Brexit Deal: Referendum

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. We need to establish early in this debate that the majority of people who signed petitions for a second referendum want to change the decision of the first one. Let us not beat about the bush. All the talk of multi-options, this deal and that deal is irrelevant. What they are really after is changing it. Yes, we are a sovereign Parliament and we could in theory overrule the decision, but that would be incredibly damaging to the whole democratic process. When Parliament agreed to stage a referendum, it was delegating that sovereignty to the ultimate sovereign —the British people.

The aim to reverse has been led by pro-remain Members of Parliament—that is perfectly legitimate and is their right—peers and, most notably, big business. They pay little regard to voters. In my constituency, 70% of voters were in favour of Brexit. Frankly, the criticism often made that they did not know what they were voting for is an insult to my constituents and many people up and down the country. I can assure you, Sir David, that the people of Cleethorpes, and the people of Southend I am sure, knew exactly what they wanted.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

When we say that people did not know what they were voting for, that casts no aspersion on their intelligence. The fact is that the Brexit campaign deliberately did not set out what leave would look like. It was a million miles away from the Scottish referendum where, whichever side of the debate people may have been on, at least those in favour of independence set out what that would look like. The Brexit campaign never did and that is why it is right that when people have the facts, they have the chance to look at it again.

[Martin Vickers]

I recognise that the hon. Lady has held a fixed position on this and it is a perfectly honourable one. I strongly disagree with her. The fact is that people voted for independence; to use the hackneyed phrase, they wanted to “bring back control”. People are very dissatisfied. We have never been anything other than a semi-detached member of the European Union. It has been a running sore through the body politic for the past 50-plus years. Whichever side of the argument we were on, this country needed a referendum to establish the will of the British people. That was clearly defined in June last year.

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[Geraint Davies]

That is precisely the point. We all bear our own responsibility for not talking about Europe enough in the past. Everyone said, “We don’t want to talk about that; it is really boring.” The Labour party has some responsibility for that. In the approach to the 2014 European election the Labour party campaign was about the cost of living crisis—to send a message to the Conservatives that it was terrible. Next to that was a leaflet from the UK Independence party saying, in various ways, “Europe’s rubbish.” If you are a normal person—I appreciate you are not, Sir David. [Laughter.] You are super-normal. If people get literature saying, “Europe’s rubbish,” and then something saying, “Send a message to the Conservatives about the cost of living crisis,” will they be bothered to vote?

I put out some literature saying that 25,000 jobs in Swansea bay depend on being part of the European Union, that people should vote Labour for the European Union—to keep that going—and that they should remember that their four weeks of paid holiday and the quality of the air they breathe and the water they bathe in rely on protection and guarantees from the EU, which is therefore a good idea. My vote went up in that election, comparing like with like and contiguous seats, with a big turnout and a big Labour vote. I think that was simply because we respected the fact that the election was about Europe, and we talked positively about Europe, as opposed to anything else.

The point that I am trying to make is that although the arch-fundamentalist Eurosceptic ideologues who seem to have hijacked the Conservative party, plus their UKIP bedfellows, keep going on in a monotonous, manic way about how awful Europe is, now that they are taking over, those of us who realise the benefits of Europe remain quiet. Worse still, Europe has been regarded as an embarrassing relative locked in the top cupboard of the house.

It is belatedly time, now that there has been a vote in principle to leave, because everyone was a bit worried about it—they do not know why, when asked—to talk about the issue and say, “Did you know that, if we go, it will be more difficult and expensive to go on holiday; we will lose all these jobs and our universities will not have such collaboration; we will no longer have the weight of the EU in negotiating trade deals but will be on our own, and the people we are negotiating with will know that and exploit it, and we will therefore be subjected to a battering of our rights and privileges; and business will say that we face tariffs and therefore cannot afford four weeks of paid holiday and all the red tape and health and safety?”

Now that people realise that will happen, they are saying, “Hold on. I thought that what was happening was that there were all these foreign people over here taking our jobs and services. I didn’t know they were contributing, net, to the Exchequer and helping me. I was led to believe something quite different. I didn’t know I would lose my job and there would be inflation. Now that I see that what is under the headline of ‘Brexit breakfast’ is something appalling, rather than what was on the menu, I should have the right to send it back, because it does not represent what I was offered.” In a nutshell, people are telling me, “This isn’t what I voted for, and I want to have the final say.”

