please confirm now that we will be leaving the common fisheries policy at the end of March 2019 and that we can then discuss which other countries we want to work with in our waters?
Mr Walker
It is clear that the UK will be leaving the common fisheries policy, but we now need to negotiate the terms of the implementation period. The EU has already set out some of its approaches and argues that we will not be playing a continuing role in some institutions. The logic of that is absolutely there. We will be leaving the common fisheries policy and taking control of our waters.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill
Baroness Hoey ExcerptsWednesday 20th December 2017
(6 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 View all European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 20 December 2017 - (20 Dec 2017)
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
My hon. Friend says a number of extreme Brexiteers in this House want to leave at any cost. Does he accept that a small number of Members will do anything—anything—to stop the United Kingdom carrying out the wishes of the British people to leave the European Union?
Paul Blomfield
No, I do not, and it is unfortunate that some people have been characterised in that way, as the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) and others were by some of their colleagues last week. If I can now make some progress—
Mr Dhesi
I rise to speak in favour of amendment 348 and new clause 21. The vote to leave the European Union was an unanticipated shock to the UK economy that increased uncertainty and reduced our country’s expected future openness to trade, investment and immigration with our neighbouring partners, the EU. The pound depreciated by approximately 10% immediately after the referendum. The depreciation raised inflation by increasing import costs of both final goods and intermediate inputs.
Today, according to Citibank analysis, long-run inflation expectations are up to 3.3%, but by June this year the Brexit vote was costing the average household £7.74 per week through higher prices. That is equivalent to £404 per year. Higher inflation has also reduced the growth of real wages; that is equivalent to a £448 cut in annual pay for the average worker. To put it another way, the Brexit vote has already cost the average worker almost one week’s wages owing to higher prices—and we have yet to leave the EU. Amendment 348 refers to impact assessments. We need clear impact assessments to ascertain how such things as well as hard-fought workers’ rights, shared values and environmental protections will be safeguarded.
Several promises were made. Post Brexit, UK Governments will be expected to fulfil the promises made during the referendum campaign. Immigration was, without doubt, a major reason for the result, but at least half of immigrants to the UK every year are from south Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and they are unaffected by EU laws. It would also be difficult to reduce the number of EU citizens in the UK unless there was a misguided programme to expel them and the UK was prepared to countenance similar expulsions of its citizens from the continent. The challenge will be not how to limit in-flows—something that featured so prominently in the leave campaign—but rather how to sustain the much needed flows of EU nationals to fill jobs in sectors such as agriculture, services and construction, an industry I have been involved in for over two decades.
Kate Hoey
I am following my hon. Friend carefully. Does he agree that my constituents’ relatives from the Caribbean should have the same opportunity to come to this country as those from the European Union, who can come here by right? That is part of the reason why many people from ethnic minorities voted leave: they saw that there would be a fair immigration system, not one that was biased towards 27 other countries.
Mr Dhesi
I have listened closely to my hon. Friend, but we will need to wait until the immigration Bill is introduced to see exactly how we will be affected.
Many British voters believe that by favouring Brexit they were voting for greater spending on the national health service and the rest of the British welfare state. Those voters will become even more dissatisfied when they discover that Brexit will not, in fact, provide anything close to the additional £350 million a week for our NHS that was claimed.
New clause 21 refers to clear explanatory statements about what is happening across this entire process. After Brexit, the UK and devolved Governments will need to carry out many functions that are currently the responsibility of Brussels, including everything from customs checks to determining agricultural subsidies. Before that happens, however, much of the civil service will be consumed by managing the leaving process between now and the end of any transition period.
Ultimately, the UK is undertaking an enormous administrative challenge in a very short space of time. The Government are reportedly seeking to employ an extra 8,000 staff by the end of the 2018 to help manage the process, with Departments recruiting heavily in recent months. However, it should be noted that they are starting from a very low base. Public sector employment, as a share of people in work, was below 17% in June 2017, the lowest level since records began in 1999, which suggests that the civil service will be unable to manage Brexit alone and will therefore increasingly need to rely on external actors to undertake many of its functions.
