European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Colum Eastwood Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons & Money resolution & Programme motion & Ways and Means resolution
Friday 20th December 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)]

I congratulate you, Mr Speaker, on resuming the Chair, and wish you the very best of luck in your office.

I heartily congratulate the new hon. Member for Belfast South (Claire Hanna) on a very fine and fluent maiden speech. It is never easy to make a maiden speech and it is certainly not easy to make it just one or two days after taking the Oath, especially in a high-profile debate such as this. She spoke clearly and put her point of view. I appreciate the manner in which she touched on her predecessor, Emma Little Pengelly, with whom I had a very good relationship and probably more in common politically. The hon. Lady could also have touched on her predecessor but one from her own party, Alasdair McDonnell, who I worked with closely for three years when I was the shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and for two years when I was the real Secretary of State.

Above all, I heartily congratulate the hon. Lady on turning up. It is most important that her point of view for the future of Ireland is represented in this House. She quite rightly mentioned John Hume. Through the most terrible years, the Social Democratic and Labour party Members bravely made their case about where they would like Ireland to go. They were looking to a united Ireland down the road, but they always turned up here and participated in local, national and European elections; they always participated fully in the democratic process. I am therefore pleased to see the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood) back here. They will not be at all surprised that I do not agree with them, but I hope that we will be working together. I congratulate her on her fine speech at a very key moment.

Let me pick up on some of the points the hon. Lady made, because I did not entirely agree with her. I see a great future for Northern Ireland post Brexit. She and I would entirely agree that there is never, ever going to be a hard border; that is never, ever going to happen, and there is no need for it to happen. I spent some time working on this issue last year. I would like the hon. Lady to look at the concept of mutual enforcement, whereby we would recognise the standards required by the market into which we were selling, and would make it a legal obligation to ensure that our suppliers matched those standards. In the same way, those selling into Northern Ireland would have to match our standards. That would not breach the point of sovereignty, which is key to this debate; it will be entirely in our national hands, but we would respect those standards. If she and the hon. Member for Foyle would like to look at that, we might find a mutually beneficial way forward, because like her, one of my main worries about the Bill is the concept of any sort of barrier down the Irish sea, which is a clear breach of the Acts of Union—to be exact, article VI of the Acts of Union 1800, which said that there would be no taxes, barriers or impediments to trade between what was then Ireland and Great Britain. I congratulate the hon. Lady and look forward to working with her.

I touched on the central issue of this debate, which is democracy. We went through this endlessly in the last Parliament. Every week I came down here and thought, “It can’t get worse,” and it did. It is very simple. In the 2015 election campaign, David Cameron promised that if there was a Conservative majority, he would deliver an in/out, decisive referendum. The people would be given the power; they would decide, and whatever they decided—remain or leave— Parliament would honour. That was then endorsed throughout the referendum debates. It was made very clear by the then Foreign Secretary, who has now left the House, that the referendum was decisive—we, the MPs, are currently sovereign, but we will give you, the people, the power to decide this issue. It was binary. There was no talk about trade deals or crashing out. It was remain or leave.

That was then endorsed in the general election in 2017, when the two main parties got over 80% of the vote. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) is not here today, but the Conservative party got the second largest number of seats in British history until this recent election. There was a further endorsement. The people were given another bite to try to get the message across at the European elections this summer, in which, amazingly, the Conservative party managed to come fifth behind the Greens, because our then withdrawal agreement was so unpalatable. The people have now had a fourth bite, and I am very proud of those people.

I was proud to represent those people eight days ago, when the windscreen wipers were on double wipe, and there were queues in the rain in Oswestry and Market Drayton. All my small villages said that it was unprecedented. At about lunchtime—in fairness, my wife got there first—we twigged that it was a rerun of the referendum. Those people had been abused. They had been traduced. They had been bombarded with propaganda leading up to the referendum and after it. Since then, they have been told that they were thick. They were told that they were racist. We in the ERG were told that we were fascists, Nazis and extremists. All we wanted was to honour the referendum, the core of which is that laws and taxes imposed upon British citizens would be levied by democratically appointed politicians—elected politicians of this House. If they passed good laws, they would be re-elected. If they passed fair taxes and spent the money well, they would be re-elected. If they did not, they would be chucked out by the electors—a very simple principle, which we have taught the world about for centuries. That is what this is about. It is staggering to hear Members this morning still quibbling and cavilling about this. Four times the people have spoken. How many more times do they have to speak to get it? They voted to leave. This Bill means that they will leave, and I am delighted for it.

