Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Chris Bryant and Tom Brake

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 4th June 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Tom Brake]

Absolutely. With or without the report, I hope that such engagement will be very much at the heart of the project. We should seek the views of and engage with not only Members, who know how the building currently operates on a daily basis, but those organisations that are specialists on mobility issues or autism, for instance. I am sure that they would want to do that.

[Chris Bryant]

I agree with the thrust of what everybody is saying, but it is worth bearing in mind that this is a wholesale set of issues, down to the fact that the annunciators are in red and green, which colourblind people will not be able to differentiate between; the lighting in the room is nowhere near good enough for the majority of people who are partially sighted; and the wallpaper and carpets make it very difficult for many people with particular forms of personality disorder.

Legislating for the Withdrawal Agreement

Debate between Chris Bryant and Tom Brake

Monday 10th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is enormous delight to follow the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr). One of my earliest memories is of dancing the highland fling in Stirling castle many, many moons ago. That is a dance, of course, that can be done entirely on one’s own. The trouble is that, as with most dances, when it comes to Europe, it is not just a question of it takes two to tango; there are 27 other member states, plus the Commission, let alone the negotiations that have to be done in this House and in Parliament.

I find this really difficult because I think that this country is making a monumental mistake. We are cutting off our nose to spite our face, sticking a pen in our eye—I do not know how to describe it. I just think that it is a monumental mistake that will be catastrophic for our future relations with other countries and for the trade that we do with other countries. All the new trade that we are talking about with all these other countries does not add up to the trade that we do with France and Germany. And that will continue to be the case in the future. It is especially true for Wales, whose single biggest trading country is not the United States of America, Australia, or any of these countries in Africa or Latin America; it is Germany.

I worry that this country is perpetrating an enormous own goal. Of course, I know that people voted for it, but I think that it is a massive distraction. My constituents in the Rhondda do not want me to be debating this tonight. They want us to be debating: why people who work 40 hours a week still might not be able to put enough food on the table for their children to be able to eat; why children from poor backgrounds still do not have the same opportunities as children from rich areas of the country; and why on earth Westminster manages to get vast amounts of money from the Government to subsidise its council tax, whereas Rhondda Cynon Taf gets barely a penny. Those are the things that my constituents are worried about. They are worried about their jobs, whether there will be houses for their children and what the future holds. I honestly think that they just see all this as a massive distraction.

I feel so angry with David Cameron, because in the end he appeased the far right in this country. Of course, lots of people are always tempted by appeasement of the far right, because it makes a lot of noise. Historically, there has always been a temptation to say, “Yes, all right, we’ll give you a little bit of ground and try to quieten you.” But, actually, the message that we have known for centuries is that if we try to appease somebody, all they do is consume us. That is exactly what happened to David Cameron and that is why we had the referendum in the first place.

I also worry that the Labour party sometimes wants to do similarly. We do not call it appeasement, of course; we call it triangulation. We used to say, “The Tories are massively Eurosceptic and the Liberal Democrats are ludicrously pro-European, but we are the sane, sensible people going down the middle.” But if we triangulate in politics, all we actually do is give up on our own values and principles and surrender a piece of political territory to somebody else. So I say sorry to the Liberal Democrats; I warn hon. Members, I will not say that very often.

I enormously respect how people voted, including in my own constituency, but I have no respect whatever for the people who lied to the country in the referendum. I am not saying that the remain campaign was pure—far from it. It tried to rely on fear far too often and created bogeymen who never really existed. But the lies on the leave side were just spectacular.

“Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”,

said Daniel Hannan, and now we have heard countless Government Members and the Prime Minister say, “Oh no, everybody voted to leave the single market.” Well, which was the truth?

We were told, “Turkey is joining the European Union and we cannot prevent it.” There is no prospect of Turkey joining the European Union. We were told, “We can get net migration down to the tens of thousands,” as if to suggest that the European Union provided more of the net migration than the rest of the world—that even with all the rules that were brought in in 2010 curtailing migration visas for families, for people bringing in their spouses and all the rest of it from outside the European Union, the number of people coming by those routes, where we have complete control, was still higher than the hundreds of thousands. It was a completely fallacious argument, and, again, part of the appeasement of the far right.

