European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Lord Trevethin and Oaksey Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 8th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

I do not want to misrepresent what the noble Lord said, but he suggested that there might be some legal uncertainty and that, theoretically at least, I or some other barrister might be instructed to argue something in court, and this is to avoid legal uncertainty. I am all for avoiding legal uncertainty, but the existence of the royal prerogative can surely not be in doubt, and this is, I suggest, an attempt to fetter that royal prerogative.

I finish with this observation. Lord Reed, Deputy President of the Supreme Court, said in the Gina Miller case of the royal prerogative that the,

“the value of unanimity, strength and dispatch in the conduct of foreign affairs are as evident in the 21st century as they were in the 18th”.

This Bill and this amendment substantially undermine that strength.

[Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)]

My Lords, I am yet another lawyer. I apologise for that. I will not detain the House for long.

I respectfully agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, that this came to the House as a bad Bill—I would say a very bad Bill. It sought to send the Prime Minister into the conference chamber not naked but wearing a straitjacket, and that was clearly inappropriate given the very delicate negotiations that are going to have to take place this week. As it stood, it was not proper legislation but, in the words of Nye Bevan, “an emotional spasm”.

I fully support the amendments proposed by the noble and noble and learned Lords. They are obviously necessary, bizarrely, to prevent the Bill having the inadvertent effect of increasing the risk of an accidental no-deal exit, so I fully support them. However, I am concerned that, if these amendments pass, the Bill will appear to be, and be, a bit of a mess. The Prime Minister has already, as I recall, made one request for an extension, which is outstanding; I doubt whether it will be accepted. After the Motion is passed in the House of Commons, a further date will be introduced and she will have to write another letter, I think, to the EU specifying another date. That will presumably displace application number one for an extension.

The amendments, which I support, would make it open to her to make a further, third, application for an extension, specifying a further date. That will displace, as I see it, the second application made pursuant to the Motion in the House of Commons. What is left of the Bill, as I see it, is nothing more than this: an edict from Parliament that the extension that the Prime Minister is able to seek cannot end earlier than 22 May 2019. If it had been restricted to that, we would have saved a lot of time.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I should like to pick up on something the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said about agreement on dates. As I understand it, the Prime Minister is asking to go to the end of June. Presumably she has Cabinet approval to do that.

Brexit

Lord Trevethin and Oaksey Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and before him the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich. I found myself agreeing with much—not everything, but much—of what they said. I also hope that their prayers prove to be efficacious, because they might be our best bet now.

One of the hazards of speaking late in what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, I think, told us was the 13th debate on this topic is that all one’s good points, if any, have been made by other speakers, and most of the less good, and even the bad, points that I was thinking of making have also been made. So I shall take up one or two of the issues raised, and draw out some out of the threads.

In his powerful speech, with which I disagreed fundamentally, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who may be moving a Motion later on revocation, said that it should be done “democratically” and then we should revoke and then call a referendum. I have great respect for the energy and resolve of the noble Lord, and the high degree of candour with which he has expressed his objectives over the past two or three years. But when he puts to the House the prospect of revoking first and calling a referendum later, he has not, with great respect, paid sufficient attention to the meaning and effect of revocation of the Article 50 notification in the light of the Court of Justice’s decision in Wightman—and, to some extent, the Supreme Court decision in Miller.

First, revoke and then have a referendum is never going to happen, so I will not take up too much of your Lordships’ time with that possibility. It will not happen because, almost certainly, primary legislation would be required before the existing Article 50 notification could be revoked. It is far too late to go into the legal analysis; anyone who is interested will find an excellent paper by Professor Young and Professor Phillipson, which sets out the reasoning in a very erudite way, on the Constitutional Law Association website. I do not think, from conversations I have had outside the Chamber, that any of the very distinguished noble and learned Lords who sit around me would disagree with my proposition.

