Brexit: Preparations and Negotiations

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, who has made a passionate speech against what was determined by more than 400 votes in the other place—that is, withdrawal from the European Union on 29 March.

In my youth I was a keen rock climber and one summer evening I nearly ended both when I wandered off route on a cliff face high above the valley of Glencoe. As I climbed upwards, the holds became smaller and less frequent, and the rock ahead smoother, greasier and unstable. Hanging on by my fingernails with a big drop below my heels, my legs began to tremble and fear suffused me. I had a choice: continue further in the hope that good jugs lay ahead but risk not being able to reverse my moves and a spectacular fall, or, with great difficulty and considerable risk, climb back to the point where I had gone astray and return to the known route I had set out to follow. The response to the White Paper by MPs on both sides of the Brexit debate, the public, Conservative voters, the Opposition and an arrogant and bullying EU suggests that the Prime Minister finds herself in an equally uncomfortable and precarious position.

My noble friend Lord Heseltine says that the Government have no plan and blames this on the Brexiteers. The White Paper is Olly Robbins’s plan; it is not the Brexiteers’ plan. Indeed, the constitutional outrage is that the Secretary of State’s plan was being ignored. This paper was produced in parallel and he was presented with it some 48 hours before a meeting at which members of the Cabinet were invited to agree it or take a taxi home.

My response on that cliff face was to climb down to the point where I had gone astray. For the Prime Minister, contrary to what the noble Lord suggests, that means taking the rejected Chequers deal off the table now and returning—the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, does not seem to have noticed it—to Mr Barnier’s previous offer of a Canada-plus free trade deal and, if that cannot be agreed, putting in place arrangements to trade with the EU on the same terms as most countries in the world under the WTO, of which we are a member and to which we have been paying a substantial subscription every year. We do most of our trade now with non-EU countries under WTO rules, which incidentally require members to facilitate frictionless trade—that is a rule of the WTO—and that includes the EU.

If we end up trading under WTO rules, with no EU trade deal—although, contrary to what the noble Lord suggests, there has never been any suggestion that any government Minister has not wanted to do better than that—we will, of course, save every penny of the £39 billion that the EU is demanding. I defy anyone—although this does not, of course, apply to anyone in this House—to stand for election in this country and explain that they want to spend £39 billion to receive no conceivable advantage.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I do not know whether the noble Lord has noticed this week’s Economist, whose headline is that the WTO is in danger of collapsing. That seems rather to undermine his suggestion that we should rely entirely on the WTO. He will, of course, recall that it is the US Administration who are doing the collapsing.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

The Economist has a particular view of these matters—but if the noble Lord is correct and the WTO is collapsing, the least of our problems will be leaving the EU.

The Prime Minister should reject the bogus posturing of the Taoiseach, the latest recruit to Project Fear, who claims that if the UK left the EU it would mean that our planes could not fly over Ireland. As flyover rules are a matter for an international treaty and have nothing to do with our EU membership, the most charitable interpretation I can put on that is that he did not know what he was talking about. The least-charitable interpretation is that he has the same advisers as George Osborne, who promised a punishment Budget, higher taxes, soaring interest rates, rising unemployment, inflation and a recession within weeks of any decision to vote to leave the EU.

Even Mr Osborne did not suggest civil unrest, which the UK chief executive of Amazon is predicting on the front page of today’s Times. He would do well to address the unrest among his own workforce arising from Amazon’s poor employment practices. If we leave the EU we will be able to introduce a tax on internet sales and level the playing field for our retailers, who pay rates and taxes and face unfair competition from online retailers. As members of the EU we cannot do that. Amazon in 2016 routed its revenues for the whole of the EU through Mr Juncker’s tax haven in Luxembourg, and paid a total of £15 million in tax on revenues of £19.5 billion.

The Irish Prime Minister has a short memory. When the EU left Ireland swinging in the wind after the financial crisis it was the United Kingdom that lent it tens of billions to lessen the catastrophic consequences of its membership of the euro. The Taoiseach’s position on the border is, to say the least, confusing. The Irish Times of 19 July reports him as saying that the European Union had assured him that no physical checks would be needed on the border even if the UK crashed out without a deal. Ireland’s exports to Britain across the Irish Sea are essential to the Irish economy. For example, 70% of their beef comes to the UK. There is already a land border for tax, duty and currency differences between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Customs officials on both sides have said that our leaving the EU does not create a need for a so-called hard border. The actual trade across the land border is a tiny fraction of that with the UK. If both Governments say they will not countenance a hard border, who exactly is going to put one there? The EU? I think not. This border issue is a Trojan horse pushed into the negotiations by people determined to reverse the UK’s decision to leave the EU—and we have heard a lot from them this afternoon.

My noble friend Lord Heseltine asked what the people voted for. The reasons why people voted to leave the EU were not just economic, although I believe that in time our leaving offers a bright future for our country once we are unshackled from the sclerotic bureaucracy that is the European Union. It was about being free again to make and unmake our own laws, to hold Governments to account for the rules and regulations that dominate our daily lives, to decide for ourselves our immigration policy and how our money is spent, to be free of the jurisdiction of a foreign court, to control our own natural resources, and to offer markets to developing countries around the world.

As a boy I was brought up in Arbroath. I watched a great fishing fleet, along with its associated industries, being destroyed by the CFP, with successive Governments of this country powerless to help. It is not for this or any other Parliament to give away the powers which come from the people and with which it is entrusted without their consent, far less wilfully to ignore the results of a referendum.

