European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

John Redwood Excerpts

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

[The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Steve Barclay)]

I begin by wishing you, Sir Roger, and all Members of the House a happy new year.

The Bill implements the withdrawal agreement negotiated by the Prime Minister. It fulfils the will of the British people and will set the stage for our bright future outside the European Union. It lets us take back control of our laws, our money, our borders and our trade policy, and it delivers on the overwhelming mandate given to us by the British people to get Brexit done by the end of January.

Sir Roger, as you have just informed the Committee, I am, under your guidance, speaking to this group. I will speak to clauses 1 to 6, clause 33 and new clauses 4 and 36, noting that new clause 19 and amendment 25 have not been selected.

Clause 1 gives legal effect to the implementation period in domestic law. The implementation period ensures that common rules will remain in place until the end of this year, meaning that businesses will be able to trade on the same terms as now until a future relationship has been agreed. This provides certainty and stability for the duration of this time. During the implementation period, the effect of the European Communities Act 1972 will be saved and modified on a temporary basis to provide the necessary continuity. It will have a new purpose: to give effect to EU law as set out in the withdrawal agreement, to provide for the implementation period. As a result, businesses and citizens need prepare for only one set of changes as we move into our future relationship with the EU.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Can my right hon. Friend give us an estimate of how much the implementation period will cost us, and will he reassure us that once we are out properly at the end of this year, there will be no future payments thereafter?

[Steve Barclay]

This will secure our membership for the period. One of the costs for businesses—one of the greater costs—would result from two sets of changes, without the comfort of an implementation period. The business community itself—of which I know my right hon. Friend is a great champion—said that it wanted an implementation period while the negotiation on the trade deal was being conducted to avoid the higher cost of two sets of changes.

The saving of the ECA will be repealed at the end of the implementation period, at which point the repurposed ECA will cease to have effect. Clause 1 is essential to achieving the terms agreed in the withdrawal agreement and ensuring the proper functioning of European Union law during the implementation period, and for that reason it must stand part of the Bill.

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[Paul Blomfield]

My hon. Friend is right to focus on the issue. The Government have seemed reluctant to embrace the idea of scrutiny and accountability since October in so very many ways. I hope they will think seriously and quite genuinely over the period ahead to ensure that there is a proper opportunity for this House to question and debate the direction of travel.

[John Redwood]

I am glad that we have this opportunity for the Opposition to make their points, but can they not see that trying to take away the proposition that we leave at the end of the year, come what may, completely undermines the British negotiating position? Every time they have tabled an amendment over the past three and a half years, it has always been to do Britain down and leave us in a weak position.

[Paul Blomfield]

The right hon. Gentleman and I have had previous exchanges about comments that he might have made about doing Britain down. The position we have taken is that possibly it is not always the best idea to jump off a cliff—that if we find ourselves in a position where we are, for the sake of weeks or months, unable to secure a deal that is in the interests of the British economy, the sensible thing to do is to give ourselves a little bit of flexibility. He may think otherwise, but that is not our view.

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[John Redwood]

I rise particularly to support clause 33. I think it is essential that we are finally out of the EU in every proper way by the end of this year. Some three and a half years have passed since the British people made their decision that they wished to leave. Many of us voted to leave because we think the world is going to be better once we have left. We do not regard it as some kind of disease or problem that has to be managed; we see it as full of opportunities. We want to rebuild our fishing industry under British regulations and British control. We wish to get all our money back and to spend it on our priorities in health and education. We wish to make sure that we can make the laws we wish, and which the people recommend to us in elections and in the normal dialogue between constituents and Members of Parliament. We are extremely optimistic about our opportunities as a leader of free trade worldwide once we have regained our full vote and voice in the World Trade Organisation and are able to do our own deals with all those parts of the world that the EU has not got round to doing deals with all the time we have been a member.

