European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 5th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

The noble Baroness will recognise that that is part of a discussion for another time. We have already touched on it on more than one occasion. If I may, I will focus primarily on the amendments before us today.

It is important that we recognise that the rights we have cannot be undone. That must be the fundamental guidance. For those who ask whether I can give a categorical assurance that there shall be no erosion of the working time directive, the answer is yes, I can give that assurance. We will not be eroding these rules as they come back or after they come back. It is critical that these rules become and remain functional as we begin to develop our own rulebook. It is right that we should be cognisant of the advances in the evolution of rights whether it be in the EU or elsewhere. We have heard this evening about a number of these rights which we have seen emanating from the UN. We should not be limited in that regard. Time and again we have found ourselves in the vanguard of particular rights. As we consider this suite of amendments, I do not think we should lose sight of the fact that in more than one area on more than one occasion we have pushed rights far further forward than had been the case of the median rights within the EU as a whole.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The Minister just made an extremely significant statement. He will appreciate that part of the problem many of us have with the Bill is how far we trust the Government to have the very extensive delegated powers which are granted by the Bill and the chatter one hears, including from Ministers, about a desire to loosen EU regulations, in particular to loosen EU labour regulations. If the statement he has just made represents the Government’s considered view, that puts a number of minds at rest, although it may upset a number of people within his own party.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

12: Clause 1, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“( ) Regulations bringing into force subsection (1) may not be made until the Secretary of State has laid before both Houses of Parliament procedures agreed with the EU for continued coordination of foreign and security policy, including association with the EU’s military staff and the European Defence Agency, and these procedures have been approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister argued in winding up on the first group of amendments that we should be talking about the Bill and not about the issues raised by the amendments, which seemed a very ill-judged remark. This Bill is about a very wide range of policy areas—economic, constitutional and international—on which the Government are asking us to give them extensive powers, on trust, without telling us what they intend to do. The question for many of us is that we cannot trust the Government so far in giving them all those additional powers, unless they tell us rather more clearly what they intend to do.

These amendments deal with the implications of leaving the EU for British foreign, security and defence policy, and with the management of those policies when we withdraw. As we withdraw, which is what this Bill is about, we will also withdraw from the structures of common foreign policy and the common security and defence policy in the Treaty on European Union, as specified in a large number of articles. So what will we do then? The leave campaign never addressed this in the referendum, so there is no way one can say, “Well, it’s the will of the people, we can’t stand in their way”. The leave campaign denied that the EU was ever concerned with anything to do with security, foreign policy or defence. We were told when we joined that it was just about the common market, and now it has turned into something else. Anyone who has read Edward Heath’s 1968 Harvard lectures, what he said when he became Prime Minister and what Sir Alec Douglas-Home said as Foreign Secretary, what Jim Callaghan did as Foreign Secretary and what the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, followed through on, including his London report on strengthening the mechanisms of common foreign policy, and what Geoffrey Howe achieved, would know that Britain was absolutely at the heart of forming common foreign policy procedures in the European Union. I remember writing something about it for publication in a Chatham House journal in the late 1970s and being briefed very helpfully in the Foreign Office by the official who co-ordinated our input to common foreign policy, whose name was Pauline Neville-Jones. One or two Members of this House may, indeed, be familiar with the name. I also recall the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who sadly is not in his place at the moment, insisting even after the referendum that the EU had nothing to do with British or European security—and I gave him an annotated copy of the 2015 security and defence review with chapter 5, which is entirely about European defence co-operation, marked for his benefit.

Last September, the Government finally published a position paper on common foreign and security policy, which said, remarkably, that,

“the scale and depth of collaboration that currently exists between the UK and the EU in the fields of foreign policy, defence and security, and development”,

is such that we need,

“a deep and special partnership”—

a familiar phrase—

“with the EU that goes beyond existing third country arrangements”.

It goes on to point out that the UK was a founding member of the EU’s CSDP and takes part in all 15 common security and defence policy operations and missions and concludes:

“The UK would like to offer a future relationship that is deeper than any current third country partnership … This future partnership should be unprecedented in its breadth, taking in cooperation on foreign policy, defence and security, and development, and in the degree of engagement that we envisage”.