On amendment 348, if the Government cannot even compile impact assessments or sectoral analyses—take your pick—in “excruciating detail,” as the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union said, how will they effectively manage the process? Our Parliament should be sovereign, and collectively we all need to take back control, but the implications for democratic accountability will be quite profound if and when outsourced services fail to meet public expectations.
If the 3 million EU nationals currently in the UK decide to apply to remain after Brexit and those applications are not processed properly by a private contractor, for example, who will be held accountable when people are wrongly forced to leave? On top of that, the sheer complexity of the Brexit process means there will be a range of convenient scapegoats whom the Government could blame when things go wrong.
Mr Baker
I did say that that was the last time I would give way, and I think it is now time for me to—[Interruption.] Yes, it is Christmas, and it is in the spirit of seasonal brevity that I would like to turn to the issue of thanks.
I should first like to thank the Committee for its diligent and well-informed scrutiny of this, the first Bill that I have piloted through Parliament. I am an engineer, not a pilot, however, so perhaps I could be said to have guided it through Parliament. It has been my pleasure to do so. I should like to thank you, Sir David, for your chairmanship, and I thank Dame Rosie, Mrs Laing, the other Sir David, Mr Hanson and Mr Streeter for theirs. It has been a pleasure to serve under all your chairmanships. I should also like to thank the Bill ministerial team, whose advice, support and guidance have been absolutely indispensable.
I should like to thank the Solicitor General, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland), the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) and of course the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker). It would be wrong of me to omit the Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), who unfortunately is not in his place. His occasional guidance to the entire team has been invaluable, and has always been followed.
Finally, and most importantly, I should like to thank all the officials in the Department for Exiting the European Union and beyond who have so diligently risen to the enormous task of dealing with the scrutiny of the Bill. They have guided and assisted Ministers in the preparation of their remarks and they have responded to every query, from the House and from Ministers. We could not possibly have asked for more from them, and they could not have responded more professionally or more energetically. We can be extremely proud of all of the officials who have supported the Bill, as we wish them all a merry Christmas.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir David, and it is also a pleasure to follow the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker). I pay tribute to his calmness and tolerance in taking a very difficult Bill through to this stage. I was around when the Maastricht Bill was going through Parliament, and the way in which he has handled this one is a real tribute to him.
I do not always agree with the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), but I agreed with him when he said that the Bill was about process. I am afraid that, perhaps because we have had eight days in Committee, we have widened our debate into areas that should not necessarily have been discussed today. We have rehashed quite a lot of the debate on the referendum. For me, this is a simple Bill about repealing the European Communities Act 1972.
I welcome the fact that there is now general agreement across the House about the date. I am pleased that it will be set out in the Bill because unlike a lot of Members here, but like my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell), I do not really trust the EU. I therefore always worry that if we are not absolutely clear about what we are doing, the EU will manage to move things, because it would like to delay the process and punish us as much as possible for taking the brave decision to leave. When we look at what we are discussing, we are simply asking to leave the EU. The British people originally voted for a formal economic agreement, but for 40 years we have seen entanglement and legal procedures getting into our country, and we are now having to go through all this to leave.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Ind)
Does my hon. Friend agree that if Parliament appeared to be dragging its feet on leaving the EU when a majority of the people decided that we should leave, the people would get frustrated with Parliament? We have to remember their wishes.
Kate Hoey
I agree. One of the good things about the Minister is that he is not a lawyer, which is perhaps why he has been able to treat this matter with quite a lot of common sense. The debate has been rather taken over by lawyers and lawyer speak, and it is pretty clear that they love things being so technical.
Paul Farrelly
I am certainly not a lawyer. Would my hon. Friend care to explain to the House why she felt unable to support amendment 7 last week? Was it perhaps because, as well as not trusting the EU, she does not trust this House?
Kate Hoey
I certainly trust this House but, to be honest, many of the people who were pushing that amendment saw it as a way of delaying things before we got into the detail of getting an agreement. I did not get called to speak during the debate on amendment 7, but I will not go back over that amendment.
