European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, in opening the debate this morning, the noble Baroness the Leader of the House said that the Bill is not about our future relationship with the EU, but about process. As my noble friend Lord Foulkes said, the Bill paves the way to our leaving the EU while setting aside a series of treaties that this country, this Parliament and, in particular, this House, spent hours and hours debating in the 40 years of our membership. As other noble Lords have emphasised, the Bill also has real constitutional consequences for us here at home, and in this Parliament—notably regarding the powers of Ministers, but also regarding our relationship with the devolved Administrations.

My noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton spoke of the disappointment of the Constitution Committee that the Government have totally failed to address the concerns published some time ago in her committee’s interim report. Its latest report, published only yesterday, reiterates the serious issues that the Bill still raises about Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement took years of patient negotiation, first by the Major Government and then by the Blair Government. This is now a matter of critical concern; the relationship between Northern Ireland, as part of a United Kingdom that has withdrawn from the EU, and a southern Ireland that remains as part of the EU, is a very important issue, as my noble friend Lord Hain and others have emphasised.

In answering the debate tomorrow, I hope that the Minister will respond to the Constitution Committee’s recommendation that, before the completion of the Bill’s passage through this House, the Government publish an assessment of the effect of the Bill, and of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, on the Good Friday agreement. This is a specific recommendation from one of the most highly respected committees of this House, and it deserves an answer from the Minister.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds said, in what I thought was a very powerful intervention, too much of the debate on our relationship with, and withdrawal from, the EU has descended to a level that undermines all intelligent democratic argument. This Bill does nothing to retrieve the balance necessary to inform decision-taking.

In June 2016, the British people voted—not overwhelmingly, as some have tried to imply, but certainly decisively—to leave the European Union. The Government accepted that decision, and so did Parliament. The decisions ahead now must lie with a Parliament that is well informed and has real powers and rights to advise and amend government policy, as my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer emphasised.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said in his tremendously spirited address, the essence of democracy is that people can change their minds when they have more information or real experience of how a Government are performing. We had an election in May 2015 and another one in June 2017, the second one called by a Prime Minister expressly and explicitly to strengthen her negotiating hand in Europe. The British people voted in such a way that her negotiating hand was not strengthened; it was badly damaged and weakened. So surely the British people may well need to be consulted again at the conclusion of the negotiations—consulted on whether the Government have delivered a satisfactory result in terms of our leaving the EU. This Bill may not be the right vehicle for legislating on that point but, as a democracy, when those negotiations are at an end, the British people should be consulted as to whether what they voted for is what this Government have been able to deliver.