Adjournment

Lord Framlingham Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab]

My Lords, I rise to move that the House now adjourns before we proceed with the remaining business, which is almost exclusively no-deal Brexit regulations. The House has spent months now endlessly debating no-deal Brexit regulations, some of us devoting a huge amount of time to it. The argument that has been put to us by the Government is that we need to because it is still the will of Parliament to keep no deal on the table and that, for as long as no deal is on the table, we have a duty to continue to make legislative provision, even though that is hugely diverting of the whole government machine. It is in pursuit of a policy that the Prime Minister has repeatedly said she does not wish to pursue and it is costing £4.2 billion. My noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham has just said that there is agreement across the House on appropriations. There might well by agreement that we could spend that £4.2 billion a lot more wisely than on no-deal preparations including for ferry companies with no ferries and the whole gamut of preparations we have seen. They are a colossal waste of public money and profoundly against the public interest.

My noble friend the Leader of the Opposition, in her robust and timely intervention a few moments ago, asked the Government what they intend to do in response to the crisis we now face, with the resolution of the House of Commons last night against no deal but, robotically, the continuation of preparations for no deal. They continue imminently in this House with another string of no-deal regulations. On the Order Paper are nine no-deal regulations, which we are expected to pass in debates after this Motion, which will involve big further demands on the government machine, big further expense and further requirements. This is emphatically not just about us; it is about whole sectors of the economy, which will now have to spring into action and make preparations, at huge cost to them and inconvenience to the public, in response to these regulations being passed.

Last night at 7.45 pm, the House of Commons resolved,

“that this House rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement and a Framework for the Future Relationship”.

That was not a capricious Motion. It was the latest in a whole series of resolutions the House of Commons has passed in the same spirit. It was passed by 321 votes to 278, so it was a decisive majority and it is now the duty of the Government to give effect to that resolution.

The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, whose contributions we look forward to because they constantly change and develop the argument on Brexit in such a sophisticated way each time he rises, has said that the issue now is the date of an extension. Of course, he is right in the technical, legal sense: having resolved that we do not wish to proceed with no deal we now need to decide what is the period of the extension we will seek in order to avoid no deal. That is correct, although I note that the European Union has already responded positively to last night’s vote. Noble Lords may not all be assiduous, like me, in their use of Twitter, but the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, tweeted an hour ago as follows:

“During my consultations ahead of #EUCO, I will appeal to the EU27 to be open to a long extension if the UK finds it necessary to rethink its #Brexit strategy”.


That is an extremely significant statement in terms of what will happen hereafter. It is abundantly clear from the resolution of the House of Commons last night that the United Kingdom does find it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy. Any rethinking of our Brexit strategy will require two elements: first, no further contemplation of no deal, which was a ludicrous proposition to put before Parliament and the country and has finally been eliminated by the House of Commons; and secondly, an extension. The length of the extension needs to be agreed, but the principle of the extension is accepted now even by the Prime Minister, and the President of the European Council has already announced that the European Union will be open to debating and discussing that, which one assumes, therefore, will lead to agreement in the European Council next week.

[Lord Framlingham (Con)]

Will the noble Lord give way?

[Lord Adonis]

I am not giving way. The noble Lord can speak after me and it is open to him to do so.

In this circumstance I cannot understand why it is in the public interest for noble Lords to proceed now to debate another string of no-deal Brexit regulations. Surely the right thing to do in the crisis situation in which we find ourselves, where the one certain fact is that we will not be proceeding with no deal, is not to proceed with these regulations, but to adjourn the House and for Her Majesty’s Government to come back in good order on Monday with actual proposals for the change of the law that is required to change the exit date. They should also come back with an apology to Parliament and to the public for the billions of pounds of public money that has been wasted on no-deal preparations. This should all have been devoted to dealing with the issues of real concern to the public—the NHS, the education system, the state of our public services—and not this complete and shameful waste of money in preparations for a no-deal Brexit, which virtually no one in the country supports.