Leaving the European Union

Chris Heaton-Harris Excerpts

Monday 1st April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Catherine McKinnell]

The right hon. Gentleman seems a bit stuck in the past. What we are talking about today is what we directly face. We could rerun the 2016 referendum campaign. We can debate the rights and wrongs, and the arguments for and against, over and over. I did not vote for the referendum or to invoke article 50, for the very reason that I could see us setting a clock ticking on a negotiation without an agreed strategy or plan. Many Members did not vote to invoke article 50, and many Members who are in the House now were not even elected at the time of the referendum. We had a general election subsequently, and that general election returned a hung Parliament, so we are where we are. The petition considers the immediate possibility that is staring us in the face—a no-deal exit from the EU, which is the legal default position if nothing changes today, or this week, to remove that possibility for 12 April.

Rather than going over the history, I am interested to know what the right hon. Gentleman thinks. Is he genuinely happy for this economy just to be driven off a cliff, with all the ramifications that flow from that?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Chris Heaton-Harris)]

rose—

[Catherine McKinnell]

I think the Minister wants me to give way.

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[Catherine McKinnell]

We can agree to disagree on that.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I will congratulate the hon. Lady properly later. She mentioned that things had moved on and that there had been a general election. Will she remind the House what the Labour party’s position was, in that election, on respecting the result of the referendum?

[Catherine McKinnell]

What is so difficult about the debate is that it has wedded itself to events in the past, rather than looking at the reality right in front of us.

Our country remains in a crisis. The situation is completely unacceptable and intolerable, and I am hugely aware of the costly uncertainty and anxiety that it is causing for businesses and people up and down the country, but I am also clear that, despite the Prime Minister’s disgraceful and inflammatory attempts to lay the blame at the feet of democratically elected representatives doing their jobs, this appalling mess is entirely of the Prime Minister’s, and the Government’s, own making.

The time-limited article 50 process was triggered without any plan or agreed strategy for where we wanted to end up—I voted against it at the time for that very reason—and months of valuable negotiating time were wasted on a general election that resulted only in a hung Parliament. After that election, there was a complete failure to listen and to reach out to or engage with MPs—either by party, geographically or according to their views on Brexit—to build that much-needed consensus, with every decision taken by the Prime Minister in her narrow party interest, rather than with the greater good of the country in mind. Yet more time was wasted by repeatedly postponing, or simply ignoring, meaningful votes on the agreement, even though it was clear some four months ago that it would not command Parliament’s support.

I implore the Minister not to respond to this important debate simply by trotting out the same tired old lines that we have heard from those on the Government Benches today, or what we have heard time and again about the Government’s approach to Brexit. I implore him to engage with the fact that this Government’s total failure to steer the country through this historic process has resulted in 6 million people signing a petition in a matter of days, calling for the only policy that this Government have pursued for the past three years to be reversed.

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[Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray, and also a pleasure to follow my neighbour, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I agree with every single word she said. I want to speak to e-petition 235138 on holding a people’s vote, but, most of all, I want to talk to e-petition 241584 on revoking article 50 and remaining in the EU, which, as has been said, has been signed by more than 6 million people, including more than 25,000 people in my constituency, which is just under a third of the registered electors in Streatham.

I do not want to speak for long, but I will make these points. There is clearly no mandate whatever for the chaos that we have seen unfold in this country since the vote in 2016. Whether people voted leave or remain, there is simply no majority in the country for the mess that has unfolded, despite the comments that we have heard in this debate. Given that there is not a mandate for this mess in this House, hopefully the indicative vote process will indicate what there is a majority for. I very much hope it will be for a people’s vote. However, if there was no resolution, and on either 11 April or 21 May we faced falling off the cliff, it is clear that no responsible Government would allow this country to leave the European Union without a deal. I want to explain why, with particular reference to the Government’s own documents on the implications of our leaving the European Union with no deal. I want to draw attention to four or five of the points made in the documents that the Government—I hope the Minister will speak to this—have published.

