Brexit: Negotiations

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Dykes]

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to bring regular reports before Parliament on the progress of the negotiations for Brexit.

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

My Lords, one of the features of my last visit to New York was a snippet of New York traditional humour. I was very impressed that the definition of a real optimist was a 95 year-old man who got married for the eighth time and bought a new house near a school. The Government need even more optimism than that to get through this nightmare of Brexit. The less congenial part of this, for me, is having to sound curmudgeonly to a very distinguished Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. We thank her for coming today and we look forward to her responses, but it is always a problem to deal with someone who has such an excellent reputation as a very hard-working Minister. So I apologise in advance for everything I say if the Minister—unsurprisingly— disagrees a little with it.

The Government do not realise how impossibly complicated this process will be. That is why the reports now need to accelerate and be much stronger and more regular in the light of all those coming to speak in this debate. I believe that the two representatives of the EU Committee are the noble Lords, Lord Jay and Lord Teverson, and I hope they will quite rightly ask the Government to promise that the EU Committee is kept well informed about what goes on. We hope that the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, will soon be back as the chairman.

The Government have lost their original mandate from the decision of 23 June 2016 because of the 8 June election this year. They cannot proceed legitimately—possibly even legally, particularly if we had a written constitution, which of course we do not have. The Bill being debated today in the Commons and on Monday grants those sinister Henry VIII powers on secondary legislation, which will not be accepted by Parliament. A minority Government, which is what they are, dependent on a peculiar DUP grouping of Protestant hard-liners in Belfast, cannot possibly enforce their decisions against the true democratic majority increasingly revolted—as are the public—by this daft plan to leave the European Union. The prospect of leaving is alarming mainly the representatives of UK industry, farming and commerce, and particularly major exporters to the EU. The idea that this will not grow from now on—it will keep coming back to haunt the Government—is daft, if that is what some Ministers still think.

The immigration issues are even more painful. All the way through, it was extraordinary that the Government, unlike other EU member states, for some bizarre reason avoided using the existing powers in the treaty of Rome—now the TFEU—to limit immigration from other EU countries if they wanted to. Guess who was the Home Office Minister in charge at the time: a lady called Theresa May—so it is even more strange.

On 7 March this year I asked the Home Office Minister in the Lords why the powers, mostly under Clause 45, were not invoked, which would have softened the irrational hostility to migrants in this country. She did not answer but said she could not be responsible for what had happened in the past. So much for Tory government continuity on main policy areas. They failed repeatedly to use the treaty three-month rule, and then in a panic reverted to Cameron’s unachievable tens of thousands formula, which, incredibly, is still being repeated by a lady called Theresa May.

I will quickly refer to Article 50 again. In response to Questions in the Lords on 19 December last year, the Minister used the word “instructed”, a word that is illicit or perhaps even illegal—it would be if we had a written constitution—as the referendum was an advisory opinion only. Of course, anti-EU Tories said they would accept the result and act on it. However, the then Government were elected with a net small majority but only by just under a quarter of the qualified voting public, which excluded the youngest voters—hardly a democratic basis in law. In the same exchanges, the peculiar invocation of a red, white and blue Brexit by Mrs May was described as red for the millions of dead in two world wars followed by six decades of peace thanks to the EU; white for the cowardly slide in this country into irrational xenophobia; and blue, representing just the Tory interest, mostly older people—a party which now has a membership base less than one-fifth of that of the main opposition party in the Commons.

The emotional background is even more striking. With Ministers floundering and dreading the growing public revulsion at this monumental disaster looming over this country, we recall the effects of what the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, described as the continuing “cancer” literally threatening to destroy the Tory party in the future. Ministers have ignored the sensible voices and opted to listen only to the dark voices of reaction, prejudice and ignorance, as well as a few genuine believers in a mystical and old-fashioned independence, which no longer exists in reality for any country, even the United States.

For once—and it surprised me at the time—the Prime Minister expressed it with accuracy in her article of 8 January this year in, of all places, the Sunday Telegraph, saying that people,

“did not simply vote to withdraw from the European Union; they voted to change the way our country works … forever”,

and were disgruntled by economic and social setbacks in their lives. Apart from immigration, this is probably the main reason why people did vote—to give the Government a kick, which is what they tend to do in referendums if they are feeling fed up with lots of things, as people are in this country now. That is fair enough but why should the Government take it out on our membership of the most successful trading system in the world?