Well, that was interesting. Nothing was said for months afterwards—and, finally, the Prime Minister last week gave her speech in Munich in which she went into a little more detail about what she at least, if not the rest of her Government, seems to envisage. She said:

“The EU’s common foreign policy is distinct within the EU Treaties … So, there is no reason why we should not agree distinct arrangements for our foreign and defence policy cooperation in the time-limited implementation period, as the Commission has proposed. This would mean that key aspects of our future partnership in this area would already be effective from 2019”.


In that case, it is about time the Government started to educate the population on what arrangements they propose to make with the European Union. I hope, at least, that someone has told the European Union the sort of things that we might like to envisage. She then goes on to talk about our: joining the European Defence Agency and the European Defence Fund; contributing to the European Union’s common development policy, but on the condition that we also play an active role in formulating future European Union defence policy—I am not entirely sure how we do that, as an outsider—co-operating in cyberspace and space; and dealing with a whole range of issues including, on internal security, a new bilateral treaty between the EU and UK.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

Before the Minister sits down, perhaps I may say to her that she will have responded to this debate admirably if she can think of a way of conveying to the Foreign Secretary—it might be relatively easy since he is here—that there are at least some in this House who believe that the right way of advancing the dossier of co-operation with the EU that we have left on a common foreign and security policy would be for us to put forward a draft treaty now—not waiting for the other side, not waiting for the Commission, the expertise of which is not on foreign policy, but putting forward a treaty drafted by the Foreign Secretary, with all his detailed, forensic skills.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, of course I shall withdraw the amendment, but I shall make a couple of comments. It is clear that we will have to return to this at the next stage if the Government do not provide any more detail. First, on the role of the Lords in considering Bills such as this, the noble Baroness said—as the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said on a couple of occasions—that this is a largely mechanical Bill. Well, it is a mechanical Bill that gives very wide discretion to the Government to design our future relationship with our most important security, political and economic partners. So a House that concerns itself not with whether the principle of the Bill is correct but with the detail is entirely in accord with its role to ask for detail on what that discretion will be used for.

It would be easier to accept that this is a mechanical Bill and not to raise these difficult questions one after another if we had some confidence that the Government actually know what they want in these areas. Part of our problem is that many of us have no such confidence. I do not think that the Foreign Secretary has a clue about what he wants by way of a future relationship with Europe: I doubt whether he has really thought about it for more than three or four minutes. He is too busy thinking about the next anecdote he is going to tell or the next joke he is going to make. His speech last week was a disgrace for a Foreign Secretary: the Prime Minister’s was of an entirely different quality. For a Conservative Party that has always prided itself on its commitment to a strong foreign policy, it must be a real embarrassment that we still have someone in place who is incapable of giving a serious speech on foreign policy. So this House is fulfilling its proper role in asking for detail on the implications of the Bill.

Secondly, I take up what the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, said: the engine room is important.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)]

My Lords, I think it is against the rules and the spirit of this Chamber to criticise a Member of another place by name. I hope that the noble Lord will see fit to moderate his comments accordingly.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I apologise for being perhaps a little stronger than I should have been in this respect. On the engine room—I wanted to return to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, on this—much of the business of multilateral organisations, be it NATO or the EU, is done in working groups and committees. The common foreign and security policy structure has some 40 working groups and committees, including a military committee that has been chaired by a British officer. If we are not in any of those working groups, we will miss out on formulating policy.

There are other details that matter a great deal. I remember the noble Earl, Lord Howe, saying on one occasion, when some of us were following the noble Lord, Lord West, and asking, “Where are you going to find the frigates to make up the carrier groups that we need?” The noble Earl said, if I remember correctly, “They do not necessarily have to be British frigates”. I took him as meaning that they might be Dutch, French, Belgian or whatever. Well, that also needs a certain structure, with certain training mechanisms and certain multilateral commands.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

Would the structure not be NATO?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord may not know, but, as I have quoted, we have been involved in some 15 EU operations, some of which have been naval. Had he visited Operation Atalanta at Northwood, he would have known that that is an entirely naval operation, commanded by the British with ships from a number of different nations. Operation Sophia in the Mediterranean has also involved British frigates working with others on the whole question of migration. So some operations are NATO, some are the EU.

