Brexit

Lord McNally Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, the three years since the 2016 referendum have stress-tested every aspect of our parliamentary democracy. At times we seem to have been living out Yeats’s words in his poem “The Second Coming”:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity”.

I was in the room at Transport House in 1971 when Anthony Wedgwood Benn proposed that the Labour Party, when returned to office, should hold a referendum on our membership of the European Common Market. He could not get a seconder for that proposal; referendums were held by tinpot dictators and banana republics, not by mature parliamentary democracies. My old mentor, the late Lord Callaghan—no relation—remarked sagely at the time, “That’s one lifeboat we may all have to climb in one day”. So we did in the 1975 referendum, which was an exercise undertaken to hold a divided Labour Party together. The 2016 referendum was held for exactly the same reason, this time to paper over the yawning divisions in the Conservative Party over Europe.

All too often, in all our parties, expediency has topped principle in presenting the case for Europe. In the end, we have been hoist by our own petard. Successive British Governments have used the same tactics the SNP has used in Scotland: it takes credit for everything that goes right and blames Westminster for everything that goes wrong. For 40 years, successive British Governments have taken the credit for the influence and prosperity that membership of the EU has brought, while blaming the Brussels bureaucrats for any tough decisions that had to be implemented. It was perhaps not surprising that the case for Europe, which has been undersold for 40 years, fell victim to a Brexit campaign of such mendacity and falsehood.

Some of the damage we are now experiencing could perhaps have been avoided if we had not rushed to engage Article 50. In so doing, we have arrived at a point where we are in very real danger of crashing out of the EU without a deal—something which was never put to the British people in 2016. It is absurd to pretend that the 2016 decision was as informed about the truth and consequences of us leaving Europe then as we are now by the realities that have been laid bare over the past three years.

In the Times on Saturday, Philip Hammond—only recently Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote:

“The radicals advising Boris do not want a deal. Like the Marxists on the Labour left, they see the shock of a disruptive no-deal Brexit as a chance to re-order our economy and society”.


He points out very clearly that the Prime Minister is backed in this strategy by,

“speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit—and there is only one outcome that works for them: a crash-out no-deal Brexit that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring”.

We are told by the political analysts that it was the elderly and the left-behinds who provided the Brexiteers with their majority in 2016. In my youth I read a book called The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which tells of how those who have the least are complicit in their own exploitation. If we crash out without a deal it will be the elderly and the left-behinds who bear the brunt of the consequences that follow, while speculators make a killing in the chaos that follows.

This is not the Eton wall game: get over the line any way you can, dust yourself down, all shake hands and move on. This is about the future of our country for the rest of this century. Those who have to live with the consequences of that decision—the young—have the right to vote again on the matter, and those who will not live with those consequences should at least be given the opportunity to think again about whether this is the future they wish to bequeath their children and grandchildren.

We should be able to make those decisions protected, as far as possible, from the black arts of modern electioneering. In the last month, Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings have been working to the Trump-Bannon playbook. Only the intervention of Parliament and the Supreme Court saved us from an illegal Prorogation, a bounce-out of the EU and a general election fought on a phony people-versus-Parliament basis. Leaving the EU without a deal or via some loophole hinted at by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, which subverts the will of Parliament, will leave an open wound in our politics that will take a generation to heal. There is still time for the one-nation Tories, the liberals and the social democrats to speak for the liberal and tolerant society that is at ease with itself and its neighbours. But time is short and the time for action is now.

Fifty-odd years ago, I visited Strasbourg for the first time as a junior official of the Labour Party. I remember how we were greeted then: not as people who had won the war, but as a country admired for its good governance and the rule of law. There was a desire to see this country play a leading role at the heart of Europe. My son—now about the same age as I was then—works in the space industry in Germany as part of a multinational European team. I asked him what the reaction of his colleagues was. He said, “Dad, it’s a kind of bemused sadness”. From how we were met in the 1960s to that bemused sadness now is something that we should all ponder.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to have listened to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and I thought for one brief moment that I was going to actually agree with him on something, because he said he had growing reservations about our unwritten constitution—but then that took him off to saying there should be a second referendum. I do not quite follow that one.

I will talk about the judgment of the Supreme Court and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, which is remarkable on two counts. The first is that it was unanimous. All 11 judges on the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion, when we all know that the judiciary is totally divided on this issue. Does this not raise slight questions in people’s minds as to how they came to a unanimous conclusion when the previous court, the Divisional Court, had voted the other way? They overturned the verdict of the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales and the Master of the Rolls. Was it not rather strange that they should reach a unanimous verdict when so many other very distinguished judges across the country had decided the other way?