We are very optimistic. We think we are going to be better off economically. I have always said that, and anyone who suggests otherwise is deliberately misrepresenting my position. I share the frustration of many leave voters that three and a half years on and with a new Parliament with a very clear mandate we are still facing demands that we are going too quickly and that three and a half years plus another year—four and a half years—is still not long enough, and why not six and a half years?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, unlike the Opposition spokesman, who seems to paint a very gloomy picture about our moving away from European regulations, this Parliament and this country are perfectly capable of regulating our own domestic affairs, and protecting the environment and workers’ rights in the British way, without always acquiescing to EU laws?

[John Redwood]

I, in particular, think we can do a lot better on taxation. I do not want tax on all these green products that the EU makes us tax. I would not have thought that the Green party really wanted those. However, I suspect that if I or others moved amendments to the forthcoming Budget this March to take out those unnecessary taxes, we would be told we are still not allowed to because we are in the implementation period and have to accept European law. It has also interfered in our corporate taxes in a way that actually reduces the revenues we gain from big business. I would have thought Labour and the Liberal Democrats rather oppose that, but because it comes from the EU, they are completely quiet on the subject. They do not seem to mind that the EU interferes with our revenue raising.

[Michael Tomlinson]

Is my right hon. Friend surprised, as I am, that the official Opposition and the Liberal Democrats, with their new clauses, are seeking yet further delays? Despite what the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) says, that is the effect of new clause 4. It would mean a lack of the certainty that the British people voted for at the recent general election.

[John Redwood]

I do think it is almost unbelievable that the Opposition are talking about adding to four and a half years of delay, under the Government model now, another two years—six and a half years. Six and a half years at £12 billion a year is a huge sum, and I would like to tease this out a bit more with those on our Front Bench because I think my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State misunderstood me. He thought I was talking about the cost to business, but I am talking about the cost to British taxpayers. This extra implementation period in itself—I really rather regret it, but I see it is a necessity from where we currently are, given the forces in this House—must be costing £11 billion or £12 billion, in tax revenue forgone, that we have to pay.

I would like some reassurance from Front Benchers that once we are properly out at the end of December, under clause 33, there will not be further bills. I want us to be able to say to the British people, “We now do control our own money. We are not going to carry on paying for this show.” I think it might be quite a good negotiating tactic to suggest to the EU that perhaps there is not a strong legal basis for some of the claims it wishes to make, because we need to put some countervailing pressure on the EU during this remaining negotiation period on the free trade agreement. I do not think we have to pay for a free trade agreement. I think it is massively in the interests of the rest of the European Union, because it sells us more than we sell it, but we have to be firm, otherwise it will walk all over us again and demand more concessions.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

Is not the lesson of the prolonged, tortuous seven years of negotiation on the Canadian deal the very fact that it was an open-ended process that did not come to an end? The effect of new clause 4 is basically to ensure, in providing for an extension, that it makes that extension certain, because the knowledge that the extension can take place will take away the very pressure to make an agreement within the time that is available.

[John Redwood]

Those of us who have had to study European Union affairs for all too long, because they affect our own country so much, have learned from bitter experience that deals nearly always happen at the last minute under artificial or genuine deadlines that the EU has often imposed on itself. All we are trying to do, in supporting a Government in doing this, is to say to the EU that there is a deadline on this negotiation: “If you, O EU, really want a free trade deal with us, as you have said you do in the partnership agreement, hurry now while stocks last.” It is not all about us; it is about the EU as well. It needs this free trade agreement, and we need to keep the pressure up. Let us tell it that there needs to be significant progress by the middle of this year so that it is realistic to finalise the text.

I do think it should be relatively straightforward, if there is good will on the EU side as well as on our own side, because we have been party to its international negotiations. If we take the best of the Japanese deal and the best of the Canadian deal—it is already there in text—it should be relatively easy to say that we can at least have that. The EU has already offered that to non-members of the European Union, and we should be able to add a bit more because by being a member we already have agreements to things that are in our mutual interest to continue.