First, we are told:

“Despite communications from the Government, there is little evidence that businesses are preparing in earnest for a no deal scenario”,

and the evidence indicates that small and medium-sized businesses in particular are unprepared for such a possibility. Secondly,

“individual citizens are also not preparing for the effects”

of our leaving the European Union with no deal. According to the evidence that the Government have published—their own economic impact assessments—if we were to leave without a deal on an orderly basis, we would be looking at the economy being 6.3% to 9% smaller than it otherwise would have been, but one of the things missed in the commentary is that that is an assessment of an orderly departure. If we were to leave and crash out on 11 April or 21 May without a deal on WTO terms, the contraction in the economy is likely to be far bigger.

Look at the practicalities:

“Every consignment would require a customs declaration, and so around 240,000 UK businesses that currently only trade with the EU would need to interact with customs processes for the first time”.

I quote directly from the Government’s own briefing papers. If we read between the lines, we are looking at an increase in food prices, panic buying by consumers and tariffs in the region of

“70% on beef... 45% on lamb... and 10% on finished automotive vehicles.”

And that before we look at the non-tariff barriers and their impact on the majority of the economy, which is service based. Based on the things that I have quoted from the Government’s own document, I do not see how any responsible Government could say that they had a mandate to bring about the disaster that they have published in their own papers.

[Steve McCabe in the Chair]

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

The hon. Gentleman raises important points from the paper. I am sure he saw the Treasury Monetary Policy Committee minutes last week that said 80% of businesses were ready for a no-deal scenario. He might have misread the number: it is 145,000 businesses that trade solely with the European Union and the Government have contacted them on three occasions so far. So, there has been some progress since the paper that he quotes from was published.

[Chuka Umunna]

I am just quoting from the Minister’s own document. Technically, he is—dare I say it?—the Minister for no deal. He is responsible for ensuring that we are prepared if we leave in those circumstances. Never mind no responsible Government allowing us to leave without a deal; I cannot see how any Member of this House who held the post that he does as the Minister responsible could stand in the way of article 50 being revoked were we on the cusp of the disaster that he is supposed to be preparing for.

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[Jenny Chapman]

Gosh, the hon. Lady invites me to make comments way above my station. I am sure she will understand that what happens with whipping is a matter for my Chief Whip. I do not know the exact position on how we will enforce it. But I will abstain on that motion this evening, as a shadow Minister, but I hope that she accepts in good faith what I am explaining: that I recognise—as, I am sure, do my colleagues—that that decision point might be something that we need to confront in future. It is not something that we need to do tonight, because for us tonight is about trying to find a majority for a way forward. I hope we arrive at that this evening.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I can confirm that my party has a free vote on that, apart from members of the Cabinet, who seem to be abstaining—something I do not quite understand myself, I have to say. Is the hon. Lady saying that her party is abstaining while trying to talk up a petition of 6 million people who wanted something else?

[Jenny Chapman]

I am admiring and respectful of the petition, and I understand the reasons for it. I also do not discount the proposition put this evening. The Minister should not read too much into the fact that I am not voting for it. I would add that the Labour party will whip its Members this evening, unlike the Government, who dare not whip even their own Cabinet. If I were the Minister, I am not sure I would bob up and down quite as much on this particular issue.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Chris Heaton-Harris)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe, which is a first for me. I shall try to be as well behaved as I like to think I normally am. I hope you will pass on my thanks —and I think everyone else’s—to Mr Gray, who chaired the first part of the debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman).

I thank the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) for opening the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee. She did so amazingly courteously and politely, taking into account all the petitions appropriately. I am sure she, like me, is pleased that there have been a number of people in the Public Gallery for the debate. I thank them both for being here and for not stripping off to make a point, as people did in the Gallery of the main Chamber this afternoon. I very much appreciate their attendance and their clothes.

