EU: Withdrawal and Future Relationship (Motions)

Debate between Joanna Cherry and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Monday 1st April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I shall be accused of bias if I give way to my right hon. and learned Friend.

I urge the Liberals to proceed on that basis, and similarly, the Scottish nationalists. I agree with them—I would much prefer to stay in the European Union—but I am afraid that in trying to give this country good and stable governance by giving steers to the House of Commons, I have compromised on that, because a huge majority seems to me to have condemned us to leaving the European Union. I have tabled motions with the Scottish nationalists and have voted with them to revoke article 50 if the dread problem of no deal seems to be looming towards us by accident, and I will again. I cannot understand why the Scottish nationalists will not at least contemplate, if they cannot get their way and stay in the European Union, voting for a permanent customs union, which will benefit business and the economy in Scotland just as much as here and is not remotely incompatible with pursuing their wider aims.

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Clarke]

As I have mentioned the Scottish nationalists, I will of course give the hon. and learned Lady the right to reply.

[Joanna Cherry]

I am very grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for giving way. The reason that the Scottish National party cannot support his motion today is that freedom of movement is vital for the Scottish economy and we do not get freedom of movement without the single market—that is the reason we cannot support his motion.

[Mr Clarke]

I will vote for the single market, if it is presented in a proper way, and I would have voted for the motion in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr Fysh) last week, had he not at the end added a gratuitous sentence ruling out a customs union. If we can get a majority for the single market, I will vote for it again.

I accept that if we pass a motion for the single market, or the motion for common market 2.0, which no doubt my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) will move later, my motion will be subsumed, but I am not confident we will pass a motion for the single market, because although the Scot nats are attracted by freedom of movement, many of my right hon. and hon. Friends are provoked into voting against it for that very reason. Similarly, common market 2.0, which I would settle for, is probably too ambitious. Mine, then, is the fall-back position.

I hope that my hon. Friend votes for my motion, but I cannot understand the Scottish nationalists. Voting for my motion is no threat to their position; indeed, it is an insurance policy—this goes back to how I started—to make sure that we move forward and that the House of Commons gives the Government a mandate that we can then ensure they have to follow in mapping out this nation’s future. In the long negotiations over the next two or three years, questions of regulatory alignment and freedom of movement will start coming into the negotiations again; that we have committed ourselves to a permanent customs union will not compromise any of those discussions.

I have not the faintest idea why Members of the Democratic Unionist party are not supporting motion (C). If we pass motion (C), it will mean we have no tariffs or certificates of origin and that the Irish border question is pretty well solved—we will be 90-odd% of the way to maintaining the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. It would be of huge benefit to the Irish economy and Irish security and mean that the DUP’s objection to the Irish backstop—that Northern Ireland is being treated differently from the rest of the UK—vanished Pass motion (C) and it applies to the entire United Kingdom.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Joanna Cherry and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Report stage: First Day: House of Commons
Tuesday 16th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joanna Cherry]

That is what I have heard, too. What I would like to hear from the Government today—this is why I tabled this probing amendment—is some indication that they recognise the gravity of the issue. This is not a political football, and it is not about stopping Brexit; it is about addressing issues of legal certainty.

As a courtesy to this House, I would like to hear some indication of how the Government propose to address the issues of legal certainty, particularly so that Members of my party, which is not represented in the other place, can have some input and give our view. Of course Scotland has a separate legal system. Clause 6(2) will apply to the High Court of Justiciary, and we need to be reassured not just on behalf of judges in the UK Supreme Court but on behalf of judges in the Supreme Courts of Scotland. I very much hope amendments 42 and 43 will draw from the Solicitor General some colourable reassurance that the Government are taking these concerns seriously and that they have them in hand, as well as some indication of the route the Government intend to go down in the other place to address these concerns.

