European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Lady Hermon and Jeremy Corbyn

2nd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I commend my hon. Friend for what she says and the way she says it. We all represent people who voted in different directions in the referendum, or who did not vote at all. We all have to represent them, but in making these decisions, we have to ask ourselves this question: if this deal is good for our country, why have the Government not produced a single scrap of evidence showing that?

[Lady Hermon]

I am enormously grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Let me pay tribute to a former Labour leader, Tony Blair, who was the architect of the Good Friday agreement, which delivered much needed peace and stability to Northern Ireland after 30 years of atrocious violence that affected all communities right across the island of Ireland.

I am extremely concerned that the Labour party, the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues have anxiety that the Prime Minister’s new Brexit deal, in some way, undermines the Good Friday agreement and its achievements. Will he please take a few moments to explain his concerns? I think that is really important.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and I am sure she and the whole House would agree that the Good Friday agreement was an historic step forward that has brought relative peace to Northern Ireland. My concern is that this Bill creates a customs frontier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK—the Prime Minister told the DUP conference that that is something he would not do—and requires the certification of goods before they can be sent from Northern Ireland to the rest of the UK, and it therefore creates a different trading relationship.

Although there might not be an aspiration at the moment to put any physical customs points on the road borders between Northern Ireland and the Republic, I gently say that the direction of travel is not a good one. The hon. Lady knows as well as I do that, as soon as we start doing that, we will end up seriously undermining the historic achievements of the Good Friday agreement.

European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019 (Rule of Law)

Debate between Lady Hermon and Jeremy Corbyn

Monday 9th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

It is extraordinary that the House is having to debate whether the Prime Minister will abide by a law that has just been passed by Parliament, and that the same Prime Minister, who managed to be here for the Division earlier, cannot be here to answer questions from Members, and no Law Officers are present either. All the Members who have spoken raised questions—

[Lady Hermon]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Yes, of course.

[Lady Hermon]

I am very grateful to the Leader of the Opposition, who is much more courteous than the Foreign Secretary in taking interventions in this very important debate. The Foreign Secretary described as flawed the legislation that is intended to stop the country leaving without a deal, which received Royal Assent today. May I recommend to him, and indeed to all Members of the House, Radio 4’s interview with Lord Sumption, a very distinguished former member of the Supreme Court? He said that there was not “the slightest obscurity” about the Act. I rest my case. It is not flawed.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention; she makes her point very well. If the Foreign Secretary wishes to reply, I will happily give way.

United Kingdom’s Withdrawal from the European Union

Debate between Lady Hermon and Jeremy Corbyn

Friday 29th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

The Government have run down the clock in an attempt to blackmail MPs at every turn. The Government are in chaos, the country is in chaos, and the responsibility is the Government’s, and the Government’s alone. The Prime Minister pulled the meaningful vote in December because she knew it would fail. Since then, in more than three months, nothing has changed—not one single word in the 600 pages of the withdrawal agreement, not one single word in the 26 pages of the political declaration.

Today, the Government are trying to bounce the House into voting for a damaging deal that we have twice rejected, but, as ever, the Prime Minister refuses to listen. Today’s vote—third time lucky, she hopes—is an affront to democracy and this country. She has separated the withdrawal agreement from the future relationship, despite having told us that the two were indivisible. On 14 January, she told the House that

“the link between them means that the commitments of one cannot be banked without the commitments of the other.”——[Official Report, 14 January 2019; Vol. 652, c. 826.]

Today, she is asking us to take a punt on the withdrawal agreement and hope for the best for the political declaration. It is not good enough; the two are linked.

Nothing demonstrates that linkage better than the backstop. The political declaration is incredibly vague, containing as it does a spectrum of possible outcomes, and nothing is even close to being resolved. That makes it even more likely that the UK would fall into the backstop, which would create regulatory divergence between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, as the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) said. We also know that it endures indefinitely, thanks to this Parliament prizing the Attorney General’s legal advice out of a very reluctant Government. Labour will not vote for a blindfold Brexit, and passing the withdrawal agreement today without the political declaration would be just that.

The Prime Minister said at the end of November, when she signed off the deal, that

“we won’t agree the leaving part, the withdrawal agreement, until we’ve got what we want in the future because these two go together”.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) said, it would be like selling your house without knowing where you are moving to, although, unlike me, I am not sure he is old enough to have watched “Monty Python”.

[Lady Hermon]

The Leader of the Opposition should be enormously proud of the achievement of the Labour party in the Good Friday/Belfast agreement, and I am extremely upset and disappointed that the Labour party today will vote against the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal, which protects the Good Friday agreement and the consent principle.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

We in the Labour party are very proud of the Good Friday agreement and the peace achieved in Northern Ireland as a result, and nobody in the Labour party wants to do anything to undermine this great achievement.

