Principles of Democracy and the Rights of the Electorate

Jack Lopresti Excerpts

Thursday 26th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paterson]

Totally understood. The hon. Lady reported this horrendous and completely unacceptable incident. I was making the point that we should all watch our language, but sadly one of her colleagues compared the ERG to Nazis. If you google “ERG fascists”, you get 227,000 results, and if you google “ERG extremists”, you get 176,000. We in the ERG would like a system of government where Members are elected to this House, from which a Government is formed. If that Government perform satisfactorily, tax sensibly and spend money sensibly, they are re-elected. If they do not perform well, they are removed by voting. That is a pretty basic summary of representative democracy.

The problem now in this country is the huge collision with the juggernaut of direct democracy. I think we have had 11 referendums in recent decades, and they have all pretty well gone along with what the establishment wanted. The political and commercial establishment were happy with the results—on Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, and probably the alternative vote referendum, too.

Then we have this current problem. In 2015, David Cameron promised, “If you vote Conservative, we will give you a one-off in/out referendum. We the MPs will give you the people the right to decide whether we stay in or leave the EU.” Possibly to his surprise, he won the election, and then promised to deliver. The right hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond) took the referendum Bill through the House in 2015. In his winding-up speech, he gave a pretty good summary. He said:

“But whether we favour Britain being in or out, we surely should all be able to agree on the simple principle that the decision about our membership should be taken by the British people, not by Whitehall bureaucrats, certainly not by Brussels Eurocrats; not even by Government Ministers or parliamentarians in this Chamber.”—[Official Report, 9 June 2015; Vol. 596, c. 1056.]

The Bill got 544 votes on Second Reading.

We then had the referendum itself. People were bombarded with a Government document costing £9 million. It was made very clear that this was a one-off and that the people would decide—that it was not an advisory referendum, but was giving a clear steer to Parliament and that parliamentarians would have to honour it. That was the understanding: whatever the decision, parliamentarians would deliver.

We then had the biggest vote in British history—17.4 million on a single issue against 16.1 million to remain. The conundrum is this. In the ensuing general election, in which, in fairness to my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) who is not in her seat at the moment, she got the second largest number of votes ever—13.6 million—in a general election, her manifesto was very simple. The Conservative party was elected on a manifesto that we would honour the referendum, leave the single market, leave the customs union and leave the remit of the European Court of Justice. Although woollier, there was pretty clear language in the Labour party manifesto that it would honour the referendum result. According to one assessment, what we have against that in this Parliament, which is a remain Parliament, is 485 Members supporting remain and only 162 supporting leave. We may never ever have a referendum again, but I put it to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that this has to be delivered. The people were told very clearly, “You vote Conservative in that original general election; we will give you the chance.” They were told during the referendum campaign, “You vote to leave; it will be delivered.” They were told by the two main parties that they would honour the result, but here we are, three years on, and this has not been delivered.

There are Members chuntering about no deal, but this is all a bit of a shibboleth. We are talking about leaving a customs union to which 8% of our businesses send goods. Our sales of goods to this organisation represent 8.2% of GDP and our sales of services 5.5%. This will not bring the roof down.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way. Does he share with me the frustration and anger that I hear every day in my constituency? People say to me, “You asked for our opinion. We gave you our opinion. Why have you not left yet and what are you still talking about?”

[Mr Paterson]

I entirely endorse what my hon. Friend says. People come up to me the whole time. The words that I get so frequently are, “Just get on with it.” Let us take up an earlier intervention. We are talking about normalisation. Our sales of goods and services are a bit over 13%. It is inconceivable that, even if we did have no deal—do not forget that on page 36 of our manifesto, we said that, “No deal is better than a bad deal”—we have agreements on aviation, we have heard from Calais and we have heard from Dover. All this stuff about no deal is a shield, and it is a shield for Members who do not want us to leave. My proposition is that if we do not deliver on the referendum, that will be far more damaging to this country. The damage to the integrity of all our institutions will be absolutely shattering, compared with just a little bit of interruption, which can be sorted out at our borders and which all those bodies who run the borders say do not represent a problem.

We may never ever have another referendum. We may go back to what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) describes—he dismisses this as an opinion poll. He is a strong believer in parliamentary democracy. I am as well, but we gave people the choice. We cannot put that back in the bottle. I appeal to all Members, particularly those on the Opposition Benches, to recognise that we have only a few short weeks in which to deliver what the people voted for, and they really must consider the extraordinary anger that could result. British people are very patient, but as my hon. Friend has just said, they are getting really angry. They have been thwarted and they know perfectly well that the establishment has thwarted them. The establishment was very happy with the results of those previous 11 referendums. For the first time, the vote went against them. What we have to do now is to deliver so that we can remove that anger and leave the European Union on 31 October.