European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting
Tuesday 7th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

There may be a staging process; we do not know how the negotiations are going to roll out yet. Michel Barnier said that Brussels could take contingency measures to deal with those kinds of issue, because he does not want economic disruption. There is an appetite on both sides. What the European Union has done far better than the UK Parliament is negotiate as a bloc, together. There has not ever been any difficulty from its side in terms of people wanting different things, whereas clearly the UK Parliament has not behaved like that. As a result, the biggest vulnerability within the European Union from a poor trade deal or no trade deal is with regard to the Republic of Ireland.

The Republic of Ireland’s GDP growth rate is around 5%. Most financial commentators say that if there was a no-deal Brexit, the Republic of Ireland would go into recession. The EU would not want that. It would not leave the Republic of Ireland behind. The UK has imperatives in striking a deal and so has the EU. To my mind, that means we can do a deal in the next 12 months. I urge the Opposition to have more confidence in their position. The remarks from the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman, betrayed a lack of confidence, appetite and enthusiasm for this whole thing.

We cannot deal with Brexit like this—and I voted to remain. We must walk forward with confidence not only about our new relationship with the European Union, but, crucially at this time, about our negotiations on the trade deal.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir George.

It has been mentioned that I am the only Labour Back Bencher in the Chamber, which is a double privilege. First, I think I am the only Labour leaver from the last Parliament left in the House. Secondly, the hustings for the start of the Labour leadership election are going on upstairs, which is important. One of my party’s problems is that although many of our supporters voted to leave the EU—and are enthusiastic about leaving—they are very poorly represented in the Labour party itself.

There is an element of tilting at windmills in this debate. I do not believe the catastrophe theories about the next 11 months or so. The public want us to get out, and it is in the mutual interest of the EU and its member states and the UK to get as good a deal as possible, so I do not believe the catastrophic predictions. I voted against the previous Prime Minister’s deal three times, and against the current Prime Minister’s deal—in November, I think—but I did so because there were not simple majorities and I believed there was a better deal out there. Going through the Lobby, I was aware that some were voting against because they wanted a better deal—one we believed would better represent the decision in the 2016 referendum—but that others were voting to delay the process because they wanted, either by measures in this Chamber or by a second referendum, to overturn the 2016 decision itself.

I am pleased we are now to leave the EU on 31 January, but I am less pleased that, because of tactical mistakes made by my colleagues, we are in a minority against the Conservative Government and look like being so for some time. I take issue with both the philosophy and the detail of the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) from the Front Bench. The debate about whether we should remain in or leave the EU was never simply about the economy. Much of the debate—certainly this is one of the things that has motivated me since the 1975 referendum, when I voted to leave—is about the democratic argument. I believe it is better for both the economy and our society if people in this country elect the people who make our laws rather than letting unelected and appointed people in other countries make them. That is a fundamental principle of democracy. Without it, we simply do not have a democracy. I also think that making our own regulations and laws for our own industries is likely to make us economically more efficient and proficient.

The other side of my hon. Friend’s argument is that the Conservatives want a race to the bottom. They might or might not. I am in the Labour party, not the Conservative party, because my philosophy differs from theirs on many issues, but it is better in a democracy if we argue those issues out in general elections such as the one we have just had. If the Conservatives, as they tend to, want a more free-market approach, they should argue for that, and if we want a more interventionist approach, we should argue for that, and whether we win or lose the argument is up to the electorate. At present, however, our ability to support our own industries depends not on whether we or the Conservatives win an election, but on rules for state intervention and support set down by the EU.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

As always, the hon. Gentleman is making a compelling argument. I congratulate him not only on his insight but on his consistency. In the end, this is a question of who exercises power and from where, in exactly the way he describes. For too long, too many people on both sides of the House have seen this argument through an economic prism, but it is actually about who decides our destiny, and it should be the British people through those they choose to speak for them here.

[Graham Stringer]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He will not necessarily take this as a compliment, but Tony Benn could have made those points, because they have run through the arguments of both Conservative and Labour Members who support leaving the EU ever since we joined in 1972.

Not only is it better that those decisions be taken here, but it is often assumed that the EU is good for the economy and the protection of trade union and environmental rights, yet quite a lot of evidence runs counter to that. I am not an expert on fishing, but the discard rule has been an environmental disaster in the North sea. I understand quite a bit about trade union protections and legislation and I never get a satisfactory answer from my side about the Laval and Viking decisions of the European Court of Justice. Not only do they undermine the minimum wage and the nature and definition of a trade dispute; they are effectively unchangeable, as we in this country cannot change laws made by the ECJ. That is what is fundamentally wrong with being a member of the EU.

I have no doubt that there will be changes when we leave the EU—people will be able to claim there has been a negative economic change there or a positive one here—but that happens all the time. Where has our paper industry gone? Has it been helped by the EU and its regulations? What about our agrochemical industry? It was essentially destroyed by European legislation, but I do not hear people in this Chamber arguing against the EU in that regard. It is accepted—I do not know why—that the EU will always be good for these things.

If new clause 4 were to be put to the vote, I would not join my colleagues in support of it. I agree with what Labour Front Benchers have said—that we should use the debate on the Bill to improve things—but going over the debate we have been having in this Chamber since 2016 will not do that. I have no idea—I have not counted up the time—but my guess is that we have spent as much time in this Chamber discussing the 2016 referendum, at which we committed to giving the people the choice, as we did debating both the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties put together. I understand, however, that Front Benchers do not intend to put the new clause to a vote. I hope they can be more constructive as we continue this debate.

[Sammy Wilson]

The Democratic Unionist party will be supporting clause 33, though tomorrow we will be tabling amendments to the Bill, because, although we accept that it is essential to get out of the EU as quickly as possible, we believe that the terms of the withdrawal agreement are detrimental to Northern Ireland. The purpose, however, of any amendments my party puts forward will be to assist the process of leaving the EU and to ensure that the whole UK leaves. That is not the case with new clauses 4 and 36, which are designed to extend the period for which we stay in the EU and would make it much more difficult to have a clean break.

Have we learned nothing from the tactics the EU has used over the last few years? The longer the period, the more it can hold back, and the more demands it can make. We have seen that time and again.

The last Parliament made it clear that it would not give the Government the support that they needed to move forward with a deal. The EU dug its heels in deeper, and did not try to be accommodating. What is important about clause 33 is that it draws a line, sends a signal and makes the position very clear. It says, “Here is the deadline: now get on with the negotiations.” No clearer message could be sent to those who are negotiating on the EU’s behalf.

Indeed it is significant that, although we were formerly told that a trade deal could take years to negotiate, the language is suddenly changing because the arithmetic in the House has changed and the Government’s will is different. We are now being told, “Well, it might not be as difficult as it was for Canada and Japan. After all, we are starting from the same place, and we have a lot of the same regulations”—and there are a number of other reasons why the negotiation might be easier than we were previously told that it would be.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

The hon. Lady makes an important point that has been raised during questions to this Department before. I have taken it up with the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that all efforts are made to make sure that children in care are properly entered into the settled status system by those who care for them. I am happy to forward that correspondence to her so that she can see the follow-up that has already been done on that front.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

7. What discussions he has had with the European Commission on the applicability of Article 24 of the WTO General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in relation to the UK leaving the EU.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (James Cleverly)]

The Government and the European Commission have been clear that our trading relationship must comply with WTO rules. Under the withdrawal agreement, the implementation period is compatible with GATT article 24. In addition, paragraph 17 of the political declaration envisages the UK and the EU forming a free trade area, which will also be compatible with article 24.

[Graham Stringer]

On an all-party visit to the World Trade Organisation, it was made clear that if there was the prospect of a negotiated free trade agreement in the future, tariff-free trade could continue. Does the Minister agree that if the EU does not agree to that negotiated free trade in the future, which would allow tariff-free trade on leaving, that will be because it wants to punish the UK, not come to the best agreement in the interests of its people?

[James Cleverly]

I am not in a position to credibly assess the motivations of the European Union. The British Government’s position has been clear—it is a long-standing position—that it is in our mutual interest to come to a trading relationship between the UK and the EU. We will continue to seek to do so.

EU: Withdrawal and Future Relationship (Motions)

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I plan to be uncompromising in my opposition to motions (M) and (L), and then, without a hint of hypocrisy, argue for compromise for where we end up.

We have heard a lot recently about marches. The only march that I am interested in is the march of my constituents to vote in the 2016 referendum, as they were asked to do by this Parliament, and to decide for a final time whether we should remain a member of the European Union. We were promised by both sides of the campaign that the decision of the people would be implemented—that is what both the remain and the leave sides said.

The remain side spent the whole campaign telling voters how terribly complex and difficult leaving the European Union was going to be, and yet people still went out to vote, many for the first time in my constituency. I had people stopping me on referendum day, saying, “How do I vote? Where do I go? I want to express my opinion on this question, which Parliament has told me is mine to make and will be implemented.” Now, just because some Members do not like the decision—or, rather, because we have messed up the whole process of leaving—it is completely unacceptable to turn around, go back to those people and say, “We’ve made such a terrible mess of it that we’re going to go back on all of those promises.”

I am appalled at the way in which many of my voters—70% of them went out and voted leave—have been belittled and besmirched since they took the decision they were asked to make. Their age has been made an issue; how, in a democracy, can age be an issue as to how valuable someone’s vote is? Their educational standards have been made an issue—apparently, whether someone has a degree or not places some sort of value on their vote. They have been told that they live in the wrong part of the country and that they have views that they do not have—people have told them why it is that they took the democratic decision that they had every right to take and that they were promised by this House and by both sides of the campaign would be implemented.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

rose—

[Andrew Percy]

I am not going to give way, because I want to stick to the five-minute limit.

It would be appalling to go back and hold a second referendum. A constituent contacted me the other day and said, “Why is it, in this matter of the European Union, that remain has to win only once but leave has to win twice for our decision to be implemented?” What am I meant to say to them? Yes, the issue is complicated and difficult. Some people in this place may even have deliberately made it more complicated than it needed to be so that they could be proven right. Certainly, there has been incompetence that has made it more difficult than it should have been, and I will not say where that incompetence has necessarily come from. It would be appalling to go back to constituents.

I also think it would unleash something pretty dangerous. I am saddened by how certain elements at the extremes of the political sphere have tried to take hold of the issue for their own particular, disgusting brand of politics, which I want nothing to do with. There is no doubt that those people would play a bigger role in a second referendum. It would divide the country, but for what purpose? Current polling shows that it might reverse the result. I think that this is a very dangerous thing that this House should avoid at all costs.

I do not have time to say a great deal about the idea of revocation, which has been suggested by the SNP. I do wonder what its response would have been had it been successful in the Scottish referendum and this House had then decided that it knew better and revoked the result.

Now to the compromise, Mr Speaker. Since I came to this place, my views on Europe have not changed. Some of my colleagues have moved into positions I cannot get my head around, but we need to bring this to a conclusion. We need to do that through a process of compromise. There is a lot in the Prime Minister’s deal I do not like, but I have voted for it and will continue to vote for it. I put my name to the amendments for common market 2.0 and for EFTA. I have concerns about free movement, because some of my constituents clearly have very strong views on that, but this is a way in which we can come together. We can accept the result of the referendum, which was people saying very definitely that they do not like the political institutions of the European Union. There is a way through this, so the House should look very closely at the propositions on common market 2.0 and EFTA. I will be supporting them. I will be voting for every leave option this evening, because I just want to get this damn thing over with and resolved in line with what my constituents voted for in 2016.

My final comment is this. I hope that we will—I have been a big supporter of yours in the Chair, Mr Speaker—have the opportunity to again vote on the Prime Minister’s deal. I do think that this is an important way of trying to bring this to a close.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Hoey]

I am not giving way to the hon. Member.