We were told, “Health tourism costs us billions in the European Union.” There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. Indeed, Spanish politicians will say, “Actually, there is quite a lot of health tourism from the UK to Spain.” That has yet to be sorted out. “The Irish border will be unaffected,” we were told. This is the bit I really do not understand. How can we take control of our borders if we do not have border controls? That is basically what the Government are trying to work out. They have been pursuing that unicorn for quite a while now, and I suspect that they will still be pursuing it when we get to Christmas and they start looking for Father Christmas instead.

We were told:

“There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside.”

Yet every single estimate that the Government have made has shown that they know that there will be considerable downsides to Brexit. They may argue that there are upsides as well, but nobody in the Government is arguing that there will be no downsides. We were told, “Every single penny that Wales gets from the European Union will be guaranteed by the Government.” We still have to hear anything about providing that amount of money for Wales.

It is not just lies, though—some of the comments were just delusional:

“The day after we vote to leave”

a Cabinet member said,

“we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.”

That is not quite how it has worked out over the past two years, is it? We were told:

“Getting out of the EU can be quick and easy—the UK holds most of the cards.”

We were told:

“The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history”,

yet there is still no prospect of anything of the kind. The Government said:

“We’re not really interested in a transition deal, but we’ll consider one to be kind to the EU.”

Yet only weeks after they made that statement, the UK suddenly realised that we were in real danger of a completely chaotic collapse out of the European Union and went begging to the EU for a transition. Finally, we were told that the UK would owe no money to the European Union after it left in March 2019. Yet we know perfectly well, as even the Minister has admitted today, that we have debts and we will end up having to pay them.

I mention all those things because I think that when we triggered article 50, we were far, far too precipitous. The Government had no idea of what they wanted to get out of the negotiations; they had not even started the process of putting together their negotiating strategy. [Interruption.] That is why I voted against triggering article 50, before the Minister says anything. At the time, I said, “I realise that this is the opposite of the way that my constituents have voted, but in honesty I can only vote according to my conscience. I believe that this will be bad for my constituents, and if they choose to throw me out at the next general election, then I’ll have to live with it.” I had not quite expected that the next general election would be six weeks later, but I doubled my majority, so all is well that ends well, I suppose.

The problem remains for us that there is not then much in the Venn diagram. If we want to make a Venn diagram of what the European Union treaties will allow, what the ERG grouping within the Conservative party will allow, what sane and sensible members of the Conservative party and the Conservative Government will allow, what the Labour party will vote for and what Parliament will vote for, there is simply no space in the middle. That is why Opposition Members who are remainers keep on saying that the danger of no deal—and a chaotic no deal at that—is very real. That is why I ask questions of the Minister. I have asked two Ministers now about something that every single British holidaymaker or businessman or woman who has to work elsewhere in the European Union fully understands: which passport queue—the British people know all about queuing—will we get in when we arrive in France, Germany, Spain or Greece next year? It is a very simple question, and so far, no Minister has an answer.

The attempt at an answer that was provided earlier by the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman), is useless. It just does not wash—as she perfectly well knows, which is why she is smiling so elegantly—because nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. There is no transition period until we have agreed all three different stages of what we have to go through. That is why the Government should have a policy now on where British passport holders will queue when they arrive in other countries of the European Union next year and where EU citizens will queue when they come here, because someone will have to start recruiting passport officers to staff those control points.

One thing that particularly bewilders me about the way that the Government are choosing to do their business is that, yet again, we are debating a theoretical Bill—a piece of legislation that does not exist. Of course, the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), is sucking his pen and thinking, “Well, that’s always the basis when you have a White Paper.” That is true, but this is a very theoretical Bill. There is no certainty that there will be such a Bill. There is no certainty about what will be in it. The White Paper even admits that the Government have referred to some things but are not yet certain whether other things will be included.