Frank Field
Is it not—[Interruption.] Yes, I am sorry, but I have got in again. One of the truths that we have to bear in mind—people on the outside will remember this even if people on the inside wish to deny it—is that from very word go, according to the great Guardian record of the European experiment, the great fear was that we the British people could not be told where this journey was taking us. Those of us who wanted a date and a time—even a British time—were concerned that large numbers of people throughout our whole history of being in the European Union have never been straight with the British people about where the journey was ending.
Ian Paisley
The hon. Lady has been totally consistent year after year in opposing EU encroachment on British laws. However, there has been not a chirp recently from some of the Members who supported amendment 7. They oppose European encroachment on our sovereignty, but they were very happy to raise some feigned hope about parliamentary sovereignty.
Kate Hoey
No, I will not give way at the moment.
Look at all the different EU regulations and the ways in which the EU has encroached on our country’s rules over the years. Majority voting has meant that we have occasionally been outvoted, and we have therefore been unable to do things that we wanted to do. When we decided that we wanted to leave, it was clear that the EU felt that we had no right to make that decision, which is why it wants to delay and delay.
Kate Hoey
No, not at the moment.
My worry about amendment 7 is what the EU has done before with countries that have voted against something that they did not want. As we get nearer the end, if we do not have an agreement, it will of course be in the EU’s interests to delay if it knows that this Parliament is just waiting to allow more time, and we will therefore just be paying in more and more money. I have a problem even—
Kate Hoey
My hon. Friend may think that I am talking absolute nonsense, but 17.5 million people out there do not.
Let me get back to my reason for speaking today: I oppose new clause 13, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie), and I want to explain why we must leave the customs union. I am very pleased that our Front Benchers have made no remarks about us supporting the new clause, and I certainly will vote against it tonight.
Kate Hoey
I can see. I do not need to be told what to do by my hon. Friend; I have been here quite a long time.
It is very clear that if we stay in the customs union, we cannot cut the kind of free trade deals that we want with the over 80% of the world’s economy that will be outside the EU once we have left. That is not what the British people voted for. They voted to leave for different reasons, but underlying everything for all of them was our getting back the ability to make decisions about what we want to do and who we want to trade with.
Albert Owen
Does my hon. Friend not understand the significance of the June election? The Prime Minister called the election to improve her majority, but it was reduced. That was a game changer in many ways. Many Labour Members increased their majority, including, I think, my hon. Friend.
Kate Hoey
Members who read this year’s Labour manifesto—it was very readable—will know that it was very clear that we had accepted the result, that the British people wanted to leave, and that we were going to leave the customs union and the single market. For once in my life, I am not the rebel on the Labour Benches; the rebels are sitting on my right. I genuinely cannot understand how progressive people who believe in equality, fairness and justice can support—
Kate Hoey
No, I am not giving way any more, because a lot of people want to speak.
The reality is that a customs union actually penalises countless people in some of the world’s poorest countries. It prevents them from selling their goods in Europe, but doing so would help them to develop and mechanise. After this change, we can make our own decisions about how we treat countries, particularly in the Commonwealth, where there are millions of people who have shown huge loyalty and dedication to this country over the years. We betrayed them when we joined the Common Market. Many people in this Chamber did not have a say in that, but we now have the opportunity to pay back. I think that some 80% of the tariffs paid by UK consumers on imports from outside the EU are sent to Brussels, although British shoppers are having to pay more on a range of imports. There is so much more that we could do, because the UK is the only large country in the European Union that does more trade beyond the EU than within it.
Kate Hoey
No, thank you.
We are disproportionately penalised by the common external tariff, so we are actually suffering from being part of the customs union, although it might have helped at one stage. In the future, we have to look outwards and globally. Of course, we cannot sign free trade agreements until we leave. I personally want us to be able to sign and apply them during the implementation period. Let us not forget that everything that the EU says we must do during the implementation period is up for negotiation. We have to be very clear about this: during those two years, we want to be able to go ahead and do the things that we left the European Union to do. We should not completely align ourselves with every dot and comma of EU legislation.
What has upset me most in this debate—a lot of it has come from my own party, but it has also come from the Conservative party—is the negativity about this whole issue that somehow says that we are such an unimportant, small country that leaving the European Union will destroy us for the rest of our lives and destroy our country’s economic future. That is just so wrong.
