Brexit

Lord Livermore Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, in the House of Commons one week ago, the Prime Minister delivered a Statement demeaning in its tone and inflammatory in its language. Deliberately provocative, it was clearly an exercise in distraction, designed specifically to divert attention from the Supreme Court’s ruling 24 hours earlier that the suspension of Parliament was unlawful. But while the Prime Minister’s Statement was reckless, it was also revealing, providing us with the clearest insight yet into the no-deal playbook, the rhetorical strategy designed to achieve the most extreme form of Brexit.

The first and most pernicious part of this strategy is to question the patriotism of their opponents, duly articulated by the Prime Minister in the phrase “surrender Act”. Although undoubtedly offensive, this phrase also betrays an extraordinarily warped world-view. Like the Japanese soldier emerging from the jungle, unaware that the war had ended some 60 years earlier, members of this Government deploy confrontational language, unable to comprehend just how much the world has changed or where Britain’s national interest now lies. They fail to realise that we are not in a war; that we will not succeed by standing alone, isolated; or that cutting ourselves off from our closest allies will only diminish, internationally and economically, the country they profess to feel pride in. It is not patriotic to knowingly make Britain poorer and less powerful, and the only thing that risks being surrendered by this process is Britain’s prosperity and reputation in the world.

Having sought to undermine the motives of their opponents, the second step in the no-deal playbook is to distort the verdict of the referendum and the mandate it delivered. The vision of Brexit that 52% of voters put their faith in three years ago carried with it some very specific promises. In 2016, Boris Johnson and those who are now leading members of his Cabinet promised that,

“there won’t be a sudden change that disrupts the economy”;

that:

“The idea that our trade will suffer … is silly”;


that,

“we will negotiate a new settlement with the EU”;—[Official Report, Commons, 10/9/15; col. 529.]

and that:

“There will be no change to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic”.


These are the promises made by the proponents of Brexit, and these are the promises their mandate required them to deliver.

However, it is impossible to reconcile these promises with a no-deal Brexit, an outcome that the Government’s own analysis shows will reduce GDP by 9.7%, increase borrowing by £30 billion, disrupt trade to the extent set out in Operation Yellowhammer and inevitably create a hard border on the island of Ireland. Yet still the Prime Minister seeks to misappropriate this mandate, distorting it to impose a totally incompatible version of Brexit, gaslighting us into believing that no deal somehow respects the referendum and honours the result. The reality is that there is no mandate for any Brexit that fails to deliver on the specific promises made. The problem for the Government is that these promises are fundamentally undeliverable; you cannot leave the European Union and retain the benefits that being a member provides.

So, the third step in their strategy is to assert that democracy demands they deliver something else entirely. Despite having no personal mandate and heading a minority Government, the Prime Minister claims that by pursuing a policy nobody voted for, he is somehow upholding democracy. He says that elected MPs who point out that this is not what their constituents voted for should “stand aside”. The truth is that it emphatically is not democratic to promise one thing and then seek to deliver something completely different. That is the opposite of democracy. When we have travelled so far from what was promised in 2016, the only democratic route is to put the decision back to the British people in a confirmatory public vote.

Having failed to deliver their impossible promises, the fourth step in the no-deal playbook is to deflect responsibility for this failure on to anyone but themselves. The Prime Minister and half his Cabinet may have twice voted against a deal, but it is now the fault of Opposition MPs that Britain is yet to leave. The Prime Minister may have acted unlawfully, but it is now the fault of the judges for saying so. The Conservative Party may have spent months on a leadership election, but it is now the Labour Party’s fault that time is being wasted. When the Government are again found to have failed to come up with workable proposals, it will of course be the EU’s fault that a deal remains elusive.

As each of the once-claimed benefits of Brexit have in turn disintegrated, the Government are now left only with the mundane entreaty to “get Brexit done”. Gone are the promised sunlit uplands. Instead, in the Prime Minister’s words, let us “put Brexit behind us”. This is the fifth and final step in their strategy: to pretend Brexit is an event, not a process—a chore that, once completed, frees us up to do the things we enjoy. Yet having first built a fallacy, they are now selling a fantasy. The truth is that, with or without a deal, any form of Brexit would be only the start, not the end, of a long and painful journey. An entire generation would be consumed with a process that would devour our politics and diminish our resources. Gone would be the time and money to tackle the challenges that first drove Brexit or the priorities that have been neglected ever since. In reality, getting Brexit done is yet another attempted deception.