So primary legislation would be required, and, realistically, there seems no prospect whatever that the House of Commons would think it expedient to try to enact primary legislation that said, in 2019—after the referendum Act, the notification Act of 2017 and the withdrawal Act of 2018—“Do you know what? We did not really mean it at all—we are taking it all back: we are revoking, without consulting the people”. The House of Commons will not do that, because it is the elected House, and it has one eye—possibly both eyes—on the response of the electors to that procedure. I agree entirely with the very powerful points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, who perhaps looks at these issues in a slightly different way from me but who very convincingly explained why it could not possibly be right to decide this issue in Parliament before it was returned to the people—if it has to be returned to the people.

So the revoke first, referendum next solution will not happen in practice. It would in any event—and it may be important for other reasons to appreciate this—be completely inappropriate because of the legal effect of the Court of Justice decision in the Wightman case. As the House knows, the Court of Justice held, in Wightman, that it is possible to unilaterally revoke an Article 50 notification. That came as no surprise at all to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, who had predicted that outcome throughout; if I had had a bet with him I would have lost. It did not wholly come as a surprise to me but, nevertheless, there was a very powerful point against the Court of Justice’s conclusion, which, in short, was that Article 50 imposes a stringent two-year time limit—as we all know by now, being in its vice at the moment. It does so in the interests of the member states that continue to be part of the Union, and one can well understand why that is so. If a departing state can unilaterally revoke a notification, it is not easy to see what would stop it tactically revoking a notification towards the end of the two-year period—because the talks had not gone so well and it wanted to buy some more time—and then re-notifying a week, a month or a few months later, thereby converting the two-year limit to a four-year limit, and conceivably doing the same thing at the end of the four-year period. That would make a nonsense of Article 50 and the Court of Justice had to deal with that.

The text of the judgment and the prior opinion of the Advocate-General, read together, do not convey an entirely clear picture of the answer to that point, but, read sensibly, it is reasonably clear what the court is saying. I shall not go into the text, but it is saying, “No, a tactical revocation of an Article 50 notification is inappropriate and unlawful. We the CJEU will not permit that”. It has to be done in accordance with the constitutional requirements of the departing state, pursuant to a democratic process and, according to the Advocate-General, in good faith. What one probably gets from that is that a revocation followed by a later notification would be treated by the Court of Justice as ineffective so far as the later notification was concerned. In short, a revocation will be final and determinative, on the state of EU law at the moment. Accordingly, “revoke first, referendum second” would not be conducive to the maintenance of trust in democracy in this country, because the post-revocation referendum would not be advisory or mandatory; it would be a rubber-stamp referendum, and the people would not like that at all. I mention those points because I have been looking at the European case law.

I shall close my observations in this way. Like, I should think, other Members of the House, I spent quite a lot of the weekend watching elected politicians on television ducking, diving, weaving and dissembling to answer good questions put to them by Mr Marr and others. It was a very depressing sight. We the country, and within the country Parliament, are in big trouble now; I think that everyone who has spoken in this debate recognises that. The crisis will get worse fast unless elected politicians in particular start talking straight about the options and how they are to be dealt with.

Let me not be partisan. The ultra-Brexiteers in the Commons should stop engaging in covert manoeuvres in the hope that they will lead to an inadvertent no-deal Brexit. I say respectfully that the Prime Minister should stop saying, “To be completely clear” and then saying something that is as clear as mud. That is not convincing. She should try to be a little clearer about what she is seeking to do. The remainers—just to be even-handed about this—should stop using language in a way that is reminiscent of the Ministry of Truth in 1984.

I shall not go back into the terminology of the “people’s vote”—we have all enjoyed analysing that concept; I want to talk about a different concept that has been gaining currency during the past couple of weeks and was discussed on television yesterday. It is a so-called “confirmatory referendum”, referred to obliquely by various representatives of the Opposition. I listened carefully and I think that the proposal is that the Prime Minister’s deal, which is so widely derided, would be voted through, but only on condition that it is subject to a “confirmatory referendum”. Such a referendum, it is suggested, would consist of a—rather displeasing to some—binary choice: vote for the Prime Minister’s deal, which has been voted down twice by the House of Commons by enormous majorities and suffers from many defects which have been discussed today and on other occasions, or vote for remain. That is, to borrow from an observation made by one speaker on the other side of this Chamber today, a choice between a dead parrot which has ceased to be—the Prime Minister’s deal, which no one wants—and remain. That structuring of the referendal question simply will not do, because it disenfranchises a large number of voters in this country. Something else must be structured if there is to be a referendum. I have not yet heard the question satisfactorily defined, and we are running out of time.