I have said quite enough. Of course I am going to withdraw, but we, along with many others, do not know enough about this area to be able to give the confidence to the Government that we want—that is the whole problem with this “mechanical Bill”. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 12 withdrawn.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I spent last weekend at a conference in Italy of experts on European international politics, where I met people from many different European countries with whom I had worked for many years, and one by one they all asked me to explain what seemed to them to be the complete incompetence of the British Government, their failure to develop a coherent approach to negotiating Brexit in the year since the referendum and their illusion that the UK holds all the cards and that other EU Governments will have to agree to its terms when it finally sets them out. I was particularly struck by the comment two Irish participants made—that they see a sad contrast between the sense in Dublin of a political culture at last breaking free of its past, while in England we seem to be wallowing yet again in imperial nostalgia.

We have now reached the point when the Government cannot avoid grappling with the hard detail of the future relationship between the UK and the EU. All trade negotiations have to grapple with hard detail: trade-offs struck, concessions taken and granted. Every time a Minister attacks those who ask questions about the details of Brexit as “unpatriotic”, people on the continent, as well as here, become more suspicious that the Government still do not know the answer: that the phrase in the Queen’s Speech that promises,

“a deep and special partnership with European allies”,

which we are told will somehow guarantee “seamless” cross-border trade without membership of the customs union or the single market, continuing co-operation on internal security without membership of Europol, and continuing co-operation on foreign and defence policy without participating in the EU’s multilateral meetings, is as meaningless as “Brexit means Brexit”. David Davis told the CEO summit yesterday that negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement will be “simple”. That is nonsense: all multilateral trade negotiations are fiendishly complicated.

One of the justifications given for this early election was to prevent the House of Lords obstructing the Government’s path to Brexit by asking awkward questions. The justification for a second Chamber is precisely to ask difficult questions, to require the Government to provide coherent answers and to ask the Commons to think again if they cannot provide such answers. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, as the Minister who will attempt to provide those answers; she is very brave to step into the breach and to take this on—I mean that in the best “Yes Minister” way. This House is entitled to ask for sufficient time to examine the necessary legislation in detail. I hope that in winding up the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, will provide us with some idea of when the Bills will reach this House and will give us an assurance that delays in Bills reaching this House will not provide an excuse for the Government to attempt to rush them through at the last minute.

The Prime Minister in her preface to the Conservative manifesto for the election stated, bluntly:

“Brexit will define us: our place in the world, our economic security and our future prosperity”.


So we might have hoped for some indication during the election campaign of what Britain’s future place in the world might be. “A global Britain” is as empty a phrase as “Brexit means Brexit”. Liam Fox’s travels suggest that he thinks closer links with New Zealand and the Philippines can replace trade with France and Germany. The illusion that Indian leaders retain so much affection for British rule that they will offer us a special trade deal still hangs around the Department for International Trade. A Canadian has told me that one British Minister recently referred in conversation with them to strengthening the ties that bind “the white Commonwealth”; at least he did not talk about “the Anglo-Saxon races”, though there are echoes of that concept on the Europhobe right.

There is an enormous gap between the windy rhetoric of global Britain regaining its status as a great power and the way our allies see us. The Financial Times last Saturday quoted one Washington expert’s view:

“For the foreseeable future, the US-UK special relationship is irrelevant … Britain has decided to remove itself completely from the chessboard”.


Boris Johnson has irritated all his European colleagues without impressing Governments from elsewhere. He promised last December that he would be making a series of speeches on Britain’s future international strategy, but I have not been able to find anything coherent in his speeches since.