I would be very optimistic about the negotiations, but I am quite conscious that if we negotiate as, unfortunately, the previous Government did before the change of leadership and the general election, we will end up making more concessions to get something that the EU has already promised in the political declaration. I do not want the fish at risk, and I do not want the money at risk. I do want to take full control of the money, the fish, the law making and the taxes from the beginning of next year, as we are promised by this Bill, and clause 33 is a very important part of trying to deliver that.

I wish the Government every success. I am optimistic on their behalf because of the promises the EU has made. My message to the EU is: “Do not underestimate the British people. You may have been right to believe that many of their political representatives in the last Parliament were on the EU’s side, not on the UK’s side, but the British people are altogether a more serious proposition, and the British people have spoken loud and clear.” The British people have had enough of the delay, enough of the dither, enough of the concessions and enough of the idea that Brexit is a problem. We believe in Brexit; we want the freedoms; and we want to choose our own taxes, our own laws and to spend our own money. Bring it on—the sooner, the better.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

The Prime Minister and some members of the Conservative party call on everyone to “move on” from Brexit. It is as if he expects those of us who see the disadvantages of leaving the EU simply to put our brain in a box and forget about the impacts on our constituents and communities. He expects us not to speak up for the colleagues, friends and, in my case, loved ones who have come here from the EU, made their home here and improved our society. He expects us not to mourn our loss of EU citizenship and to be silent about the damage to healthcare, manufacturing, the food and drink industry, farming, and even fishing—yes, fishing, that oft-quoted supposed beneficiary of Brexit.

The trouble is that the Prime Minister thinks there is only one fishing industry, and one Scottish fishing industry, and he completely ignores inshore fishing, such as that in my constituency on the west coast of Scotland. Eighty-five per cent. of that catch goes to the EU, but with extra bureaucracy, delays and the threat of tariffs, the industry will struggle to compete with Northern Irish fishermen, who share the same waters but will land their catch directly into the single market. To save their boats, some fishermen have even mooted registering them in Northern Ireland, but that would destroy the viability of our fishing harbours, fish markets and onshore processing. It is certainly not a “sea of opportunity” for coastal communities.

Despite his hollow demand to “let the healing begin”, the Prime Minister has produced a worse deal than his predecessor. Like her, he made no attempt to seek common ground across the Chamber, or across the nations of the UK, and he ignored the Scottish Government’s compromise of enabling both Northern Ireland and Scotland to stay inside the single market and customs union, which would have respected the fact that both nations voted to remain in the EU. Even the supposed triumph of the Northern Ireland protocol is sketched on the back of a fag packet, with almost everything left for the Joint Committee to work out and enact through sweeping and unlimited delegated powers.

The changes made to the October version of the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill set the tone for what we can expect from this Government in future. The deletion of clause 34 and schedule 4 removes the protection of workers’ rights from this legally binding treaty, while clause 37 abandons the commitment to family reunification for unaccompanied child refugees. Particularly concerning are the Government’s plans for a ridiculously short transition period of only 11 months—despite the former Prime Minister taking two and a half years just to get the withdrawal agreement. The Tory manifesto revealed the Government’s aim of changing the balance between Government, Parliament and the courts, and in this Bill we see that begin. There is little input for the devolved Governments, despite the impact that Brexit will have on their devolved policies. This debate has been limited to just three days in the House of Commons, as opposed to 30 days to debate the treaties of Rome or Maastricht.

We hear much about sovereignty as an argument for Brexit. The rather pointless clause 36 simply restates parliamentary sovereignty, yet clauses 5 and 6 give the withdrawal agreement supremacy over all domestic UK law. This Bill is not “getting Brexit done”; it is the beginning of the beginning. The former Prime Minister tried to have her cake and eat it, while painting herself into a corner with her own red lines. This Prime Minister clearly does not care if he only manages a few crumbs of a basic, bare-bones trade deal, and the loss of 50-plus EU free trade deals with other countries in the world. Such is the obsession with a short transition—there is certainly no more talk of frictionless trade!

