UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Helen Goodman

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend has given yet another example. During February, the Financial Times has had headlines that read “Nissan reverses investment pledge”, “Trade deal with Japan won’t be completed”, “No deal will lead to two more years of austerity”, “The economy shrank in December”, and “Businesses are moving to Holland and Ireland”. In my constituency, as in hers, this is playing out badly: sheep farmers are terrified of a 45% tariff on exports; the pharmaceutical industry is spending millions on stockpiling medicines; and brick makers are worrying about unfair competition from China. I talked to a foreign-owned manufacturer about the prospect of no deal and was told, “No, it won’t be catastrophic for our business, but we will have to sack several hundred of your constituents.” Well, that will be a catastrophe for those people who lose their jobs, which is why I will be supporting amendments (a) and (e), and, if it is necessary, the Bill from my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin).

We also need to look beyond the short term and what we are going to do to prevent our crashing out, and on to how we come to a decision on where we go next. We need to acknowledge that not everyone is going to get their first choice; there will have to be compromise in this House, and we need institutional arrangements to facilitate this. Amendment (c), tabled by the Father of the House, is designed to do this. It has not been selected today, but I hope hon. Members will look at it seriously and consider whether we might need to come back to something like it in a fortnight’s time.

Thomas Cromwell invented the current Divisions system in 1529 in order to expose and intimidate those opposed to the King’s will. Binary choices are all right for some things, but the minute we have a complex problem with multiple options they do not serve well for good decision making. It has been and continues to be easy to make coalitions against propositions, but extremely difficult to build coalitions for anything. We saw that in respect not only of Brexit, but the House of Lords, where we all wanted reform but we could not get it, because in 2003 every option was voted down and in 2007 four options were voted through but no clear steer was given. House of Lords reform is not the biggest and most important issue in the world, but Brexit is really important. We cannot make the same mistake again. We must use a different approach, and we have suggested using one that we use for choosing our Select Committee Chairs.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

The hon. Lady is arguing articulately for the scheme she put forward and persuaded me to join her in recommending. Does she agree that one thing causing the chaos today is that the remain element in this House are not all pursuing the same end, because they all have their own preferred route, and the leave people in the House, on both sides, are divided in the same way? The system she has put together and is commending in this speech would bring them to coalesce on the most popular route, and it is highly likely that the remain side and the leave side would each come together, and would demonstrate that the remain side is in the majority.

[Helen Goodman]

The right hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely correct, because a lot of gamesmanship is going on at the moment in this House. As he says, these games are being played by Members on all sides, with everybody hoping to be the last man standing. That tactic would not be possible if we had paper ballots where every option was put simultaneously and we found out what the shared view and consensus was. We are not proposing anything in secret and we are not suggesting a hiding place for Members of Parliament; we are suggesting full transparency. Nor are we doing anything to undermine the Whips, because full transparency means they could whip this exactly as they do with deferred Divisions, which we use every week, with our pink sheets.

We want to urge hon. Members to look beyond this to where we want to be in a month’s time. If we really want the country to be less divided we need to show the way. Parliamentarians are constantly urging on their fellow citizens the need to be flexible and to embrace change. Well, perhaps, for once, we should lead by example.