European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I shall try to compete with the Opposition spokesman on brevity by being briefer than he was.

This is a chaotic debate in every conceivable way. Future generations will look back and be unable to imagine how we reduced ourselves to this disorderly exchange on a whole range of views, cutting across the parties, at a time when we were taking such a historic decision. That was summed up to me yesterday when I drove through the gates into New Palace Yard and was flanked on either side by lobbyists waving things at me. To my right, I had people waving yellow placards with the words “Leave means leave.” To my left, I had people waving European Union flags and demanding my support. In so far as anyone was shouting any clear message to me, it seemed that both sides were shouting the same thing. Both sides were demanding that I vote against the withdrawal agreement. That summed up the confusion, because both were pursuing objectives, neither of which I agreed with and which took us a million miles away from the national interest, which the House of Commons should surely turn itself to in the end.

We all know where we are coming from, and I am not going to labour my well-known views, because I have been here so long. Yesterday I slightly offended one of my very good friends in the House when I referred to hard-line remainers as well as hard-line Brexiteers. I confess that I am undoubtedly a hard-line remainer. I do not think that there is anyone more hard-line on the subject in the House. When I was a Cabinet Minister, I refused to vote for the referendum being held. The Prime Minister and the Chief Whip chose not to notice my attempts ostentatiously to abstain on the vote. I am the only person on the Government side of the House who voted against invoking article 50. I am a lifelong believer in the European project, and no opinion poll is ever going to change my mind at this stage.

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Clarke]

I apologise to my hon. Friend, but I have no time.

I believe that Britain’s role in the world now is as one of the three leading members of the European Union, and one that has particular links with the United States—when it has a normal President—that the others do not. That enables us to defend our interests and put forward our values in a very dangerous world. We have influential membership—we lead on liberal economic policy— of the biggest and most developed free trade area in the world, which is always going to be where our major trading partners are, because in the end geography determines that they matter to us more than anyone else.

I will not go on, but just in case there is any doubt about where I am coming from, let me say that I am being pragmatic, as we all have to be. The Attorney General was quite correct to raise the need for the House to achieve some kind of consensus and to accept some kind of compromise to minimise the damage, which I regard as my duty. The vote on invoking article 50 revealed to me that there was not the slightest chance of persuading the present House of Commons to give up leaving the EU, because it is terrified of denying the result of the EU referendum. To be fair to my friends who are hard-line Brexiteers and always have been, none of them ever had the slightest intention of taking any notice of the referendum, but there is now a kind of religiously binding commitment among the majority in the House that we must leave. So we are leaving.

Why, therefore, am I supporting the withdrawal agreement? It is a natural preliminary to the proper negotiations, which we have not yet started. Frankly, it should have taken about two months to negotiate, because the conclusions we have come to on the rights of citizens, on our legal historical debts and on the Irish border being permanently open were perfectly clear. They are essential preconditions, to which the Attorney General rightly drew our attention, to the legal chaos that would be caused if we just left without the other detailed provisions in that 500-page document.

The withdrawal agreement itself is harmless, and the Irish backstop is not the real reason why a large number of Members are going to vote against it. One would have to be suffering from some sort of paranoia to think that the Irish backstop is some carefully contrived plot to keep the British locked into a European relationship from which they are dying to escape. The Attorney General addressed that matter with great eloquence, which I admired. It is obviously as unattractive to the other EU member states as it is to the United Kingdom to settle down into some semi-permanent relationship on the basis of the Irish backstop.

In my opinion, we do not need to invoke the Irish backstop at all. We can almost certainly avoid it. It seems quite obvious that the transition period should go on for as long as is necessary until a full withdrawal agreement, in all its details on our political relationships, regulatory relationships, trade relationships, security and policing, has been settled. I do not think that will be completed in a couple of years, however. I actually think it will be four or five years, if we make very good progress, before we have completed all that, and I think that is the view of people with more expertise than me who will be saddled with the responsibility of negotiating it if we ever get that far. I have actually been involved in trade agreements, unlike most of the people in this House.