I believe that we need more optimism. During its existence, the EU has shown real contempt for national Parliaments and their political activities. It has shown real contempt for electorates. It showed real contempt by forcing the Greek Prime Minister out of his job and through its enforcement of huge, huge cuts on Ireland. The EU does not tolerate the political independence and democratic integrity of the modern European nation, and we should know that in this Parliament. When we talk of parliamentary democracy, let us not forget just how many years we have lived without true parliamentary democracy in this country.
I believe that we should be optimistic. We should not see this as some people—perhaps even some members of the Government—seem to see it: as almost a burden that we have to get through as we say, “Yes, we are leaving, and it is a terrible pity, but we are going to make it work just about.” I want us to be optimistic and to be out there saying, “This can work. This can be great.” We are a great country, so let us get on with it. I am delighted that we have got through this Committee stage.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), who represents the part of London in which I live when I am down here working in the House of Commons. We do not agree on this subject. During the debates on this Bill, she has voted with the Government almost as many times as I have voted against the Government. We are going neck and neck, which has been the position between us for the very many years we have both been in this House. We have diametrically different views.
I am afraid that I do not recognise the hon. Lady’s description of the European Union. In our 45 years of membership, it has helped us to become a more significant political force in the world in looking out for our interests, and it has been one of the fundamental bases of our giving ourselves a modern, successful economy, but this is not the time for a general debate.
I speak to new clause 54, which I tabled in co-operation with the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie). The new clause has been signed by a number of Members from both the major parties in this House. As I said in an earlier intervention, compared with the debates on other things, it should be quite easy to get this amendment passed because we drafted it to be entirely consistent with stated Government policy.
New clause 54 seeks to insert the policies set out in the Prime Minister’s Florence speech into the Bill, thereby including that part of what we have so far achieved by way of clear policy, so we can proceed further with the full approval of this House. I know perfectly well that the Minister who drew the short straw of answering today’s debates would immediately turn to some interesting, original and rather obscure arguments why this new clause should not be accepted, which has been the pattern throughout our eight days in Committee.
There have been hardly any concessions of principle. When issues of great moment have been debated, it has been unusual for a Minister to be allowed to engage with that principle. What happens is that a very long brief is delivered, some of it quite essential—this is not a criticism of either the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), or other Ministers, and I do not envy the role in which they find themselves of holding the line on this Bill—in which a Minister goes into tremendous legalistic, administrative and even constitutional niceties without actually debating the subject.
We have already talked about amendment 7, which was passed against the Government. The amendment was all about whether this House should have a meaningful vote on the agreement before the Government bind themselves to it. The Minister on that occasion, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), never joined the debate about a meaningful vote. Indeed, today’s Minister would not when he was drawn into going back into where we are on amendment 7. All kinds of bizarre arguments were produced on why it was not suitable to put this in the Bill, and the House had to assert that it is not going to allow this Government to commit themselves to things that will be of huge importance to future generations, probably affecting our political and trading position in the world for many decades to come, without their first getting approval from this House of Commons for whatever it is they want to sign up to. New clause 54 is an attempt to minimise the risk of that happening again.
EU Exit Negotiations
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Davis
My hon. Friend is right, and that was part of the text that we discussed yesterday. Of course there will be ups and downs and pressure points—that is what negotiations are like. I have to tell the House that yesterday it was not London but Brussels that forecast an instant outcome. We had said that Monday’s discussion was a “staging post”, and we want to get to the outcome by 15 December—full stop.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
I am sure that millions of members of the public think that our Government are not being tough enough with the European Union, and that in these negotiations, we should say clearly that the EU is stopping the continued co-operation—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. I am very keen to accommodate colleagues, and please rest assured that I will do everything I can to do so, but the hon. Lady must be heard.
Mr Davis
The hon. Lady makes a point that is, I am sure, supported by many members of the public. I said at the beginning of the process more than a year ago that I would be unusually courteous and polite to the other side in this negotiation. I will continue to be so, because that is the best way to advance the British cause.
