UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

John Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

The two previous motions, one in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady) and the other in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman), are both incorporated in the Government motion.

With respect to the first motion, there has been no realistic suggestion for a credible replacement to the backstop since the motion was passed and the EU is still saying it will not renegotiate. There is no withdrawal agreement simply because it has not been signed. In that context, the Brady motion was meaningless. Furthermore, as I said to the Prime Minister on Tuesday, article 4 of the current draft withdrawal agreement undermines control over our own laws. That will create uncompetitive havoc for businesses, and for trade unionists and for workers, as the laws are passed by the other 27 member states, as they go through the Council of Ministers, and we will not even be there. The measure also contradicts the repeal of section 1 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and the repeal of the European Communities Act 1972.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, were we to make the mistake of saying that we rule out leaving without signing the withdrawal agreement, we would take away the Government’s main bargaining card for getting improvements to the agreement?

[Sir William Cash]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right.

On the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden, in reply to my question on Tuesday, which the Prime Minister agreed with, the Prime Minister said that Members from across the House voted to trigger article 50, which had a two-year timeline, ending on 29 March, and that every Conservative Member had voted for the withdrawal Act. She was right. However, the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden passed only because it was supported by Members from all parties who had already voted for the withdrawal Act, the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017 and the European Union Referendum Act 2015, and were in effect, on the Prime Minister’s own analysis, undermining their previous votes. Furthermore, we were whipped against the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden.

There was no consultation prior to the tabling of the Government motion now before the House. In any case, the Government’s position that a so-called no deal remains on the table is clear, as the Secretary of State confirmed. The motion makes no sense, so why are we faced with it today? We are told that it is to keep traction with the EU, which has been, as I said to the Prime Minister on Tuesday, both undemocratic and totally intransigent. As I have said, the withdrawal agreement itself is inconsistent with the European Communities Act 1972. It is therefore also inconsistent with the referendum itself and our manifesto. The 2018 Act includes the repudiation in UK law of all EU laws and treaties, and article 4 of the withdrawal agreement is completely inconsistent with that. A vast number of voters see through this charade—they see through the smoke and mirrors—and in particular so too does the Conservative party membership—a recent “ConservativeHome” poll showed that 70% of them are against the withdrawal agreement.

The real problem goes back to what I said at the time of the first vote on the withdrawal agreement and my observations about the failure of public trust in respect of the Chequers deal and this withdrawal agreement. Those words stand as much today as they did when I spoke on 15 January. Today’s motion further undermines public trust. We are now truly entering the world of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In his book “1984” Orwell wrote:

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

This double motion is doublethink in action, and I cannot possibly vote for it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams). While I agree with Wales in voting to leave the EU, I am afraid that I found little in his speech—though he put it powerfully and coherently—that I could agree with. I certainly cannot agree with a second referendum, or indeed, to taking no deal off the table.

I have always found that it is a good idea in the House to vote on what the motion says and not necessarily on what Ministers or other Members say in the House, so I thought I had better have a look at what it says today. It is very clear, actually:

“That this House…reiterates its support for the approach to leaving the EU expressed by this House on 29 January 2019”—

so I thought I had better look and see what the House had agreed to, and within the motion that it agreed to were the words

“rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement”.

In other words, the motion that we are voting on tonight takes no deal off the table. It does not matter what Ministers have said. It is what the motion says, so I would expect all Opposition Members who do not seem to want a no-deal option to support the Government’s motion tonight, which is exactly the reason I will not be supporting it. It is a badly worded motion—well, no, it is not a badly worded motion; it is deliberately worded that way. I think the Government thought that they could slide it through and that it would not matter. I know that, if I supported this tonight, the Whips would point out to me, “You have supported taking no deal off the table.” That is not what I can do.

I want to go back to when I was a co-founder of the Grassroots Out movement. I travelled the length and breadth of the United Kingdom during the referendum campaign discussing with people what they wanted if they were going to vote to leave. It came down, I think, to a few things. They wanted to end the free movement of people, to stop giving billions and billions of pounds each and every year to the EU and for us to make our own laws in our own country, judged by our own judges. I fear that the current withdrawal agreement proposed by the Government fails on all those tests. Maybe that is one of the reasons why it suffered the biggest defeat in Commons history. Anybody who had suffered the biggest defeat in Commons history might want to go away and think very carefully about what they put to the House, and not tinker around for a couple of weeks before coming back with more or less the same motion, because the same thing will happen. It will get rejected by this House.

Let us look at the tests. Does the withdrawal agreement end the free movement of people? It does not, because there is no future deal worked out, just some sort of political wish list—a political declaration—so it fails on that score. Does the agreement stop billions and billions of pounds being given to the EU each and every year? We know that £39 billion is going to be given whatever happens under the withdrawal agreement, and if the transition period is extended, even more money will be given. Clearly, our courts will not be able to be the final arbiters, because the European Court of Justice has a significant say over our future.

[John Redwood]

Will my hon. Friend confirm that, because the agreement is not about the future partnership, it sentences this House and the whole nation to 21 to 45 more months of the rows, disagreements, uncertainties and problems that we have presided over for the last two years and seven months?

[Mr Bone]

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s intervention. I will deal with that issue in a minute, but I want to finish the point that clearly the withdrawal agreement does not let us make our own laws in our own country, because we would still be tied to the European Union.

The one thing that people say—I hear it from leading remainers—is that they want certainty, but the one thing that the withdrawal agreement and the political declaration in particular give us is uncertainty, with months and months of squabbling and not delivering what the British people voted for in June 2016.