Brexit: Parliamentary Processes

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 3rd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I agree with my noble friend. I think the Benn Act was designed to undermine our negotiating position by people who actually do not want to leave the EU but do not have the courage to admit to the British people that that is what they in fact desire.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, at the beginning of this Session, the Government set out a series of Bills that needed to be passed in order to provide for an orderly Brexit. These included Bills on trade, immigration, fisheries and agriculture, none of which has yet proceeded through this House, completed their progress and become Acts. Do the Government intend that we have a disorderly Brexit without the legislative framework, or are we intending to sit Saturdays and Sundays for the last two weeks in October in order to get the legislative framework in place?

[Lord Callanan]

As I said to the noble Lord before, we are able to give him the reassurance that he needs that we already have all the necessary legislative framework in place that will allow us to leave the European Union on 31 October in an orderly fashion.

Brexit

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister is right: we need to get Brexit done. The longer the delay, the more divided we will become—if that is even possible. Last week, bloodletting in the other place plumbed new depths of acrimony and abuse. It was shocking, but hardly surprising. After three years of deadlock, remainers and Brexiteers have become more and more entrenched in their positions, allowing anger and resentment to replace reasoned debate.

Meanwhile, the frustration of our voters at Parliament’s inability to honour its commitment to the referendum result grows by the day. We have reached such a point that many outside the Westminster bubble no longer care whether we leave with a deal, without a deal, or with just half a deal. Surely the European elections were warning enough. Yet we appear to have learnt absolutely nothing from the dramatic success of the Brexit Party. Our heads are deep in the sand. This is how revolutions—like the one that destroyed my Russian family—begin. It beggars belief that, three years and three months after the referendum, Brexit remains undelivered. At the time of the last extension, President Tusk urged us to use the time well. Can we honestly say that we have done so?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

No.

[Baroness Meyer]

Exactly. Brexit delayed is Brexit denied. Yet, with the latest deadline looming, Members of this House and the other place are scheming, yet again, to frustrate the wish of the majority of the British people and to undermine the Prime Minister’s determination to deliver Brexit—and, may I say, with a deal; that is what he trying to do. This plotting is as calculating as it is unworthy. It is, to quote Sir John Major, “political chicanery”. This is not a struggle between two types of democracy: parliamentary and plebiscite; it is a blending of the two. It was Parliament itself that agreed the referendum, undertook to implement it and, by a thumping majority, voted to trigger Article 50. Because it makes Brexit more difficult and revoke more likely, the Benn Act is, in reality, a distortion of parliamentary democracy, not its triumphant assertion.

As for negotiation, to rob the Prime Minister of the option to walk away from the negotiating table is self-defeating madness. It is like playing the Wimbledon finals with a hole in your racquet. We have to ask the question: what is behind this Westminster scheming to get another extension of Article 50?

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are now in the endgame of Brexit: less than four weeks to go, a choice between crashing out, staying in or some sort of ingenious or fantastical deal over the Irish border.

The Lords, we all accept, is a revising Chamber. We look at the detail of what the Government propose and whether it is workable. Some noble Lords have spoken of the referendum three years ago giving “instructions” from the British people to Parliament, but those instructions did not go into any detail. They did not tell us whether “the people” wanted to maintain co-operation between police forces and exchanges of data on crime and terrorism, and they did not tell us whether the UK should stay in the European space programme or the Joint European Torus on fusion research.

Boris Johnson spoke this morning of the JET Culham research campus as a British asset, but there is a reason it is called the Joint European Torus, and it is not clear yet whether we are planning to shoulder its full cost and staffing ourselves. It is in the Henley constituency and it has a European school. He was deliberately misleading his audience.

The Prime Minister, we know, is not a details man. He showed his eccentric and limited grasp of the details of trade policy in a speech in New York last week, which I happened to catch on television. In it he took as his prime examples of UK exports that would benefit from deregulated access to the US market four items: socks, cauliflower, haggis and lamb. The Minister must be familiar with the research behind this statement. Can he therefore tell us what proportion of UK exports is currently composed of cauliflowers, what scale of expansion in domestic cauliflower production is envisaged, and how easy it will be to supply cauliflowers to California while they are still fresh? I had understood that the UK was at present a net importer of cauliflowers and that it produces them for only one month a year. However, the Prime Minister must understand the sector much better than I do, since he placed more emphasis on that than on high technology, the creative industries or services.

In his update last week, the Prime Minister accused Parliament of living in a fantasy world. I see Mr Johnson and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, as living in an alternative universe. They and their allies told us three years ago that negotiations with the EU would be quick and easy. They also said that the eurozone was about to collapse, that staying within the EU would leave us “shackled to a corpse”, and that the EU was a “superstate” over which we had no influence.

Now Dominic Cummings says that leaving without a deal will be “a walk in the park”. Mr Johnson says, “Let’s get it finished”, as though there will be nothing more to negotiate after 31 October and no more financial contributions to shared European programmes. Several speeches in this debate have clarified that Britain’s future relationship with the EU remains to be negotiated, in principle and in detail. At best, we will find ourselves a second and poorer Switzerland; at worst, an offshore island like the Irish Free State 50 years ago.

I listened to the Prime Minister’s conference speech this morning. He has a wonderful sense of comic timing—he would have had a successful career as a stand-up comedian. However, he wears his principles lightly and he happily propounds contradictory statements one after another. His best comic line was entirely nonsensical, and I think that I ought to quote it:

“When the chlorinated chickens waddle from the hencoop where they are hiding, that is the vision of the country that we will put to the people”.