[Lord McNally]

What is the noble Lord implying? He should not just put a question mark up. The clue as to why there is a difference is in the name “Supreme Court”. Why does the noble Lord think all 11 came to the same conclusion? By raising it, he is implying that there must have been some collusion or malfunction. Why ask the question without giving us an answer?

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Because I do not know what went on in the previous discussions of the Supreme Court; I was not there. All I am saying is that it is very strange that the conclusion the court came to was completely unanimous. This is very odd.

Brexit: Preparations and Negotiations

Lord McNally Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I notice that the noble Lord, Lord Cope, said, “The recess is coming”, with all the passion and fervour of a former Chief Whip. We worked together for a number of years as the usual channels and it was great to hear him again.

At home I have a cartoon which I have mentioned in such debates since the early 1960s. Like all good cartoons, it says more than many pages of writing could. In a football changing room, well-known figures of the time—De Gaulle, Erhard and Adenauer—are putting on their football kit. Framed in the doorway is Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who was then the Government’s representative in Macmillan’s preliminary negotiations about joining the then Common Market. Sir Alec is standing there pristine in his cricket whites, with his cricket bat under his arm and his cap at a jaunty angle. The title of the cartoon is “Joining the Game”. One of the problems with Britain’s relationship with Europe over these 70 years and more has been that the British have often wanted to join a game that the Europeans did not want to play. This goes back to EFTA, free trade and all that.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds, who sadly is no longer in his place, put his finger on it when he identified a lack of understanding on the part of the British, under successive Governments, of a dimension to Europe that we have never felt. In the early 1970s I had the honour and pleasure of working with Jean Monnet. I once asked him what were the drive and the motivation behind his ideas for the Schuman plan and then for Europe. He said, “I wanted to create something that would make it impossible for Germany and France ever to go to war with each other again”.

The Brits do not really understand that passion and what it means to Europeans who have gone through all the traumas of war and defeat, the Stasi and all the rest. We have never really bought in to the idea that Europe is more than a trading relationship. It is also a social relationship, and much of the beneficial legislation, from which our trade union movement benefits, such as protection of consumers and workers, was as much part of Christian democrat Europe as it was of social democrat Europe. There was always that drive and that other dimension to Europe, which is important and needs protecting. One of the reasons I oppose the Brexiteers is that I believe that their hidden agenda is to dismantle a great deal of the gains of social Europe so that they can play the buccaneer in this mythical free-trade world in which they want to sail.

Time and again over the last few weeks, from all parts of the House, we have heard the general view that this cannot go on. I can think of no decision since the war when the Government have been in such disarray—and, believe me, I have worked for one or two Governments who might have come close. We finally got the White Paper and it may be that the Government achieve a kind of settlement—certainly the approach that the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, put forward might give them a fair chance of doing so—or we may end up with a no-deal Brexit. But what is absolutely clear is that, whatever the outcome, it is light years from the prospectus put to the British people in 2016. I cannot agree with the noble Lord, Lord Birt, who unfortunately is not in his place, that Brexit must be honoured. This is not the Charge of the Light Brigade—we do not have to go on league after league regardless of the facts, regardless of the change in circumstances and regardless of what is put before us.

I knew we were in trouble when Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg debated this. Nick raised a whole range of problems about Brexit and all were dismissed, rather in the way that the Minister dismisses questions that we put to him on a variety of issues. Matters will always be dealt with by some great, special deal, as yet unspecified. It reminds me of that line in “Henry IV”:

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep”.


Of course, the next line is:

“Why, so can I, or so can any man;


But will they come when you do call for them?”

This is the uncertainty that still prevails, but when we get certainty we have to move to a decision that gives the British people a final say, with all the facts in line. It will demand a kind of courage that was referred to by my noble friend Lord Taverne—the courage of Burke, of each parliamentarian making his decision. I really believe that we will have to make a decision quite as important as the time when Leo Amery shouted to Arthur Greenwood, “Speak for England, Arthur”, at the 1940 Norway debate. What a tragic misunderstanding of history Jacob Rees-Mogg showed about Robert Peel, who turned to his Front Bench and said, “You must answer them, for I cannot”, in abandoning the corn laws. Each parliamentarian will have to make a key decision, which, in all justice, must be to give the British people another choice.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord McNally Excerpts

Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 14th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

I wonder if my noble friend could add just one more example. She and I and the Minister—before he was sent to the Brexit gulag—worked on the Space Industry Bill. Nothing more typifies the need for co-operation within Europe than that industry. Will she add to her litany of examples the space industry, to which we have made such a contribution and about which there are many unanswered questions?

[Baroness Randerson]

My noble friend makes a very good point. The uncertainty is already having an impact on the space industry because aspects of it are moving abroad. The same applies to the automotive industry, where we have had such growth in recent years. The impact of customs arrangements on the industry will be so complex that it will not be able to import and export parts across borders during the manufacturing process as companies have been doing. People occasionally say, “Well, what you can do is produce all the goods in one country”. They make the point that it takes about five years to develop a supply chain in one particular process in one country. It is extremely difficult, nigh on impossible, to do that in the modern world.

