European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Liddle

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 4th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

I understand that, but you would think that they are the only people who count. What about the 6 million people who in the past two weeks have signed a petition to revoke Article 50? That is one of the biggest demonstrations of support for remaining in the European Union that we have seen. What about the 1 million people who went on the march? Are they just part of the London bubble and do not represent anyone outside London?

[Lord Adonis]

I thank my noble friend for giving way. How many of the 17.4 million does my noble friend think voted for a no-deal Brexit, six weeks’ worth of medical supplies, the M20 becoming the largest car park in Europe, the ports not working, international driving licences having to be introduced and so on? Does he think that more than perhaps a few hundred thousand voted for those particular horrors?

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Liddle

Committee: 11th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I add an English voice in support of the amendment—a northern English voice and a Cumbrian voice. In deference to the noble Lord, Lord Cavendish, for whom I have great regard because of the work he does in Cumbria, I think that European funds have made an enormous difference to our prospects in the north. In our debates on the Bill, we have heard a lot of the voices of Wales and Scotland about how they should be treated in the light of Brexit, but we have heard very little about how the north of England should be treated. This reflects the fact that federalism in this country has not advanced far enough. We do not have a proper devolved system of government. It is an object lesson in how the interests of large parts of England are completely forgotten in a lot of our deliberations.

The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, is absolutely right that the £350 million a week claim on the bus played an enormous part in the leave victory. I remember giving out leaflets on the streets of the ward I represent on the county council in Wigton in Cumbria. People came up to me and said “Roger, you know, we’re not going to vote for you on this because we’re just wasting all that money”. I tried to explain to people that the £350 million that they were talking about was a gross figure of UK contributions to the EU, from which we got back substantial amounts of money which went to Cumbria in a big way.

Let me cite some examples. There is not just the agricultural support, which I know is a great concern of the noble Lord, Lord Cavendish. We would not have broadband in Cumbria if we had not had special EU support for it. We would not have had the regeneration schemes for the ports of Maryport, Whitehaven and Barrow if we had not had EU structural funds. We have had huge support for regeneration.

One other interest that I should declare is that I chair Lancaster University, just outside my native county, which is presently building a health innovation campus that would not happen without EU structural funds—and this for an excellent university, which is top of the league in the Sunday Times this year, if I can plug it in the Lords Chamber. It is a vital investment for the university’s future.

The truth is that, if the £350 million claim that the leavers made was to be met, all that spending would have to be scrapped—all the spending on agriculture and the regions and all the spending on culture, science and innovation would go, because that was the gross contribution. Clearly, therefore, there is great embarrassment on the Benches opposite as to their present intentions, because they cannot tell the Foreign Secretary that he was lying throughout the campaign. But the truth is that that was what he was doing. He was lying about the £350 million. The fact is that, if these programmes, the agriculture support and structural fund money is to continue, there is no £350 million. There might be a lesser sum from the net contribution, but when you are thinking about the net contribution, you have to think about the impact of Brexit on our economic growth and therefore on tax revenues. It is already the case that, whereas we were growing before the referendum at the top of the G7 league, we are now growing at the bottom of it, and the Chancellor’s own forecasts for the next five years suggest that we will continue to be in that position and will suffer a considerable loss of potential growth and tax revenue.

This is a very serious issue. I would like clear answers from the Government as to what promises beyond 2020 they are prepared to make on agriculture and structural funds. That matters greatly to the future of the regions of this nation.

[Lord Adonis]

I endorse everything that my noble friend Lord Liddle has said. Always when the House debates a Bill at length, certain themes appear, and the themes and patterns can often be of some significance. One of the most significant themes that has appeared in your Lordships’ consideration of this Bill is how weak the voice of England has been in our debates compared with the voice of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

There has been only one substantive debate about the interests of England after EU withdrawal and how it is handled, which was the debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley—significantly, a former leader of Newcastle City Council—on 19 March. It was a very significant debate in the form that it took. What came through very clearly in the debate was that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and other leaders of local authorities in England, including the noble Lord, Lord Porter, who sits on the Conservative Benches and is the leader of the Local Government Association, had far more confidence in the EU’s processes of consultation through the Committee of the Regions than they did in any institutional arrangements for consultation between Her Majesty’s Government and local authorities in England.

I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, in his place—I think that he may be responding to this debate. In his characteristic way, he made a very constructive response to the debate, saying that the Government were considering consultation arrangements post-EU withdrawal with local authorities in England. I took it to be a very significant statement when he said that that might involve new consultative machinery, including possibly a new consultative body between the Government and local authorities in England. I have to say that the fact that it takes EU withdrawal for Her Majesty’s Government to produce proposals for formal institutional consultation between the leaders of local authorities in England and the Government is a pretty damning commentary on the state of our constitutional arrangements in this country. One of the themes that comes through very strongly from Brexit is that English local government and the regions and cities of England are essentially government from London in a colonial fashion, in much the same way as Scotland and Wales were before devolution. One of the very big issues raised by Brexit is that whatever happens over the next year, whether or not we leave—and I hope we do not—Parliament is going to have to address with great seriousness in the coming years the government of England as a nation but also the relationship between this colonial-style government that we have in Westminster and Whitehall and local government across England as a whole.

