European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Anne Main Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[George Eustice]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Subsection (3) would have to not exist for the point of the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) to be valid. Amendment 20 would amend subsection (3) and therefore change the terms under which subsection (2) could be exercised, which would in turn have a direct impact on the reading of subsection (5).

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I want to test amendment 20 slightly, because it is not dissimilar to an amendment that has been selected in my name. How did my hon. Friend pick 30 June 2019? How does that offer clarity on what he wants to achieve?

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I think I chose that date primarily because the Prime Minister initially suggested that she may seek a short extension until, say, June. We all recognise the issues with the European elections and that if we were to go for a long extension, we would have to consider whether to fight those elections and start fielding candidates. My own view is that, by selecting 30 June as a maximum, the amendment would not preclude the Government from choosing a date of, say, 22 May, but if, for instance, it were thought necessary to go slightly longer, to go to 30 June, it would be open to all parties, both the UK Government and the European Union, to have a conversation about whether it is indeed necessary to hold European elections in this country, given it would be only a short extension for another month.

I am aware that the British civil service has considered whether, in a short-term, interim arrangement, it might be possible to send delegates from this House to represent the UK in the European Parliament.

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[David Hanson]

I accept fully what my hon. Friend says. The Leader of the Opposition has this very afternoon met the Prime Minister in Downing Street, at her request, along with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), to set out positions on a customs union and a single market, and potentially even a confirmatory vote, for the Prime Minister to consider. The Bill does not fix a particular date, which provides the flexibility needed to give time for that process. The amendments, which I have only had a cursory look at, fix dates of 30 June and 22 May.

I recognise that there is a problem: the European elections are the elephant in the room. When I was the Minister of State for Northern Ireland, we regularly passed legislation to establish or not establish elections in the Northern Ireland Assembly within a day or two days. The Prime Minister is going to the European Council on 10 April to discuss what the House has decided. The House may well decide that this Bill should have an open date, or we can fetter that discussion by putting a date in place. I want to give the Prime Minister the maximum flexibility.

[Mrs Main]

I will be speaking to my amendment, but I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman desires flexibility to deny Brexit altogether, given that he represents a leave constituency. The point of my amendment, which I hope he will look at a little more closely, is to stop the Prime Minister agreeing anything that may be unacceptable to the House. The date I have picked is the one currently being discussed by the European Union. Therefore, should the Prime Minister agree a date that the House finds unacceptable, she would have to come back to the House to suggest it, rather than being able to do what she can at the moment, which is to pick a date that this House may find unacceptable. That is the point of my amendment.

[David Hanson]

That is an interesting point. The amendments are fresh, but the key thing for me is that the House has shown in the last three months—certainly in the last two to three weeks—that it will not accept unilaterally what the Prime Minister wants to bring back to the House, and this House has many ways in which it can check the Executive’s decisions.

The simple point I make is that, in my constituency in north Wales, the manufacturing businesses that make cars have said that no deal would cost them £10 million per day; the farmers who produce lamb would not be able to export in a no-deal scenario; and Airbus, which makes the best planes in the world, would have difficulty exporting in a no-deal scenario. The Cabinet Office has said that prices would rise—it is not me saying that, it is the Government’s own estimation.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford mentioned the European arrest warrant and the SIS II agreement on sharing information. We do not know whether those would exist in their current form in a no-deal scenario. In the Select Committee on Justice, on which I sit, neither the Secretary of State for Justice this morning nor the Solicitor General yesterday could give assurances about the future relationship on important matters of security and justice in a no-deal scenario.

[David Hanson]

With due respect to the hon. Gentleman, we have had that argument over the last three or four weeks, and the House of Commons has spoken. That is why his party leader has invited my party leader to discuss the next steps. I will wait to hear what the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), says about the Government’s amendments, because we need to be clear about those. However, the fettering of the process by the dates stated in the amendments would cause great difficulty for the objective of my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford, which is to ensure that next week, whatever happens with our discussions, we have a date determined by the Prime Minister for when we will leave with a deal, rather than crash out without a deal in the future.

