NATO Brussels Summit 2018

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I am afraid I will have to write to the noble Lord with that information.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it was very noticeable that while the summit was taking place, Russia was enjoying an enormous propaganda coup. In support of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, perhaps I may put it to my noble friend that, bearing in mind the unpredictability of the leader of the western world, it really is crucial that we engage in dialogue. It is utterly farcical that our relations with Russia are worse than they were at the height of the Cold War. I ask my noble friend to convey that to the Prime Minister.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As I said in a previous answer, although we have suspended all planned high-level bilateral contacts, we continue to engage with Russia multilaterally.

European Council

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As I have set out, the White Paper will be a comprehensive document detailing the entire breadth of our future relationship, and we expect and ask the EU member states to consider the proposals seriously. We both need to show flexibility to build our relationship. This will be a detailed paper about our view of our future partnership with the EU and we look forward to discussing it with it over the summer.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend accept that what we all hope for at the weekend is a constructive Cabinet discussion and the reassertion of the doctrine of collective responsibility? I express the hope that neither she—I am absolutely confident that she will not—nor any other member of the Cabinet will be overinfluenced by missives from Somerset.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 20th June 2018 Lords Chamber

The House knows that we on these Benches believe that Brexit will make us poorer, less tolerant, less secure and less influential. We believe it would be an act of national self-harm. As noble Lords know, we have fought with every breath to amend the withdrawal Bill but in reality we are still in the early skirmishes of the overall Brexit battle. I am sure that the Leader and her team will be hugely relieved tonight to have survived this far. They may deserve their rest tomorrow but they are going to need it, because we will not rest until we have stopped Brexit.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

No! Sit down!

[Lord Cormack]

I thought it was the hallmark of your Lordships’ House that we listen to each other’s arguments. All I want to say is that I much prefer the analysis of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, to that of the noble Lord, Lord Newby. I believe that your Lordships’ House has in fact improved the Bill very significantly and I think we should take quiet pride in that. I believe we were entirely right to pass that amendment on Monday and to send it back to the other place. I said then and I repeat now: the ultimate power lies with the elected House. We are right to accept what it has decided today, without Division, but I think it would be to the advantage of us all if there was a little more mutual tolerance of differing views in your Lordships’ Chamber.

G7: Charlevoix, Quebec

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The communiqué agreed that we must maintain the global norms against the use of chemical weapons and there was agreement among leaders on the need to strengthen the ability—as the noble Lord pointed out, it is not there at the moment—of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to attribute responsibility for chemical weapons attacks. As he will be aware, there is a special conference of state parties later this month, which will be an important moment to demonstrate our determination to reinforce the Chemical Weapons Convention. We will, of course, be an active participant.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it would appear from what happened earlier today or late yesterday that President Trump has dissociated himself from the communiqué. Is that officially the position, or is the United States still officially signed up? When are we likely to have the pleasure of welcoming President Trump to this country? I think it would be a good thing if he did come, because he could hear what we think, as well as us hearing what he thinks. Has his invitation been confirmed?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As I think I mentioned in answer to another question, the communiqué was agreed by all parties. We fully intend to honour it and we hope that the US will continue to stand by the agreements made. I believe that President Trump’s visit is on 13 July: I could be wrong but it is certainly in July. He and the Prime Minister discussed the visit briefly and both are looking forward to it.

Syria

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord’s sentiment. Russia has used its veto six times on the topic of chemical weapons use in Syria since 2017, including, as I mentioned, the recent veto of the draft resolution which would have established an independent investigation. Of course, we have used other mechanisms. Through the EU, we have brought sanctions against those involved in the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and we will continue to try to work through international bodies to ensure that those who commit these heinous crimes are brought to justice.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what my noble friend Lord King and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said about the role of Parliament. I express the hope and, indeed, make the request that in the debate on Thursday, when we will have a chance to discuss these things at some length, the Government come up with a coherent position. Although the Prime Minister said that this was not about regime change, we have from the word go reduced our potential influence by refusing to recognise what might be an ultimate outcome by derecognising the regime. The first thing we should do as we seek to bring parties together is to establish a diplomatic presence in Damascus. Can we please not have that ruled out yet again?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I can certainly reiterate that this action was not about regime change or intervening in a civil war; it was about preventing further humanitarian catastrophe and restoring the international norm against the use of chemical weapons.

