European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I am arguing in favour of the principle that, when events change, people change their minds. I do not consider that to be a dishonourable practice. When I look at the Government Front Bench in either this House or another place, I see person after person who apparently had a miraculous change of mind either just before or just after the referendum; I accept that that is sometimes what people do. The noble Lord possibly has never changed his mind, but most people in your Lordships’ House have a greater flexibility of approach, which is to be welcomed. I beg to move.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, although I oppose this amendment, I can imagine two circumstances in which a second referendum might be justifiable. The first would be after we had actually completed the negotiations, left the EU and then people decided they wanted another referendum. That would seem perfectly justifiable.

The second situation where a second referendum would be well justified would be if the original referendum question had been framed in such a way as to say, “Do you wish the Government to enter into negotiations about leaving the EU, and then to put the result of that referendum to a second referendum later on?”. However, that was not the question on the ballot paper. As we have heard endlessly, the question was whether to remain or leave; it was quite unambiguous. It seems that we are slipping into the habits that the EU itself has with referenda. Mr Juncker on one occasion famously said, “If the people vote the wrong way, we must go on voting until we get the right answer”. I suspect that that is the real motivation behind the amendment. We saw this in the EU with the referendum on Maastricht. After the Danes said no, they had to vote again. We saw it with the treaty of Nice: when Ireland said no, we had to have another vote and that reversed the first one. We saw it most blatantly of all with the European constitution, as proposed, which was rejected in recommendations by both France and Holland. In order to avoid a referendum, that was then translated by a device into the Lisbon treaty. We absolutely should not go down that road.

[Lord Cormack]

If we had a second referendum and the question was, “Do you want to stay out or go back?”, how could that realistically be asked, unless we knew that they wanted us back?

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I think that the question of whether they want us back is a very real one. I wanted to come to that very point. At Second Reading I quoted the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, as having said that he was firmly opposed to a second referendum. He is shaking his head; if he wants to correct me I will gladly be corrected, although I have three other press reports of where he said a second referendum was not desirable and should not take place: one in the Times on 20 September; a report from Asia House of his speech there on 6 September, together with a second report of that speech; and an article in Somerset Life on 24 June—so I have quite a lot. The noble Lord may have been misreported. If he has been misreported once, I apologise to him, but he seems to have been misreported several times.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon (LD)]

I am content to be misquoted by the noble Lord and I am content to be able to intervene, not least because my words have been used in the past. I shall make an intervention later in which I shall clarify the position.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

We look forward to that clarification. If we wanted to, we could quote many other Liberals, not least Mr Vince Cable, who I am sorry is not in this House. He made it clear that he thought that there should be no second referendum:

“The public have voted and I do think it’s seriously disrespectful and politically utterly counterproductive to say: ‘Sorry guys, you’ve got it wrong, we’re going to try again’, I don’t think we can do that”.


My noble friend Lord Cormack made the point that there is also the assumption that the EU definitely wants us to remain in. There is also the assumption behind the amendment that Article 50 is reversible. As I understand the position, this is legally an open question. The Supreme Court did not opine on it because the two parties to the case, Mrs Miller and the Government, agreed that they would not argue about the issue in front of the court, so it did not take a view. I understand that lawyers are divided on the matter, but it is by no means clear that Article 50, once it has been invoked, is reversible.

Regardless of what the legal argument is, politically it seems difficult to believe that Article 50 could be reversed. Would the EU really want to negotiate with a country that is saying, “Well, we will get some terms from you which we will put back to the people, and then we may come back and ask for a better set of terms if they are not satisfactory”? If my noble friend Lord Cormack and I are wrong about this and the EU definitely and 100% wants us to remain in, it will give us the worst possible bargain, knowing that it has to be endorsed by both Parliament and a referendum. The amendment that has been proposed seems to be opportunistic and it does not have any logic to it at all.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)]

My Lords, “the will of the people” is a phrase much bandied around in the wake of the referendum and it has taken on a totemic significance. Anyone who suggests that the country should not now blindly leap off the cliff into the unknown that is hard Brexit risks being accused of trying to defy the will of the people. When the Supreme Court judges examined the Government’s plans to ride roughshod over the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament, they met with a disgraceful headline labelling them “Enemies of the people”. Their determination to stand up for the rule of law rather than the rule of the mob was seen as defying the will of the people.

I do not wish to defy the will of the people. Amendment 3, introduced so persuasively by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, proposes the opposite of defying the will of the people. It is about upholding democracy, not denying it. It simply proposes that once the terms of our withdrawal from the EU are clear, the public should be given the final say on whether to accept them. As I said at Second Reading, I cannot understand why even the most devoted Brexiteers would not wish to give the public the final say on the terms of such a momentous decision unless they feared that the terms might not be acceptable.

The process would demand simply that Parliament should approve the terms by a resolution of both Houses. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, it would be the vote of the Commons that was decisive; we know our place in this Chamber. If there is no deal, however, and the Government simply decide to withdraw from the EU, this too should be the subject of a resolution of both Houses. I will support a later amendment that calls for that procedure. I believe it to be absolutely crucial that, if the Government think that they have secured a good deal for this country, that deal should be put to the public in a referendum.

We are a proudly democratic country. We hold elections and we abide by the results even if the majority is wafer thin. The party with the largest number of MPs gets to govern. But the difference between a general election and the referendum is that a few years down the line the country has a chance to change its mind and to think again. People judge the efforts of those whom they have elected and, if they are not satisfied, they throw them out. A Parliament is not for life. However, when the country is now embarking on one of the most momentous decisions ever, a decision that will affect our children and our children’s children, there seems to be a perverse determination to insist that the people have made their bed and that, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, they are jolly well going to lie in it in perpetuity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

Would the noble Lord please correct what he said about the Conservative manifesto saying we would stay in the single market? That was in the context of the negotiation that the Prime Minister promised to undertake, and was on the assumption that, as he wanted, people would say “yes” to remain. If the referendum went the other way, it was made perfectly clear that the single market would no longer encompass Britain.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

The noble Lord could have been much quicker if he said, “Yes but we just changed our minds”—which is exactly what the Government have now done. The Government have a mandate to leave but they have no mandate whatever for this brutal form of leaving that will damage this country. By the way, it is not us that has been undemocratic but the Government. They have taken the British people’s vote and hijacked it for their anti-European prejudices. That is why now they need a referendum on the outcome—not a second referendum on “in or out” but a referendum on the deal. Noble Lords and the House will know the enormous difference between the hard Brexit that the Government propose, with no access to the single market and no membership of the customs union, and a Brexit maintaining access to the single market. The difference between these two options is huge for the people of this country, for our influence in Europe and the wider world, and for jobs, industry and our economy. Maybe the Government have got it right in their judgment—their guesswork—that the British people are content to leave the single market, but let them test that. They have no mandate from the referendum outcome whatever for that solution.