In the brilliant four-page “Why we are still angry” special in the New European newspaper on 10 to 16 February this year, the second of the four whys reminded us that,

“every one of the reasons given to persuade Leavers to vote for Brexit is a lie”.

Let us note the voices of good old British common sense, of people who are beginning to wake up to what is happening in this country with this daft policy of Brexit, such as John Cole, a citizen from Shipley, West Yorkshire, who stated in the Guardian in January this year that the referendum,

“was only ever advisory. The government had no obligation to act on the outcome, especially when it was so close. Any golf club or musical society requires a super-majority for significant constitutional change … the government has grossly overinterpreted the result”.

He must have been thinking about the fateful utterance of the infamous words after the previous election that “Brexit means Brexit” by an inexperienced and maladroit Prime Minister in the heat of the moment.

There are now very difficult questions facing the Government and they have to be faced up to from now on, with regular reports to Parliament, both the Lords and the Commons. We know that in both places the majority against Brexit is growing. In the Lords I believe the majority against leaving Europe is very large indeed, among all groups and parties.

How do we avoid hard Brexit? As the negotiations have now started at last, some eight weeks later than if there had been no election, the earlier strong fears that Theresa May would be happy to opt for a hard Brexit—a no deal at all kind of outcome—have happily receded somewhat, only because of the gradual evolution of some common sense among some Ministers. I will avoid naming names. It does not apply to all who are involved in this exercise.

As early as 21 February this year, in the debate on the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill in the Lords, the highly respected Cross-Bench Peer, the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, said that there was “no question” of just ignoring the referendum. However, he rejected absolutely the concept of the hard exit, or Brexit, which had not been mandated. He added,

“there is no way that I am going to vote for triggering a negotiation designed to achieve a hard Brexit, which is likely to be so damaging for our country”,—[Official Report, 21/2/17; col. 222.]

for reasons he went on to explain in some detail. He also went on to attack the approach as a cavalier disregard of the 48% of voters, then and now a figure that is growing, who are against this daft policy.

On 6 July I argued that the original Brexit mandate had lapsed long since the 8 June outcome. Indeed, the results of that election are striking. Even Sky News in its analysis said that there was a built-in majority against Brexit in the overall result of all the electors voting for the political groups. Of course, we had new younger voters coming in for the first time as well, who signalled a very significant change. The Tories are now down to just above the Member numbers for the Liberal Democrat party with their absurd and childish psychodrama which we have all been locked into. When I met senior officials and MPs in Berlin recently, they asked me one of those psychological questions: “Why are they being so childish?”. I was unable to reply so I said that I would refer the question to Ministers here and ask them. I did so, but I never got an answer from the then Lords Minister about it.

In the Financial Times on 18 July, the writer Gideon Rachman put into chilling context that when people say that the vote which occurred on 23 June must be followed they mean,

“the Leavers’ view of democracy is similar to that of a third-world dictator—‘one man, one vote, one time’”.

Thus it can never be revisited. That of course was not the case in the 1975 referendum, which was reversed by the second in 2016. There is now less than a 50/50 chance of a comprehensive agreement being reached by March 2019. My noble friend Lord Kerr wrote on 26 January this year that, “The UK might withdraw its Article 50 notice, as it legally could”. Meanwhile the rest of the EU is paying close attention to the neurotic antics here which shame the reputation of UK politics. All the 27 sovereign member states, who incidentally are proud of the links between their own national sovereignty and the collective sovereignty afforded by EU membership, see more and more people here beginning to back away from the Brexit disaster movie, filmed in black and white.

If anti-Brexit is thwarting the will of the people, by 2019 some 2 million people from the Brexit electorate will have passed away and have been replaced by a similar number of voters aged 18-plus, on top of the 1 million extra young voters in the election held in June this year. Hence we conclude that staying in the single market and the customs union is a legitimate compromise. The Opposition should repeat this all the time and I do hope that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and others will persuade Jeremy Corbyn to sound a little more enthusiastic about matters European, not only to please members of the Labour Party but others in this country, and indeed many trade union members who are increasingly keen on Europe.

The inexorably looming and increasingly obvious solution is to study the sage words of one of our most brilliant authors, Ian McEwan. Early in June this year he said,

“I am a denialist. Almost a year on, I am still shaking my head in disbelief. I know it’s not helpful, but I don’t accept this near mystical, emotionally charged decision”.


That view will be echoed by others as we see what happens from now on. I wait with interest to hear the response of the Minister.