European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Chris Leslie Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: Second Day: House of Commons
Wednesday 17th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Everybody is awake; we have been listening to the right hon. and learned Gentleman with rapt attention.

[Mr Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) on warming up the debate so well. In a way, Mr Speaker, I feel sorry for you in the Chair, because it is perfectly ridiculous that the programme order is such that we have to conclude our series of debates at 4.30 pm when so many issues have not been properly aired on Report. I said that during yesterday’s debate on the programme motion, and I hope that Members in the other place will bear that in mind when they consider the Bill.

I tabled amendments on six issues that I did not think had been adequately covered in Committee. Being a dutiful Member, I felt it my responsibility to table amendments to cover those issues, but I must rush through them, because otherwise I will not exactly be flavour of the month with many of my colleagues.

[Chris Stephens]

Hear, hear!

[Mr Leslie]

Don’t say “Hear, hear” in that way.

New clause 5 addresses a massive topic. It simply says, almost in the words of the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, that after we have left the EU, we should have the exact same benefits for the service industries in our country—including financial, legal and professional services—as we have now. The service sector accounts for some 80% of the British economy. During our consideration of the Bill, we have not yet really debated the implications for the service sector. It is often easier to talk about the trade in goods, because goods are tangible—they are physical, and we can imagine them crossing borders, going through ports and so forth—but in many ways we excel in our service sector, so new clause 5 would simply put into the Bill the commitment that Ministers have previously given that they would seek the exact same benefits.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Leslie]

I do not have much time to go into new clause 5 and I shall try not to take too many interventions, but how can I resist my right hon. Friend?

[Hilary Benn]

Does my hon. Friend agree that on the question of services, never mind goods, this is probably going to be the first negotiation in human history in which a Government have gone into the process knowing that they will come out with a worse deal than the one currently enjoyed? The reason for that is the red lines that the Government have set for themselves. Does not that demonstrate what a profound error this has been, especially when we now know that the decisions on those red lines were taken without any assessment at all of their economic impact?

[Mr Leslie]

Absolutely; I could not have put it better myself. We currently have, in the shape of the single market, one of the finest free trade agreements available to any country anywhere in the world. It is frictionless and tariff-free and, of course, it offers great opportunities for those in the UK service sector to sell their services to 500 million customers. There was nothing about departing from the single market on the referendum ballot paper, so this is a ridiculous red line that the Government should not have put in place. I take this opportunity to gently ask my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench please not to acquiesce to the red lines. The fact that the Government have set them does not necessarily mean that they are correct. I want the Labour party to fight for permanent access to and membership of the single market, and I will not stop making that point.

New clause 2 might look a bit lengthy, but it sets out what we should hope to expect to see in the withdrawal agreement that is currently being negotiated by the Prime Minister and the European Commission. I think that a lot of people expected, having passed phase 1, that this was going to be the moment to talk about trade and the sort of deal we were going to get. That is not where we are in the negotiation. We have entered a period of talks about talks—that is simply where we are in this phase 2 arrangement. The article 50 process specifies that, after we have buttoned down a transition arrangement—I shall come to that in a minute—we can perhaps hope to get a framework for our future relationship. That could easily be a single side of A4 with very warm words saying, “Let’s all work together,” and we would then be supposed to depart on our one-way journey without knowing for sure where we were heading.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Grieve]

The issue of the withdrawal agreement was supposed to be resolved last December, as part of phase 1 of the negotiations. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is abundantly clear that there are massive potential pitfalls, particularly in respect of the relationship with the Irish Republic, in the translation of what appears on the face of it to have been a mutually convenient fudge into what will in fact be a binding treaty obligation?

[Mr Leslie]

That is absolutely right, and the right hon. and learned Gentleman neatly and helpfully moves me on to my new clause 3, which deals with the question of the Irish hard border. I think that many people read the phase 1 agreement in an optimistic light. In many ways, those words were all things to all people. The can was kicked down the road, but there will have to be a translation into some sort of legal text by the time we get to the withdrawal agreement. Heaven help us when the two sides to the negotiations have to start talking in specific terms.

