European Union (Withdrawal)

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 3rd September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

Mr Speaker, you are very generous to me. I will try to be extremely brief. The right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) has just enabled me to be briefer, because he made the key point in the last few moments of his speech when he talked about what really lies behind this Bill, from the point of view of Parliament and parliamentary democracy.

We all know that we are in the middle of an historic crisis, and we all know that our duty is to take the decision that will be best for future generations and will do least damage to our political standing in the world and to our economy. This horrendous debate, which is tearing the country apart, is doing great harm to our political institutions, and particularly Parliament. A large number of the population on either side of the European debate are beginning to hold Parliament almost in contempt. Fanatic leavers are convinced that it is wicked MPs who are undermining the people’s will and that we are solely responsible for the appalling deadlock we are in.

I am very glad that, with your help, Mr Speaker, my right hon. Friends and others have found this way of enabling Parliament to assert itself, give its view and face the fundamental challenge from a constitutional point of view which will determine the political relationship between Governments of all colours and Parliaments for quite a long time to come.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Clarke]

With great respect, I would love to debate with my right hon. Friend, and I often have, but my speech will get longer and longer once I give way. As Mr Speaker has not put me under the time limit, I will try to avoid giving way, to be fair to others.

The reason for this motion and the underlying reason for the opposition to it is simply that the Government are insisting on pursuing a policy that they know a majority in Parliament is opposed to. There is no precedent for it that I can think of—certainly not in modern times. I have been around for long enough, but 10 years ago, if a Government had attempted to implement a policy that they knew the majority of Parliament were against, it would have created outrage.

Parliament has twice voted against leaving with no deal. This Prime Minister has plainly determined that he has put himself in a position where he has got to have no deal. We have seen the most extraordinary attempts to avoid this House having opportunities to vote on that, to debate it and to play a role in it. If Parliament allows itself to be sidelined, the precedent that we will create for future generations and for the behaviour of future Governments of all complexions vis-à-vis Parliament will be quite horrendous.

We have heard arguments about the importance of limiting these emergency debates. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is very good at keeping a straight face when he is coming out with arguments that are almost incredible. The benefits of trading solely within the WTO I will leave on one side. I am sure the North Koreans thrive under that in every conceivable way. [Laughter] I think it is only the North Koreans, the Algerians and perhaps the Serbians who do that. When the Leader of the House says how important it is that this House defends its traditions by making sure that in no circumstances can it ever debate business of its own choice, even in an emergency—and I know that he is a profound parliamentarian and deeply committed to the wellbeing of this place—his ability to keep a straight face is quite remarkable. However, I am being deflected from the serious point I was making.

Prorogation was the final, almost charmingly naive, attempt to make sure that there was not even an opportunity by mistake for something on the Order Paper to enable anybody here to express their opinion. Apparently, it is suddenly frightfully important that the Government’s whole new policy package—which seems to be emerging at an extraordinary rate, in figures anyway—is put before Parliament before the end of October, when we have not really bothered with policy of that kind for a very long time. It is plainly impossible to put it off until the beginning of November!

Most importantly, apparently the reason for the extremely long break is that it is extremely important that we do not distract the public from paying proper attention to the party conferences! [Laughter.] We have to be respectful to the Trades Union Congress; we cannot distract the television sets of the nation from the Liberal assembly; apparently every Conservative MP is dying to go to the Conservative conference. [Laughter.] We know there are people who will have engagements there, but I am sure the pairing system can cope with that. The idea that at the moment of such historic crisis, such momentous decisions, the House can be faced with arguments of that kind, I find quite preposterous and very saddening.

Given that we are being treated in this way, it is quite obvious that the House must seize its own agenda—that is all that this evening’s vote is about—and make the most of the opportunity in the next few days. Then the House can make key decisions on what it will legally require the Government to pursue in the national interest: most importantly being strongly against just leaving with no deal. I would be amazed if a majority does not emerge, yet again. It is not that anybody really wants that—I think about 20 Members of the House of Commons really think it is a good idea to leave with no deal. It is the right of my party, that has given up and decided to get it over with: “Leave with no deal; it’s all the fault of the Germans, the French and particularly the Commissioners—all the fault of Parliament. Have a quick election, wave a Union Jack and then we will sort out the bumps that will come when we have left.” The House must stop that, and use the opportunity.

Tomorrow we will debate the merits of the arguments. We will go on and on. I am dying to intervene in more of the arguments—I have already spoken in this House more than most on Europe, and we all know where we stand on the leave/remain arguments—but there is one point of real substance that I would like to address tonight, on which I am afraid for the first time ever the Leader of the House was slightly annoying me. He was using what is currently the cliché, extreme right-winger argument, that anybody who wants to stop a no-deal Brexit is actually reversing the referendum. I think we exactly reflect the public; Parliament, in its paralysed confusion, entirely reflects the division of the public, where there is no clear majority for anything, so far, except that we are against leaving with no deal. We cannot get a majority for anything else; everything else has so far been blocked by hard-line right-wing people who do not want any deal with foreigners, and people’s vote people, who will not vote for anything that involves leaving the European Union because they want another referendum. I am afraid they have, so far, outnumbered the middle. I think more of them should join the middle, because I believe, with great reluctance, that the obvious compromise, to bring together both public opinion and this House, is a soft Brexit where we keep the present economic ties.

