European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Committee: 10th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I have one simple message: do not tie the hands of those negotiating on your behalf.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

Will my noble friend at least acknowledge that if his concern is that the Government will be boxed in, he should be aware that the Bill allows Ministers to extend the date by order?

[Lord Cormack]

Yes, but it is therefore contradictory to have a specific date written in the Bill because the Government are answerable to Parliament and Parliament is sovereign, as we have said many times over the past few weeks; it seems like an eternity. The one message we should convey is that we should not seek to tie the hands of those who are negotiating. We will do so if we put a particular date in the Bill. Failure to reach agreement by that date will then be trumpeted abroad as a failure. None of us wants that. There must be flexibility.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

Ministers still maintain the fiction that technology is the answer. All technological solutions require resources, infrastructure and preparation to implement. They do not substitute for the need for checks and inspections but merely aid the efficiency in crossing the border legitimately and identifying potential breaches of compliance or false declarations. As the former Permanent Secretary at the Department for International Trade, Martin Donnelly, has made clear, on the Northern Ireland border there is absolutely no evidence, and no serious expert in the customs field, who thinks that there can be an invisible technological border. He said that it does not exist anywhere in the world.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

I am most interested but I wonder whether the noble Lord has looked at the evidence given to the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union in the House of Commons by the head of Customs and Excise, who said that whatever the outcome of the talks, there would be no need for infrastructure on the Irish border.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

So if you break it down a bit further than the rhetoric you see that there is no such thing as this vast, wonderful, countervailing benefit to leaving the single market and the customs union, as the Government have been pretending. There is a fundamental falsehood here and we should use the opportunity that this Committee provides to try to expose some of the illusions which the Government have been putting forward, and to throw light in corners which the Government have been trying desperately to keep dark, of which this is undoubtedly one.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this debate but since it seems that no one else is going to speak up for the option of leaving the customs union, I thought that in the interests of attempted balance, at least, I should make a brief contribution.

I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, spoke with great passion—not, to me, entirely persuasively—and his sincerity was palpable. But some of the phrases he used do not really correspond with the reality of the situation as I see it. He talked about breaking our ties. It is not the Government’s intention that we should break our economic ties with the single market. He talked about this being an absolutist solution. No one is pursuing something out of dogma. We are trying to make an assessment of what we think is in the best interests of the country. I agree with the words that my noble friend Lord Hailsham used: we ought to be considering what is in the national interest. Noble Lords opposite may find it difficult to believe but that is actually what the Government are trying to do and what people on this side of the Committee are trying to do: come to a set of arrangements, once this decision has been made, that will maximise the welfare and interests of the country.

The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, was not comparing leaving the customs union with what the Government are trying to achieve. The Government are trying to achieve a free trade agreement with Europe. That is what you ought to compare the customs union with. In what respect would having a free trade agreement leave the country worse off than it is now? He was talking about a customs union. He did not make it clear but he said he was not disputing the decision to leave so he must have been talking about a customs union while being outside the EU. That is very different from being inside the customs union as a member of the EU. That is putting yourself precisely in the position of Turkey, which is inside the customs union and suffers all sorts of disadvantages, as I shall try to demonstrate.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

Perhaps I could make a suggestion to the noble Lord. If he were to go to 100 Parliament Street and sit and read the assessment, he would indeed see the comparison between being in a customs union and being in a free trade agreement. If he were to look at Hansard again and read about the damage to the economy that my noble friend Lord Newby described, he would find a great deal of that detail which explains that the free trade agreement route still leaves an unbelievably damaged country, in every region, especially the north-east, and in virtually every single industry sector.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

There are calculations that say that. No doubt when the noble Baroness comes to make her speech, she will give arguments. I am not going to be persuaded by just a piece of paper with a statistic.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

Noble Lords jeer but are they really going to say that a piece of paper with a statistic somehow analyses the problem? I put it to the noble Baroness that if you have a free trade agreement you have access to the market. What is the disadvantage? The disadvantage, which I will come to, is that you have to trade against that the inconvenience of rules of origin. That is what it comes down to: balancing the advantages of free trade against the costs of rules of origin.