It is outrageous. Labour supporters and voters who came back to Labour and voted Labour, having dallied with UKIP for a while and believing that Labour meant what it said, would see it as a huge betrayal.

[Graham Stringer]

I agree with the thrust of my hon. Friend’s argument. Does she agree that the argument being put in the Chamber today that we should give people a second vote because they have changed their mind would lead to a “neverendum”—people could change their mind every year, though all the polling evidence, as presented by John Curtice, is that they have not changed their mind—and that about 98% of the people promoting a second referendum are remainers?

[Kate Hoey]

My hon. Friend is quite right. On that basis, we would have to have general elections practically every month. Some people might change their minds the day after they voted. We cannot go down the road.

I have a big remain constituency, but I have made very clear from day one—and I shall have been in this place for 30 years in June—that I want us to get out of the EU. Everyone has known my views, so I have no apology to make for campaigning to leave. A constituent wrote to me saying that he had thought that the manifestos of the Labour party and Conservative party—the two main parties—had said, “We will implement the result of the referendum.” There is nothing difficult about the word “leave”. It is very simple. Members have deliberately made it difficult here.

My constituent wrote:

“Can we the electorate now expect that anything promised in a manifesto is to be honoured, that it should be written into law, that, if you promise a course of action, you must follow through and make it happen.”

Why, he asked, do party leaders order three-line whips so that what they promised in the manifesto can be reneged on?

I think that we are in a very dangerous situation in the House. We are trying to thwart the will of the people, but democracy cannot be compromised. Outside, there is huge anger. We may not see it here in London, particularly in areas where there was a large remain vote, but there is huge anger elsewhere, and it is growing. We have backed ourselves into a hole, and now the only way out is for us either to leave with a World Trade Organisation agreement, or to find a way in which the withdrawal agreement can be changed so that we can accept it—and that means that there must be a change in the backstop.

Nearly all the motions involve compromise. I make no apology for saying that I do not think we should be compromising with the electorate. I mean no criticism of you, Mr Speaker, but it is very unfortunate that motion (E) was not selected, because it is the one motion that we could all have gone along with, if we believed in the referendum result. Anyone who votes to revoke tonight is actually saying, “We do not accept that result— we never did, and we never will.” I hope that that motion will be turned down.

Leaving the EU

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I agree with much of what the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) said, except his final conclusion that somehow this deal is a way forward. There are a number of reasons why it is not. First, it is not a deal; it is an agreement to have negotiations for a final deal. On Sunday, Neil Warnock, the manager of Cardiff City—I am not used to quoting him on his political stance or on football matters—spoke for probably the majority of the United Kingdom when he said that the Government should get on and implement what the people had decided in the referendum. After two and half years, that should happen, but the Government have not done so. They have come back with an agreement to negotiate that the Prime Minister should be embarrassed about. It leaves control over the end of that negotiation, and over whether Northern Ireland has different laws from the rest of the United Kingdom, subject to a different legislature. That is an outrage. It is an embarrassment to the Prime Minister and a disgrace to the country that anybody, of whichever political party, would bring back a deal like that.

The debate on the petitions ranges all over the place, but it is worth going back to the referendum. The wording of the referendum was unambiguous and unconditional. There was no condition on the ballot paper. It was absolutely clear that if people voted one way they were voting to remain in the EU, and if they voted in the other box they were voting to leave. The Prime Minister has not managed to deliver the result. Since then, we have had a vote to trigger article 50, which passed by a huge majority. In many cases, although not in all, remainers have looked for ways to undermine the decision, even though it was unconditional and unambiguous. A number of statements have been made, which at first sound quite sensible. I hear regularly in the Chamber, and I have heard it said here, that people did not vote to make themselves poorer. I know they did not—it is true—but they did not vote to make themselves richer. They voted to leave the European Union.

The statement that people did not vote to make themselves poorer has two implications. One is that people never vote to make themselves poorer—that it would be absurd even to think that. But a moment’s thought shows that that is absolutely not true. Right hon. and hon. Members in this Chamber regularly stand for election on manifestos that contain tax commitments. Tax commitments are a way of confiscating people’s income and capital resources, and they make people poorer. We all vote for them, and we all stand on manifestos that make people poorer, usually for social and public benefit. I think it is a nonsensical statement. It appears to have credibility—who could disagree with it?—but its objective and purpose are to undermine the democratic decision that was taken by more than 17.4 million people, as the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam said.

The other implication is that being in the EU always makes us richer and never makes us poorer, and that its decisions always benefit the people of the United Kingdom and the EU. That is demonstrably not true. As a member of the Labour party for many years who opposed the monetarism of the early 1980s, I am astonished that members of the Labour party are so wedded to the EU, which has at the core of its policies the stability and growth pact. The stability and growth pact is, in fact, monetarism; it is Thatcherism internationalised. It is not just abstract thought. It is one of the reasons why youth across the whole of southern Europe have lost the democratic right to determine what happens in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and why there is a whole generation of young people on the dole. The situation has been created by the macroeconomic policies at the centre of EU policy. The policy does not just affect those people; by deflating the EU economy, it affects our ability to export there.

There are many examples of perverse EU decisions that have led, and will lead, to job losses. Last summer, the European Court of Justice, in line with what the EU Commission had said, ruled that the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which is about inserting parts of genes into crops, was unlawful. That decision has been widely condemned throughout the scientific community as anti-scientific and as having “a chilling effect” on research and the economy. The rest of the world is happy to get on with it, because this technology, where it exists, leads to a drop of about a third in the use of herbicides and a 20% increase in crops. That decision will damage UK and European science, and related jobs in science and agriculture, and it may lead to less food. It is extraordinary that the CRISPR technology has, in effect, been banned, while new crops created by random genetic mutation—using irradiation, so there is no controlling what happens—are allowed.

I use those examples—one economic one, at the huge end of things, and a specific scientific one—to illustrate the point that it is nonsensical to think that the EU always makes decisions that lead to more jobs, more growth and better science. It simply does not. I believe fundamentally that we would get better regulations if we made them ourselves, for our own industry and science, rather than having them designed to fit across the 27 or 28 countries of the EU.

Another argument that is made for a second referendum, or for not implementing the 2016 referendum, is that people did not understand what they were voting for. As I said, it was a simple proposition, and people did know what they were voting for—to leave the European Union. Having talked during the period of the referendum to people I represent from some of the poorest estates in the country, it is fairly clear to me that they knew exactly what they were voting for. It is an insult to them to say they did not know. The implication is that the educated, cosmopolitan elite are superior, and that their votes should weigh more than the votes of people in poorer parts of the country without degrees and A-levels. I do not believe that, and I guess that if it is stated explicitly, most people in the Chamber do not believe it, but that is at the base of “didn’t understand it”. If people did not understand a simple proposition such as the one about leaving the European Union, how are they going to understand the pre-negotiation agreement, with its 585—or perhaps it is 685—pages of nonsensical legal script? They are not going to. It is ludicrous to pretend that that is easier to understand than the simple proposition.

Also, if we are to ignore the first referendum, what credibility would a second have? What credibility would any future referendum have? Would we have to say, when it was agreed to hold a referendum, “We’ll have a first one, and if it goes the way the establishment would not like, we will make it the best of three”? That is what the proposition for a second referendum is like. We should not proceed with a second referendum. We have had many debates about it here and on the Floor of the House, and we should not have another.

I have one further point to make about the economic impact of the EU. It is assumed not just that the EU is economically beneficial to us, but that stopping the current trading arrangements, under which we are in the EU internal market, would be wholly negative. We are running a huge trade deficit of between £70 billion and £80 billion a year. I think that if the rules are changed we will get a lot of substitution. Jobs will be created here, because any tariffs—and possibly a drop in the pound—would make it cheaper to manufacture here. Why we consider it so economically advantageous to us to be in an internal market where we have a huge trade deficit, I do not know.

It is worth thinking about why the EU had done as it has. We are in complete regulatory alignment with it, and it has a trade surplus with us. We have been paying a lot of money into it. The reason why many of the university exchanges work is, to put it bluntly, that our top universities are better than the EU’s. To take a simple criterion such as the number of Nobel awards, one college at Cambridge has won more Nobel prizes than the top universities in the EU. They need our universities. So what motivates the European Commission to be so unaccommodating in the negotiation? I do not think it is to do with trade. The Commission is prepared to punish EU citizens by coming to what is, from their point of view, a bad deal, given their trade surplus, because it does not want any other states to follow our example. I think that it is partly its non-democratic nature that is responsible for what is happening around the EU—not only economic problems on the southern coast, but the rise of the far right in many countries. It is extraordinary that in my political lifetime there should be a party of the far right in Sweden, and that Sweden—one of the great, long-standing democracies in Europe—should not be able to form a Government. There are other strands to the reasons for the resurgence of the right in Europe, but one is that people can no longer vote for Governments that will do what they want them to, because those factors are determined by the EU.

If it came to a no deal—although frankly it would be better for us to have our cake and eat it, and have a deal beneficial to EU citizens and to us—would it be the end of the world? I agree with the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam that it would not. There would be some short-term disruption, but nothing like the disruption suggested in what the BBC propagates, or in the regular cries of woe heard on the Floor of the House of Commons. However, there is bound to be some disruption. We heard from the sub-prefecture of Calais that there would be no halting of goods there—and why would there be? Why would countries try to make it more difficult for their own industries to export? It has always been a put-up job—the idea that somehow, in support of the European Commission, the French would not want to sell us wine, but would want the people producing wine in Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhône valley to be poorer. That is an extraordinary proposition. The same would be true of Spain and other European countries.

Those things are not going to happen, but when anything is changed there will be some short-term disruption. Because we would be making our own laws, in a very short time there would be major benefits. We would also keep most of the £39 billion that the House of Lords EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee said we had no legal obligation to pay. That would probably give a 2% boost to our GDP. Incidentally, I think I would go to Mystic Meg for predictions about the economy before I would go to the Bank of England, which said that the mere vote to leave the EU would lead to half a million job losses after 23 June. How many jobs were lost? More jobs were created. Yet people regularly state on the floor of the House of Commons that we will have an economic disaster, based not only on the Bank of England but on other think tanks and institutions that are using the same failed models, which do not allow for the flexibility and substitution that exist in the market in this country.

In a more general sense, most of our trade is done under World Trade Organisation rules anyway; most of the world trades under World Trade Organisation rules. I am not saying it is better than what we have—it is not—but it is adequate. The car industry has bleated quite a lot, but the imports of parts are not solely from the EU. Some come from other parts of the world economy. The rest of the world is also where most of the growth is. The EU has been one of the slowest-growing parts of the world economy. It is in Asia, the United States and even South America that most of the growth is occurring, so I do not think we have a great deal to be frightened of on those matters.

I have covered a lot of ground, and one could cover more, because the petitions themselves cover a huge amount of ground, from staying to leaving to what the impact will be. The view that I have set out may not be the majority view in my party or in the House of Commons, but it is the majority view in the country, as the 2016 referendum showed. I remind hon. Members of what the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, said—that the people are sovereign. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said in response, “This is not for Members to decide; it is for you, the public, to decide what happens.” It would be quite wrong for us to stop now.

Sadly, the Government have not come back with a deal after two and a half years, and I will vote against what they have come back with. I agree with the leader of my party that if there is a general election, it may well help to put pressure on the Commission, but one thing we know: if this pretty appalling deal is rejected, the EU is master, or mistress, of the last-minute deal. The EU will suffer more than the UK in absolute terms, although less in percentage terms, if there is no reasonable agreement on 29 March. I do not think tomorrow is the end of the story. I think the Prime Minister should have said at the beginning, “We are not accepting a ridiculous deal like this.” She needs either to go back to the Commission and get a better deal, or to go back to the people; hopefully, the Labour party would then get a mandate to negotiate a better deal.

[Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I will speak in support of the petition that has received more than 300,000 signatures and argues that we should leave the EU on World Trade Organisation terms.

Clearly, a free trade agreement with the EU is optimal. I am an economic liberal and I believe in the benefits of free trade and open markets. However, leaving the EU under the Prime Minister’s deal will restrict our ability to sign free trade agreements with the most exciting and fastest-growing economies in the world. That cannot be allowed to happen. The withdrawal agreement will make the UK a vassal state, a country whose destiny is controlled by the EU and its institutions. That cannot be allowed to happen; it would be a sell-out of the British people.

Leaving on WTO terms should not panic the UK. There are positives to leaving under such a deal when compared with the Prime Minister’s disastrous deal. If we want to take back control of our money, our laws and our borders, keep our £39 billion and trade freely with the rest of the world, a clean WTO Brexit will achieve that. Some in this place have warned that negotiating a new free trade agreement with third parties will be more difficult and we will not be able to achieve such good terms as those negotiated through the European Union, but I believe that argument is flawed.

We all know that the EU is cumbersome; it is over-bureaucratic and full of red tape. For free trade agreements to be signed off in the EU they must be approved by every member state, so the economies and priorities of 27 nations, including individual regions, must be considered. When negotiating our own free trade deals, we can be proactive and seek out opportunities. We can be flexible while the EU is rigid. We can be fast and nimble while the EU is slow and cumbersome. The UK will be free and liberated to sign free trade agreements with the exciting economies of tomorrow.

Let us not talk down the UK. We are the fifth largest economy in the world and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and we speak the global language of business. We have world-class universities and an incredible global reach, and we sit at the heart of the Commonwealth, which is home to 2.4 billion citizens. I could not be prouder to say that I am British and believe in Great Britain and the United Kingdom. We will succeed no matter what lies in our future; we will prevail because our strength and dynamism lie with the British people, not in being part of the European Union.

The reason we are here today is that the Prime Minister’s deal has failed. She has failed to achieve a deal that is good for the UK, but this is the deal before us. The President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has stated:

“I am totally convinced that this is the only deal possible.”

The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, has told the European Parliament that

“the treaty that is on the table is the only deal possible.”

The President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, has also said that the deal agreed is the only possible one, as has our Prime Minister. Let us not forget what the Opposition’s shadow Secretary of State for International Trade, the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), said about Labour’s Brexit plan—I will not use the swear word in the Chamber that he used then.

[Graham Stringer]

He was right.

[Andrea Jenkyns]

Therefore, if politicians want to respect the outcome of the referendum, WTO becomes a legitimate option and it is right that we are here today discussing it. The world has benefited hugely from the considerable progress made in trade liberalisation in the past 70 years, but multilateral liberalisation has slowed and it now needs a new champion. The UK can be that champion. The benefits of free trade are clear to see. The world needs a liberalising voice, and the UK can be that voice at a time when open markets are threatened.

The UK will prosper as a WTO member. We can immediately start further liberalisation with other WTO members on day one. I acknowledge that tariffs are a concern for some, but I ask them to keep in mind my desire for fewer tariffs and fewer restrictions to trade. Currently, under WTO rules, tariffs vary significantly by sector, but we need to see the bigger picture. In the 1980s, the EU’s share of world GDP was about 30%. In 2017 it was about 16% and by 2022 it is expected to fall further to 15%. The EU has a shrinking share of world trade, and Brexiteers can see the benefits of trading freely with the rest of the world, which is growing at a much faster rate than the EU.

The organisation Economists for Free Trade recently released a detailed report that considered the many implications of leaving the EU on WTO terms. In my view, the report shows that, although a deal is preferable, we have nothing to fear from leaving on those terms. From an economic perspective, the report showed that under WTO rules, we would be more prosperous as a country than we are now, and a lot better off than under the Prime Minister’s withdrawal agreement, which would leave us worse off by a staggering £100 billion. The report also showed that under no deal, consumer prices would fall by 8% and there would be an additional boost of 15% to the poorest households. I know many of my constituents would welcome that at a time when ordinary families are feeling the pressure.

It is important to note that since the mid-1980s, British exports to WTO countries have grown three times faster than those to the European single market. In fact, our biggest overseas market is America, and we trade with it on WTO terms. All that, taken together, demonstrates that, despite all the fear-mongering and demonisation of no deal, the reality is that there is nothing to fear. We already conduct much of our trade under those terms, which are essentially a set of global, enforceable rules that outlaw protectionist tricks, discriminatory tariffs and bureaucratic hurdles. The result is free and fair trade for us and our global partners.

After we leave, trade between the UK and the EU can move to WTO rules, meaning tariffs averaging about 3%. Some products have higher tariffs, such as cars, at 10%, with a 4.5% tariff on components from the EU. However, car companies can withstand a 10% tariff on sales into the EU because they have already benefited from a 15% depreciation in the value of sterling. Border checks on components from the EU will be unnecessary, counterproductive for EU exporters, and illegal under WTO rules, which prohibit unnecessary checks. The heads of firms such as Dyson, JCB and Northern Ireland’s Wrightbus support Brexit because they see the long-term benefits of our being free from the EU’s red tape. A WTO Brexit can achieve that.

I may have agreed with the decision to leave the EU, but it was the British people, not politicians in this place, who decided to leave, and their decision must be upheld. I was only elected to this place in 2015. I am not a career politician and I never worked in the Westminster bubble before being elected. I may not have had the traditional route into politics, but I strongly think that that is a positive. Trust in elected politicians is vital if the public are to have faith in this place and in the democratic process. I aim to uphold that trust. It is naïve to think that we know better.

My constituents know best: they know how best to run their lives and spend their money, and they know what is best for their country. They voted for Brexit, and Brexit must prevail, be that under a WTO Brexit or under a better deal than that agreed by the Prime Minister. My constituency, the Yorkshire and the Humber region and the country voted to leave the EU. We need to leave the European Union and its institutions and take advantage of the opportunities that Brexit can deliver.

I wanted a deal like the Prime Minister’s vision in her Lancaster House speech, which would have satisfied the referendum result. However, the Prime Minister decided, mistakenly, to no longer pursue that vision. Moving to WTO rules will achieve that global Britain vision. We want to be in Europe but not run by Europe. We want to be a truly global, free-trading powerhouse. That can still be achieved, but only by trading under WTO rules. Let us now look to the future, where we can all be free from the EU, to make our own decisions and to chart our own destiny.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

This may be the first time I have served under your chairship, Mr Hanson. It is a pleasure to do so.

I am a patriot. I love my country. Serving my neighbours, estate, city and country is the most important thing I can do with my life, which is why I come here every week. I leave my family on a Monday morning and desperately hope to get back by the time I said I would, not breaking any promises along the way. I find that that is the best way to do it.

This week we arrive at the significant crossroads that we have been approaching for several weeks. There are a number of paths ahead of us, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some options will please some people, others will please other people, and none will please everybody. In fact, I presume that every option will anger significant portions of our society. I say that as a preamble because when talking to friends in a more relaxed setting over Christmas—this may have happened to other hon. Members as well—people would try desperately not to talk about Brexit, but eventually somebody would ask why it is taking so long. This debate, and the petitions that sit behind it, show precisely why it is taking so long. The subject is difficult and unclear, and there are multiple points of view.

I attended this debate because I think it neatly encapsulates that. The arguments in favour of the Prime Minister’s deal, as well as those in favour of no deal, a new deal and another vote, all have things going for them—that is not a very popular thing to say, but I believe it to be true—but they also have a lot not going for them. Those who support those options do so with a deep passion, and those who do not often oppose them with a deep anger. I believe that virtually everybody holds a sincere belief that their course is the correct one to follow.

The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) skilfully introduced the debate, which covers such a broad and contrasting set of views. However, it is interesting that each of the petitions states as fact assertions that the others say are not facts. That shows that this is a difficult subject, which is why it is up to us in this place—we have put up our hands and said that we, as patriots, want to lead our local communities and our country because we care about them—to pick through it and arrive at a solution that serves our nation’s best interests.

Tomorrow will be our first test. Our first choice will be laid out in front of us—whether to accept to Prime Minister’s deal or not. I will vote against the Prime Minister’s deal. I cannot in good conscience bind our nation to a 585-page legally binding withdrawal agreement in pursuit of a well-meant but non-binding political declaration. I believe that this document threatens our historic Union and, frankly, that it does not please or deliver for those who wish to leave or to remain.

The deal is the result of the sum total of 31 months of negotiation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) said, probably rather more artfully than me, it is a pre-agreement rather than a deal. Do we think that we will have negotiated a comprehensive deal by the end of 2020? No, of course not; I do not think anybody believes that. We could therefore apply the extension. Do we think we will have negotiated a deal by the end of 2022? Using the narrowest definition, the EU-Canada comprehensive economic and trade agreement took five years of pure negotiation. Do we think that we could do it in less than four years? Has anything suggested that that could happen?

Before Christmas, the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) and I were on our local television channel, Notts TV, as we often are. We always seem to get paired together; I think it is something to do with being younger Members. I am sure that we agree on many things about the world in general, but on political matters he and I disagree on quite a few. We discussed where Brexit would go in the new year and began to agree that the withdrawal agreement may in time become so attractive to the EU27 that it becomes the deal itself. The hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) said that getting deals done with the EU requires the consent of all 27 other countries, one of which might say, “You know what? We’ve got quite a good relationship here. Why don’t we just stick with it?” That risk is another reason why it is not worth supporting the deal.

I read and took seriously what the Prime Minister said earlier today, as I always do. Obviously, I have not heard what has been said in the Chamber, but I suspect it was closely related. I do not take much comfort from the letters from the European Council, either, although I understand where they come from and the intentions behind them. The Prime Minister has said that she will not be here at the end of 2022. How many more leaders on the European Council will have gone by then? The answer is plenty. I therefore cannot in good conscience swap the legal certainty of what will happen to our country in the future for the assurances on a letterhead from those leaders, many of whom will not be here at that time. That seems to me a very poor trade. I am surprised anybody would be persuaded to make it.

The probable outcome, as has been said for a long time, is that the Prime Minister’s deal will fall tomorrow. No deal is not and should not be an option. The trade arguments are well played out. At the end of last year I visited Toyota outside Derby to see its just-in-time manufacturing operating model, and it was clear that any delay in the system would be very injurious to it. The economic shock resulting from tariff barriers will be felt by my community, one of the poorest in the country. That cannot happen.

We talk a lot about the economic impact of no deal, but we rarely talk about the security implications. The Select Committee on Home Affairs produced a very good report on that subject. We took a lot of very good evidence from people with differing views. We covered the Schengen Information System II, which ensures that violent criminals, possible terrorists and paedophiles from other countries cannot get into our country; they get the tap on the shoulder, go to a side room and do not come into our country. That database, which we check 500 million times a year, relates to people who present at a UK port. We do not know about it, but it keeps us safe in our beds.

I do not agree with the argument made by the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood about WTO trading terms, but it was well made and I respect it. However, the WTO provides no fall-back in relation to security. I know that people will push for a no-deal option, which is valid. I understand that, and I get emails to that effect. However, those who do so should explain what would happen to someone who presented at a port at 12.1 am—one minute after we have left the EU, while the fireworks or whatever are going on—who would previously have got that tap on the shoulder and not been allowed into our country. The answer to that question is critical, but I do not think there is one; our Committee’s inquiry certainly could not find one. As a result, I do not think that any responsible Government ought to countenance no deal.

I shall put that to one side and move on. It is well known that Labour Members seek a general election, as the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam said, so that we can secure new leadership on this issue and, of course, many others, although this is probably not the moment to go through them. Having said that, I am not averse to a trip to the bookies and I am very aware that the bookies do not think that we will win in our pursuit of a general election any more than the Prime Minister is likely to win tomorrow night, so let us say that both of those fall. What happens then? It means that, come Wednesday or onwards, into early next week, Parliament as a whole will have a real job to find something that respects the referendum result but does not damage our country.

