Brexit

Lord Truscott Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Truscott (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the persuasive speech of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who of course was a very experienced Member of the European Parliament.

We need to hold our hands up after almost three years and say that we are not ready to leave the EU at the moment, and will not be ready to leave in April or May either. The negotiations have been a shambles and a national humiliation, as many noble Lords have said today.

I said back in December that we needed time as a Parliament and a country to sort ourselves out, to extend or revoke Article 50 and to scrap the withdrawal agreement and the political declaration in their entirety. As the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, said, the EU says that it will not renegotiate the deal. Fair enough—let us look at an entirely different model.

I have been one of the millions of people who have signed the parliamentary petition calling for the revocation of Article 50. We need the time that that will buy us to look at Brexit again and, as a country, work out what we seek before starting negotiations, rather than the other way around.

The May premiership is in its death throes. Colleagues say that she is now irrational and unstable. She should, in my view, resign.