Brexit: Petition to Revoke Article 50 Notification

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

No doubt my noble friend is an avid follower of social media and will therefore have seen some doubt being cast on some of the signatories, but I do not doubt that the vast majority were indeed British citizens.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

Does the Minister realise that there is more than one online petition? The one to revoke has brought in nearly 6 million signatures, but the one to leave has brought in 570,000 signatures. Should we not now respond to the recent will of the people?

[Lord Callanan]

As I said earlier in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, in this country we do not have government by online poll; we have government by the ballot box and by this Parliament, and that is what we will be following.

Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, those who argue for this deal say that the people have voted and that we must honour that. The people voted two and a half years ago, when they were a different constituency. Many of them have now departed and millions more are now eligible to vote. Therefore, we are disregarding the views and the future of many of these young people. Not only that but we are withdrawing from the European Union, which means that we are withdrawing their European citizenship. These young people were born into European citizenship.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Does the noble Lord intend to have a referendum every two and a half years?

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

That is not my intention, of course, but I shall mention something in a moment that might go in that direction. As I said, we are denying young people their voice in this issue. People change their minds. Even Prime Ministers can change their minds. The Commons were to have a vote in December; now they will have a vote in January. If the people are not allowed to change their minds but the Prime Minister and parliamentarians are, we are denying a democratic right to the people.

We know all about referenda in Wales. In 1979 we voted against having a Parliament for Wales—900,000 people voted no and about 200,000 people voted yes—yet we now have a Parliament. Why is that when the people voted against it? It is because in 1987 we had another vote and the people changed their minds. People are allowed to change their minds. The same thing happened in Scotland. People reflect the era and the thinking that they are part of. To deny them the right to change their minds is to make them fossils. Therefore, we really have to think about whether we are reflecting the views of the people today or those of the people of yesterday.

Noble Lords will be glad to hear that I will not keep them for long. We have had other votes in Wales. We voted against opening pubs on Sundays. In, I think, 1891 we had a licensing Act that closed the pubs on Sundays and it was another 70 years before, in 1961, we had the Licensing Act that gave local authorities the right to open the pubs in their area on a Sunday. I remember it well. I was in the Llŷn Peninsula, and being a Methodist minister I knew which side I was going to battle for. Most local authorities in Wales said, “Yes, let’s keep Wales dry”, yet between 1961 or 1962 and 1990 all the pubs in Wales opened on a Sunday, although the people had voted for that not to happen. During that time, we had six ballots. Here, we are asking for two but in those six ballots the Sunday opening campaign was squeezed forward. I was in the studio when the count came in from Carmarthen. We thought, “Oh gosh”, but these things happen—people change their minds. Only one local authority claimed to keep Sunday dry and that was Dwyfor on the Llŷn Peninsula. The only reason that pubs there started to open on Sundays was that the local government boundaries changed.

Therefore, people change their minds. Are noble Lords going to say that people are not allowed to do that? Are they going to say, “No, we’re going to be as we were. We’ll go ahead with slavery and women won’t have the vote”? People change their minds and we as a Parliament should be ready to reflect that change. That is why we need another opportunity, following which we will be able to say, “Yes, the people of 2019 have decided”. I hope very much that when the vote takes place in this House on Monday, we will be able to reflect the need for an opportunity for the young people who were disfranchised last time to cast their votes.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

The noble Lord talked about people changing their minds about a Welsh Assembly, where the vote was very narrow—just over and just below 50%. The young people did not have a chance to vote on that, so, following his logic, shall we have another vote on the existence of the Welsh Assembly?

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

If the noble Lord wants to organise another vote, he should do it.

Brexit: Legislative Timetable

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 7th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I will not advise the noble Lord and others what amendments can be acceptable. That is not my role. There are a number of pieces of primary legislation still before this House and, if we are in a no-deal situation, further pieces of primary legislation will be forthcoming.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, is the Minister convinced that all this legislation can be carried through Parliament in the 40 working days we have left? How on earth will he manage that?

[Lord Callanan]

Of course, it will be a challenge, but I am sure all Members of this House want to see us leave the European Union in a smooth and orderly manner, which requires the appropriate legislation to be put in place.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Report: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 30th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

It is a question, and my noble friend has not finished.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

Are we learning the lessons of history? Sometimes it is very valuable to see what has happened in other countries when similar steps have been taken. We remember the reluctance of Mrs May to allow Parliament to be involved. She wanted the Government to be in charge. My mind went back to Berlin in March 1933 when the enabling Bill was passed in the Reichstag, which transferred the democratic right from the Parliament into the hands of one man—that was the Chancellor, and his name was Adolf Hitler. Perhaps I am seeing threats that do not exist, but they are possible. Who would have thought before the 1930s that Germany, such a cultured country, would involve itself in such a terrible war?

Let us take the warning. What we are doing here must involve Parliament. I would like to see it involving the people as well, but it must certainly be in other hands. We cannot let an enabling Act of the United Kingdom possibly lead to the catastrophe that took place in Berlin in 1933.