I am here today—I take the chance to speak to and engage with Government Front Benchers when I can—to appeal for a change of tone. I say this very personally. There is no party politics in this; it is my personal feeling. It is a culmination of 18 months of frustration, because I feel that we have been derided throughout this process. I was elected in June 2017, and I feel that since then those of us on the Opposition Benches have been told that we cannot count, that we do not read the documents—that is always a good one—that we are not being honest in our intentions and when we say we are pursuing one goal, we are actually pursuing a second, secret goal, or that we are playing politics in what we do. I believe those to be unfair and untrue charges. As I said at the beginning of my speech, I come here because I want to serve my city and my community.

I believe that the Government will have to change their tone because, frankly, whether it is on Wednesday morning, Thursday morning or next week, the Government will need support from Opposition Members. It does not take a political strategy genius, which I am not, to say this. We are getting to the point at which we know what there is not a majority for in Parliament. We know or may well find that there is not a majority for the Prime Minister’s deal. We know from last week that there is not one for no deal. If it is shown that there is not one for a general election, either, we will become defined by what we know there is not a majority for. That means that we will have to look at what there is a majority for, and we will start with the biggest blocs, which are the Government’s payroll vote and Members on the Opposition Front Bench. The Government will have to engage with the Opposition. Labour Members are derided for not having a position on Brexit, but our priorities have been on the website for a long time. We have been talking about a customs union for a long time. We have talked about migration, rights at work—

[Graham Stringer]

My hon. Friend is right to say that there is no majority in the House of Commons for a general election at present—partly because a two-thirds majority is needed under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011—but does he really believe that if the Prime Minister loses tomorrow by more than 100 votes and potentially 200 votes, this Government will have any credibility left at all if the central plank of their existence has failed by so many votes in the House of Commons? Is not the only honourable thing to do to have a general election and see what the public think?

[Alex Norris]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I would not presume to explain any elements of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act to him, given that he legislated it and I did not, but as well as his reference to a two-thirds majority, the failure to achieve a second vote of confidence within 14 days will automatically lead to a general election. However, I take the point that, on the issue of the day, on the sum total of 31 months of work and leadership—what we are answering tomorrow is the product of all that work—if that fails, it is a fundamental failure for the Government and one that I do not think could be seen off. I think we ought all to be careful, certainly on the Opposition Benches, about setting what we think are good and bad losses. Any loss on this issue is devastating for the Government, whatever the number is.

If they want to carry on, the Government will have to engage with the Opposition on the presupposition that we want to engage on the issue, that we want to make things better and that we might want to find a solution, all of which has been said so far. We all might—this would be of benefit outside the House as well as inside—try to change the way we engage with each other. The petitions show the need for that. They start with assertions that are not necessarily facts; they are just strongly held views, and we all have strongly held views. And we all come at the issue—I assume this is true of all hon. Members present—from the perspective of what we believe is best for our country, so perhaps we ought to engage with one another on those terms, rather than on the basis of what fits into 140 or, now, 280 characters and going down to those very pure binaries. Frankly, if we do not show that there is a parliamentary solution in this place—I have talked about the things that there perhaps are not majorities for—where does that leave this issue? Hon. Members who might passionately have wanted to see a particular goal achieved might end up not getting it at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to wind up the debate for the Opposition with you in the Chair, Mr Davies; I am sure you will deeply regret having missed many of the contributions made earlier in the debate, knowing your views on these matters. I thank the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) for the way in which he opened the debate—he drew on points made by petitioners on both sides of the argument and on different proposals—and for the way in which he explored the complexity of the issues that we face. In that context, I draw attention to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris): the tone of our discussions is so important, particularly given some of the stuff we have seen around the precincts of Westminster over the past week. He was right to say that we are at a crossroads. People are expressing wildly diverse but sincerely held views; the reasons why people voted as they did in the 2016 referendum were sincere, too. We should respect all those views.

The petitions we have debated reflect the divisions in the country, and indeed in Parliament—divisions that have been exacerbated, not healed, by the way in which this Government have approached the negotiations over the past two years. It did not have to be like this. When the negotiations began, we urged the Prime Minister to look beyond the war in her own party, and to reach out to the majority in Parliament and across the country who respected the fact that the people had voted to leave—the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) are right about that—but also accepted that they had done so by a painfully close margin. We urged the Prime Minister to recognise the vote for what it was: a mandate to end our membership of the European Union, but not to rupture our relationship with our closest neighbours, our key allies and our most important trading partner, and certainly not to crash out of the European Union without any agreement.

The hon. Members for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) and for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns), in disagreeing with the deal, both said that it was the only deal that would be countenanced by the European Union—that, in the words of the Prime Minister, it was the only deal possible, a point that I am sure the Minister will make. But it was the only deal possible within the constraints that the Prime Minister had set herself. The European Union made it clear that there were a range of options and relationships that it was prepared to consider, but the British Government had effectively ruled those out with the negotiating terms that they had set. We regret the fact that the Prime Minister allowed the agenda to be set by what her own Chancellor described as the Brexit “extremists” within her party. She set the red line, boxed herself in and ended up pleasing nobody—neither leave nor remain voters—with the deal.

In December, with the clock ticking, the Prime Minster wasted a further month by delaying the vote on the deal that is doomed to fall tomorrow. So what is her strategy now to get the deal through? Threatening MPs and the country with no deal at all. We have made it clear from the start that we would not accept a blackmail Brexit: the choice of “My deal or no deal.” We will reject her deal tomorrow, confident that Parliament will not allow the country to leave without a deal; that is the clearly expressed view of the majority of Members of Parliament. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer has made clear, leaving without a deal would be a “terrible” outcome for the UK economy. He compared it with the dark days of the 1980s.

It is not enough to talk about doom merchants or the car industry “bleating”. I say to the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay that the stories about stockpiling medicines were not scare stories run by doom merchants. They were the proposals made by the Government in the preparatory papers that those supporting Brexit had urged them to prepare to ensure the country was ready for no deal. It was the Government who said we needed to stockpile medicines and food, and who said they could not continue to guarantee the power supply in Northern Ireland. That is their assessment of the position in relation to no deal.

We should recognise that the voices warning against no deal do not simply come from partisans within this place. They come from the CBI, the Engineering Employers Federation, the British Chamber of Commerce and the TUC—those who are at the coalface of the consequences if we leave with no deal. I have heard it said in this debate, and it is strongly argued by many, that if we leave without a deal, we should reclaim the £39 billion that we are to hand to the EU. Many of the people who make that argument also argue that we should strike out to secure new trade deals with many other countries around the world. The Chancellor was right to ask what country would sign up to a deal with a country that has demonstrated its ability to renege on agreements properly made in good faith.

[Graham Stringer]

We agree on tomorrow’s vote, but disagree on the objectives. I assume we agree that we all should follow the law. Does my hon. Friend not accept the view of the House of Lords Committee about where our legal obligations start and finish? We do not have a legal obligation to pay £39 billion, and the basis of trade deals is to follow the rules and the law.

[Paul Blomfield]

I obviously agree with my hon. Friend that we should follow the law; there would not be much purpose to this place if we did not accept that premise. The House of Lords Committee expressed an opinion. There are different opinions. I would probably accept that we do not need to pay all of that £39 billion. There are different views, and the hon. Member for Mansfield differentiated between some of them, but reneging on the entire £39 billion, as some Brexit extremists suggest we should, would put us in contravention of agreements.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

What was interesting about the hon. Gentleman’s speech was that about halfway through it, I realised I had heard it all in a speech he gave before Christmas. It was eloquent and well put, but I have heard all the arguments before.

I am not scared of a second referendum; I am simply trying to focus people’s minds on what it means. It is being proposed not by great exponents of democracy or champions of the people’s voice, but almost exclusively by people who are on the record as saying that the first referendum result was a disaster, that they want to reverse it and that they fully accept that the only way of getting their cherished aim of staying in the EU is with a second referendum. I reject that approach because it tries to subvert the result of the 2016 referendum. We can pretend that it is a wonderful exercise of democracy, but it is not; it is trying to go against the clear and decisive vote of the people in 2016.

The hon. Gentleman says that opinion polls have changed, but they have not changed that much. And as my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) points out, they are the very opinion polls that said the day before the 2016 referendum that remain would win by 10 points, and that got things consistently wrong throughout the whole referendum campaign. I do not believe that the second premise of the argument made by the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard)—that somehow there has been a marked shift in public opinion—should precipitate a referendum.

[Graham Stringer]

I agree completely with the Minister’s point about the motivation for a second referendum, but some of the people who want to subvert the 2016 referendum result have another string to their bow: attrition. By extending article 50, they want to extend the whole process until the House or the public should get weary of it. Will the Minister give us an assurance that under no circumstances will the Government introduce a statutory instrument that changes the date for leaving the European Union that was set in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that issue. My understanding is that the Government will not seek to extend article 50. That is the Government’s view, but in the light of what happened last week and the fact that we are hearing stories about a potential motion of the House to overturn Standing Order No. 14, it may well be that the House will take a collective view. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), said something to the effect that the House would not countenance no deal—I may be quoting him loosely. That means that the House would take it upon itself to introduce legislation or a motion to bind or strongly encourage the Government to extend article 50.

I know the Government’s position, but given that last week, extraordinarily to me, the amendment of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) was made and was allowed to be made, who knows what will happen? The Prime Minister is quite right to suggest—indeed, it is a statement of fact —that Brexit itself is in danger.

If the House votes down the deal tomorrow, we will have about two and a half months. The House may take it upon itself to stop no deal; I suggest to the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) that enough MPs have said publicly that under no circumstances will they countenance no deal. Those people will not simply sit on their hands watching the sand running down the egg-timer until no deal happens on 29 March. They are bright people, skilled in parliamentary debate and procedure, and they will do all they can to frustrate no deal—they have pretty much said that, and their actions have shown it. I feel that a lot of my Brexiteer colleagues are showing remarkable complacency in thinking that all we have to do is sit and wait for no deal to take place. What I am saying is that nobody knows.

I think that the best, clearest, most elegant and simplest way of delivering Brexit is simply to vote for the deal. The deal is not perfect—no deal is perfect—but it takes us forward to the second stage of negotiations with the EU. It means that we leave the EU, as the hon. Member for Edinburgh East suggested. He is honest: he says he does not want to leave the EU, which is why he will vote against the deal. It is extraordinary for Brexiteer colleagues to say that they want Brexit but will vote down the deal by marching through the Lobby with people whose sole political aim is to frustrate Brexit. Members who advocate Brexit will, metaphorically, link arm in arm with people who want to frustrate the whole project. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield and my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) have radically different views on the nature of Brexit, its purpose and its good effects, as she and I see them, but they will probably go through the same Lobby. Frankly, this is a crazy situation.

EU Membership: Second Referendum

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. People speculate either way about polls they have read. There are studies dressed up as polls about what would happen now if there was a second referendum, predominantly because a lot of money is funding the campaign for the so-called people’s vote and that money has to be justified somehow. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that people had their voice heard and want us to get on with the job they tasked us to do—they gave us that mandate. That is really important.

I campaigned to leave and voted to leave, and I take my responsibility seriously to ensure that we get out in the best way possible and in as orderly a way as possible. I understand that 48% of people did not want to go and that we want to be able to trade with European Union partners beyond Brexit. That is why we need the whole gamut, rather than me sitting in my corner saying, “Yay, I won—fantastic! I’m off now.” That is not realistic. Inevitably, there will be complexities and compromises. We have to factor all that in, but that is what we are put in this place to do. It will test the mettle of many of us over the next week and a half, as we wrestle with some very complicated and important decisions that will have an impact on this nation for many years to come.