I am sure that that is entirely clear to all noble Lords present. For me, the worst contradiction was between his declaration—“I love Europe”—and his use of the language of war to describe our relations with the continent.

After the referendum in 2016, Boris Johnson wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph that claimed that Britain would remain in the EU single market after Brexit. Reportedly, that was one reason that Michael Gove decided that, as he then declared,

“I have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead”.

Gove was right then, as was Johnson, but both changed their minds.

We have heard some of the wilder interpretations of our difficulties with Brexit in this debate, which remind me of the overlap between Brexit believers, climate change deniers and other conspiracy theorists. The noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord James—I do not see the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in his place at the moment—clearly see the EU as an evil empire, although the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, prefers to define it as the Soviet Union rather than the usual depiction of it as the German Empire. The noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, ascribes the lack of progress with Brexit to “scheming and plotting”—by, I assume, malign forces in Parliament and elsewhere. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton of Epsom, even suspects a deep judicial plot.

As several noble Lords have said, we are also straining Britain’s constitutional settlement. On the “Today” programme this morning, the Conservative Party chairman, James Cleverly, said:

“There is little point in electing representatives unless we listen to them”.


I cheered up immensely. However, he was actually referring to the DUP and not the UK Parliament. As far as the UK Parliament is concerned, the Prime Minister is whipping up the populist theme of the people against—I assume, an allegedly corrupt—Parliament. That is very dangerous for British democracy. Democracies can die if political leaders cease to defend their principles. Democracy is not just about voting but about the rule of law, respect for an ordered political process, freedom of speech, the toleration of dissent, and limits on and careful legislative scrutiny of executive power.

When the Attorney-General declares, “This is a dead Parliament”; when the Daily Mail declares that the Supreme Court’s recent judgment saw democracy begin to die, as it did the other day; and when the Prime Minister describes an Act of Parliament as the “surrender Act”, we are drifting on to very dangerous ground.

The Minister may remember the Queen’s Speech of two years ago, which set out an ambitious legislative agenda to prepare for an orderly Brexit. Of the list of Bills then produced, the taxation Bill passed, as did the Nuclear Safeguards Bill and the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill. The Trade Bill has gone through both Houses and is waiting for ping-pong. The immigration, Fisheries and Agriculture Bills are still waiting for Commons Report stage. As Jacob Rees-Mogg admitted in the Commons last week, fear of amendment has led to government delay.

This means that—although the Minister may try to assure us that the necessary legislative framework will be in place for the UK to leave on 31 October—that can happen only if the Government are given Henry VIII powers to put through a very large number of statutory instruments to allow them to push a massive legislative programme through in two weeks; otherwise, we will not be ready and will need to extend.

This week, the Mail on Sunday headlined allegations from “a senior Number 10 source”—in other words, close to the Prime Minister—that:

“The Government is working on extensive investigations into Dominic Grieve, Oliver Letwin and Hilary Benn and their involvement with foreign powers and the funding of their activities. … The drafting of … legislation in collusion with foreign powers must be fully investigated”.


Later in the article, Philip Hammond’s name was added to this list of potential traitors. Number 10 thinks that three recent Conservative Cabinet Ministers have now gone over to the enemy.

The hostile foreign power with which the Prime Minister’s Office alleged that they were colluding was not Russia or China but France, an ally of the UK for more than 100 years. The Prime Minister’s frequent references to “our friends in Europe” presumably includes the French. But refighting the Second World War, for this pocket Churchill, makes him contradict the whole idea of friendship with our neighbours across the channel, through references to “surrender”, “traitors”, “betrayal”, even “the Dunkirk spirit” as the war is endlessly replayed.

We know that the Prime Minister likes to compare himself to Churchill. The press increasingly compares him to Trump: constantly campaigning rather than governing, dividing the country while talking of uniting it. Watching the Prime Minister’s update to the Commons last Wednesday, I thought more of the comparison with Viktor Orban, the authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, who has coined the phrase “illiberal democracy”, by which he means democracy in name only, without the rule of law and without independent media. Like Boris Johnson, he started off as a social liberal. I even shared a platform with him at a conference in 1997 when he was seen to be one of the rising liberal modernisers in eastern Europe. But then he discovered that appealing to nationalist resentments, attacking the European Union, sneering at intellectuals and demonising immigrants whipped up public emotions and consolidated his hold on power.

On the Conservative Benches behind the Prime Minister last Wednesday, Brexiter MPs were attacking the “liberal establishment” as the core of the alleged parliamentary plot to thwart the will of the people. The liberal establishment, as I understand it, includes the mainstream media—except the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, but including above all, the BBC, of course—as well as experts of all kinds, the universities and the academic class, the churches, the judges and the Civil Service. That covers most of us present in this Chamber; it includes people who think, who have respect for evidence and who believe in reasoned debate. The populist right, which has taken over the Conservative Party, defines itself against this as the illiberal anti-establishment, speaking for the people against the elite. Noble Lords need only look at Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Johnson himself to see how ludicrous their claim to represent the people against the elite is.

I can think of two earlier instances of the Tory party losing its mind. The first was in 1687-88, when Tories supported the King against Parliament and patriots such as General John Churchill appealed to a foreign power—the Dutch—to invade Britain in what we now remember as the Glorious Revolution. The Tories at that point were supported, politically and financially, by the authoritarian French. The second instance was in 1913-14 over Ireland, when Tory politicians fanned the flames in Ulster, coming close to promoting civil war against the elected Government in Westminster. We were saved from that threat of civil conflict by the disastrous outbreak of the First World War. We have to hope that this third bout of madness will not lead to another such political, economic and constitutional disaster. We appeal to those reasonable Conservatives—followers of the one-nation tradition, from Disraeli to Macmillan to Cameron—to help us return British politics from right-wing populism to reasoned debate.