The long wish list of aspirations in the political declaration is way beyond a trade deal; it is the future relationship with the EU. The political declaration makes it clear that the more the UK diverges, the less there will be on the table, and the outcome of that will affect the wellbeing of people in all our constituencies. By deleting clause 31, and by removing parliamentary oversight of negotiations on the future relationship, MPs are losing the ability to influence the terms of that relationship on behalf of our constituents and local industries. We are also losing the possibility of scrutinising the Government’s proposals and holding them to account on their progress. This is a blind Brexit. As others have said, we are expected to jump off a cliff at the end of this month, and we are meant just to trust that somehow the Government will knit a parachute on the way down.

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[Sammy Wilson]

Of course that will be the opening negotiating position. He is not going to say, “Yes, and by the way, we do not have to have close alignment.” There will still be a desire on the part of the EU to keep us as close as possible. However, one way of ensuring that we get a deal, and get the kind of deal that we want, is to make it clear that we will not engage in protracted negotiations. We must say, “We will not allow you to use all the tactics that you have used before. You must come to a conclusion. If you want access to our UK market—and you need access to it because you sell more to us than we sell to you—and if you want the future trading relationship and the co-operation that the Government have offered time and again, you must reach a deal quickly.”

[John Redwood]

Has the right hon. Gentleman noticed, in the three and a half years of these endless debates, that the Labour and Liberal Opposition have always tabled proposals that strengthen the EU and undermine the UK? Has he noticed that they only ever put the EU case, and never put the UK case?

[Sammy Wilson]

That was the whole point of extending the implementation period, to allow that tactic to be used, even in this Parliament, with different arithmetic. It is one of the reasons why I think the Government are right to draw a line and say, “We have a year in which to do this. Now let us get on with it, and let us get the deal.” I just hope that during that period, the Government will also be cognisant of the fact that the protocol on Northern Ireland is damaging to the Union, and will seek to ensure in the negotiations that that protocol is weakened and the differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK are changed, so that we leave the EU along with the rest of the United Kingdom and on the same terms.

European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

John Redwood Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons & Committee: 2nd sitting
Wednesday 8th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Will the Minister make sure, in the discussions with the devolved Governments, that the interests of England are also central to his considerations? We do not have a devolved Administration, but we have a very strong wish to see Brexit through, because we think there are a lot of gains from Brexit.

[Mr Walker]

My right hon. Friend is of course right that people across the whole of the United Kingdom, including in England, voted for Brexit, but we should not forget the large numbers of people in Scotland, the almost 1 million people in Northern Ireland and those in Wales who also voted for Brexit.

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[Thangam Debbonaire]

I rise to speak about parliamentary sovereignty. Clause 38 is a puzzle, and we have tabled our amendment 11 to tease out more of that puzzle, to try to work out what it is for and to expose some of what we on this side believe has been quite puzzling leadership on the part of those who have been peddling the idea that we are going to take back control of our laws, our money and our borders because they have somehow not been under our control for the last 40 years. I am going to stop using the phrase “take back control” in a moment, but I will first analyse it to make my point about our amendment.

We have been repeatedly told that the EU referendum was about taking back control and restoring parliamentary sovereignty. I am seeing nods from certain esteemed Government Members telling me that that is indeed what it was about. It was not about that, however. I find this most puzzling. Have we ever actually lost our parliamentary sovereignty? The answer is, of course, no. Saying that Brexit is about taking back control of our laws, our money and our borders is quite extraordinary. Let us start with laws. Have all the laws we have passed in the past 40 years been just a dream? Did we imagine all those laws? Just in the four years since I took my seat, we have passed law after law. We have put Bills through a process of scrutiny, debate and amendment.