As the shadow Solicitor General, my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), said, article 184 of the withdrawal agreement commits the Government to negotiate expeditiously on the terms of the political declaration. That would be a deal based on a very wide range of potential outcomes for the country, and who would decide which direction we go in? Now that the Prime Minister has announced her own departure, we do not know if the future is to be chosen by the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), or maybe even the jobbing Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin). The Labour party will not play roulette with this country’s future, especially when the roulette wheel is rigged by the Conservative party.

Labour respects the result of the referendum—we reiterated that in our manifesto and again in our party conference last year—but the Prime Minister’s approach to Brexit has been nothing short of a shambles. The choices facing our country post Brexit have been decided solely by what is in the interests of the Conservative party, not the country. The Prime Minister announced her red lines and went to negotiate without any consultation with the House, without any attempt to build consensus. Those red lines were opposed by the representative bodies of workers, businesses and industry, who are now tearing their hair out in exasperation at the Government’s incompetence and the uncertainty that they face.

The first Brexit Secretary said that he would get a deal that would deliver the exact same benefits as now. The current Brexit Secretary obviously felt that that was far too good for the country because, only two weeks ago, he went into the Lobby to back no deal and oppose an extension. That would leave the UK crashing out in just 10 days with no preparations and chaos at our ports and airports, leading to a crisis in factories, shops and hospitals.

What did the Government forecasts say about the Brexit Secretary’s preferred no-deal option? That it would make the economy not 4% worse off, but nearly 10% worse off. So it is no wonder that, faced with a choice between the Prime Minister’s bad deal and a disastrous no deal, this House has given a clear no to both, repeatedly. The Government suffered the largest defeat by any Government ever in parliamentary history in January. The Prime Minister said then:

“It is clear that the House does not support this deal.”—[Official Report, 15 January 2019; Vol. 652, c. 1125.]

So what was the Government’s response? They tried begging, bullying and bribery, and still they were defeated by the fourth largest majority in parliamentary history.

The Prime Minister told us that we must leave on 29 March, and even wrote it into primary legislation. She herself then voted against leaving on 29 March. She then went to Brussels to negotiate an extension and, almost unbelievably, even turned that into another negotiating failure. This Government’s Brexit negotiations have been a litany of failure, culminating today with a Prime Minister who has been forced to announce her own departure tabling only half the deal she has negotiated. This really is a half-baked Brexit.

When she became Prime Minister two and a half years ago, she said that it was her mission to deliver Brexit. She has failed. She also stood on the steps of Downing Street and promised that her Government would tackle burning injustices. Since then, she has failed on every test. Homelessness is up. Life expectancy is falling. Infant mortality is rising. Crime is rising. Police numbers have fallen. This year, the NHS had its worst ever month—people waiting longer in A&E, for an operation and to start cancer treatment—and just yesterday, we learned that more children are in poverty and the scourge of pensioner poverty is increasing again.

The job of Government is to make people’s lives better, and this Government have failed. A botched and half-baked Brexit deal like the one before us today would compound that failure. On Wednesday, the House sought to find an alternative—a new negotiating deal for the Government. Labour’s plan, I believe, provides the best compromise for a deeply divided country and a deeply divided House. It is backed in large part by major organisations in industry and business and by trade unions. It is based around the certainty of a permanent customs union, close alignment with the single market and a dynamic alignment on rights and protections.

Labour urged support for four of the options tabled by members of different parties on different sides of the House. We did so not because we would be equally happy with each of those outcomes but because we recognise that we have to compromise to get this resolved. The whole House knows that the current uncertainty is damaging businesses, reducing investment and costing jobs now and in the future. The stress of people in work is palpable as we travel around the country and talk to people in all parts of the country.

I hope that on Monday, when the House retakes control, parties and Members on both sides will enter into those debates and votes in the spirit of trying to find an acceptable compromise. We need to get a better deal, the country deserves a better deal, and I am convinced that a better deal can be negotiated and, if Members decide, a chance for people to have a final say. If we cannot do that on Monday, I will say—and many others will agree with me—that ultimately there will be no alternative other than to have a general election to decide who rules this country in the future.

To enable the Prime Minister to have sufficient time to respond to the debate, I say this in conclusion. I urge Members to act in the best interests of their constituents and to vote down this unacceptable deal. There are many people who fear for their jobs, for their industry and for whether they and their friends have a future in this country. That is causing immense stress to many people. However they voted in the 2016 referendum, they are united in their stress and concern about their future and that of their communities.

We need to rebuild our country and invest in our communities, too many of which have been neglected, ignored and underfunded for years. A botched and half-baked Brexit deal such as the one before us today would only deepen those problems and divisions. This deal, even the half of it that we have before us today, is bad for our democracy, bad for our economy and bad for this country. I urge the House not to be cajoled by this “third time lucky” strategy and to vote it down today.