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[Lord Callanan]

Of course it will require the co-operation of the Irish Government. We want to discuss with them and the EU how we can address the unique situation of the circumstances in Ireland to bring about our exit from the European Union without imposing border infrastructure. That is what we want to achieve. We recognise that it is a unique and unusual circumstance. Indeed, we expect that the Irish Government will also wish to ensure that there is no infrastructure on their side either.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Since the Leader of the House is here, we repeat strongly the request to have sufficient time for this tomorrow, rather than having a Statement with 20 minutes for questions. This is clearly important, and we will need much more time.

[Lord Callanan]

The Chief Whip is not here, but the Leader of the House has heard the noble Lord’s comments. I am sure the usual channels will want to discuss how much time is available.

Brexit Readiness and Operation Yellowhammer

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

I will thank the Minister for repeating the Statement; but where are the plans for a deal? The Statement has got nothing on them. That is not because they are being kept confidential in order to aid negotiations, as the Minister claimed earlier. It is not even to stop Parliament scrutinising the potential deal. It is because there is nothing to scrutinise.

We need to consider the UK offer before it is consolidated into a deal. This Statement is all about a no-deal departure, despite the Act passed this month to ensure that we do not leave without a deal. So are the Government planning to flout the law again, because they do not appear to have an idea of what deal they and the EU could accept? The Government say that they want to remove the backstop, but to replace it with what? What else would guarantee no hard border within Ireland? The Statement does not explain where these various physical checks will take place. It admits that, with different tariffs, rules and standards across the EU, with a third-country border there simply have to be checks. That is what happens if you are not in the same customs regime. If our immigration rules are different, checks to ensure that people do not fly into Dublin and then arrive unchallenged here imply a hard border, as happens everywhere else between the EU single market and non-EU single market countries.

The Statement says:

“We will allow goods from the Republic of Ireland free circulation into NI”,


but says nothing about EU citizens there coming freely into the UK. Going forward, that would not be in accordance with our immigration policy, which would obviously be different from that of the EU. What plans do the Government have in that regard?

There are 36 days to go. We have not seen the plans for a deal. We have not even seen the complete plans for no deal—a prospect that continues to haunt the car industry, the pharmaceutical industry, transport, exporters, manufacturing and business. And not just business: consumers would pay the price, with WTO tariffs on cars and vans costing the EU and UK industry and consumers almost £6 billion a year. The BMA worries about the healthcare costs of EU citizens. We read that hospitals in Kent are booking hotel beds for staff because they fear that they will be unable to travel on blocked roads after a no-deal exit, and Northern Ireland police are planning to cancel annual leave in those circumstances. But still the Government throw taxpayers’ money at no-deal preparations despite an Act of Parliament which says that that cannot happen unless the Commons agrees it, and we know that the Commons will not agree it.

As the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, who is unfortunately not in his place, wrote after yesterday’s, as he called it, “car crash” for the Tories, the Government,

“may have to reconsider its plans for Britain to leave the EU on October 31”.

The only word of the noble Lord’s that I would challenge is “may”. Surely the Government must abandon this reckless date and start engaging now with all parties to ensure that we put the country’s future first. They must also understand that the Government, having been found not to have been trustworthy over Prorogation, must now earn Parliament’s trust and be clear that they will not undermine the law by failing to do everything possible to obtain an extension to Article 50.

Will the Minister tell the House: what proposals are being put to the EU; when he envisages any negotiated deal will be agreed by the European Parliament; how many clauses are in the requisite Bill to implement the deal that he envisages; when will it be tabled in Parliament; and when we will receive the full, not just the summary, of the Yellowhammer plans?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am very puzzled by a great deal in this Statement. The optimism on negotiations suggests that the European Union has moved and given way to us on a range of significant areas, and it does not suggest that we have moved at all. If that is the way that the negotiations are going, then pigs are flying the channel every day. Perhaps the Minister would like to suggest whether the British Government have moved their position at all as the negotiations move forward or whether we are expecting, as the European Research Group has suggested, that the EU will have to give way when it comes to the final point and we will not have to give way or change our position at all.

On Northern Ireland, the position has always been entirely clear that an open border without any checks or infrastructure between the EU and the UK after we leave would be open to smuggling, illegal border crossings and a whole set of issues which seem to have eluded those who wanted a hard Brexit when much of that was evident years ago. Here we are, with five weeks to go, and there is a lot of material here about last-minute discussions on issues that were evident after the referendum and indeed were entirely evident when the coalition Government consulted on this. I was one of the Ministers in the coalition Government who took part in a major consultation exercise with representatives from business, justice and others, which fed back detailed arrangements for the Government on what was regarded to be in Britain’s best interests, and which No. 10, by and large, ignored.

I am puzzled that discussions are mentioned here only about relations with France. We have borders and some significant trade with Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Can the Minister assure us that conversations with them about border controls have also taken place?

The Minister said that action will be taken,

“if appropriate mitigations are not put in place”,

but surely all appropriate mitigations should now be in place for something happening at the end of October. The “if” suggests that the Government are simply not ready. When I listened to representatives from major business organisations last week, they expressed considerable dissatisfaction with their relations with the Government, and in the Financial Times yesterday a story about business representatives being “bullied” by Ministers, as the paper put it, confirmed the suggestion that Ministers are resisting the calls that they are getting from business for detailed changes in what is going on. Would the Minister like to reassure us that these stories of Ministers bullying business organisations which do not tell them what they want to hear are untrue, or at least are exceptional and not normal?

