Legislating for the Withdrawal Agreement

Catherine West Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Prime Minister herself has said, “We value your contribution; we thank you for your presence in this country; and we want you to stay,” and I am not quite sure which part of that Opposition Members fail to understand.

Under the withdrawal agreement, any administrative procedures introduced for UK nationals are required to be smooth, transparent and simple, to avoid unnecessary administrative burdens. The Government are working closely with the European Commission and individual member states to confirm the processes that will be in place. We will also be running an information campaign to let UK nationals know of any changes—for example, in how they should access services—and I would recommend that all UK nationals resident in the EU sign up for exit-related updates on gov.uk. They can also find a country-specific living-in guide for their member state of residence.

I should like to turn now to the implementation period. The Government are committed to providing certainty—

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way before she goes on to her next paragraph. I want to ask a question about family rights. Quite rightly, EU citizens have asked, “If my mother is very ill, could she come to the United Kingdom to be looked after?” Can the Minister give us clarification on the question of elderly parents who wish to join their children here in the UK who are currently EU citizens?

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

I am well used to the hon. Lady asking questions that are slightly out of left field, but I fail to see how the Opposition can give an opinion on whether we will back a deal about which we do not know the full details and which is still being negotiated. We will faithfully apply our six tests when the deal comes before us, as we all hope it will.

The political gimmickry must stop, and when we approach this next Bill, we hope that the Government will focus on what is the most effective way to legislate for the issues in hand, but there is good reason to fear that that same short-termism—a myopic approach driven by whatever will buy Ministers a few days or weeks of respite from the predations of the European Research Group—could stand in the way of a sensible resolution to those parts of the withdrawal agreement on which no agreement has yet been reached. It is to that issue that I shall now turn.

As Members will know, several aspects of the agreement remain unresolved, of which the two biggest are the mechanism for settling future disputes and the Irish border. It is on the second of these that I shall focus, because the issue of how we avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland is clearly now the major sticking point to concluding a withdrawal agreement. We can talk as much as we like today, and on future days, about how Parliament will legislate for a withdrawal agreement, but if the issue of the Irish border is not resolved, there will not be a final deal to legislate for.

[Catherine West]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it comes down to what happened last Christmas in relation to the Northern Ireland question, and that we are again getting obfuscation after obfuscation? We are never getting to the point of what the actual deal for Northern Ireland is.

[Matthew Pennycook]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As I shall come on to say, we need urgent, rapid progress on this issue, given the time constraints that we face.

Many Brexiteers—although, I must make clear, not all—continue to belittle the Irish border issue on the grounds that it is a problem that has been exaggerated by nefarious Brussels bureaucrats or those at home who seek a close future relationship with the EU. Having initially dismissed the issue as posing no threat to the peace process, they now seek to talk down the Good Friday agreement. Their behaviour is not only irresponsible, but misunderstands the significance of the open border as the manifestation of peace on the island of Ireland. The border is a deeply political problem, not just a technical problem. It is about not merely how we avoid a hardening of the border, but how we ensure continued co-operation in a range of areas—economic and social as well as political—as set out in the Good Friday agreement.

Anxiety on both sides of the border and across all communities about the risk of no deal, or the failure to agree a legally binding backstop, is very real, and it is growing. Of course, the best means of solving the issue would be to secure agreement on a future relationship that is compatible with protecting north-south co-operation and avoiding a hard border, thereby ensuring that any legally binding backstop that might be agreed will never be used, yet the ideological red lines that the Prime Minister outlined in her Lancaster House speech are fundamentally incompatible with securing a future relationship of that kind.