On the mandate, both the main parties pledged in their 2017 election manifestos to respect the result of the referendum. Eighty per cent. of the electorate voted for one of those two parties. That shows that the two parties have taken people with us as best we can, and that people want us to get on with the job—they have tasked us with the responsibility.

The draft withdrawal agreement and the political declaration will allow us to respect the referendum result and get out of the EU in an orderly manner. The choppy times we have had over the last couple of years and that undoubtedly are coming up are not due to a lack of mandate. Largely it is remainers who are trying to wish away the result. After the referendum, many people said, “Crikey, the debate was poor quality and really divisive.” Now they are saying, “I’ll tell you what—let’s just do it again.” That makes no sense. We have a responsibility. Many of us may have gone to a family gathering and seen a new baby or young child, played with it and got it excited, and then handed it back crying to its angry parents. I will not hand back this Brexit baby to its parents, because we have a responsibility.

Even if we choose a second referendum, we have run out of time to have one. Trying to get the legislation through would be an absolute nightmare. We would have to do it within a month or six weeks, but with Christmas coming up that would take us well into the new year. Can we even imagine what the referendum question would be? People would say that remain should not even be an option on the ballot paper because we have had that discussion and leave won. They might say, “Why don’t we choose whether to have the deal as proposed, or no deal and leave on World Trade Organisation terms?” Other people would say, “Let’s have a three-way choice of the deal on the table, no deal or remain.” That would be so complex.

Let us say that the remain option got 40% of the vote, the Government deal got 30% and the leave with no deal option got 30%. Clearly, remain would win and we would stay in the EU—if that was even possible—but 60% of people would have voted for one of the leave options. That would cause a huge democratic deficit: a constitutional crisis. That is why the question itself would be a problem if we went down that road. Who is to say that the debate would be of any better quality? Frankly, I suspect we would have one group shouting, “Vassal state!” and another shouting, “Cliff edge!” back. There would be a lot of heat, but I do not think much light would be shed on the issue. Clearly, we need to move on and bring ourselves together. Let us not ask again, but understand why people voted the way they voted in the first place.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a significant point. The question in the 2016 referendum was very simple—“Do you want to be in the EU or out of the EU?” The deal, which is 575 pages and an addendum—I tried to read it, without success—is a much more complex item to put to the electorate. Given that remainers say voters did not understand the original proposition, does he agree that the argument that the question in a second referendum would be simple and the electorate would understand it is ridiculous?

[Paul Scully]

The hon. Gentleman makes some very important points. There are complexities that we need to debate in this place. I suspect that boiling 575 pages down to a relatively simple question on a ballot paper would be difficult. We need to understand and put across to people what the withdrawal agreement actually does.

There are many reasons why people voted to leave, but they relate predominantly to sovereignty, immigration, and trade and future prosperity. Clearly, lots of people do not think the withdrawal agreement is perfect. I certainly do not, but I can deal with it, because it means that we will leave the EU’s political institutions, which is fundamental to our leaving the EU, and we will stop paying huge membership fees. That is all in there. It will be up to us, as a sovereign state, to opt back into things and accept joint sovereignty.

Anyone who was driven to vote to leave by immigration will see that ending free movement of people is in the agreement, and those who were motivated by our future prosperity will see that it means we will be able to start negotiating our own trade deals. That is a work in progress—the second bit of the negotiation will determine when we can crack on and implement those trade deals, but we will be able to start negotiating them right from the off. I have to say to the friend I referred to who is bored of Brexit that we are only halfway through the process, so he has another couple of years to go while we agree our future relationship.

Let us not be distracted by a people’s vote—a second referendum. Let us concentrate on what is in front of us: on getting the best deal possible in an incredibly complex set of negotiations, which have to satisfy different people. There is no perfect Brexit, so we need to chart our way carefully through choppy waters, take our responsibilities seriously, get rid of the egos and the ideological positions, and work out what is best for the country. Let us not be distracted by a second referendum.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I am disappointed by the number of people who have turned up to the debate. I came to listen to it because I spoke in the debate on the counter-proposition—that there should be a second referendum—two weeks ago. This is one of the most important constitutional issues of our time, so I expected more right hon. and hon. Members to be present. However, I am grateful for the opportunity briefly to contribute. I will not repeat the arguments of the previous debate but, I hope, make one or two new points.

I am sure you remember, Mr Hollobone, as a learned person, that in 1953, after the uprising in East Berlin, Bertolt Brecht said ironically that the regime should dismiss the people and appoint a new one. It seems to me that those people who now argue for a second referendum are saying that in 2016 the electorate got it wrong. They make a number of supporting statements, such as, “The electorate didn’t understand.” I think the electorate did understand what was a very simple proposition. Worse than that to my mind is the statement that the electorate were motivated by anger, disillusionment and alienation because they live in poorer regions of the country. That all boils down to the same point: that people in Hartlepool, Wales, the north of England, the south-west of England, the midlands—all the areas that voted to leave—dealt not with the question before them but with their own internal situation.

My experience was quite the reverse. I talked to people while I was out and about on the day of the referendum, and they had a very simple and direct definition of democracy and sovereignty. A couple of them said something like, “We should make our own laws, shouldn’t we?” That is a pretty simple question and a pretty fundamental way of defining democracy and sovereignty, which are at the core of this issue. I therefore dismiss that suggestion by people who argue for a second referendum.

The establishment took one in the guts on this. They did not expect to lose the referendum, so they denigrated people who voted to leave as a way of not dealing with the fundamental arguments. Those arguments were about democracy and sovereignty—the right of an electorate to dismiss the people who raise taxes and make laws. The EU, since its inception, has been a challenge to that process.

I do not really want to repeat the arguments that have been made, but some are worth addressing in detail. There are practical problems. If there were agreement in both Houses that there should be a second referendum—I do not think there is—how long would it take to pass the necessary law? It is not obvious what the question, or questions, would be. Would it be about the 575-page document we have been presented with, which I suspect even lawyers would find difficult to decipher? Would we have another in/out vote? Or would we vote on all three things? I have heard hon. Friends argue on television and radio that there should be a three-point question. They never seem to have the answer to the question posed by the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully): what happens if the electorate vote a third, a third and a third, or if there are other contradictions in the result?

It seems to me that because of those complicated issues, the timetable for getting a second referendum through both Houses would be long. It is not obvious what the decision would be, and interpreting it would be difficult. I am sure the Scottish National party spokesperson, the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), will correct me if I am wrong, but the debate on the Scottish referendum took more than two years. He will not have been happy with the result, but a thoroughgoing debate was had in Scotland on its future.

We had just over a year to debate the 2016 referendum, which came after the 2015 general election when a significant majority of people voted to have a referendum, and still people claimed that there was not sufficient time to hold a referendum. There would be the time taken on the complicated issues of what questions the referendum would ask and what it would be about, and then there would be the time to have a thorough debate. If one of the problems with the first referendum was that the debate was not thorough and detailed enough, one would want at least as long to debate a more complicated question.

Those are practical problems, but there is a deep problem of principle with the belief—this applies to Plaid Cymru, the SNP and others—that referendums are the solution to a problem. If this referendum result is not honoured, what will happen with the honouring of any future referendum results? It calls into question whether Parliament means it when it says, “This is for the people to decide, even by a majority of one.” I can give quotes from Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem spokespeople who said that. That was the decision of the House of Commons and it was passed by a large majority.

[Jon Cruddas (Dagenham and Rainham) (Lab)]

I want to go back to what my hon. Friend talked about earlier, given the points he is making now. He said that the initial vote was not driven by anger or alienation. Will he comment on the consequences of shoehorning in a second referendum? Would it not incite greater anger and alienation of the kind that we did not necessarily see in the first referendum?

[Graham Stringer]

There has been an outpouring of anger by the establishment—those whom we on the left used to call the ruling class—who suddenly found that they were not ruling anymore. They have gone from being completely nonplussed and surprised to being angry. The electorate were told that they had a decision to make, but they are now being told, “We didn’t like the decision you made; think again and do as you’re told this time.” I realise that that is what the EU has done on a number of occasions. The EU has ignored referendums in Greece and France, and it has made the Irish vote on two occasions on different treaties. That fits in with the EU, but I think people in this country would be angry if that happened.

Opinion polls are all over the place; until there is a campaign on whatever the question is, nobody knows what decision will be made. I think the people of the United Kingdom in total are a rather cussed lot and would not like to be told that they have got it wrong and to do it again. Their initial response would be anger and it would not resolve anything. Fundamentally, those people who say that holding a second referendum is a solution are wrong. It would not solve bitterness and it would not necessarily solve the constitutional problems faced by the Government. It really would not solve anything.

Importantly, we should not follow Brecht’s ironic suggestion, which I mentioned at the beginning of my speech, to change the electorate or tell them to do it again. This is the responsibility of Government. The Government said that they would implement the result. They have come back with a deal, about which there are different views. I find the backstop, which I believe our civil service would like us to be locked into forever because it effectively locks us into the customs union, is anathema. It means that we cannot do our own trade deals. Nobody can tell me what we would be getting for £39 billion. I know what the Minister’s position has been over the years, but it is not clear that the £39 billion is anything but a blackmail payment to the EU. It is about the same amount as we would have paid had we had a seat around the table and had we still been a member of the EU. I have been told by Ministers on a number of occasions that there is no legal basis and it is not an obligation to pay that money. There are some smaller obligations. Not only is there a backstop and a lack of trade deals, but we will also be paying a fortune.

I was a member of the board of Vote Leave and one of the biggest criticisms of the leave campaign was that the amount on the side of the bus was exaggerated and was a distortion, because it used the gross payment to the EU and not the net. The figure that the Government are suggesting that we pay for nothing, which will not go into children’s services, social services, protection of the elderly or the NHS, is £60 million per constituency. For what? £60 million per constituency is £1,100 per individual member of the electorate in this country.

I am grateful for the opportunity to talk on this matter again. I do not believe that a second referendum would resolve anything. It is impractical, it is not principled, and I do not think it should be given the time of day to be debated. It should be thrown out.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

Like other hon. Members, I am a little surprised at the level of attendance at this afternoon’s debate. I can never tell with these things whether it is a lack of empathy across the House for the sentiments behind the petition or whether it is just that the Attorney General is bigger box office than this discussion, but we are where we are.

The way I see it is this: I do not think that in a free, open and democratic society we can say that people do not have the right to change their minds. Of course they do. A group of people voting in a referendum one day in history cannot forever bind people for the future. Any of us would be on very thin ice if we were to get into a situation of saying, “You can never have a second referendum on this question.” On the other hand, we have to accept that with big questions of governance and constitutional politics, we cannot go changing our mind every day, or every month, or even every year.

Therefore, we have to ask ourselves in what circumstances it is legitimate to consider a second referendum, a so-called people’s vote. There are three tests that need to be applied before the legitimacy test is passed. First, it must be demonstrated that the information on which people made their original decision is in some way compromised, either because it was wrong or because it is now obsolete and has been superseded by further developments. With regard to the Brexit referendum, I do not think anyone can argue other than that the information on which people based their decision was fatally flawed.

In response to the statement by the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), I am not one of those who blame the electorate; I do not say that people were stupid or did not understand the question. I say they that were deliberately misled by people. I say that they were given information that was false, and deliberately so. In many ways the mendacity in that campaign was on an industrial scale. That is why people were conned in many ways into making the decision they did in June 2016.