The Government’s chosen course of action in relation to residence rights is quite disturbing. I suspect that we will have an immigration Bill at some point. If this country is leaving the European Union, we will have to have a new immigration policy. Unless I have missed it, we still have not even had a White Paper on an immigration Bill. The Government, as far as I understand it, have no policy at the moment on what our future immigration rules should be.

When making very significant changes to the way that we conduct our business that affect thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people living in this country and our citizens, it is a mistake to rely on secondary legislation. But that is precisely what this White Paper says we will do in relation to residence rights. Government Members will say, “Oh yes, but we have been doing that ever since 1971 when we changed our immigration rules,” but I think that that has been a mistake. It was a mistake in 2010, for instance, only on the back of secondary legislation, to change the rules on visas for spouses by increasing the amount of money someone has to earn in the UK to £18,600. That was not understood by the vast majority of people. I think that if that had been put to the House in primary legislation, it would not have been carried.

It is a phenomenal mistake, therefore, to use secondary legislation to go down this course—especially since in the past, the whole premise of secondary legislation was that if the Leader of the Opposition or a significant number of people in the House prayed against a statutory instrument, there would be, in proper time, a debate and a vote in the Chamber of the House of Commons, but in recent years, the Government have repeatedly refused to provide that, and on very significant issues. If the Government intend to change the rules on residence rights for EU citizens in the UK by an SI later this year, I certainly will not support them, and I will point out time and again that government happens by consent, and a Government do not gain consent by sneaking things in through the back door.

I have one final point to make, which is about the timetable. I honestly think that the Government are leaving all of this far, far too late. I return to the point about government by consent. A Government have to take the people with them, and they have to make sure that the legislation is in good nick, preferably before it is presented to the House and certainly before it ends up becoming law. However, I am guessing that everybody has now given up on October as the date for the negotiation to end. It looks as though Michel Barnier has done so. The EU is now proposing 13 November for a special summit meeting, as I note from the media today, and I guess we may then have a meaningful vote. I use the term “meaningful vote” advisedly. I do not know how we can have a meaningful vote under the terms of the withdrawal Act, because all the motion will say is that this House has noted the fact that there has been a debate, and if hon. Members vote against that, it will have no meaning whatsoever. Let us say that the meaningful vote is perhaps on 20 or 21 November, because the Government will want to get their ducks in a row, but as has happened quite often, that may be delayed—perhaps to the last week in November.

On the back of that, legislation will have to be drafted to implement the deal. I have never—never once—known a Bill of the extent we are talking about being drafted by parliamentary draftspeople in less than six months, even on things that really mattered, so I suspect that that will be a tall order. I suspect the Minister will stand up and say, “Oh, no. We’ve got all of this written out. It is just a question of crossing some bits out and putting some other bits in. It’s going to be dead easy. We will be able to produce a Bill, following the negotiation day and after the meaningful vote, within a week.” I doubt it, but perhaps that is what he is going to say.

Let us say that that means First Reading is in December. We cannot have Second Reading on the same day as First Reading, unless a motion of the House is carried to that effect, and I think that would be a dodgy business because hon. Members would not have been able to see the Bill before we started talking about it. I therefore presume that Second Reading is very unlikely before Christmas. Will there be a Report stage—sorry, a Committee stage—of 10 working days? I cannot believe we will devote all of January to a single piece of business, so the legislation may be out of the House of Commons by 14 February—maybe, but I suggest that is a tall order for such a piece of legislation. It will then go to the House of Lords, where the Government cannot control the timetable at all. The only bit of the timetable they can control is when Parliament prorogues and the whole lot is lost.

The point is that there is no prospect at all of getting this legislation in place between mid-November and the end of March—absolutely no prospect whatsoever—unless the Government are going to use every trick in the book to make sure we cannot have proper debates or end up with proper legislation. In other words, they will have to shove as much as they can through in secondary legislation and allow barely enough time to get through proper amendments in this Chamber, let alone in the House of Lords, with the single threat of the sword of Damocles hanging over everybody. I just cannot see it happening.

