European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Con)]

It is perfectly clear from listening to the leader of the Labour party that he is joining the shadow Chancellor and the shadow Brexit Secretary and is now determined to frustrate Brexit and the result of the referendum in 2016. That is absolutely clear from what he just said.

I must regretfully say to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that I cannot believe that a single Member sincerely believes that the deal before us is good for the UK.

[Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)]

rose—

[Boris Johnson]

There is one. I said “sincerely”. [Interruption.]

[Mr Vaizey]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I sincerely believe it. I have no stake in this Government any more, but I still think it is the right thing to do.

[Boris Johnson]

In which case, I am happy to acknowledge my right hon. Friend’s sincerity. However, I have to say that the Government’s heart does not appear to be in this deal. From listening to those who are sent out to defend and explain it, they know that it is a democratic disaster.

As has been said, after two years of negotiation, the deal has achieved an extraordinary thing: it has finally brought us together. Remainers and leavers, myself and Tony Blair, we are united—indeed, the whole Johnson family is united—in the belief that the deal is a national humiliation that makes a mockery of Brexit. I am sorry to say this—these are hard truths—but there will be no proper free trade deals and we will not take back control of our laws. For the Government to continue to suggest otherwise is to do violence to the natural meaning of words. We will give up £39 billion for nothing. We will not be taking back control of our borders. Not only have we yet to settle the terms on which EU migrants will in future come to this country, but we will be levying EU tariffs at UK ports and sending 80% of the cash to Brussels. In short, we are going to be rule-takers. We are going to be a de facto colony. Out of sheer funk—I am sorry to have to say this to the House—we are ensuring that we will never, ever be able to take advantage of the freedoms we should have won by Brexit.

Under the terms of the backstop, we have to stay in the customs union, while Northern Ireland, and therefore the rest of the UK if we want to keep the Union together, will stay in regulatory alignment unless and until the EU decides to let us go. And why should they let us go? By handing over £39 billion, we lose all our leverage in the talks. With the £95 billion surplus they have with us in goods alone, the EU has absolutely no interest or incentive to allow us—

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[Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds), and I agreed with every word that he said.

Let us go back. David Cameron promised that if people voted Conservative in the 2015 election, there would be an in-or-out referendum; the people would decide—no ifs, no buts, no second choice, they would decide. To his horror, he won and had to deliver the referendum after a botched negotiation. What happened? We had a referendum—absolutely clear. All the processes in the House said, “You, the people, will be sovereign. We the MPs will give you the decision. You will decide.” We then had project fear mark 1. The people were bombarded with propaganda. Leaflets worth some £9 million were sent—crazy stuff from George Osborne’s Treasury—and the people voted to leave. A total of 17.4 million people voted to leave, the largest vote in British history on any single subject. We then had from those who lost: what does leave mean?

[Mr Vaizey]

What does it mean?

[Mr Paterson]

Like me, my right hon. Friend was elected on a particular platform at the general election, because the Prime Minister very helpfully said, “Leave means leave the single market, leave the customs union and leave the remit of the European Court of Justice. Every single Conservative member was elected on that platform and, helpfully, it was endorsed by the Labour party, so 85% of the votes in the general election endorsed the fact that leaving meant leaving those three things.

We then had the Lancaster House speech, which said that there would be no halfway house. What we have in this latest document does not deliver that. If this is passed, there will be the most appalling disillusion with our institutions. The people will have been thwarted and deprived by the establishment. We have seen it this evening: the political establishment hates Brexit; the commercial establishment—the CBI—hates Brexit; and the media establishment hates Brexit. None the less, the damage to our institutions will be grievous.

What we have in this document is worse than where we are at the moment. I was the Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and represented the country in the common agricultural policy negotiations. We worked with our allies in Germany, Hungary and wherever. We stopped some of the more stupid proposals going through in the CAP reform, but we had to swallow an awful lot because we always got outvoted eventually in the qualified majority voting. We will not be there from now on. We will have law imposed on us. We will not be able to amend it or to repeal it in this House. The idea that we can sign trade deals is, sadly, nonsense. I was in Washington two weeks ago. Democrats, Republicans and senior members of the United States Trade Representative made it absolutely clear that countries cannot do trade deals with other countries that do not set their tariffs or their regulatory regimes. We will not set our tariffs and we will not set our regulatory regime.

