European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham]

My Lords, the noble Lord concluded his remarks by saying, effectively, that it should be Parliament that decides the terms. I am wholeheartedly in favour of that. It is an essential part of representative democracy, by which I mean that Parliament, at the end of the day, should be in a position to determine whether the terms that have been negotiated are acceptable, whether the absence of terms is acceptable, whether no deal is acceptable or whether we should remain in the European Union. It is Parliament, not the Executive, that should make that decision.

The amendments that have been tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Hain—it is remarkable that I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord, having been in disagreement with him for, I suppose, 25 years or so—are absolutely right. Give Parliament the power to determine the exit date and you greatly reinforce the control that Parliament has as to the outcome.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to make clear my unequivocal support for the last three speeches. The critical issue that my noble friend Lord Adonis raised on the interplay between the various clauses that deal with the timing and the possibilities of how that could go wrong and the points made by my noble friend Lord Hain and also the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, on the sovereignty of Parliament seem to me to be right at the very heart of what the whole process in this House is about. It is either about us assuming the responsibilities that we are supposed to have and display, or it is about giving Ministers what they have plainly wanted throughout, which is the ability to take decisions irrespective of what Parliament might wish. I hope that Ministers will not be tedious enough to get up and deny that this is what they have been trying to do. At every key stage of this process, whether in front of the Supreme Court or elsewhere, it has been essential to force out of the Government an understanding of the role of Parliament and that Parliament will not be set aside.

Like everybody else, I have of course thought hard about why anybody would put a hard date into a clause of a Bill of this kind. Why would you do it? The answer is that it is a party management issue—and only a party management issue. I am sure that many noble Lords on the Government’s side of the House will recognise that there are costs and disadvantages alongside what they might regard as advantages in taking the steps that they have taken. But the advantage they perceive—which seems to outweigh everything else—is that they can say with conviction to the people who are determined that we leave, crash out, or go any which way out of the European Union that they have set a hard date and have in some sense given certainty by virtue of that. I believe—and I think in this debate the House overall is likely to believe—that the complexities with which this country and this Parliament are faced in trying to deal with this absolutely massive constitutional, economic, security and every other kind of issue means that the setting of a hard date is about as arbitrary a thing as you could conceivably do in the circumstances.

In his response to the last debate, which I regret I found very limited, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said of a number of the amendments that they required reports to be made and the dates for many of those reports were arbitrary. There could scarcely be a more arbitrary date than this date, when almost nothing has been learned so far about the Government’s intentions and when there is absolutely no certainty that we will learn any more about those intentions. The fact is that setting a date makes it more or less impossible to conceive of all the different elements being drawn together with sufficient coherence for any of us to exercise that final act of parliamentary authority that we have all been promised.

I recall just three, four or perhaps five weeks ago, the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, spoke on industrial strategy. He made the telling point that, whenever we deal with people from other countries who have strong industrial strategies, strong industrial histories and a great deal of success in all those, we go about it believing that our native wit and wisdom is so superior to all of them that we can constantly get exactly what we want from them and they will never have a presentable argument to put to us. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, quite rightly said that if you look at the countries where we tend to take that view—Germany, Japan, China now and the United States—you come across people who are extremely competent at developing industries and strategies, who have views and will argue for those views and who may very well prevail. In this discussion about what future trade will be like, those arguments will be displayed with great ability and, I have no doubt, will not be the pushover that many on the Government Benches seem to think they will be.

I suspect that one argument that will be made about having a hard date is that it focuses negotiation and is a means of drawing a negotiation to some sort of conclusion. I have said before in your Lordships’ House—and I do not say it to cause offence—that my experience is that, by and large, politicians are not the best negotiators that you ever come across. Many of us have spent parts of our lives as trade union negotiators or general secretaries of trade unions, have done negotiation in government, in the Foreign Office—in my case—and so on or have spent a great deal of their lives negotiating in business and in industry. I say without any doubt in my mind that if I wanted to make my life more difficult in any negotiation, I would say, “Here is the deadline”, and let everybody else stretch me out across the rack that I had made for myself, because that would be the easiest thing that they could conceivably do—and they will do it. If you are in a position of enormous strength, I guess you could say, “Well, we have set a date, we are going to push everybody else along”. But if you are not in a position of enormous strength and if, peradventure, you are in a position of enormous weakness, everybody else will take the maximum possible advantage and they will succeed.

I have heard some of the comments made by others who have business experience, and I draw attention to my entries in the register as well. In business, I have never once seen the weaker party in a negotiation have any advantage out of a fixed deadline. If we ever needed to learn that in spades, we would look at what is happening in Northern Ireland now and the constant setting of deadlines—which has happened in the past—only to find that the people of violence, or the people who have been prepared to allow people of violence to push the envelope further, have always been those who took the greatest advantage of it and made it more or less impossible for anybody else to make real progress.