Nobody has said that there are any advantages to leaving the customs union and I would like to make a few points. First, obviously, the customs union that we are members of—on certain goods, not all—has quite high tariffs on goods that particularly affect the lower paid, especially food, clothing and footwear. That is not an inconsiderable factor. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, being inside the customs union would make it impossible for us to sign free trade agreements with other countries. He was pooh-poohing that and thinks we will not be able to do it. But I put it to him if he looks at the record of quite small countries such as Singapore or Chile or a medium-sized country such as Korea, he will find that when you add up the GDP of the countries they have signed free trade agreements with, it is very much in excess of the added-up GDP of the countries that the EU has signed free trade agreements with. That is to say: these small countries, precisely because they negotiate on their own and do not have to take into account the arguments of 27 other partners, have been very effective at signing free trade agreements. Switzerland, for example, has a free trade agreement with China but the noble Lord thinks it will be impossible for us to have one with it.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords—

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I assume this is not a point of order but a point of information.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am grateful to the noble Lord and would like to give a point of information to him. We already have a free trade agreement with South Korea, as a result of our membership of the European Union. Our leaving the European Union would result in our losing our free trade agreement with South Korea.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I do not know whether the noble Lord misheard me, whether I misspoke or whether he misunderstood. I was not talking about having a free trade agreement with Korea but about the free trade agreements that Korea has signed with other countries across the globe.

Another point about a customs union is that it is not just a question of collecting tariffs. A lot of regulations go with it and there is a vast range of non-tariff controls on goods—you obviously have to have definitions. We would not be able to divert from these at all if we remain members of a customs union, or even to depart from them in our own domestic market. If we did that, the goods that were allowed in which had circulated in the other countries of the customs union would be in contravention of them. Again, I put it that there are some advantages which have to be put into the balance of the argument for leaving the customs union.

One mystery about this amendment is that if you are in the customs union, there is the collection of the tariff revenue where the individual countries are allowed to retain only 20% of the revenue. The rest of it goes to the EU, so would we be outside the EU and paying 80% of the revenue on the external tariff to the EU? That does not seem to make a lot of sense.

It is also possible to be outside the customs union and to have a free trade agreement with the EU. That is precisely what Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein do but of course, to come to the noble Baroness’s point, if that is regarded as a cost you have to offset against it the fact that you have rules of origin. People have pooh-poohed the technology argument but is that really going to be such an insurmountable thing to do? Switzerland exports per capita five times as much to the EU as we do, and it has to operate rules of origin on many sectors when it sells goods to the EU. That does not seem to have had any inhibiting effect.

[Baroness Kramer]

My Lords—

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I would like to make a little more progress, as this is taking rather a long time. The rules of origin are one of the points for consideration. I know that a lot of British industry is worried about this but I noticed what Mr Azevedo, the Secretary-General of the World Trade Organization, said in a newspaper interview that he gave the other day. He pointed out that a large part of Britain’s trade, because we have a bigger percentage of trade with the rest of the world than some other European countries, already has to observe these requirements of documentation and rules of origin. He did not see that there would be a big problem in switching the rest of our trade to a similar regime.

I have also met representatives of some of the companies that run ports in this country, some of which operate on a WTO basis and some of which obviously operate on an EU basis. But when I talked to the management—I do not want to name them because they would not want to be too involved in political controversy—I was told that they did not see a huge difficulty in moving from one administrative system to another. Whether people agree with that or not, I put it to your Lordships that that is what the argument is all about: a trade-off between that and a free trade agreement with access to the market. It is not clear that the advantage is all one way.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

Does my noble friend not agree with me and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, on animal hygiene? Given the high levels that the Secretary of State has insisted our farmers will meet on leaving the European Union, how can we physically check the animals coming into this country when we leave if we have no customs controls at UK borders? It cannot be done by technology.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

Even in Northern Ireland, we have some checks already. There will have to be checks, as there are checks throughout the European Union. I would be in favour of checks, but this is not an overwhelming argument against leaving a customs union.

I have one final point on the customs union. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, seemed to be advocating being inside the customs union but outside the EU. That is the consequence of the amendment. That really gives us the worst of all worlds. Consider the position of Turkey. It has to agree to whatever free trade agreements the rest of the EU signs up to and has to have goods under those agreements circulating within its economy, even if it is totally opposed to that, because it has no say in negotiating free trade agreements between—

[Noble Lords]

My Lords—

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I would like to finish a sentence without being interrupted. The EU negotiates free trade agreements but does not take into account what Turkey wants, and Turkey has no say. I will give way one last time; then I will make one other point about the single market; and then, the House will be relieved to know, I shall shut up.

