European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend is right, and I shall come back to that point in a second.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

The satisfactory amendment that left the House of Lords would oblige the Government to table a substantive motion if their agreement were being rejected. No doubt they would draft that with a view to commanding the majority of the House, but other people could table a substantive amendment with alternative proposals for how to proceed. My right hon. Friend rejects that, and is trying to replace it with a situation in which the Government do not have to put anything in their second amendment, except that they take note. Then, if anyone tries to table a substantive motion as an amendment, I will give you a pound to a penny, Mr Speaker, that the argument will be “If you pass this, it will mean no deal, because the Government are not going to negotiate this, and it will bring the thing to an end.”

I cannot for the life of me see why the Government are hesitating about the Lords amendment, except, of course, that they have come under tremendous pressure from hard-line Brexiteers in the Government, who caused them to reject the perfectly satisfactory understanding that had been reached with Conservative Members who had doubts last week.

[Mr Davis]

I am afraid that I do not agree with my right hon. and learned Friend, as he will be unsurprised to hear. I will not try to follow him down the path of what might happen and in what circumstances. I shall explain in a moment the reasoning behind the restriction of amendment, which is precisely accurate in this area.

Let me say this to my right hon. and learned Friend. He has been in the House even longer than I have, and he knows full well that very often, when matters are particularly important, the procedural mechanism of a motion does not actually determine its power or its effect. That goes all the way back to the Norway debate, which arose from an Adjournment motion tabled by the Chief Whip of the day, and which changed the course of the war. So I do not take my right hon. and learned Friend’s point at all.

The amendment sent to us by the other place does not offer those motions in neutral terms. It is therefore possible—indeed, I would predict, likely—that wide-ranging amendments will be tabled which would seek to instruct the Government how to proceed in relation to our European Union withdrawal. This may seem to be a minor point of procedure, but it is integral to the nature of the motions, and to whether they pass the three tests that I set out last week.

The debates and amendments of the last week have revolved around what would happen in the event of no deal. Let me explain to the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) the distinction between the amendments and the motion that we promised the House—indeed, I think that I first promised it to him as long ago as the article 50 debate. The provisions of the motion will come about if the House rejects the circumstances of a deal, but the amendments apply principally to the issue of no deal, which is really rather different. Let me also make it clear to the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) that I have never argued in favour of no deal. I do not favour no deal, and I will do what I can to avoid no deal. It is not an outcome that we are seeking, and, as things stand, I am confident that we will achieve a deal that Parliament can support. However, you cannot enter a negotiation without the right to walk away; if you do, it rapidly ceases to be a negotiation.

The Lords amendment undermines the strength of the United Kingdom in negotiations. There are plenty of voices on the European side of the negotiations who seek to punish us and do us harm—who wish to present us with an unambiguously bad deal. Some would do so to dissuade others from following us, and others would do so with the intention of reversing the referendum, and making us lose our nerve and rejoin the European Union. If it undermines the UK’s ability to walk away, the amendment makes that outcome more likely. That is the paradox. Trying to head off no deal—and this, too, is important to the hon. Lady—is actually making no deal more likely, and that is what we are trying to avoid.

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[Mr Grieve]

No, I will not.

In view of that acknowledgement, I must say that I weigh that and the clear words of this statement against what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has told me about her anxieties. My judgment—it is purely personal—is that if that is the issue, having finally obtained, with a little more difficulty than I would have wished, the obvious acknowledgement of the sovereignty of this place over the Executive in black and white language, I am prepared to accept the Government’s difficulty, support them and, in the circumstances, to accept the form of amendment that they want. I shall formally move my amendment at the end, because I do not want to deprive the House of the right to vote if it wishes. Members have the absolute right to disagree, but it seems to me that, with the acknowledgement having been properly made, I am content to go down that route.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Grieve]

No, I want to end.

We are facing some real difficulties at the moment. It is rightly said that those whom the gods want to destroy, they first render mad. There is enough madness around at the moment to make one start to question whether collective sanity in this country has disappeared. Every time someone tries to present a sensible reasoned argument in this House vilification and abuse follow, including death threats to right hon. and hon. Friends. There is a hysteria that completely loses sight of the issues that we really have to consider. There is an atmosphere of bullying that has the directly opposite consequence in that people are put into a position where they feel unable to compromise, because by doing so they will be immediately described as having “lost”—as if these were arguments to be lost or won. The issue must be that we get things right.

Right at the other end of the spectrum, we get some other ridiculous things. I have had Daily Mail journalists crawling over the garden of my house in France. I do not quite know, but I think they were looking for silos from which missiles might be aimed at the mansion of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg). The area where I have a holiday home has a history of monsters and witches chucking megaliths backwards and forwards across the channel. Such is the state of our discourse, and that is the very thing we must avoid. We are going to have differences and, if there is no deal, those differences may extend to my taking a different view, as a Member of Parliament, from what the Government might wish. This House has a right to act if there is no deal in order to protect the interests of the British people, and the responsibility in those circumstances lies as much with us as it does with the Government.

