Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, particularly as I agree with everything he said. It is a truism that when two people in an organisation agree, one of them is unnecessary, but I do not think that applies to a legislative Chamber. I did not speak in the last debate. Looking at what has been happening—not just since then but earlier—all I can say is that Brexit has sucked the life out of British politics. We are not functioning as a country anymore because Brexit dominates everything. There is no thinking going on, and problems concerning poverty and the economy, for example, which my noble friend spoke about, are not being dealt with. We have to move forward.

When this process began, with a referendum, it was fairly clear that Northern Ireland would be one of the sources of enormous difficulty. Indeed, I argued at the time that, even if one supported leave in every respect but one, Northern Ireland was a good reason to vote remain. I did not support leave at all but Northern Ireland itself was an argument for voting to remain: there is simply no solution to the problem. I do not see a way forward and nobody has yet been able to suggest one. That is a good argument for thinking again about the whole thing.

There is a way out: to have a customs union and for us to be in it; then, the Northern Ireland border would not be a problem and everything would be fairly straightforward. For some reason, the Government do not like the idea of our being in a customs union. Their argument is that we should be free to negotiate with other countries. But let us look at how well Germany, within the EU, does trade deals with China and with other countries. Many European countries are knocking spots off us and are not at all constrained by being in the EU. Our being in the customs union would not be a constraint on anything. It would be a positive move and very helpful as regards Northern Ireland.

Moving on to Dover, which I visited with the Select Committee some time ago, one of the figures given to us was that it takes less than two minutes to clear a container from within the EU, while it takes an average of one and a quarter hours to clear a container from outside the EU. There is simply no space at Dover even to make the arrangements to look at the loads to see whether they pass the health tests. Frankly, unless we have a seamless operation in Dover, Kent will be a car park. The whole problem of stacking along the M20, which we have seen when there have been problems in Calais with farmers over the years, will be much exacerbated. I do not know what we are going to do, and none of the people who support leave has an answer to it.

I have spent a lot of time knocking on doors during the referendum campaign. I was mainly in Hammersmith, which was 70:30 for remain, so I was not getting a typical picture. Nevertheless, immigration was pretty well the only issue that came up—I suspect that “take back control” was interpreted by people as meaning immigration. I will recount one little doorstep encounter. I was talking to a woman who said she was not going to vote remain because of immigration. I said, “But look at the health service. I had a small procedure carried out in Charing Cross Hospital. I was there for one day, and all the people who treated me—the doctor, nurses and so on—were immigrants. Where would we be without them?” She said something which I thought quite significant: “It’s not the ones who are here that bother me; it’s the ones who are going to come in the future”. That is where Boris Johnson, with his 70 million Turks poised to enter Britain, has a lot to answer for. That was Project Fear, if there ever was.

I believe the referendum showed a strong alienation in this country between people in the north and those in the south, and between people in towns and the countryside and those in cities. It is an alienation for which all political parties are responsible and which we have done very little to tackle. The referendum result was a symptom of people saying, “You don’t care about me, so this is my answer to you: I’m just going to vote against the system”. It was an argument of people who felt that their voices were not being heard.

I believe in a second referendum, but I have argued with myself for quite some time as to whether it is democratic to have another one. People on the other side argue that it is a total breach of faith with the electorate if we ignore the result of the referendum. I honestly do not believe that is so. I believe people are entitled to have their say yet again on the detail when they know what it means. It is a bit like buying a house: you like it and you put in an offer subject to survey; then the survey says that the house is rubbish and there are all sorts of problems, so you withdraw. It is quite legitimate for us to argue that it is democratic to say to the people of this country, “We’re going to give you another chance to have your say now that you know the details”. I do not understand why the people on the leave side of the argument are so frightened of that. If they believe public opinion is still with them, they should have confidence in that.

John Hume, the great Northern Ireland politician and Member of the European Parliament, knew a thing or two about peace processes. He said that the European Union, to his mind, was the most successful peace process in world history.