[Lord Adonis]

The noble Lord referred to Turkey twice. On the first occasion when he referred to Turkey he said that there were all kinds of disadvantages in its customs arrangements with the EU from being in the customs union but not being free to strike trade deals beyond that. Why therefore does he think that Turkey has willingly and freely stayed a member of the customs union?

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

As the noble Lord knows very well, Turkey aspires—that aspiration may now be fading—to join the European Union, so being in the customs union was for many a halfway house to joining the EU, just as for noble Lords who tabled this amendment it is a halfway house to rejoining the EU. That is what their amendment is really about.

Lastly and briefly on the single market, the noble Lord, Lord Newby, was exhorting us all to go to the Treasury, look at the papers, draw the curtains and see the forecasts that have been made. Of course those documents should be taken into account, but there are many other studies made outside Whitehall that take a very different view. I refer him to the research by the academic Michael Burrage, who was at the LSE and at Harvard. He has done an in-depth analysis, which is published on the Civitas website, of the effect of the single market on the British economy and British exports. He has come to the conclusion that there is no correlation between the single market and the growth of trade between the UK and the EU.

Furthermore, he has pointed out something that people have acknowledged in these debates before—namely, that many non-members of the single market, countries outside the continent of Europe, have increased their exports to the single market much faster than Britain has increased its exports to the single market. So the idea that this great liberalising force has had a huge impact on the British economy is absolutely not proven. I make these points simply because the debate so far has been very unbalanced and, as my noble friend Lord Hailsham said, we ought to be considering, in a sober, balanced way, what is in the interests of our own economy now that the decision has irrevocably been made.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

On the customs union, as a pro-European in his youth, the noble Lord will be aware that the customs union was one of the founding acts when the European communities were established. I understand why Eurosceptics might make a lot of arguments that the European Union has become much more federal and political than the economic basis on which it started. But what, given the arguments that the noble Lord made so powerfully in the early 1970s in favour of membership of the customs union, now prevents us staying in the customs union on leaving the EU?

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I am sure the noble Lord is not intentionally misleading the House when he talks about the arguments that I made so compellingly and eloquently in the 1970s. If he has been studying my maiden speech in the House of Commons, I shall be astonished. The reason why I supported the customs union in the 1960s was that we then lived in a world of very high tariffs, and the EEC was a liberalising influence in the 1950s and 1960s. It was only after the American Administration started cutting tariffs in the mid-1960s that the relevance of the EEC in tariff negotiations became much less significant.

Since the noble Lord wanted me to get my feet again, I will say that my attitude towards the customs union is very different from his. I remember a debate in which he spoke about not being in the single market. He explained how he had been to a German car manufacturer which had explained to him—I could not believe my ears—how Germany was manipulating car standards in order to keep out goods from other countries. The noble Lord thought that was admirable and we were very stupid not to be part of this racket. Well, I do not want to be part of it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Altmann]

My noble friend Lord Lamont and others have said that other countries manage without being in the EU, but their economies have not spent 40 years integrating and intertwining their industries and economies with the EU. The only country trading on WTO terms is Mauritania.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

Could my noble friend tell me which country is more integrated with the EU: Switzerland or Britain?

[Baroness Altmann]

The industrial success of the British economy is based on the integrated supply chains. The jobs in Sunderland and across the automobile industry, as an example, and the biotech industry and pharma industry depend upon those integrations. The foreign companies that own those operations will be unable to compete if we do not have the same kind of access that we have now.

The Government’s evidence, which is being hidden from the public, shows that Brexit will be a huge cost, the size of which depends on the hardness of the Brexit. I urge colleagues on these Benches and across the House to wake up to the reality that we face and to at least support these amendments to stay in the customs union, the single market, the EEA or equivalent.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

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

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, as it always is. It is also a pleasure to follow 185 other speakers; but I do not envy the Minister who has the job of summing up the debate.

Reference has been made several times to the Third Reading of the European Communities Bill in 1972. I have to confess that I, too, was another person who participated in that debate. My noble friend Lord Baker referred to the speeches by Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. He did not refer to my maiden speech, illustrating what the writer Mackworth Praed meant when he referred to,

“a maiden speech,

Which all men praise, but none remember”.

