Further Developments in Discussions with the European Union under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Newby

Monday 11th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, the reason given for having the debate today—the 12th on the Government’s withdrawal agreement with the EU and the political declaration—was so that we could debate the proposal that the Government were putting to a meaningful vote in the Commons tomorrow and express a view on it. We are all too well aware that the views of this House are now not pivotal to the Brexit process. But, under the terms of the withdrawal Act, we are given a minor role: that of debating what is proposed—and that is what we were hoping to do today.

The plan was that the Prime Minister would make a Statement at the start of business in the Commons this afternoon, setting out the basis on which she was asking the House to reverse its decision to reject the Government’s agreement and, if successful, to proceed to exit the EU on 29 March. For this to happen, the Government were to secure changes to the Irish backstop that would make it palatable to the DUP and a large number of otherwise dissident Tory Back-Benchers. Having failed to make any progress whatever in achieving a breakthrough on this, and facing another overwhelming defeat tomorrow, the Prime Minister is allegedly travelling to Strasbourg this evening to try to make more progress in an evening than a bevy of officials and Ministers—with or without a codpiece—has achieved in recent weeks.

Whatever the Prime Minister’s chance of success this evening, this sequence of events renders today’s debate almost totally pointless, as we have absolutely nothing new from the Government on which we can express a view. Indeed, were it not for the fact that some 40 of your Lordships have spent part of the weekend labouring over their speeches, I would be arguing that this debate should be scrapped—if only to spare Ministers the hideous ordeal of trying to explain what is going on and hearing 17 speeches from their own Back-Benchers, no doubt expressing 17 versions of what the future should look like.

However, as we are going on with the debate, I wonder whether the Minister could answer a couple of questions. First, is it true that the Prime Minister is going to Strasbourg this evening? Secondly, if she is, what is she taking with her that is new? Thirdly, if she is going and taking with her something new, on what basis does she believe she will have more success this time than on all the previous visits to Strasbourg and Brussels by officials over recent weeks?

Fourthly, by what mechanism do the Government believe the EU could express a definitive opinion on any new proposals before the planned debate in the Commons tomorrow? Fifthly, if the Prime Minister means there to be a meaningful vote tomorrow, how can it be achieved given that, presumably, no government Motion can be tabled tonight in advance of any talks taking place in Strasbourg on which a meaningful vote can be taken? Sixthly, if, by some procedural sleight of hand there were to be a meaningful vote tomorrow, this could be done on a Motion that had been before the Commons for only a few hours at most. Given that this is the most important decision MPs will be asked to make in their lifetime, how can this be seen as anything other than an extraordinary abuse of process by the Government?

Seventhly, we believe that the Government may have the meaningful vote tomorrow. However, if the EU states that it wants to take a decision tomorrow or later in the week in response to this unknown proposal that the Prime Minister might be taking forward, when might we then have a vote?

Over recent months, we have seen the Prime Minister repeatedly rebuffed by both Parliament and the EU. We have marvelled at her resilience. But this failure to make progress, coupled with her complete unwillingness to confront the facts, means that the Prime Minister really has now run out of road. Imagine if she were a chief executive due to make a major presentation to the board, and she said on the eve of the board meeting, “I’m sorry, there are no papers for this board meeting because my original business plan has failed. I’m hoping to amend it. I’m talking to my major customers overnight. I’m not sure whether I will be able to amend it, but, given that my sales directors failed to get them to agree to anything different, the likelihood is that I will fail to amend it. I hope you will still come to the board meeting tomorrow in the vague hope that you might have a proposal in front of you”. What would people say of such a chief executive? They would not still be there the day after tomorrow. But that is the position we find ourselves in with the Prime Minister.

As for the rest of the Cabinet, they are like sheep without a sheep-dog. We are told now that only two of them actually support the Prime Minister, and one of them is Mr Grayling. That is not wholly reassuring. It has to stop. The Commons must take control of this process and the affairs of the country, because the Government have lost control of them. There must be a meaningful vote tomorrow and then, on the reasonable assumption that the Government will not prevail, on Wednesday as planned there should be a vote to reject leaving the EU without a deal, followed by a vote to extend the Article 50 period, as the Prime Minister promised.

However, this is not enough. If the Prime Minister is forced to go back to the EU and ask for an extension, it will understandably ask, “For what purpose?”. There can be only one sensible purpose, which is to give the people the opportunity to stop this whole self-damaging spectacle in a referendum.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

The noble Lord has been very frank about that. The purpose of having a people’s vote, as he describes it, is nothing to do with consulting the people as far as he is concerned; it is to reverse the decision of the people. The noble Lord and all his colleagues—I will give them this credit—have been absolutely committed from the day of the referendum result in 2016 to reversing it. Should there be a people’s vote and should the people decide, as I believe they would, to reaffirm their previous decision to leave the European Union, what confidence can I or anyone else have that he and his colleagues here will walk through the Lobbies with enthusiasm—because this House would have to confirm that vote, as would the other—to implement that decision to leave?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, every time I make this speech, the noble Lord stands up and asks me the same question.

