European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill
Debate between Colum Eastwood and Owen PatersonFriday 20th December 2019
(4 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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.
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.