Northern Ireland Protocol Bill

Lord Triesman Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 11th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support the Bill. As a former Member of the European Parliament—

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

I am sure the noble Baroness will get a go.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, to clarify, there has been a bit of a swap. It is the turn for the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson. We will then hear from the noble Lord, Lord Triesman.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Howard and Lord Pannick, for providing us with an unanswerable case that this is a breach of international law. Many of us will want no part in a breach of international law. It is an unmoveable bedrock of what we do.

The noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, provided a serious agenda for what can and should take place in the negotiations, which I also hope will be successful. But I have tried to reflect—particularly as I thought I would be following the noble Lord, Lord Frost—on what negotiators from the Foreign Office do when they set about the business of negotiating. One of the first things you do is think about what tools are available to you. For the most part, you cannot send a gunboat or threaten people with God-alone-knows-what. You have to go and argue on the basis of pragmatism, honesty and the expectation that you will keep your word and try to find something that is a suitable balance.

The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said that we should not be obsessed with history. One of the first things that happens in any negotiation is that you think about what has gone before, because if you have not understood that you have a pitiful chance of analysing what might bring the contending parties together. He was advocating negotiations between four year-olds who go into a room and shout at each other.

My noble friend Lord Murphy made the absolutely right point that all such negotiations tend to end in a compromise, which is why I hope the next negotiations will be successful. Revisiting all the issues will unquestionably take time; it was not an accident that they took time in the last iteration. They may involve the same parties, who may make it difficult, and they will unquestionably end in another compromise, because that is what happens in any negotiation. If you go in with the same tools—good faith, pragmatism and, critically, your honesty, your word being your greatest and maybe your only real asset, and recognising that the rule of law is fundamental—then you have some chance of producing a new agreement and a new compromise, and compromise is what it is.

The rule of law is important for all of us in another way. We are a country that depends on inward investment, which is attracted because people believe that we have a satisfactory rule of law. That is not on the big occasions but on every occasion when you want things to be litigated by honest and trustworthy people.

I agree with much of what has been said, not least by my noble friend Lady Chapman about the subsections, because those are also critical. However, I conclude with a point that I know will cause offence, but I am from north Tottenham and I do not mind trying to say things as I see them. It is astonishing that the Minister should have argued that it is the breakdown of the arrangements in the Parliament of Northern Ireland, in the power-sharing agreement, that has produced the peril that we apparently now face. Who is refusing to take part in power-sharing in Northern Ireland? It is arguably the most extreme right-wing party anywhere in the United Kingdom, the DUP—members of that party will not like it, but I am afraid that is my view of who and what they are. They have decided that they will not take part and that the efforts that could be made across health, education and other areas should not proceed. That is a dreadful and scandalous thing to do. I say that straightforwardly. I would never have contemplated doing anything like it.

The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, has been welcomed back, and I welcome him—up to a point. That point is this. He is a Foreign Office Minister, and he will go out and negotiate again in the wider world. People will ask the question, as they always should of all of us: is his word to be respected? Is he capable of going back on fundamental promises that have been made? I appeal to him, because I like him, not to lose his reputation recklessly, because he is in danger of doing so.

Private International Law (Implementation of Agreements) Bill [HL]

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 3rd June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, this is a short piece of legislation but an incredibly significant one. That why I wanted to speak to this group of amendments.

Before going into the detail, I would like to make a general point to my noble and learned friend the Minister. Does he agree that the very nature of English law—how it has developed and how it is seen around the world—gives us huge potential post December as a tremendous export as it is respected and highly used across the globe, and we really should seek to maximise its positive impact to this respect?

I turn to the amendments. We see, as we have heard from other noble Lords, that it is envisaged that these powers would be used only infrequently—infrequently, yes, but with potentially extraordinarily huge impact for the individual. So, building on other noble Lords’ comments, my concluding question for my noble and learned friend the Minister is: as currently constructed without these amendments, how does he see the necessary level of scrutiny taking effect? What is his overall view of the coherent use of secondary powers and the coherent and sustainable way to legislate not just on matters such as these but across the piece?

[Lord Triesman (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am afraid I must start by disappointing the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier: I have not been discouraged from pursuing the point that a number of noble Lords have made in this debate. I strongly support my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer’s amendments. I do so for all the reasons that have been given about the need for scrutiny, questioning and elaboration. Because a number of other noble Lords have made those points, I will not make them again, other than to say that they seem to me to have considerable force.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Bhatia, I am not a lawyer, but I share with my noble friend Lord Hain the honour of having been a Foreign Office Minister. One of the things that was in my portfolio was the consular service. I know in practice from the responsibilities that the consular service laid on me that, particularly where there were criminal cases or the kinds of cases that the noble Lord, Lord Bhatia, has mentioned, which touch on people considerably because they have to do with marriage, children and so on, there was a huge expectation on the part of UK citizens that the Foreign Office would be able to offer them competent advice and help through the consular service. Frequently, in order to work out what was needed, we found that we also, although not lawyers, turned to the Lord Chancellor’s advisory committee. We tried to make sure that we had a very strong sense of what was and what was not possible, and from that we could work out what sort of help we could—or, sadly, on some occasions could not—provide to British citizens.