Last Sunday’s Telegraph had yet another article suggesting that Hong Kong should be our model in our future role. Daniel Hannan MEP—the leading Conservative ideologue of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism —declared in last Thursday’s Daily Mail that our future relationship with the rest of Europe should be modelled on Switzerland or Guernsey. Great Britain as a “Greater Guernsey”—what wonderful ambition. An island to which rich people emigrate to avoid taxation: the real citizens of nowhere, moving to the Channel Islands to escape national control. Of course, the leave campaign was funded largely by such citizens of nowhere, who made their money through offshore companies in Gibraltar and the Caribbean and want to promote a deregulated British economy that would become an offshore financial centre.

The promise of the repeal Bill shows that the Government have so far resisted the pressures from hard Eurosceptics for the bonfire of regulations which they promised would follow, so “taking back control” will in practice mean wholesale incorporation of European regulations into domestic law. This House will wish to examine closely how far the Government intend to follow the evolution of European regulations after we have left in order to maintain the “seamless” cross-border trade they assure us they will maintain in the same way that the Swiss, not to mention the Channel Islanders, follow the rules negotiated by others in Brussels. If so, we lose, rather than regain, effective sovereignty, and we continue to follow the judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU, in spite of the irrational hatred which Conservative Europhobes have for that “foreign” court.

I note the contradiction between the Government’s declared support for the rule of international law in all other areas and the passionate hostility to the European Court of Justice, on which British judges have sat since we joined the EU. London is a global centre for international arbitration and civil and commercial law, including European law. We will clearly need an agreed legal framework for future relations with the EU in which the ECJ will have to play a role to,

“provide certainty for individuals and businesses”—

again, to quote the Queen’s Speech.

The Government have said very little so far about the costs of Brexit, which will be considerable. One of the most blatant lies of the leave campaign was that leaving was a one-way bargain—all benefits and no costs. European agencies, which served British as well as other national needs, will have to be replaced by new national agencies. If the Government are serious about taking back control of our borders, we will need a substantial increase in border agency staff, coastguards and maritime patrol ships and aircraft. There will, of course, also be indirect costs, but the direct costs of replacing the common services which the EU has provided, from aviation to pharmaceuticals, must be capable of estimation, and the Government should offer Parliament that estimate.

No senior Minister has yet touched on the importance of maintaining the good will of our continental neighbours through these negotiations and after our departure. Over the last year some Ministers have appeared to believe that relations with China and Saudi Arabia will become more important than those with Germany, France, Italy or Spain and that authoritarian countries are more natural partners for Britain than our immediate and democratic neighbours. That is one of the greatest illusions—or lies—of the Eurosceptic camp. British prosperity, British security and British values are most closely linked to the interests and values of our democratic neighbours. Over the last year, the Government have lost the respect of our continental partners. This House will wish to press the Government to work to regain that respect and good will as vital to a successful negotiation and to our future relationship after we leave.

Brexit: Scotland

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 15th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dunlop]

As my noble friend will know, there are a number of bits of intergovernmental working architecture, including the Joint Ministerial Committee and the British-Irish Council. In addition to the bilateral discussions that need to take place between the UK Government and the devolved Administrations, we need to use those multilateral forums to discuss the implications of exiting the EU and how we go forward.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Government have pledged to consult the devolved Administrations and London about the implications of Brexit. However, there are some very distinctive interests in the disadvantaged regions of England. The population of Yorkshire is slightly larger than the population of Scotland. Do the Government have any intention of finding a way to consult the north and the west of England about their very real interests, which are distinct from those of London and which the Government need to take into account?

[Lord Dunlop]

I am sure that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union wants to consult and engage widely. I note what the noble Lord said and I will certainly pass it on to my right honourable friend.

Smith Commission Principles: Railway Policing

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 18th April 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dunlop]

As regards this issue, I go back to what my noble friend Lord Empey said. I am not sure whether he is in his place today, but he has great experience of these matters in Northern Ireland. He was absolutely confident that we could put in place effective working arrangements. However, he did caveat that by saying that it would take time to achieve that. It is certainly our view and expectation that it would take two to three years to ensure that there is a proper transfer of these functions.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, is the Minister sure that we should be making a direct comparison with Northern Ireland in this respect? I understand that trains run between England and Scotland but not between England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

[Lord Dunlop]

I absolutely take the point that the noble Lord makes.