[Lord Grocott]

I do not.

[Lord Newby]

He does. He may not have been listening, but I have said that, if the people decided in a further referendum that they wished to leave the EU, we would respect that decision. Would we go through the Lobbies with anything other than a very heavy heart? No, we would not. If we had another referendum and the people decided that the Prime Minister’s deal made the country better off, I would still not believe that to be the case. I would respect the decision, but that does not mean that I would suddenly say, “Oh, my word—for three years I have been mistaken”. The noble Lord knows that for a Liberal Democrat to lose a vote is not a totally new experience. If I lose another vote, it will not be new to me, but it will not mean that I stop thinking what I thought the day before I lost the vote—any more than the noble Lord, who has sometimes stood for Governments who have not prevailed, has stopped thinking that the Labour Party should remain in government. That is the nature of politics as I understand it.

We know now that the vast majority of young people believe that to leave the EU would be a bad mistake because it is bad for their future. We know that the majority of Labour voters, and the majority of voters in virtually every constituency, are in favour of having a vote and in favour on that basis of then remaining in the EU. If the Minister and the Government Front Bench are so sure that their deal is a good one, what are they worried about? Let us have a vote. Get on with it. We have had previous elections, as the noble Lord knows—

Brexit: Preparations and Negotiations

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Newby

Monday 23rd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, it seems extraordinary that the Chequers Brexit summit was little over a fortnight ago and that the Government’s White Paper embodying the Chequers agreement is a mere 10 days old. At the time, it all seemed so rosy for the Prime Minister:

“Chequers-mate: Theresa May ambush routs cabinet Brexiteers”,


screamed the Sunday Times, for example. Well, it does not look so rosy now. Although about the only thing that everybody seems to agree on is that the White Paper will not survive in its current form as the basis of any Brexit deal, it is by far the most detailed exposition of the Government’s Brexit policy that we have seen, and it lays bare the inherent challenges of Brexit. It is the first time that the Government have begun, albeit partially, to accept that you cannot have your cake and eat it—that you cannot have both market access and control of the rules, and that very many features of our EU membership are unambiguously beneficial to the UK.

The core of the document, of course, deals with trade. On goods, the Government’s policy is to be part of a free trade area, accepting all EU rules in perpetuity but seeking to retain the right to have our own trade deals by separately collecting UK and EU tariffs for goods trans-shipped through the UK. It also seeks to allow EU content in UK exports—most of the components by value in all cars, for example—to be treated as though they were manufactured in the UK. All this is to be made possible by a non-existent technology to be introduced over an unspecified timescale at an unspecified cost to both government and individual businesses. It is highly unlikely to be acceptable to the EU in its current form.

For services, no such closeness of rules or access is even planned. As the White Paper starkly puts it,

“the UK and the EU will not have current levels of access to each other’s markets in the future”.

This is a quite extraordinary policy, which explicitly acknowledges that the UK will willingly forfeit economic activity, jobs and tax revenue for the wholly unspecified benefits of flexibility. If anybody has any doubts about the consequences, listen to the CEO of Lloyds of London, which has operated here since 1686. Speaking last week, she said that Lloyds,

“will be moving at pace now”—

to Brussels, that is—and that,

“we will be full steam ahead”.

To a greater or lesser extent, that approach is now being adopted right across the financial services sector.

Reading the White Paper as a whole, however, you can see why the Brexiteers are so angry. On my reckoning, it lists no fewer than 62 EU bodies or programmes in which it wishes the UK to participate post Brexit, and it is clear why that is the case. All these programmes and bodies are crucial to our prosperity, security and well-being. To be outside them altogether would be extremely damaging. They do, however, all constrain our freedom of independent action, so it is not surprising that the Brexiteers see Britain under the White Paper as a Gulliver, shackled by the myriad constraints of the EU Lilliputians.

But that is not the correct analogy. Those who wish to retain the many benefits of our association with the EU without the cost are like the man who is in the process of divorce negotiations and who says to his ex-wife, “Will you be my live-in mistress afterwards, or I won't pay the alimony?” That is not normally a realistic or successful approach.

The White Paper, of course, has in effect been changed by the amendments to the customs Bill, which the Government accepted, at the hands of the ERG last week—as the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Liddle, pointed out. One of them, on my reading at least, directly contradicts paragraph 17a of chapter 1 of the White Paper, in that it would require the EU to collect UK tariffs as part of the facilitated customs arrangement. I am sure that the whole House is agog to hear the Minister’s more detailed exposition of that position at the end of the debate—only another six and a half hours to wait. Another amendment would require VAT to be accounted for and to be payable when goods are imported to the UK rather than when they are sold. That would have severe implications for the cash flow of thousands of small businesses.

These amendments show the palpable weakness of the Government, but they do not fundamentally affect the broad options facing us, or their degree of support in Parliament. However, they have helped to shine a light on an extremely inconvenient truth—that there is now no Commons majority for any proposal that leads to Brexit. In reality it is clear that Brexit now could happen only in one of two circumstances. There is no longer a multiplicity of options; there are only two.

