European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Ian Murray Excerpts

Monday 8th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baker]

I am delighted that he is, but I think he voted to notify the EU of our withdrawal. If he did, he voted to leave without an agreement.

The fundamental point of the amendments to Lords amendment 5 is that the time has come, after every effort that we have made to enable the Government to secure a withdrawal agreement to which this House could give its assent, to say enough is enough. The Government should reject Lords amendment 5, accept the amendment in lieu from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone and move heaven and earth to get out on Friday without a withdrawal agreement.

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) on bringing us this Bill. I had not intended to speak this evening, but I was slightly shocked by the speech from the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who started by saying that everything we were doing was undemocratic and then proceeded to give us four or five clearly democratic examples that he was attempting to make undemocratic.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) wondered how it could be a democratic outrage, in the words of the hon. Member for Stone, to have both this House and the other place vote for a piece of legislation in the democratic fashion that we have used for many hundreds of years.

[Sir William Cash]

May I just point out to the hon. Gentleman that the European Union Referendum Act 2015, which this House passed by six to one, deliberately and exclusively gave the people the right, by sovereign Act of Parliament, to make the decision themselves? That was us giving the people the right to make that decision, and the hon. Gentleman and others are now trying to retrieve that decision from the British people, which is totally undemocratic.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Murray]

If the hon. Gentleman wants to intervene again and tell me about one promise made at the 2016 referendum that still stands today, I will happily accept his argument. We are here only because his Government and his Prime Minister have created the biggest mess in parliamentary history in a hung Parliament—one that was made hung by his Prime Minister gambling with a 33 majority and losing. Everything changed at the 2017 general election, but he forgets that.

The hon. Gentleman went on to talk about it being undemocratic to hold European elections. It is apparently undemocratic to ask the entire country to go to a polling station to vote in a democratic election when it is the right of people across Europe, by treaty, to go to a booth to put their cross in a box. How can that be undemocratic?

How can it be undemocratic to try to prevent a no-deal scenario? This is the worst thing of all. This House has voted on at least three occasions by a vast majority to prevent a no-deal scenario, so it is perfectly democratic for the House to take charge of the business and pass legislation to ensure that no deal does not happen. That is perfectly and utterly democratic.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there was no word during the referendum itself from those suggesting that we leave the European Union that we should leave without a deal and plunge our economy off a cliff?

[Ian Murray]

I hate to quote the leave campaign, but I think Mr Hannan himself said that nobody was considering leaving the single market. Indeed, the whole campaign was predicated on having the easiest trade deal in history, on 40 trade deals rolling over by 29 March, on a Brexit dividend, and on an extra £350 million a week for the NHS, but none of that has come to pass.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a sad indictment of where we have reached that Peter Oborne, who describes himself as a “strong Brexiteer”, said over the weekend:

“Now we must swallow our pride and think again”?

He was one of the 17.4 million who voted for Brexit but he now says:

“I have to admit that the Brexit project has gone sour”

and that it will “make us poorer”. It is not just remainers who support the Bill; leavers are also saying, “This isn’t what we voted for. This isn’t the state of a nation that we recognise.” It is time for us to take a step back and not rush to a decision that we will regret.

[Ian Murray]

I am grateful for that intervention. To paraphrase a former Secretary of State, a democracy fails to be a democracy if the public are not allowed to change their mind. That is exactly what people have been doing. [Interruption.]

[Andrew Griffiths (Burton) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has mentioned on a number of occasions the hundreds of years of activity in and decisions taken by this place. Can he give one example of when such an important constitutional Bill has been rammed through this House with fewer than four hours of debate?

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Murray]

Time is of the essence. If the Bill had not been put through this House with four hours of debate, it would not have made it in time for the European Council on Wednesday. In actual fact, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford should be thanked by the Prime Minister for this Bill.

SNP Members are jumping up and down because I said that a democracy fails to be a democracy if the public are not allowed to change their mind. Actually, the public of Scotland have not changed their mind on independence. Indeed, they are more against it— [Interruption.] I have probably just set the cat among the nationalist pigeons.

I have a lot of respect for the hon. Member for Stone because he has always held his views about the European Union. We have to respect those views, listen to them and agree to disagree—we will definitely do that—but what is undemocratic is for Members to table amendments to trash a Bill that has gone democratically through this House and the other place to put democratically into law the prevention of no deal. That is what is undemocratic, which is why we should support the Lords amendments.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Many people outside this House are losing confidence and trust in us and our proceedings. Tonight is another plunge in how they see us, because we are behaving collectively so badly. My right hon. and hon. Friends who have complained about the lack of time for debating both the Bill and the amendments are quite right. This is a serious constitutional matter. We have not been given time to construct proper amendments and there is no time in this brief hour to do justice to the complex issues raised by the Lords amendments. We had but a short debate on the original consideration of the Bill, when I was able to set out some of the constitutional difficulties involved in groups of MPs seizing the agenda and taking over money resolution and Crown prerogative matters, and we are not allowed proper time tonight to consider exactly how all that fits with this Bill.

What we do know, however, is that the very slim majority who have got the Bill this far through this House intend to go against the clearly expressed wishes of the British people in the referendum. All those who voted to leave, two years and nine months ago, had every reason to suppose that all Labour and Conservative Members elected on their 2017 manifestos would see through our exit in a timely way. They should also have expected that from the promises made by both the leave and the remain campaigns in the referendum, the legislation put through in granting that referendum, and the clear statement of the Government at the time, who said that we would implement the wishes of the British people. The Opposition did not dissent from that particular view when the Government put out their leaflet. Indeed, during the remain campaign many Labour MPs endorsed the Government. That is why tonight is another sad night. This Parliament is breaking its word, breaking its promises and letting down 17.4 million voters, but it is also letting down quite a lot of remain voters.

A lot of remain voters are good democrats who fully accept the verdict of the British people. Quite a lot of people in our country were only just remain voters or only just leave voters and are prepared to live with the judgment of the majority, and they now, too, are scandalised that this Parliament is insisting on a second needless delay when we have had two years and nine months to prepare for exit and when our Government assure us that they are fully prepared for exiting without signing the withdrawal agreement.

I find it very odd that Members of this House think that the withdrawal agreement is, in itself, Brexit or in any way helps Brexit because, of course, the withdrawal agreement is a massively long delay to our exit, with the added problem, which the Opposition have rightly identified, that it entails signing up to a solemn and binding international treaty to undermine our bargaining position in the second part of the negotiations envisaged by the EU’s process.