The year 2020 will be the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath. It was a letter, in Latin, to the Pope, signed by eight earls and 45 barons, some of whose descendants are actually in the House today. The words come tumbling down the centuries: “We fight, not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no honest man surrenders but with his life”.

Those words were delivered to Rome; today we should dispatch them to Brussels.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I was fascinated to hear the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, quoting the Declaration of Arbroath, and I look forward to discussing Scottish history a little with him. The declaration, after all, was aimed at the papacy, but Scottish independence was defended primarily against the English and was maintained through trade with the Hanseatic League in the Low Countries and through the alliance with the French. But let us leave that matter.

I would like to start by talking about borders. When the Cold War ended, the Metropolitan Police approached Chatham House, for which I then worked, to ask us to convene a seminar on border control and cross-border co-operation in this transformed circumstance. Before I chaired the conference, I was briefed by various border staff who had managed the east-west border. I particularly remember what the Finns told me about the way they managed their border with the Soviet Union. They stated bluntly: “You can’t manage a border on your own. You have to co-operate with those on the other side, however difficult or hostile they may be. And the more open the border becomes, the closer the co-operation you need”.

This White Paper fails to grapple with the contradiction between unilateral insistence on sovereignty and the necessity of close and institutionalised co-operation with neighbouring states with which we share intensive economic independence, mass travel and security. We still hear hard Brexiteers say—as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—that we could unilaterally declare the Irish border open if we leave the EU without a deal and challenge the Irish to accept or reject it.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I was quoting the Irish Taoiseach saying that he had that assurance from the EU. Is he wrong?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the point I am making is that either side cannot deal with it unilaterally; we have to work together. We are condemned to work together.

We cannot manage our Channel border on our own either. We have several hundred UK Border Force personnel stationed in France with the agreement of the French Government. We also depend on active co-operation with customs and border staff in Belgium and the Netherlands.

There is a similar contradiction at the heart of the White Paper’s approach to foreign policy and security. The executive summary proclaims that we will reclaim the UK’s sovereignty and assert,

“a fully independent foreign policy”.

Chapter 2, in contrast, goes into great detail about the Government’s,

“ambitious vision for the UK’s future relationship with the EU … that goes beyond existing precedents”.

It then lists a long succession of EU agencies in which we wish to remain either as a full or associated member. These include Europol and Eurojust, the Schengen Information System, the European Criminal Records Information System, passenger name records and the passenger information unit, the Prüm data exchange arrangements on DNA and fingerprints, the European arrest warrant, joint investigation teams, the European Union Satellite Centre, the EU military staff, the EU intelligence and situation centre, the European Defence Agency, the European defence fund, Galileo and the European defence technological and industrial base—15 different legal and institutional frameworks. We wish, that is, to move from being a full member with a number of significant opt-outs to being a non-member with a lot of significant opt-ins.

The UK also proposes close co-operation across all foreign policy areas, with invitations to informal sessions of the EU’s Political and Security Committee, regular dialogue between officials, reciprocal exchange of personnel and expertise and provision for discussion between EU 27 leaders and the British Prime Minister on as regular a basis as possible. There is no mention here of the Government’s earlier proposal for a new security treaty with the EU—perhaps the Minister will tell us whether that goal has been explicitly abandoned—but Chapter 4 sets out an extensive institutional framework, with layers of committees, which will clearly require legal backing and ratification.

That is all very ambitious—and unavoidably constraining of British sovereignty. The White Paper notes, as others have said, that,

“where the UK participates in an EU agency, the UK will respect the remit of the Court of Justice of the EU”.

That will be hard to sell to the members of the European Research Group and the columnists of the Telegraph and the Mail. It suggests that,

“much of this can be done within existing third country precedents … There are opportunities to build on existing precedents”.

This contradicts what the Prime Minister has said repeatedly and in the foreword about the unprecedented character of the deep and special relationship that the UK wishes to build. I ask the Minister specifically to tell us which precedents the White Paper is referring to as a model for our future foreign policy and security relationship. Is it EU-Turkey, EU-Ukraine, EU-Georgia or EU-Azerbaijan? I assume that it is not EU-Norway, because that is a closer association than the Government think is compatible with UK sovereignty.

Chapter 2 of the White Paper tries desperately to bridge the gap between sovereign independence and intensive co-operation—and fails. Perhaps that is not surprising when for the past two years our Foreign Secretary has entirely failed to engage with the question of the future institutional framework for Britain’s place in the world. He said in his resignation speech last week that:

“We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave … but as great independent actors on the world stage”.


In effect, that dismisses almost everything presented in Chapter 2. His only formulation of Britain’s future place in the world was,

“to take one decision now before all others, and that is to believe in this country and in what it can do”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/18; cols. 449-450.]

If we just believe, everything will be all right. That is rather like Peter Pan or like the song in Disney’s “Pinocchio”—

“When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true”.


However, one difference between Pinocchio and Boris Johnson is that when Pinocchio told a lie, his nose grew longer; our former Foreign Secretary’s nose remains unchanged.

In 1962, some 56 years ago, the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, famously said:

“Britain’s attempt to play a separate power role … a role apart from Europe … is about played out”.


All these years later, the Eurosceptics are still dreaming of some sort of global Britain apart from Europe. The White Paper tries to offer them independence while struggling to maintain essential links with Europe and fails to resolve the contradiction. This leaves Britain without any coherent foreign policy drifting offshore in the eastern Atlantic while Russia becomes more threatening, the Middle East more dangerous and the United States more erratic. What a position for a Conservative Government.