Legislating for the Withdrawal Agreement

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

I echo the hon. Gentleman’s comments about his colleague. Is he aware that British businesses are already finding that when they are dealing with EU suppliers with a lead-in time for orders of six months, those suppliers are saying, “Well, of course we can sign a contract with you, but you’re going to have to bear all the risk of things like no-deal tariffs and delays on the border, and we’re not going to carry any of that risk.”? That is already happening to British businesses.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

If Members are down to speak, I do not want to hear their speeches in interventions. Can we please just stick to interventions?

[Peter Grant]

The right hon. Gentleman touches on something that Members on both sides of the House have referred to in the past. We know that a lot of very significant businesses right across the whole spectrum of the UK economy have serious concerns. They are telling Ministers in private what their concerns are. They are bound to be saying it in private, because they do not feel that they can go public for various reasons. Obviously, businesses do not like to go public about things that they think might bring down their business. That is how the Government can get away with simply pretending that there is not really a problem, or claiming that anyone who highlights a problem is somehow being unpatriotic or not getting behind British business.

The Minister talked in glowing terms about all the trade deals that we will be able to negotiate in the blink of an eye after we leave the European Union at the end of a transition period—or implementation period, or whatever it is being called this week. Of course, an implementation period does not give us certainty; all it does is extend the period of uncertainty by a year or so. It is bit like someone who is heading towards the edge of a cliff thinking that maybe it is good if they can prolong the uncertainty about just how high the cliff is until the last possible moment, but who does not use that period to back away from the worst potential consequences of their decision. An implementation period that causes a cliff-edge Brexit at the end of 2020 is not really much better than a cliff-edge Brexit at the end of March 2019.

The Minister talked about all these trade deals that somehow we cannot do just now. I cannot understand how Germany manages. Germany seems to manage to trade very effectively and very profitably with a lot of countries that the United Kingdom does not trade with or trades with on very poor terms. What are the Germans doing right? What are the German Government good at, with regard to running their economy, that this Government are not good at? I do not have time to give all the answers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

That is very tempting—I would be delighted to talk about that proposition—but the title of our debate is “Legislating for the Withdrawal Agreement”, so I feel I have to stick to those terms because otherwise Mr Deputy Speaker, who I understand has had a very nice holiday in France, showing our continental cousins that we still send them our finest and best—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. For clarification, I was actually looking around a first world war battlefield, and I went to see the grave of a Victoria Cross recipient from Chorley. It was essentially not a holiday.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I do apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker, although I understand there was a haircut while you were abroad that was reported in the national newspapers and should be brought to the attention of the House.

The third point is money. Money is really important. The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) intervened earlier on my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham to say that we were the sort of country that pays its bills—that is absolutely true—but the question is: what do we owe under international law? On this point, the most authoritative report is “Brexit and the EU budget”, published in March 2017 by the House of Lords EU Committee.

One may say that an EU Committee will be stuffed full of Eurosceptics and would be bound to come out with a report unfavourable to the EU, and that could perhaps be true in the House of Commons. I used to serve on the European Scrutiny Committee, and it would only be fair to confess that most of us were followers of that great gentleman, my hon. Friend—not right honourable, sadly—the Member for Stone, but in the House of Lords that is simply not true. The Lords Committee is made up of former Law Lords, a former Cabinet Secretary and others who, by and large, were in favour of our membership of the EU.

The case explained in that very powerful document is that if we leave under the terms of article 50 without a withdrawal agreement, we will owe no money, and the reason is that our obligation to pay any money would in normal circumstances depend on the 1968 Vienna convention on the law of treaties. If we leave under those terms, without anything in the Lisbon treaty or other EU treaties, we would indeed be liable for our share of the liabilities, but that convention says that if the treaty of the organisation to which one belongs makes a different provision for leaving, that provision is authoritative. And then we go back to article 50, and the provision of article 50 is that if we leave after two years without a deal, that is it—there is no financial provision at all. In those circumstances, this £40 billion of our constituents’ money, which could be spent on other pressing needs—every Member could identify a pressing need in their own constituency, or for their own constituents or the nation at large—is not a legal obligation, but a charitable donation, unless it comes with a very clear quid pro quo.

The hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), the Opposition spokesman, made an excellent point on this in his very considered speech. He said that the Opposition would be expecting a good deal of detail on the second stage. What are we moving to? A report last week said that we would have a 10-page document on a political agreement saying that motherhood and apple pie was all fine and dandy. That would be £4 billion a page for waffle. Well, Members may like waffles—they may prefer Belgium waffles—but £4 billion a page for waffle is not something that any responsible Member of Parliament could vote for. For what, after all, is the job of this House and its power? How do we control the Executive? It is has always been through the provision of money, and if the Executive wish to waste British taxpayers’ money, we must say no.

The answer, then, is that we are generous and say yes to people who are living here, but that we say no to being a vassal state, no to being tied down by Lilliputians, and no to squandering taxpayers’ money.