EU Exit Negotiations
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
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Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s firm rebuttal of the ridiculous idea that Northern Ireland would be taken out of the rest of the United Kingdom and made to stay in a customs union. Does he also recognise that the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee recently met the head of customs in Switzerland, which is not in the EU, and the one thing that he said over and again was that there was nothing that could stop this from working if there was full co-operation on all sides? Is that not what this is really all about—if the Republic of Ireland do not want to have a hard border, that can happen?
Mr Davis
The hon. Lady is exactly right. That is true across the board. We were told that a free trade agreement was impossible to achieve, but the former EU Trade Commissioner, Karel De Gucht, said that, no, it was not impossible if the political will was there. The same is true in this case. If the political will is there, this can be done. I am quite sure that the political will is there both north and south of the border.
Exiting the EU: Sectoral Analysis
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years, 6 months ago)
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Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
I am sure that the public will, on the whole, use common sense and agree that this timing is reasonable. May I ask the Minister to make it very clear that, whatever is in these documents that we will be sitting up all night to read when they are published, it will make no change whatever to the policy of this country—that we are leaving the European Union, the single market and the customs union?
Mr Baker
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady, and I agree with her. The Government’s policy follows naturally from the UK’s democratic decision to leave the European Union. We will take back control of our laws, our borders, our money and our trade policy, and I am confident that we will make a success of it.
European Union (Withdrawal) Bill
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has spent more time scrutinising EU legislation and directives than all of us. I am pleased to have been a member of the European Scrutiny Committee for some years now, although we have often felt very alone. We have been up in the Committee Rooms going through documents after documents, realising that we could change very little. The public watching us today will see all this interest. They will look at the time we are spending discussing intense scrutiny and worrying about Henry VIII clauses and statutory instruments, and they may well think, “If only a quarter of that time had been spent by Parliament examining some of the thousands of EU directives and regulations that have simply been imposed on the country.” We have had very little say. As the hon. Member for Stone said, much of what happened in the European Union was behind closed doors. As just one of 28 countries, we were always being outvoted. We had to take those decisions on board many times without being able to change them.
There is genuine concern among many of my colleagues and some Conservative Members about the scrutiny process, including the use of some Henry VIII clauses and statutory instruments. I agree very much with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) that there are mechanisms by which we could bring people together. One problem is that those of us who voted to leave and were pleased with the result genuinely feel that, although a lot of people are saying, “Oh yes, we accept the result of the referendum”, they are doing every little bit of work they can behind the scenes not necessarily to prevent us from leaving, but to make it as difficult and tedious as possible. They want the public to think, “Oh dear. Have we done the right thing?” That comes through from the media and all the people who were strongly in the remain camp, and it does a disservice to our country because, when we are negotiating with the EU, we need to show that both this country and this Parliament are united.
Whatever happens and whatever people in my party say, we will be leaving in March 2019. We want to leave in a way that will maximise certainty and confidence in business. We want to maximise the confidence of the people, many of whom voted remain but who have now decided that they want to get on with it and are saying, “Let’s just do it.” Let us speak up for all the positive things that are happening. We should now recognise that all the dire warnings about the things that would go wrong were, in fact, wrong themselves. We need to be as positive as possible.
I look back on the last Labour Government in which many current Members of Parliament served. In that time, we actually doubled the number of statutory instruments to introduce new laws, so Labour Members are being a little hypocritical. I know there are people in the Labour party who are genuinely so upset that we are leaving the EU, but we should be putting the country’s interests first at this time. We should be deciding that we want to work with the Government, which means that the Government also need to want to work with us. That requires a positive attitude from the Opposition Front Bench. I have been pleased to say that there have been positive attitudes over the past few months, but I now worry about us going against the principle by voting against Second Reading. No matter whether some people genuinely feel that it is the right thing to do, it will be seen by Labour voters in the public—many of whom came back and voted for us, having fraternised with the UK Independence party for some time—as though we are not really serious about leaving the European Union.
I am very disappointed that we will not be supporting the Bill on Monday night. During the course of the debate, I hope that some of my colleagues will actually feel that they should support the Bill, even if they are going to support the reasoned amendment because this Second Reading is the principle. We can then probe with our amendments and new clauses some of the problems—undoubtedly, there are some—with the scrutiny process.