I hope that we will not trap ourselves in that way. These amendments give us a means of not trapping us in that way, and I urge all noble Lords to give us the best chance we can have, rather than the worst.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I do not wish to emulate either the forensic skill or the eloquence of those who have already contributed to the debate but rather ask the Minister a very specific question. He will be aware that in Clause 14—the interpretation clause—there is a specific reference to exit day, which is spelled out in subsection (4):

“A Minister of the Crown may by regulations—


(a) amend the definition of ‘exit day’ in subsection (1) to ensure that the day and time specified in the definition are the day and time that the Treaties are to cease to apply to the United Kingdom, and


(b) amend subsection (2) in consequence of any such amendment”.


As the noble Lord, Lord Hain, said, that is secondary legislation. The Minister will be only too well aware that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, on which I serve on behalf of your Lordships’ House, is already very critical of the number of powers that Ministers are taking under this Bill, not least because it sets a precedent for powers that will be expected by Ministers under subsequent Bills in the series that relate to Brexit. Therefore, it is important for your Lordships’ House to be told very clearly at this stage by what process the Government intend to put that secondary legislation before the two Houses of Parliament. Will it be by the negative resolution, the affirmative resolution or, indeed, the super-affirmative resolution, as that completely changes the way in which Parliament will be able to exert its control, as noble Lords have suggested? If the process is to be undertaken by negative resolution, that is very limited and the powers of the two Houses of Parliament would be so undermined as to be laughable. If it is to be done by the affirmative resolution, there is more opportunity for discussion and either House can decide what should be done in those circumstances. However, I suspect we will be told that this has to be done with such speed that it will have to be done by an accelerated process, which will inevitably mean that there is no proper opportunity for either House to decide whether we agree with this process.

The super-affirmative process may well be selected. The Minister may be better informed than most Ministers on the Government Front Bench but I defy him to spell out to the House this evening which of these options will be put in place. This is of critical importance. We should not just sweep away this opportunity to take this decision. As all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate have said, it is an extremely important one which will colour the views of your Lordships’ House when we look at some of the other powers that Ministers seek to take under the Bill. Again, I refer to the recommendations of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. If we really are taking back control, here is an early opportunity for the Government to show who exactly is taking back control.

Brexit: Trade in Goods (EUC Report)

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by drawing attention to my interests as declared in the register, which are principally in merchant banking. I suppose that rather over two-thirds of my work is structuring trade agreements and commercial agreements between businesses in this country and other countries. It is a niche in merchant banking that is to do with international trade much more than domestic trade. I make that point because inevitably it colours some of the things that I want to say today.

I join everyone else in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for the way in which she chaired this committee, as well as the staff, who deserve profound thanks for an extremely detailed and complex piece of work, conducted frictionlessly—I think that is one of the occasions when I can use the word safely. I also thank my colleagues on the committee because I felt it was an extraordinary adult education class, with a huge amount learned in every session of it. I deeply appreciate that.

What I want to say next is not really a criticism of what some Conservative politicians and Peers have contributed to the debate; it is straightforwardly a criticism of the Government. I share the regret that there has not been a response. I suspect that another date will be needed to debate whatever response there is, because I cannot imagine that it will be uncontroversial or that we will not want to pay attention to it if it ever materialises. However, I have come to the conclusion, because of a batch of evidence, that it is not being withheld from us out of some spirit of malice or unhelpfulness; rather, nothing is being said because the Government really do not have anything to say. That was evident from the Ministers who were good enough to provide us with their time. They certainly cannot be faulted for having stayed on message; that is something I was never particularly good at but, my goodness, they were extremely good at it. They said that Brexit—well, your Lordships know what they said. They said the same things time and again and said them with a certain panache, and added more or less nothing to our knowledge.

However, Ministers produced a set of excuses for why nothing was going to be said. The first was, “We don’t reveal our bargaining hand, but later in the process we may”. As someone who has spent his life negotiating, I do not accept that. Generally, as you get deeper into a negotiation, it becomes more complex. As you get closer to the detail, and the difficulty in striking the final deal is what is in the front of your mind, that is when you do not talk about it—that is when it is hardest to talk about it. At the beginning, you could say what the architecture is of the objectives that you are seeking. So I did not accept that that was an excuse. I also did not accept that we should not worry because it will all be all right in the end, which did not seem to be the most compelling argument I had ever heard either. As I have said, I draw the conclusion from all that that they did not actually have a huge amount to say.

I fear that the approach that is being taken infantilises us, at both ends of this building. It treats us as though we were a group of children who could not take a mature discussion of mature difficulties—the sort of discussion that we all of us probably in one sense look forward to. It often sounds almost like an appeal to the Tooth Fairy: “It will all turn out all right. Something will turn up and deal with the issues”.

