European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, I need to make a few declarations. The first is that I have the privilege in this House of chairing the EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee. I would say this, but in my opinion it is the most significant committee at this point in terms of the angles that it is looking at, such as financial services and the EU budget. My other declaration is more personal. I am married to a German, I have lived and worked in France, and I have a house in Italy. So I have a big dog in this fight, not a little whippet.

However, I have to tell the House that on the passage of this Bill I will be voting with the Labour Opposition and the Government Benches. Why do I take the position I do? It is not because I am any less a remainer today than I was on 23 June—I am every bit a remainer; as I explained, I have a deep and personal motivation to wish that the result of last June had not happened. But I believe that a second referendum entails risks for which the price is too high: too high for the country overall and too high for the other European countries. It has been stated that the people voted for a departure but not a destination. In my view, people had a very clear idea of the destination: the destination was a break from the EU. I agree that they did not know exactly what the terrain would look like, but they knew they were taking a risk.

A vote is always conducted on imperfect information. There is an inherent risk in any decision about the future, whether it is intervention in Syria or, as on this occasion, the EU. Take as an analogy the Scottish devolution referendum in 1998. At the time, Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem unionists in Scotland were told that the electoral system was such that no single party could take power alone and so the nats would not be able to take power and re-open the independence question again. We all know how that turned out. Take the euro. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, voters in several EU states had a referendum on joining the currency. In their nightmares they could not have imagined the financial crisis and the banks too big to fail nearly bringing down the sovereigns. In Greece, Italy and indeed even in Germany, people could not have known what was to hit the euro in less than a decade. People always act on imperfect information.

The other reason why I believe that we now have to implement the result is the referendum Act of 2011. Let me remind the House that that Act commits us to a referendum if further powers or competencies are passed to the EU that entail treaty change. That is the current situation. There are people across this House who wished to try to defeat the Act—I was one of them—but we failed. We now have a situation where treaty change, driven by the exigencies of European integration, is inevitable. This House knows that the eurozone crisis, the security issue, the need for joint co-operation on immigration and a host of other things will bring the Europeans to the point at which they will need treaty change, if not in the next five years then in the next 10. We would have had to take this issue to the British people anyway, if not in 2016 then perhaps in 2026.

Let me turn now to the central purpose of the Bill, which is in effect to trigger Article 50. While it may be theoretically possible to revoke Brexit while the talks on the question are still going on over the next two years, politically we cannot revert to the status quo ante. It is contrary to what the other 27 countries of the EU envisage in terms of their understanding of Article 50: that in effect it is politically irrevocable.

Once we have passed this Bill, there is no longer any possibility of a negotiation where the UK could go into the talks again with a set of demands on the proviso that if they are not good enough we will have another referendum. I say “again” and “another”, because we have already done that. From 2013 a referendum was promised if the Conservatives won the election. After 2015 the Government spent a year renegotiating a new settlement with the EU, securing what I think was a very good settlement. However, we were not able to sell that to the people, and here we are.

The EU has seen the latest bout of UK-inspired disruption for six years now, since 2011, with at least a further two years to go. The idea that we can try the same thing again and again shows a profound misunderstanding of how the EU works and ignorance of our partners’ patience and preoccupations. They will not go into an Article 50 negotiation or give us any serious terms if they believe that we will prolong the agony, theirs and ours, with the risk that we might have the same result after another vote. In fact, the contrary is likely to happen, as there is already a view across the Channel that what we were offered last year was too generous. So to stop others from using the same ploy we are likely to lose some of our opt-outs and special exemptions. To keep united, the EU needs us to move on so that it can resolve the myriad problems confronting both the Union and us.

Janan Ganesh writing in the Financial Times today lays out a future for Britain’s relationship with the EU where we, the remainers, will have to mobilise, to make our case, and to wait for new relations to evolve. Bit by bit, the UK will have to renew its engagement with the EU if it is to thrive and not just survive. Pragmatism will be driven on that occasion by the voters themselves, again. He says:

“Brexit is an idea whose only effective rebuttal is its own implementation”.


It will take time and it will take patience. I hope to play my small role in the passage of this Bill.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 7th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 1, but I believe we have Amendment 1 and Amendment 3 in the wrong order. If we pass Amendment 3, as I suspect may well happen, that would give Parliament the final say, which is certainly better than allowing the Government to walk roughshod over Parliament and decide for themselves. We cannot ignore the fact that the people, regrettably in my view, voted to leave the EU, although in doing so they did not have a clear view as to the alternative they were backing. If Parliament—or the Government for that matter—has the final say and the people who voted out last June do not like it, we could easily escalate the situation into an almighty crisis. That could be avoided by a confirmatory referendum.