The hon. Lady spoke, as she always does—I admire her for it—in a very honest and brave way. She represents a seat that voted leave in quite some numbers—something like 56.8%, I believe, not that I check these figures.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I would be interested to know where the Minister got that figure. Officially, Newcastle as a city voted remain, and the votes were counted on a city-wide basis, so there is no breakdown for my constituency. I wonder whether he has been reading the Daily Mail.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I always read the paper that my mother reads; it is very important to know where she is going to come at me next time. I apologise if that is not the correct figure, but I maintain that the hon. Lady is an honest and brave parliamentarian.

[Sandy Martin]

I know the estimated percentage of my constituents who voted leave. It is 56.7%. However, I have told them that my role is to represent their best interests, and that is what I am trying to do. I am trying to represent the best interests of them all—not just the people who voted for me, but the people who did not vote for me; and not just the people who voted leave, but the people who voted remain.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I think that is a completely honourable position for the hon. Gentleman to take. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North, who has been straightforward throughout this process, is similarly honourable. As she said, she did not vote to activate article 50, and she has sometimes been quite outspoken, in a very polite way, about the process we have gone through in the House.

I hear the hon. Lady has had many conversations with people in her constituency, and many Members who contributed to the debate mentioned the many conversations they have had with leave voters. There are lots of reasons why people voted to leave, so we cannot say that everybody came behind one reason. Actually, there are lots of different reasons to vote to remain as well. People might have voted to leave because they wanted us to set our own laws—to have them set by this place, not by the European Commission—or to make our own choices about how to spend our money, or because they wanted to end freedom of movement. A number of people might vote for the Common Market 2.0 option today, knowing full well that means continuing freedom of movement, which their voters might well have been quite strongly opposed to. A number of people have said over the past couple of years that they voted to leave because they were concerned about how their wages had deflated against overall wage growth. People voted in the way they did for a huge number of reasons, and they are all legitimate. We must not debase the legitimacy of people’s actions.

I am very pleased that the hon. Lady was proud of the people who demonstrated last week, and I am quite sure she was proud to have the full and uncompromising support of her party leader at the front of the march. Oh, he wasn’t there, was he? I think he was in Morecambe. Perhaps she was nearly led from the front by her party leader.

Nineteen Members intervened in the debate, which I think is the most interventions I have experienced. The hon. Member for Darlington talked about the many petitions debates we have had in the Chamber. It is nice to have a full house of people—even on one side—talking about the petition, because these are very important decisions that we are making on people’s behalf.

I thank the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie) for his contribution. As long as he is on the other side from me, I feel—no, he is a very good gentleman, and I entirely understand his view on this subject. He said this debate should have taken place in the main Chamber. I have no disagreement with that whatsoever. Perhaps when so many people—more than a million, or whatever it might be—sign a petition, the Petitions Committee could consider whether the Floor of the House might be the best place for the debate. I am in agreement with him on that, but obviously it is a House matter, so it is up to the Petitions Committee how it goes about that.

[Catherine McKinnell]

On a point of fact, it is not up to the Petitions Committee where the debates are held. The Committee has an allocated slot on a Monday afternoon here in Westminster Hall. This is where we are allowed to hold the debates on petitions that we decide have passed the relevant thresholds. It would be for the House authorities to negotiate how that might be changed, but it is purely a matter of the procedure that the Committee has at its disposal that we have the debates here in Westminster Hall.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I hear what the hon. Lady says. We have a Speaker who believes in the evolution of parliamentary process at a very speedy rate, so I am sure there is a way that very popular petitions could get time on the Floor of the House. I do not think anybody would necessarily disagree with that. The process might be slightly more interesting behind the scenes, but that is one for those who deal with those matters.

I thank the hon. Members for York Central (Rachael Maskell), for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I will spar one day with the hon. Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna) on no-deal preparation. Actually, no-deal preparation has gone well—much better than he might care to make out.

