European Union (Withdrawal) Act
Debate between Emily Thornberry and John Redwood(6 years ago)
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Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
This has been an excellent debate covering a range of vital and urgent issues. I am not going to repeat the many compelling points made by the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) in her speech. I cannot do adequate justice to all the other 48 contributions that have been made, some of which I missed. I am told, however, that there was a typically brilliant speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David).
In the time I have available, let me highlight those contributions which I believe best sum up why the Prime Minister’s proposed Brexit deal would leave us less secure as a country and would not deliver the fair rules for migration that we need—two out of Labour’s six tests failed in one debate. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, said, we are being asked to make this decision without even seeing the immigration White Paper we were promised. We therefore have no detailed idea of what the new migration rules will say or how they will work in practice. She also said that we are being asked to support a political agreement that is entirely silent on our future access to the SIS II database and will leave our police and security services less well able to protect the public than they are at present. As the former universities Minister, the hon. Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), pointed out, if we are being cut out of the Galileo database even while the agreement is being discussed, what hope do we have of negotiating access to other vital databases once the agreement has been signed?
We also heard an important contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly), who talked about his German lessons at school and the lessons from history that show that our place in the world is not strengthened but diminished when we cut ourselves off from Europe—a point also made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma). From the Chair of the Health Committee, the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), we heard about the grave consequences of the dangers of this deal, and even worse of no deal, for the national health service, both for medical supplies and for medical staff. That is something that the Foreign Secretary should understand better than anyone, because that is what he used to say when campaigning for remain.
We were reminded by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin) not just that EU co-operation and networks help to keep our country safe from crime and terrorism, but that the Prime Minister personally fought to keep our part in them when she was Home Secretary. Now, however, she cannot guarantee that they will continue. My hon. Friends the Members for Cardiff North and for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) both rightly said—I agree with them—that far from helping to maintain Europe’s leadership on climate change, which is the single biggest threat to the world’s long-term security, this political agreement cannot even guarantee that we will continue to agree a common position in future international negotiations. Indeed, let us note that it used to be one of the warnings against a no-deal Brexit that Britain could lose access to the EU emissions trading scheme. However, even this supposed deal does not guarantee that continued access, and says only that the parties should “consider” co-operation—just one of many foreign policy sections of the document where clear, existing agreements on co-operation have been replaced by vague, loose aspirations.
What this debate and all the many contributions have laid bare is that on the first duty of every Government—the duty to protect the safety and security of their citizens—the Prime Minister’s deal fails. I hope that when the Foreign Secretary speaks in a moment, he will address the points that I have mentioned: access to vital security databases—
Emily Thornberry
No, I have been asked not to take interventions at this stage of the evening.
Scotland Bill
Debate between Emily Thornberry and John Redwood(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
There seems to be cross-party support in this place for legislation that would substantially implement the recommendations of the Smith commission. We have heard some interesting contributions, not least from the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson). We all wait with bated breath to see what amendments will be tabled to the Bill to try to establish full fiscal autonomy for Scotland. We certainly hope that in order to fulfil that promise, the amendment will be a little stronger than the one on the Order Paper today, which is all about Scotland moving to
“a position in the medium term where the Scottish Parliament and Government are responsible for all revenue raising”.
That seems to me to be a lot of weasel words and very far away from full fiscal autonomy.
There has been a certain amount of interest in this pledge from people watching the debate in this place, and I have been asked by many where the Scots believe they will get the money needed to fill the hole—we understand it might be £7.6 billion or even £10 billion. However much it is, people in Scotland and presumably across the whole of the United Kingdom will want to know from the Scottish nationalists where that money is going to come from, if they get full fiscal autonomy. The prime opportunity comes from introducing an amendment to this Bill, and we all wait to see what it is going to say.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
When the hon. Lady’s party introduced devolution at the end of the last century, it said that it would settle the kingdom once and for all, and that Scotland would then live very happily in the Union. What went wrong?
