European Union (Future Relationship) Bill Debate
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Diane Abbott
Main Page: Diane Abbott (Labour - Hackney North and Stoke Newington)Department Debates - View all Diane Abbott's debates with the Cabinet Office
European Union (Future Relationship) Bill
Diane Abbott ExcerptsWednesday 30th December 2020
(3 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 30 December 2020 - (30 Dec 2020)
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab) [V]
In over 30 years in this House, this is the most important and consequential piece of legislation on British-EU relations that I have taken part in. Let me say at the beginning that I will not be voting for this Tory Brexit deal today, but that is not because I do not respect the result of the 2016 referendum.
I think I have rather good Eurosceptic credentials. I voted against the Maastricht treaty in 1992, and I have voted against most other pieces of further EU unification that have come in front of this House. However, I voted against the Maastricht treaty not because I was opposed to freedom of movement or because I had fears and concerns about EU migrants or because I had the notion that migrants drove down wages; I voted against the Maastricht treaty and other aspects of EU integration because of a concern about fundamental issues of democracy and accountability. By driving this historic deal through Parliament in one day, with no time for proper scrutiny, this Government are trashing democracy.
This deal falls short in many policy areas, but I want to talk about security. The Government claimed that they were going to get
“a security partnership of unprecedented breadth and depth”.
On the contrary, our access to Europol and to Eurojust has been compromised, and we will no longer have access to the European arrest warrant and to EU databases that allow for realtime data sharing, such as the Schengen Information System, and are valuable to our police and the National Crime Agency. The database was consulted over 600 million times by UK police forces in 2019.
In closing, I have the greatest respect for the result of the 2016 referendum, but this shoddy deal falls shorts. It fails the British people and fails my constituents, and I have to meet my responsibilities as a Member of the British Parliament and vote against it today.