[Colum Eastwood (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Paterson]

No; I am looking at the clock.

I touched on my fears in relation to Northern Ireland, and I want briefly to mention fishing, on which the Prime Minister gave me a splendid answer. In 2005, the Conservative party fought an election on my Green Paper, which established that the common fisheries policy is a biological, environmental, economic and social disaster. We need to replace it and take back complete control of the exclusive economic zone and all our resources, and then on an annual basis, in an amicable manner like other maritime nations, negotiate reciprocal deals on quota. That is the way ahead, but this is a day for democracy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), and it is also a pleasure to have heard some really excellent speeches already, most notably the maiden speech made by the hon. Member for Belfast South (Claire Hanna). It was a pleasure to hear the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman), who spoke powerfully about trust.

In a sense, we are ending this year very much as we started it: with a debate and a vote on an EU withdrawal agreement. As I did in January, I will be voting in support of the withdrawal agreement, first and foremost because I am a democrat. I believe in honouring the outcome of the 2016 referendum and I will support measures to take the United Kingdom out of the EU. I also believe that how we leave the EU really matters. I believe in an orderly exit. I have been consistent in my support and preference for leaving with a deal. We have what I think is an eminently supportable deal in front of us.

We are also ending this year in a very different place from where we started. All week, there has been a sense of a fresh start around Westminster and of a page being turned. I appreciate that that might not be felt equally on both sides of the Chamber, but I hope that this will be a fresh start for the whole House of Commons, with a new sense of purpose and direction. I believe that voters last week put us here to bring a fresh sense of purpose and direction. Voting for the Bill today will send a very powerful signal back to the British public—back to our voters—that we have heard their message and that we are bringing that sense of direction and purpose.

Make no mistake about it: for those who were not in this House during the course of this year, 2019 has been a year of sclerosis. We took the British public on a tortuous journey of suffocating delays, endless and repetitious debates, and votes that took us nowhere. There was no substantial outcome from all the hours that we spent in the Chamber on this very subject. The British public turned out at polling stations a week ago to give us their verdict on that. Very quietly and very firmly they said, “Enough now.” It is time for action and decision.

We have a Government who have been put here to legislate to take us out of the EU in an orderly and responsible way. We have tested the patience of the British public quite enough. They send us here to do a job. Yes, they expect us to scrutinise. They expect us to ask difficult and challenging questions of the Government, even when their Ministers sit on our side of the House. They expect us to work hard at that, but they do not expect us to come here and wilfully block a democratic mandate such as the one they gave in the 2016 referendum.

[Colum Eastwood]

May I just point out—I know it was not said very often in the previous Parliament—that the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain? In every election since, they have reasserted their rejection of Brexit. Government Members talk about one nation and all that, but will they recognise that Northern Ireland and Scotland have once again, and very loudly, rejected this Brexit and every other kind of Brexit you could possibly come up with?

[Stephen Crabb]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. In fact, I was going to come on to make precisely the point that as well as being a democrat, I am also a Unionist. The election results in Northern Ireland and Scotland, which reaffirmed the referendum votes there, present a challenge to those in government about how to take Brexit forward. I am satisfied that we are dealing with Northern Ireland very sensitively and I think we have work to do on how we address the issue for Scotland, but I come back to the point I was making: we have been sent here to do a job. Voters—members of the public—do not expect us to block democracy. They do not expect to see their Members of Parliament trying to use every trick in the book to block Brexit, but that was precisely what happened in 2019. Members of Parliament went to their constituencies to tell their leave voters on a Saturday that they really wanted to get on with Brexit. They then came back here on a Monday morning to find and use every trick in the book to block Brexit.

I am very clear that the constituents of Preseli Pembrokeshire have put me here to do a job. Passing the Bill today is a really significant, first positive step forward to implement the outcome of the 2016 referendum. I believe that to vote against it would be a vote for continuing all that we saw during 2019: a winter that never ends, and never reaches Christmas. My appeal to colleagues on both sides of the House is to get behind the Bill and show the country that this new House of Commons has a real sense of direction and purpose for the whole United Kingdom.