European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Desai Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, the advantage of following the noble Lord is that he has woken you all up and I can now get on with what I want to do. I have spoken about five times on this issue in your Lordships’ House. Your Lordships may not remember, but I have. My line has been very consistent. Whatever we may think of the referendum as a process, we cannot judge its quality by the result. If you do not like the result, it does not mean that the process was bad.

The result was quite remarkable—52% to 48%. In England it was 53.3% to 46.7%. Few people remember that out of 34 million votes, 28 million were cast in England. In England the difference was between 15 million and 13 million. The difference of 2 million was exactly the difference at a national level—18 million to 16 million—so the 3 million votes on either side were cast in the three devolved regions. So the majority for Brexit comes from England. This was an English nationalist vote—make no mistake about it—and we have to take it seriously because this is the largest part of the United Kingdom.

There is a double process. First there is the divorce and then there are negotiations on cohabitation. A lot of people in the debate today, with a lot of good will, have mixed up the two processes. They want to have a good cohabitation. More or less, they are saying, “Yes, I want a divorce”, but then, “Let’s forget it. I want the same life as we had before”—in other words, we want the single market, we want the customs union, et cetera. As the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, said, this option may not be available.

First, we have to do not a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit but a quick Brexit. The precise breaking up of the legal membership has to be done as quickly as we can. That will leave more time for the negotiations on the quality of the cohabitation, which are going to be long drawn-out. Even a trade deal will be long drawn-out if you want a trade deal with 27 other members. All the other things noble Lords have mentioned, including security and human rights, will take a long time to negotiate—so let us get the Brexit bit out of the way as soon as we can, maybe in six months. The Government may be able to come back after that to consult Parliament about the shape of the cohabitation. Once the Article 50 process is finished, we will be free to discuss among ourselves what to do next. But that distinction has to be made.

The only amendments to the Bill that will be admissible will be to clarify whether we want the parliamentary process to be there between invoking Article 50 and Brexit—whether Parliament should be consulted at all or whether we should give the Government a free hand to get on with the job and finish Brexit as quickly as possible.

The most important thing that will be discussed in the divorce negotiations is the budget. I am on the Financial Affairs Sub-Committee of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the European Union and I can say without any doubt that practically no one knows what the bill is going to be. It is a fiendishly complex issue. In October, the Financial Times, no less, said that the bill would be £20 billion. In November it said that it would be £60 billion. I could give your Lordships almost any number between £10 billion and £200 billion on perfectly sound grounds. The problem is that what we pay will be the subject of the hardest negotiation possible. For example, there is a multiannual financial framework which is agreed for seven years—2013 to 2020—and we are going out in the middle of this seven-year budgetary agreement. Therefore, the question is: we agreed to pay something in 2020; do we get out without paying or can they say, “Hey, come on, you made commitments”? Not only that—there may be a committed scheme, say, to launch a road in Estonia for €10 billion, of which only €5 billion may have been spent so far. We have agreed to spend the other €5 billion and pay our share of it. Do we stop paying it?

So there will be a number of complex issues about the budget, and unless we get that right, and get it right early, we will not be able to proceed with the other good things in life that we want out of the European Union. My view is that we need clarity of thought about this problem—and the sooner we do it, the better.