Salisbury Incident

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The noble Lord is absolutely right that the international community, including ourselves, welcomed the OPCW statement in September 2017 on the complete destruction of Russia’s declared chemical weapons stockpile. It is important to clarify that these were declared weapons of the Russian state, which is exactly why the Prime Minister asked for an explanation of how the Novichok nerve agent came to be used in Salisbury last week. The noble Lord is absolutely right, as I said in a previous answer, that we made a national statement to the OPCW executive council and we will be talking to it about further actions we can take in the future.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, what advice are we giving British visitors to Russia, particularly those who are of Russian birth but are now naturalised British subjects who are planning to go this weekend, which happens to be an election weekend? Can my noble friend pass on any advice? I have a specific reason for asking.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

There has been an update on travel advice. Due to heightened political tensions between the UK and Russia, travellers should be aware of the possibility of anti-British sentiment or harassment. If anyone is in Russia, or due to travel in the coming weeks, they are advised to remain vigilant, avoid any protests or demonstrations and avoid publicly commenting on political developments. While the British embassy in Moscow is not aware of any increased difficulties for British people travelling in Russia, they should of course follow the security and political situation closely, and keep up to date with further travel advice.

Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that we will all want to take careful note of what the noble Baroness just said. She made some powerful and persuasive points. I make it plain at the beginning that I hope that the Lords will approve, without Division, the Motion before us tonight, and will not vote for the amendment, much as I have sympathy with many of the points which my noble friend Lord Naseby made.

Before the Commons took its vote last week, I was minded to argue for remaining. I took advice from architects and others, all of whom said that it was an entirely practical course. But I have often said in this House, in debates on Brexit and on the size of your Lordships’ House, that we should defer to the elected House, and this is a case in point. Therefore there will be no opposition from me to the Motion that was so eloquently moved by my noble friend the Leader of the House.

However, I wish to raise points which we ought to consider. First, we should reflect on the expense, but in a rather different sense from that indicated by my noble friend from the Front Bench. We should not spare expense in the restoration and renewal of this building. As we have been reminded several times, we are merely trustees of it. This building is regarded throughout the world as a symbol of democracy. We should make sure that, 100 years from now, a similar debate does not take place.

However, we should look carefully at how we use taxpayers’ money for the interim solution. We have not got it right there. I have great sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, in his remarks about Portcullis House. I know about Portcullis House because I was on the new building committee in another place when we selected Sir Michael Hopkins as the architect and oversaw the building of that important addition to the Parliamentary Estate. For part of the atrium to be used for a five or six-year period or maybe more seems a prudent use of space and a sensible way to go on rather than to demolish Richmond House. That would be an unnecessary extravagance and expense, and I hope it will be resisted.

I am also not happy about the suggestions that your Lordships’ House should go to the QEII Centre, for various reasons. First, proximity between the two Houses is important. Secondly, the accommodation afforded would not be entirely what we need. Thirdly, however, and in a sense most importantly, the QEII Centre fulfils an important role in our national life, and if it were made over to Parliament for a decade—which is what it has been asked to consider—it would cease to exist as a conference centre.

I believe that there are other solutions that we should explore. There is a very controversial proposal to build a Holocaust memorial on the Embankment gardens. I yield to no one in my desire to see a Holocaust memorial built in our great capital city but there is a much better space by the Imperial War Museum. It would be an entirely appropriate use of the Embankment gardens to have a temporary Chamber there, behind the education centre, for your Lordships’ House, and I hope that that solution can be considered by the bodies established to look at these things—the sponsor board and the delivery authority.

When the composition of those boards is decided upon, it is very important that the sponsor board should be composed entirely of parliamentarians from both Houses. I would favour a joint chairmanship arrangement, such as we had when my noble friend Lady Stowell and Mr Chris Grayling jointly chaired the body that has brought us here today. The delivery authority is a different beast. Of course, the suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Maude could well be adopted and we could have a parliamentary chairman of that, but that is for the future. However, I believe that parliamentarians should ultimately be answerable for delivering to Parliament this restored and renewed great Palace.