[Dr Wollaston]

On no-deal preparation, one thing that has been quite frustrating is the use of non-disclosure agreements—gagging clauses. It is very difficult for the Health and Social Care Committee to assess the extent to which no-deal planning for medicines supplies has been a success, as people have had to sign those agreements. Is the Minister prepared to sweep those out of the way so that we can see whether there is adequate planning for supplies of vital medicines and medical equipment in the event of no deal?

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[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Perhaps the hon. Lady missed the email update last week to 19,000 doctors by Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, who said:

“I know that many of you will have been watching the news about Brexit…with feelings of uncertainty and increasing alarm…I have been considerably reassured by governments’ preparations relating to medicines supplies…governments, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the NHS have been working hard behind the scenes…and we believe that our medicine supplies are very largely secured”.

His biggest concern was panic buying. As far as I am aware—I will happily take this up with the hon. Lady offline—NDAs have not been a practice of no-deal preparation for quite some time. I will happily correspond or have a conversation with her afterwards about that, because if she has concerns I would like to bring them into the open a tiny bit.

[Dr Wollaston]

Is the Minister saying that everybody who has been asked not to disclose any issues to do with the supply of medicines is now at liberty to disclose them?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I have said what I have said in public, and I will happily take that up with the hon. Lady after the debate.

I also thank the hon. Members for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day), for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), for Stockport (Ann Coffey), for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield) and for Totnes (Dr Wollaston). The hon. Member for Totnes cited a whole host of reasons why she is allowed to change her mind. I will not go back and quote all the things she said to her electorate in the 2017 general election. I also thank the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle), and the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock), who missed the point that wages are rising ahead of inflation at this point in time, and obviously I thank the hon. Member for Darlington, who informed us about Labour’s whipping.

More importantly, I thank the number of people who have expressed themselves to the Government in the three petitions we have debated, which ask us to reverse the 2016 referendum result, whether by revoking article 50 or holding a second referendum, as well as the exact opposite: that the Government ensure that we deliver the outcome of the 2016 referendum no matter what. The Government’s position remains clear: we will not revoke article 50 and we will not hold a second referendum. We remain committed to leaving the European Union and implementing the result of the 2016 referendum.

Parliament’s position is now also clear. In the series of indicative votes on 27 March, Parliament voted on the options of revoking article 50 and holding a second referendum. Neither option achieved a majority in the House. Indeed, the House voted, with a majority of more than 100, against revoking article 50.

The Government really do acknowledge the substantial number of signatures that these petitions have amassed. We also recognise the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in London on 23 March in favour of a second referendum. In particular—I do not think anyone has done this—I congratulate Margaret Anne Georgiadou, the creator of the revocation of article 50 petition, for starting a petition that, at current count, has attracted more than 6 million signatures. That is a considerable achievement in anyone’s terms.

I want to take a moment to note that I, the Government and, I am sure, everyone in the Chamber, were disgusted to hear the reports that Ms Georgiadou has received threats and abuse for starting a petition. That is utterly unacceptable. Everyone should feel and be able to express their opinions and participate in political discourse without fear of intimidation or abuse. That is integral to our democracy and it should be at the front and centre of our minds when we debate and discuss all issues, including Brexit. It is those democratic values that underpin the Government’s commitment to uphold the result of the 2016 referendum.

Although I have elaborated on this process before, let me do so again, to reinforce exactly why it is that we must uphold the result. In 2015, Parliament voted overwhelmingly to give the British people a choice on whether to remain in or leave the European Union, allowing them to express a clear view to Government. Before we asked them to vote, the Government wrote to every household, committing to implement whatever decision they made.

On 23 June 2016, the British people expressed their view to Government. With nearly three quarters of the electorate taking part, 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union. That is the highest number of votes cast for any single course of action in UK electoral history. More British people than ever before or since amassed in agreement on a single, clear outcome: they wanted the Government to deliver the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union.