I am puzzled by the reference to free movement of labour and the negotiations on the right to work in other countries, as well as visa-less travel. I assume that will be mutual, in which case there will be free movement for EU citizens from all other countries to visit and to work in Britain. That, as the Minister will know well, is of active concern to multinational businesses operating in this country. I can remember British Aerospace saying some time ago that it moves 8,000 workers in and out of Britain a week for meetings and to get equipment, or whatever, and that the complications of moving to any sort of detailed control would undermine its entire business model between Britain and its other facilities in Europe. Will that be mutual and has he yet told the noble Lord, Lord Green, and Migration Watch UK that free movement for work within Britain will be continued after we leave?

Lastly, I must object to the last but one paragraph here, which could have come straight from the Bruges Group rather than the Government. I cannot believe that any civil servant who looked at this accepted the reality that we would somehow be a strong voice for freer trade in the World Trade Organization. The Minister knows as well as I do that the World Trade Organization is in crisis and that the United States Administration is doing their best to undermine the WTO. The idea that we are about to enter a world of freer trade outside the EU, when the US and China are moving towards a trade war, is absolutely pie in the sky. The paragraph also refers to the opportunity to deal more effectively with cross-border crime. All the evidence we had in the balance of competences exercise was that there was no better way of dealing with cross-border crime than the arrangements we had within the European Union. That statement is frankly idiotic and ought to be withdrawn. A number of other statements in this paragraph:

“the opportunity to strengthen our democratic institutions … the opportunity to invest more flexibly … the opportunity to overhaul government procurement”,

are equally vacuous, if not wrong. On that basis, I give a very weak welcome to this Statement.

[Lord Callanan]

I thank the noble Baroness and the noble Lord for their comments. Let me run through their questions in turn, starting with the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. I repeat what I said to her earlier: negotiations are continuing. They continued last week and are continuing today. The Prime Minister met a number of European leaders, including Leo Varadkar, at the United Nations yesterday. My Secretary of State met Michel Barnier last week. There is a technical team in Brussels today conducting negotiations. Papers are being exchanged and talks are ongoing, so we are keen to get a deal. I can assume only that the bluster from the noble Baroness is to hide the absolute lack of clarity on Brexit from her party, which has no policy at all. She tells us that it is keen to avoid no deal. Of course, the Labour Party could have avoided that by voting for a deal, but it has so far managed to be against everything that is suggested, while at the same time telling us that it wants to respect the result of the referendum.

The noble Baroness referred a number of times to the legislation in the Benn Act. That Act does not prevent us leaving with no deal. I think that she knows this very well but, as she repeated in her questions, it merely hands the power to decide whether we leave with no deal to the European Union and, of course, undermines our negotiating position. With regard to the tabling of a Bill, she can be reassured that as soon as we have a conclusion to the talks, we will want to table a Bill as early as possible to enable full consideration. But as we discovered with the Benn Act, it is amazing how quickly the House can operate when it has the will and desire to do so.

Turning to the comments by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, let me repeat again that we want a deal. Of course, in any deal-making situation, compromises will be required from both sides. We have compromised considerably on our side. It is time for the European Union to compromise as well.

I would take his entreaties on a need to get a deal with a little bit more seriousness if his party had not done its level best to undermine our negotiations. Fairly incredibly, Lib Dem MEPs wrote to Jean-Claude Juncker only last week urging him not to make a deal with the UK, genuinely trying to undermine our negotiations. From the way that they are doing this and by voting against our negotiations at every opportunity, one might think that they are actually keen to get a no-deal exit.

The noble Lord referred to other Governments. We are in negotiations with as many other Governments as we can be. We are keen to have more detailed negotiations with some of those, but the European Commission are doing their best to dissuade Governments from engaging with us on many of these matters.

All appropriate mitigations are being put in place. There are a huge number of work streams across Whitehall directed from the XO Cabinet committee, which meets daily, and there are a number of different projects ongoing, but these cannot be put in place instantaneously. Many of them take time.

The noble Lord referred to business organisations and bullying. I do not recognise that description at all. I have myself met with many of those business organisations. I spent a considerable part of August meeting with a whole load of companies across a range of sectors. All of those meetings were incredibly constructive. Of course, some businesses have criticisms of our position and we do our best to explain the position to them. However, most of them have taken an extremely constructive approach and are keen to work with us to ensure that we get the best outcome for this country.

Regarding the noble Lord’s comments about the WTO, we stick to our view that we are going to do our level best to make the WTO work effectively in the future, whatever problems there are.

The noble Lord also referred to cross-border crime. We will be able to enhance the criminality checks that are carried out at the border which are not permitted for us under the current EU version of freedom of movement. We will do that and help to keep the country safer after Brexit.

Extension of Article 50

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, with the permission of my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who is delayed coming in from the airport, and at his express request, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

[The Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

My Lords, our focus remains on getting a deal at the October European Council and leaving the EU on 31 October. We have been working enthusiastically to negotiate a deal with the EU. Renegotiations have intensified, with regular sessions taking place over a number of weeks; these have been constructive, and we have been making good progress. The Government are clear that we will not be deterred from getting on and delivering on the will of the people to come out of the EU on 31 October.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am most impressed by the optimism the Minister expresses on the progress of the negotiations. We all hear reports that the Government have presented three sides of paper in their proposals so far in Brussels; it does not seem that either the pace or the detail has got very far yet. Given that, and given that business and the Civil Service are struggling with uncertainty around how far they should take preparations for no deal at the present—uncertainty which is very damaging for the economy and our society as a whole—and given that Operation Yellowhammer, in so far as we have been allowed to read the reports, suggests that the outcome of no deal would be disastrous, would it not be helpful if the Government were now to say that if the negotiations do not make sufficient progress, they will shortly ask to extend Article 50?