Regarding those comments about the political parties, there has not been much political leadership toward giving people the final say on the exit package, but people are asking for it of their own volition. The news is very biased; I am not talking about the BBC here, but some of the gutter press have an almost manic obsession with saying, “We’ve got to get out at any cost; it doesn’t matter.” They have an obsession with leaving Europe, perhaps because Europe has the collective will to bring in regulations that bring people’s taxation to account and ensure that we live in a civilised world that is not becoming increasingly polarised. The people, as the recent Survation poll shows, are now saying, “Yes, we want to have a final say on the exit package. We voted in good faith, but this is not what we voted for.”

I believe that this is a one-way road, not a flip-flopping of British opinion. Every day, people are saying, “This isn’t what we voted for.” They are suddenly coming to that realisation. The important thing is that nobody blames the people for voting in good faith for what they believed to be the case, because they were told that it was true, but it has emerged that it was not true. As Keynes famously said:

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

The answer, from a lot of Conservatives in particular, is, “Well, I just continue as if I didn’t know.” We can say, “Oh no. If you keep walking down this road you will go off a precipice.” They say, “Well, I’ve decided to walk down it anyway.” That is where we are headed.

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman is making an eloquent speech. The poll he just mentioned, showing that more people want to stay now, also showed that young people are disproportionately among those who want to keep a close relationship with, or stay inside, the EU. Is not one of the tragedies of Brexit that we are betraying the futures of those young people? They will live with the Brexit decision much longer than any of us will, and their voices should be heard much more loudly in this debate.

[Geraint Davies]

That is an absolutely critical point. As the hon. Lady will know, the fact is that only one third of 18 to 34-year-olds voted in a referendum that will have such a massive impact over their lifetimes, and indeed their children’s lifetimes. Something like 80% of the over-65s voted. Of course, what follows is that, tragically, many of the people who voted to leave will have since passed away, and many of the people who were 17 at the time will now be 18. There is no doubt in my mind that, if there was another referendum, more younger people would vote. We saw that in the general election: a lot of the Labour vote, in my view, was from people who thought, “Hold on. I missed out on this Brexit thing. I’ve been sold down the river by all these older voters who participated, and that’s my future.”

One of my daughters said, “I’ve got a long time to live on this decision. Don’t you think that my vote should be weighted by the amount of life I’ve got left? There might be people who voted to leave who will sadly be gone from this world in 10 years, and I’ve got another 70 years.” I am not saying that she should have that weighting, but we should bear in mind that the future of all our young people is at a turning point. The idea that we should say, “It doesn’t matter if people have changed their minds. It doesn’t matter if the facts have changed. They said this then, based on a load of rubbish, so we’ve got to do it anyway,” about such a profound change is an indictment of the whole democratic and parliamentary system.

Our parliamentary system sends the people in this room, and in the larger Chamber, here to represent the best interests of their constituents. It might be the case from time to time that, because we spend our time thinking about these things, we like to think we have some inside knowledge or information to make those decisions. To subcontract and say, “You make the decision on the basis of a pile of lies on a red bus,” is disgraceful. I believe—and it is constitutionally true—that the vote was advisory. That was confirmed by the Supreme Court, which is why the Government were forced to have the article 50 vote.

The situation is changing. In fact, public awareness seems to be growing faster than awareness here, because they suddenly want a vote and the people in here do not want one. Once it hits a certain threshold—I think it will hit 60% within the next few months—we will find MPs saying, “If that is what they want, then we will have that,” which I think is fair enough.

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[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir David. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in support of the petition for a ratification referendum, which was signed by no fewer than 864 of my constituents. For the purposes of full disclosure, the other petition, which was against a ratification referendum, was signed by 10.

The Green party fully respects the fact that voters made a decision and delivered a message to Parliament on 23 June last year, but we have also consistently said that the referendum was, and could only be, the start of the democratic process, not the end of it. The voters could not and did not express any opinion on the terms on which the UK should leave the EU, because those terms remained completely obfuscated. The leaders of the leave campaign did not ever want to set out what leave would look like, so it was hard for people to express a view on that.

For example, did the voters instruct the Government to ensure that when the UK leaves the EU it remains in the single market and the customs union, perhaps through membership of the European economic area? No one knows—not the Prime Minister, not the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and not any Members of the House. Alternatively, did the voters instruct the Government to ensure that the UK leaves the EU, the single market and the customs union? Again, no one knows. Although, we do know that voters were repeatedly and confidently assured by prominent leavers, such as Daniel Hannan MEP, that there would be

“full participation in EU markets”

after withdrawal.