The people may not have known what they were voting for, but they will know if they are being lied to. We and all elected representatives need to start talking straightforwardly to them.

Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Trevethin and Oaksey Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, and I agree with just about everything she said, but I shall address some similar points in my own way.

The withdrawal negotiations were unquestionably always going to be very difficult. They represented a negative-sum game, and we had two significant cards to play. One was money. Inexplicably, we tossed that card away on day one, before the talks really started, so that one has gone. The other card we had to play still just about exists, although it has not been played as it might be. That is the threat of no deal. No deal is bad. It is bad for this country. I entirely agree with much that has been said on the other side of the argument about that.

It is also unquestionably bad for the other 27 and particularly bad for our Irish neighbour, which is taking a central part in the negotiations. That card has been greatly weakened because we failed to make very visible preparations for no deal at an early stage. I am forced to wonder whether the Prime Minister and her negotiating team have played much poker in their lives, because there was scope here for a certain amount of constructive bluffing, which might or might not have been called by the EU negotiators. That scope is much reduced but has not entirely disappeared because, contrary to what has been said by some speakers, it remains the default position that in about 80 days we will come out of the EU on a no-deal basis unless something happens to stop that. Clearly, things may happen in the other place that prevent that admittedly undesirable outcome, but the possibility remains and it is to be hoped that something will turn up in respect of an adjusted and better deal over the next few weeks. Something needs to turn up because the present deal is, I suggest, plainly unsatisfactory and unacceptable. It is not really a deal at all; it is an agreement to enter into an agreement at some point in the future.

I note that reliance has been placed by those who speak for the Government on the existence of a best-endeavours clause. I have spent some time over the years, in various cases, trying to enforce best-endeavours clauses in much simpler, bipartite cases in front of hard-headed commercial court judges. I have not had much luck. They are very nebulous, slippery things. They are, I respectfully suggest—I will listen with great interest to anything the Minister may say about this—simply impossible to enforce in a case involving 27 different counterparties with 27 different sets of interests and involving a rather nebulous arbitration process, as opposed to proceedings in these courts. So something needs to turn up.

We know from this and earlier debates that many in the House hope that what will turn up is referendum mark 2, and I shall conclude my remarks by making some observations about the desirability or, as I see it, the extreme undesirability of a second referendum. I am very doubtful—I agree with the noble Baroness about this—that the proposed second referendum, if the questions that are to be posed in it can ever be formulated, will lead to the result that the campaigners desire. I suggest that the dodgy figure on the side of the Boris bus will be replaced in the second referendum by three other figures: the impressive but slightly condescending Monsieur Barnier, the frankly preposterous Mr Juncker and the unspeakably smug Mr Tusk. The British people have watched those three gentlemen negotiate with our representatives over the last two years and I foresee that they will be asked if they really want to go back to those individuals and kowtow. I am not at all sure that the answer to that question will be yes.

Let us suppose that I am wrong about that. Let us suppose that referendum mark 2 achieves the desired outcome, which would be regarded as a triumph by many in this House and the other place. How would it be regarded by 17.4 million who thought that this issue had been disposed of in 2016? I am sorry to be blunt but I suggest they would regard it as a fix, a stitch-up, a plot against democracy and a monstrous breach of trust. Why a breach of trust? They have, in writing, a document the Government sent to every house saying that this was a once in a generation decision—I emphasise the word “once”. “It is your decision and we will enact what you decide”. If that promise is broken, the consequences will be serious. The question for all of us, which should trouble all of us, is not whether this talk of a plot against democracy is objectively valid. That is an interesting question but I am not addressing it. The question is different. It is: does such talk, in the event of a second referendum, appear sufficiently plausible to be believed by a large part of the 17-odd million who voted to leave? The answer to that question is plainly yes—it would be believed by many millions of our country men and women.