Of course, Parliament also made a commitment to uphold the result of the 2016 referendum. In the 2017 general election, the British people cast their votes again, and more than 80% of voters voted for parties who committed in their manifestos to uphold the result of the referendum.

[Martin Whitfield]

rose—

[Dr Wollaston]

rose—

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I will happily give way to all three hon. Members, beginning with the hon. Member for East Lothian.

[Martin Whitfield]

I refrained from raising this in my speech, but the Conservatives also stood on a manifesto saying that they would not separate the withdrawal agreement from the political declaration. How can they keep to one bit of the manifesto but not the other bit further on in the same paragraph?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I give way to the hon. Member for Streatham.

[Chuka Umunna]

I thought the Minister might want to reply. The point he continues to ignore is the reason why he and his Government are in the mess they are in. Ultimately, the 2016 referendum gave a view on whether a majority of people participating in that referendum wanted to leave the European Union, but how to leave was reserved to Parliament. His Government put a very hard Brexit to the British people and lost their majority. The clash of those two mandates is why we are going through all this chaos right now, and yet again he is sticking his head in the sand and ignoring that fact. It is all very well asserting the result of the referendum, but it did not tell us how the country wanted to leave the European Union. That has been the essential problem in this process.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Forgive me for not answering the point made by the hon. Member for East Lothian. I was going to take all three interventions first, but let me do what the hon. Member for Streatham would want. Our manifesto was quite clear, and Labour’s manifesto was quite clear. My party wants to deliver on its manifesto commitment.

To respond to the hon. Member for Streatham, absolutely, things did move on between 2016 and 2017, and that is why his party—then—and my party made the commitments they did. People understood that we would be leaving the single market and the customs union.

[Chuka Umunna]

The Minister is also ignoring what his own Chief Whip will say on BBC 2 later this evening: the Government have refused to alter course and change their red lines in light of the fact that they lost their majority. They cannot get measures and propositions through the House of Commons. That is why they are in the mess they are in.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I tend to disagree. First, obviously I have not seen a programme that has yet to air.

[Chuka Umunna]

It is online!

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Forgive me—it is a tiny bit busy at this moment in time. Obviously I will watch and read every word that the Government Chief Whip might say and put that in the context in which it might have been said.

The hon. Member for Streatham might not have enjoyed reading his former party’s manifesto in 2017 at the general election, and I might not have enjoyed reading mine; but as well as spending a lot of time in my own seat, I canvassed across the country, from Bolsover to Coventry South, in Northampton and through swathes of south London, where people whose doors were knocked on rightly thought that Brexit was in the process of being delivered, because everybody agreed they were going to respect the result of the referendum. Yes, I do believe that there has been a bit of a democratic disconnect, but in a slightly different way from the way the hon. Gentleman believes it.

[Wera Hobhouse]

The one thing I struggle with is why, if the Prime Minister says with so much passion and conviction that her deal is what the people voted for in 2016, she is too worried to put it back to the people. If she believes it is what people voted for, she should proudly present her deal and just check that with the people.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I shall happily answer that point later in my speech.

[Neil Coyle]

The Minister seems to be struggling to split the hypothetical from what happened in the election. Perhaps he has the figures for the number of people who downloaded or bought the Conservative manifesto; however, as to the simplistic suggestion that the vast majority of voters read any party’s manifesto, we all know it to be untrue. The practical reality in constituencies such as mine was that in every leaflet I put out—in every interview and article, and at the hustings—I said I would continue to oppose Brexit, full stop, so it is completely false to pretend that in the election voters only voted in the knowledge that Brexit would be delivered. It is nonsense.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

In a way the hon. Gentleman is making the point that I was trying to make to the hon. Member for Streatham, because people did pay attention to what individual MPs were saying in their constituencies —at least, more people than ever before attended hustings in my constituency, and I should like to think that that was reflected elsewhere. The disconnect comes from the fact that in the end lots of people vote, as the hon. Gentleman knows, for a party rather than an individual. If a candidate’s party, nationally, says something loud and clear, they are almost disrespecting their party’s manifesto by saying something different locally.

