European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I think I have spotted an issue on which absolutely everybody in this House will agree, and that is that a can of WD-40 should be acquired to deal with that hinge which keeps making a noise like a wounded heifer from that end of the Chamber.

The noble Lords, Lord Forsyth, Lord Cormack, Lord Taylor and Lord Bridges, all made the point—as did the noble Lord, Lord Maude, I think—that this House must send this Bill back unamended, because otherwise we are in trouble as a House. Others disagree. I am not 100% sure that they are right, but it is worth reflecting on why the British people and, to some extent, the other place, distrust our motives and suspect that we are once again trying to prevent getting Brexit done if we amend this legislation.

In this House, we have heard three and a half years of excuses for not enacting the wishes of the British people. We heard that the economy would collapse if people voted to leave, but the British people said, “Get Brexit done.” We have heard that people did not understand what they were voting for, but the British people said, “Get Brexit done.” We have heard that there was a need for a meaningful vote in Parliament before any withdrawal agreement be passed, and the British people said, “Yes, okay, fine, but get Brexit done.” We have heard that the Northern Ireland border was insoluble, and people said, “Yes, fine, but get Brexit done.” We have heard that the EU would not let us diverge, and the British people said, “Please get Brexit done.” We have heard that there is not time to scrutinise all the secondary legislation necessary before leaving the European Union, and the British people said, “Get Brexit done.” And we have heard that people might have changed their minds since the vote in 2016, so in 2017 we had another general election, in which people voted overwhelmingly for parties that wanted to get Brexit done.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

I am most grateful, as it is not usual to intervene in such a debate. Surely the question is: is it meaningful, without all the negotiations which we all know must take place over the next two or three years, just to say “Get Brexit done”, as if it makes sense, and to worship the people for saying something which might be rubbish?

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, I very much echo the basic thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate, has just said. If it is true that on the doorsteps of Widnes and Wakefield, the election reflected a frustration which only Mr Dominic Cummings was able to put his finger on with the second of his brilliant pieces of mendacity—“Get Brexit Done”—that may itself turn out to be a false prospectus. If it does, what will be the position in a year’s time when the same people, on the same doorsteps of Widnes and Wakefield, see that it was a second misleading slogan? “Get Brexit Done”, implying a magic solution almost overnight, was an even bigger fib than “Take Back Control”—as if we are going to take back control in Widnes of a multinational corporation such as Google, or as if our workers could get some countervailing power with the world of China, the United States and so on.

I am also rather doubtful whether the citizens of Widnes and Wakefield would agree if it was put to them that “You’d much rather transform Britain into ‘the Singapore of Europe’, would you not?”. I think they would all say, “What’s all that about?”. I might say, “Well, let me tell you a little about Singapore works”—but of course it is a slogan. The trouble is that life in this country is now—social media comes into this—getting into a bigger remove from what we have slaved to do in the trade union movement. We had weekend schools trying to talk about how world market share depends on having a better value-added performance, along the lines of what they do in Sweden and so on. We had a lot of those things successfully transformed in the Labour Party and the TUC in 1988 by the famous occasions of Jacques Delors. It is very difficult, as time goes by, to counter the new right’s slogans when it is easy for people to think that this sort of quasi proto-nationalism is what chimes with them, just like support for their local football club. So we have a major problem in how we are going to avoid further disillusionment.

Only last week, we saw the beginnings of the unravelling of the idea that all this can be sorted out this year. I do not know whether the Minister can confirm this, but it was said by one well-informed journalist on the Spectator—his name is Mr James Forsyth—that a week ago, there was a Cabinet committee that decided that we would not in fact be able to sort all this out this year and therefore that we would have the gloss on this commitment, that it needed to be selective and the deal would be far more focused on goods than services. The punchline in the Spectator article was:

“The tight Brexit deadline will be met but, crucially, not all of the Brexit deal needs to be agreed by then. ‘We can do this in stages,’ says one cabinet source. ‘That will kill any talk of a cliff edge.’”


But that is not what the president of the Commission has agreed to. What we are saying is make-believe; my noble friend Lady Donaghy called it a pig in a poke. This is becoming absolutely undeniable. George Orwell would have been proud of the doublethink.

Finally, we are told that we have got to fly the union jack at the end of this month. The union jack is a flag that is being torn up by Boris Johnson. The scenario that is increasingly plausible about what could happen in Scotland, which my noble friend Lord Darling touched on, would mean that the St Andrew’s flag would go and we would break up the United Kingdom. This is what happens when you play the nationalist card and start talking about the flying of the union jack.