Time does not permit me to develop all the arguments that would be deployed by those whose interests lie in fostering talk of conspiracies and plots, but I shall just identify three or four. First, the EU has form in ignoring and then reversing democratic decisions it regards with disfavour. Ask the French, the Dutch, the Danes, the Greeks and the Irish. Secondly, the recent decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union which held that the Article 50 notification can be reversed will be seen by many as rather odd—convenient for some, but rather odd—given that the Supreme Court, in an entirely proper and carefully reasoned decision in the Miller case, based its decision on a premise that was common ground between the litigants that the notification could not be withdrawn. Thirdly, there is the hapless conduct of the negotiations. It will be asked: were their hearts really in it? Fourthly, there will be difficulties about the formulation of the question or questions to be put in a second referendum. Those difficulties will require the attention of the Electoral Commission and may lead to litigation. They will certainly generate suspicion among the leave contingent.

Where does this all lead? I doubt he has been quoted in this Chamber before, but at the Sex Pistols’ last concert the lead singer said, “Ever feel you’ve been cheated? Goodnight”. If, in the events I am contemplating, that question is asked of the British people and the answer is yes, democratic processes in this country will be poisoned for a generation. Those are stakes even higher than those involved in the Brexit process itself.

Brexit: People’s Vote

Lord Trevethin and Oaksey Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Marks. I do not wish to take one side or the other in this debate; I shall limit my remarks to a few short observations about the statutory and regulatory context in which a second referendum would take place, subject to major revising primary legislation. Very little has been said about that so far. The governing Act is the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which contains a set of provisions which are clearly designed to achieve fairness in the referendal process. It seems obvious to me that it would be unsafe to ignore those provisions in the course of any attempt to achieve a second referendum, because it would be very dangerous to give the impression that the process was in any way being accelerated or rigged to achieve the outcome which, it may be fair to say, the political class would, generally speaking, wish.

Along with the Roadmap to a People’s Vote, which is an interesting document, I commend to your Lordships another document, which is quite bulky. That is the Electoral Commission’s report on the 2016 referendum. It contains a lot of constructive material, which time does not permit me to refer to. It reminds one of the course of events in 2015-16. It took, give or take, about nine months for the referendum Bill to move from introduction in the Commons to completion. By completion, I do not mean Royal Assent, I mean the passing of three essential regulations before the referendum could take place. There was then a further three-month period in the spring of 2016 before the referendum could take place.

During that entire period, the Electoral Commission played a critical role, and it seems to me that it would have to play much the same role in any second referendum. First, it was under a statutory obligation to comment on the intelligibility of the referendum question. It did so in 2015 in a way which led to the question being changed from one in clearly leading form to one in an acceptably binary form. That task may well be much more demanding if there is to be a second referendum. I have not yet heard any clear formulation of the issue—or issues, perhaps—that would be presented to the voters at a second referendum. That would have to take place, and the Electoral Commission’s role as an objective, non-party body, is clearly critical.

Following the completion of the legislation, the Electoral Commission played an important role in registering permitted participants and designating lead campaigners. All of that takes time. That has led the Electoral Commission to make what seems to me a significant recommendation. Recommendation 2 states:

“Referendum legislation should be clear at least six months before it is required to be implemented or complied with”.


By “should be clear”, it explains that that means that the legislation, including any secondary legislation, should be in place six months before the referendum is held.