[Lord Callanan]

The noble Lord has been reading the wrong newspapers. We are optimistic about the progress of the negotiations: there is an official-level delegation conducting technical discussions in Brussels today; the Prime Minister met with Leo Varadkar yesterday; the Secretary of State in my department met with Michel Barnier last Friday; and intensive discussions took place over a number of days last week. We are optimistic on getting a deal. We will leave the EU on 31 October.

European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 6) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 5th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Dinton (CB)]

My Lords, I have listened to, I think, nine hours of debate, yesterday and today. I was not going to speak but I somehow think I have to. There are so many things I could say, but I want to make just three points. First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and those in the other place who have put together this Bill. It may be a very important example of cross-party working. It is 50 years since I sat in the official Box in this House, and I have been observing its proceedings regularly for that period. I have a sense at the moment that we are in a watershed. Things will never be the same after these Brexit years, not least because Brexit will be with us for 10, 15 or 20 years. It will divide the country, whether we leave or stay, and we have a huge problem dealing with it. Part of that problem is that our political institutions are not keeping up with the world, which is changing around us. At some point we will have to look at ourselves quite radically to ensure that we can keep up with what is expected of us. We are not helping ourselves in the way we are carrying on business at the moment.

Within that, the position of political parties is becoming a problem. I should never talk about political parties; I lack the gene that gives people passion for them. I have for a long time been very privileged to observe politicians closely and I have never, ever understood them. I just accept that I am not “one of you”. Equally, I know the importance of parties. At the moment, both in government and in political and party affairs, there are too many moving parts and too many fixed structures in my life are no longer stable or reliable. That is an unnerving feeling. If I am honest, the dismissal of 21 members of the Conservative Party appals me—I am not a politician but it appals me. It is over 50 years since I observed a number of leading Conservative politicians—the now noble Lords, Lord Howard, Lord Gummer and Lord Lamont, and Mr Kenneth Clarke—in the Cambridge Union. I remember Kenneth Clarke as a blonde, tall, slim chap with a northern accent, and I am utterly dismayed to find his contribution treated so cavalierly.

Listening to the debate and watching what is going on, I feel that I am living in a world that is going mad. Too many things are happening. I cannot be alone in feeling that—it is not just my age; it is true. We need sanity. There is sanity in this House and within the parties, and we will be rescued only if sane people can overcome their differences, act in the national interest and work together. This Bill is an example of that. Maybe it will lead to a referendum because I cannot see how a general election will get us out of our difficulty; what will happen if we again have a hung Parliament? So perhaps there will be a referendum. That is my first point: be true to your parties but also look at the national interest before your party interest when needed.

My second concern is that there is a need for a view about the future of this country in the world. The world around us is changing fast. We are in the middle of a technological revolution that I think is greater than the Industrial Revolution. Just 15 years ago we did not have smart phones and apps but now they are an indispensable part of everybody’s lives. Social media is changing the whole political context not just in this country but in other countries. I have recently chaired conferences and have learned that I can chair meetings without understanding a word of what is said. I chaired a meeting in Cambridge on quantum computing and another on blockchain, which is even worse. I also chaired one on DNA—on CRISPR-Cas 9 for those who are interested.

The things that are being brought to fruition in the world of research at the moment will alter the world more in the next 10, 15 or 20 years than has been the case in the last 10 or 15 years, and that has been fast enough. We in the political world and in political institutions have to keep up with and understand those things. Brexit is important but it is not the only change that is happening, and we need to have a view of the world, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, said earlier. We need to have a view of our place in the world and of how we will cope with it and be equipped to deal with it. It is not my field but the tectonic plates of world politics are changing. America and China will dominate the scene. Europe will not be the centre of the world, as we have thought of ourselves. The need to have a position in which we can choose between America and China, when each of them puts pressure on us, will be important. We will lack company if we isolate ourselves from the rest of Europe by behaving badly towards it and having no deal. The context of all this will be fundamental for the future of this country in a way that goes deeper than just politics and economics; it will be cultural too.

I am hugely bothered by the way in which the word “trust” has been used. I am used to people trusting government institutions. Part of my career has involved trying to uphold trust and ensure that people know where the boundaries are in a pragmatic way. One of those boundaries, as my noble friend and successor said just now, concerns special advisers. A lot of my time was taken up with special advisers and I have a detailed question for the Minister when he replies. There were, and I think there still are, rules governing special advisers, one of which was that they are temporary civil servants and do not have Executive powers. Can the Minister assure us that present special advisers are not exercising Executive powers? For instance, sacking another special adviser is the exercise of an Executive power. Special advisers do not have such powers. If someone purports to sack someone and they do not have the power to do it, is that sacking valid? I assume that this has been looked into and that the Government know what is going on, but I raise it because it is a small example of a more general principle. We need to ensure that the codes of conduct—not just gentlemen or good chaps behaving well but the basic rules of government—are being observed. I feel that, at the moment, when people feel able to be careless and cavalier with conventions, we ought to ask whether basic principles are being observed and challenging when they are not.