This is the no-deal playbook: a strategy to crash Britain over the cliff edge to achieve the most extreme form of Brexit and fulfil their long-held ideological obsession. It is a strategy designed to bend the facts—to insist black is white. However, let us not be fooled into thinking that this is the strategy of a confident project that believes it is winning. It is the last resort of an ever-more desperate Government; of a project built on lies now colliding with reality.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Livermore Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, in the referendum last year I voted for Britain to remain in the European Union. Along with millions of other people, I did so not out of a lack of patriotism but because of a deep and abiding concern for my country. I was convinced that leaving the European Union would be an act of monumental self-harm that would diminish Britain’s prosperity and our influence as a nation. I saw nothing from the supporters of Brexit during last year’s campaign, nor have I seen anything from the Government since, to change that view. However, this debate is not about refighting the referendum, nor is it about the principle of whether or not we should leave. Instead, it is about a seemingly narrow Bill that disguises a far broader intention. Without a meaningful provision to ask the Government to think again, the Bill seeks not just a mandate to leave the European Union but a mandate to negotiate a very specific outcome.

What was set out in the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech and in the Government’s White Paper is the hardest of Brexits, giving up our membership not just of the single market but of the customs union too, before even getting to the negotiating table. This is only one possible interpretation of the referendum result, and it is an interpretation for which there is no majority in the country. The referendum campaign, and the relatively narrow margin by which it was won, revealed a country deeply and almost evenly divided. Even among the 52% who voted to leave, there were multiple and often contradictory reasons for wanting to do so. There will have been leave voters who believed the claims that Brexit would mean an extra £350 million a week for the NHS. Others will have been persuaded that it would mean the revival of traditional industries and an end to the impact of globalisation. Still more will have believed assurances that we could end immigration while not having to leave the single market. However, it is now clear that Brexit meant none of these things. They were fake promises and false assurances, specifically designed to deceive.

Rather than seek to heal this divided nation, hold an honest conversation with the country and try to build a national consensus, since 23 June this Government have chosen a very different route. Through the constant repetition of empty phrases such as “Brexit means Brexit”, they have sought to simplify the mandate, disguise its central complexity and distort the meaning of the result, while what they ultimately seek becomes clearer with every threat made to our former partners. Their clear goal is an offshore, small-state Britain, meaning not more money for the NHS but less, and the systematic reduction of the rights of British workers. I have no doubt that this vision of Britain as a mid-Atlantic Singapore is strongly supported by hard line ideologues in the Conservative Party and in some sections of the media. But equally I have no doubt that they would never have won the referendum had they been honest enough to articulate that beforehand.

The verdict of the referendum has now become so distorted as to be unrecognisable. In this Bill, we are being asked to support an unelected Prime Minister, with no mandate of her own and pursuing a policy opposite to that in the manifesto on which her party was elected, as she seeks to negotiate the hardest possible interpretation of Brexit for which there is no majority in the country and which will be devastating to the lives of millions of those leave voters on whom the outcome depended. Yet the Government now have the nerve to lecture us about respecting the “will of the people”.

There was an opportunity in the House of Commons for the Labour Party to resist this interpretation. I am proud that many of my colleagues stood up for an alternative way forward, putting growth, jobs and living standards first. However, at the very moment when the country needed our party to act in the national interest and in the interests of the people it was created to defend, our party’s leadership was found badly wanting.

As a result of that vote in the Commons, I have no doubt that the Bill will pass, but I cannot support it. From the outset, the issue of Brexit, from referendum to negotiation, has put narrow political interest before the national interest. The decision to hold the referendum was made purely to keep the Conservative Party together. The Government’s response has been simply about electoral calculation. Now this House has been warned that, if it dares to act in the national interest, it faces abolition.

