European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Lord Radice Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Radice (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow my fellow “yellow-belly”, if I may call him that —he is wearing a yellow tie at the moment, and rightly so. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Barwell, on a most interesting speech and I look forward to his contributions in this House, especially on housing and on how to run a Government. I also look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Mann, because I want to see where he stands on these matters.

I am not going to give a re-run of old arguments, but as a historian, I would like to put the Bill into some sort of context. I have to say straightaway that as a supporter of the European Union and of Britain’s membership of it for the past 65 years, Friday 31 January, when the divorce Bill becomes law, as it must, will be a day of great sadness for me and, I believe, for millions of others.

I believe that the main reason for our departure lies not so much with the media but with our politicians. If things went well in Europe, it was a victory for Britain. If there were problems, they said that it was the fault of Brussels. With a few notable exceptions, they never spent time explaining the benefits of British membership. In the 2016 referendum result, we reaped what the politicians had sown.

Once the British people had decided to leave, albeit by a narrow majority, I believe that a pragmatic natural leader ought to have limited the damage to the economy by remaining as close as possible to the EU. Instead, both Mrs May, except just at the end, and Boris Johnson, took a different and much harder line. I have to admit that over the last few months the Opposition have made things worse. Under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, a general election was not required until 2022, and despite polls indicating a large Tory majority, Mr Corbyn and Ms Swinson, in a mixture of what I believe was short-sightedness and hubris—I was surprised not to hear this from the Liberal Benches—fell into Mr Johnson’s elephant trap and voted for the election which both he and Dominic Cummings so desperately wanted. That is the background to this. As we now know, the result was not only a landslide victory for the Tories, which gives the Government great power—and great responsibility; it has greatly increased the risk of the no-deal Brexit which the last Parliament worked so hard to rule out.

“Let’s get Brexit done” was a clear and, I believe, clever election slogan that appealed not just to leavers but to voters fed up with three years of bickering over Brexit, as they saw it—but in reality it was seriously misleading. The most important issue, the UK’s future relationship with the EU, has still not been decided. That is where we are today, and it will take some time.

I understand that Boris Johnson is allowing us only 11 months for negotiation, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Barwell, that that will make it very difficult. Indeed, the new European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has already warned that this timetable does not allow sufficient time to negotiate an agreement satisfactory to both sides. The danger is that there will be either a deal that, in the words of the Financial Times, is “minimal, rushed and last-minute”—a bare-bones agreement that leaves crucial sectors of the economy out—or, even more disastrous, no deal, which could bring Britain to its knees.

Boris Johnson has said that leaving the EU will offer the UK a bright future. We shall see about that. He seems to forget that being a member of the EU has already brought great benefits to this country—I do not think it is rerunning old arguments to remind noble Lords of that—in increased power, influence and security, faster trade, investment and employment, greater affluence and well-being for our citizens, and improved environmental and social protection. Sadly, we are unlikely to enjoy such benefits outside.

I see that my time is coming to an end. Speaking in the House of Lords a year or two ago, I predicted that if we left the EU with no deal or a botched arrangement, the result would be unacceptable to the next generation, and I stand by that prediction. I believe they will have concluded that a medium-sized European power such as the UK should act in partnership with its close neighbours.

Brexit: Preparations and Negotiations

Lord Radice Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Radice (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the balanced and considered speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I would have expected nothing less from him and I congratulate him on it.

It was Michael Bloomberg, the American media mogul, who said about the referendum result that it was the,

“stupidest thing any country has ever done”.

He based this harsh judgment on the underlying reasons for Britain’s pre-referendum prosperity: the UK’s massive trade with other member states and its 40% share of the EU’s inward investment, with foreign companies coming to the UK as a base for trading within the EU, and with the UK, like Germany, using its membership of the EU to facilitate its entry into other global markets. As my noble friend Lord Anderson—he is not here now—said, the recent fantastic trade deal between the EU and Japan is a good example of what EU membership can bring. It is interesting that it has been hardly mentioned in the Eurosceptic press.

The UK’s position within the EU has been buttressed by special opt-outs, the prime examples being on the single market and Schengen. If Bloomberg is right, the main purpose of our Brexit negotiations should be to mitigate as far as possible the loss of these great advantages. Instead, Mrs May’s negotiating strategy has so far—I hope that she will improve in the future—been to try to buy off the hard-line Brexiteers in her own party rather than negotiating realistically with the EU to achieve the best possible deal for the UK.

Mrs May in her Lancaster House speech of 17 January 2017, which I consider was a bit of a disaster and I see was much quoted by the former Foreign Secretary in his extremely thin resignation speech, laid down her red lines. She confirmed that the UK would end the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain; she made it clear that the UK would leave both the single market and the customs union; she foolishly announced that

“no deal … is better than a bad deal”,

and talked airily about a “Global Britain”. In short, to win over her Eurosceptics, she became a prisoner of their Eurosceptic “red lines” and she has been a prisoner ever since.

The White Paper, which, as my noble friend on the Front Bench said, should have been produced long ago and certainly before Mrs May triggered Article 50, is at least an attempt to row back from Lancaster House—to that extent it is an improvement and should be welcomed—but we are still no clearer on what the Government really mean on a number of key issues, including the Northern Ireland border and the customs union.

As Alex Barker pointed out in the FT, within the space of a year Mrs May has floated five variations of a customs union: a customs union associate membership, a highly streamlined customs arrangement, a new customs partnership, a temporary customs arrangement, and now a facilitated customs arrangement. This is surely carrying circumlocution a bit far. It enables Monsieur Barnier to claim that he is mystified by the Government’s position, and I see his point.

For there to be any realistic chance of a good deal, we will have to accept that we should remain a member of the customs union and probably the single market as well. That in itself is no bad thing. It was Sir Martin Donnelly, Liam Fox’s former Permanent Secretary, who remarked that leaving the single market and the customs union was like,

“giving up a three-course meal … now, for the promise of a packet of crisps in the future”.

He is right. It is also the case, of course, that no trading deal that we can now achieve with the EU is better than our existing one as a member of the EU. Indeed, in the two years since the referendum it has become ever clearer that leaving the EU, especially at this time, is a dangerous, high-risk strategy. By contrast, the case for remaining in the EU is gathering force by the day, which is why the Brexiteers are so vocal.

Maybe we will leave the EU, I do not know; I do not have the certainty of the spokesman of the Liberal Democrats. I hope that it will be with a half-sensible deal, a so-called soft Brexit, which to some extent will mitigate the cost of leaving the EU. Even if that happens, I for one am increasingly certain that at some stage in the future, maybe during the so-called transition period—I am not absolutely clear what this is for—or not long after, a new consensus will emerge in the UK for a return to the EU, perhaps in a new form but certainly as a member. If I am right it will be on the conclusive, unanswerable grounds that a medium-sized European power such as the UK must act together with its continental neighbours, not only for its own good and the good of its citizens but also for Europe as a whole.