It would be unwise and perhaps constitutionally improper to attempt to sweep aside those procedural protections if there is to be a second referendum. That would suggest that the suggested date for the second referendum of May next year is hopelessly optimistic. We are nowhere near a position in which we can begin to formulate the issues. Anyone who campaigns for a second referendum—I fully understand why that campaign is being undertaken—needs to address the matters to which I have referred.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Trevethin and Oaksey Excerpts

Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford]

I am just concluding my remarks. I want simply to support what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, about the importance of the Northern Ireland issue. You cannot have differing rights on each side of the border. The European Commission has said that the Good Friday agreement requires equivalent standards of protection of rights on both sides of the border. I simply remind noble Lords that Jacob Rees-Mogg has opined that EU sanctions for breach of the withdrawal agreement would go against the EU’s own charter of fundamental rights. The irony and hypocrisy of that statement require no elaboration from me.

[Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)]

My Lords—

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Trevethin and Oaksey Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 31st January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. As he said, more or less everyone agrees that the Bill in its present state requires substantial improvement. The objective must be maximum clarity, to take a phrase from the Constitution Committee’s very powerful report, and minimum legal uncertainty. I think that is the right phrase, as legal certainty is just not achievable here. UK judges will be grappling with issues thrown up by this Bill and related legislation for many years. Your Lordships’ duty, it seems to me, is to make their job manageable. Personal views about the merits or demerits of Brexit seem to be largely irrelevant to the performance of that duty.

It is a bit late in the day for legal stuff, so I apologise, but I want to say something about the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which I think is likely to take up a bit of time as the Bill goes through the House. On this point, the Government are probably right to exclude the charter from the body of EU law which is to pass into post-Brexit UK law. I agree with what has been said about that by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, and the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, but will add a few observations of my own.

The Government seek to justify the exclusion of the charter on the ground that it adds nothing to existing rights, and therefore its exclusion is of no consequence. This is most unpersuasive, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, has said, because it invites the response, “Why bother to exclude it then?”. It is also incorrect as a matter of law. The retention of the charter as part of UK law would, in fact, make some difference. I recognise that it would provide litigants with a few additional arguments, but it would also lead to considerable legal uncertainty. In particular, it would lead to unnecessary complications regarding its interaction with the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which, as the House knows, is a very similar foundational document.

The convention was drafted in 1949. As is well known, a large part of it was brought into domestic law by the Human Rights Act 1998. Some parts were left out, advisedly. That Act was very carefully drafted, under no pressure of time—unlike this Bill—and struck a balance between the protection of human rights and the constitutional principle of the sovereignty of Parliament. It achieved that by means of the Section 3 obligation to construe legislation in a way that is compatible with human rights, and by means of the Section 4 power to make a declaration that primary legislation is incompatible with a convention right. It does not give the court a power to strike down legislation on the basis of such incompatibility. Almost every practising lawyer and judge would agree that the Human Rights Act and the convention behind it have worked very well. The scope of the Section 3 presumption has been defined in the case law, and Governments have respected declarations of incompatibility.

The charter was drawn up in 2001, but had no legal force until the Lisbon treaty of 2009, which provided that it,

“shall have the same legal value as the Treaties”.

The UK and Poland negotiated what they thought was an opt-out—at least that is what the politicians said—but in December 2011, the CJEU said that in fact it was a document whose purpose was to remind the British and the Poles that they had opted in. At this point, it began to dawn on UK litigants and their lawyers that the charter could be invoked. It is a pleasing irony that one of the first litigants who took the road to Luxembourg was David Davis, who was then on the Back Benches. The point of reciting this history is that throughout the period from 1998 to around summer 2016, so far as I can tell, almost no one said, “Look, hang on—the convention isn’t working. The Human Rights Act isn’t working. We need more. We need the charter”. No one was saying that. What has changed? I am not sure.

The charter differs from the convention in two important general respects. First, its scope is limited by Article 51 to the actions of member states,

“when they are implementing Union law”.

The precise scope and meaning of that phrase is debatable. In any event, no such limitation applies to convention rights, so the scope of the convention is broader than that of the charter. On the other hand, the powers of the domestic court pursuant to the charter go well beyond any power conferred by the Human Rights Act 1998 in relation to the convention. If legislation is incompatible with charter rights, the court must disapply it. If legislation is incompatible with convention rights—which will often be identical—the court cannot disapply it but may grant a declaration of incompatibility.