[Mrs Main]

The right hon. Gentleman has been saying that he would like to have certainty—I completely accept the worries about a possible no deal and not knowing what is going on, which is crucial for businesses—but, in relation to the amendments restricting exactly how long the Prime Minister can agree to on her own, how will he feel if the Prime Minister comes back and says, “I have accepted, because I am able to, a two-year extension”, and all the uncertainty for his constituents about what will happen is magnified for two years?

[David Hanson]

Let me say to the hon. Lady that we have to have some trust in this process now. This House has to compromise and have some trust. The Prime Minister has made a genuine offer to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition—much to my surprise—to get herself and indeed, with due respect to the hon. Lady, the Conservative party out of a giant hole. Let us leave the Prime Minister unfettered in determining the date, because that is the important matter in discussing our objectives today.

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[Mrs Main]

I would like to speak to amendment 1, standing in my name, which addresses similar themes to the proposal of my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), who spoke earlier.

I was quite horrified when I read this brief Bill, because it mandates the Prime Minister to seek an extension, but there is no date associated with that extension, as other Members have mentioned. On top of that, as we know, article 50 enshrined the date on which we would be leaving: 29 March. The Prime Minister, as was quite within her rights—my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) said it was her untrammelled prerogative—decided, when she went into her negotiations, that she would accept a new date, which was offered to her by the European Union, having been agreed in a room, in a debate in which she did not participate. She accepted a date that was not of her choosing.

My concern is that, whatever date this House considers to give the right amount of time, if the Prime Minister is not fettered, as the right hon. Member for Delyn (David Hanson) mentioned, she is quite within her rights—nobody here is seeking in any way, shape or form to curtail those rights—to accept another date that is offered to her and which might be the only date on offer. Whatever date this House might choose, for whatever associated reasons or purposes, the Prime Minister is quite within her rights to accept—or reject—the date on offer from the European Union.

I find that incredibly worrying. Depending on which side of the argument hon. Members find themselves, they could have the Prime Minister seeking a date in line with the House’s instructions, but not having to agree the date, even if the EU says that she can have it. That would be a rather bizarre scenario, but the Bill would not stop it, so whatever date the House fixed on could, in theory, only be asked for, but then be rejected.

The other side, which worries me far more, is that the Prime Minister could go along with a date—as yet unspecified by this House and with no associated justification—and be offered a date, let us say, two years in the future. I would suggest that at that point most hon. Members would have severe concerns about the legitimacy of whatever was being agreed by the Prime Minister—or any of us in this House—with the date set so far in the future.

Amendment 1, which stands in my name and that of 21 other hon. Members, simply proposes a date that has already been accepted by the European Union—I know that Guy Verhofstadt has talked about the end of June, but the European Union has suggested this date on many occasions—as a date that it would be comfortable extending to. It is also a date that would not oblige us, by default, to fight in the European elections. It would mean that the Prime Minister could accept the date offered to her—to the 22nd—but could not arbitrarily accept any other date offered without bringing it back and discussing with the House whether it met what the House wishes to achieve.

The right hon. Member for Delyn talked about not tying the Prime Minister’s hands, but if the House truly wishes to shape the next phase—I really do not like this process, but I am trying to look at it constructively—it is incredibly important that she does not have carte blanche to sit in a room in Brussels, meekly accept a date that is fixed, and then come back to the House, which will not be able to alter that date. I picked the 22 May date, because she can agree anything up until that point. After that date, with which we are all familiar, we will not have the Prime Minister accepting a date that may end up coming to this House and not finding favour. We are then back in the long grass. We are back to arguing about the date. We are back to arguing ad infinitum, to the great uncertainty for the many businesses who feel that what is going on here today is beyond a farce.

Other Members who have a better legal brain than mine—I have no such qualifications whatever—are looking at the Bill line by line and saying it is shoddily and poorly drafted, and that it does not stand up to scrutiny. The argument that comes back—I have heard it a few times this afternoon—is that, “Well, we haven’t had a lot of time and this is to stop no deal.” My amendment does not do anything to harm the Bill’s objectives. It gives the Bill belt and braces to ensure that the Prime Minister, to whom everyone says, “Let’s give her some latitude and trust”, is not able to accept something that is certainly beyond the wishes and scope of this House or the people who voted to leave the European Union.

