European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 6) Bill

Debate between Lord Winston and Lord Howard of Lympne

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

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

Parliament passes laws initiated by government, and when Parliament passes, and indeed amends, those laws, it does not enter into the detailed prescription of government contained in this Bill. That is why this Bill and its predecessor, introduced earlier this year, represent so fundamental a breach of precedent. They were facilitated only by the fact that the Speaker in the other place decided to dispense with precedent and, as far as we are aware, to dispense with the advice he was given and to allow the Opposition to take charge of the business of the House.

I want to take the House back to the Second Reading of the referendum Bill in the other place—the Bill that provided for the referendum. That debate was introduced by the then Foreign Secretary, one Philip Hammond. He said that,

“whether we favour Britain being in or out, we surely should all be able to agree on the simple principle that the decision about our membership should be taken by the British people, not by Whitehall bureaucrats, certainly not by Brussels Eurocrats; not even by Government Ministers or parliamentarians in this Chamber”.

I repeat,

“or parliamentarians in this Chamber”.

He said that the decision should be,

“for the common sense of the British people”,

and that this Bill,

“delivers the simple in/out referendum that we promised”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/6/15; col. 1056.]

The Bill which provided for that referendum was of course passed by a very large majority, but the difficulty that we have faced ever since is that the British people delivered a result that Parliament neither expected nor wanted. I am happy to give way to the noble Lord.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

I do not want to take up much time but it is very clear that, if we had to take the decision again, we would not have a referendum.

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

The noble Lord is entitled to his view but I would not agree with him.

That is the root cause of the difficulties that we have faced over the last three years. Parliament took a different view. Parliament got the result from the British people, and certainly the then Foreign Secretary, who moved the Second Reading of the Bill, got a result very different from the one that he wanted or expected. I regret to say that Parliament has, at every turn, sought to thwart the implementation of that decision of the British people, and this Bill is but the latest instalment of that sad endeavour. Of course, it gets us nowhere. We have had one extension as a result of the Bill’s predecessor. It has given six months of extra time, which has resulted in no conclusion. The failure of the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, to answer the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, was eloquent in its admission that those who came together to support the Bill before your Lordships, both in the other place and in this House, are not in any sense in agreement about the next steps and what ought to be done.

This situation is made even more serious by the refusal of those who proclaim their belief in democracy to put that belief into practice. It is bad enough that Parliament thinks that it knows better than the British people on this issue; it is even worse that, as things stand at the moment, Parliament is denying the British people a general election in which they would have the right to decide and to express their view on the performance of the malfunctioning of the other place and to insist on the implementation of the decision that they took in 2016. This Bill is, I hope, one of the final acts of a House of Commons that has proved itself manifestly incapable of meeting the challenges in front of it. I urge your Lordships to reject it.