My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House says that I am just defying 17 million people. Well, I have not defied 17 million people. I have already compromised. I was not in favour of the referendum. I feel very self-justified, looking back on it. I did not vote for it; I made it clear that I was not going to change my lifelong opinions because of one day’s vote on a simple question on the terribly complicated subject of our national destiny. I even voted against invoking article 50; I was guilty of that. Since then, I have accepted that the only way to proceed is a soft Brexit: to leave the political union and stay in those superbly free trade arrangements, which British Conservative Governments took a leading role in creating. I have voted for Brexit three times. If the Bill gets passed, and if we get on to the substance of the thing, I will vote for Brexit again. I have had the privilege of at least once voting alongside the Prime Minister and the Leader of the House in favour of Brexit, on terms which they now treat with derision.

I do not want to listen to conspiracy theories about the Irish backstop. Sadly, I do not think any of the English public take any interest in Irish political affairs; nine out of 10 have no idea what the Irish backstop is. It is an entirely closed little debate—but a very important one, I concede. I am strongly in favour of the Irish backstop unless we could replace it with something that is, equally, absolutely guaranteed to preserve the Good Friday agreement. At the root, we have to deliver to the people, and I think we could get a broad mass of the public together on something that keeps our economic ties together and attempts—as the EU keeps doing under British leadership—to extend free trade through more and more EU trade agreements, which we took the leading part in pressing for and which we are now about to walk out of to go back to WTO terms all over again, with South Korea and Mercosur and so on. That must be stopped.

I would like to see a Bill in which we put more positive steers from this House. We all know what we are against—no deal—but we cannot agree on what we are for. I do not think that making it a legal obligation to seek a customs union or to have some regulatory alignment would make the Prime Minister’s position more difficult in Europe; they would just wonder why on earth no British leader had asked for that before. I will leave that until the proceedings on the Bill.

If this Parliament does not pass this motion, it will be looked back upon with total derision. What sort of a Parliament was it, in the middle of this crisis, that said to the Government—this new Government, this populist Government, storming away as it is—“Oh yes, we quite agree with you: we should not be troubled with this. The Executive, as we have just been told, have absolute powers. We are only a debating society, only commenting when we are allowed. Feel free to deliver what you wish by 31 October.”? Then we go back to our constituents and say, “It is very important that you have us to represent you in Parliament, to look after your interests, but as it happens we have given unbridled powers to Boris for the next few months on the European question.”

You may gather, Mr Speaker, that I am going to vote for this motion, with more passion than I usually go through the Lobby. It is an extremely important evening.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Edward Leigh

1st reading: House of Commons
Thursday 1st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I have listened to many Budget speeches but when I listened to this year’s I was taken by surprise, in a rather cheering way. I came here expecting that we were going to hear how the Chancellor had solved the problem of raising some taxation to help pay for the very welcome £200 billion given to the NHS. I sat there listening to him deliver an excellent speech, cutting taxation and increasing public expenditure. It was an open and expansive Budget based on a courageous Budget judgment that I had not seen coming—I welcome that and wish it every success. It was of course based on spending all the unexpected surprise of the extra tax revenues that the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts had produced—or had already delivered—and on spending everything anticipated in the forecasts in order to keep us on track to eliminate debt.

I welcome bold decisions, and I hope this one succeeds, but I am afraid I am going to express a little caution, as someone needs to, even in the Chamber of the House of Commons. I have seen many Budgets and the reaction is quite predictable: all my right hon. and hon. Friends have joined in welcoming every piece of good news, as I do. The money for health and social care was very much needed, and I welcome what has been done for small businesses and city centres—I could go on, but my seven minutes does not allow me to cover all the good news in the Budget. But somebody has to express caution, but I do not do so as a party pooper; I am not going in for all the gloom and foreboding of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Standard & Poor’s, the rating agency. But as the Labour Opposition are in my personal opinion so completely useless on an occasion like this—all they do is greet an expansive and popular Budget by saying, “Oh, it’s nothing compared with the vast sums we would spend in future”—it is probably as well that we do express some caution.

All I would like is for my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary, who I believe is going to wind up the debate, to reassure me that we are proceeding with some care. Many political judgments involve taking risks. Very few political judgments and policy judgments give an obvious answer, which is fine. A courageous Minister takes some of those risks, but they do have to be aware of them and to anticipate what they would do if they started to materialise, and I hope my right hon. Friend will be able to do that.

