UK’s Withdrawal from the European Union

Dominic Grieve Excerpts

Wednesday 13th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

If only the Labour party would give its own Members a free vote, then we could find out what they really think.

[Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

It seems to me that the difficulty that might be arising across the House is as follows. If the House passes this motion this evening, and I have no reason not to support the motion in the terms of its ruling out no deal, in order to achieve that two things have to happen: first, we need to get an extension to article 50; and secondly, we are going to have to make a change to primary legislation in the withdrawal agreement Act. I assume the Government are undertaking, if this motion is passed in its own terms, to do exactly that?

[Michael Gove]

I am very grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for his intervention, because it allows me to underline and further elucidate the point. It is absolutely correct that tomorrow the House will have an opportunity, if the motion passes tonight, to decide how to seek an extension. Obviously an extension is not something we can insist upon and automatically see delivered; it is in the gift of the EU and requires the assent of all 27 other EU members. But of course there will be an opportunity further to debate that tomorrow.

[Mr Grieve]

Just to remind the Secretary of State: there was a second part to the question, which is equally critical. It is that the Government will have to bring a statutory instrument to the House to alter the departure date set out in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. In those circumstances, I assume that the Government are undertaking to do exactly that.

[Michael Gove]

The Prime Minister and others have said that previously, and I am happy to place on the record once again at this Dispatch Box exactly that commitment.

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[Keir Starmer]

I give way to the former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve).

[Mr Grieve]

Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman agree that the difficulty with the Government’s motion is that it is in fact inaccurate? The fact is that the default position, indeed, applies only if we do not ratify or choose to revoke, which one could do either by our own motion or after a referendum, for example. That is why—he may agree with me—suspicions have been raised in the House that the motion is slanted. That may be unintentional, but of course it is within the power of the Government potentially to remedy that with a manuscript amendment to their own motion before this debate is over.

[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful for the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s intervention and agree with his interpretation. I think it would be helpful to have the motion amended. One thing that has not helped is the House making a decision only to find weeks later that the decision we thought we had made is called into question. I invite clarity on that, so that we can express a clear view.

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[Mr Clarke]

I am going to be very brief—as brief as I can be. I have already taken longer than I intended.

The argument is that these matters were settled by the referendum, but one of the problems is that the debate at the time of the referendum does not resemble the debates that we keep having, with ever more frequency, in the House. That is not because we are out of touch with the real world. It is because the referendum was conducted in the most bizarre, broad-brush terms, with the leading figures on both sides using ridiculous or dishonest arguments in order to make their case, which had nothing whatever to do with the merits or otherwise of being in the European Union.

Remainers, I am afraid—the key remainers, David Cameron and George Osborne—decided to raise all those fears of immediate catastrophe, which did not actually materialise. That has led people now to say that every future warning from every major business lobby in the country, from the Treasury, from the Government and from everyone else is to be ignored. That is a classic case of crying wolf: one day the wolf actually arrives, and we cannot conduct the government of this country on the basis that we ignore every expert piece of opinion we have, which most of us in fact agree with because we think their warnings are correct.

The referendum gets invoked in all our other debates, too. When I ask my constituents who are leavers—most of them, I am glad to say, voted remain—it is clear that the idea that they were expressing a view on the Irish border and the problems of the Good Friday agreement when they voted to leave, or that most of them were expressing any opinion on the single market or the customs union, is absolute nonsense. Indeed when I talk to members of the public now—who are all expressing anger about the state of affairs we are in—they are still not lobbying me about the Irish border and the single market and all the rest of it. We are having to be engaged in this because our duty is governance; our duty is the medium and longer term better governance of this country, and we have to address the real world of a globalised economy and today’s systems of regulation and the international order in which we have to earn our living against a background of bewildering technological change.

All the arguments about the damage to business and the threat to Ireland, including its constitutional position, and so on have already been addressed by others and I have agreed with every word that has been said. However, I want briefly to give my reaction to that handful—I think it is no more—of Members who seem to think now that no deal is positively desirable and that it is an objective we should have sought from the first. They make it sound very respectable by describing it as “WTO rules”, but I strongly suspect that many who argue that point had scarcely heard of the WTO at the time of the referendum, and I do not think most of them understand what WTO rules actually comprise. I will not go into too much detail, not least because I have not refreshed my own memory too greatly, but there is no developed country in the world that seeks to trade in today’s globalised economy only on WTO rules. They are a fall-back that cover all that international trade that is not governed by recognised free trade agreements. They are designed to ensure that there is no discrimination among countries with which we do not have an agreement. That is why they require a schedule of tariffs, to be accepted by the WTO, and then those tariffs to be imposed on all those countries with which there is no agreement. That means the EU is obliged by WTO rules, now much loved by Brexiteers, to impose the same tariffs on us that it imposes on other third party countries, and we are obliged to impose the same schedule of tariffs on the EU and all other countries with which we do not have a deal.

There are WTO rules that do not allow countries to abdicate a thing like the Irish border. We cannot say we are not going to put any border posts in, so we are going to have organised smuggling become the major industry of the island because we have no idea how we are going to enforce it all. Not only would the Republic be under great pressure from the rest of the EU, but WTO rules would require us to co-operate with policing our border, collecting tariffs, regulatory checks, customs checks and all the rest.

My main worry, however, is not entirely about these short-term consequences, catastrophic though they would be for some sections of our economy including agriculture and the motor industry. My main worry is that, whatever happens in the global economy, the effect of leaving with no deal in the medium and long term and on the comparative economic strength of this country will be that we and the next generation will be made poorer than we would otherwise be. That will be the result if we cannot move away from this no deal nonsense, and I hope a big majority settles that tonight.

