Brexit: UK-EU Relationship

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, this is about the fourth time I have spoken on the result of the referendum and I shall say the same as I did in the first debate: I voted to remain but out means out. I do not think that we do any good by demeaning those who voted for Brexit or describing them as—to use Hillary Clinton’s word—“deplorables”. In England, 28 million people voted out of 34 million, and the margin for Brexit was seven percentage points—53 to 46. The difference in England of two million votes was also the national difference. In all the devolved regions, three million voted for and three million voted against. So this is very much an angry English decision—and we should listen to it carefully.

My noble friend Lord Monks described it as a divorce, and so did I. The point of a divorce is to get it over with quickly. Then, you want to cohabit, but you cannot begin the discussion on cohabitation until after the divorce. We have walked out of the house; now we have to proceed with the divorce. If we are going to go through with this divorce, it is neither a hard nor soft Brexit but a quick Brexit that is of the essence. Once you get a quick Brexit, then you can have a smart framework agreement for cohabitation. Much more time should be spent on discussing cohabitation than on either delaying the invocation of Article 50 or making it very complicated.

I know that I am in a minority on this side of the House in that respect, but I sincerely think that, to end the uncertainty, we have to have a quick Brexit. It is no good hoping that, somehow, the world is going to change, the British people are going to change, France is going to break down and Germany is going to go up in flames—none of that is going to happen. The 27 other member states are not going to treat us nicely, whether we insult then or not. They have their own interests to protect. We have walked out and so we have to take the consequences.

The important question now is: what role does Parliament play in this, whatever decision the Supreme Court makes? It would be good to have a discussion in Parliament like the ones we have been having more or less continuously since June before Article 50 is invoked—a much more extensive discussion, along the lines of the one we are having today, with different views. However, as I have proposed before, once Article 50 is invoked we should have only a Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament to get detailed information from the Government on a Privy Council basis so there can be interaction between Parliament and the Executive. Finally, when the decision has been made, Parliament can come back into the decision-making process and vote either to approve or not approve the package that has been agreed. If Parliament does not approve it, I do not know where we go from there—but that is the way we should conduct our business.

As I have said, there should be much more interest in what happens after the Brexit negotiations. Everybody else deals with WTO. We can do that as well—it is not a miracle and we should not be frightened of it. That is what others do, so we will do it as well. We have to be prepared for that and not wait for some miracle reversal of our decision.