Finally, on the charter of fundamental rights, I will wait to see what the official Opposition do, as we each have an amendment down. Given the spirit in which we have worked together on other aspects of this Bill, I am sure we can come to an agreement on that. The Scottish National party will be happy to support new clause 7, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). Many of our constituents feel strongly about the issue it raises, as do those of other MPs, and we are grateful to her for persevering with it.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie) began his speech by saying that it was going to be very short but he then generously gave way to dozens of interventions from Members from all around the House and spoke for half an hour. He was expressing views with which I largely agreed, but I will try not to follow his precedent. I was not trying to catch your eye at all, Mr Speaker; I was waiting for the Solicitor General to reply to these points, as I was waiting for Ministers to reply to them in Committee, when I made speeches on one or two of them. However, I decided to make a short speech to save myself and the House from the long interventions that I am prone to make and would otherwise make on the speech of my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor General.

This speech concerns the three points that have dominated throughout, where I am in great sympathy with what many people have said. First, why are the Government singling out the charter of fundamental rights to be the only piece of EU legislation that they wish to repeal? Secondly, on retained EU rights, why are those people who have existing rights of action able to get only this strange concession that for three months they might be able to pursue those rights, otherwise retrospectively they will lose them if their solicitors do not act quickly enough or they do not realise in time that they might have an action? Thirdly, and finally, we have this strange question of how in future a sovereign Parliament will amend EU law if it wishes to do so and why we have this confusion about what is, in effect, primary legislation and will require an Act of Parliament to change it, and what is secondary legislation and will require regulations. I will not repeat the arguments on any of those points at any length, because I addressed some of them in Committee and they have been well put today. But I am astonished that we have got to Report without, as yet, having had an adequate response to any of them.

I was rather doubtful about the charter of fundamental rights when it came before the House originally. I was a supporter of the treaty of Lisbon and I voted against my own party, with the then Government, quite frequently throughout those proceedings, as I thought the treaty was highly desirable. I am glad to say that when we came to power we showed not the slightest sign of wishing to undo any of it. The charter of fundamental rights was the bit I was least keen on, thinking it on the whole unnecessary, as it largely duplicated the European convention on human rights, and thinking that it was not going to make any difference; I did not use The Beano quote, but I could not see that it mattered very much and I went along with it reluctantly. I was wrong, as the charter has led to some extensions of rights in important areas. I cannot see why we should wish to halt that process. We have not yet got the Government’s proposals as to what they are going to do to fill the gap on things such as equalities law, which will emerge if we just repeal this.

The point I wish to make in a short speech is about what kind of answer I want from my hon. and learned Friend. He is genuinely a personal friend of mine. He is an extremely eloquent and valuable member of the Government. Obviously, as all lawyers do from time to time, he follows a brief, but I am sure he makes a considerable contribution to that brief and gives very valuable advice to those who seek to instruct him to temper what they would otherwise wish to do. So this is not at all aimed at him personally. But the Government’s approach throughout these unsatisfactory proceedings so far has been not to debate the main issues; we get raised with us all kinds of technical, drafting or slightly irrelevant reasons why the proposals coming from the Front Benchers on all sides cannot be accepted. So far, as far as I am aware, the Government’s case on the charter of fundamental rights is, “Well, it would not make any difference to repeal it. It hasn’t added anything. This is just unnecessary. We have singled it out, uniquely among all other EU law, simply because our tidiness of mind makes us wish to remove something that is perfectly adequately reflected in other areas.” That is not good enough.

On all three points that I have set out, the Government today, on Report, have the last chance in this House to say why they are repealing the charter, what evil it has done, what danger they think we are being protected from by its repeal and so on. I have yet to hear an example from anybody of a case where the charter of fundamental rights has been invoked in a way that anybody in this House would wish to reverse. We have not been given an example of an area of law that we have been taken into despite the bitter opposition of either the Government or this House. The advances that have been made, in some cases invoking the charter, seem to me perfectly worth while, so I hope the Solicitor General’s speech will specify those areas where the Government see that damage has been to our approach to rights and to law, and what hazards they are going to prevent us from falling into by reversing the charter.