I think that is enough for now. I could go on at length about the principles at stake today, but so much has been said that I agree with and I will not repeat it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a very useful debate, but I think the House may agree that it is perhaps now time to wind up. Today’s has been a much more constructive debate than last night’s—oh, I give way to the noble and learned Lord.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have had a very constructive debate today. It has been much more interesting and wide-ranging than the long hours we had yesterday attempting to prevent today’s debate. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, on his return. I had understood that he was on a sleeper train to Scotland last night—perhaps he was not—but it is very courteous of him.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

The noble Lord is referring to me and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, told me off for intervening because I did not get here in time. I had to go and speak at a social care conference and came back at the first opportunity—which I would have thought was perfectly admissible. While I am on my feet, perhaps I may correct the noble Lord. What we were doing was preventing this House from having a guillotine Motion—it had nothing whatever to do with the Bill.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is all the more courteous of the noble Lord to return if he had a speaking engagement in Scotland. I regret that the noble Lords, Lord Dobbs and Lord True, and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, have not had the respect for the House to be here today, having detained us for so long in those circumstances last night. I hope that the Conservative Whips will make it clear to them that respect for the House in these circumstances would have suggested that attendance was more appropriate in their circumstances, as far as those of us who cut short our sleep and returned on time are concerned.

We are discussing some fundamental constitutional issues in this Bill: the relationship between Parliament and the Government. It is highly relevant to that that the leave campaign promised us that Brexit would restore not just British but parliamentary sovereignty.

Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Howard, reminded me of some of my undergraduate studies in history—the 17th-century conflicts and the emergence of the Tories and the Whigs, the Tories being those who defended the Crown against Parliament, with the Whigs favouring a stronger Parliament. However, the noble Lord referred not to the divine right of kings but to the will of the people. In some ways, this is an equally difficult concept to pin down and define.

These are very wide-ranging issues. The future of the union has been mentioned. My son now lives and works in Edinburgh and I have therefore visited it much more frequently in the last three years. I understand that the future of the union is at stake in this debate for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Then there are the questions suggested by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds, my noble friend Lord Campbell, the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, and others. What sort of country do we want to live in? What sort of values do we think we are about? Do we think that we do not share European values, that we share more with the American right and that that is where we would like to be instead? We have also discussed the conventions of what we used to regard as our wonderful unwritten constitution.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. May I apologise for my discourtesy —in his view—in not being able to be here for today’s debate in its entirety? I have attended the debate and have listened to his wise words on the monitor. Sadly, there are other duties which people must attend to. I would be very appreciative if he would apologise for his discourtesy in getting his facts wrong and personalising something that should be about politics, not personalities.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The question is about the role of this House, the way we all conduct ourselves in this House and the way we conducted our business yesterday evening. I am very happy to discuss this further with him off the Floor of the House.

[Lord Dobbs]

Could the noble Lord give a little moment? This is important. I have been referred to on the Floor of the House. Will the noble Lord simply accept that these matters should be about policy and politics, not personalities? I hope that he will reflect on the fact that referring to personalities actually demeans his case and does not strengthen it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am sorry. I have not read many of the noble Lord’s novels. I am sure that they do not stress that personality is important in politics. It seems to me that it is rather difficult to disentangle personality from politics. Let us discuss this further off the Floor. I even promise to buy the noble Lord a drink.

I was talking about conventions of the British constitution. I have been recalling the answer that the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, gave last year when the question was raised about the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments’ sharp letter to the Foreign Secretary when he resigned about the way in which Boris Johnson broke the Ministerial Code in three places within three days of resigning. The noble Lord extremely carefully stressed that the Ministerial Code is an honour code and depends upon the honour of the men who sign it, leaving the question of whether Boris Johnson is a man of honour hanging in the air.

That is part of the issue of trust which the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Hayward, and many others across the House have raised today. The matter of whether the Government would consider ignoring a law passed through Parliament if they did not like it, quoted in the Times today, increases the degree of mistrust. When the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, said that he cannot believe that the Prime Minister is negotiating in good faith, he speaks for a large number of people, which is worrying. He also says that we have to remember that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff is in contempt of Parliament and has written a blog showing many examples of his contempt, not only for Parliament but for most politicians in all parties. The problem, therefore, is that we cannot trust this Government, so Parliament is justified in tying their hands, which is the purpose of this Bill.

There is then the question of the role of evidence in policy-making, and of Civil Service advice and impartiality. The relationship between the Civil Service and the Government is based on the principle that civil servants advise on the basis of the best evidence they can find, and Ministers decide. What we have seen throughout this long argument about our membership of the European Community is Ministers and politicians disregarding advice and putting aside the evidence. I recall during my time in government, long before we reached the referendum, when, with David Lidington and Greg Clark, I chaired a Committee which at Conservative insistence looked at the balance of competences between the European Union and the United Kingdom. The Conservatives had insisted on it in the 2010 agreement because they were convinced that the evidence would demonstrate that business and other stakeholders would want to claw substantial powers back from the European Union to the UK. One of the most conscientious suppliers of evidence to the 32 reports that were provided was the director of the Scotch Whisky Association, Mr David Frost. He had been engaged in this for some time and he clearly knew what he was talking about and where the evidence lay. When those reports concluded that the balance of competences as currently established suited British business and other stakeholders well, the Prime Minister’s office did its best to supress further debate.