[John Redwood]

But does the hon. Lady not understand the message of the referendum and the election? There are very large numbers of directly acting regulations that we can do nothing about, and we have had a lot of legislation going through this House directed by EU directives, which the UK was not happy with.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I understand the difference between a law and a directive. I also understand the fact that we were perfectly capable of making our own laws during the past 40 years. Let us take an example that I am very fond of—[Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) is shaking his head, but he knows perfectly well that we have passed laws. For instance, let us take one that was passed on the very last day of the last Parliament. My dear friend Stephen Pound, the former MP for Ealing North, was standing right here at the Dispatch Box making his last speech as shadow Northern Ireland Minister. He was closing for the Opposition on the final stages of the Historical Institutional Abuse (Northern Ireland) Bill, which would at last provide compensation for victims of historical child abuse. He marked that occasion with tributes to the victims, some of whom were in the Gallery, with respect for cross-party collaboration and with a heartfelt plea for the law to be implemented fully and speedily and never to be needed again. Anyone who was in the House that day, as I was, cannot fail to have been moved by his speech but also by the impact of the law, whose value to the lives of people who had suffered will continue for many years. Many of us will always remember that debate.

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[John Redwood]

Nobody is disputing that we can pass laws while a member of the EU as long as the EU allows us to. It is quite simple.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

I am going to continue with my example, because this is incredibly puzzling. I do not recall such a thing at any stage in the passage of this Bill or any other Bill that I have been part of—as a Whip I have served on many a Public Bill Committee in the past four years—because at no point during the passage of the Historical Institutional Abuse (Northern Ireland) Act 2019 did anybody have to ring up the EU and ask for permission.

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[James Duddridge]

I disagree with virtually all the hon. Gentleman’s points. We will take back control, hold that sovereignty, take our seat as an independent nation state on WTO rules, and engage in international forums to look globally, rather than looking within Europe in European forums.

Clause 39 relates to interpretation. This type of clause is standard practice in primary legislation and contains key definitions. Subsection (1) lists items used in the Bill with accompanying definitions, such as the relevant agreements with the EU, the EEA, EFTA and Switzerland. Given the possibility of a change in EU summer-time arrangements, the clause provides for consequential changes in the exact time of the implementation period on 31 December in the United Kingdom. Let me be very clear: this power cannot be used to change the time and date of the implementation period for any other purpose. The clause is fundamental to ensuring the operation of the Bill.

Clause 40 and schedule 4 make further provision for regulations to make powers under the Bill, which is of interest and importance to Members of Parliament. Schedule 4 provides for the parliamentary scrutiny procedure for secondary legislation under the powers in the Bill. We recognise that our exit from the EU is momentous and Parliament will want to scrutinise any changes that we make to the statute book as part of that process.

[John Redwood]

I am very much in favour of clause 38, which reasserts our sovereignty. If the European Union wanted to legislate punitively against us during the implementation period, can I take it from the Minister that we would use this clause to prevent such legislation from having effect?

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[James Duddridge]

We will have more influence: we will have influence with the Americans, who want to do a trade deal with us early on, and we will work with other international partners. The WTO has been of immense value in liberalising trade, and in many ways the EU trading within itself has been a block on the liberalisation of global trade, although it has opened out trade within the EU. I have made that point around Parliament and I think Members support the principle.

[John Redwood]

Let me elucidate the point. I sometimes think the Opposition do not seem to understand that we are in the WTO through the EU anyway. The whole EU is governed by WTO rules and the WTO court, yet the Opposition say that we would sacrifice control by going into the WTO. That bit of it already applies to us. We will get our vote and our voice, so we will actually get some power.

[James Duddridge]

My right hon. Friend is right. I disagree with some of the points made by the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), but if he was right we would be suffering those problems at distance through the EU; if indeed it was the problem that he describes, it would not be a new problem.

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[John Redwood]

Clause 38 is welcome. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) for being one of the co-authors of that excellent piece of Government-proposed legislation. I also support the Minister in opposing various new clauses and amendments before us.

