European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019 (Rule of Law)

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ian Austin]

The more Labour Members interrupt, the longer it will take: I am going to make these points. The reason I have not moved is that I did not leave the Labour party to join another party; I left the Labour party to shine a spotlight on the disgrace it has become under the Leader of the Opposition’s leadership and because I regard myself as proper, decent, traditional Labour, not like the extremists who have taken over this party and are dragging it into the mud. That is the point I am going to make in this debate.

These are people—the Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Chancellor—who have spent their entire time in politics working with and defending all sorts of extremists, and in some cases terrorists and antisemites. We should remember what these people said about the IRA. It might be ancient history to the Labour party’s new young recruits, but many people will never forget how they supported terrorists responsible for horrific carnage in a brutal civil war that saw people blown up in pubs and hotels and shopping centres.

A few weeks after the IRA blew up a hotel in Brighton—murdered five people at the Tory party conference—the Leader of the Opposition invited two suspected IRA terrorists to Parliament, and when the man responsible for planting that bomb was put on trial he protested outside the court. The shadow Chancellor said that

“those people involved in the armed struggle”

—people he said had used “bombs and bullets”—

should be honoured. And they have the brass neck to lecture anybody about the rule of law; what a disgrace.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I understand that this debate is about whether the Prime Minister obeys the rule of law, not whether Members talked to people who allegedly have broken the law; it is about whether we deliver the rule of law.

[Mr Speaker]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and his antennae are keenly attuned to the debate. There is a fine dividing line, and the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is dilating on the broad theme of disregard, bordering on contempt, for the law. If I think he has elided into a wholly different subject then I will always profit by the counsels of the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), but for now the hon. Member for Dudley North is all right—just. But I do warn him that I hope his speech tonight is, given that many others wish to contribute, not going to be as long as the speeches he used to deliver at the students union at the University of Essex 36 years ago, when we jousted together; it needs to be shorter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Our fundamental values are democracy, human rights and the rule of law—those are our fundamental values across Europe—yet we now have a Prime Minister who says he would prefer to die in a ditch than to deliver a law that was developed by our democracy, the mother of all democracies, in order to protect people’s human rights and prevent no deal. We have not seen the implications of no deal, but a lot of it has leaked out. The reality is that nobody in Britain voted for no deal. People did not vote to get out, “do or die”, on 31 October. They do not want to die.

The majority voted to leave, but the people who did so in Swansea say to me that they voted for more money, more jobs and more control. Now they learn that they will not get any of those from Brexit. We see Ford leaving Bridgend, we see Airbus leaving and we see problems with Tata Steel. We see no more control and no more money. Those people who voted leave deserve a final say and a final vote. They certainly did not vote for no deal. It is a bit like people agreeing to go to the cinema to see a love story or a comedy and ending up with a chainsaw massacre. They are being told that they agreed to go to the cinema, but now it is the chainsaw massacre and they still have to go in.

This links me back to no deal. In Wales we are going to see the slaughter of millions of sheep because we will be unable to export them, given the immediate 40% tariffs that will be imposed. We also know that 1 million diabetic people in Britain will be at risk of not having enough insulin. The list goes on, yet the Prime Minister—who has failed to turn up to this debate about whether the Government will deliver the rule of law—is now known not to be negotiating. Instead, he is spending £100 million of taxpayers’ money on delivering propaganda even though he knows from Operation Sledgehammer, or whatever it is called—Operation Yellowhammer—that we face calamitous ruin.

The unfortunate truth is that the Prime Minister is spreading the contagion of nationalist populism: the basic idea that we here are better than the Europeans over there, and that if we have a problem here, it is their fault over there. We have seen it before with Donald Trump talking about the Mexicans, the wall, the Muslims and the blacks. We have seen it in Germany with the Jews. Now we have heard it here, with people talking about the Europeans. Nigel Farage’s narrative has now been taken on by the Prime Minister when he says, “Oh, they voted leave three years ago and nothing could be simpler: just leave. The reason we’re not leaving is because MPs are corrupt and parliamentary democracy is rotten.”

It is easy for everyone here to agree to leave. The difficult business is getting us all to agree where we are going to. It is no surprise that a lot of parliamentarians think the deal would have made us too close to Europe, while a lot think we would have been too far from it. We do not agree—this is not easy, and everybody here knows that—but the lie is spread around that it is the people versus Parliament, or the people versus the courts. Tonight, we are here to defend our fundamental values of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, and it is those institutional values that are under attack on the footway to neo-fascism.

The Prime Minister wants an immediate election in the hope that the Brexit vote will unite and think that he is mad enough to vote for no deal, and that the remain vote will divide, so that he can say, “We’ll have no deal. Everything will be all right.” We know that people like Dominic Cummings, Farage and others want to undermine our fundamental democratic institutions, whether the BBC, the civil service, the universities or parliamentary democracy itself. We face a chilling time and a moment of truth as we wait to see whether the Prime Minister will in fact obey democratically agreed laws. He is willing to go around promoting the lie that no deal can be delivered without massive collateral damage. The democratic world is looking to us, as the mother of all Parliaments, to see whether we will ensure that the rule of law and democracy go forward. We must show the rest of Europe and the rest of the world that we will not bow to the language of popular tyranny, but stand true to the rule of law and democracy and move forward.