I hope that I misheard the noble Lord, Lord Howell, when he suggested that David Frost was perhaps not pressing the Prime Minister’s case on the Irish backstop as hard as he might in Brussels—

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

The noble Lord misheard me.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am glad to hear that. We have seen a worrying number of occasions when Ministers have blamed civil servants for decisions that they should have taken responsibility for. Poor Ministers blame officials in the way that poor workmen blame their tools. Michael Gove on experts, David Davis on officials, and others have lowered the quality of political debate in this country. We desperately need to rebuild it. It is not only the Government; the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, reminds us of the migration issue. I have read many of the Migration Watch UK reports over the years, with good evidence presented to suggest that the migration problem in Britain is largely a European one, rather than a global one. That helped the leave campaign very considerably, and I regret that misrepresentation of evidence. Operation Yellowhammer is the most recent example of good evidence being presented by civil servants, so far as we understand it, and suppressed by the Government because it did not fit what they wanted. Again, I may have misheard the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, on Tuesday. I thought he said that the report was based on “reasonable assumptions” about the outcome of a no-deal Brexit, and that it was a “worst-case analysis”. The think tank I worked for dealt in scenario planning, and would have central analyses, and best-case and worst-case analyses. I understand that Operation Yellowhammer was a central-scenario analysis of the risks. The Government should therefore be prepared to share what they think are the potential risks of a no-deal Brexit.

It is three years since the referendum. The focus of negotiations has been within the Conservative Party and not between the UK Government and the European Union. Theresa May, as Prime Minister, was pulled to the right by the European Research Group and imposed tight red lines. There could have been a compromise. Had the Government said that we would have a soft Brexit and stay within the single market and customs union, everything would have been over and dealt with long before now. The red lines were tightened and tightened, in late 2016 and early 2017, which led us to where we are today. After three years, the Conservative Party is even more deeply divided and we now see it crumbling at the edges, with the Cummings purge and even more so with the resignation of Jo Johnson this morning, when he said he is,

“torn between family loyalty and the national interest”.

We need politicians to think about the national interest, although I see Twitter remarked that this is the first occasion that a Minister has resigned to spend less time with his family.

The time remaining is short. The clock is ticking and deadlines are approaching. After three years of drift, without a clear government policy on what sort of exit to take, the idea that a deal could be reached on 17 and 18 October and implemented by 31 October is as absurd as some of the other things we have heard. As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, remarked, the legislative basis for an ordinary Brexit will simply not be there. We will be going out without the legal framework that we need; that is not an orderly Brexit. We need more time. We need more honesty about the choices, more respect for evidence, what is possible and what is not. We need a Government and an Opposition who put the national interest ahead of party factionalism. Since we do not sufficiently have these qualities in our national debate at present, we need this Bill.

EU: Law-making Process

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

We are constantly having discussions with old and new MEPs. Indeed, last week I was in Brussels talking to some of the old and newly elected Members of the European Parliament to put forward our position. Of course there is a bit of an interregnum while we have a leadership election but the noble Baroness is quite right to say that, when we have a withdrawal agreement to put to the new European Parliament, it will have to agree it—as will this Parliament.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a joint editor of a series of books on law-making in the European Union. I am quite prepared to allow the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, to read it. I know that Sir William Cash has read it, so perhaps he would like to. When and if we leave the European Union, will it not be all the more important for people interested in policy-making in Britain to understand the policy-making of the European Union, because outside it we shall still be influenced by decisions taken in Brussels and in other national capitals, and we need to know and understand those processes?

[Lord Callanan]

As someone who worked in the institutions for 15 years, I think it took me all those 15 years to understand them. I think it is important to understand how the EU legislative process works. I am delighted to hear that the noble Lord will allow the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, to read his books. Perhaps I can act as a bit of a matchmaker here and suggest that he might want to send him copies, so that he does not need to detain us by asking Questions about it.

Brexit: Cross-party Discussions

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, democracy is a dialogue and it requires Governments to carry their public with them and to continue to explain the rationales for their policies. Part of the problem we are now in is that we are getting from different members of the Cabinet a range of different opinions. We are not getting any clear message about what is and is not possible in getting out of the hole we are now in on Brexit. When can we expect the Government to return to Parliament and explain what they think is or is not a possible exit from where we are?

[Lord Callanan]

What we think is possible is the agreement that we have negotiated. The EU has said that it is the only agreement possible. I know that the noble Lord’s party do not believe in respecting the result of the referendum, but we do, and if we want to implement it the agreement that we have negotiated is the best way of achieving it.

European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 8th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have been thinking hard over the past few weeks about the meaning of parliamentary sovereignty, which was one of the things that the leave campaign strongly campaigned to restore. Last week, I was struck to hear Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg in the other place defend the relationship between the Government and Parliament at the time of Henry VIII as the most appropriate relationship between monarch and Parliament. Oliver Letwin replied that we had fought a civil war a century later to establish a proper relationship between the Executive and the legislature.

Much of what we are doing in this Bill is not entirely ideal. We need not have had this Bill if the Government had been more united, if negotiations had been expedited and if Parliament had been more actively engaged at an earlier stage. We are now up against a tight deadline and we have to take some emergency measures. That is where we are and we need to recognise that.

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

I wonder if the noble Lord might add this to the conditions in which this Bill would have been unnecessary: if Parliament had been prepared to respect the result of the referendum.

