European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 6) Bill

Debate between Lord Hain and Lord Hayward

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 5th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain]

My Lords, I do not think the Labour Benches have spoken recently. It is a pleasure to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, as it was to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, who is indeed a friend as well.

I fear that the new Prime Minister, his advisers and his Ministers are clearly hell-bent on crashing this United Kingdom out of the European Union without a deal. There is a dogmatic, hard-right elite in No. 10. In passing this Bill, Parliament is standing up for the decent majority in this country and against that malevolent elite. This sinister, self-serving, ideologically obsessed, wilfully destructive approach has to be stopped in its tracks. We in your Lordships’ House have a chance to do that today in supporting the elected House of Commons.

A salutary measure of the reckless dogmatism of the Brexiteers is that surveys show that two-thirds of Conservative Party members and the same proportion of Leave supporters simply do not care if Brexit means a hard Irish border or Scotland leaving the United Kingdom. For them Brexit is everything, come what may. You might say that, for them, Brexit trumps everything.

With the clock ticking rapidly towards 31 October, the new Government have done precisely nothing in their couple of months in office—deliberately so. Whatever the Prime Minister’s disingenuous protestations, he is running down the clock to crash out of the European Union on 31 October unless we stop him.

We simply cannot believe what he says. As Aidan O’Neill QC said of the Prime Minister in submissions to the Court of Session in Edinburgh on behalf of the 77 parliamentarians in the challenge to the Government’s arbitrary Prorogation of Parliament:

“You look at the record, you try as best you can to determine the credibility and reliability of what is said against a background of an individual whose personal, professional and political life has been characterised by incontinent mendacity or, to make it plainer, an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge and speak the truth”.


I see that the Prime Minister’s EU negotiator was back in Brussels again yesterday, again with nothing to say, nothing to offer and nothing to propose—a briefcase full of blank sheets of paper, I suspect, and a waste of taxpayers’ money on his Eurostar fare, I would venture. Apparently, this negotiator is an able and experienced diplomat. Having worked with his predecessors, I have no doubt that he is, but his political masters will not let him use those talents and do his job. Instead, the Prime Minister travels to Paris and Berlin— Dublin next Monday, too—then exaggerates or fabricates what exactly happened.

“We’re making real progress”, claims the Prime Minister. I have checked directly with government contacts in the main capitals and with people in Brussels and that is simply not true. Look at the comments on the record from Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Dublin, and it is crystal clear that not one single proposal has been made. It is also clear that they are not budging. Why would you in any negotiation if the other side has not made any counterproposal at all?

The tragedy is that this is not incompetence. This is not a Government taking their time in the background to prepare a serious, considered new idea. It is deliberate inaction, running down that clock and being gratuitously insulting to our friends in the Irish Republic, hoping to make it to a no-deal exit designed to turn this country upside down and convert it into a free-for-all, deregulated and fundamentally unequal society blissfully disengaged from its neighbours and isolated from the outside world.

Today, we get a chance to make the Prime Minister stop that clock. I do not want Brexit at all and I think the people should have another say in a public vote to stop this madness, but if the choice ends up being between a deal and no deal, we have to stop no deal.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

Following on from the noble Lord’s comments about checking with other European capitals, I did likewise this morning and asked whether any full proposal has been put forward in relation to any aspect of the negotiations. I received the categoric response that no proposals have been put forward.

[Lord Hain]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that intervention because he is absolutely right and confirms what I was asserting.

Nowhere is the serial dishonesty of the Prime Minister starker than on the Irish border. Do not take it from me; take it from our very own Civil Service, whose work on no-deal planning emerged in mid-August in what was known as Operation Yellowhammer. Its analysis made it crystal clear that, although Ministers keep saying that they will not do so, not putting up border controls will be unsustainable because of,

“economic, legal and biosecurity risks”,

and that this could lead to “direct action” and road blockades. I fear that that is an understatement.