To conclude, I meet dozens of representatives of businesses in the transport sector on a weekly basis. I am assiduous in meeting organisations and individual companies and going on visits in order to take the temperature of their views. I am yet to meet a single one who thinks they would be better off outside the EU, outside the single market, outside the customs union. They are, with a will, trying to prepare themselves for the worst, but they still hope for the best.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord McNally Excerpts

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 12th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham]

My Lords, in view of what my noble friend has said, I can be very brief. I support the first four amendments in this group, to which I have set my name, and have ventured to put forward a sort of default position in my Amendment 340. As the Committee will appreciate, the purpose of the first four amendments is to ensure that the regulatory power now under discussion cannot be used to create a criminal offence, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, has set out very clearly the reasons for this. Amendment 340, which stands in my name, is the default position, so that if by any evil chance this Committee or your Lordships’ House decided that it was right to create a criminal offence, it should be one that does not attract a custodial sentence.

We need to be quite plain about what we are talking about. The Bill as presently drafted enables the Minister, if he deems it appropriate and subject to the affirmative resolution, to create a criminal offence that attracts a custodial sentence of up to two years. Two years is not an insignificant period, and it is very important that one reminds oneself that the test is whether the Minister thinks it is appropriate. Furthermore, we must go on reminding ourselves that the procedure—that is the affirmative resolution procedure—is simply not subject to amendment. So this is, in effect, the power to introduce a criminal offence which attracts a custodial sentence by fiat or declaration. I find that profoundly unattractive.

As a former Minister who signed an awful lot of statutory instruments, I know that the degree of ministerial oversight is extremely limited. As I said, if this Committee decides that a criminal offence should be creatable in this way, then surely it should not attract a custodial sentence of any kind.

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, my name has been added to a number of the amendments in this group and I appreciate the Minister’s intervention, which should make this debate fairly short. I want to take up an earlier point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley: he said that he thought some of the speeches were too long and bordering on filibustering. That set a little alarm bell ringing in my mind. I have sat in on some of the debates and I have read others, and I think that this Bill is being handled by this House in the appropriate way that it deserves. Some of the speeches, from all the Benches, have been among the best I have heard in parliamentary debate.

The Minister, in referring to his Privy Council Bench, said that they were poachers turned gamekeepers. I say, en passant, that I look on them as sinners turned penitents, but that is a matter of taste really.

As I say, there have been some magnificent debates, but I worry where we are going on this. Sometimes I wonder whether the Ministers are adopting the tactics of the great boxing champion Muhammad Ali. His “rope a dope” strategy was to take all the punishment in the early stages and then have his own way in the later stages of the fight.

I hear what many noble Lords have said—the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, among them—that of course the House of Lords can go only so far with its opposition in the face of the Commons. The contribution from the father of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, who warned of an elected dictatorship, comes into play here. So too does something I have mentioned on a number of occasions over the past 20 years that I have sat in this House: this House has the right to say no. We must ask ourselves why successive Governments, some with very large majorities in the House of Commons and some who have reformed this House from time to time, have left it with the right to say no. The reason is that unless we retain the right to say no, we would become a debating Chamber and the Government could simply use their Commons majority to force things through willy-nilly, regardless of whether or not we oppose them. I realise that, in some areas, we bow to the wishes of the elected House, even when we do not want certain things to go through.

As happened in the past two sittings of this Committee, we have discussed in great detail two very important constitutional issues: the right to impose taxation and, now, with this group of amendments, the right to create criminal offences. The proposals go to the very heart of our constitutional settlement and, in my opinion, to the very heart of the responsibilities of this House. Therefore, although I appreciate that a considerable promise was made at the opening of this debate, I say this to Ministers and to colleagues who have made outstanding speeches: regarding our red lines about the right to impose taxation and to create criminal offences, somewhere down the line, if what the Government come up with is not satisfactory, in our responsibility to defend the constitution this House must reserve the right to say no.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, I want to add one short point to what has been said about sentences of imprisonment. It is likely that if the Government think it necessary to introduce new criminal offences, they are not going to be offences of assault or anything of that kind, but offences that relate to the conduct of business between the United Kingdom and the European Union. What we are talking about here are possibly mainly regulatory offences, for which sentences of imprisonment may not be necessary at all. However, such offences may affect severely the conduct of companies and the relationships between them, the conduct of local authorities and so on. Therefore, I ask that included in the scrutiny that the Minister has very helpfully promised is a slightly more sophisticated test that bears in mind the effect of potential new offences on the business community and the economy.