It seems to come down to the question, “What is sovereignty?” and I think the public understand it so much better than many Opposition MPs seem to. The public fully understand that our constitution should be based on the proposition that the public decide who should represent them in the House of Commons and then the House of Commons decides what laws are appropriate, what taxes to raise and how to spend that money, and at the end of four or five years—or sometimes a shorter period—the public get to judge whether we collectively made a good job of it or not, or whether there is some new configuration of Members of Parliament that can make it better. So the public are ultimately sovereign but they trust us, their elected Members, with their sovereignty for a period of up to five years to exercise the powers of government.

When we first joined the European Economic Community, the country was assured that that sovereignty —that set of powers—would not be damaged in any way. To underwrite that promise the Government said, correctly then, that there would be no matter decided in the European Economic Community that could be forced on the United Kingdom against its will; we always had a veto so that if it proposed a law, a charge or a tax that we did not like, we could use the veto. Over our years of membership, we have seen those vetoes gradually reduced—those powers taken away—so that today, although we are still a full member of what is now the European Union, there are huge swathes of policy areas where we are not free to legislate where we wish, or in some cases not free to legislate at all, because it is entirely occupied territory under the Community acquis.

The ultimate sovereign power in the United Kingdom today is the European Court of Justice; that is the ultimate appeal of any legal issue, and it can overrule what the two Houses of Parliament decide, it can overrule a statute, and it can strike down a law passed in this place. It is that which a majority of the British people decided they thought was unsatisfactory. When they had voted many years ago to support our continued membership of the European Economic Community it was called a Common Market and misrepresented as a free trade area, which of course is rather different from a customs union with complex rules, and they were given an assurance that their Parliament would still be able to choose their taxes, spend their money and pass their laws in the traditional way. That turned out not to be true.

The loss of those freedoms was progressive under the Single European Act, under the Maastricht treaty, under the Amsterdam treaty, the Nice treaty and, above all, the Lisbon treaty. The Lisbon treaty was the culmination of that journey towards a very strong European Government that was superior to the United Kingdom Government, and the implied substantial strengthening of the wide-ranging powers of the European Court of Justice, because every directive and every regulation that was passed—and there were thousands of them—not only produced a more directly acting legal power over our country that we could not modify or change, but also gave so much more extensive powers to the European Court of Justice because it is the ultimate arbitrator of that body of law.

It is that body of law which this legislation today is seeking to put under United Kingdom control. We have been arguing over this for three and a half years now. The public thought it was a very simple matter and told us to get on with it. We had a fractious and unhelpful Parliament until recently, which did all in its power to thwart the putting into law of the wishes of the United Kingdom electors.

I hope today, after a second general election and after a referendum where the British people made it clear that they wished their sovereignty to rest again with them and be delegated to their Parliament, that the Opposition might have understood that, and might have understood that currently, contrary to what we have been told by the Labour Front Bench, there are a very large number of areas where we cannot do as we please.

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[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

May I just pick up on one point? My right hon. Friend talks about, “should we wish to give them benefits”. The reality now is that the British Government have to pay benefits even to families of people working over here when their families are not with them. That is roundly disliked across Europe, but those countries all accept there is nothing they can do about it because the European Court of Justice imposed that as part of freedom of movement. It was never debated as part of freedom of movement and it was never supposed that it would happen. It is an end to sovereignty when one can no longer make a decision to change something like that.

[John Redwood]

My right hon. Friend puts it brilliantly; that is exactly the kind of limitation of our sovereign power, and of our freedom to make decisions that please our electors, that I have been talking about. It is quite important, given the history of this debate.