If I have a dagger to my heart, it is the opposite to that of the noble Lord, Lord Butler. The dagger to my heart is that I strongly supported our joining the European Community at that time. Quite why I and others over subsequent years developed increasing doubts about the European Union is illustrated by the Bill before the House, because it incorporates both visibly and when you dig into the Bill such a huge amount of EU law covering all sorts of things, from zoos to human rights, beaches, canals, immigration, extradition, foreign policy mechanisms, policy in north Africa and overseas aid. At the time of the 1972 debates, we were assured by the Law Officers that the supremacy of EU law was confined “essentially to economic matters”. Those were assurances that were repeated both by the Prime Minister in 1972—Ted Heath—and by Harold Wilson in 1975 at the time of the other referendum. Some 12,000 pieces of legislation later, and after Nice, Maastricht, Amsterdam and Lisbon, we can clearly see why many people like myself think they were mistaken to believe the assurances that we were given.

We had at the opening of this debate excellent speeches from the Leader of the Opposition the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, from the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. It was particularly excellent that they made it quite clear that they did not intend to obstruct this Bill and that they approached it in a constructive spirit. I totally agree with all three of them that there is great need and scope to amend this Bill in certain crucial areas.

A lot of concern has been focused on the so-called Henry VIII clauses and the number of statutory instruments that will flow from this Bill. This is, of course, the mirror image of the problem that we had when we joined the European Economic Community in 1972. Section 2(2) of the 1972 Act allowed EU law to have legal effect in the UK by delegated legislation. Some of that delegated legislation was by Order in Council and directives that totally bypassed Parliament. However inadequate the procedures that we are examining tonight are, they were even more inadequate in 1972. None the less I do not dispute for one minute that it is quite right that this House should seek to strengthen the safeguards, although some wild things were said in the House of Commons such as that this Bill could be used to alter the composition of the House of Lords or to postpone the date of the next election. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, made a powerful speech. He referred to the powers of the House of Commons. Statutory instruments are not government by fiat; they are a parliamentary procedure. If you object to something, turn up and vote against it. As has been said in this debate, it is not easy to see an alternative to the use of statutory instruments. Given the huge volume of legislation, it would be quite impractical to incorporate it all by primary legislation.

These are serious issues, but some of the speeches that we have had, although serious, were not really about the merits of the Bill but criticised the Government’s tactics in the negotiations as a means of getting a second referendum on to the agenda and into the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, who I see in his place, was rather flirtatious—rather triangulating—about this question. He said he had been of the opinion that the referendum ought to be binding but it was no longer axiomatic. As Clemenceau once said to Lloyd George after an ambiguous speech: “Pour ou contre? Oui ou non?”. We all know which way, in the end, the noble Lord is going to go on that question.

The Opposition present the phrase “the single market”, which they parrot all the time, as though by finding a phrase they had found a policy. They never go beyond the phrase to explain why a free trade agreement would be worse than membership of the single market. We know that if you export into another market without being a member of the single market you have to observe the rules, just as many countries do—many countries that have increased their exports to the single market more than we have, faster and to a larger extent. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, referred to the customs union. I wondered whether it was the same distinguished noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, the Commissioner who used to preach the virtues of free trade—that it was a spur to productivity and helpful to consumers—as he was defending without further argument, just by the phrase, a customs union that imposes very high tariffs on food and goods, including textiles and clothing, from poorer countries. I found that very difficult to comprehend.

I regret that this country has been so divided after this referendum and that some people have been so upset by the result, but that is no excuse for caricaturing Brexit as some dangerous extreme nationalism. Brexit is not a rejection of the values that we share with Europe, those values being human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Some Liberal Democrats were cynical and dismissive of the Prime Minister’s call for a special deep partnership with the European Union and called it just rhetoric, but why should we not have outside the framework of the EU co-operation between universities and in science and technology just as Switzerland does. Is Switzerland any less European by being outside the European Union? No, it is not.

Yes, Brexit is about self-government, sovereignty and making our own laws through our own Parliament rather than through a Parliament in which we have only 15% of the share of the votes. Millions of people voted for this because they believe in the nation state and that the nation state and democracy are two sides of the same coin. That is what people voted for and this Bill is necessary to facilitate that. It requires amendment and improvement but it should be given, expeditiously, a Second Reading.