I will end with the hon. Member for Stirling.

[Tom Brake]

The hon. Gentleman is coming to the end of his speech, but I thought he was building up to suggesting that the Government should at this stage start engaging in informal discussions with all 27 EU countries about the need to extend article 50.

[Chris Bryant]

I do not doubt for a single instant that the Government have already started doing so—I am certain of it—and if they have not done so, they are in doolallyland. They should certainly be getting on with that. It was crazy to have started article 50, but it would be even crazier to stick with that date if they cannot produce proper legislation so that there is legal certainty in the United Kingdom.

The Prime Minister has gone several rounds with the English language, given all her sentences such as “Brexit means Brexit” and “No deal is better than a bad deal”, when no deal is actually the worst possible kind of deal we could possibly end up with. In her first letter to Donald Tusk, she herself said that, if there is no deal on everything, there is no deal on security. She therefore knows perfectly well that, if there is no deal, she is—we are—compromising the security of this country and of other countries in the European Union.

The Prime Minister knows that the Chequers deal is dead—it is not going anywhere. She would be better off tabling a motion on the Chequers deal, for us to debate the moment we get back in October and discover that there is no majority for it in this Chamber. That is one of the reasons there will be no deal. I suspect that in the end she will be begging Parliament for a people’s vote, so that the people can decide the right outcome for us all.

The hon. Member for Stirling expressed enormous respect and admiration for the Prime Minister, as did the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean)—it is great to see her back in her place; waving, not drowning. I honestly think that the real disaster of this Prime Minister is that she knows perfectly well in her heart of hearts that this will damage Britain. No Prime Minister has ever brought to this House a project that they themselves did not even believe in. That, in the end, is why I believe this will prove to be the greatest catastrophe we have ever engaged in.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chris Bryant and Tom Brake

Thursday 25th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

I have some sympathy with the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but as I am sure he—now an expert in these matters—knows, this is a matter for the House. If he chose to, he could approach the Procedure Committee and ask it to look at this issue.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

We do have a sort of electronic voting now because the Clerks are using iPads—but using the iPads takes longer than using the pieces of paper of the past because it takes more time to spot the individual names.

I still support our going through the Lobbies—it is a good opportunity to meet Ministers and other colleagues—but it would be good if every vote did not take 16 minutes. Would it not be a good idea to consider some swifter form of technology for the Division Lobbies? We could use a fingerprint or thumbprint to vote.

[Tom Brake]

The hon. Gentleman has made a sensible point, which I am happy to take back in considering whether the electronic voting that he has described could speed things up.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chris Bryant and Tom Brake

Thursday 26th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

As the spokesman of the House of Commons Commission, I am somewhat loth to express a Treasury view—the Treasury is better equipped to do that than I am. However, as for the risk profile associated with doing these works over, say, a 30-year period as opposed to a much shorter period of time, the risk of some catastrophic failure is clearly much higher if the works take place over 30 years while we are in situ debating in either Chamber and, indeed, our staff are here working.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman says that we are hampered in making a decision because the two Houses have not come to a view, but that is because the Government refuse to table the motion that was agreed last year by the then Leader of the House, which says that there is

“an impending crisis which we cannot responsibly ignore.”

It is downright irresponsible of the Government consistently to delay. The next edition of the “Oxford English Dictionary” will say for the word “procrastination”: “See the inaction of the Tory Government on the misunderstanding of the phrase ‘impending crisis’.” Get on with it, man!

[Tom Brake]

For the reasons I set out about the risk profile associated with the services in the building, I certainly support what the hon. Gentleman says about the need for urgent action to be taken, although I may not echo the tone that he uses.

[Mr Speaker]

I am very grateful to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) for his attempted imitation. I usually have the copyright on the phrase “Get on with it, man,” but they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I am deeply obliged to the hon. Gentleman.