European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Butler-Sloss Excerpts

Committee: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 12th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

It seems to me that almost any circumstance does not fit this part of the Bill; indeed, I find it difficult to find a single circumstance that does. I hesitate to put this to my noble friend because on the last occasion when I tried to be helpful he found me more unhelpful than usual, so I shall be very careful, but I ask him to imagine that this particular clause was being proposed by a monarch who simply said, “I want to have the powers to decide what kind of word I am going to use for taking money out of your pocket without proper parliamentary control”. I think I know what our forefathers would have said to that monarch. He might indeed have been in fear of his life, for this is precisely what Parliament is about.

We ought not to deal with this merely in the reasonably light-hearted way in which we have pointed out that this is an ill-conceived, utterly ill-thought-through and entirely indefensible bit of the Bill. We should take it one stage further and say that it is fundamentally unacceptable in a democracy that any mechanism can give Ministers the power to decide on taxation without representation. This is what we are here for. This is what Parliament is here for.

It is no good my noble friend reading out, as he will, the carefully phrased answers, because the people who have written the answers have caused the problem in the first place. They are the ones who have not understood that taking back control does not mean giving it to my noble friend. It means, if it is necessary—I do not think it is, but if it is—giving it to Parliament. This is part of the Bill which does not so do. The amendments attempt to put right what is, in the immortal words of some Members of the House, a dog’s breakfast, which is rude to dogs.

This is entirely unacceptable, but there is one bit that I find more unacceptable than any other. If this is necessary in order to carry through our international obligations, which is an argument that has been used, it is a peculiar addition to a Bill which is removing us from international obligations. The one place where this should not be is in the withdrawal Bill. We are withdrawing from international obligations on the basis that we do not want to have them, but writing in an ability to assert international obligations by secondary legislation.

My noble friend Lord Forsyth, who has followed me so far, did not like my little comment about the EU, but I am sure he agrees that we should not be using secondary legislation to impose taxation as a result of international obligations. That is not what it is about.

My last point is very simple. I have always found the word “expediency”, when used by Ministers, a red flag. Ministers always say that something is necessary because it is expedient. Expediency is always the excuse for doing something which you cannot do properly but which you get through on the basis that this is an emergency, it is urgent, or it has something to do with terrorism—we can find some reason or other that means we cannot wait for the proper process.

I was a Minister for 16 years. We are three former Ministers. None of us thinks that this power should have been given to us, so just think how little we believe it should be given to people with a different political view. I say to the Minister, who is well to a different part of the Conservative Party from me, that he should be the last person to give these powers to Ministers.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I make two short suggestions. One is that all the words that we have heard today should be treated exactly the same. The second is that Parliament should deal with all of them.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Deben, in his scintillating speech, referred to the power of arbitrary monarchs. I do not need to remind him—or anyone else in your Lordships’ House—that 369 years ago something happened to a monarch who had sought to exert those powers absolutely. The ultimate end of ship money was outside Banqueting House in Whitehall on 30 January 1649. I do not want to make too many historical diversions, but I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, whom we missed last week when we really began these debates on Wednesday, for referring to what I had sought to say then. This is the specific consequence of the generality that we abhorred last week—giving to Ministers, effectively, arbitrary power.