Brexit: Economic Analyses

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Wednesday 24th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

My Lords, we are not winding down our membership of these agencies. We are members of the European Union until March next year, and we will continue to meet all our obligations and commitments during that period. I was in Brussels all day yesterday, consulting with the European Parliament on these issues. The Norwegian deal is not a superior deal, in my view. We want a proper, bespoke arrangement that will benefit the United Kingdom and respect the Brexit result.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, if the Government were misguided enough to initiate an inquiry into the three questions posed by the noble Lord, would they add a fourth, which would be a study of whether they expect European trade with Britain as a percentage of our total trade to continue to decline in the next 10 years, as it has in the last 10 years? If the Government were misguided enough to initiate such a study, would they ensure that it was not done by the same officials who made such misguided and wrong forecasts about the immediate impact of a Brexit verdict in the referendum?

EU Exit Negotiations

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for the Statement. I welcome in particular what he said about the European Court of Justice. Can he clarify what exactly is meant in the Statement? He says that we will bring to an end the direct jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice but at the same time he says that our courts can take account of the rulings of the ECJ in this area to help to ensure consistent interpretation. Can he expand on that and explain how the Government think that will work? Secondly, can he say something about the timing of the withdrawal Bill: when does he expect it to be available to Parliament; when will the vote take place; and will that be closely linked to the vote on withdrawal, which I think is a separate matter?

[Lord Callanan]

On the issue of the ECJ, I do not want to go any further than the Statement. We will end the direct application of the European Court of Justice in the UK. That is entirely right—we would not expect a foreign court in any other country or organisation to have effect on UK citizens or the UK judicial process. We expect the debate and vote on the withdrawal Motion to take place before the withdrawal Bill—but of course we cannot have a withdrawal Bill until we have an agreement to withdraw from.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech]

My Lords, I read it in the papers every day.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

Perhaps the noble Baroness would quote to the noble Lord, Lord Lea, exactly what President Hollande said: “There has to be a price. There has to be a threat. There has to be a cost”.

[Baroness Deech]

Thank you.

Much of our argument turns on whether Article 50 is revocable or not. The Supreme Court judgment in Miller did not go that far. The judgment was based on the fact that triggering Article 50 would be the no turning back moment at which the two years would start and inevitably run their course. Indeed, I know that there has been a legal opinion from three knights that Article 50 is revocable, but I know from my dealings with lawyers that you can find another three knights who will tell you something quite different. Although I have heard it said that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, drafted the article, so he knows what it is about, in our system, it is not the draftsman who in the end declares what the article means.

If parliamentary approval were needed at the end of the deal, what might it look like? Some parts of it might very well deal with European nationals. Only a few days ago, we were expressing our shock and dismay that the position of European nationals might not be taken care of. Would we be throwing them all into disarray in two years’ time if, among probably thousands of pages of deal, there was something about European nationals?

I am sorry to say that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has departed from his usual clarity in legal matters. He has tied himself and the House in knots. On the one hand, he says that we always defer in the end to the Commons. I wonder whether we will hear that this evening or next week if there is a head-on clash between our decision, if we approve the amendment, and what the House of Commons says. On the other hand, he has also said that approval is better than having an Act of Parliament: it leaves it open to the Prime Minister to decide what to do. But with an Act of Parliament expressing what is in the amendment, the Commons would prevail because of the Parliament Act. You cannot really have it both ways. The only other possible outcome at the end is no deal. The two-year shutter comes down and we are off the cliff—that is the general outcome. Others know just as well how difficult that would be.

Our lack of sovereignty means that if at the end of two years the rest of the European Union does not give us what we want and either House rejects that deal, the European Union will, for sure, not welcome us back with open arms, will not necessarily accept a revocation of Article 50 and not necessarily give us a better deal. That is the reality of the situation. We will have to take what comes our way in two years’ time.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I am arguing in favour of the principle that, when events change, people change their minds. I do not consider that to be a dishonourable practice. When I look at the Government Front Bench in either this House or another place, I see person after person who apparently had a miraculous change of mind either just before or just after the referendum; I accept that that is sometimes what people do. The noble Lord possibly has never changed his mind, but most people in your Lordships’ House have a greater flexibility of approach, which is to be welcomed. I beg to move.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, although I oppose this amendment, I can imagine two circumstances in which a second referendum might be justifiable. The first would be after we had actually completed the negotiations, left the EU and then people decided they wanted another referendum. That would seem perfectly justifiable.