I hope my amendment is given serious consideration, since we are now supposed to be engaging constructively with the process in a cross-party consensual way to try to get something through. I would be far more comfortable if the Prime Minister was not allowed free rein, or untrammelled prerogative, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said. As the House may have observed, we have already tried that and it has not got us terribly far. I therefore ask Members please to consider this amendment. It is very small. It does not stop anything. It simply might stop what some Members have maybe not thought through too well, which is the date.

[Michael Tomlinson]

I applaud my hon. Friend’s ingenuity. I am minded to support her amendment this evening and I hope she presses it to a Division. May I ask her about another extension? Clause 1(2), as drafted, does not mandate or order the Prime Minister to do anything—that comes later on in the Bill—but no timeframe is given either. My hon. Friend mentions a timeframe up to 22 May, but, as drafted, the Bill effectively gives no specified time period within which the Prime Minister needs to seek any extension in any event.

[Mrs Main]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Clerks were very helpful when I was trying to draft my amendment. I said, “Surely we can’t have this open-ended situation?” Very helpfully, the Clerks said to me that the Bill can say what it likes, but at the moment the Prime Minister, in the untrammelled way that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said, can do what she likes. That is the situation. We are in fact sending off a Prime Minister who will be reluctant to deliver this proposal.

The Bill is supposed to be incredibly flawed, but what I do not want it to be, as we discovered from the Gina Miller challenge, is a nightmare going through the courts. Our businesses deserve better than to have a piece of cobbled together legislation that is rammed through—I gather it will be rammed through the other place, too—just to make sure we avoid no deal. Have hon. Members not done any adding up recently? This House is the tail that is now wagging the dog. There is no pretence on the Government Benches that this is going to be an easy ride—not for this stage, the next stage or any other stages coming down the road. There might be fears from Opposition Members, but they seem to be able to exercise an awful lot more muscle on the political agreement than we can on the Government side of the House; they in effect have the whip hand over the Government. The true nature of the House is that it does not really desire to leave. The House will have masses of opportunities over the coming months to ensure that the political agreement is shaped in a fashion that they would like. That is the one thing about which the European Union has said, “We can open that, no trouble.” What the EU will not open is the withdrawal agreement, and a withdrawal agreement will be required to achieve many of the things that the House wants to achieve. That is why I reluctantly agreed to support the withdrawal agreement when it was separated from the political arrangements.

The Bill that we are considering is poor, and badly drafted. I accept the reasons why, and I accept that we are all scrabbling around to try to improve it, but I am disappointed that the Lords may not have much time to consider any amendments that are made tonight. I hope that the other end of the building does not function like a rubber-stamp machine and say, “It doesn’t matter; this Bill is going through regardless.”

The Bill will come back to haunt the House. If the procedure that we have followed today ends up creating a lawyers’ charter and a nightmare in the courts, it will do huge damage to our industries. Believe me, for every Gina Miller out there launching challenges to make sure that a public vote is listened to in a proper legal fashion, there will be lawyers picking over the Bill and saying that it does not stand up, so can we please ensure that sensible amendments are made tonight?

I would like to think that my amendment is sensible because, as the hon. Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna) has pointed out, the only date that the European Union will accept is 22 May. I believe that if we put that date in the Bill, we would be picking a date that the European Union was comfortable with. The House would have the security of knowing that the Prime Minister could not unilaterally accept any other date that the EU came up with, but would have to bring it back for Members’ consideration. If the House chooses to adopt it, fine, and if the House says, “Go back and try harder”, fine, but there will be certainty. I hope that Members on both sides of the argument will support this amendment, because it would give them the certainty of knowing there will be no jiggery-pokery and no clever shifting of dates or times. My amendment would oblige the Prime Minister to come back to the House with any new date, and she would not be allowed to accept a date that did not reflect the will of the House. Surely, that is what the House wishes to achieve.

[Tom Brake]

I thank the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), who is not in his place, for tabling amendment 20, because it gives me the opportunity to speak against it. In the amendment, he attempts to set 30 June as a date beyond which the Government cannot seek an extension. As the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) said in an intervention, it is clear that if the UK wants to secure an extension beyond that date, it will have to embark on a general election or a people’s vote, or go to the EU with a concrete, credible proposal that would enable the EU to give us a longer extension.