The biggest liability for British citizens was of course that, as in many cases in domestic law, they were not absolutely clear about what the law was or what it might imply for them. They could see nothing of considerable relevance to go back to in the debates there had been about it. Indeed, they probably did not even go back to those debates very frequently, but nor could we—the people who were trying to work out what should be provided through the service.

Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, at the start of this debate, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed two objectives. The first was, rightly, that there should be proper regard for real facts on the ground. He cited east Kent and elsewhere. The second, also right, was a desire to see a deeply fractured nation drawn back together by some form of reconciliation.

In my view, the worst thing about the Cameron referendum was arguably not the absurdity of trying to take so complex an issue to a conclusion by that lamentable route, or his palpable fear of Farage, or that he scuttled away after his failure; it was the deep divide that he bequeathed the people of the United Kingdom. While I hope for reconciliation, I do not pretend that it will happen anytime soon. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, was certainly right: we will not be divided by what happens in the near future because we are already deeply divided. I know that I cannot be reconciled to the atavistic nationalism expressed by some Brexiteers and I know full well that they cannot be reconciled to my instinct for internationalism and modernity. The much-researched social divisions in the United Kingdom may not be reconciled for a generation or more—certainly not by clustering around the Prime Minister’s unacceptable proposals. She never grasped what is involved in reaching out in a mature manner to all sides of Parliament.

The fault line between embedded nationalism and modern social democracy should not surprise us; it is visible in the United Kingdom, many parts of Europe and the United States. It has constituted the basis for turmoil in Europe for centuries. It has never gone away. Victories for nationalists have scarred Europe more than any other experience, yet we never seem to learn fully from such disasters. Where institutions build peace and security, we still seem to pull towards chaos and crisis. Nationalistic populism still has broad appeal, especially when it is focused on foreigners—people not like us who can be blamed for a failing economy that leaves people and institutions struggling, for austerity and for feeling humiliated. Those sentiments must be addressed fully and properly.

When was our politics more toxic? With the miserable negativity of the remain campaign, the mind-staggering mendacity of the leave campaign and its funders and the brutality of the language that is now common, have we ever known worse? I cannot be reconciled to that kind of world view. Brexit is not the cause, of course, but it picked the scab open. Hate crime, xenophobia, rhetoric about the “citizens of nowhere” and a hostile environment for the people who wish to live here make us an uglier society by the day. Across the street from us, fascists scream at MPs. I cannot speak at first hand of the place where either of our most reverend Primates celebrates his religion, but what has happened when my place of worship must be surrounded continually by large numbers of guards? Is this what we must live with now? I would rather face the struggle against nationalism because we cannot run from it, but I offer a sincere challenge to those who say that conciliation is possible; the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, made a similar point.

It is plain that, until the last few days, the Prime Minister has not tried to reach out to others, and has then tried mainly to frighten them; nor has the leader of my party reached out to anyone. Our calamity has not found our Churchill and Attlee. We do not seem that grown up. Perhaps someone with the moral authority to do so can take the kind of approach taken by Desmond Tutu: to convene urgently an effort to find common ground, hopefully with the broader and more deliberative discussion advocated by my noble friend Lady Armstrong, between crashing out and rebuilding a decent, united United Kingdom. There is little time and I see no sign of the Commons Front Bench doing it. Were the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury here, I would ask him—I will have to ask the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York instead—whether the Church is up to the challenge of carrying out reconciliation, not just calling for it.

I support my noble friend’s amendment in these critical circumstances. It recognises the dangerous shortcomings in our security profile, about which my noble friend Lord Browne warned us on Wednesday. It is an astonishing position for a permanent member of the Security Council to find itself in as a nation. There must be a moment when the weight of economic and commercial evidence is acknowledged by Brexiteers, although I note that on 16 December Jacob Rees-Mogg said that crashing out will boost the UK’s economy by more than £1.1 trillion. What world is he in? Goodness knows, in his case. I have gone back over previous rounds of major European venture financing decisions—the sort of things that businesspeople study to see which way the investment wind is blowing. It is a discouraging picture: only one of the top 10 capital raises was in the United Kingdom. The picture for higher education and culture is equally ugly, as others have said. I do not buy shares in the crash-out sunny uplands myth peddled by the hard right. Those saying it—except perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Lilley—cannot truly believe it either. Mr Rees-Mogg and his colleagues want to convince us that we will enjoy a soft landing. What they always omit to tell us is what we will be landing in.

What worries me most, and I conclude on this point, is the failure to focus on the prospects of young people, who took no part in the decision and who have been ignored by Jeremy Corbyn among others. They have a say every few years in general elections—nothing is set in stone—and here we are trying to bind them more or less indefinitely to a decision which all the evidence shows they abhor. Few mistakes are more dishonourable than damaging the future of our children and their children. We will rely on them as the architects of the future. Let us give them a decent start.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others who have welcomed the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, to her current role. I had never taken her for a masochist, but I notice that she has brought a security blanket, and I suspect that we will probably all need one very soon.

