Treaty Scrutiny: Working Practices (EUC Report)

Lord McNally Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the chairs and members of these committees for their excellent reports, which are as topical as tomorrow’s headlines. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for her contribution. There was grave danger of this being a rather herbivorous Committee, with us all agreeing and, knowing that the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, is himself a very skilful soother of worried brows, that we would have gone home tonight thinking that there is no problem and that it is all done and dusted. So I am grateful to the noble Baroness because I suspect that what she said was closer to what No.10 is thinking than any other contribution around this table tonight. I say to her that, yes, I am a remoaner, but the onus is now on her and her Brexiteer friends to deliver what they promised to the British people, which was sovereignty back to Parliament.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, is giving the new committee a dry run, and I hope it becomes a Joint Committee. There is an absolute reason for reform of the CRaG Act. As somebody else pointed out, it was written while we were fully embedded in the EU, with the European Parliament taking on a lot of the heavy lifting on these treaty matters. The CRaG therefore needs to be reformed.

On the royal prerogative, I do not go as far back as Bagehot, but I do go as far back as Tony Benn. I remember him putting forward reform of the royal prerogative to the then Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan. Unfortunately, Jim was far too much of a small “c” conservative on these matters to tolerate it—but in fact he was right. The quote from Bagehot that was given is right as well. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, suggested some of the ways forward in looking at the royal prerogative, but the status quo is certainly not enough.

I also worry because the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge—I am sorry that he is not here today to contribute—has given us ample warning of the overuse of Henry VIII powers in legislation. Along with Tony Benn, another voice from the 1970s and 1980s, Lord Hailsham, warned us of the danger of the democratic dictatorship, where, unless Parliament builds in the checks and balances to ensure both transparency and accountability, we will not be in a new era of parliamentary democracy in this country. We will find it very difficult.

This is the moment for a Parliament to exert itself. In a year’s time or two years’ time, we will be blithely told from the Dispatch Box, “Well, the precedent was established when we saw X Bill through or Y Bill through.” This is the moment of maximum leverage for Parliament. The Government have a lot of business to get through. If they want the co-operation of both Houses of Parliament in doing that, they should give cast-iron assurances that they will make the kind of amendments to our checks on the Executive called for in these three reports.