The second situation where a second referendum would be well justified would be if the original referendum question had been framed in such a way as to say, “Do you wish the Government to enter into negotiations about leaving the EU, and then to put the result of that referendum to a second referendum later on?”. However, that was not the question on the ballot paper. As we have heard endlessly, the question was whether to remain or leave; it was quite unambiguous. It seems that we are slipping into the habits that the EU itself has with referenda. Mr Juncker on one occasion famously said, “If the people vote the wrong way, we must go on voting until we get the right answer”. I suspect that that is the real motivation behind the amendment. We saw this in the EU with the referendum on Maastricht. After the Danes said no, they had to vote again. We saw it with the treaty of Nice: when Ireland said no, we had to have another vote and that reversed the first one. We saw it most blatantly of all with the European constitution, as proposed, which was rejected in recommendations by both France and Holland. In order to avoid a referendum, that was then translated by a device into the Lisbon treaty. We absolutely should not go down that road.

[Lord Cormack]

If we had a second referendum and the question was, “Do you want to stay out or go back?”, how could that realistically be asked, unless we knew that they wanted us back?

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I think that the question of whether they want us back is a very real one. I wanted to come to that very point. At Second Reading I quoted the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, as having said that he was firmly opposed to a second referendum. He is shaking his head; if he wants to correct me I will gladly be corrected, although I have three other press reports of where he said a second referendum was not desirable and should not take place: one in the Times on 20 September; a report from Asia House of his speech there on 6 September, together with a second report of that speech; and an article in Somerset Life on 24 June—so I have quite a lot. The noble Lord may have been misreported. If he has been misreported once, I apologise to him, but he seems to have been misreported several times.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)]

I am content to be misquoted by the noble Lord and I am content to be able to intervene, not least because my words have been used in the past. I shall make an intervention later in which I shall clarify the position.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

We look forward to that clarification. If we wanted to, we could quote many other Liberals, not least Mr Vince Cable, who I am sorry is not in this House. He made it clear that he thought that there should be no second referendum:

“The public have voted and I do think it’s seriously disrespectful and politically utterly counterproductive to say: ‘Sorry guys, you’ve got it wrong, we’re going to try again’, I don’t think we can do that”.


My noble friend Lord Cormack made the point that there is also the assumption that the EU definitely wants us to remain in. There is also the assumption behind the amendment that Article 50 is reversible. As I understand the position, this is legally an open question. The Supreme Court did not opine on it because the two parties to the case, Mrs Miller and the Government, agreed that they would not argue about the issue in front of the court, so it did not take a view. I understand that lawyers are divided on the matter, but it is by no means clear that Article 50, once it has been invoked, is reversible.

Regardless of what the legal argument is, politically it seems difficult to believe that Article 50 could be reversed. Would the EU really want to negotiate with a country that is saying, “Well, we will get some terms from you which we will put back to the people, and then we may come back and ask for a better set of terms if they are not satisfactory”? If my noble friend Lord Cormack and I are wrong about this and the EU definitely and 100% wants us to remain in, it will give us the worst possible bargain, knowing that it has to be endorsed by both Parliament and a referendum. The amendment that has been proposed seems to be opportunistic and it does not have any logic to it at all.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, “the will of the people” is a phrase much bandied around in the wake of the referendum and it has taken on a totemic significance. Anyone who suggests that the country should not now blindly leap off the cliff into the unknown that is hard Brexit risks being accused of trying to defy the will of the people. When the Supreme Court judges examined the Government’s plans to ride roughshod over the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament, they met with a disgraceful headline labelling them “Enemies of the people”. Their determination to stand up for the rule of law rather than the rule of the mob was seen as defying the will of the people.

I do not wish to defy the will of the people. Amendment 3, introduced so persuasively by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, proposes the opposite of defying the will of the people. It is about upholding democracy, not denying it. It simply proposes that once the terms of our withdrawal from the EU are clear, the public should be given the final say on whether to accept them. As I said at Second Reading, I cannot understand why even the most devoted Brexiteers would not wish to give the public the final say on the terms of such a momentous decision unless they feared that the terms might not be acceptable.