The one telling exception to this pattern is London, because London has a directly elected mayor and the Greater London Authority. As a former Minister, I know that the whole way that London is treated is radically different from the way that the rest of England is treated because it has a mayor and the GLA. When the Mayor of London phones Ministers, sitting there with 1 million votes—somewhat more than my noble friend has as the county councillor for Wigton; I know he has done very well but he does not sit there with quite so many votes—I assure noble Lords that Ministers take the Mayor of London’s call.

I remember vividly that when I was Secretary of State for Transport I met the then Mayor of London, who is now the Foreign Secretary, and he did not know who the leader of Birmingham City Council was. It only happens to be the second largest city in England. That is a very telling commentary on the state of the government of England. How England is going to be treated is massive unfinished business in our constitutional arrangements, and Brexit has exposed a whole set of issues relating to the government of England that will now have to be addressed.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Liddle

Committee: 10th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, the noble Baroness needs to be very cautious about taking on the noble Duke, of Wellington in a debate. I hope that she will be able to agree with her ducal colleague. There are two key points here: one is fundamental, the other pragmatic. The noble Duke made the pragmatic one, which is compelling. There could be reasons, perhaps to do with the final ratification processes, why it is in the public interest to delay and we should not put obstacles in the path of that. There is also a reason of fundamental constitutional principle why we should not agree to this. We are being asked to agree to a date for leaving the European Union, and to put it in statute, before we know what we will be doing after we leave. Until we have the withdrawal treaty, we will not be aware of what the terms of withdrawal are—

[Lord Liddle]

I do not think we are going to know what the terms of withdrawal are even when we get that treaty. All we are going to get is a political declaration. It is clear that everyone in Brussels thinks that the British Government want to fudge that as much as possible because that is the only way the Prime Minister, Mrs May, can get an agreement through the House of Commons and her own party.

[Lord Adonis]

My noble friend makes very good points, which will be a subject for discussion when we see the proposed withdrawal treaty. However, this is all the more reason why Parliament should not commit itself now to a date in advance of knowing the basis on which we are going to withdraw. The arguments for taking the date out of the Bill are compelling. It is not sufficient that only a Minister has the power to change the date. It is crucial for Parliament itself to be in charge of setting the date, once it has agreed the terms of departure.

I am always an optimist in these matters. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, did the noble Baroness on the Front Bench a great disservice when he said that he knew in advance what she was going to say. We know that the noble Baroness is highly emollient and listens to debates in the House. She is not her noble friend Lord Callanan, who just reads from the script and is totally unresponsive to the mood of the House. We have great confidence that the noble Baroness will say that she has listened to the compelling arguments which have been put to her, particularly from her ducal colleague; that she is going to depart from the words in her script; that Her Majesty’s Government will consider this matter on the basis of the overwhelming weight of arguments which have been put in this Committee and that she will be delighted to accept the amendments on the Order Paper this afternoon.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Liddle

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

I entirely agree, and I hope that the noble Lord will say that to the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, who is sitting right next to him. It provides a devastating response to the noble Lord’s intervention just a moment ago.

We are asking the Government simply to declare the policy of Her Majesty’s Government in the negotiations that are taking place. Since one assumes that our European partners are being told what we are seeking to negotiate—it is quite hard to negotiate something if you do not tell the other side what you are seeking to negotiate—I cannot see that there is any damage to the public interest in telling this House and the public. These are very straightforward questions. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, says that we should not declare our hand midway. Are we or are we not in favour of keeping the European arrest warrant after 29 March next year? If we are, that is a clear negotiating objective of the Government. It will require a straightforward continuation of the current arrangements, and people like me will say all the way through that it is yet another argument as to why we would be much better off staying in the European Union in the first place and not having to go through this hugely complex and difficult process of attempting to replicate arrangements so that we do not end up with a worse situation, when there is every likelihood that we will.

The devastating response to and commentary on all these matters come from the Prime Minister herself—both in her Munich speech, in which she made it very clear that she would regard it as damaging to the national interest not to have a treaty at the end of March, and in her speech on 25 April 2016 before the referendum, in which she was even clearer on these matters. In that latter speech, in which she sought to argue why we should stay in the European Union, she went through in great detail the benefits that the European arrest warrant, the Prüm arrangements and so on gave to the security of the United Kingdom. Those are all points that the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, has raised.

