Article 50 Extension

Justine Greening Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening (Putney) (Con)]

Like many in the House, I find it impossible to overstate my concern for our country today. We are nine days away from Brexit and, as things stand, we have no agreed strategy for the country to follow. Instead, we have a Government who continue to put their head in the sand about a deal that has simply not been accepted by this Parliament. There will be many books written about why we have ended up in this position, but the reality is that this situation was clear months ago. It was clear from the Chequers agreement and the subsequent White Paper that the strategy would not command consensus in this House, and that has proved the case ever since. I will briefly talk about the damage it has done to his place, before finishing by returning to the fact that, even if the Government were to get a deal through, it would be a pyrrhic victory that serves no one, including themselves.

This Government have delayed. We are debating the extension today because they have not been prepared to confront the fact that their deal has not been accepted by this House. The reality is that, in doing all this, they have undermined the procedures of this House, which are there to help this democracy and those of us privileged enough to be elected to represent our communities. They have damaged the fabric of this place, because Parliament is meant to work by us coming here to represent our communities with our votes and, on the back of our decisions, the House moves on to the consequences. Instead, on Brexit and on this deal, the Government have refused to allow that to happen.

First, the Government refused to have a vote and wasted precious time this country does not have by simply delaying because they did not want to confront the fact that their deal, which had been unpopular in the summer, was still unpopular at Christmas. We finally had a chance to vote before Christmas—I had made my speech—before the vote was cancelled and the debate was suddenly cut short. The deal was not just narrowly defeated; it was significantly defeated. If ever there was a vote that expressed the House’s will, it was that one. If ever there was a time when a Government clearly should have seen the writing on the wall, it was that moment.

The Government could have chosen at that stage to listen to what Members across the House and across parties were saying. Members were representing their communities, and they were not trying to be awkward, which is the impression Ministers have given to Parliament. The simple fact is that very few people were writing to tell us that they wanted their representatives to support the deal. Had the Government recognised that, we could have spent time, even since mid-January, debating, discussing and trying to conclude whether Britain could take another route forward that commands consensus in this House.

I listened to the approach of the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union to this debate and, yet again, it is about party politics. This could have been a three-hour debate to test the House and see whether there is any consensus on what kind of extension the Government should be seeking. Again, the approach has not been to do that. The approach has simply been to brush off the points raised by other Members and to argue as if this is some kind of debating society, rather than a House in which decisions need to be taken at the 11th hour to save jobs and investment in our country.

That approach has massively undermined this place because, fundamentally, we take decisions by voting on motions and legislation. If our votes do not count, it strikes at the fabric of how this democracy works. I have heard Members say today that the vote against a second referendum was very big, but that is not the point. We all know that we might have another vote on a second referendum. We know that we might have a second vote or a third vote on lots of things, because the Government’s approach to Brexit has undermined the very basis on which this House debates: to have one vote on an issue. If a Member supports the motion, they should vote for it—and they should not expect it to come back to the House for another vote at a later time.

Those rules are there not only to protect Members but to make sure that this democracy works, and we have seen those rules fundamentally undermined when it comes to Brexit. We are not meant to have three votes on a deal, and the rules are meant to protect Members from being bullied by the Whips. They are meant to protect our democracy from becoming a “pork barrel” democracy in which billion-pound funds are launched purely to get Members on side for the next round of voting. That is not how the UK Parliament is meant to run. It is totally unacceptable.

[Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful case for parliamentary sovereignty, which is, after all, what the referendum was about in many ways. Does she agree that in trying to ram through a deal by bullying MPs to vote for it, the Government are not building a sustainable majority, which is needed not just for this deal, but in the months ahead, because so much about the Prime Minister’s deal is open-ended and not settled yet?

[Justine Greening]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right on that, and I will come to it shortly in my closing remarks.

