European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2017 Commons Chamber

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

I am pleased to speak today on behalf of my Brighton constituents and indeed of anyone else who continues to be desperately concerned about the enormous risks to this country from the Government’s approach to Brexit. To my mind, the bottom line is this: the Prime Minister has no mandate for the extreme Brexit she is pursuing. It was not on the ballot paper, and I see no contradiction between respecting the outcome of the referendum, which I do—we are leaving—and withholding consent to trigger article 50 tomorrow, when the kind of Brexit that has been set out is so profoundly damaging to the people of this country, and when it is being pursued in profoundly undemocratic ways: with the absence of a White Paper, an absence of safeguards for our economy and with no guarantees for our key social and environmental priorities, either.

I have to say that it is a little surreal to hear so many hon. Members acknowledge that extreme Brexit will be a disaster, yet then announce that they are going to go ahead and vote for it anyway. Very cleverly, the Government have managed to morph a narrow vote in favour of leaving the EU into an apparently overwhelming mandate to leave the world’s biggest trading zone and be cut off from the EU and its agencies. The Government seem increasingly desperate to make deals with any despot they can find—we saw an arms deal with Turkey last weekend, and a trade deal with a divisive and dangerous US President to whom the Prime Minister has already clearly demonstrated she is entirely either unable or unwilling to stand up. That is not what the people voted for.

Nobody voted in the referendum to scrap environmental protection, consumer standards or workers’ rights. Nobody voted to undermine the rights of UK citizens living in other EU countries, or indeed EU citizens living here in the UK. Nobody voted for future generations of young people being denied the right to travel, work and study at a level at least equal to what they enjoy now. And nobody voted for the UK to become a tax haven floating off the coasts of Europe, clinging on to the coat tails of Trump’s America. Yet triggering article 50 under the terms set out will set us on a course that will cause all those things to happen, because they are the logical consequence of the Prime Minister’s extreme version of Brexit.

The Prime Minister’s agenda is essentially about sacrificing the many benefits of the single market on the altar of ending free movement. It may be unpopular to say so, but it needs to be said that free movement has benefited our country in numerous ways. It has benefited British people by giving them the opportunity to work, to study, to live and to love in 27 other countries. It benefits our public services, especially the NHS, and it benefits our economy as a whole because EU nationals contribute more to our public finances than they take out. We would be a poorer country without the taxes EU nationals pay and the work they do in our hospitals, our care homes and our councils—and, more importantly, our societies and our communities would be immeasurably the poorer as well.

The Prime Minister’s agenda will also see us abandon the customs union, and it threatens a new economic model defined by a race to the bottom on corporate taxation—a model that, despite the Prime Minister’s pledge to unite the country, will likely see inequality in Britain rise, as spending on vital public services such as the NHS is eroded yet further. Again, nobody voted for that on 23 June, either. On the contrary, many voted for more money to be invested in the NHS. I seem to recall £350 million a week—yet, just last week, Ministers released official figures showing that they will be cutting the NHS budget per head in real terms in 2018-19.

Let us challenge this idea that these other trade agreements are somehow going to make up for the difference if we leave the single market. Research has shown quite clearly that even if we manage to do deals with the US, the EU, China, Russia, Canada and New Zealand, they would not anywhere near compensate for the loss to the economy of withdrawing from the single market. For voters who support leaving the EU only if they are not personally worse off, that, I think, is crucial information.

The Government have been forced grudgingly to allow Parliament a say on triggering article 50, but it is massively insulting to squeeze this resentful scrap of a Bill into a timeframe that is entirely disproportionate to the immensity of its consequences—and doubly so when the Bill throws us off a cliff edge.

[Mr Baker]

I am just enjoying a blog post on a website of 13 July 2015, in which the hon. Lady comments on the Greek situation under the hashtag “ThisIsACoup”. She describes the IMF, the eurozone and the European Central Bank as “the forces of darkness”. She finishes her post by writing:

“It’s time that politicians here in Britain, no matter where they stand on the economics of the Greek situation, take a stand for the simple right of a nation to manage its own affairs.”

Does she still believe what she wrote back then?

[Caroline Lucas]

I do not see any contradiction between what I wrote back then and the position I am taking now. I have always been critical of certain actions of the ECB and I will continue to be so. That does not mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Only someone who was enormously reckless would think that was a sensible way forward.

What is reckless is a Bill that is going to throw us off a cliff edge, entirely unnecessarily, because it fails to include any mention, let alone give any details, of any transitional arrangements. That means that once the clock starts ticking—once article 50 has been triggered—if negotiations take longer than those two years, we will suddenly be thrown into a world of WTO-only tariffs, and I can assure the hon. Gentleman that his constituents will not thank him for that. I do not believe that democracy is well served by such recklessness.

In the last few moments available to me, I want to say a few words about the environment, an issue that has been conspicuous by its absence during most of the debate over the past few days. I am especially concerned about the need for guarantees—real guarantees—to maintain environmental regulation that is at least as strong as current EU regulation. An environmental protection Act—crucially, with its own court of arbitration —might be one way of delivering that, but we also need to ensure that there are clear ways of retaining our relationships with important European agreements such as REACH, on the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals, and with the European Chemicals Agency.

We need UK environmental regulators and enforcement agencies, ready to step into the shoes of the EU institutions that currently perform such roles. Those institutions must be properly funded when the EU is no longer funding them. We need to ensure that the principles that underpin our environmental regulations, such as the precautionary principle, are not lost. At present we have no guarantees, and we deserve to have guarantees before article 50 is triggered. About this, as about so much else, there is no information.

Leaders of the leave campaign famously talk about taking back control. If that means anything, it surely means that control must be not just about our departure, but about our destination. Democracy requires that Parliament has ample opportunity to scrutinise the terms of the Brexit deal that will emerge from negotiations, but it also requires the country to have the right to continue to be given a say in the form of a referendum on the proposed deal. I cannot vote for a Bill that fails to provide those safeguards.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas]

I do wish that Government Members who say that we have to go for an extreme Brexit would stop rewriting history. At the time of the referendum, plenty of people, including Dan Hannan, were saying things like, “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening to leave the single market.”

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. The hon. Lady has already spoken. Other Members present have not yet spoken, and the speech limit will already have to come down at some point, so I implore people who have spoken not to intervene, please, because it is literally taking time away from other Members.