The first option is that we reach a deal, loosely based on either the White Paper or some EU-compliant variant of it. The second is that we reach no deal and simply crash out. As Boris Johnson’s policy-free resignation speech demonstrated, there is simply no third Brexit option on the table. The crash-out option is now being more aggressively planned by the energetic Mr Raab. I suspect that he will go down in history as the man who proved that “no deal” was simply impossible, because the more he seeks to make our flesh creep—by proposing to turn the M26 into a lorry park, forcing 250,000 small businesses to fill out customs returns for the first time, or readying the Armed Forces to move food and medicines round the country—the more people are bound to recoil.

That we should be spending vast sums actively planning for these acts of national self-mutilation, not as a result of war, pestilence or some external threat but simply as a result of a rift in the Tory Party, seems almost literally incredible, particularly to the rest of the world. Incredible or not, I do not believe that this option has anything like majority support in the Commons—if it came to it, it would be rejected.

The second option is based on the White Paper. As Gavin Barwell has already acknowledged, and the EU has made abundantly clear, the White Paper will not be accepted in its current form and further concessions will be needed—for example, by ditching the impractical facilitated customs arrangements and the financial services proposals. If, none the less, a deal were reached on terms that vaguely approximated to the White Paper, it would be even less likely to be accepted by the Brexiteers than the White Paper itself. I simply do not believe that Messrs Bone, Cash, Leigh or Rees-Mogg could possibly vote for it. By excluding services, and demonstrably costing jobs and prosperity, it would also break Labour’s red lines, so Labour could not support it, either.

So it is now pretty clear that neither of the only two remaining Brexit options can survive a Commons vote. In these circumstances, there is only one further option—and that is not to leave the EU. We might now call this the Greening option, because Justine Greening has correctly identified that, if there is no Commons majority for either Brexit option, the only way of breaking the impasse is to have a referendum asking the people how they wish to proceed. Traditionally, referenda have a single question. The Greening option would include three questions—the two Brexit options, and remaining in the EU. But whether we have one question or two, it is now likely—as yesterday’s poll in the Sunday Times suggests—that any referendum would result in a clear preference for remaining in the EU. No wonder the idea of such a referendum is hated.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Given that the noble Lord and his party did not accept the result of the national referendum in 2011 on changing the voting system, and given that he and his party have not accepted the result of the referendum in 2016 on whether we should leave or remain in the European Union, what confidence could anyone have that he would accept the result of any future referendum?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, it is very interesting that the noble Lord should ask that question. We are talking about the most important issue that the country has faced in my lifetime, and I can give him an absolute assurance, as I have said many times—including to him in response to identical questions—that, if there were such a referendum, it would lance the boil of this question. We would accept the outcome and go ahead on the basis of the referendum result.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Newby]

We are talking about what the options are. I am saying that there are three; perhaps the noble Lord believes that there are others. I believe that there are two relating to Brexit—no deal, or something broadly based on what the Government have produced. I believe the only other option is staying in, and the only way to get that accepted in the country, politically and morally, is through another popular vote.

As for timing, it would be perfectly possible to legislate quickly for such a referendum; it would be perfectly possible to get a very limited extension of Article 50 from the EU. It is typical of what happens when people are losing the argument—they come forward with administrative problems. Are we saying that we could not hold a referendum relatively quickly? Is it beyond our powers? Of course not. The truth is that, if we want to do it, we can do it. The arguments for not doing it are not administrative—they are political.

Finally, as this fractious Parliament takes its summer break, the position on Brexit is now clearer: there are only two options, neither of which can command a majority in the Commons. The only other option is to remain in the EU following a people’s vote, and the people would now vote to remain.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords—

[Lord Newby]

No, I am not going to give way to the noble Lord again.

Sadly, we will now have to endure nine months of further tortuous negotiations, a bitter debate and loud recriminations before we reach this end point—but reach it we will.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Newby

Report: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 30th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, as I was saying, many noble Lords are opposed to referenda, and I have some sympathy with that view, but I am afraid that on this issue the pass was sold when Parliament, including your Lordships’ House, approved the 2015 European Union Referendum Bill. On Brexit, Parliament gave the initial decision to the people; it is in no position now to take a stand on the concept of its own sovereignty on this issue.

[Lord Grocott]

The noble Lord referred to an initial decision. Could he point to any phase in the passing of the referendum Bill when it was emphasised that this would be just an initial decision by the public?

[Lord Newby]

Well, during the referendum Bill, all sorts of things were said, including by many people that it was an advisory referendum. That soon fell by the wayside, did it not?

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords—

[Lord Grocott]

This is a point of clarification. The noble Lord said that it was an advisory referendum in 2016, a point often made by my noble friend Lord Foulkes. Can he answer this simple question? Is the new referendum that he is considering an advisory one or a binding one?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I said that during the debate that was said. The truth is that, if you ask the people to have a vote, Parliament, having given them a mandate to have a vote, politically cannot come back and say, “Thanks very much, you’ve had your vote but, actually, we are going to ignore it”. Everybody knows that that is not realistic politics.