The extension that we require clearly needs to be for a purpose. There are only so many versions of Brexit. We can do a clean-break, hard Brexit, which I know many MPs want, and I respect that. Indeed, the millions of people who voted to leave had that kind of Brexit as their expectation. Alternatively, we can have this soft Brexit that the Government are proposing, but I see very little support for it in this House or among the public more widely. The last opinion poll I saw on this deal showed just 12% of the public supporting it.

[Anna Soubry]

My right hon. Friend—she will remain my friend, and she is a great friend of this House, who speaks with great authority and good sense—has, in the past, talked about shabby deals behind doors. Does it concern her to learn, as many of us are learning on Twitter, that the Prime Minister is meeting leaders of parties and groups—I believe this is the first time she will have met all the party leaders, including the Independent Group, in one room at one time—and is then meeting a group of hard Brexiteers, presumably from the Back Benches of the Conservative party? Apparently, at 8 o’clock she is then not coming to this place to make a statement to this Parliament, but making a press announcement of some description in Downing Street. Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that that speaks volumes about the entirely inappropriate and shabby way that this entire process has been conducted from the outset?

[Justine Greening]

I agree about that.

In a sense, there are two issues here: the substance of the decision we need to take, which I was just talking about; and the manner in which the decision is taken in a way that makes it a sustainable one. The substance is that there are only so many routes forward on Brexit. This House just needs to decide whether it can find a consensus on any of them. If we cannot, we need to confront what that means for finding a decision for the country as a whole.

I have been clear that I felt back in July that it was obvious that this place was gridlocked. I take no pleasure in the fact that that has been proved absolutely correct. It has not served this country well that the Government have sought simply to avoid that fact, putting their head in the sand, and that therefore we are days away from Brexit with no decisions having been taken. There is no point in saying that a referendum will waste time, given that the Government have wasted far more time than a referendum would have ever taken. For this extension debate to have any quality or meaning, we should be debating whether we want to delay until the end of the calendar year, the end of a fiscal year, or beyond that. We should be talking about the rationale for the different strategies on Brexit—there are only so many. I do not think that the way this debate has been approached or how it reflects the broader Brexit process has served our democracy well—it has been hugely counterproductive.

I wish to finish my comments this afternoon by talking about what happens even if the Government win a vote on their deal next week—if they are allowed to have one; I listened to your ruling and felt you were right to make it, Mr Speaker. Even if somehow a third meaningful vote on a motion not substantially different was allowed to be put to the House and it was won, the Government would not have won the argument. Brexit is not a moment and a vote in this House; it is about a process—a journey on which we will take Britain over the coming years—so just cobbling together a majority at one moment does not fix anything. It does not take the decision for those of my colleagues who genuinely feel that this version of Brexit is not what 17 million people voted for; it does not address their concerns. Quite rightly, they are simply not going to accept this version of Brexit when they feel so passionately that the thing for which they have campaigned for so many years is not being delivered. Such a vote will resolve nothing. It will end up feeling like the Government have simply tried to get something over the line for the sake of ticking a box, when this process should have been about so much more than that. It will not work and it will not be sustainable, so it not only serves our democracy badly but serves our country badly. I predict that we will have to revisit these issues anyway.

I know that what I am saying will not be welcome to Ministers’ ears. They have set their face for years—certainly for months—against listening to comments in this Chamber that are contrary to Government policy, but the time has now come when they need to face facts and face reality. It seems the one thing this House cannot do is take decisions per se for the Prime Minister and make her follow them. We need Government Ministers to wake up, smell the coffee and start acting responsibly on behalf of this country. This House rejects the Government’s deal. We want an alternative. We must allow the House to have the debate that can find the alternative, and if we cannot do that, allow it to take a decision about what we need to do as a Parliament. We cannot just steadily get to the 29 March cliff edge and simply ignore the fact that this is a grave crisis for this country that will affect people’s livelihoods and jobs. Having grown up in a place where there was unemployment, I find that totally unacceptable.