The Prime Minister had a slightly different view from the Republic of Ireland of what the phase 1 agreement meant. She reported back to the House that it was simply to be restricted to the issues listed in the Belfast agreement, which does not, of course, include trade in goods, to mention just one small policy area. There are massive questions about the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. People in that area share reciprocal healthcare, as well as environmental factors such as rivers, streams and lakes. They have a shared energy market and shared fisheries, food and plant arrangements. All those are shared because of the very geography of what are two distinct countries, so trying to fudge the issue just will not work, particularly if the UK is a third party.

[Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)]

Is not it essential that at some stage in these Brexit negotiations the Government legislate to protect the fundamental principles of the Good Friday agreement—the Belfast agreement? Those principles include freedom from discrimination, equality under the law and parity of esteem. They are fundamental principles—I could go on listing them, but I will not—so is it not essential that the Government protect them?

[Mr Leslie]

I believe that that is essential. I completely agree with the hon. Lady, which was why I took the exact words from the phase 1 agreement to create the text of new clause 3. If the Government really mean to commit to there being no hard border, they should enshrine that commitment in the Bill. That is the test for the Government—it is what they have to prove if they really believe that this was not just some mealy mouthed commitment to get them through a particular difficulty in the short term.

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has spoken about the island of Ireland on many occasions during our scrutiny of the Bill. Could not this complicated issue be easily resolved, and does not the resolution lie in the customs union and the single market?

[Mr Leslie]

That is indeed the case, but the Prime Minister said, “Oh no, that’s a red line.” The difficulty is that Prime Ministers can get into stubborn positions. Are they going to have to back down? How do they deal with these things? It would be a measure of the Prime Minister’s status and stature were she to say, “On reflection, I have looked at this issue and it cannot be solved.” I know that the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes), will be encouraging the Prime Minister to do that, because she has that way about her. The Prime Minister should change her mind and say, “Things have changed.”

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend is obviously making some absolutely excellent points, but the crucial thing is how all this matters practically for people and businesses. I wonder whether he saw yesterday’s concerning announcement about the opening of a new ferry route between Spain and the Republic of Ireland. The port of Cork expressly said that it was doing that to avoid having to come through all the Brexit uncertainty that was being created in the United Kingdom.

[Mr Leslie]

I did indeed see that. Think of all the distorting arrangements that will pop up.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Leslie]

If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I must make some progress, because I have to talk about new clause 4, which relates to the divorce bill—the payment or the settlement. The Prime Minister said that the amount would be somewhere between £35 billion and £39 billion. When the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Fareham, was on “Question Time”, she said that that was absolute nonsense and would never happen, but it turns out that £39 billion equates to over £700 for every adult in the UK. That is how much we are talking about. That is £700 a head for all the men and women in her constituency who voted for her and all those who did not vote. Strangely, that did not feature on the side of the red bus, and the notion of £350 million a week for the NHS has disappeared into thin air. We do not want to catch that particular bus ever again.

I am glad that the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), who chairs the Treasury Committee, has written to the Comptroller and Auditor General of the National Audit Office to ask him to examine the reasonableness of the sum. The phase 1 agreement said that a methodology had been agreed between the two sides to calculate the sum, but that has not been made available as far as I can see. I hope that the NAO will have that methodology, and that it will go through the agreement with a fine-toothed comb to find the exact figure that our constituents will end up paying.

Amendment 39 seeks to tease out what is happening on the question of transition, for which there are all sorts of metaphors. My hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna) talked about there being no safe harbour, but the metaphor I like to give is that, if we have a cliff edge, transition is about our having a plank going a few feet out from the cliff edge: it would perhaps give us a bit of extra time, but it would not obviate the precipitousness of the fall that could affect the country—it simply defers when that will happen. The European Union side is absolutely clear that if we are going to have a transition, it will need to be on exactly the same arrangements that we have now, minus having Britain around the table with a say on the rules. That was why I tabled amendment 39. The Government have to get on with securing a transition, and the Chancellor was right to talk about it as a diminishing asset.

The arrangements had better be visible and available for businesses to see by the time we get to Easter and the March European Council meeting, because they need to know what will happen. Otherwise, quite naturally, they are going to have to make contingency plans to protect their business thereafter. I was talking to the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union, which has come up with the sort of transition deal that it believes that many of its firms that work and invest here, employing many of our constituents, want to see. It thinks that a transition needs to have two distinct aspects. First, there needs to be a bridging period during which we can settle all the rules, finish all the negotiations, and establish the treaties and procedure. That will definitely take more than 21 months, and I saw that the chief executive of the EEF was completely scathing yesterday about how little could be achieved in the period currently envisaged. Secondly, there needs to be an adaptation period—a phasing in of the new rules. We need to start getting into exactly what the transition will involve, and that was why I tabled amendment 39.