Now we have an awful lot more information about what is at stake and what the consequences are, so we move on to the second test: have a significant number of people changed their minds on the question? By “significant”, I mean enough to produce a different result, were the question put again. Again, that test is met. It is consistently clear from opinion polls over three or four months—the latest one only today—that a large number of people have changed their mind on the question, sufficient to produce a different result were the question put again. The Prime Minister and the Government are fond of saying that 17.4 million people voted to leave the EU, the biggest number in our history that have ever voted for anything. That is true, but here is the inconvenient truth: at least 2 million of them have now changed their minds. I think it is disrespectful to those people not at least to consider whether the circumstances are such that they should be consulted again.

The third test is that the Parliament or legislature charged with discharging the mandate from the referendum is either unwilling to do so, or incapable of doing so. We are not at that point yet, but I am fairly certain, and I have no reason to change my view from the speeches so far today, that next Tuesday evening Parliament will reject the withdrawal agreement that has been put before it by the Government. In those circumstances, we will be entering a period of unknown chaos, where the Parliament may well be incapable of making any decision. That political gridlock or stasis can perhaps only be resolved by putting the question back to the people who started the process in the first place—all the citizens of the country. I say therefore that a people’s vote should not be regarded as an alternative way of agreeing the withdrawal deal. It is going to happen, if it does, as a consequence of the failure of the Parliament and the Government to prepare a withdrawal deal.

I speak for the Scottish National party, the third party in the United Kingdom Parliament, so it would be remiss of me not to try to give some sort of perspective from north of the border. Scotland, as colleagues know, took a different view from the rest of Britain.

[Graham Stringer]

I am following but do not agree with many of the points that the hon. Gentleman is making. On his final point, that there is a failure of Parliament, is it not primarily a failure of the Government? If the Government fail, should not the Government go back to the electorate?

[Tommy Sheppard]

The hon. Gentleman predicts my next point, but let me first say something about the situation in Scotland, where 62% of the people voted to remain in the European Union. By all polling evidence, if that question were asked again it would be more like 68% to 70%, so the opinion is quite different in Scotland from in England and Wales.

The attitude of the minority SNP Government in Scotland, when faced with a question of what to do with this result, where Scotland had voted one way and the rest of the United Kingdom had voted another way, is interesting. We had tried, as colleagues will remember, in the debate on the European Union Referendum Act 2015 to get some provisions in the Act itself that would recognise the different nations within the United Kingdom, but we failed in that endeavour.

The Scottish Government did not say, “Oh well, we don’t recognise the result in the UK because we are against Brexit and this is the Scottish position.” Quite the contrary: a Government that believed in and aspired to an independent Scotland and membership of the European Union produced a detailed document that advocated neither of those things. “Scotland’s Place in Europe”, published in December 2016, was a detailed and comprehensive policy analysis of how Brexit could take place in a way that would not have such effects on the Scottish economy and would better respect public opinion in Scotland. We were basically arguing, as we still argue to this day, for a compromise on what has become known as a Norway-plus position, where we aim to stay in the single market and the customs union. We have not yet been successful in that endeavour, but it is interesting that for 24 months the Scottish Government have been trying to offer this compromise and to get a discussion going about it, and for 24 months they have effectively been ignored.

That brings me to the point about how the Government have managed this process. Here we are, 30 months after the original referendum result, a result that was, by any observation, a narrow and divided one, with the country clearly split. A better Government would have taken that result and tried to steer a course that respected the majority of public opinion to leave the European Union and no longer formally be a member of it, but also recognised that almost half the country valued their European citizenship and tried to find some compromise that would allow Brexit to take place in a way that minimised the depression of their European identity.

The Government did not do that—not at all. The Government took an absolute position and said, “This is clearcut, it is black and white; the 52% won and we are now no longer going to talk about the 48%.” They were written out of history as if their opinions did not matter. That is one of the things that has caused so much resentment and anger and is now fuelling the demand for a people’s vote. In fact, it is even worse than that, because the 52% were disrespected as well; we had every right-wing cause in the country trying to tack its ideas on to the 52% as if that was a mandate for what they wanted. Many people in the 52% were misrepresented as well.

If we had had a Government that could have been more inclusive in their approach and had a dialogue with people, with Opposition parties, with local government and with the national Governments in the devolved legislatures, we might be in a slightly better position. We might have had more of a consensual approach that could possibly command support on the Floor of the House next Tuesday. But we are where we are; we do not have that, and we have a Prime Minister who, Canute-like, seems to be just ignoring wave after wave of concern and opposition that is expressed.

Over the next five days we will spend a lot of time talking about the detail of the 585-page withdrawal agreement and the 24-page framework document, so I will not go into that here. However, the Government getting themselves into this position is calamitous. It did not need to happen. Even at this eleventh hour they could pull back. They need to understand that, by setting their impossible red lines in the first place, they put themselves on a course to deliver a product that was never going to command the support of the House and, worse, does not really seem to satisfy anyone in the country, never mind the 52% who voted to leave in June 2016.

In many ways, the Government have to think again. It seems to me that, once we get past next Tuesday, giving people the opportunity to vote again on this question may provide the Government with a lifeline to try to get out of the mess they have created for themselves. If they do not do that, I certainly agree that the time has come for this Government to get out of the road and be replaced by a Government that will do a better job.

Leaving the European Union

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Liz Twist]

I agree with my hon. Friend that the fact that is already happening is of real concern.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend accept that there are now more EU citizens working in the NHS than before the referendum decision?

[Liz Twist]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I do not have that detailed knowledge, but I am aware from talking to people who work in the NHS that there is a great deal of concern about that situation.

Many European Union citizens have left the UK, and it cannot be right for them to be so worried that they will be unwelcome that they leave, rather than risk staying. The Government have said that European Union citizens living lawfully in the UK today will be able to stay, but they will need to register for settled status under a new scheme, which is not yet up and running. That is not what those people signed up for, and they are understandably worried about a new regulatory framework replacing what was free movement between the UK and other European Union countries. Of course, that works both ways.

I do not speak as a technical expert on the mechanics of Brexit, and I do not suppose that Ciaran is a technical expert either. However, he and over 110,000 petitioners—a number that was still growing as of yesterday evening—say that they have huge concerns about the impact of Brexit on the areas I have mentioned, and that if there is no deal, or a deal that cannot deliver assurances on all of those issues, Brexit should be stopped.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I debated with my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) during the referendum campaign, and we both tried to keep the debate calm and rational. I completely agree that anger, nastiness and calling people names does not help the cause of democracy. Having said that, I disagree completely with her last point. She said that the result of the referendum was for compromise. No, it was not. It was to leave the European Union, and the question was completely unambiguous and unconditional. Since the referendum, the people in the minority—those who lost—have gradually tried to recast the debate, continue with project fear and put barriers in the way so they can start again. I do not think the debate should be between leavers and remainers: it should be between the people who accept the democratic decision and those who do not. The Lib Dems have been quite clear throughout that they do not accept the democratic decision.

[Tom Brake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, as he has accused us of not being democratic. Will he explain what is undemocratic about allowing the people, in a people’s vote, to determine whether they agree with the deal that the Government have come forward with?

[Graham Stringer]

The fact is that we had a vote, and it was hard-fought-for. Like many hon. Members on both sides of the House, I had been arguing for a referendum since before I joined Parliament—I was elected in 1997, as was the right hon. Gentleman. Right hon. and hon. Members had been arguing for referendums going back to Maastricht—I voted to have a referendum on Lisbon—and we kept losing. The argument for a referendum was that many of the people’s rights had been given away in treaties such as Amsterdam, Nice, Maastricht, the Single European Act and Lisbon, and they should have had a chance to vote on that.

[Peter Grant]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Graham Stringer]

I have not finished answering this one.

Eventually, a party that agreed that there should be a referendum won a general election. Hon. Members from all parties voted to have a referendum. I accept that in a democracy people can change their minds, but they cannot do so before we have implemented a decision that hundreds of right hon. and hon. Members voted for. That would detract from democracy.

If the result of the referendum is not respected fully and carried out, there will be a fundamental issue for those who support the 1975 innovation of referendums. The Scottish National party, for example, will no doubt come back for another referendum on the future of Scotland; we have also had a referendum on the voting system, and might have another. That will undermine the legitimacy of not only this referendum but others. People who voted leave would not necessarily accept the legitimacy of a second referendum, and not to implement the first one would undermine the whole constitutional construct of referendums. That is the answer to the question of the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake).

At the previous general election, the right hon. Gentleman stood on an election ticket for another referendum and won his seat. I accept that, but only 12 people from his party won on that particular ticket; my party stood on a ticket to honour the referendum result, as did the Conservative party, and that is what I intend to vote for, and will continue to vote for, whether that means voting in support of the Government if they put sensible things forward, or voting against if they do not put sensible things forward—which I think is the position with the agreement.

A great deal has been said today, and I will go through some of the arguments put forward. One was that during the referendum people did not know enough to come to a conclusion and were duped in some way. As in all electorates, people on both sides distort: they get excited and go past the facts. For example, I have never been in a general election in which the Lib Dem literature put out in the constituency has stayed close to the known facts that everyone else in the constituency believes in, but that is not a reason to rerun elections. The same happens at a national level. In a democracy, we leave it to the electorate to use their common sense to judge, from their experience, between nonsense and sense.

[Tom Brake]

Will the hon. Gentleman accept that there is a difference between a general election, the result of which may be overturned in three, four or five years —whenever the next election takes place—and a referendum, which potentially has a permanent effect? Does he not agree that the confirmed evidence of illegal activities by Vote Leave and BeLeave—Leave.EU is now being investigated by the National Crime Agency—suggests that this referendum was of a questionable nature? In case he suggests that the remain campaign did the same, I add that no one has taken any allegation about that campaign to court, as has happened to the other side.

[Graham Stringer]

I am sure, Sir Roger, that if I started to get into matters that may come before the courts, you would rule me out of order. I will not do that. All I would say is that legal action has often been taken over general elections—another case from Kent is before the court at this very moment—so I do not accept that point. After the 1975 referendum, it took more than 40 years to hold another. As I explained in answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s previous intervention, a party needs to win a general election saying, “We want a second referendum”, before we have one—and good luck to them, because I think they would lose.

All parties have a great deal of division. The country is split, and party support is split. Many leave voters vote for my party, and for the Conservative party, so if the parties chose to move away from their position, they would be in electoral peril—but it is up to the parties to stand for that, if they want to, and to lose the support of people who voted leave.

It is often said—it has been said in this debate—that promises were made by Vote Leave that have not been kept. I campaigned as hard as I could for leave, but I made no promises. How can a Labour MP, in opposition, make such promises? The referendum was not a manifesto that one party was behind; it was an argument about what this country should do—should we be in the European Union, or out? The only decision, as I said at the beginning, was whether to leave or stay in—a decision that the electorate made.

[Peter Grant]

I am intrigued by the hon. Gentleman’s astonishment at how a Labour MP could possibly make promises to the electorate during a referendum. His colleague next to him, the hon. Member for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield), will know what I am talking about. Did the hon. Gentleman read the vow that Gordon Brown put on the front page of Scotland’s biggest national newspaper immediately before the 2014 referendum? That was clearly a case of an Opposition politician—a Labour politician—making promises about what would happen if, in a referendum, people did what he wanted them to do. Why is the hon. Gentleman so astonished about what a Labour politician might do in 2016, when his own party leader did it in 2014?

[Graham Stringer]

I am not sure that I completely understand the question. One cannot promise to carry out something if one is not in government; one can only make the case for people voting a particular way in a referendum. The electorate voted as they did, and that was clearly an instruction for the Government to carry out. They have not been very good at doing it, but it was an instruction. During the debate that set up the referendum, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), who was on Labour’s Front Bench at the time, gave an absolute commitment: “This is not for Members of Parliament to decide. We’re passing the power over to the electorate to decide.” That was echoed by all the parties. One cannot make promises in a referendum campaign; all one can do is advise people which way to vote, which I did. It is a bogus argument to say that promises were made and not carried out.