The process would demand simply that Parliament should approve the terms by a resolution of both Houses. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, it would be the vote of the Commons that was decisive; we know our place in this Chamber. If there is no deal, however, and the Government simply decide to withdraw from the EU, this too should be the subject of a resolution of both Houses. I will support a later amendment that calls for that procedure. I believe it to be absolutely crucial that, if the Government think that they have secured a good deal for this country, that deal should be put to the public in a referendum.

We are a proudly democratic country. We hold elections and we abide by the results even if the majority is wafer thin. The party with the largest number of MPs gets to govern. But the difference between a general election and the referendum is that a few years down the line the country has a chance to change its mind and to think again. People judge the efforts of those whom they have elected and, if they are not satisfied, they throw them out. A Parliament is not for life. However, when the country is now embarking on one of the most momentous decisions ever, a decision that will affect our children and our children’s children, there seems to be a perverse determination to insist that the people have made their bed and that, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, they are jolly well going to lie in it in perpetuity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

Would the noble Lord please correct what he said about the Conservative manifesto saying we would stay in the single market? That was in the context of the negotiation that the Prime Minister promised to undertake, and was on the assumption that, as he wanted, people would say “yes” to remain. If the referendum went the other way, it was made perfectly clear that the single market would no longer encompass Britain.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

The noble Lord could have been much quicker if he said, “Yes but we just changed our minds”—which is exactly what the Government have now done. The Government have a mandate to leave but they have no mandate whatever for this brutal form of leaving that will damage this country. By the way, it is not us that has been undemocratic but the Government. They have taken the British people’s vote and hijacked it for their anti-European prejudices. That is why now they need a referendum on the outcome—not a second referendum on “in or out” but a referendum on the deal. Noble Lords and the House will know the enormous difference between the hard Brexit that the Government propose, with no access to the single market and no membership of the customs union, and a Brexit maintaining access to the single market. The difference between these two options is huge for the people of this country, for our influence in Europe and the wider world, and for jobs, industry and our economy. Maybe the Government have got it right in their judgment—their guesswork—that the British people are content to leave the single market, but let them test that. They have no mandate from the referendum outcome whatever for that solution.

Brexit: Trade Arrangements

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

The noble Lord, with his usual forensic skill, puts me in an interesting position. Let me just repeat what has been said. As a Government, my fellow Ministers and I have had numerous conversations with business, and the noble Lord is absolutely right that there is a considerable amount of interest and concern in certain quarters as to what will happen at the end of the two-year period. We are very focused on that. As the Prime Minister has said, we want to avoid a cliff edge. We want to provide certainty where we can and are looking at all the options, although I am not in a position here and now to go into that. Clearly, some of those options will be dependent on what comes out of the negotiations, but rest assured we are very mindful of this issue.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

Would my noble friend distinguish between a transitional negotiating phase and the transitional implementation phase? Surely there is no reason why the negotiations might not be completed in two years, whereas the implementation, in order to avoid a cliff edge, might take place over a longer period. But that is entirely different from what the noble Lord was suggesting.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My noble friend is absolutely right, and once again we need to be very precise in the use of our language here. In many treaties there are periods for implementation. In other treaties, heads of terms might be negotiated and they are a bridge between those heads of terms and the end date. We need to be very clear what we are talking about.

Next Steps in Leaving the European Union

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s Statement. He is quite right to emphasise how absurd it is for the Opposition to advocate that the actual aims of the negotiation should be paraded in public. When the Minister hears the Opposition preaching the merits of membership of—not access to—the single market, will he perhaps remind Members opposite that there are some disadvantages to such membership? These include the facts that we cannot make our own trade deals, that we must accept regulation applying not just those to firms that export to Europe but to the whole of the economy, and that we must make a significant financial contribution equal to 0.5% of GDP. These are significant things that cannot be wished away.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My noble friend makes some very wise points, coming from the position that I know he does. It is absolutely critical that as we go on we are very clear and precise in the terms we use. As he rightly said, there is a great difference between membership and access. In the debate over the last few weeks, people have become rather confused on this. I agree that it is critical that we are clear what we are talking about. On where we are going, as I said, I am not in a position at the Dispatch Box to go further in defining the Government’s course of action other than to say that clearly we are considering a whole range of options, but equally clearly it is in our interests to ensure that we get the maximum freedom for business to trade with and within the single market.