It is a building that has meant an enormous amount to me throughout my life. My first visit to a Young Conservatives conference in London in the year of Suez—1956—was when I first fell under the spell of Barry’s and Pugin’s great Palace. Fourteen years after that I had the good fortune to be elected to the other place. So enamoured and enraptured was I by the building that 11 years later I produced a book—long before Mr Bryant produced his—about Westminster Palace and Parliament. It is in my blood, and it is a potent symbol of democracy. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, when he says that we should take opportunities during the next few years to try to reinforce the democratic appeal of the building. That is essentially what he said.

Many of your Lordships have referred to the dates and times. If we are to embark on this course—and I hope that we will—we should try to accelerate the timetable. We should take carefully into account the fact that one thing that prevents work being done on a continuous process is the abandonment of the long Summer Recess. If Parliament needs to meet in September —frankly, I question the need—a temporary solution can be used. We could meet for a day in the QEII Centre or in Church House, but we should keep this place clear of parliamentarians for the period from mid to late July until the beginning of October so that as much of this work as possible can be got on with. If that shaved off a year and saw us moving out in 2023 or 2024, that would be all to the good.

We must now set our hands to this plough. We must ensure that this work is done and that no Government of any political persuasion withdraw from the commitment that I hope we will bind them to tonight.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 31st January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, that was not a warm-up act; it was a very moving and powerful speech, and I echo much of what the noble Lord said. I too felt obliged to speak today for similar reasons. I have two sons who are much older than his children—they are in their late 40s—but they were passionately in favour of staying in, while my two elder grandchildren, undergraduates now, were totally bereft.

I do not like this Bill and I did not want it, but it is before us. I hope there will not be a Division on it this evening. I also hope the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who moved his amendment yesterday with great passion and force, will not test the opinion of the House tonight. His own Front Bench have made it plain that they could not support him, and the result could be misinterpreted because he would not get the votes that he might otherwise obtain. That is not to say that I would vote for a second referendum—I find it very difficult to think of that—but I just make the point.

The Bill must pass, but the Act that it becomes and that emerges from your Lordships’ House must be an assertion of parliamentary democracy and not an abdication of it. The Bill needs significant amendment, as our own Constitution Committee so graphically and splendidly demonstrated.

I am one of those who believes that referendums are inimical to parliamentary democracy, but they are part of our system now and we have had a number of them. But we must also recognise that we are where we are, and I was on the losing side. As a loser, I must try to be gracious. But those who won should try to be magnanimous. They should recognise that their margin of victory is no cause for triumphalism. They should consider our union—the United Kingdom. They should consider that in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London significant majorities voted to remain. I hope that during the passage of this Bill we will hear from Ministers on our Front Bench a clearly articulated sense of direction and destination.

Before I was turfed off the EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee for having the temerity to vote against the Government on amendments almost a year ago, I heard witness after witness come to our committee to indicate that the success of negotiations would be judged by how close the agreement in question came to replicating what was being replaced. That is a bit odd, is it not? That is why I am one of those who feel that it was not a good negotiating ploy, before the negotiations even started, to draw red lines that outlawed certain important things, such as contemplating membership of the customs union. As a true Conservative, I was brought up to believe that one should advocate change only if one is convinced that the latter state would be better than the first.

Yesterday, I sat in this Chamber for almost the whole debate and I listened to 67 very interesting speeches. Much was made by the Leavers about the predictions of what might happen straight after a vote to leave. But as I tried to indicate to my eloquent and alliterative noble friend Lord Ridley, we are still in the European Union. Predictions that we read about today are the ones we should perhaps view a little more carefully.

It was a bad campaign. There was hyperbole on one side and mendacity on the other. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds indicated in a fine speech yesterday, there was too much emphasis on economics. There was no vision. I hope that he does not have the modern prelates’ aversion to the King James Bible, but I thought that he might have said:

“Without vision, the people perish”.


The visionary element was lacking. Of course, vision and nostalgia are very different things. Brexit is not about recreating a country that exists only in the imagination. We are at a crossroads without a compass and with squabbling back-seat drivers. It is important that the Government indicate what they see as the preferred outcome. The Prime Minister must not be cowed and prevented from making speeches by some of her squabbling Cabinet colleagues.

We can all recognise what we are, whether we come from England, Scotland, Ireland or Wales. I always say that my identity is English, my nationality is British but my civilisation is European, and I am immensely proud of that. I hope that when we come to the end of negotiations, after this Bill is long on the statute book, there will be a coming together, because I fear an implosion within my own party. I am sorry he is not here at the moment, but my oldest, longest friend in politics—and a very dear friend he is too—is my noble friend Lord Lamont of Lerwick. He has a reputation for singing in the bath. I cannot challenge him on that, but I hope that when the dust has settled, he and I can sing in unison—it will not be a pretty sound but it might be an agreeable conclusion—the song he made so famous, “Je ne regrette rien”.