[Martin Whitfield]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a difference between a general election, in which parties stand on manifestos on a broad range of issues, and this referendum, which asked a very specific question? Today, we have a very different level of knowledge of what that specific question means, which was not available when the referendum took place.

[Graham Stringer]

It was always going to be the case that we would have a different level of knowledge and information afterwards, because time goes on; I agree with my hon. Friend. I put it that what has happened since is that our arguments have been validated by the obstructive nature of the EU. I remember many debates and discussions in which the arguments of the leave campaign were, in essence, that the EU had too much control of our democracy and the majority of our laws. My opponents said regularly, “No, it’s less than 10%”; we would argue about the Library documents on what was and was not a law; and they would say, “No, this is essentially just a trading organisation. It has minimal impact.” Now, we see that the EU is trying to hold on to control, not only in Ireland, but over our regulations and laws on manufacturing. We can now see how powerful the EU is, and how difficult it is.

The Prime Minister went to the EU and has come back not, unfortunately, representing the views of the people of the United Kingdom to the EU, but representing the views of the EU to the United Kingdom. She has come back with an absolute constitutional monstrosity, under which, in effect, the EU will keep control of whether Northern Ireland has separate laws from the rest of the country.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Over the years, I have been a remainer, and I make no secret of that. It was always an alibi of Ministers, when agreements were made in the Council of Ministers and when the thing was not going well in the House of Commons, to say, “That is a European angle.” I remind my hon. Friend, who takes as much of an interest in the trade union movement as I do, that a lot of the progressive trade union legislation came from Europe; they had to fight tooth and nail there. Finally, the referendum was not run like a general election campaign. Leading lights in the referendum went around with a red bus and made all sorts of promises to the British people. We must face up to that to be truthful with one another, as my hon. Friend said earlier.

[Graham Stringer]

My hon. Friend makes a number of points. On trade unions rights, there is no doubt that in 1988, when the President of the Commission came to the TUC, he said, “Forget Thatcher; we can look after the trade unions.” Unfortunately, we moved from a social Europe to a global, much more free-market Europe. Since then—I do not know if my hon. Friend knows—the Viking and Laval decisions have undermined minimum wage legislation throughout Europe, and have damaged trade unions because they have changed the definition of a trade dispute. I do not accept that the EU is fundamentally good for trade unions, but I must move on.

[Mr Philip Hollobone in the Chair]

I was not going to talk about Northern Ireland, because there are people in this room who know a great deal more about it than I do, but I do not think there is anyone else here who was present—the Minister could have been, but I am pretty certain that no one else was —when Croatia was accepted into the European Union. There were about three or four of us in the Chamber—there clearly was not as much concern about the EU then. Croatia has one of the EU’s longest borders with the rest of Europe. Across that border there is human trafficking and sex trafficking; it is unguarded a lot of the time and it is one of the main entry points of wickedness into the EU. Croatia was accepted by the EU, but it did not have the rule of law, and it protected war criminals after the break-up of Yugoslavia. The EU wanted Croatia in, because it was expanding.

Northern Ireland has had a troubled border. The EU had nothing to do with the Good Friday agreement. The basis of the Good Friday agreement is that all parties accept peace. The EU has been weaponising that issue; the United Kingdom Government have said very clearly that they will not produce a hard border, so the only people who might are those in the EU. They have used that as a control over the UK, which unfortunately the Prime Minister has accepted.

This is a huge debate, as I am sure you know, Mr Hollobone. The continued project fear accepts that somehow the EU has been great for the United Kingdom’s growth, and that the EU’s regulatory model is economically a good thing, but for the 10 years before the referendum, all other continents apart from Antarctica grew by considerably more than the EU—it was not a particularly vital area. There are some areas where this country is strong, such as in the biological and agricultural sciences, where we are world leaders, but the regulations coming from the EU damage our economy and cause job losses regularly. I do not believe in a completely free market—quite the reverse—but we can have regulations that are appropriate to our economy, and that will help us to create jobs at the cutting edge. The only future for this country is in high technology, which is restricted by the EU.

Although there are many more points I could make, I will finish by talking about no deal. It would be better if we had a deal. It is extraordinary, when our regulatory position is completely aligned with the EU, that the EU tries to keep control of this country’s laws. It is even more extraordinary that the Prime Minister has accepted that. The majority of our trade is on World Trade Organisation rules. The EU is a signatory to the World Trade Organisation. There is no reason whatever why the disruption if we left the EU without a deal would not be minimal. Are people here who support the EU saying that if we left without a deal, the EU would stop sending medicines to this country? If they are saying that, why would we want to be part of a body that would punish the child with muscular dystrophy that my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan talked about? It would not happen by accident; the EU would have to stop medicines coming to this country. It would have to stop radioactive materials needed for the health service from coming to this country.

[Lisa Nandy]

We rely on our Government being prepared to go back to the EU to seek that ongoing co-operation to prevent that from arising. I have asked the Government to provide clarity on that. It cannot be right that we are asked to back something without absolutely no idea where it may lead and what the alternatives are.

[Graham Stringer]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and I hope the Government will go back. I hope that those five Members in the Cabinet who say that this deal is simply not good enough have their way.

[Tom Brake]

The difficulty in the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion that those who claim there might be medicine shortages are part of project fear is in the fact that the Secretary of State for Health asked pharmaceutical companies to stockpile medicines. It is not the remainers but the Minister in charge who has asked for it to happen, not because those nasty Europeans—as the hon. Gentleman seems to believe they are—would block medicines from coming to the United Kingdom, but because they may get stuck at the border, at Calais and Dover, when checks have to be carried out on those vehicles, as would be required under no deal. Government Ministers have asked to start that stockpiling, not remainers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stringer]

I do not think the right hon. Gentleman was listening to what I was saying. We are completely aligned with the EU, both on our medical regulations and on our trade regulations. There would be no need, on day one, to stop those medicines coming across.

A deal would be better—a sensible deal, not the deal put forward, which gives the EU suzerainty over this country for an indefinite time. I will probably be in the same Lobby as my hon. Friends when it comes to voting on this deal—if it ever goes to the Floor of the House. I have voted with the Government and against them, and I will continue to look at whether they are implementing the deal. The Prime Minister said originally that no deal can be better than a bad deal. Unfortunately, she has come back with a bad deal.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

The debate can last until 7.30 pm. We now come to the Front-Bench speeches, after which Liz Twist will sum up the debate. The first Front-Bench spokesman is Peter Grant for the Scottish National party.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. I am pleased to be able to begin the summing-up speeches, but I am in two minds because a little birdie told me that the Division bell may go at around half-past 6. I wonder whether we should try to get through the debate by then, rather than having a hiatus of perhaps an hour and a half and coming back for the last few minutes.

The events of the past week or so have made this debate even more topical. By far the most significant thing to happen in the past week has been the Prime Minister, not once but twice, going on the record and saying, “We can stop Brexit.” She no longer talks about there being two options—her deal or no deal. She now talks openly about the possibility that Brexit may not happen.

Interestingly, in her lengthy contribution, the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) never actually said we cannot stop Brexit. She attempted—not very successfully, in my humble opinion—to explain why we should not stop it, but she never tried to say we cannot stop it. I invite the Minister to tell us, right at the beginning of his response, whether he agrees with the Prime Minister that Brexit can still be stopped. Once the Government conceded that point, the debate would become very different. I still believe that we can stop Brexit, if that is the will of Parliament and the will of the people. How do we know what the will of the people is without asking them? That is a question that some people may want to answer.

I believe the Government tried not to have to present a coherent argument that we should not stop Brexit because, once all the facts have become known and people, I suspect including a lot of MPs, realise just what it involves, there is no longer a coherent argument. The recently departed Brexit Secretary admitted that he did not realise how important trade between Dover and Calais was to the UK economy. If the person who led negotiations on the UK’s behalf did not fully understand what Brexit was about, what chance did the 34 million other people who took part in the referendum have of understanding all the intricacies and details?

I could almost understand the rationale for saying, “Well, maybe it’s a bad idea and maybe a disastrous idea, but we have to go through with it anyway because it’s what people voted for.” The truth is that none of us has the right to say what those 17.5 million people voted for. We know they voted to leave the European Union. I think it was the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake)—it may have been someone else in his party—who said immediately, “Now we know where people voted to go away from, but we’ve no idea what they voted to move towards.” We can guess that not many of those people voted deliberately to make themselves, their families, their towns and their communities poorer.

We do know that those people voted for some kind of Brexit in a referendum that, by today’s standards, would not get a clean bill of health as free and fair. The leave campaign, in its various guises, stands accused on a number of counts of breaching spending limits that are there to stop the wealthy elite from buying our democracy. We know there were large-scale breaches of data protection law. We know that the leave campaign lied to us. How else can we describe the £350 million on the side of the big red bus?

[Graham Stringer]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, when we include the leaflets arguing the case for remain that the Government sent out, the remain campaign effectively spent twice as much? Those leaflets cost £7 million, doubling the amount spent on the remain campaign.

[Peter Grant]

It is a matter of record how much the UK Government spent. It is not yet a matter of record how much the leave campaign spent, and I doubt whether it will ever be a matter of record where exactly in the world that money came from. Some of it was deliberately channelled through Northern Ireland to ensure that its original source could never be made known. Interestingly, those who are so desperate to have no regulatory divergence between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain are quite happy to have regulatory divergence when it stops the source of that half a million pound donation ever being made public.

The Brexiteers tell us—the hon. Gentleman tried to—that none of this really matters. They tell us that, somehow, if someone cheats at the Olympics and gets caught, they have to hand back their medal and lose their world record 10, 15 or 20 years later; if someone cheats at football, they are banned from the competition the next year; but if someone cheats with the very fundamentals of our democracy, “Well, that’s just what politicians do.” If that is the view of the Brexit side in this argument, it is no wonder that, as the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood mentioned, politicians are held in such low regard by the citizens of these islands. If politicians themselves are prepared to stand up and say, “Oh, yeah, somebody cheated, but it doesn’t matter because it’s only politics”—

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Thursday 25th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I should say to the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) that I was speaking at a theatre in Colchester last night and I referenced him in the course of my remarks. Knowing that he is not altogether averse to a focus upon himself from time to time, I think he would have enjoyed my observations.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that, if the 2016 referendum is not honoured, a second referendum would have no credibility whatsoever?

[Suella Braverman]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. This is not the best of three. It is not about, “You keep trying until you get the result you want.” This was a historic vote, when millions of people put their faith in democracy. To do anything other than revere that vote would undermine democracy and cause a collapse in that faith.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

May I start by paying tribute to their lordships for the diligent and considered manner in which they so thoroughly scrutinised the Bill? In particular, I pay tribute to Labour colleagues in the other place for the extensive effort they put into securing many of the cross-party amendments that we are debating today.

This Bill began life as a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation. Many of its original flaws stem, I suspect, from the fact that at the time it was being drafted, the Government had yet to fully work through precisely how withdrawal would have to take place. Indeed, some of us still remember the Secretary of State’s glib dismissal of the need for any transitional arrangements after 29 March next year, and the misplaced magnanimity with which he made it clear that he would only consider granting transitional arrangements to “be kind” to the EU. But as with so many aspects of the Brexit process—even if not yet in every respect—reality has slowly caught up with the Government, just as the very real deficiencies in this Bill have now been subject to thorough scrutiny in the other place.

If anything has vindicated the Opposition’s decision to vote against this legislation on Second Reading, it is the succession of defeats that the Bill has faced in both Houses, as well as the scores of amendments that the Government themselves have had to table. That said, after successive defeats in the other place and the latest round of concessions from Ministers, some of the worst aspects of the Bill have been ameliorated.