I make that point because I want to address the idea that for the most part we did not speak to people who were in favour of Brexit; on the contrary, to claim that would be a travesty. The officials and others who assisted in the inquiry made sure that there was a very wide spectrum, so I hope there is no imputation that there was an attempt to screen out different voices; that was far from the case. In general, though, as the noble Lord, Lord Horam, was saying, there has been a certain lack of listening to the kinds of arguments that demonstrate the complexities. Although I do not mean to put words in anyone’s mouth, the noble Lord, Lord Livingston, made essentially the same point: that we have not really listened very carefully to the counterparties in the whole of this process. As the noble Lord said, we are in a rush and they are not, and that is the worst negotiating position that you can ever find yourself in. I am quite sure that he avoided it at BT as far as he was humanly able.

Those who have done the job of trying to negotiate, not only in business, as many of us have, but also in government, negotiating major international deals, will know just how hard it is. I remember, in the period before the state visit of President Lula, the work that had to be done to try to pull together at least a minimum number of agreements that could be signed off with a flourish on that occasion. I will confess to the House that it took me about three years to get a cultural agreement to allow musicians to move freely between Brazil and Britain, which you would not think of as being the most complicated thing you would ever have to do in your life—not least because when the Brazilian negotiators came over they included Gilberto Gil, who sang pretty much through all the negotiations. It was none the less an extremely difficult job. We never really got to the end of the ethanol negotiations, and on services and education, we were miles apart after years of work. The Doha process was taking us more or less nowhere. I do not predict that we would never have arrived at a conclusion, but I am under no illusion about how difficult it is.

So I am not up for any fanciful claims about what can be done. I am not up for any alternative facts about how everyone else will respond to us, because it does not accord with any of my experience in business or international relations, and we have to be real. We have to be real about who is capable of conducting negotiations. I have met many people in business and in trade unions who are very good negotiators; commercial lawyers are often extremely good negotiators; but I have met only a handful of politicians who can do the job, and they are not among the best and most natural negotiators whom I have met in my professional life.

Where is the capable force that will do the job illustrated by the report? Where are the people and how will they be found to do a job of this complexity in this short time? The great advantage of taking part in an inquiry of this kind is that you get to grips with a lot of detail. It is important to remember that the detail was provided by the witnesses—not by us but by the people who came to speak to us. They provided information which I think the Government would be unwise not to read through carefully, understand and talk to them about rather better.

It is unfair to pick on any particular witness for excellence, but Mike Hawes from the automotive industry was a very good example. His discussion of the character of the value chain and border crossings—which has implications in a different industry for Northern Ireland, which is worth reading off from what he had to say— was essentially about automotive assembly. It raises critical questions in a world in which the smoothness of the supply chain is critical to business and building more warehousing to use as a buffer, as he described it, is not a practical solution.

We did not take particular evidence on this, but I know that many here will be familiar with the difficulties that Airbus is already experiencing in working out how it will move massively complicated parts of aircraft from north Wales and Lancashire to the continent. I do not say this as a harbinger of doom, but it will surely at some stage say, “This is not the best way to do it”, and start making it close to where it will assemble it. It would be foolish not to take that step.

Noble Lords will see that the report reaches some obvious conclusions: almost everything is unknown; almost everything that affects investment decisions will continue to remain unknown; and the timetable is very problematic, as many noble Lords have said—it is not that it is short, it is a strangulation. I cannot see how anybody can make a deal work to do all the things expected of it. Incidentally and paradoxically—a point made by several noble Lords—when people are taking investment decisions, they need a long run-in, particularly for significant decisions about large sums of money. They need to be taking them now. The more high-tech we are, the more we are interested in those businesses, the more that that is a problem. As the Israeli entrepreneurs said, the lifetime of products of leading-edge, high-tech businesses is between two-and-a-quarter and two-and-a-half years before they are superseded. If decisions are not being made about such investment today, the products will not be there when the two years are up. If they are made much later, they will not be there for several years beyond that, and we will not be competitors in those markets. I suppose one ought also to say that sterling is on a giddy ride; that does not help to create a sense of stability.

I know that the noble Lords, Lord Inglewood and Lord Bilimoria, have been making essentially the same sort of argument, but my final point is that if we are to be global, we will have to think global. We will have to change our mindset and think in a very different way. In doing that, we should not beguile ourselves with things which will not turn out to be accurate. I have heard the arguments about how the digital world is transforming everything. I have also noted from what the automotive industry said that we will have not just to read labels but to look inside the packaging. We will have to make checks, even if it is of samples, to ensure that the things as labelled or electronically tagged are what is inside. There were electronic labels on hamburgers which turned out to be little to do with beef and a great deal to do with horse and pork. They were labelled and electronically readable, but what was in the package was not what it said on the outside. These things will be complicated. When we consider the Northern Ireland food industry and the movement backwards and forwards across that border, we can see what the complexities will be.