Then there is the horror of the backstop, so eloquently described by the right hon. Member for Belfast North. This really is disgraceful, especially given the difficulties in getting the Belfast agreement signed. The absolute pillar of the agreement was the principle of consent that the status of Northern Ireland would never change without the majority of the people in Northern Ireland voting for that change. And what do we have? Something ghastly called UK(NI) has been created. Northern Ireland will be under a different regime. That is a breach of the Acts of Union 1800. It is extraordinary that this has been allowed through.

There are only two solutions to the Northern Ireland border. The first is that we stay in the customs union as a full member, as the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) said. The second is that we address the reality that customs has moved on. I have spent a lot of time on this issue. I wrote a paper with the European Research Group that we published in mid-September. I discussed that paper with the Government and sent a copy to Monsieur Barnier, resulting in a very fruitful meeting. The fact is that there is currently a border—a VAT border, an excise duty border and a currency border—and that it is all done with technology.

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[Mr Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con)]

I am grateful for the chance to take part in this important debate. It is a common theme at the moment to praise the Prime Minister’s resilience, but may I take a moment to praise your resilience, Mr Speaker? When this debate concludes you will have been in the Chair for about 13 and a half hours listening to a combination of highfalutin rhetoric and complete drivel; I will leave the House to conclude what Members are going to hear for the next eight minutes. In the time that you have been in the Chair, Mr Speaker, you could have travelled to Paris and back on multiple occasions and probably could have flown to Gibraltar and back on multiple occasions, which emphasises how close Europe remains, despite the fact that we are leaving the EU.

I said in an earlier intervention that I have come to my own conclusion that it is right to back the withdrawal agreement. I came to that conclusion all by myself. No one gave me a knighthood; no one offered me a job. I looked at what the best solution was for the United Kingdom and Brexit, and I think supporting the withdrawal agreement is the right solution.

Let me just deal with one piece of homework. I praise the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, because I see our continued relationship with Euratom as a very important issue. We are leaving Euratom, and in Culham—just outside my constituency —we lead the world in nuclear fusion research. I am delighted to say that almost all the relationships we had under Euratom will be replicated through a series of bilateral agreements and legislation.

I also praise something else that perhaps does not get enough praise, the inanimate object of the civil service, made up of many animate objects. The civil service has worked tirelessly for the past two and half years to put in place the measures we will need for a successful Brexit, and too often the thanks it gets from certain parts of the Chamber is to be traduced, slagged off, insulted and dragged into some absurd conspiracy theory. In my time as a Minister I never met any civil servants except ones who worked hard, were strictly neutral and did the bidding of their Ministers.

Let me also speak briefly about the importance of the creative industries. Although I will back the withdrawal agreement, I remain concerned that too many issues that affect those industries—the most successful part of our economy—have not been covered. Notably, they are the future of free movement, which is very important, as there are many freelance workers in the creative industries; the future of copyright; our ability to have international broadcasters based in the UK who can broadcast throughout Europe; and digital transfer.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Vaizey]

I give way to the tallest Pole in the Chamber.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Can my right hon. Friend tell me, in hindsight, what were the biggest mistakes made by his close friend and neighbour, David Cameron, in the run-up to the referendum, during it and after?

[Mr Vaizey]

I have only got six minutes, but his biggest mistake was not to win the referendum, which I wished we had done on behalf of my constituents, who voted to remain. In the last few hours, I have had more than 200 emails calling for a second referendum from my constituents, and I shall disappoint them in not endorsing that call. Although I was trolled heavily by ultra-remainers a few weeks ago, all of whom seemed to be quoting Burke, I remain a representative and not a delegate. I know my own mind and what the way forward is for Brexit—the withdrawal agreement. Too many people do not seem to realise that this is a two-stage process. We have to leave the European Union before we negotiate our close trading relationship with it, of which the political declaration is a part.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) said that too many people think that Brexit is a disaster to be managed, but we are separating from a 45-year relationship. Of course it has to be managed: we cannot simply walk away. Sadly, it has fallen to the remainers to manage it. We had a Brexit Foreign Secretary who walked away, we had a Brexit Brexit Secretary who walked away, and we had another Brexit Brexit Secretary who walked away. The thing that annoys me most about those people who fled the scene is their continued claim that somehow they represent the purity of Brexit. Well, we have a Brexit Environment Secretary who is happy with the withdrawal agreement. We have a Brexit Leader of the House who is happy with the withdrawal agreement, and a Brexit International Trade Secretary, with whom I work as a trade envoy and who is doing a great job, who is happy with the withdrawal agreement.