[Sandy Martin]

Surely the point of a manifesto is to let the voters know what the party will do if and when it forms a Government. We wrote our manifesto in the hope and expectation that we would be able to form a Government and carry through the manifesto that we wrote. Unfortunately for the British people, we were not able to form that Government or to take control of the Brexit process. Clearly, over the past two years, the present Government have not been able to take control of it either, but we can hardly be blamed for that, and I do not think that the electorate should be able to blame us for the fact that the Government have not been able to control their own Members or bring forward a feasible, viable Brexit process.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I do not think that I was blaming hon. Members collectively. I was just making a point about what people might well have expected. It is not just the Government but many colleagues who stood on manifestos promising to uphold the result of the referendum who have an obligation and mandate to do so.

[Dr Wollaston]

Does the Minister agree that it was the publication of the manifesto that was the tipping point for the Conservatives, and it was all going quite well until then, when things fell off a cliff? That was my experience.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

The problem is that people sometimes do not like it when politicians say one thing and do another. We all recognise that, and it is a difficulty that we all might have at some point in the future. What if a Member goes round during a general election campaign saying

“this constituency voted by 54% to leave. I think this is one of the things that annoys people, is telling them that they didn’t know what they were voting for. That was the purpose of the referendum, we accept the result…We have to go into this, absolutely understanding that the principle here is that we respect the outcome of the referendum and I think it would be a huge mistake to go into this promising that I’d be prepared to vote to actually overturn the deal and send us back into Europe”?

That is what the hon. Lady said to her constituency.

[Jenny Chapman]

I remind the Minister that we are being observed here by members of the public in the Gallery, and also by many people watching at home, because they have a certain level of engagement with this debate, perhaps more than others. What they do not want to see is an attempt to undermine, one by one, Members who have made a case on behalf of the petitioners today. They would like the Minister to address the substance of the petition.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

That is what I had started to do. Failing to deliver on the commitments that we, as politicians, have made to the people we serve, would be hugely damaging.

[Deidre Brock]

The Minister talks of a commitment to people’s original voting intentions but, at the very least, the accusations and, indeed, proof of illegal activity undertaken by the Vote Leave campaign, surely mean that a reconsideration of that vote by the Government is entirely appropriate?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I am afraid I completely disagree.

Let me be clear. To revoke article 50 or to hold a second referendum would be failing to deliver on the commitments we have made. Parliament once again rejected those motions last week. Second-guessing or otherwise reversing the outcome of the 2016 vote damages the trust that British people place in their Government. It gives cause for British people to lose faith in politics and politicians and in the most important democratic practice of all—voting. I recognise, in the midst of the uncertainty, that the petitioners question why the British people should not have a chance to have a second say —a second vote—on Brexit. However, I ask Members what guarantees we could give, if we cannot show that we can uphold and respect the results of one referendum, that we could respect and uphold the results of a second. Would we need a third, or the best of five? What would prevent a third referendum? When would the uncertainty and the back-and-forth asking of the question end? When could we consider ourselves to have settled the question?

The Government believe we have settled the question. It was settled by the British people in the 2016 referendum. To question that vote and try to undermine what was expressed in it is a harmful precedent to set, and one that the Government are firmly unwilling to set. However, people have expressed an important message to us through the petitions. Through them, we recognise the frustrations and concerns caused by the current uncertainty. It is our view, and Parliament’s view as expressed in numerous votes last week in the indicative vote process, that the solution is not to revoke article 50 or hold a second referendum, thereby irreparably damaging the relationship between people and politics, but to try to move forward with certainty as we deliver on the instruction that was given to us. That is what the Government are trying to do.