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[Philip Davies]

I am not going to give way. As I was saying, if only that had been the case before. I excuse from this my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), because he did not vote to have a referendum and so there is absolutely no reason why he should feel in any way bound by its result. I perfectly respect that; his position has been entirely consistent. What I have no time for—

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

To make it clear, this totally irrelevant argument that we are trying to reverse the referendum is as irrelevant to me as it is to any other of my right hon. and hon. Friends. This House voted, by an enormous majority, to invoke article 50. We are now trying to debate, and have parliamentary influence over, what we are going to do when we have left and what the form of our new arrangements with Europe and the rest of the world will be. So will my hon. Friend stop, yet again, introducing—this is not just him, but he is the ultimate Member to do it—this totally irrelevant argument and try to say what is wrong with the process set out in the Lords amendment? What is the excessive power that it apparently gives this House to have a say when the negotiations are finished?

[Philip Davies]

I am afraid that the public are not fooled by the motives of people who clearly want to delay, frustrate or overturn the result of the referendum. It is a shame some of them cannot admit it. The shadow Secretary of State said that people had said over a long period of time that if we did this or that, Brexit will be frustrated. May I just suggest to him that he gets out of London, because people around the country feel that Brexit is being frustrated? It is already being frustrated a great deal by this House. So he has this idea that Brexit has not been frustrated, but he needs to get—

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[Mr Speaker]

Order. I would like to accommodate further speakers.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

I shall make the shortest speech here that I have made for very many years—[Hon. Members: “Ever!”]—and I shall take no interventions. [Interruption.] Well, the Government are restricting debate on this European issue as ferociously as they are trying to restrict votes and powers. I voted against both the previous timetable motions. With no explanation, we have been told that we have an hour and a half for this extremely important issue today. Presumably, it is to allow time for the interesting debate that follows, taking note on the subject of NATO, which could be tabled at any time over the next fortnight and has no urgency whatever. None of us are allowed to say very much about this matter.

The Government have been trying to minimise the parliamentary role throughout the process. That is only too obvious. I will try to avoid repeating anything that others have said, but the fact is that it started with an attempt to deny the House any vote on the invocation of article 50, and litigation was required to change that. A meaningful vote has been resisted since it was first proposed. The Government suffered a defeat in this House during the earlier stages of our proceedings before they would contemplate it, and then they assured us that they would not try to reverse that; there would be a meaningful vote. But actually, because that amendment needs amplification and the Bill needs to be made clearer, we now have this vital last stage of Lords amendments and the final attempt to spell out what meaningful votes and parliamentary influence are supposed to mean, and it is being resisted to the very last moment.

Last week, I thought that the Government would be defeated because of their resistance. I was not invited to the negotiations. I do not blame the Chief Whip for that in the slightest. I have not fallen out with him personally, but I think that he knew that I would take a rather firm line as I saw nothing wrong with Lord Hailsham’s amendment if nothing else were available. My right hon. and hon. Friends, including my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), actually believed that they had undertakings from the Prime Minister, and I believe that the Prime Minister gave those undertakings in good faith.

My right hon. and learned Friend for Beaconsfield negotiated with a very distinguished member of the Government acting on the Prime Minister’s behalf, and they reached a firm agreement. That agreement is substantially reflected in Lords amendment 19P and my right hon. and hon. Friends expected that it would be tabled by the Government. It was not. And now the Government are resisting the very issue upon which last week a very distinguished member of the Government reached a settlement—to use the legal terms—because the Government are not able to live up to their agreement. We are being asked to substitute, for a perfectly reasonable Lords amendment, a convoluted thing that would mean arguments about the Speaker’s powers if it ever had to be invoked.

[Mr Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

There are only two issues that come out of this debate. The first is about honour. The right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) tried to ensure that he got a deal from the Prime Minister. He went with other Members to negotiate with her and she made a promise to him about an amendment, but that promise was not necessarily fulfilled in the interpretation of the Members who heard her say it, so the House of Lords had to send this issue back to us today. This issue is definitely about honour. Other hon. Members have said that they believe that the House can pass resolutions and motions, and that they will be honoured, even if they are not necessarily binding. I believe that the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield is an honourable man, and he is again taking the Government at their word.

That brings me to the second issue, which is that this is also about Parliament. If the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield has achieved anything, it is that he has moved the Government from where the Prime Minister was on “The Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday, when she said that Parliament cannot tie the hands of Government. The right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield has managed to extract a statement from the Government, who are now saying that it is open for Members to table motions, that parliamentary time will be provided, and that it is open for this House, through Mr Speaker, to ensure that motions and decisions can be made. The right hon. and learned Gentleman believes that that is worth having and it is indeed true that it is a step forward. The difference that I have with him is that he believes that the Prime Minister and the Government should be given the benefit of the doubt yet again; I would suggest that he should not and could not necessarily trust their word. That is where we differ.