The trouble for the pure Brexiteers—the wreckers, the people who ironically will bring down Brexit with their pathetic behaviour on the withdrawal agreement—is of course that no one had a specific view of Brexit and it has been left to the House to work it out and vote for what it thinks is right. I will support a withdrawal agreement that secures citizens’ rights, that does not leave us as a vassal state, that has a backstop that keeps Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom, and that—unfortunately for me—restricts freedom of movement. I am a huge fan of freedom of movement, but if people think that that is what people voted for with Brexit, so be it.

[Mr Lord]

Will my right hon. Friend reflect on the fact that had the Prime Minister put a Brexiteer—as he calls them—fully in charge of Brexit, whatever deal came back would perhaps have more support in the country among the 17.4 million who voted leave and the leavers and Brexiteers in the Chamber as well? Brexiteers should have been made to own Brexit, because we think that we might have done a slightly better job of it.

[Mr Vaizey]

I do not think the Brexiteers would have done that. Too many Brexiteers fantasised about what Brexit would look like without confronting the cold reality. I slightly wish that the Prime Minister had done that, however. As it is, she has given the Brexiteers a get-out clause. They will all complain about the withdrawal agreement not being good enough, and if we crash out with no deal, they will all say that nobody prepared for that. Nothing is ever the Brexiteers’ fault and no solution is ever put forward by them. The Department for International Trade, the Foreign Office and the Brexit Department are three pretty big Departments, and I would have thought that they, along with the Prime Minister—whom the Brexiteers elected, by the way—would allow the Brexiteers to deliver the Brexit that they pretended they wanted.

Another thing that has annoyed me about this whole process is the sudden rising up of free trade deals that can be done overnight without any concern about how the public might react when we do deals with huge economies such as China, the US and India.

There is also the ridiculous confrontational language. I know I have been guilty of it in this speech, but I am worked up at the moment. The ex-Foreign Secretary was talking about the EU deciding to let us go, but the EU is now desperate for us to go. What people do not understand about the backstop is that we will now have to have our cake and eat it, to coin a phrase. We will have access to the European Union single market without paying in and we will have a restriction on freedom of movement. This is not part of a plot to turn us into a vassal state. The EU did not want us to leave, but now that we are doing so, it wants us to leave in as orderly a manner as possible. We should embrace that. It is appalling that we use such confrontational language.

Unfortunately, however, this does not mean that I support a people’s vote, which I think is a complete red herring. If we were to agree to one, people would be entitled to say, “If you’re asking us to vote again, can we have your salaries? We delivered our verdict in the referendum, and we asked Parliament to reach a conclusion and vote on it.” That is what this withdrawal agreement is about, and it would be a humiliation for this Parliament if we were to go back to the people. I also believe that those who think that a people’s vote will deliver a verdict that we should stay in the European Union would be sorely disappointed by the outcome of any such vote.

I said at the beginning of my remarks that I supported this withdrawal agreement because I had come to the conclusion that that was the right thing to do. I am not supporting it because I am a huge fan of the Prime Minister or of the way in which she has conducted herself over the past two years. I really have been angered and appalled by the “citizen of nowhere” and “jump the queue” language. Too often, the Prime Minister has spoken only for the 52%, although I was delighted when she said a bit about the 48% earlier today. There has been no attempt to heal the divisions after the referendum, which leaves me hugely disappointed, but I will still back her withdrawal agreement because I believe that that is the right way forward.

Do you know what disappoints me most, Mr Speaker? If we were to analyse my genetic make-up, I am sure that we would find a bit of Viking and a bit of Huguenot, but I am sure that we would also find a bit of Brexiteer. My hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti) knows this only too well from when he tried and failed to select me for Bristol North West. I absolutely accept what was said earlier by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr Godsiff). He said that there was a European project, a ratchet and a will to create a European superstate. Part of me thinks that we could potentially thrive after Brexit if we do it properly. We could actually remake the European Union and the European continent. We could have what moderate Eurosceptics always wanted, until this debate turned toxic, which was an inner core, with a single currency, pressing forward towards an ever closer union, and an outer core, outside the single currency, with a looser relationship with Europe. That outer core could still have all the benefits of that relationship without the fear of being subsumed into a superstate. This withdrawal agreement is potentially a step forward, but after months of hard technical work and with the prize within our sights, what happens? Of course the hard Brexiteers come out and try to tear the whole thing down. Well, try—and see if you get your Brexit.