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

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a habit in these debates to say at the beginning of each that there is nothing new to discuss, but this time there is a great deal to discuss, and I want to share my thoughts on it with your Lordships. In addition, we have had a new joke from the noble Lord, Lord Newby, which is always helpful and familiar.

From inside the Westminster bubble, I can see that things still look very confused, but if one stands aside outside and pauses for a moment, the situation is in fact as clear as daylight. In practice, the great binary choice on offer has shifted from the withdrawal deal or no deal to the withdrawal deal or Article 50 being delayed. The delay may be short and limited or it may be longer; it depends on what goes on in the other place. We have no control over that and no one really knows.

Obviously, the Prime Minister was always going to be reticent, to put it mildly, about what happens if she loses again before 12 March. That is entirely understandable. You do not enter a race announcing what you will do if you fall off at the first big fence; you enter the race to win. But this new situation, where the binary choice has changed, poses an acute dilemma for the European Research Group warriors, who now face an almost impossible choice. With the Prime Minister having nodded towards a short delay, as she did yesterday, the dilemma for the Brexiteers—the harder-line ones—is even deeper. The excellent Mr Nicholas Boles MP pointed this out in the Evening Standard the other night, and he is right, although he did not mention that this will also encourage some of the strongest remainers to oppose Mrs May’s deal in the hope of ending up with no Brexit at all. That is their hope and they are quite open about it.

None the less, it seems to me that the Prime Minister has outfoxed her own rebels, half the media and now the Cooper-Letwin ensemble—we shall see about that this afternoon; it is going on now. Labour’s new-found love of a second referendum—although on precisely what question is not at all clear—deepens the dilemma for the ERG rebels even further. If they vote with the Prime Minister, with or without add-ons to the withdrawal treaty and with or without a backstop softening or any other so-called alternative arrangement, she is over the hump, at least for the moment. If they vote her down, we delay and lurch into another bog land of uncertainty with all sorts of outcomes, of which a second referendum is only one—that would please the Liberal Democrats—and no Brexit is another.

In all this, the group I feel most sorry for—well, not really, but almost—is the ERG warriors, with their marshalled ranks and drawn swords. We were just talking about the Ides of March. My mind went back to Lars Porsena and his glittering Etruscan hordes, who planned to capture Rome but found that things went rather differently when they got to the city gates and the bridge. Instead of taking control, they ended up with those behind shouting “Forward!” and those in the front crying “Back!”

Of course, the absolute diehards in my party will never give in. I read one ill-informed article, alas by a recently joined Member of your Lordships’ House, claiming that they had taken over the Tory party. In reality, they now risk losing everything. If even half the ERG breaks ranks now and just some of the Labour remainers who are waverers support the Prime Minister, she will win this round, contrary to all the predictions of the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and his friends.

This is what I believe will happen. The people worrying about shipping goods here by sea from Tokyo after 29 March need not worry. By April, we will either be on the path to frictionless trade and an admittedly slow journey out of the present customs union to a new form of free trade or still in the European Union. There can now be no crash-out, managed or otherwise. That does not seem to have been absorbed, judging by some of the comments made this afternoon. I am afraid the Brexiteers’ dream has, for the moment, gone up in smoke. My belief is that the Prime Minister, with her deal, the massive agreed treaty with the European Union and all those in this country—the majority, I suggest—wanting to settle matters now and move forward, will win the day. Any further concessions from Brussels may come before 12 March if Brussels is feeling helpful, or afterwards if not. Obviously the negotiators will not reopen the agreed treaty, but they may well agree to a codicil about its interpretation as time goes by. I gather they are now working it—the so-called joint interpretative instrument.

My prayer is that after this unhappy phase we will get on vigorously with building close relations—not just in trade but in security, defence, cybertechnology and even possibly in physical links such as the mooted second channel tunnel—with all our regional European neighbours, all as part of our new, unfolding international policy stretching out to Asia, Africa and the Americas, and to carefully balanced ties with China, where all the growth will be. For this we will need powerful networks and the know-how to nourish and benefit from these networks, the Commonwealth being foremost among them. Old alliances are falling away and new ones are becoming necessary as we enter a new cycle in international history.

This morning your Lordships’ International Relations Committee heard evidence that we were on the verge of a terrifying new arms race and the possible spread of tactical nuclear weapons, and that the limits on nuclear warfare that the world has hung on to since Hiroshima are now slipping away and could leave our cities in smoking ruins. Somehow our Brexit bickering, breakaways and gabbling interviews with excitable MPs all seem rather small in comparison.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

But what he brought down was graven on a tablet of stone, and what Mr Nick Timothy drafted for the Prime Minister in September 2016 was not, in my view, to be taken as graven on a tablet of stone. We know now that the Cabinet was not consulted about it. We knew at the time that the country and this Parliament were not consulted, but these four red lines have determined where we are now.