These distinctions can have odd results. In the Benkharbouche case decided a few months ago by the Supreme Court, employees at the Sudanese and Libyan embassies made various claims which were, on the face of things, barred by the State Immunity Act. The Supreme Court held that the Act was incompatible with both Article 6 of the convention and Article 47 of the charter—which resembles the former but is not quite the same. Some of the claims were EU claims within the charter, some were not, but they were all claims about working conditions and pay. The Supreme Court found that the EU claims within the charter could proceed since the Act had to be disapplied, but the latter could not. It was a strange and, noble Lords may think, unprincipled outcome.

Is there harmonious co-operation between the ECHR in Strasbourg and the CJEU in Luxembourg? One might have thought that there would be, given that Article 6(3) of the Lisbon treaty provides that the EU should itself accede to the convention—and if there were such harmonious co-operation, the potential for conflict and legal uncertainty would be much reduced. But there is not. In December 2014, I think to general surprise, the CJEU issued an opinion which explained why accession to the convention by the EU was not permissible. It is an interesting document that can be summarised, not unfairly, in one sentence: “The continent is not big enough for two supreme courts”—delivered in the manner of the film that the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, took his maiden aunts to.

The problematic nature of the relationship between the charter and the convention—and between Luxembourg and Strasbourg—is illustrated by the proceedings I mentioned brought by Mr Davis in relation to data retention legislation. Mr Davis relied on Article 8 of the charter and the Digital Rights Ireland case in the CJEU. In that case, the Divisional Court and the Court of Appeal expressed perplexity and concern that the CJEU had not dealt with a competing and diverging sequence of cases in the Strasbourg court. So the Court of Appeal made a reference to the CJEU and said, “Help us, please—tell us what you mean. Do you mean to expand the charter beyond the convention?”. The CJEU’s response, which came about a year ago, was imperious. It said, in what is again not an entirely unfair paraphrase: “The convention is not an EU text. The charter can reach parts which other conventions cannot, so the UK court’s request for clarification is inadmissible. We are telling you nothing more”.

Allowing human rights law to flow from two separate and, frankly, warring sources is a recipe for legal chaos. The convention works well, and the common law’s protection of human rights is alive and kicking, as the Supreme Court’s judgment in the UNISON case showed. A proliferation of foundational texts is unnecessary and damaging. We do not have time to waste in Committee, and for my part, I think the charter can safely be left in Luxembourg.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Trevethin and Oaksey Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trevethin and Oaksey (CB)]

My Lords, I hope that this is not too legalistic an intervention but I wish to seek some clarification. There have been a number of references to the Miller case. In paragraph 36 of its judgment, the Supreme Court said:

“The applicants’ case … is that when Notice is given, the United Kingdom will have embarked on an irreversible course that will lead to much of EU law ceasing to have effect in the United Kingdom, whether or not Parliament repeals the 1972 Act. As Lord Pannick QC put it for Mrs Miller, when ministers give Notice they will be ‘pulling … the trigger which causes the bullet to be fired, with the consequence that the bullet will hit the target and the Treaties will cease to apply’”.


I may be being obtuse, and of course there is an important difference between the role of the applicant and the role of the legislator, but I am curious to know whether the amendment would, if enacted, provide a bullet-proof jacket to the bullet which my noble friend Lord Pannick so effectively deployed in argument in the Supreme Court.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

My Lords, I support Amendment 31. I realise that I am feeling a bit fractious, which is probably because I have not had my dinner. I cannot answer for other noble Lords’ fractiousness this evening but I imagine that it is for similar reasons.

I have no legal training but I think that the situation is perfectly logical. We had to have an Act of Parliament to go into the EU, and therefore surely it is completely logical to have an Act of Parliament to enable our withdrawal. To those people who keep on about taking back control, I say that if we do not have that Act of Parliament and that scrutiny, we will be giving the European Parliament or the EU more control over the terms than we have ourselves. So I commend Amendment 31.