[Lord Blackwell (Con)]

My Lords, I have listened very carefully to those noble Lords who have proposed this amendment but I have concluded, on the basis of the other arguments which have been set out, that it is fundamentally flawed, for both constitutional and practical reasons. As the noble Lord, Lord Howard, said, the constitutional argument is that it risks completely confusing the roles of the Executive and the legislature. We have a system in this country where the separation of those is very clear. The Executive can command authority so long as they have a majority in the House of Commons. Their role is to bring proposals to Parliament; Parliament’s role is to be the legislature. You cannot have a negotiation where a Parliament seeks to be the negotiating partner: that is an impossible situation. Subsection (5) in the new clause proposed by the amendment allows Parliament to try and direct the details of the negotiation. That is constitutionally inappropriate—that is the role of the Executive. The Executive are accountable to Parliament but it is their role to negotiate and bring their proposals to Parliament.

On a practical level, even more importantly, and as other noble Lords have said, it would completely undermine the Government’s negotiating position if they did not have the opportunity to walk away. A negotiation has to involve compromises by both sides. If the European side of this argument knew that, however onerous they made the conditions, the Government would come back to Parliament, which could tell them to go back and concede some more, we would simply be offering the opportunity for one side of the negotiations to keep pursuing its case rather than compromise. That would completely undermine the practical basis on which negotiations have to be held between two sides which have the authority to negotiate, with proposals brought back for approval by the House.

Brexit: EU Citizenship

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I think that that is because they have Romanian passports. Romania is an EU member state and takes those obligations accordingly. As I said, it is very difficult to see how the treaties would be changed to enable this to happen. I am aware of the proposal from the European Parliament. We are not against the idea—we would be happy to consider it—but I think that there is very little chance of it happening.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, I am very proud that I was born Welsh, and I am very proud that I was born British as well. By what right can the Government or anybody else deny those who are born after we joined the European Union of their citizenship in Europe? How can we deny it to them?

[Lord Callanan]

Because, my Lords, we had a referendum on the subject of leaving the European Union and the people of the United Kingdom—and, indeed, the people of Wales—voted to leave.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

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

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, when we are told that the people have spoken, we are referring to the one-third of the electorate who supported the leave campaign. I would say that the people have not spoken. They were taken on a ride in a bus built in Poland by a German company. On its side it said, “When we are out of the EU, we will have £350 million a week to spend on the NHS”. That was the promise, yet in Arron Banks’s recently published book, The Bad Boys of Brexit, he says that from the beginning they knew that it was a blatant lie. One of the biggest donors, giving £5 million to the leave campaign, has said that they knew from the beginning that it was a blatant lie.

If it was a lie, is it not possible that the result of the referendum was because of a lie on the side of a bus? In all probability, by the leave campaign’s own admission, the referendum was won on a blatant lie. If that was so, we have every right to ask the people to consider it again when the time comes. It will determine the future of every one of us—our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. This House can either go along with a lie or it can decide that we are going to stop this here.

People say that we can rely on the Government. I have heard it argued that we can sort out the minutiae of this. I hope that the Government’s promise to do this is firmer than their promise to bring 20,000 Syrian refugees to the UK and to provide a home for 3,000 unaccompanied children. I do not trust this Government to keep their promises.

The difference between 23 June and today is that we have a different Administration in the United States. When people voted, Obama was President of the United States. Today we have a very different presidency —a Trump presidency. Every day we recoil in disbelief at the news from the US, the daily edicts of an Administration who are totally unpredictable. We only have to go the other way—to Russia—and, again, we have questions.

I am not going to speak at great length but, at this time of tremendous instability in the US, in Russia and perhaps in other states in Europe, I suggest that this is the very worst time for us to weaken the European Union. We are the basis for stability. We have our faults. We know that the European Union has its faults, but our own UK Parliament and Government also have their faults. What could be worse than for us to withdraw from Europe? It could be the beginning of the unravelling of the European Union at a time when we need it more than ever before. I would urge this House, at every opportunity, to secure not only our own future but the future of other countries in the world by voting to stay, strongly committed, at the heart of the European Union.

Brexit: European Union Citizenship

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they are planning to protect the European Union citizenship status of United Kingdom citizens who were born after the United Kingdom joined the European Union on 1 January 1973.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)]

My Lords, when the United Kingdom is no longer a member state of the European Union, British nationals who are not nationals of another EU member state will no longer be EU citizens. In terms of UK citizens already living in the EU, the Prime Minister has been clear that the Government want to protect their status in the same way as we want to protect the status of EU nationals already living here.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, I would be happy if the Minister will advise me how I can explain to my grandchildren how a leave vote of 18 million can affect the status of 65 million—the whole population of the UK—and that that vote seeks to deny them a fundamental right which they have. That is especially true for those born since 1 January 1973, when we joined the Union. The birthright of half the population of the UK is now being denied to them. Will the Minister explain that, please?

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

Yes, my Lords, I can explain in one word—the referendum, a point which the noble Lord made earlier. I can totally understand and sense the passion with which he speaks but this was a decision taken by the British people. The actual Act to introduce that referendum was passed in the other place by six to one. It is a manifesto commitment from this Government to respect the outcome and that is what we will do.