Your Lordships will know, as it is no secret, of my opposition to leaving the EU, but of course I also know what the nation decided, by a very narrow majority of 51.9% to 48.1% in the referendum. I understand the importance of that vote and the multiple reasons for leaving given to researchers by the people who voted to leave. As many noble Lords have said, events in this country have moved on. The Prime Minister went to the country seeking a strong mandate and an effective parliamentary majority to negotiate a Brexit incorporating leaving the European single market and the customs union, all part of the same general proposal. As we know, she lost her majority, and she lost a mandate for what I can only regard as having always been a reckless plan. Indeed, she will now be propped up by the votes of only 10 people, for whom we seem to have paid £100 million to £150 million per vote, if you put it in quantifiable terms.

If noble Lords look at the votes cast for the unambiguous leave parties in the general election—and even then there is the complexity of the DUP’s position on the border in Ireland—they can see that the votes equal 14,556,247, or 45.1% of those voting. The number who voted for parties supporting stay quite explicitly, as the Lib Dems did, or the retention of the European single market or the customs union, or even the slightly slidy ways of describing the same thing, which I am afraid my party engaged in, but who none the less were quite clear about what was being said, came to 16,422,498, or 51%. Given the basis on which the Prime Minister called the election, that seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate way of looking at the result. So there is no inhibition on us, and there is an entitlement to argue this through in every respect—a point made with clarity by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, yesterday.

There is no case for retro-fitting what happened last June, not least the inevitability that we must walk away because a better prospect of settlement is merely whistling in the dark. And there is no case for reverse-engineering the reasons given for calling the election. I have heard people try to describe all sorts of reasons why the Prime Minister called it, but she called it in explicit terms. We all understood those terms, and I do not think that there can be any question about what she was seeking as she described the strong and stable team for the purpose of negotiating an absolute Brexit. Nothing was said in any of the opening speeches that appears to recognise the dangers that she has placed the country in. Maybe we will hear about that in the closing speeches.

The then Government, and today’s minority Government, not least the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have explicitly recognised the dangers and stormy waters ahead. My noble friend Lady Hayter has also recognised this in the amendment that she seeks to move: that no deal is probably the worst possible disaster. Incidentally, as somebody who has spent their life as a negotiator, I understand that you do not give away your hand to the other side, but there are occasions when you just do not say any of that kind of stuff. There is nothing that compels you to put it in those terms in the first place. It is amateur night.

The record numbers who registered to vote on the deadline this year were mainly young people, many of whom were voting for the first time and who had been excluded from the referendum as the amendment to enfranchise them had been defeated. We must face the fact that they have come back to exact revenge. And they will. Our job is both to test the Government, which of course is the function of this House, and to face the challenge of thinking strategically. It is not, and it never was, a matter of simple tactics. Anybody who tries to approach it in that way will miss the key factors and the key opportunities to get to a better position. I strongly support my noble friend Lord Adonis in his amendment, precisely because it is strategic, and it is a strategy guided by principle.

I argue, very briefly, that the leave campaign was driven by two main forces. The first was those who hanker after the past, either because they fell through the holes in the global economic net and felt unhelped and disregarded or because they felt that there was an appeal in reclaiming some of the distant sense of community that was perhaps no longer so apparent. There were others who also felt a distinctive longing for our mercantile past and the historical trajectory of our island people. No matter that the economic structures have changed beyond recognition and that the old way is beyond reinvention. The world of our empire and the way in which we treated the peoples of that empire are long gone—and thank goodness for that.

The second force needs some deciphering. It is a force that I associate with the noble Lords, Lord Lamont and Lord Forsyth, Michael Gove and Liam Fox: that we should abandon almost all regulation and get to a position where we really are like tax havens such as Singapore, without regulation or anything that might be a barrier. This is completely at odds with the first of those motivations, which is an appeal for localism. It is instead an appeal for untrammelled globalism, which is why it is reasonable to say that people who are at the bottom of the economic pile will be as hurt as they will be in the future.

I hope that over the months the Government will spare us a diet of soundbites and platitudes, and on occasion grubby Trumpian lies, and will tell people the truth. People are now fully entitled to know that truth, particularly the younger generation who have come out and become political in these circumstances and who are entitled to know what the future holds for them. They look at young people across Europe and across the world and recognise that many are of them are innovative and want to do significant things in this and other economies. They do not see them as different or alien, so let us get rid of some of the xenophobia that there has also been in this. Let us treat people with respect, and respect their intelligence. That ought to go for all of us. They know, I think, that they will have a much better future with the kind of arrangement that my noble friend Lord Adonis has recommended. I wholly support his amendment. It provides clarity for our route of travel and has a strong prospect of building trust, and I say to noble Lords on my own Front Bench that it will help them to stop hopping from one foot to another in order to try to persuade us that there is a plan when there plainly is not.