I have great humility about the outcome of the referendum and about the unelected nature of this House, but if we sincerely believe that the course we are on will do untold damage to our country, we have a duty, whether elected or unelected, to say so, to oppose it and to tell the truth. I believe that working people’s lives will be made worse by this Bill. I believe that those who voted for Brexit in the greatest numbers will suffer most from the outcome. I believe that the very real problems in their lives were not caused by the European Union, and will not be solved by our leaving. I believe we will do them no favours by pretending otherwise.

Those of us who believe that Britain’s national interests are best pursued inside the European Union must listen, learn and understand why our view was rejected, but we should never stop telling the truth. The British people are being sold a lie, and we should say so. When the extent of this betrayal becomes clear, when what has been promised turns out to be undeliverable, there will be a terrible reckoning—maybe not now, maybe not in two years or even in 20, but history will judge us very harshly indeed if we now connive in that betrayal when we believe in a different course.

I want to know that I did the right thing so, with a clear conscience, I feel bound to affirm my opposition to the Bill and to its profoundly damaging effect on our country.

UK Withdrawal from the EU and Potential Withdrawal from the Single Market

Lord Livermore Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, I believe there is a strong and positive link between the two halves of this debate: EU citizens living and working in this country and a prosperous economy. Therefore, it is of great concern that the Government have chosen to make their national priority not growth, jobs and living standards but reducing immigration, regardless of the economic cost.

This perspective that the economic well-being of the nation matters less than the politics of control has driven the Prime Minister to set out the hardest possible interpretation of Brexit. Her argument is not that this will make Britain more prosperous, but that controlling immigration is so important it is worth pulling Britain out of the single market and the customs union to achieve. Therefore, as we scrutinise this decision, it must surely be right for us to consider what impact restricting the rights of European Union citizens to live and work in this country could have on our economy.

The economic benefits of immigration are clear. It increases growth, provides more tax revenue and helps pay for an ageing society. It creates new job opportunities, brings skills into our economy and makes us more competitive. There is substantial evidence that reducing immigration would damage our economy, and, by lowering tax receipts, put great strain on our public services. The recent Autumn Statement showed that we would need to borrow an additional £16 billion by 2020 to make up for the reduced tax take from falling migration, with a further cost of £8 billion every year thereafter. Yet, despite these arguments, the question of controlling immigration dominated the referendum campaign. Indeed, the Prime Minister believes it was so central to the outcome that we should withdraw from not just the European Union but the single market too, despite estimates that membership could be worth as much as 4% on GDP compared to WTO terms alone.

For this Government, the political priority of ending freedom of movement is more important than the economic benefits of the single market. However, by making immigration their national priority, they are creating huge expectations—expectations they are unlikely to meet for three reasons.

First, there are the numbers. Through constant reference to the burden on infrastructure and the impact on wages, the public have been led to believe that, when we end freedom of movement, not just immigration but the number of immigrants already here will fall. Yet what if—as we all hope they will—existing EU migrants are allowed to stay? What of new trade deals, where every potential new arrangement comes with the demand to open our labour market to that country’s citizens? What, too, of the Government’s record on controlling immigration from non-EU countries, the source of the majority of our immigration, over which we have always had control? The previous Home Secretary tried and failed to meet a target to reduce it and now non-EU net migration alone stands at double the Government’s target of 100,000 per year. The reality is that non-EU migration may have to increase to meet the ongoing demand for skilled and unskilled labour.

The second expectation concerns the cultural impact of immigration: the view that ending freedom of movement will prevent the nature of our communities from changing. Yet, where this happens, much of the impact arises as a result of immigration from outside the EU, which, we should be clear, will be completely unaffected by ending freedom of movement.

Finally, it remains the case that the greatest hostility to immigration is to be found in those parts of the country where there are fewest immigrants. Despite politicians of both main parties advocating immigration control in order to solve the problems of these areas, their problems will not be solved because their problems were not caused by immigration in the first place.

These huge gaps between expectations and reality create a great danger for our country. We risk damaging our economy by leaving the single market only to find that the political promise of control was itself a fiction, and we risk stoking fears about immigration that will never be adequately addressed simply by ending freedom of movement. In this gap between expectations and reality, the politics of extremism will lie in wait. We need urgently to change the terms of debate in this country and focus not on raising expectations that cannot be met but instead on solving the real problems that people face.