European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Angela Smith and Gareth Snell

Thursday 10th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle). He and I disagree on answers to Brexit, but no one can doubt his passion for his community and the causes that he champions. I wish to make a brief contribution in that spirit of conciliatory debate.

I wish mainly to speak to amendment (p), which I have tabled along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) and my hon. Friends the Members for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and for Wigan (Lisa Nandy). We hope that our amendment is the start of a conversation: a process to understand that there are various things wrong with the Prime Minister’s deal that mean that we are unlikely to be able to support it next Tuesday—things that will probably not be resolved by next Tuesday. But whatever the result on Tuesday, it is the start and not the end of a process.

We as a Parliament have to be honest and up front with ourselves about where we go after Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, we are not suddenly going to have a magic answer coming from the rejection of the deal. We will see people who ardently advocate leaving on WTO terms with no deal going into the same Lobby as those who ardently want a second referendum with a remain option, and to campaign for remain. I am sorry to burst their bubbles, but one half of that unlikely coalition will be very disappointed in whatever we get out of Brexit as a result of our votes in this place.

The grown-up response is to look at the cross-party group—it exists, unfortunately, mainly on the Back Benches, not the Front Benches—who want to find a way of getting through this that does the least economic damage to our country but respects and understands that those who voted leave did so not because they were duped by words on the side of a bus, or because they were not clever enough to understand the Facebook ads put towards them, but because they had deep-seated anxieties about the inequalities that exist in this country. The amendment would, I hope, start that conversation.

For me, as a Labour and Co-operative party member, and someone who has worked in the trade union movement, how we protect and enshrine workers’ rights in future is fundamental to the sort of country we want to be. A number of those rights have been derived from Europe, but we must be honest about the fact that a number of rights that Europe now holds up as a bastion of its good practice came from work done by the United Kingdom in the first place, by driving those changes through Europe and providing the bar that everybody else needs to reach.

We must protect those rights and ensure that we do not regress or water them down once we leave the European Union. Any new changes from Europe must be considered by this place, and once we have brought back sovereignty, we will choose whether to adopt them. My argument will be that we should adopt all such measures and continue in step with Europe, because in my opinion any change or improvement to environmental standards, consumer protections or workers’ rights is a good thing.

[Angela Smith]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Gareth Snell]

I am afraid I will not. Everyone else has had their time, so I will carry on.

It is important to find a mechanism that protects those rights, and does not kick the can down the road with another referendum, or simply add procedure and stop talking about the people. Too much of this debate—we saw this yesterday on both sides of the House with tedious and continual points of order—has been about a point of process that does not progress the debate further, or resolve the fundamental issues that are important to my constituents in Stoke-on-Trent, and those of hon. Members across the House.

At some point in this Parliament we must decide what we are for—not what we are against, or what we wish to rehash or reargue, but what we are for. I wish that the conversations I was privileged to have this week with Government and Opposition Front-Bench speakers had taken place two years ago. I wish that the Government and those on the Labour Front-Bench had got together after the general election to try to hash out some sort of plan. Such a plan would not have pleased everybody or given them what they wanted, but we need a pragmatic approach to find a way of healing the country, bringing forward the things we know are important, and delivering a Brexit referendum outcome that does not do economic damage to our country. We must ensure that people who voted leave, and those who voted remain, feel that they have a stake in the future of our country.

My frustration with this process is, and continues to be, that we appear to be moving away from a pragmatic middle and towards two extremes. Those who do not support a second referendum are labelled as hard Brexiteers who wish to sell their country down the river, and those—like many of my colleagues—who hold the principled position that we should have a second referendum are an affront to democracy. Neither of those things is true, but at some point we must face facts and understand that the country voted to leave—albeit marginally—and our job as parliamentarians is to work out how we take that forward and bring everybody together. The amendment that I have tabled is one way of achieving that unity. It by no means solves everything, and it will not remove a number of the concerns that I still have about the vote on Tuesday, but if we can use it as a starting point after that vote, I hope we will have achieved something better.