European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Alex Burghart Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this historic debate. It is getting late and a good many of the issues that need raising have been raised, but I would just like to return to a few of them.

I rise to support the Bill for one very good reason: it is the sort of Bill most of my constituents would like to see. They voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU and, like me, they want us to leave in as orderly a fashion as possible. The Bill ensures that we do not create legal black holes and therefore grand uncertainty for employers, employees and investors. It allows future Parliaments to amend all laws as they see fit and, in that sense, allows Parliament to become sovereign again. It is adaptable to the inevitable uncertainties of the Brexit process. The Bill achieves all that, and it is to the credit of the Government and of officials that they have managed to do it under tight time constraints.

There are some reasoned and principled objections to the Bill and to how it has been presented. It is clear that parts of the House will require guarantees over the so-called Henry VIII powers. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) mooted earlier, that might be possible if the Government set a legal limit on their ambitions. That said, we must not in our admirable quest for parliamentary scrutiny forget that this is a fiendishly complex transfer of legal powers the like of which this House has never seen. For that reason, we must afford the Government a degree of plasticity. We do not yet know how the final deal will turn out or when it will be available to the House. The Bill must be adaptable to permit that process to proceed as best it can and to allow for a multitude of outcomes.

Getting that give and take on particular clauses and powers will take time. If the House finds that it does not have enough time in Committee, it must have more. Call me boring, Mr Speaker, but I was a bit disappointed when the House did not sit past five on Thursday—it was very sad to see such big beasts manacled by a five-minute time constraint. I heard the Father of the House rightly pooh-pooh the Blairite family-friendly hours under which we labour. Family friendly? Is someone yanking my chain? Which of us in the Chamber today gets to put our children to bed of a night as it is? We should carry on sitting until our work is done; if we have to sit late, if we have to sit some Fridays, if we have to think about the length of recess, we must. The importance of getting the Bill right goes beyond those concerns. This is a job that requires sacrifice.

It is my firm belief that this Bill can be got right. I know that Members opposite feel the same, because in all the hours of debate that we have had none of them has been able to raise a serious reason why it should be voted down on Second Reading.

[Mike Amesbury]

This debate is about not if but how we leave the EU. I was elected to this House very recently to speak up for my constituents, not as a spectator. I want Parliament to take control, stand up for democracy and protect parliamentary sovereignty.

[Alex Burghart]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention.

I know that Opposition Members feel the same as me, because they have not raised a single meaningful reason why the Bill should be voted down. As my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) said on Thursday with a logician’s concision, to say that we will oppose the whole Bill because we disagree with a few clauses is a non-sequitur. If we go hunting for the sequitur, however, I believe that we can find it in the admirably principled intervention made by the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) earlier. The truth is that if the Bill were to fail tonight it would be very difficult to bring it back. The Government would have to introduce a new Bill in a new Session, or this one would have to be reintroduced in a suitably different form so as not to fall foul of the same-question rules. In short, voting this Bill down runs the risk of having no Bill. It runs the risk of legal black holes, of terrible uncertainty, and of investor panic and economic shock. That is what the Opposition will be voting for tonight.

I will go further than that. The Opposition Front Benchers know full well that if they defeated the Government they would not stop there; they would try to bring the Government down. The Opposition wish to vote this Bill down tonight because they know that defeat on such a central piece of legislation might cause the Government to fall. That is their motivation—nothing more, nothing less. The shadow Secretary of State does not want the Government to go back to the drawing board, he wants the drawing board for himself. He says that he wants the article 50 process to succeed. I believe him, but I do not believe that he wants this Government to succeed in doing it. I believe that he will put the interests of his party above the interests of the country in that regard. If he succeeded in his aims, he would do so only after a period of terrible turbulence for the country and after a terrible loss of time—and time, right now, is a terribly precious commodity. He says that he sees this not as a great repeal Bill but as a great power-grab Bill. Well, that is certainly the purpose for which he intends to use it. He is accusing Government Members of that of which he is guilty. I ask him to do the honourable thing and to put his political ambitions on ice for the purposes of the vote tonight so that this House can move more quickly to a detailed discussion of the essential clauses within this Bill.