Next, there is the Northern Ireland Civil Service, an organisation under considerable pressure because of not just Brexit but the shameful lack of a Government in Belfast. Its top official said bluntly that the impact would be much more severe than in Great Britain and would have profound and lasting social and economic consequences, and that the overall consequences for Northern Ireland would be grave.

Worse again—if that is possible—the new chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland warned that Brexit could become a “trigger” and a “fuelling point” to attract more people to extremist groups. His assistant chief constable was reported to have said in an interview that,

“we would be concerned for a six to 12-month time frame there would be some sort of upsurge in support for dissident republican groupings and activities”.

Those are not my words; they are the words of police chiefs. I could go on but, on the basis of just those three assessments by professional public servants, I ask this: why in God’s name would we ever wilfully facilitate these no-deal outcomes? The Prime Minister seems happy to do so, but I am not—and I trust that this House is not happy either.

At the root of the problem is that the Prime Minister and his fellow Brexiteers never have had a proper plan of their own for Brexit. They never put one forward in the referendum, and on the Irish border he still does not have a plan. That is why many of them openly favour no deal: because it is the only alternative if you have no plan.

The truth is that no deal equals a hard border because that is what falling out under World Trade Organization rules means. I am no fan of former Prime Minister May’s withdrawal agreement, but I accept the backstop knowing the complexities of Northern Ireland from my time as Secretary of State. In his reckless, bull-headed fashion, the Prime Minister has made the backstop the villain of the piece, but it is an insurance policy and, if alternative arrangements are found to achieve the same objectives, of the same open border as we have now, then it is set aside. What is wrong with that?

The Prime Minister and many commentators here—and, sadly, some elements in Belfast as well—try to pretend that Northern Ireland is no different from anywhere else: that it is just another border, like, as he famously said, that between two London boroughs and just another straightforward place where trade in goods is the only issue. In fact, the Prime Minister seems to have dumbed this down even further and decided that the only goods traded are animals and food. I thought the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, was extremely telling. I have great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Howell, but he did not answer his noble friend’s question: there is no other border in the whole world like the Irish border. That is why it needs a particular solution and not a no-deal outcome.

The Prime Minister surely knows deep down that it is not true either that this border is simply about animals and food. It is a 300-mile border with some 300 crossings—those are the formal crossings; leave aside the farms that cross the border and other communities that straddle it—unlike almost every other border in the world. It has unique arrangements under the Good Friday/Belfast agreement for north-south co-operation and that agreement is an international treaty. A little-noticed document published on 7 December by the Department for Exiting the EU lists no fewer than 157 different areas of cross-border work and co-operation on the island of Ireland, north and south, and many have been facilitated by Ireland’s and the UK’s common membership of the EU. These areas are the things of everyday life; they go well beyond animals and food and must never have a new border erected to block, discourage or thwart them. They include food, tourism, schools, colleges, farming, fighting crime, tackling environmental pollution, water quality and supply, waste management, bus services, train services, cancer care, GPs and prescriptions, blood transfusions and gas and electricity supply.

Almost every one of these areas is about people’s everyday cross-border lives and almost all are linked to the European Union, and Ireland’s and the UK’s common membership of it since 1973—we joined at the same time. To interfere with those arrangements—either through no deal, the terms of any divorce deal or any new trade agreements that we may someday, somehow strike with EU partners—would be a terrible step backwards for which the people of the island of Ireland would pay a terrible price, as would we in Great Britain.

With other Peers, I learned one other thing the other day. With Stormont suspended and unlikely to be resurrected unless Brexit is stopped, if no deal occurred there would be no legal powers left for the Northern Ireland Civil Service to maintain the necessary civil contingency and security arrangements in border communities and beyond. In other words, no deal means direct rule. That is the serious consequence for the island of Ireland of no deal.

I am desperately worried for the future of Britain under no deal, but I am absolutely livid about the impact on the island of Ireland. It will destroy the work of successive UK and Irish Governments in helping courageous and visionary leaders in Northern Ireland to remove borders and instead put them back up. If for no other reason than to maintain peace and progress in Northern Ireland and good relations with the Republic, I urge that this Bill pass without amendment.