The reasons for my reservations are, simply expressed, that the very welcome news about the tax revenues recently may not last. We have had windfall revenues in the past, and nobody quite understands why we have these windfalls now, so I think a little caution is called for before we start anticipating that they are going to carry on in that way.

As for forecasts, I never spent the money in forecasts, because all economic forecasting, at any time, is extremely fallible and extremely difficult. I do not think I know of a time when it has been more impossible than now. I have only seven minutes, so I am not going to be able to dilate about Mr Trump’s trade wars, problems of Chinese debt, the emerging problems in many emerging markets, the reckless nature of the Italian Government they have elected and, above all, the uncertainty of Brexit, which dominates us. All this makes the task of economic forecasting almost impossible, so we should not spend the money it looks as though we might be getting without having at the back of our minds some idea of what we are going to do if it does not work out.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

My right hon. and learned Friend is right to pour cold water on economic forecasts. What did he think of the Treasury forecast before the referendum which warned that if we voted for Brexit, there would be an

“immediate and profound economic shock”?

[Mr Clarke]

The Treasury took some welcome measures to ease that shock, stepping in with an emergency cut in interest rates and expansionist measures to mitigate the problem. One problem with forecasting is timing. If we get a hard Brexit, I do not think my hon. Friend will be dismissing quite so lightly the forebodings of the Treasury. I agree that some of the leading figures in the remain campaign turned the whole thing into a bit of a farce by talking about Budgets putting up taxes and so on in two or three months’ time, but I did not echo that and nobody else did. Also, it was not as bad as most of the quite dishonest arguments being put forward by the leave campaign about the millions of Turks who were coming here, but I will leave that to one side.

The Brexit deal will have consequences for our immediate economic future. I want a soft Brexit, if we have to leave. I want no new barriers to our trade and investment and no new customs arrangements; I want regulatory convergence and open borders to continue with our major market, but we may not get there—no one knows. I have added in all the other uncertainties in the global economy at the moment. We are all being sustained by an American boom, which may be quite short lived, as these fiscally induced booms usually are. Recession is not impossible in the next two or three years, and we have to make sure, first, that we avoid it and, secondly, that we are prepared for the warning signals when they come.

So I hope I can be persuaded that the Chancellor has retained some firepower in case the economy risks going off, and I hope he will manage expectations. We are all enjoying this Budget, but the key public spending decisions are going to be in the public expenditure round in 2019 and 2020. Nobody should be led to expect that vast sums are necessarily going to be forthcoming then, and we need to manage expectations.

What slightly worried me were what I thought were presentational errors made in the run-up to this Budget. Had I been Chancellor, I would not have agreed that £200 billion for the health service should be announced on an inconsequential date a few months ago and then have been left with the Budget to explain how we pay for it. If we had put the two together, the health service spending would have been the highlight of this Budget, because it is a very welcome and very important decision. The public were braced to pay something towards it. The first reaction is that some other taxpayer should pay, but we could have given ourselves more firepower and maintained our direction on debt by raising some taxes towards it. But they are the only reservations I raise.

Budgets often are popular at first but they are forgotten by Christmas—even mine. What matters is where the economy is in two or three years’ time, and I hope the Chief Secretary will tell me that the Government have not lost sight of that.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I will not, I am afraid, because had the suggestion been put to my hon. Friend during the Maastricht debates that if the Government got defeated on a resolution, they could take it over on their own and let Parliament know in due course what was going to happen, I do not think he would have welcomed it. I understand that we are in a different position.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

You’ve got to give way to him now; you’ve mentioned him.

[Mr Clarke]

I thought my hon. Friend and I had debated this quite long enough for everybody already, but I will give way to him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

These arguments were put—almost as forcefully as my hon. Friend is putting them—when we had our debates before Christmas in Committee. This House then passed an amendment on a meaningful vote, defeating the Government. People had foreseen that that would undermine the Prime Minister, cause an election and represent a crisis, but the next morning, apart from the fact that there was now to be a meaningful vote, nothing stirred. The position of the Prime Minister was not weakened and negotiations have not been hindered. My hon. Friend is putting his arguments with his usual great eloquence, but, with great respect, they avoid what we are really talking about, which is the important process of parliamentary accountability.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I am afraid that my right hon. and learned Friend was not listening to his own speech. Was I not listening—was I not two or three feet away from him—when he said that the amendment that we passed earlier was not going to make much difference to the whole process? It was like giving a statement, was it not? What we are talking about is completely different. This really is the ultimate wrecking amendment, and it is not the wrecking of parliamentary sovereignty; it is the wrecking of the will of the people and democracy. There are so many compromises that we all have to make. There are so many things that I do not understand about this negotiating process, and about how we have got stuck on the hook of Ireland, the backstop, “max fac” and all these other things, but the essential thing is this: the people want us to leave the EU. They want to regain control of their borders and they want us to be out of the European Court of Justice. All this Bill does—it is not the EU negotiating Bill—is simply to implement the will of the people. Parliament, do not stand against the people! Implement their will.