Did the voters instruct the Government and Parliament to ensure that the UK leaves Euratom, the REACH agreement or the European Medicines Agency’s regulatory regime? Again, no one knows, but it seems reasonable to conclude that most voters will not have given such questions any thought, because they did not feature in the referendum campaign, despite regulatory certainty being essential to British businesses.

Did the voters approve the terms of the future relationship agreement negotiated between the UK Government and the EU27? Of course they did not, because they were not told that there would be such an agreement, let alone what would be in it. Indeed, 17 months on, and with just 10 months left to conclude the negotiations, neither the voters nor Members of this House know whether there will be any such agreement before we drop out of the EU on 29 March 2019. However, we do know that voters were blithely assured, again by leavers such as Daniel Hannan, that the terms of the agreement would be “easily” agreed. That is very odd, because it does not look very easy right now.

Thanks to the chaotic and reckless nature of the UK Government’s negotiating strategy, and their stubborn refusal to lay out detailed proposals, we simply have no idea how the Prime Minister and her bumbling Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union plan to square their determination to leave the single market with the rather obvious fact that that implies having a hard border somewhere—either across the island of Ireland or in the middle of the Irish sea.

The Green party believes that a democracy worthy of the name must mean voters having a real say over the biggest decisions affecting their lives. Withdrawal from the EU is simply the most significant decision that Britain has taken since 1939, which is why we have consistently said that the terms of the withdrawal agreement, or departure from the EU without any such agreement, must be subject to a ratification referendum. That ratification referendum must give voters the option of approving the terms of withdrawal negotiated by the Government, or, if they do not like those terms, remaining in the EU—that has to be on the ballot paper as well. In other words, the ratification referendum—let us remember that this is the first referendum on the terms of withdrawal from the EU and the basis for our future relationship—must allow voters the democratic choice between accepting what is actually on offer or cancelling the article 50 notification and remaining a member of the EU.

I want to stress that we are not talking about a second referendum, although that term has been used many times this evening. This is not an attempt to overturn the decision that voters made on 23 June last year. The point is that the leave campaign, very deliberately, never set out what Brexit would look like, and people’s views naturally evolve as more information becomes available, so it is absolutely right that the British people who triggered this process should also sign it off, since once they know the outcome of the current negotiations they can see the terms of the deal and decide whether they like it. If they like what they see, they can go ahead and leave the EU; but if they do not, the option of remaining inside the EU must also be on the table and on the ballot paper.

[Paul Masterton]

Can the hon. Lady clarify whether her proposed—I will not say second referendum—new referendum would provide an option for saying, “No, we don’t like this. We want you to go back and push on these items,” or would it be a binary, all-or-nothing choice, where we either take what is on the table or cancel the whole process?

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Certainly, if there was enough time to ask our negotiators to go back to the table, I would have no problem with having that option. However, the real worry at the moment is this: we heard what the Secretary of State for Brexit said on the Sunday television programmes yesterday, and he is talking about having a whole year for negotiations, so the idea that we would then be able to come back and have a serious discussion, if they have not properly negotiated a transition period, is yet another thing that is in doubt. It is clear that people should have the option, if they wish, to remain in the EU. The Prime Minister has pledged that MPs will have the final say on any deal, but I simply want to widen that franchise. The British people should have the final say. That is not denying democracy; it is enhancing it.

It is also important to stress that a ratification referendum is not a silver bullet. We owe it to ourselves to acknowledge that when people voted to leave, many of them did so because of very legitimate concerns. In my view, from the people I have spoken to, not many of those concerns actually relate to the EU per se, but those people were persuaded that their very legitimate concerns about housing, jobs and the NHS were somehow linked either to our membership of the EU or to the presence of immigrants in this country. What we also need to do, at the same time as campaigning for a ratification referendum, is campaign for changes in this country, as well as changes in the EU.

I am not talking about some kind of reversion to the status quo ante—the status quo before the referendum happened. We are not pretending that it did not happen or trying to go back to 22 June last year. It did happen, people are very angry and many of the reasons for their anger are legitimate. However, the irony is that by leaving the EU, the problems that they were most concerned about—their future prospects at work, their kids’ future prospects, whether they could access the NHS and whether they could get affordable housing—are all going to get 100 times worse. Believe me, we have not yet even begun to imagine the anger of those people when they realise that.

