The Government's Plan for Brexit

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House recognises that leaving the EU is the defining issue facing the UK; notes the resolution on parliamentary scrutiny of the UK leaving the EU agreed by the House on 12 October 2016; recognises that it is Parliament’s responsibility to properly scrutinise the Government while respecting the decision of the British people to leave the European Union; confirms that there should be no disclosure of material that could be reasonably judged to damage the UK in any negotiations to depart from the European Union after Article 50 has been triggered; and calls on the Prime Minister to commit to publishing the Government’s plan for leaving the EU before Article 50 is invoked.

For months, Labour has been pressing the Prime Minister and the Government to set out their plan for Brexit. For months, the Prime Minister and a succession of Ministers have refused to do so, either in writing or from the Dispatch Box. Facing defeat on today’s motion, the Government have now caved in—last-minute amendments tell their own story and everybody knows it. This is a victory for common sense. I thank those from various Opposition parties who backed putting pressure on the Government to disclose their plan, and I thank the Conservative Members who, rightly, want to see far more detail about the approach their Front Benchers are intending to take.

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

Does the hon. and learned Gentleman acknowledge that, by accepting the Government’s amendment to his otherwise very good motion, he is falling into a Tory trap of binding his party to supporting the invoking of article 50 by March, which is an unrealistic and increasingly arbitrary date?

[Mr Speaker]

Before the hon. and learned Gentleman responds, may I politely say that the intervention is absolutely legitimate but this is a helpful guide: if Members who are hoping to speak intervene more than once, in accordance with very long-standing practice they will be relegated on the list? That is only fair if I am to try to secure equal opportunities for all Members.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I welcome the motion tabled by the official Opposition and I had been planning to vote to support it. However, their adoption of the Government amendment changes things in two key ways. I regret that the Labour leadership appears to be walking into the Tories’ trap: they are insisting that, in return for accepting Labour’s motion, it votes to invoke article 50 by March. Introducing such a tight timetable, based on an arbitrary deadline, undermines the principle that this is about getting the best possible deal for Britain. That is particularly pertinent given that serious negotiations will inevitably not start until autumn next year—after French and German elections. We will therefore effectively lose about six months if we stick to the timetable set out in the amendment.

To say the Labour strategy of pushing the Government to produce a plan worthy of the name by the end of January—in effect only four to six weeks away—is ambitious would be to take understatement to new levels. Any plan needs to be more than a summary of the banalities that the Government have been repeating until now about the so-called “best possible deal.” We should have been demanding a full-blown White Paper. That is why I cannot support the Government-amended motion, which threatens to throw Britain off the Brexit cliff edge, with a vague plan at best and within a timeframe that simply is not compatible with developing any sort of coherent strategy.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that some things we are voting on tonight totally disregard respect for the devolved Administrations?

[Caroline Lucas]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady’s point about the devolved Administrations. Her party has put it clearly on the record and I am grateful for that.

I want to tackle head on the accusation that voting against this amended motion, or even being prepared to vote against triggering article 50, equates to disregarding the will of the British people. This is not about challenging the result of the referendum, which of course I accept, but it is about saying that we need to know what kind of Brexit the Government are planning to negotiate. As many others have said, it is not about the issue of departure, but about destination. We are no clearer about that now than we were three or four hours earlier. That is why I believe it would be irresponsible to vote to throw the country into the potential nightmare of leaving the EU within two years without knowing what might be in the plan and what kind of plan it is. To do so without any solid proposals for an interim deal after two years of negotiation would be particularly reckless.

Turning to the content of the negotiating position, I wish specifically to argue for an outcome that maintains strong social and environmental regulation, and free movement and membership of the single market, because I believe that that is what is best for Britain and for my constituency in Brighton, where so many businesses and the two universities have been talking to me about the uncertainty they believe is being engendered by the current proposals. On the environment, the referendum was not a mandate to weaken our standards on air, water or wildlife. A poll in August found that 83% of the public think that laws protecting wildlife should remain as strong as they are now or be made tougher following our departure from the EU. The environment must not, in any way, be the price we pay for any deal struck with the EU over membership of the single market. In the Environmental Audit Committee last month, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs suggested that about a third of EU environment legislation will not be carried over. That is wholly unacceptable and indicates that the Government are not prepared to fight for the UK to remain part of EU-wide action on tackling climate change, on reducing the use of dangerous chemicals or on animal welfare standards. Any plan must set out how the Prime Minister intends to reflect the cross-border nature of the environmental challenges.

[Geraint Davies]

Is the hon. Lady concerned, as I am, that 40,000 people a year are dying of diesel pollution in Britain and we may get rid of the EU monitoring standards?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. May I just point out to the hon. Gentleman that he has just spoken and he is going to prevent other people from speaking, which is discourteous?

[Caroline Lucas]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. In broad terms, I agree with the point the hon. Gentleman is making about air pollution, because the EU is providing the best bulwark against the reduction of air pollution standards in this country.

Let me move on to talk about freedom of movement, as, sadly, few MPs seem prepared to defend it any longer. It is especially sad and worrying that the leadership of the official Opposition are in danger of ceding the terms of this debate to the right. I readily accept that it is easy to blame free movement when the benefits have been enjoyed so unevenly. There are people in my city of Brighton and Hove who have not visited Brighton seafront because they cannot afford to get there. For them, the idea of being able to live, work or study in another country is about as likely as travelling to the moon, but that reality does not justify denying them the right to free movement in the future. On the contrary, it should mean fighting tooth and nail for a Europe of equals, in which the hard-won rights enshrined in EU law do not just exist in the statute books as perks for the privileged, but are genuinely available to all EU citizens. We should have, and we deserve to have, successful policies to redistribute wealth fairly and to create real opportunities for all.

There is an enormous task ahead of us to reunite our country, and it will be made all the more difficult by further economic hardship of the kind that we will have with a hard Brexit which does not have us as part of the single market and does not have free movement. So we absolutely need to know what the plan is going to look like. The justifiable anger and mistrust felt by those who voted leave will only deepen if the many promises made turn out not even to be worth the red bus they were written on. We need to be honest about how people are feeling and why they feel the way they do. We do not need blindly to follow the damaging, blame-laden rhetoric that is being used to distract from the failure of neo-liberal economics to provide the basic needs of all members of our society. Immigration has been systematically and cynically scapegoated for everything, when in fact what is at the heart of this is decades of not investing in our public services. That is what—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Matt Warman is the next speaker. We have eight would-be contributors and I would like to accommodate them all, so the time limit will have to be reduced, with immediate effect, to three minutes. Colleagues are absolutely welcome to intervene on each other, but if they do, somebody will not get in.