Emily Thornberry
The right hon. Gentleman will, I am sure, realise that we have all moved on in the last 100 years and that things change and we have become different people, but I think the majority of people in these islands identify as British. We saw that in the referendum result and the feelings expressed across the whole of this nation, and the important thing is that we remain a United Kingdom. With the devolution being introduced today, which will be a continuing devolution, we must nevertheless remain a United Kingdom. I believe I speak on behalf of the vast majority of people in Great Britain when I say that.
What concerns me about the Bill, however, is how the Sewel convention will be implemented. The Smith commission recommends that the Sewel convention be placed on a statutory footing. However, despite the Secretary of State’s contention that the Bill will implement the commission’s recommendations in full, in my view clause 2 falls short of fulfilling that promise.
In the 1998 debate on the Scotland Bill of that year, Lord Sewel said:
“However, as happened in Northern Ireland earlier in the century, we would expect a convention to be established that Westminster would not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters in Scotland without the consent of the Scottish parliament.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 July 1998; Vol. 592, c. 791.]
In seeking to put this convention on a statutory footing, the Bill uses identical language, stating that
“it is recognised that the Parliament of the United Kingdom will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament.”
What does that mean? Does that mean we will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament unless the UK Parliament does not like it? It seems rather an odd way of proceeding and it is a funny way to write the law.
In its report on the Government’s draft proposals, the House of Lords Constitution Committee described this in much more measured terms than I would. [Interruption.] It says
“the use of the word normally…is unusual in legislation and is undefined.”
[Interruption.] The Secretary of State, who is the only Scottish MP on the Government Benches, should listen: the House of Lords Constitution Committee says his legislation is nonsense, and he should listen.
The inevitable question is what the Government mean by “normally”. Language that may be appropriately applied to a convention may well be inappropriate in statute. For instance, we might pass legislation that says, “Normally, it is illegal to steal someone’s wallet”—except when it is legal—or, “Normally, millionaires should pay their fair share of tax”, although perhaps that is a bad example. How about this example, then? Legislation might say, “Normally, it would be illegal to blow up the Houses of Parliament,” but there might be circumstances in which it was legal. This is the legislation being put before us by the Government today.
Debate on the Address
Debate between Emily Thornberry and John Redwood(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Emily Thornberry
Of course I do, but I still feel British and as part of being British I want our country to remain united with Scotland. I want us to be British and I do not want to see the fracturing of our nation. The irresponsible way in which the Government have played those cards in the past few weeks and months has put at risk our very Union. I do not want to be pompous about this, but I am profoundly worried.
It has not been enough for the Government simply to do that. They have also been playing to their Back Benches, playing the Eurosceptic card and playing for good headlines in the Daily Mail, but they are also playing with the future of our country. The Conservative party seems to me to have moved far away from the Conservative party of Churchill that tried after the second world war to have a future for us in Europe, bound together by common ideals and principles. Those ideals, expressed in the treaty, have been looked after by the European Court of Human Rights over the past few decades. British Conservative lawyers wrote the European convention on human rights, which we have imported into this country.
Over the past few decades the Foreign Office has promoted human rights around the world; I am proud of that and want it to continue. The idea that we will pass a British Bill of privileges—under which certain people will be given rights and others will not, under which certain people will be more important than others, under which we will not have rights simply because we are human and under which we will not all be equal—and that we will not have legislation that fights for the weak against the strong is disgraceful. It is disgraceful that we are travelling down this road. How can we hold our head up high internationally if we are going to pull the rug from under a system of international treaties through which we have promoted human rights? Our legislation, written by us, is essentially part of a form of legal imperialism sent around the world to set a series of minimum standards of which I am very proud.
John Redwood
The hon. Lady might like to note that Churchill, in his Zurich and Fulton, Missouri speeches, made it very clear that the European Union would not have the UK as a member but that we would join a union of the English-speaking peoples. That was also the conclusion of his “History of the English-Speaking Peoples”. He did not write a history of the European peoples.
Emily Thornberry
I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that 67 years ago, Churchill said:
“The Movement for Europe…must be a positive force, deriving its strength from our sense of common spiritual values. It is a dynamic expression of democratic faith based upon moral conceptions and inspired by a sense of mission. In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law.”