Business of the House

Debate between Lord Adonis and Viscount Ridley

Thursday 4th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley]

Noble Lords opposite may laugh but that is exactly the point my noble friend made. Bit by bit, we are disentangling a very delicate constitution. If ever there was a time to ask the Commons to think again about shoving legislation through in this unprecedented and dangerous fashion, it is now. The people of this country are watching us and, as the polling evidence makes clear, they are not in favour of this kind of manoeuvre. Given the choice between a bad Brexit and a Brexit with no withdrawal deal, they have clearly expressed a view for the latter, yet this Bill would deny them that.

Moreover, I am astonished that so many Members opposite, who normally do all they can to prolong and encourage debate, and to revise and amend Bills, have suddenly discovered a love of closure Motions—of shutting down debate before it has hardly even started. What an extraordinary volte face. How many times have I come into this Chamber over the past few years to hear the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others arguing that the Government have not given them enough time to debate an issue? Now, suddenly, they want to shut down debate.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I have not once taken four hours and 31 minutes of the time of the House. If the noble Viscount would compromise between the time I normally take, which is 10 or 15 minutes, and the four hours and 31 minutes taken today, we would have finished about two and a half hours ago.

[Viscount Ridley]

I have taken five minutes so I do not quite understand his point, but there we are.

I am always conscious that the House of Lords should not exceed its powers. It is not an elected Chamber and it does not have the democratic legitimacy of the Commons. That applies to life Peers as well as to hereditary Peers. Our job is not to force through legislation but to tidy up, revise, gently question, and sometimes to ask the Commons to think again. This is surely a case where we should be doing that. We should ask the Commons to think again about shoving legislation through in this unprecedented fashion. I am equally clear that if there is ever a time when the House of Lords suddenly needs to discover its constitutional teeth, it is when the Commons is doing something unconstitutional, egregious, hurried and potentially worrying. This is not an argument about Brexit but about doing things properly.

If there ever was a justification for the constitutional monstrosities of hereditary Peers being still here, it is that we can occasionally cry foul when a despotic majority tries to ride roughshod over the carefully balanced but fragile device that is the British constitution and—if noble Lords will excuse the mixed metaphor—to stand against the sudden and dangerous enthusiasm of a temporary, 50.08%, majority that does not want to do things in the proper way. What is more temporary than the majority exercised by Sir Oliver Letwin? In this case, the despotic majority is the Motion passed by a single vote in the other place at something like the third attempt. A majority is no less despotic for being small if it is allowed to be unconstitutional.

The purpose of the Commons passing that measure was to take control of the House of Commons and force a Bill on to the Order Paper to defy the clear wishes of a huge popular vote of 17.4 million people and deny them what they have voted for—namely, Brexit, if necessary without a deal, on the date they had been repeatedly promised. You can be in favour of that or against it—

European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (Exit Day) (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Debate between Lord Adonis and Viscount Ridley

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps it is inappropriate to continue, therefore, with the speech that I was going to make, but I will start anyway. Earlier this afternoon, I was having tea with my son and past the window went a tugboat which was going against the tide. It was really struggling. I know how it felt. But I cheered myself up with the thought that the tide turns. The water goes down stream in the end—the tug was going up stream, I should explain.

Perhaps I can cheer up my noble friend Lord Framlingham by emphasising that 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union and this genie is not going back in the bottle. If we fail on this occasion, there will be another chance to get it right. After the second Punic War, which imposed the Carthaginian peace that Mr Boris Johnson likes to talk about, there was a third Punic war. That did not end well either, but perhaps this one will end better—for the Carthaginians, that is.

As noble friends have said, the Prime Minister said 108 times that she would leave on 29 March, come what may. She said 50 times that we would not extend and she said 32 times that no deal was better than a bad deal. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, talked about the need to heed the will of Parliament. But surely we also need to heed the will of the people. There was a time when people on both sides of this debate, shortly after the referendum, emphasised that that is what they wanted to do. Hilary Benn said:

“You vote to leave? We’re out. That’s it. We’re going”.


George Osborne said:

“There’s no second vote. This is the crucial decision of our lifetimes. Do we stay in the EU, a reformed EU or do we leave?”


Yvette Cooper said, “I don’t think you should be trying to unravel a decision the public has made”, and so on and so on.

The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, speaks of her hope that there will now be a U-turn on the second referendum issue as well as all these other issues. She is hoping for a Government who will do that. Maybe she should heed the will of MPs on this because the Wollaston amendment on a second referendum was turned down a few weeks ago by 334 votes to 85. But now they want a second vote on the second referendum and scheming is going on by Keir Starmer, Dominic Grieve and co to try to avoid an embarrassing defeat of that second vote on the second referendum. I understand that the Beckett/Kyle amendment, which is the result of this scheming, is a strange beast that tries to avoid getting blamed for this second referendum being turned down in Parliament.

Some of us wanted to abide by the result of the first referendum. Some of us are not convinced that there is any need to delay. Some of us are convinced that we were ready to leave. We may never get the chance to know just how wrong the scaremongering about no deal was. But we have known for three years that we were supposed to leave on 29 March. If we were not ready, then some people were preventing us from being ready. We have known for two years that the European Union was interested only in driving a very hard bargain and therefore we should have kept no deal firmly on the table.

Like my noble friend Lord Robathan, I deeply regret having to see this change enacted. I will not support the Government in making this change, but I cannot support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

The resignation of any Prime Minister is an extremely sombre moment, and I think it will not be lost on the House that this is the second Prime Minister in a row who has—

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Viscount Ridley

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 18th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley]

The European Union has an external tariff. It applies to not all products from Africa, admittedly, but to a considerable number. It also applies to Caribbean and Asian countries: there is a 20% tariff, for example, on tomatoes.

I beg those who have not yet made up their minds how to vote to recognise this amendment for what it is. It is an attempt to wreck the Bill and to prevent Brexit.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

I defer to the noble Viscount in his knowledge of millionaires. Maybe he is right, maybe he is wrong, but I do not think that they particularly enter into it. It is ordinary, hard-working people who will, of course, suffer the consequences if our trade collapses, and they are the people we should have at the front of our minds. However, on the point about trade with the wider world, almost two years ago a very thorough analysis of our trade and trade policy was made by a prominent politician in a speech. This is what she said:

“It is tempting to look at developing countries’ economies, with their high growth rates, and see them as an alternative to trade with Europe. But just look at the reality of our trading partnership with China—with its dumping policies, protective tariffs and industrial-scale industrial espionage. And look at the figures. We export more to Ireland than we do to China, almost twice as much to Belgium as we do to India, and nearly three times as much to Sweden as we do to Brazil. It is not realistic to think that we could just replace European trade with these new markets”.


That was the current Prime Minister speaking on 25 April 2016, and I do not think anything has changed since.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Viscount Ridley

Monday 19th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley]

I was under the impression that that is exactly what we are debating right here and now, and it is what the other place debated fully—and came to a very different decision from the one that we might come to here.

[Lord Adonis]

The noble Viscount just quoted David Cameron. Was that the same speech in which he said he would not resign if he lost the referendum?