Brexit: Date of Exit

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 8th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I understand very much the concerns of my noble friend, but there are two processes in play here. There is the Article 50 process, which is a matter of international and European law, and the domestic EU withdrawal Act, which had to be changed to reflect that new date using secondary legislation powers in the Act, which were extensively debated at the time, as he will recall. Following that, there were debates in both Houses that then agreed those dates.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that national sovereignty in a peaceful world order is not something which allows you to tell everyone else to sod off whenever you want, but is the right to negotiate with others on mutually acceptable rules for international order? Can he explain the evident contradiction between what the ERG and the Bruges Group have been saying for the last three years—that we have absolutely no influence over decisions of the European Council—and recent remarks by spokesmen for those two groups that if we stay in the European Union for the next year, we can block it and impose an effective veto on what it wants to do?

[Lord Callanan]

I think I need to apologise to the noble Lord: I thought I was here to answer questions on behalf of the Government, but apparently he thinks I am now here to answer questions on behalf of the ERG. I suggest that the best way for him to get answers to his questions is to pose them to the gentlemen who made those statements.

Further Discussions with the European Union under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer]

The issue is sovereignty, which, as I said, was not mentioned yesterday and I do not think it has been mentioned today.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

It has.

[Lord Farmer]

That was the main issue, according to the polling, behind people voting to leave. It was not about trade and the economy, where the UK would benefit more from being outside the EU than from being part of it. When the Prime Minister’s Statement was repeated in the House yesterday, much was said in the exchanges that followed about trade and economics, but no one mentioned the fundamental importance of sovereignty to those who voted leave. Our silence in this area makes us seem very out of touch, so I shall take a little time to spell out why so many wanted to leave the European form of federal government—not, I might add, to leave the continent of Europe itself. I have not heard anyone express an interest in pulling up the drawbridge or stopping the flows of trade which so many forms of business value greatly.

Many noble Lords, perhaps particularly those on the Benches opposite, will be familiar with the erstwhile Viscount Stansgate, Mr Tony Benn, and his five questions for people of power. I must admit, I never thought I would be quoting this particular political giant, but he makes a powerful point. His five questions were,

“what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you?”.

They will also be aware of his maxim:

“Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/11/98; col. 685.]


We cannot get rid of President Juncker, President Tusk, Monsieur Barnier, Herr Selmayr or the European Commission. But, according to the House of Commons Library, the democratic deficit of the European Union is much wider and deeper than this. Its main characteristics are:

“The increased use of qualified majority voting … for the adoption of legislation in the Council; limiting Member States’ powers by removing their veto in the Council of Ministers; expanding the policy areas in which the EU has a role, sometimes excluding any action by Member States (EU ‘exclusive competence’); an increase in executive power and a decrease in national parliamentary control with deeper EU”,


regulation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Farmer]

I believe that the system until now has been that each country has a veto, and, as I say, the qualified majority voting would now override that veto. I will carry on about the democratic deficit. The Library document goes on:

“The EU’s executive, the Commission, is unelected; the EP is too weak compared with the Council and Commission”,


and elections to it are not really European elections. Electorates vote on the basis of their support for domestic parties, and turnout is low. It has fallen by 30% since the first elections in 1979. The European Union,

“is too distant from voters”,

and,

“adopts policies that are not supported by a majority of EU citizens; the Court of Justice makes law rather than interpreting it; there is a lack of transparency in the Council’s adoption of legislation and in certain appointments (e.g. EU Commissioners); EU law has primacy over national law and constitutions”.

Unsurprisingly, the latest Eurobarometer survey shows that among the EU 28 countries only 42% tend to trust the EU versus 48% who do not, and the UK lags very far behind—53% of those in the UK do not tend to trust the EU versus 31% who do. This, like so many other things, could be blamed on Brexit, but even back in spring 2015 the United Kingdom had one of the lowest trust ratings of the EU’s institutions across the 28 nations. Only 27% tended to trust the European Commission, compared with the EU 28 average of 40%, and only 29% tended to trust the European Parliament, compared with the EU average of 43%.

National leaders are also painfully aware that the EU is in urgent need of reform. According to Tim Shipman’s book about the road to Brexit, All Out War, Merkel was consulted before David Cameron gave his Bloomberg speech pledging an in/out referendum in the Conservative 2015 election manifesto and she,

“urged him to ‘couch the speech in an argument about Europe having to change’”.

He fell in with this, taking,

“Merkel’s advice on how to pitch his call for reform”,

in that speech, by saying:

“I am not a British isolationist. I don’t just want a better deal for Britain, I want a better deal for Europe too”.


That completely sums up my own position.

As I said at the beginning of my speech, we have to lift our heads and see beyond the current entrenched positions. The painful reality and process of Brexit will or should exert enormous moral pressure on the European Union to reform so that continental citizens are better served—otherwise, we could be the first of many to leave. This is another reason why holding a second referendum would be so damaging. Instead of sending the message that democracy and sovereignty matter, and sowing unchokeable seeds of reform, we would instead be saying that they have to be traded off so that we can stay in thrall to a status quo that really serves only the elites who prop it up. In our own and countless other electorates, there would forever be that recognition that democracy ain’t what it seems to be.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords—

[Lord Farmer]

Noble Lords will be pleased to know that I am finishing my speech. As a metals trader for more than half a century—I shall change tone here—I want to finish by saying something about trade. In the financial markets, there is a fear of global stagnation. I read this afternoon about the American factory output being disappointing again. While this has very little to do with our leaving the EU, Brexit could be a can opener for new trade initiatives. By breathing life into a world somewhat obsessed by tariffs, it will potentially end up boosting the global economy by breaking up the rather sedentary three big blocs of the US, China and the EU. The world needs competition to be encouraged and Britain could be an agent for that. So instead of a harbinger of doom, Brexit could be a force for reform, both economically and politically, but we have to get on with delivering it. It is, after all, the will of the people.