As we only have three hours of debate on the first group of amendments, I intend to touch only briefly on most of the Lords amendments towards the end of my remarks, and focus instead on what we believe to be the critical issue in this first group. That is the issue of what form parliamentary approval of the withdrawal agreement should take. Many of the amendments passed in the other place are of great significance in terms of their constitutional implications and how they might shape what is left of the Brexit process. It is deeply disappointing that the programme motion only allocates 12 hours to debate them.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Rather than praising the Lords for the number of amendments they have passed, would it not be more in line with Labour party philosophy and views to say that they have gone way beyond their constitutional remit in trying to overturn not only the decision of the electorate but the decisions of both the Labour party and Conservative party manifestos, which together received 82% to 84% of the vote at the last general election?

[Matthew Pennycook]

I respect my hon. Friend’s argument and his long-held views, but I have to fundamentally disagree. None of their lordships’ amendments seeks to frustrate the Brexit process in any way or to allow this House to overturn the referendum result.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 6th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Ian Paisley]

Yes, and every single poll that I have read about myself and my party tells me that I have lost every election, but in reality I have won them all. The poll that ultimately counts is the one that is taken by the people.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the logic of the Lib Dems’ position—which they certainly did not put forward on Second Reading of the Bill that introduced the provisions for the referendum—is that we should have three referendums? In that way, it could be the best of three, or they could carry on until they got the result they wanted.

[Ian Paisley]

My hon. Friend puts his finger on a very Irish solution to the problem. I remember the Lisbon treaty. The Irish voted against it, but they were told by their political masters that they had made the wrong decision and had to vote again. This is ultimately a ruse to ignore the will of the British people, as expressed in a referendum on this matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Williams]

I thank the hon. Lady for adding to the evidence. We must listen to the evidence.

As we know, the proposals before us would require the divorce bill to be assessed by independent watchdogs, and I support that. It is important that the information that comes out of the Government’s negotiations with the EU is properly scrutinised in this Chamber and beyond. As a scientist, I learned to follow evidence. When new evidence emerges, so must our course of action change. As a doctor, if a test carried out on a patient revealed a totally unexpected result, I would repeat the test again rather than plough on with a process that I thought would harm the patient. For some years, medical professionals used to say that smoking was not a risk to people’s health, and they also used to tell pregnant mothers that moderate drinking during pregnancy posed no risk to the health of their child. With the benefit of hindsight, new information and the evidence we have now, how ridiculous do those statements seem?

We must continue to keep an open mind and to scrutinise the divorce-bill negotiations and Brexit more widely. As the opportunities seem to diminish and the potential for harm to our economy and society increases, we must also be willing to ask whether this is what the public voted for. Yes, we have a duty to act on behalf of our constituents, but as representatives, not simply delegates. I promised the residents of Stockton South that I would fight and work for them all, regardless of how they voted. The public must have the right to change their minds; that is one of the key aspects of democracy. It is why we have elections every five years—or perhaps more often. If public opinion shifts, we must all be able to look at matters again.

Attention to detail and accountability to Parliament are crucial to the Brexit process, and particularly the divorce bill. That is why I shall support new clauses 17 and 80 tonight.

[Graham Stringer]

rose—

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[The Temporary Chair (David Hanson)]

Order. I am happy to call both hon. Members—indeed, I have no discretion not to call the hon. Members for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) and for Ilford South (Mike Gapes)—but I must point out that they have not been present since the start of the debate. I have no discretion on this matter, so I call Graham Stringer.

[Graham Stringer]

I am grateful for your comments, Mr Hanson. You are right I have not been present in this particular debate for the whole time, but I have been in many of the debates and this is the first time I have stood up to speak on the issue. I shall not detain the Committee for very long.

Following on from the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams), of course people in every democracy have the right to change their minds. The correct way to do that is through the same means by which the referendum came about in the first place: a political party should say in its general election manifesto that it wants a referendum, win that election and hold another referendum. The Lib Dems tried that at the most recent election; admittedly, they gained seats, but they lost votes. That is the way to do it, not by calling on the most immediate opinion poll.

Opinion polls change. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South and other Members may be interested in a poll taken by Lord Ashcroft the day after the referendum. He surveyed all those people who had voted for Brexit and found that 94% of them had not voted for it on economic grounds, so a lot of the arguments about economics do not apply to the people who voted to leave.

[Peter Kyle]

To clarify a point, the 2015 Labour manifesto opposed a referendum; Labour was led then by my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband). Two weeks after the general election, we were whipped to vote for the piece of legislation that enabled that, and the Labour party did so. Did my hon. Friend think that we were wrong because it was not in our manifesto? We opposed a referendum in the manifesto

[Graham Stringer]

I have to say that I found it a bit curious, having voted for a referendum for many years, to find all my Labour colleagues finally in the same Lobby as me. The argument given by the leadership at the time was that the election had been lost, the public had voted by a majority for a referendum and it was going to recognise that.

On the financial issues, I am always in favour of transparency, which is what the essence of this argument is about. It is difficult for any Member not to be in favour of transparency, but with regard to the actual wording of the amendments, they are rather biased in terms of costs and do not, as I would have preferred, put the savings in the context of what we do not have to spend. As has been said, in all certainty, net, there will be a saving. People opine that there will be huge costs to leaving the EU. I do not know what the Government are likely to pay or not pay. I suspect that they will end up paying too much, but if we look at the history of the common market and the EU, over that period, we have probably paid half a trillion pounds net—a huge amount of money. What has been the benefit of that? We have gone from having a balanced trade with the EU to running a deficit of about £70 billion a year.

[Mr Leslie]

I am incredibly grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. I accept the point that there could be savings or, in my view, much bigger costs, but could we at least agree, here and now, that the £350 million a week for the NHS, which was on the side of that big red bus, is not going to happen?

[Graham Stringer]

I do not know what decisions will be made. I believe that the Government are likely to pay too much. Let us ask ourselves: why would we be paying money so that the rest of the EU can trade with us and every year sell us £70 billion more in goods than we are selling to the EU? Why is that a deal that we should be keen to support? I suspect that the Government will come back and put it to—

[Stella Creasy]

Whatever my hon. Friend’s feelings towards the European Union, he has just said that he fears that we may pay too much, whatever the number is. New clause 17 is about knowing what that number is. Surely he must support that principle. Then we can answer the question about whether it is too much, not enough or completely irrelevant.

[Graham Stringer]

I hope that my hon. Friend was listening to me when I was arguing in favour of transparency. I was arguing against the particular wording of these amendments, which I believe to be biased. Of course we should be transparent about what things cost, and we should have the right to have a view and determine what we think about that. Who could argue against that? All I am saying is that, if we are paying £40 billion over 40 years, that is probably against £400 billion that we would be paying, and that should be the context in which these figures are produced.

[Wera Hobhouse]

rose—

[Graham Stringer]

I am sorry about this, Mr Hanson. I will not give way again after this intervention, because I did say that I would not take much time.

[Wera Hobhouse]

As a member of the Labour party, the hon. Gentleman should understand the word “solidarity”. He has just been talking about the fact that Europe is much more than just a financial project. Is this not about European solidarity and we, as one of the richest countries in the world, acting in solidarity with people and countries in eastern Europe, which, for decades, have been losing out? Now we are helping those countries and their democracies to thrive.

[Graham Stringer]

There could be a very long answer to that question, which I will not give. All I will say is that the EU—and this is one of my reasons for voting to leave it—has had a hostile view to democracy and national sovereignty from its very conception. I believe that we should have solidarity with those countries that are moving towards democracy and improving the rights of their citizens, but I have never believed that the EU is a body that can do that.

There has been an assumption in the debate not only that the finances and paying for a trade deal were good things, but that most of the regulations that came from Europe have been good and most of the application of those regulations has been good. There are many regulations that are not good. The clinical trials directive is the obvious one, which I have discussed with my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie) previously, but there are many others, including the electromagnetic field directive, which nearly wrecked much of our medicine. There has been an anti-scientific view from the EU that has stopped the development of genetically modified organisms in the EU. One has to take a balanced view. There have been good things from the EU, but there have also been many negative and bad things.

Finally, the essence of many comments that have been made today is that it is difficult to become an independent country. These are essentially the arguments of imperialists. It is not that difficult for a powerful economy such as ours to take over its own democracy and become independent again.

[Mike Gapes]

I was here for seven hours on Monday before I spoke, so I feel that I can say at least a few words today.

We face a fundamental choice in this debate. Are we still a parliamentary democracy, or do we simply—because of a very narrow vote on 23 June 2016—take our eyes off of the detail and go like lemmings towards anything in order to implement a decision that is thought to be irreversible? The leave campaign told us that it was about taking back control. The reality is that this Parliament must assert itself and take back control from an overweening and incompetent Executive who want Henry VIII powers in their Bill and wish us just to be supine—to lie down and accept anything that they come forward with.

That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie) tabled new clause 17, which I am delighted to support. It would mean that there has to be an independent assessment of the costs of the Government’s proposals. We in this House—this democratic Parliament —can then assert centuries-old tradition against overweening Executive power. We can decide democratically. We can assert and take back control. That is why we need to vote for new clause 17 and support the associated amendments.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I will support the Bill on Second Reading for two reasons—one relatively small and personal, and the other to do with the general principles of democracy.

The first is that, when I joined the Labour party as a very young man, my Labour MP, Paul Rose, who was the youngest Member of Parliament elected in the 1964 Parliament, was one of the 69 Labour rebels who voted with Ted Heath to implement the 1972 Act. I have been smouldering with quiet anger over the 45 years since that happened, so it is a personal delight to be able to vote to repeal that Act—Paul Rose certainly made his constituents and constituency party very angry at the time.

The much more substantial reason, however, is that we had a referendum last year, and people voted by a majority to leave the European Union. Although this is not the Bill that takes us out of the European Union—that is done under article 50—it is absolutely fundamental to leaving the European Union. Having made their decision, and many of the people who voted remain having come to the conclusion that we should get on with it, I do not think people will understand the Labour party’s tactical position of voting against the Bill, having said in the general election only three months ago that we would implement our manifesto. That is not a principled position, and I do not think the electorate like it. I think the Labour party has made a serious mistake in coming to the conclusion it has, and I hope it can reverse it between now and the vote on Monday evening.

Having said that, I think my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), who led for the Labour party, made some substantial points about flaws in the Bill, as did other speakers. While I will vote for Second Reading, I hope Ministers are listening carefully to what has been said and will come forward with compromises. It is not healthy to have so many Henry VIII clauses. Every Government has had Henry VIII clauses, but not of this substantial nature.

I have never liked self-amending regulation, which was one reason I went through the Lobby against the Lisbon treaty with the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Chancellor. The Lisbon treaty contained passerelle clauses, which effectively allowed bureaucrats in Brussels to change our laws without any response from Parliament. To respond to what the previous Attorney General said earlier, I do not believe that two wrongs make a right, but I do believe in consistency: it was certainly wrong to have passerelle clauses and huge Henry VIII clauses before, and it is wrong now. I hope the Government will listen to the reasonable points that have been made.

A great many points have been made, and one cannot, in the short period of five minutes, cover all the positions that have been set out. I would make one point, because there has been genuine concern on the Labour side about the loss of protection from environmental laws and changes to trade union laws. What lies underneath that is a belief that everything that has come out of the European Union has been good for trade unions and the environment. That simply is not true. If one looks at the Laval judgment from the European Court of Justice or the Viking judgment, one sees that they undermine minimum wage legislation and the definition of what constitutes a trade dispute. If one looks at the width of environmental legislation, one sees that there is a lot in the history of the EU that has done serious damage to the environment. The issue that comes to mind most is the fisheries policy, which nearly denuded the North sea of cod and other fish.

I hope that the Government are listening and will come forward with some compromises, and if it is necessary to give us more than eight days, I hope that that time will be given.