Michel Barnier goes on about the clock ticking, and many people have mentioned that today. It is ticking. But it is actually ticking for the European Union just as much as it is ticking for us in the United Kingdom. It now seems that the only thing at the top of the European Union negotiators’ minds at this moment is money. That is not necessarily true of the individual countries. Over the next few months, I think we will see changes in some European Union countries that really want to get a good deal with us because they know it is in their interests. But the European Union negotiators know how much they will miss our money, and that tells us something about what the European Union has been all about. They want to keep our money coming in for as long as possible. I will accept any kind of transition period only if we stop paying any more money from day one that we leave the EU. That is not to say that there might not be some really legal things, but I would like to see the detail—I would like the European Union to come up with every dot and comma of why it thinks we should pay something back. We need to be clear that we are not going to pay anything more after we leave the European Union.
John Redwood
I entirely agree with the hon. Lady. Does she agree that the EU probably does not want to talk about trade, because, in practice, it will want tariff-free, barrier-free trade if it is at all sensible, and it thinks it can get money out of us for that, when it has to have it for itself?
Kate Hoey
The right hon. Gentleman is right: money seems to be the crucial thing the EU is using in the negotiation. I hope our negotiators will stand up to that and stop allowing the media and others to make every little bit of negotiation into some kind of conflict, saying that it is always the EU negotiators who are doing the right thing and that we are somehow not doing the right thing. I want it to be the other way round: I want us to be positive about our negotiations, because, in the end, we can get a good deal by just proclaiming how strong the United Kingdom is, how well respected we are, how strong our City of London is and how, despite the fact that we are leaving in 2019, companies are still coming to invest here. There is a very positive message, but it is not getting out.
I know that lots of people want to speak, so I will end by saying one thing. I am not a lawyer, although there are a lot of lawyers in here who are loving every minute of this, because it is the kind of thing they love. However, I am not a lawyer, and the vast majority of the public are not lawyers. They will be watching today, and they will be judging all of us, whatever our party politics, on whether we are doing what is in the long-term, best interests of our country. I do not believe we should be playing some kind of political game about not voting for the Bill because it might make it look to some people in our party as if we are standing up to the Government. This is about the future of our country. Labour Members should vote for the Second Reading of this Bill on Monday night, and then challenge and change things, if we can, in Committee.
EU Exit Negotiations
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Davis
My right hon. Friend is exactly right. It is one of the reasons that there is tension within the Labour party now—[Interruption.] There is very visible tension on the television screen, let alone anywhere else. My right hon. Friend is dead right that the point of the repeal Bill—now the withdrawal Bill—is to ensure that the laws we have the day before we leave the European Union are the same laws as the ones we have the day after we leave, except where there has been another piece of primary legislation to replace it, whether on immigration or whatever else. That is simply a practical matter. It should not actually be a matter of politics; it is a simple matter of national interest.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
As the Secretary of State just said, the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill is a crucial piece of legislation for us to leave the EU. Would he therefore agree that, although people might have difficulties with parts of it that can be discussed in Committee, anyone who votes against the principle on Second Reading is betraying the will of the British people?
Mr Davis
The hon. Lady is exactly right. Such people will have to face their own constituents because those constituents voted to leave. This is a practical Bill designed to protect the interests of British business and British citizens. That is what it is there for—nothing else.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
Baroness Hoey ExcerptsWednesday 8th February 2017
(7 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 View all European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 8 February 2017 - (8 Feb 2017)
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—
Exiting the EU: New Partnership
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
I welcome the principles in the White Paper, particularly around protecting and enhancing existing workers’ rights. Will the Secretary of State confirm that there is nothing to negotiate with the other EU countries on workers’ rights because they already exist in our law and will be protected? The people who have been going around saying that such rights are threatened should be told that they are not.
Mr Davis
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The Government’s approach is to maintain every single piece of employment protection that exists now, which incidentally is much better than that of most European countries, and to enhance it. There should be no concern about that at all.