Let us imagine over the next two years that negotiations get nowhere and the Government resort to the WTO basis with no preferential access to the single market. Car factories start closing, as the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, mentioned. Financial services move to Paris or Frankfurt. The EU insists on a €30 billion payment, or whatever, from the UK. EU nationals start quitting key posts in the NHS and expats find that they have to start paying for their healthcare in the countries they live in, or lose pension increments that arise from the UK. At that point, many who voted out will start bleating, “This isn’t what we voted for”. At that point, the only way for the Government to hold their line is to be able to tell them, “Okay, you will get the final say, so let’s see what happens with the final package”. It is therefore in the Government’s best interest to have a confirmatory referendum. I believe that is a very good reason for backing the amendment.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, I am unable to support the amendment. I say so with a heavy heart, but I am extremely conscious of the economic consequences, not least the ones the noble Lord just mentioned, of prolonged uncertainty. I will briefly sum up why. We have had uncertainty in this country from when the then Prime Minister made his Bloomberg speech, but more so since he started his negotiation. The negotiation took 14 months. We have had the referendum. That took four months to organise. So why are there noble Lords here who believe that it could be done in the space of an election campaign? The Electoral Commission’s role is such that it needs to take its time. We would probably run into a referendum around October 2019. If the result was that the country did not like what it got, there would have to be another negotiation, either to revoke Article 50 or to change the terms. That would bring us into the general election. If there is going to be a general election in 2020 anyway, there seems to me little value in having a referendum in early 2020 or late 2019.

That is just the chronology. To imagine that our EU partners would hang around from 2015 to 2020 without making provisional plans for a 12.5% hole in their budget, or for a potentially dramatic change in the relationship of 65 million people with the single market, is somehow not to understand even the EU’s position. I say that advisedly. We have seen HSBC move 1,000 jobs. We have heard Mario Draghi telling us that euro clearing would have to move. We have heard the Irish Government tell us that they are preparing for companies to move their office space. We know that 1.1 million people are dependent on the financial services sector, and their jobs are in line at the moment. The idea that business will hang around for a further four years was rebutted in the evidence we took for the report of the EU Financial Affairs Sub-committee on Brexit and its impact on financial services. We were told in terms that uncertainty was extremely damaging to the sector and that people therefore wished to have a transition period.

Let me conclude with one or two points that relate directly to some of the remarks made by speakers in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, said that a process which is started by a referendum should end with one. I accept the logic of that. The process started with a referendum in 1975. Until last year, the people of this country who are 60 years old or under had not had a say in our future direction. I have to admit with a heavy heart that they did not go in the direction I wanted them to go in, which was to remain, but they made their choice. So the process did start with a referendum and it will end with one. I suspect that what the noble Lord is alluding to is a third and potentially a fourth referendum.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said that we do not know what the world will look like in a couple of years’ time, and I agree with her completely. That is why I look forward to debating the amendments to come about whether Parliament should make an assessment.

I am in a place where I think that referendums are a dangerous tool. Direct democracy, in my opinion, is dangerous. Referendums should be used with great care and clarity. We cannot explain a complicated negotiation result in a referendum, as Mr Cameron found out to his cost.

[Lord Robathan]

My Lords, I agree entirely with the noble Baroness that referendums are a bad idea, and I am surprised that everyone else in the Chamber does not agree, especially those on the Liberal Democrat Benches.

Nevertheless, we had a referendum and, as the most reverend Primate said, it was a binary choice: yes or no. People knew what they were voting for, and they voted to leave the EU. It is unbecoming and, if I may say so, patronising of people to attribute to the individuals of this nation the reasons for how they voted. Personally, in 1975 I voted to stay in and some 40 years later, with my experience of the EU, I voted to take back control of this country and put it in the hands of the British people. That is what I have done, and that is what I suspect that most people are expecting from us. It is patronising to suggest that people did not know what they were voting for.

The logic to which the noble Lord, Lord Newby, referred is this: what would happen if in a second referendum the people of this country rejected the Government’s negotiating position? No one has an answer to that, so I would say that there must be a third referendum, but I would not particularly want to get into that.

Finally, perhaps I may direct my friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches—I count them as friends and I hope that they count me as a friend from time to time—to an article published in the Times yesterday by a man called Edward Lucas, who outed himself as a Liberal Democrat—I did not realise he was until then—which suggested that this is part of reinvigorating the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats. I would say the contrary. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, suggested that there might be corrosive and justifiable anger, but the great British people have had their referendum and they do not want another one. So we should just ignore this amendment and carry on.