Frankly, I do not think the Government can do anything that will enable them to hit the date of 22 May, or even 30 June, so it would be regrettable to preclude that possibility. I imagine that every Member here has been contacted by their local authority returning officer to confirm that they have all been asked to start the process of preparing for European elections. Whether the Government like it or not, preparations are being made for that at this very moment.

The amendment would also preclude the Government from responding to business concerns. I mentioned earlier this evening the contact that I had today with businesses in the retail sector. They were adamant that leaving on 12 April would be catastrophic, leaving on 22 May would be catastrophic and even leaving on 30 June would not allow them to make the preparations that they need. They were talking about an extension until at least March 2020 to enable them to prepare properly. Arbitrarily setting a cut-off date of 30 June would be extremely unhelpful.

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[Tom Brake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I guess that would just add to this picture of chaos and confusion and of running down the clock that has become a feature of this place in the last few months.

[Mrs Main]

Can the right hon. Gentleman not see the merit in what I am saying, whereby that very scenario would not happen? It is just that the Prime Minister cannot agree the date. I am sure—given that he has just mentioned 20 weeks or so to get together a people’s vote or whatever—each person’s agenda has a timescale associated with it. Therefore, if the Prime Minister is offered a date, surely she ought to bring that date back here and ensure that it meets whatever it is that people wish the date to achieve. We are doing this the other way around in the Bill. We are sending her off with a date and mandating her to seek it. I do not see why—that seems ridiculous.

[Tom Brake]

The Bill specifically does not include a date, but it enables the Prime Minister to go with a date that she has in effect inserted in the “[…]”, so it is within her control.

I will draw my remarks to a conclusion by saying that I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth—he is not here, so I would not want to cast aspersions—intended the amendment as a means perhaps of ending up with no deal. We know that seeking an extension until 30 June would not be well received by the EU, because it does not enable anything to happen in the time that is left. I hope that that was not his intention, but if this amendment is pushed to a vote today, I and the Liberal Democrats will oppose it on the basis that it would preclude a people’s vote. It is very clear around the country now that there is a very strong appetite for such a vote to take place.

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[Sir William Cash]

The motion cannot be carried until 12 April at the earliest. That means that the Prime Minister is obliged at some stage to seek an extension, but she is not obliged to do so immediately. Unless she does so on 12 April and it is agreed before 11 pm that day, the United Kingdom is out. It will be “Leave, leave, leave, leave.”

Clause 1(6) and (7) are I suppose intended to deal with a situation where the European Council meets on 10 April and seems to volunteer to offer an extension to a certain date. I mentioned earlier—perhaps in a point of order—the role of the European Council in all this. The reality is that the procedure being followed puts the ball back in the European Council’s court. It is possible that nobody will be sensible enough to veto this extension, although they have the power to do so and I trust that one or other of them, or perhaps several, will.

My objection to this arrangement is contained in the European Scrutiny Committee report we put forward last March—a whole year and one month ago. We raised grave concern because the European Council, which is driving a lot of the negotiations, set out the terms of reference and the guidelines and the sequencing. The fact is that the Government gave in on all that and supplicated and went along on bended knee to the European Council and asked, “How much can you possibly let us get away with? What can we be allowed to do that you will agree with?” There were also all the monstrous negotiations conducted by Olly Robbins, who appeared in front of my Committee, and Tim Barrow and others. The reality is that submitting ourselves under this Bill to the decision-making processes and the cosh of the European Council is not only completely humiliating to this country, but has put us in an impossible situation under the withdrawal agreement.

Article 4 of the agreement—which is directly relevant to everything we are discussing here because it is about the governance of the European Union in relation to the UK on leaving—stipulates in terms of the UK that we will be subjugated to the decision making of the Council of Ministers.

I hope somebody on the Opposition Front Bench will take this on board. The Council of Ministers will be making laws for probably up to four years, when this House, as I said the other day, will be politically castrated in relation to the European treaties, which will have entire competence over us and all laws. We will not be able to pass a single law in contravention of them, and our courts will not be able to defend our voters—our taxpayers—from any of the decisions taken while we are put at the mercy of our competitors during the transitional period, however long that may be.

