Leaving the EU: Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to speak this afternoon for Scotland’s national party in this debate. I congratulate the official Opposition and thank them for giving us this opportunity. I welcome the cross-party consensus that has seen, to my reckoning, every party bar one represented on the list of signatories to the motion. I congratulate the Secretary of State. I have always admired his ability, in best debating society style, to speak at great length without hesitation or repetition. This afternoon, however, he managed to add the achievement of not actually saying anything during the whole time he was on his feet.

Let us forget the cries of democratic and constitutional outrage at the very idea that Parliament should decide what Parliament is going to discuss in the future. As my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) pointed out, there are very successful and highly regarded Parliaments not too far from this one where Parliament sets the business, and that seems to work perfectly well. The constitutional experts say it is a bad idea. I wonder what the predecessors of those same constitutional experts thought of the “ridiculous” notion that women should be allowed to vote and sit in this Parliament. No doubt they were telling us that that was a dangerous precedent, too.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that the Secretary of State appeared to be telling us that he agreed it would be wrong to drag the Crown into Parliament by having a Prorogation as political as that suggested by some of the Tory leadership candidates? Does he therefore agree that passing this motion merely puts into our Standing Orders for that particular date an insurance policy to prevent the more unscrupulous of those who are currently standing for the Tory leadership from doing precisely what they are threatening in hustings to do?

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Lady makes a very valid point. I think the more important point is that the motion would allow, on one particular day in two weeks’ time, the elected Members of this Parliament to decide what we will discuss. The Secretary of State and others have said that that would prevent the Government from putting their business on the Order Paper. The Government cannae tell us what they want to be discussing on Monday, never mind in two weeks’ time! Given the stuff they have been using to pad out the agenda over the past several weeks, they can hardly claim that there is a backlog. Well, there is a backlog of massively important proposed legislation that needs to come through, but there is absolutely no sign of it.

I will tell you, Mr Speaker, what would be a democratic and constitutional outrage. It would be an outrage for any Government, either through deliberate malice or sheer incompetence, to plunge us into a disastrous no-deal Brexit against the interests of our four nations, against the will of Parliament, and now, since 23 May, quite clearly against the will of the people. It would be an outrage for the expressed will of 62% of the sovereign citizens of my nation to be cast aside as if they neither existed nor mattered. It would be an outrage if 3 million citizens on these islands saw their basic rights curtailed and undermined as a result of a flawed and corrupted referendum that they were banned from participating in.

All those outrages would pale into nothing, however, compared with the outrage if the first act of a Prime Minister, appointed in an election in which less than one quarter of 1% of the population was allowed to take part, was to abolish this Parliament and reinstate it only when it was too late for us to carry out the duty for which we were elected: the duty of pulling our four nations back from what everyone in this Chamber knows would be an economic and social catastrophe.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

It is a great privilege to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) and the speech he has just given. I fear that the trajectory of the entire Brexit debate since the referendum, with everything that has happened, is pushing us to the extremes of that debate, because we had a Prime Minister who simply did not bring the country back together, or seek to do so. She decided that the way through this conundrum was to appease the unappeasable Brextremists in her own party. It is hard to see whether there will be the kind of consensus and bringing back together of our fragmented country for which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) wishes.

I see us heading towards a final choice between no deal and revocation, but in the absence of that choice being before us today, the modest measure that we are debating gives us a chance as a Parliament to have an insurance policy against careering off into the catastrophe of no deal. A newly elected leader of the Conservative party with no democratic mandate from the country and no majority in Parliament might manipulate the way in which this House works to deny us the chance to express what we have already expressed clearly: there is no majority in this Parliament to take this country out of the European Union without a deal. To me, that is a modest proposal.

[Lady Hermon]

The Brexit Secretary studiously avoided questions about the Government’s commitment to the Good Friday agreement. Does the hon. Lady agree with me that taking this country out of Europe without a deal would have very serious consequences for Northern Ireland? Sinn Féin would certainly be incentivised to campaign for a border poll were there any hardening of the border, which would be inevitable with a no-deal Brexit. Heaven help us, but think what dissident republicans might do if there were to be no deal.

[Ms Eagle]

I agree with the hon. Lady. She is absolutely right to point out the Irish dimension of the entire debate. That many Conservatives seem willing to cast the Good Friday agreement into the flames has been an astonishing aspect of this debate.

Members of the Conservative party opposed to this modest insurance policy describe it as a constitutional outrage that this Parliament should seek to ensure that the country is not driven off the cliff of a catastrophic no-deal Brexit. In seeking to put aside one modest day of debate, to try to pass a Bill—which would need a majority in this House and to get through the House of Lords—to prevent that scenario, they suggest that we are somehow upending years of constitutional propriety.

I would listen to such self-serving arguments with far more patience had we not had a Government who have spent the past few years disregarding all sorts of constitutional propriety in how they have run this Parliament: gerrymandering the number of people on Select Committees, wilfully ignoring Opposition motions and finally refusing even to participate in votes, and being quite happy to ride roughshod over centuries of constitutional convention for their own aims. They then get themselves in a lather about the very modest motion that we are debating.

In the interests of the economic prosperity and security of this country, we have to prevent the Government party and any new Prime Minister behaving like a latter-day Charles I, seeking to govern without this Parliament. If we have to do that by using a modest Bill, that is the least we can do. There is no way, for the legitimacy of what we do in the future, that this Parliament must allow a Government without a majority and a new Prime Minister who does not have a direct electoral mandate to cause a no-deal Brexit without referring this back to the people.

There is only one way, in the end, of solving the constitutional issues facing us, and that is through either a general election or another referendum. In any case, it is the people who must decide how we go forward. We are not going to allow any newly elected head of the Conservative party to take that decision away from the British people. That is why I support the very modest change before us today to put that insurance policy on to the statute book.