I understand the point about value chains and the integration between services and production of goods. There are great benefits in that spread in the digital world, but this is not an unproblematic development. It is a development of technology which has allowed for far more efficient crime and untrackable currencies, facilitated criminal-scale child abuse and can close and hold to ransom businesses—and the NHS and Parliament less than a month ago. It may very well be that people want to intervene in that digital space to protect themselves rather better, certainly before it is allowed to distort the outcome of the election to the presidency of the United States

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

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

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Maude. I was once told by somebody else that he and I were true free marketeers and entrepreneurs, so I had better draw attention to my commercial interests in the register.

I will say a few words about the way in which I want to approach this. I have, sadly, been on the losing side in general elections. I recognise that the Government that were elected are the Government that are elected. But it never once occurred to me that I should be expected to abandon values or not try to do the job of Opposition. It was a fundamental expectation of our democracy that we should review things, hold people to account, amend and sometimes even reject—although in this case I accept the result in the referendum—but we should do so responsibly and respectfully, and without threatening one another or the existence of the political Chambers in which we work. None of that is of any help in trying to get a proper discussion in our democracy.

Indeed, I always thought that the point of being described as the “loyal Opposition” is that there is, of course, loyalty to the Crown and loyalty to the nation, but there is also loyalty to the concept of opposition and doing the job properly in a democracy; that is what people expect. For that reason, if we were to say, on a massive existential issue, that we are just going to wait until somebody thinks that we are more right, and then we will have the freedom to act as we wish and we should pass over any of the other tasks of the Opposition, that would be a woeful neglect and would never be understood by anybody in a democracy such as the United Kingdom.

I say to other noble Lords: be careful what you wish for. In many ways, it is the absence of a serious Opposition at the other end of this building that is the gravest risk to the Conservative Government. Not being able to say to people, “You have sometimes a rather curious view of the world, and there are other things and other voices that need to be considered”, is hugely dangerous, and we can avoid it at least in this House. Keir Starmer has done a fine job—a heroic one in many ways—but nobody could say that opposition has been shown fully. For example, the Prime Minister probably came here yesterday to seek a nostalgic reminder of what opposition was like, on the grounds that she had a very small chance of seeing it in the Chamber in which she operates.

I opposed leaving for lots of reasons, notwithstanding the EU’s irritating characteristics. There are a number of reasons why it is important to consider what we might say in the context of the Bill. When it started out, the decision that “Brexit means Brexit”—a transposition of a line from Alice Through the Looking-Glass: it means whatever you want—morphed, rationally or not, first into leaving the economic area and then into something along the lines of leaving the customs union, or at least substantial parts of it. It has morphed all the time, and the only thing that has finally ended up as consistent is the Prime Minister saying that she would rather have no deal than an unacceptable one. I have never believed that politicians were good negotiators and I will say it candidly in this House. Anyone who went into a negotiation and said, “This is my final point”, can expect the people on the other side to play it for all it is worth. It is an amateur approach and needs to be thought about with a great deal more seriousness.

I believe that we will be worse off on a number of fronts: the economic future; the staffing of the NHS and care homes; the excellence of our universities; in defence, where our key counterpart in the White House is an isolationist and, at least on the question of Sweden, a fantasist; on Europol; on Euratom; on the environment; on employment protection; on Ireland and hardened borders; and on the security of the United Kingdom as a union, which is something I have always supported. I think that we have problems, and the referendum debate on both sides did not throw much useful light on those issues.

I know that others disagree with me: they think I am wrong; I think they are wrong; and that is absolutely fine. However, none of us knows what it will be like in two years’ time. Of course we do not know what the conditions or the final settlement will be. In those circumstances, it is perfectly fair to say that the final terms need to be approved by a future Act of Parliament and we should consider that amendment. I also believe that it should go back to the people, exactly for the reasons described by the noble Lord, Lord Butler. If there is no agreement, it must be open to Parliament and the people of this country to consider whether they want any kind of system to replace the one from which they will be departing. Those are fundamental, existential issues for our country.

We should not play with people’s lives. They have put down roots; their kids go to school; they have families here. They are people about whom we normally express profound values. Let us not play with that. The use of “grandfathering” yesterday was not an accidental choice of word. It is about family and deeper values in the way we deal with people.

My final brief point is that this has been a very divisive period. A number of communities have felt the full force of that, including my own. I do not know how they have done it, but the Portuguese Government have managed to track some of the Sephardic community that left in 1492. I am in the happy position that I may apparently be offered Portuguese nationality, although I will have to take an exam in Portuguese which I am not optimistic about. Real, deep strains are coming out and people are experiencing fear and violence. To all the Brexiteers who said, “That is deplorable, the law should protect people and we always want to do so”, I say, “Stand up and do the things that protect people—do not leave them in this position where their lives seem parlous for no reason at all”.