Turning to the Scottish nationalists, I agree with what the Scottish nationalist spokeswoman, the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), said: we only want volunteers in our Union. We are democrats. We believe that the Union works, but that if a significant portion of the Union develops a feeling that it is not working for them, we need to test that. I was a strong supporter of accepting the Scottish National party idea, just a few years ago, that there should be a referendum. That referendum had the full support of the United Kingdom Parliament, which is the sovereign authority for these purposes on Union matters. I also fully agreed with the then SNP leadership when I talked to them about it—I think our formal exchanges were recorded in Hansard. They said that they agreed with me that whichever side lost should accept the result, and that it would be a “once in a generation” event, not a regular event that happened every five years until one side got the answer that it liked. I hope that the SNP will reflect on that. We are democrats and we want volunteers in our Union, but we cannot pull it up and examine it every two or three years through a referendum, which is very divisive, expensive and damaging to confidence and economic progress. We should live with the result.

[Dr Whitford]

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that we did respect the result? We have been here for four and a half years. We would not have been if we did not respect it; we would have been independent, and we would not be being dragged over the EU cliff at the end of this month. He should accept that the claim of right that Scotland has had for 331 years did not disappear in 2014, and that his party has changed the entire fabric of the United Kingdom. It cannot continue to treat Scotland’s views with disrespect.

[The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Sir Gary Streeter)]

Just before the right hon. Gentleman continues, we do not want to be dragged into a debate on Scottish independence on clause 38. Let us continue to debate these amendments and the clause.

[John Redwood]

Good advice, but I am trying to address the SNP point related to its proposals on how we treat devolved government fairly and whether we are listening properly to Scotland. I think that we are very much listening to Scotland, but we have to understand that the matter of the Union is a responsibility of the Union Parliament, and that the matter of our membership of the European Union is a responsibility of the European Parliament. It is the hon. Lady’s misfortune to have been on the wrong side in two referendums, but there has been a deeply democratic process in both cases, as to whether Scotland stays in the Union and whether we stay in the EU.

I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench to remember that there is a fourth country in our Union: the country of England. We are very reasonable people, and we do not go on and on about English issues. However, when we get to this debate over how the different parts of the United Kingdom are consulted and respond to the issue of how we leave the EU, England too needs a voice within the Government and needs to be seen as an important part of the process.

The overwhelming vote for Brexit was an English vote because in numbers, England is a very large part of the Union. That is important, just as the Scottish and Northern Irish view is. I hope that the Government will look at this machinery of government issue and make sure that there is, within Government, a clear and definitive English voice. In due course, I think that we need to discuss whether this Parliament should have an English Grand Committee that can not only veto proposals that England does not like, but make proposals that England wants, because that would do something to correct the obvious imbalances that make this a particularly difficult matter to settle, when the largest part of the Union, with the overwhelming Brexit vote, is not formally represented in the discussions.

[Geraint Davies]

It is a pleasure of sorts to follow the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) and the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). On the issue of sovereignty and democracy, it is worth remembering something. The basis of the 2016 referendum was one person, one vote, one issue, and there was a clear majority then to leave. In 2019, we had another vote, a general election, and had that been counted on the same basis—one person, one vote—we would have had 14.5 million voting for the oven-ready Brexit on offer and 16.5 million voting for a people’s vote or remain. Obviously, that vote was on a different basis—on a constituency representation basis and on a number of issues—and the clear decision was for a Conservative Government with a majority of 80. That is clearly understood, but to try to conflate the two is wrong. In fact, there remains a compelling case that the oven-ready Brexit being railroaded through—in my view, a reckless Brexit that would undermine the sovereignty, power and financial and trading credibility of Britain—should go back to the public for a final vote.

[John Redwood]

I gently remind the hon. Member that during the election senior Labour people argued passionately that it was fine for a leave voter to vote Labour and that they were not all in favour of what he has just said, so I do not think he can say that in all cases the Labour vote was definitely a vote for remain or a second referendum.

[Geraint Davies]

To be clear, I said that the proposition was remain or public vote on the deal. The Labour party position essentially was that the oven-ready Brexit would be bad for Britain—it would make us more divided, weaker, poorer, more isolated and so on—and that we could put together a better Brexit that protected our jobs through trading alignment and our environment and workers’ rights through dynamic alignment of those conditions.