If we extend the transition period as is necessary, we will never need to go into the backstop. Putting an end date on the transition period is pretty futile, because we cannot actually begin to change our relationship until we have agreed in some detail what we are actually changing to. If this House persists in taking us out of the European Union, that is eventually where we have to get to.

[Anna Soubry]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Clarke]

If I give way to my right hon. Friend, who is a good friend, I shall suddenly find that everyone is leaping up, and I will not keep my word if I start giving way.

The outcome that I wish to see is, as it happens, the same as the Government’s declared outcome. Keeping to the narrower matters of trade and investment, we should keep open borders between the United Kingdom and the rest of the European Union and have trade relationships that are as free and frictionless as we have at the moment. I shall listen to people arguing that that is not in the best interests of the United Kingdom and future generations, but that is an impossible case to make. It is self-evident that we should stay in our present free trade agreement. We cannot have free trade with the rest of the world while becoming protectionist towards continental Europe by erecting new barriers. Nobody said to the electorate at the time of the referendum that the purpose of the whole thing was to raise new barriers to two-way trade and investment.

It seems quite obvious, and factually correct in my opinion, that if we wish to keep open borders—the land border, which happens to be in Ireland, and the sea border around the rest of the British Isles—we will have to be in a customs union and in regulatory alignment with the EU, which would greatly resemble what we call the single market. All this stuff about new technology may come one day when every closed border in the world will vanish, but under WTO rules we have to man the border if there are different tariffs and regulatory requirements on either side. That is where we have got to go, and we will have to tighten things up sooner or later.

The Government keep repeating their red lines, some of which were set out at an early stage long before the people drafting the speeches had the first idea about the process they were about to enter into. Most of the red lines now need to be dropped. The standard line is that we cannot be in a customs union because that would prevent us from having trade agreements with the rest of the world, which is true. We cannot have a common customs barrier enforced around the outside of a zone if one member is punching holes through it and letting things in under different arrangements from other countries. For some, that is meant to be the global future—the bright and shining prospect of our being outside the European Union, which nobody proposed in the referendum. As far as I can see, such things stemmed from a brilliant speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), who was praised for putting an optimistic tone on it all. He held out this vision of great countries throughout the world throwing open their markets to us in relief when we left the European Union and offering us better terms than we have spent the last few years obtaining when taking a leading role in negotiating together with the European Union.

Of course, the key agreement that is always cited is the trade agreement that we are going to have with Donald Trump’s America, which is a symbol of the prospects that await us, and China apparently comes next. I have tried in both places. I have been involved in trade discussions with those two countries on and off for the best part of 20 years. They are very protectionist countries, and America was protectionist before President Trump. I led for the Government on negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The reason why the EU-US deal had the funny title of TTIP was that we could not call it a free trade agreement, because the Americans said that Congress was so hostile to the idea of free trade that we could not talk about such an agreement, so we had to give it another title.

We got nowhere, even under the Obama Administration, because we wanted to open up public procurement and access to services, including financial services, in the United States, and I can tell you that it was completely hopeless trying to open up their markets. We are told that things are different with President Trump, that the hopes for President Trump are a sign of the new golden future that is before us. However, President Trump has no time for WTO rules. He has been breaking them with some considerable vigour, and he will walk out of the WTO sooner or later. His view of trade deals is that he confronts allied partner countries and says that the United States should be allowed to export more to them and that they should stop exporting so much to the United States. He has enforced that on Canada and Mexico, and he is having a good go at enforcing it on China.

President Trump’s only expressed interest in a trade deal with Britain is that we should throw open our markets to American food, which is produced on an almost industrial scale very competitively and in great quantities. That trade deal would require one thing: the abandonment of European food and animal welfare standards that the British actually played a leading part in getting to their present position in the rest of the EU, and the adoption of standards laid down by Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—in response to the food lobby. There is no sovereignty in that. Nobody is going to take any notice of the UK lobbying the American Congress on food standards. It is an illusion.

