Brexit: UK-EU Relationship

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, it is indeed a delight to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts. He is most welcome to your Lordships’ House. While thanking my noble friend Lord Liddle for the opportunity that he has given the House today, I am tempted to respond to the Motion by simply saying that the best option for the UK’s future relationship with the EU is to revisit the whole decision, either through a second referendum or as a manifesto pledge at the next general election.

When the leave campaign beckoned a small majority of the British people to vote with them in the referendum, they were effectively organising Royal Assent for the law of unintended consequences. For instance, only this week, it was revealed that leaving the EU means leaving Euratom, the body that regulates the nuclear industry and the safe disposal of nuclear waste across the continent. This might not seem a big story in itself, until one wonders—as the Financial Times did this week—what is to happen to the 3,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste to be left in the European Torus project in Oxfordshire? I declare an interest: I live near there. I must admit that I had not realised that there was going to be a problem with nuclear waste if we left the European Union. Euratom is a perfect example of how Europe shares risks, skills and costs and it is now yet another asset to be thrown on to the Article 50 bonfire.

Brexit is indeed becoming a learning curve—a curve of the vertical take-off variety. Every day brings a new Brexit-based challenge to our national interest that simply was not foreseen. I can understand why the Prime Minister is having sleepless nights about Brexit right now. The trouble is, British businesses and British workers will be having sleepless nights about Brexit for the next decade, in all probability. To carry on from my noble friend Lord Liddle, the only person who will never have sleepless nights is President Putin. For him, the possibilities are Shakespearean: “Brexit, pursued by a bear”, a Russian bear.

The complexity mounts. From this side of the House we can see the astonishing sight of our British Government having their policy on the verge of being completely paralysed by a Brexit process that no one can fully understand, no one can perfectly define and no one can realistically manage. Even some leading leave voices must now at least privately acknowledge that they never understood just how many concentric circles of complexity would ripple out from a national decision to leave the European Union, but too many of those voices are what I will call Brexit Bennites—noble friends on our Benches will know what I am talking about. They are acting as if cancelling our membership of the EU is simply a matter of political will. There is no point in anyone any longer saying that “Brexit is Brexit”. It is not and never has been as simple as that.

There is no such thing as a clean Brexit break. There are always going to be unexpected items in the Brexit bagging area. Transition is essential. The Labour Party is quite rightly resisting the hard and fast Brexit and has called for full, tariff-free access to the single market. The democrat in all of us will, of course, say that the referendum result must stand. But I, for one, do not know what that really means anymore. The events of the last six months have shown that there are as many forms of Brexit as there are shades of grey.

Let me be clear: I believe that all parties, including my own, must keep the option on the table of the British people changing their mind and thinking again about the decision of 23 June. It may be an unpalatable call but I believe that it is emphatically where we are.