I have already made the point that the transitional period could cost £90 billion; I do not know the sum, because we do not know what date will be settled on yet. What I do know is that this House will be subjugated—completely neutralised—in the transitional period. I see that the Minister is shaking his head. I invite him to appear in front of my Select Committee and answer on that; I would like to cross-examine him on the question of who will be governing this country during that period, because it certainly will not be this Parliament, I can tell him that.

[Mrs Main]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern, which is why I tabled my amendment, that the House seems to happily think it can put a date on this Bill and the Prime Minister will go off and secure the date, but the House seems to have lost sight of the fact that we will probably have to take what we are offered—or maybe not be offered anything at all? This Bill seems to me to assume that the European Parliament will take notice of what we wish to happen.

[Sir William Cash]

Absolutely; the idea of our subjecting ourselves to the European Council as well as to the European Parliament is about as humiliating as anybody could imagine. I suppose we are not supposed to say this but it happens to be true: we saved Europe twice in the last 100 years, yet we are now, as a result of this withdrawal agreement and these provisions, subjugating ourselves to the decisions taken by 27 other member states by majority vote.

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[Sir William Cash]

I have heard it mentioned that the elections would cost £100 million, which is quite a lot of money for nothing. In some constituencies, as it happens, there have been turnouts of about 19%. European elections are a complete farce anyway. In fact, I think the European Parliament is a complete farce. Frankly, getting rid of the elections altogether would be a massive step in the right direction, and this Bill is the opportunity to do that.

[Mrs Main]

The public have had no real engagement in the process. I cannot imagine it would be good for democracy if we say to the public that these people will not be around for five minutes because we are all trying to get rid of them.

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[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I will not attempt to answer that question, because it answers itself. Nobody will be held accountable for what goes wrong as a result of the Bill.

If the Prime Minister goes to the European Council for an extension—I have long been reconciled to the expectation that she will—what really matters are the conditions that come with it. Where is the accountability for the conditions that will apply? Or will she simply accept an enforceable agreement with conditions, and bring it back to the House as a fait accompli, as she did originally?

[Mrs Main]

rose—

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I will press on, if my hon. Friend will allow me.

I have addressed the enforcement point, but let me come back to the question of legitimacy. The issue is not just the illegitimacy of the whole process, and the concept of the House legislating to instruct Ministers in a way that is outside the control of Ministers. As I said, there has been a huge Government campaign—some might call it a fear campaign—supported by the second referendum campaign and other very well funded lobby groups and business interests. The arguments in favour of leaving without agreement have pretty well been disposed of by default. They do not get a hearing. One can think of one or two broadcast outlets that delight in ridiculing perfectly respectable arguments.

I have a document here called “30 Truths about Leaving on WTO Terms”. It goes through all the canards, and it sets out how leaving without an agreement would leave us with an extra £39 billion to spend on our priorities, which over a couple of years would increase the GDP of this country by about 2%; how it would end uncertainty much more quickly; and how every party involved with the Irish border has said that there will be no infrastructure there in the event of a no-deal Brexit. So it goes on. I shall not detain the Committee with those arguments now, because this is not the time to make them; I just make the point that these arguments have simply not been made. Despite that, a very recent poll conducted by YouGov shows that where an extension is an option, 40% would support no deal. Only 11% would support an extension, though 36% would still support remain. The point is that the most popular option in the polls at the moment is leaving without a deal, so who does the Bill represent? This is despite the deluge of propaganda that has been emptied—[Laughter.] Opposition Members laugh, but no effective leave campaign has been conducted in favour of no deal, and the Government, who pretended to say they agreed that no deal is better than a bad deal, have not conducted a campaign to reassure voters that leaving without a deal is a sensible option. Despite that, the British people want to leave.

Who in this House was elected to put this Bill through Parliament? Who is this House was elected by saying, “When I am elected, I am going to put a Bill through the House to delay article 50”? The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), who is promoting this Bill, was not elected by saying that. She was elected on a manifesto to leave, and she is now defying that manifesto and voters in her own constituency, who voted to leave. When the extension option is removed in the YouGov poll, the percentage of people in favour of the no-deal option goes up to 44%, against 42% who are in favour of remaining. No leave campaign has been conducted in this country for the past two or three years, yet that is what the British people think.