Finally, I just want to be totally clear what the Government’s intentions and motives now are. I hope I have been reassured that, if we pass this motion tonight, the Government will in all circumstances take whatever steps it is eventually necessary to take in 16 days’ time to avoid our leaving with no deal. I do not want them to come back in a fortnight’s time saying to the House, “It’s your fault, because you will not vote for the Prime Minister’s withdrawal agreement, so sadly we are going to have to leave with no deal.” We are ruling this out. That really means having indicative votes to give us some idea of what the British are going to negotiate over the next two or three years. Failing that, it means revoking article 50. Speaking as someone who is a diehard European—

[Mr Grieve]

rose—

[Mr Clarke]

My right hon. and learned Friend and I do not agree on referendums, but we agree on practically everything else. As he is a close political ally and a good friend of mine, I shall give way to him.

[Mr Grieve]

In the spirit of trying to encourage the Government to be clear with the House, does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that the difficulty with the Government’s motion is that the revocation route is not acknowledged? The Government may not want it, and of course there are different ways of reaching it—one is through a referendum; another is through a revocation by this House alone—but the difficulty with the Government’s motion as tabled is that it pretends that that route does not exist. It seems to emphasise a binary choice. Does he therefore agree that getting clarity on that, and possibly a correction, would be immeasurably helpful? Otherwise, it gives the impression that the Government are trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

[Mr Clarke]

I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend entirely. I have no idea why the Government thought it necessary to put the second half of the motion on the Order Paper. I have been reassured, however, so let me try to reassure him on this. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State opened the debate, he referred several times to revocation as the alternative—he is now nodding in the affirmative—and I think that if forced to do so, he would revoke. I take comfort from remembering the Prime Minister occasionally saying—normally to the right-wing nationalist members of my party—that if they were not careful, the alternative to her deal would be no Brexit, which amounts to the same thing. I would prefer the wording on the Order Paper to make it perfectly clear that we are ruling out no deal, but I take it that we have been given a guarantee that if no one can think of any better and more sensible way of resolving things, we are going to revoke article 50 and start all over again, because as I said when I began, we have got absolutely nowhere after three years of effort since the vote was announced.

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[Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

I cannot agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) that a no-deal Brexit is somehow eminently liveable with; it plainly is not. From looking at my own constituency, talking to the pharmaceutical companies that are there and looking at the costs already incurred by them to try to face up to the prospect of no deal and the risks they run if no deal goes ahead, it seems plain to me that no deal would be very damaging to this country indeed: damaging in the short term because of the chaos that will accompany it, and damaging in the medium to long term because I believe we will be seriously economically disadvantaged by it.

I find it genuinely very troubling that as we come closer to the crunch there seem to be more and more people who may previously have advocated a deal but, not seeing that there is a deal around, suddenly decide that no deal is the option because they cannot get what they want or the form of deal they might desire. It is an extraordinary form of frenzy: they smash up the china first, and when they are not satisfied with the china they have smashed, they decide to smash some more. That is what we are facing, and it is my duty to do everything I possibly can to prevent it, and I will continue to do that for as long as the opportunities for doing it present themselves.

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

My right hon. and learned Friend talks about smashing up the law; does he not accept that section 1 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 makes it abundantly and expressly clear that we will repeal the European Communities Act 1972 on exit day?

[Mr Grieve]

It may do, but it lies within our capacity to change it, and we will have to change it; indeed, it is inherent that it will be changed in the next fortnight, and I will move on to that in a moment.

I do not want to dwell on the risks of no deal in practice because I do not wish to repeat what others have said perfectly eloquently. So then we turn to this process, and I simply point out that it is very unfortunate that instead of what I understood yesterday would be a clear opportunity for this House to express itself against the principle of no deal and make clear that we do not want it before moving on tomorrow to discuss what we might do to prevent it, which is a real issue, the Government have tabled a motion that gives the distinct impression that, like children, we will be offered the same pudding, if not eaten at lunchtime, at tea time, supper time and now for breakfast, when it is perfectly clear that this House has rejected this pudding in its totality.

As a consequence, something that might bring us together in reasoned debate has started to be undermined by a suspicion that the Government are interested only in forcing a binary choice between no deal and accepting their agreement. Listening to the Secretary of State at the Dispatch Box earlier, I began to realise that perhaps that was not the case, but then why was the motion ever tabled in this fashion? I cannot understand that. In fact, the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman) was correct in trying to identify and deal with that mischief.

The Government have a point, however. I agreed with a lot of what the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) said, and there is an issue here. This House has lived under the protection of our party system for a long time. I am now beginning to see a distinction on my Benches, and actually on the other Benches, between those of us who have in a sense exposed ourselves and as a consequence get a huge amount of threats, flak and invective, and those of my colleagues—I do not include the Prime Minister in this, because she has many a burden—who are hiding behind the party system to avoid making the difficult choices. We cannot go on doing this. The party system might restore itself—I rather hope that it does—but as things stand at the moment, it is blown to pieces.

We have to make the decisions. Are we going to find a motion to accept the Prime Minister’s deal being offered up again? I do not want that, because I think that it is a poor deal, despite her best efforts. Are we going to find some other deal? Or are we going to revoke? Revocation is not something that I would wish to do without going back to the public, because in the light of the referendum, that would be a rather draconian and dangerous step. However, we will have to address that question because, otherwise, we will go round in circles and the Minister is right to say that we will eventually run out of time. We will simply have pushed back the cliff edge. We will have to resolve this, but at the moment, the Government are not helping by tabling motions of this tendentious character. I really urge my colleagues on the Front Bench to face up to their responsibility and to ensure, first, that we get some clarity from them tonight, and secondly, that we can take this debate forward.