If we had enforced freedom of movement properly before all this, we would not be in this trouble. All the anti-immigrant element of the leave vote was not really about EU workers working here. We were already permitted to make it a condition that people could only come here for a prearranged job, and we were permitted to say that someone would have to leave if they did not find a new job within three months of losing one. Everybody in this House and outside falls over themselves with praise for the EU workers in the national health service and elsewhere, but it is another illusion.

Given the present bizarre position, my view is that we must get on with the real negotiations, because we have not even started them yet. It is not possible to start to map out the closest possible relationship with the EU if we are going to be forced to leave. We are in no position to move on from this bad debate and then sort everything out by 29 March. It is factually impossible not only to get the legislation through but to sort out an alternative to the withdrawal agreement if it is rejected today.

We should extend article 50, but that involves applying to the EU and it implies getting the EU’s consent, which would be quite difficult for any length of time. I advocate revoking article 50, because it is a means of delay. We should revoke it—no one can stop us revoking it —and then invoke it again when we have some consensus and a majority for something. I will vote against it again, but there is a massive majority in this House in favour of invoking article 50.

[The Attorney General]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Clarke]

I will annoy everyone else by giving way this once.

[The Attorney General]

I am admiring my right hon. and learned Friend’s speech minute by minute, but there is one point on which he is wrong. We cannot revoke article 50 unless we provide satisfactory evidence to the European Union that we are cancelling our departure—not suspending it, not pausing it, but cancelling it.

[Mr Clarke]

I have not been in legal practice for 40 years so, if that is the case, I will examine it and look at what authority my right hon. and learned Friend gives me. Would we be prevented permanently thereafter from ever invoking article 50 again? I would like to examine that proposition. If that is the case, we have to extend article 50, but we cannot carry on having this chaotic debate and, in the next 70 days, coming to conclusions that commit this country to a destiny that will have a huge effect on the next generation or two, because we are heading towards leaving with no deal at all, which would be just as catastrophic as he described.

The vast majority of Members of Parliament are flatly against leaving without a deal. For that reason, pragmatism and common sense require us to vote for this withdrawal agreement to try to get back to some sort of orderly progress.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I rise to speak to amendment (f) in my name and that of other right hon. and hon. Members. Briefly, it would give the UK Government the unilateral right to exit the backstop at a time of their choosing. It is very straightforward: the UK could not find itself suspended indefinitely in a backstop. If the amendment is passed, it would allow the UK to choose the time to exit, had we entered the backstop; the UK would not have to seek EU approval to do so.

I speak with some sadness. The negotiations to date have been approached as a problem to be solved, rather than as an opportunity to be seized. I, for one, do not like the transition period, but in any negotiation—in particular after 40 to 45 years of integration—there has to be an element of compromise, and I am willing to accept that. The backstop, however, is the real problem for many on the Conservative Benches.

At the moment, the Government cannot answer this very simple question, which directly addresses the indefinite nature of the backstop: without any legal certainty with regards to our ability to exit the backstop unilaterally, what certainty is there that the EU would not play a long game, dragging out the negotiations? By further extending the transition period, which it could do, we could still be having this discussion in three, four or five years to come. That is not honouring the result of the referendum. We need to leave the EU. We need to be definite about that, and the backstop is not the answer because it is indefinite. We could be there for a very long time—

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Baron]

I am sorry: others want to come in.

Passing amendment (f) would encourage both parties to negotiate constructively when it comes to the transition period and the trade deal, because if the EU knows that it cannot trap us in the backstop, it is more likely to constructively negotiate a trade deal for the benefit of both parties. The Prime Minister could then go back to the EU, which has a long track record of eleventh-hour deals. The amendment would go a long way to helping to unite our party, which is terribly, terribly important. If the amendment is not passed, unfortunately and reluctantly I will have to vote against the withdrawal agreement.