House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to be able to follow one of the great Speakers of the other place. She has certainly not lost her vim or vigour, nor her questioning powers. I begin by declaring an interest as the chairman of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, of which the noble Baroness is a regular attender and participant. I also have to apologise on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who, with me, began this group in 2001. Sadly, he has to be at the funeral in Hull of a very close friend and mentor today. Another founder member of the group, the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham of Felling, is also at a funeral today of his oldest and closest friend.

In extending sympathy to them and giving an apology to the House, I am also warning noble Lords that we will not have the benefit of their wisdom and experience. Another person has asked me to mention his absence, about which he is very sorry—my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern. He asked me to stress, particularly to colleagues on this side of the House, that he stands 100% in support of the Burns report. That does not mean that he agrees with every jot and tittle; nobody possibly could. But we owe the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and his colleagues a real debt of gratitude for the rigour and vigour with which they conducted their investigations, the elegance—a word used by the noble Lord, Lord Newby—of their conclusions, and for producing something that is entirely practical.

As I am in the business of giving thanks, I would like to say how much we owe to our Lord Speaker. I had the honour of introducing a debate on 5 December last year that addressed this problem, in which more than 60 Members of your Lordships’ House took part. Within two weeks of that debate—a year ago tomorrow—the Lord Speaker announced from the Woolsack that he was setting up a committee under the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and gave the names of the committee’s members. That committee got down to work immediately and would have produced its report much earlier, had it not been for the somewhat unexpected general election with which we were confronted earlier this year.

We owe the noble Lord, Lord Burns, a real thank you for what he has done. At recent, well-attended meetings of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, we have had unanimous support for the general principle of the Burns report. I hope that, after today’s long day, we will be able to convince my noble friend the Leader of the House, whose suggestion it was when she wound up the debate last year that the Lord Speaker might convene a committee, that there is—not unanimous; that is impossible—widespread support for the Burns proposals. I hope that she will then respond by doing all she can to facilitate progress towards implementation of these very sensible proposals. As a number of colleagues in all parts of the House have said, if we get the Government to respond, they will have to recognise that successful Burns implementation depends on the Government accepting constraints and limitations on their power, particularly the prime ministerial power of appointment.

We have no written constitution in our country; we operate through evolution. If we are to accept this report and all its implications we have to recognise that there will be new conventions within our system. Of course, this is nothing new. As it has evolved our constitution has required recognition of the acceptable, rather than assertion of the theoretically possible. That is why no monarch has declined to give assent to an Act of Parliament since the reign of good Queen Anne. If we are to build a new Chamber capped at 600 Members, those constraints must be accepted.

I conclude by echoing what has already been said by a number of colleagues. There will be no change unless your Lordships’ House wills it. We will not have this chance again this Parliament and who knows what will happen after that? One of the fundamental principles of the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, which the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and I founded in 2001, is that the supremacy ultimately lies with the elected Chamber. We believe in an appointed House because we do not wish to confound the position of the elected Chamber by having an ambiguous mandate at this end of the Corridor.

I urgently request that everyone here considers very carefully indeed that this is a chance that may not come again and certainly will not come again in the near future. Let us show the Leader of the House that we are very much behind these proposals and, having done that, let us hope that we can proceed to seeing them implemented during the rest of this Parliament.

European Council

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As we have said, we are looking for a time-limited implementation period to ensure that businesses and individuals have to make only one set of changes. We want a swift agreement on the implementation period. Our objective is for access to each other’s markets to continue on current terms, based on the existing structures of EU rules and regulations but for a time-limited period.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, last week my noble friend told the House that the Cabinet was united. It really is not helpful when articles and interviews are given by members of the Cabinet, particularly those intimately involved with these negotiations, which in effect undermine the Prime Minister’s excellent work, which we should all be applauding. If the Prime Minister cannot bring herself to give the sack to some of them, can she at least put gags in their crackers?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I can only repeat what I said last week: the Cabinet is united and we are looking forward to a very constructive discussion tomorrow.