UK and EU Relations

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome and congratulate the Government on the excellent position papers that they have produced setting out our aims but, quite rightly, not our strategy. I cannot for the life of me understand the wisdom or logic of the Official Opposition’s Motion, which is on the Order Paper for debate later today, calling on the Government to publish their strategy for the negotiations, thus revealing all our key negotiating positions and red lines. What sort of foolishness is that?

When Churchill gave his first speech to the Commons as Prime Minister in May 1940, he said:

“You ask, what is our policy? … It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might … You ask, what is our aim? … It is victory … victory, however long and hard the road may be”.—[Official Report, Commons, 13/5/1940; col. 1502.]


Did he then go on to set out his strategy? Did he go on to say, “First, we will take on Rommel in North Africa, then we will land in Sicily and drive up through Italy and, hopefully, some time in 1944 we will land in Normandy”? Of course not. A strategy revealed is no longer a strategy but a concession. That is what the Opposition and some other noble Lords are asking for in that Motion.

So what is our policy? It is to leave the EU with the best deal possible. What are our aims? They are the 12 aims set out in the White Paper. I have heard no one suggest that those aims are inadequate or wrong. It would be madness for the Government to publish in detail the strategy on how they plan to achieve the aims. We see the monstrous try-on by Mr Barnier, suggesting that the UK should pay anything from €50 billion to €100 billion and asking if we would kindly make him an offer. I am sure he would love to see a UK strategy paper setting out what our bottom line might be and what we would be prepared to settle for.

I want to see a deal done with the EU that meets our aims of the White Paper. But that deal has to have us out of the single market, the customs union and the EU court, because that is what the British people voted for. Let us have no more of the myth perpetrated by some remainers that those things were not on the ballot paper and the public did not vote for them. Oh yes they did vote for them—it is insulting to say that the electorate did not know what they voted for. The authoritative report recently published by NatCen Social Research—not one of my usual reading papers—makes it clear, as did the Vote Leave analysis, that voters were principally motivated by sovereignty issues and that the Government’s dire warnings of economic Armageddon or being poorer were not as important to them.

I hope that we get a deal but I suggest to my noble friend that we must seriously prepare for a no-deal scenario and prepare a position paper on that, because it is looking increasingly likely that the EU will remain intransigent in its desire to punish Britain. I welcome what I heard from the noble Lord, Lord Jay, that his EU Committee will look at a no-deal scenario paper as well. I hope my noble friend, in addition to all her other reading, has read the article by Yanis Varoufakis in the Sunday press and the leaked memo by Jeremy Browne, a former Lib Dem MP and Foreign Office Minister and, currently, a City envoy. There is no reason to disbelieve them, and all the evidence points to the fact that the EU intends not to give a single inch in so-called negotiations, expecting that at some point the UK will panic and surrender. That is a very good tactic for them—if it works—and we must not play into their hands by showing signs of panic.

Mr Varoufakis wrote:

“That Michel Barnier and his team have a mandate to wreck any mutually advantageous deal there is little doubt. The key term is ‘sequencing’. The message to London is clear: you give us everything we are asking for, unconditionally. Then and only then will we hear what you want. This is what one demands if one seeks to ruin a negotiation in advance”.


Did we not see that in Barnier’s attitude to his divorce bill demand? When UK officials spent three hours going through his monetary demands line by line, questioning the legality of it, he was apparently outraged that we dared to question it instead of plucking an offer of billions of euros out of thin air. We have also seen how they rubbished our position papers. Mr Varoufakis also said that the EU’s “media cheerleaders”, meanwhile,

“would work feverishly towards demeaning London’s proposals, denigrating its negotiators and reversing the truth in ways that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of”.

No one has challenged that view. Then he says:

“Right on cue came the leaks that followed the dinner that the prime minister hosted for Jean-Claude Juncker … their explicit purpose being to belittle their host. Then came the editorials by the usual suspects … deploring the ‘lack of preparation’ by the British—using … Brussels’s favourite put-down that ‘they have not done their homework’”.


The latest, of course, is the slur by Juncker that my right honourable friend David Davis is lazy and lacking in stability—all that abuse gleefully reported by the BBC and some of our media as if it had the force of divine writ. I congratulate my right honourable friend the Secretary of State on the way he is conducting the negotiations and on not indulging in the sort of vile abuse which the EU is heaping on him.

We must prepare for a no-deal scenario, I am afraid, because as Jeremy Browne reveals in his memo, according to the Sunday Telegraph:

“Brussels shows no interest in finding ‘long-term solutions’ to Brexit and could ignore the interests of European Union business”.


In the memorandum, Browne says:

“The restricted mandate means little energy is expended on the imaginative search for long-term solutions. People can look most contented when they have declared a problem to be intractable”.


He notes:

“Such a virtue is made of intransigence and ensuring that Britain learns lessons from the EU”.


He also writes:

“It is the received wisdom that all that is required is for Britain to come to terms with the inevitable and yield accordingly”.


It is clear that the EU tactics are to refuse to negotiate on issues of substance and to wear down UK negotiators until we capitulate and promise them huge unjustified sums of money, so that we are then in no position to strike any sort of deal on market access.

Much as we would all like a good deal, so must stay at the negotiating table—of course we do not walk away—and take on the chin all the intransigence and abuse from our so-called partners, we must now plan and prepare for the possibility of a no-deal scenario.