Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, if there were no other reason for supporting the Motion before us today, for me it would be Ireland. So much was achieved in the Good Friday agreement, but that was only a beginning. The immense amount of dedicated, practical work happening at all levels on intercommunal relations has been important in building a secure, stable future for Northern Ireland. What has facilitated that is the reality that, as members of the European Union, a minority in Northern Ireland felt that there was an equivalence because they had the charter and the European Union’s position on human rights as a context, not just a traditional British approach to justice.

The question raised in this debate is this: what has changed since December? For me, a great deal has changed. Over the recess, I spent a lot of time talking to a wide cross-section of people. I was dismayed at the degree of disenchantment among intelligent people with how political institutions in Britain were mishandling the situation. The situation is grave. In my long life in politics, I do not remember a time when there was such widespread disenchantment, including with the ability of the most privileged sections of our community and how they think about these issues. It is grave because, out there, extremism is real. The memories of the 1930s should be dominant in our preoccupations. We must not play into the hands of extremists. We have a huge responsibility at this juncture. There has also been a failure to put in a wider political context the possibility of another referendum—a failure of real political debate and a failure to engage the widest possible cross-section of the community.

One issue about which I have always been concerned is migration. It is disastrous that, in Britain, the issue has become almost totally one of immigration. Immigration is just one consequence, or one part, of the much wider global issue of migration. Where in the debate about our relationship with Europe has been the real concern about the part we should play in devising worldwide migration policies? Without this, we shall always be talking about sticking fingers in the dam or coping with a particular influx.

We have not really debated in this context the relevance of all this to the world economy, on which Britain is utterly dependent. What are our policies on the world economy or on trading systems? There is a great deal of preoccupation in Britain with social injustice, but the concern is not just about poverty and wealth differentials in Britain. A lot of people are deeply concerned about the global dimensions to all this. Where has that debate been? We are preoccupied—at times almost neurotically—with environmental issues, the latest being the very real issue of pollution and the damage it is doing to our children’s health. Where has been the debate about that?

A further referendum might be a fallback position, but I am concerned that it could mean we forgo the chance for a real, widespread public debate about how the European Union as an institution is relevant to the issues that confront us, nationally and internationally, in all these dimensions, and what our position should be in response. I believe that the best way of having that debate is in the context of a general election.