The European Union has said all along—it said it in the cover note of its first mandate—that if our red lines were to change, then it was happy to look again at its mandate and change it. However, we do not seem to listen to those across the House of Commons who propose something that would break one of the red lines. When Labour talks of customs union, and this House votes for customs union, it is dismissed because it breaches one of the four red lines.

By the logic of the Prophet Timothy, Switzerland, Turkey and Norway are not sovereign states independent of the EU, because in at least one respect each breaches at least one of the four red lines laid down by Mrs May in the party conference speech in September 2016. Yet the Swiss think that they are independent. They do not think they are in the EU, and are commonly regarded as not being in the EU. I do not know why the definition of Brexit that was laid down without consultation in September 2016 has to be accepted as the only definition, and why it is a denial of Brexit, flying in the face of democracy, to argue that there might be a better Brexit than the one defined by Mr Timothy and the Prime Minister in September 2016. That is why I am offended by the “my deal or no deal” choice.

As everyone has been saying and as the document published yesterday proves, no deal is an economic catastrophe for the country, but it cannot be right that the only alternative is the lineal descendant of the tablet brought down by Moses to the party conference in September 2016. There are at least two more options available. One is to try for a better Brexit, which I do not believe the Prime Minister is going to do with the short extension she says that she might be ready to foresee. She is not looking at anything other than the sort of declaration that could be fitted into the political declaration, or might be free-standing, in some way adding emollient words about the backstop. However, the backstop is not the only defect in this dreadful, humiliating package—this humiliating treaty and vacuous declaration.

If we were prepared to contemplate the Swiss approach to free movement of persons, the Turkish approach to a customs union or the Norwegian approach to the single market, or if we were prepared to envisage an EEA-type arrangement, we do not know what new prospects might open up—we have never tried, because No. 10 does not listen. It has never been tested. We have never discovered what the EU means when it says that, if we were to change our red lines, it would change its negotiating position. That makes the “my deal or no deal” position irresponsible.

Others have explained why no deal is extremely bad for our trade. There would be no preferential arrangement with the EU or with any of the countries with which it has preferential deals, which amounts to more than two-thirds of our trade. The non-EU countries I am talking about include some very big ones, such as Japan, South Korea and Turkey. We are told that we have rolled over six agreements, but these are with minnows—not Japan, not South Korea and not Turkey.

Quite apart from the question of our domestic tariff, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, spoke about, we have to accept that our export market would be seriously damaged by no deal. Whether it happens in April, May or June, no deal is no better then than it would be on 29 March.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord—he said some very nice things about me and I have a lot of very nice things to say about him. However, he has presented me with a puzzle. He keeps talking about this business of “my deal or no deal”. In fact, the Government have now recognised that it is not “my deal or no deal”, but “my deal or postponement”—admittedly, in the words of the Prime Minister, a “short” postponement. We all know perfectly well that an overwhelming majority in the other place supports a delay in Article 50. If the Prime Minister fails on 12 March—I do not think she will—there will be a postponement. The concept of “my deal or no deal” is last week’s story. It is simply out of date, so why is the noble Lord worried about it?

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

I am worried about it because I do not believe that the Prime Minister intends to use the short delay she says she is prepared to settle for—although she has not said that she would vote for it—to explore the possibilities of a better Brexit. As far as she is concerned, the only deal is that which she brought back in November, possibly titivated slightly in the declaration to try to deal with the objections of some to the backstop. I believe that is all she intends to do. The right thing to do is to have a long enough extension to go back and consult the people. This has turned out so differently from what we were told, and it is absolutely right that we would go back and consult the people.

The point I was trying to make was about trade. I would like to end on a warm and friendly note towards the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, who is in such sparkling form today—I shall try to sparkle back in what is, for me, an unusually friendly way. I congratulate him on his honesty in the last debate, when he put to rest the Legatum Institute theory that the answer to the problem of WTO terms and no preferential trade deals was Article 24. It was extremely straightforward and honest of him to say of Article 24:

“This provision refers to interim agreements. In order to use it, we would need to agree with the EU the shape of the future economic partnership, together with a plan and schedule for getting there. This would then need to be presented to all 164 WTO members and they would be able to scrutinise it, suggest changes and, ultimately, veto it”.—[Official Report, 13/2/19; col. 1935.]


That, I believe, is absolutely correct. I think it was generous and honest of a Minister to put it on record. Article 24 is absolutely no way out in the situation we would be in with no deal. It depends on a deal being struck. It depends on a process going on. It is possible that eight years into future negotiations this is what we might be able to do, although we would, as the Minister rightly said, be dependent on the agreement of 164 parties in GATT. Therefore, even that cannot be assumed.