The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, seems to want to will the ends without the means. I understand that he has not had to negotiate these issues himself, but just says, on a wing and a prayer, that he wants these objectives to be secured and is sure that our negotiators in Brussels will be able to do it. If the noble Lord had had any systematic engagement with the Ministers responsible, I do not think he would necessarily have so high a degree of confidence in their capacity to negotiate his objectives.

The Prime Minister herself gave the devastating response to the question of why we should stay in the European Union in respect of these security and justice issues. In her speech of 25 April 2016, when referring to the European arrest warrant and the passenger name record directive, she said that these show,

“2 advantages of remaining inside the EU … without the kind of institutional framework offered by the European Union, a complex agreement like this could not have been struck across the whole continent, because bilateral deals between every single member state would have been impossible to reach”.

Let us be frank: that is why we are in the European Union, why it serves our national interest and why we have a very high degree of co-operation when it comes to justice and home affairs.

We are talking about very large numbers. The Prime Minister herself gave the figures, saying that in the five years prior to her speech—2011 to 2016—5,000 people had been extradited from Britain to Europe under the European arrest warrant, and 675 suspected or convicted wanted individuals were brought to Britain to face justice. She said:

“It has been used to get terror suspects out of the country and bring terrorists back here to face justice”.


Just as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, gave his extraordinary statistics about how long it used to take to get extradition proceedings under way, the Prime Minister said:

“In 2005, Hussain Osman—who tried to blow up the London Underground on 21/7—was extradited from Italy using the Arrest Warrant in just 56 days. Before the Arrest Warrant existed, it took 10 long years to extradite Rachid Ramda, another terrorist, from Britain to France”.


These issues are of the utmost gravity and we need an assurance from the Minister that, in the negotiations for the treaty that the Prime Minister referred to in Munich, we will seek to maintain arrangements that are in every respect as good as those we currently have. If we do not have those in the treaty she presents to Parliament at the end of the year, many of us will say that this whole Brexit process has seriously damaged the security of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

Does my noble friend accept that the reason the Government will not disclose their negotiating objectives is not that this would somehow prejudice their position but rather that they do not know what those objectives are? The truth is that this is an issue of real sensitivity to the Brexiteers. The question is whether these arrangements are intergovernmental or involve the institutions of the European Union and the supervision of the European Court of Justice.

I know all about this because, as an adviser to the then Prime Minister, I went through many iterations of this issue. When justice and home affairs first became a subject of the European Union, and a pillar of the Maastricht treaty, it was all at an intergovernmental level. Gradually, it became more communitised, as it were, for the simple reason that that was the way to make it work. We could not make it work as an intergovernmental mechanism. We could not get the degree of co-operation needed to make something like the European arrest warrant work without having some judicial supervision mechanism, so the Labour Government agreed to it—somewhat reluctantly because some of the people involved were not the greatest supporters of civil rights in many respects, but they agreed to it.

What is happening in Brussels at the moment is that the member states are discussing among themselves what framework they are going to set for the negotiations for the rest of the year. That will be coming out at the end of March.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Adonis]

My noble friend’s intervention is excellent and gives the Minister more to respond to. I know he is short of points to deal with at the end of this debate.

[Lord Liddle]

This is Committee stage. We are allowed to go back and forth. What are the Government saying to other member states at the moment about the nature of the agreement on this that they are prepared to contemplate? Are they saying to our current partners that they are prepared to see judicial supervision in these arrangements or not? I hope the Minister will answer that very simple point.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Adonis and Lord Liddle

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

Perhaps I may ask the noble Lord, Lord Kerr—the supreme oracle on Article 50—a question which, again, I think will be important for our deliberations later on. An extension of the Article 50 period requires unanimity in the Council. However, if Her Majesty’s Government wished to extend Article 50 for the purposes of holding a referendum, or conceivably for a parliamentary vote, thus completing our established constitutional procedures, would the Council recognise that automatically because it recognises the domestic procedures of member states when it comes to the ratification of agreements?

[Lord Liddle]

I would like to follow that up with a relevant question to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I agree with all the excellent speeches in favour of this amendment. To me, the politics of the amendment is the question of whether, when exit day is discussed, Parliament knows what it is exiting to. That is the question. If Parliament does not know what it is exiting to, surely the logic is that the date should be extended until it does.

Along with my noble friend Lady Kennedy, I have recently been on Select Committee visits to Brussels, and she can confirm that there is much uncertainty about what information will be available to Parliament in the autumn of this year. If things go well, we might have a withdrawal agreement and a transition period, but the only thing on the future relationship that we will have is a political declaration. There is no question at all of there being a trade agreement when Parliament votes; it will be a political declaration. The European people to whom we talked said that they wanted that to be clear and precise. However, at the same time, people said to us, “We think that possibly your Government might quite like to get away with a fudge”. Why should Parliament be put in the position of taking this crucial decision when all the British Government are offering is a fudge?