My final point is about new clause 6, on which I will seek the views of the House if I get the opportunity. It relates to what will happen if unforeseen circumstances arise in the process. What will right hon. and hon. Members do if the Government come back with an unacceptable deal? We need to know what our options are. We have asked the Prime Minister on many occasions about the article 50 process. It is a notification process, and she sent the letter in, but when we ask whether the process can be extended, altered or revoked, she says that that is not the Government’s policy. That, of course, is not the question we are asking. We are asking whether the process can be extended. What is the legal advice? The Government have obviously taken legal advice, and I suspect that it says that the UK, if it so chose and the circumstances arose, could unilaterally revoke article 50. We would of course have to do that before exit day, because if we chose to do so after exit day, we would be looking to apply to rejoin the EU under article 49, which would mean our losing many of the benefits in our current deal. We in the House of Commons need to know the options available to us.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

On that point in particular, does my hon. Friend agree that all the new clauses and amendments are about trying to get greater openness and honesty about the pros, cons and trade-offs of the choices we face as a country? It is vital that that information is available not just to this House, but to the public. It is our job as Members of Parliament to put it before the country, because these huge decisions have big consequences, but we have had to drag the Government every step of the way towards putting such information before the country.

[Mr Leslie]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. It is important that our constituents know that nothing is inevitable. One parliamentary decision cannot bind a successor Parliament, because Parliament has the capability to do a number of things. Although the article 50 notice signalling the Government’s intention has been sent in, it is not a binding commitment.

[Sir William Cash]

rose—

[Mr Leslie]

It might be my intention to give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I might change my mind by the time I get there. I can walk towards a Division Lobby while thinking that it is my intention to vote for a particular issue, but I might change my mind at the last minute. We are all able to change our minds. That is the nature of life, and we can all do the same in a dynamic democracy and Parliament.

Article 50 says that treaties shall cease to apply from

“the date of… the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification”,

but we will have left only after those events. Article 50 is of course silent on what happens during the two-year interim period before the agreement. We are still full members of the European Union, prior to the withdrawal agreement or the expiry of the two-year period, so it stands to reason that we should continue to act as such. The framers of article 50, who include Lord Kerr, said that a “request readmission after negotiation” clause was not necessary because that was taken as read. That is how the 1969 Vienna convention on the law of treaties operates, and it is accepted by many jurisdictions around the world. Article 68 of the Vienna convention states:

“A notification or instrument… may be revoked at any time before it takes effect.”

That is the widely understood nature of such treaties.

[Sir William Cash]

I just thought that I would draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017. I do not think that he voted for it, but 499 other Members did, and it passed the House of Lords, so I would have thought that that would be quite a difficult problem for him to overcome.

[Mr Leslie]

No Parliament can bind its successor, and that Act was passed in a different Parliament. It may not be necessary for the UK to consider extending or revoking the article 50 process, but it might prove necessary. MPs and the public have a right to know that such options are available. Nothing is inevitable about this whole process. Choices and options are available to this country, and the Government should publish their legal advice and a summary of that advice. There is ample precedent for doing that. Indeed, when the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) was Attorney General, he published summaries of legal advice. The measure does not even ask for a breach of the confidentialities between client and legal adviser, but this House is entitled to a summary. We need to know and the public need to know, which I is why I want to press new clause 6 to a Division, if I get the opportunity.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

There will be a change of tone, because the speeches so far have been understandably wide ranging, and mine will be much more narrow and technically focused and also much shorter. I say by way of preface that it is both strange and regrettable that the analysis of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) was not adopted by the remain campaign, because we might have been saved a great deal of trouble if it had been. Frankly, he speaks passionately and well, and I prefer the economic analysis as to risks and/or benefits of someone who was one of the most distinguished post-war Chancellors to that of those who have not had the opportunity to hold those exalted positions and whose view of the matter sometimes seems a little more based on articles of faith than on practical experience.