It is absolutely crucial that, alongside campaigning for the ratification referendum, we look at the way in which the deep social divides in this country have been exploited by many of the leaders of the leave campaign. They have used them as a wedge to drive home their long-standing ideological hatred of the EU, even though those problems are likely to be made worse by leaving the EU.

[Lee Rowley]

The hon. Lady makes a powerful point, even though I do not agree with it, and powerfully expands her position on a second referendum. May I ask her how many referendums she proposes to accept in this discussion? Will we be going to 20, 40 or 135, until we get the right answer?

[Caroline Lucas]

I was about to thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but that was such a ludicrous and frankly dishonourable one. It is very clear that I am talking about the idea that people should be able to look at the facts, which are not present right now, and were certainly not present on 23 June last year.

I am also making some serious points about the very real grievances that the referendum result laid bare. Frankly, it is cynical and shocking how those grievances are being manipulated by the leave campaign for its own political ends. I believe that one of the things that the referendum tells us is that we need to look at the way in which people are governed in this country. That involves looking at a voting system that systematically takes power away from people. It is such an irony that the party that is in the lead in calling for Brexit and bringing back control does not want people to have control when it comes to their own electoral system. That party does not want them to have a real say. At the last election 68% of the votes cast made no difference to the outcome, because they were piling up in constituencies where, because of first past the post, they were not necessary.

Let us look at the way the UK is governed. Let us look at issues such as more devolution to the regions and electoral reform for more widespread proportional representation. Where the case is to be made to the “left behind”—those people were left behind not in some kind of casual accident, but as a deliberate and predictable outcome of the process of neo-liberal globalisation, which systematically marginalises them—it will take a long time to turn around some of those impacts at the root of why so many people voted to leave the EU, but we have to start now by finding genuine solutions to people’s worries about jobs, pay, schools and housing. Ultimately, things will only shift once trust is built and people see with their own eyes that their lives are getting better and that being inside the EU was never the cause of their problems.

In conclusion, a ratification referendum would give the British people more democracy, not less. This time around, I hope, the necessarily short referendum campaign will be conducted in a more open, honest and transparent way.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr Robin Walker)]

First, I congratulate the Petitions Committee on arranging this debate and the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) on presenting and sponsoring it. Like her, when I studied these petitions I noted that a wide range of views were reflected in them, but she did an excellent job of reflecting those views in her engaging introduction.

As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) described, a veritable smorgasbord of EU referendum-related issues has been put before us. However, the motion largely considers the case for a second referendum, or, indeed, as the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) described it in his usual perceptive way, a third referendum on the deal for the UK’s exit from the European Union.

The Government’s position remains the same. We said at the time of the EU referendum in 2016, which I remind people that Parliament voted to hold, that we would respect the result, and that is what we are doing. The result of the referendum on 23 June 2016 saw a clear majority of people vote to leave the European Union. This Parliament overwhelmingly confirmed that result on 8 February this year, by voting with clear and convincing majorities in both Houses for the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill. The Bill was passed by Parliament on 13 March 2017 and it received Royal Assent from Her Majesty the Queen, becoming an Act of Parliament on 16 March 2017. The UK voted to leave the EU and it is the duty of the Government to deliver on that instruction.

[Caroline Lucas]

The Minister says that the people voted for Brexit, but the ballot paper had no clear option regarding the single market and the customs union. Will he not accept that the Government have no mandate at all for the kind of extreme Brexit they are pursuing, whereby we would be out of the single market and out of the customs union? That was not on the ballot paper and he cannot claim that it was.

[Mr Walker]

I say to the hon. Lady that we have been very clear that we respect the position of the European Union but the four freedoms are inseparable, and therefore the Prime Minister was clear in her balanced Florence speech that our approach will be to come outside the single market and the customs union, and to negotiate a new relationship with the European Union, which I will come to.

The 2016 referendum was one of the biggest democratic exercises in British history. Turnout was high, at 72%, and more than 33 million people had their say. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire made clear, at that time the Government made the implications regarding the decision that people were taking very clear.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton), I campaigned for a different outcome, but I also spoke out repeatedly in this House, both before and during the passage of legislation for a referendum, about trusting people on this matter. As I have emphasised to the House before, and as I think the hon. Member for Sheffield Central made very clear, this was not a decision made after just a few weeks of campaigning, but one that came after a debate that had exercised this House and our country for decades. Indeed, as the hon. Gentleman said, this debate should not be seen as a debate on a second referendum so much as a debate on a third referendum, but each of those previous referendums were billed as the decision for a generation and we should respect that.