Brexit: Parliamentary Approval of the Outcome of Negotiations with the European Union

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interests, as recorded in the register, from which it can be readily discovered that I am a Eurofanatic. I am, too, very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, who I have known since we were both in different parties—although he has managed two moves to my one.

I have observed in the past that you can change your history but not your geography, and we will find out, in the years to come, that being 22 or 23 miles from Calais will not change because we leave the EU. We seem to be in danger of talking about the deal as if it settled everything. It settles nothing: all it does is begin the negotiations on getting where we want to get to. We are at a very preliminary stage, and, as I have said many times in this House and elsewhere, we are being totally unrealistic. There is no way in which we leave the European Union and get a better deal than when we are in it, for the simple reason that 27 countries do not want to be reduced to 26 and will make it jolly certain that we get as difficult a deal as they can get away with. That is where the history and geography come together.

I turn now to a couple of practical things. We talk about extending Article 50—let us remember, however, that the European Parliament has to agree to whatever deal is reached. The last sitting of the European Parliament is on Thursday 18 April; it does not return until 2 July. The whole of the week when it returns is a basically ceremonial time when it elects its president, its committee chairs and all the people needed for the negotiations. The European Parliament, therefore, will have to decide whether it wishes to maintain its EU committee and whether Mr Verhofstadt will continue in his role. The European Commission will have to decide whether Mr Barnier is to continue in his role, or perhaps to become the new president of the Commission—an outcome I see as highly likely.

There will also be a change of presidency: at the beginning of July the Finns take over the presidency of the European Union. The odds are that theirs will be a fairly active presidency. Perhaps the Minister can tell us how much discussion there has been between HMG and the incoming Finnish presidency on how they propose to handle the period from July to December.

We then proceed through the autumn, when the European Parliament has hearings for the nominated Commissioners. Every country will nominate a Commissioner. A presidency will be nominated in July and throughout the autumn there will be hearings of the new Commissioners on their new portfolios. The EU will not be in a great position to be doing any negotiation. So an extension of three months is pretty meaningless.

Let me consider the MEPs. The Prime Minister said in her Statement:

“It would require an extension of Article 50”.


This is when she was against it; I am not sure what position she is in today. She continued:

“We would very likely have to return a new set of MEPs to the European Parliament in May”.


We would not, actually. The MEPs could lapse and there is a long-established procedure that when a member state joins the EU, the parliament nominates the MEPs. There is no legal reason why an outgoing state could not nominate MEPs—or, for that matter, have no MEPs at all. As we enjoy shooting ourselves in the foot, that might be the choice. They can be appointed.

We are also told that a second referendum would set a difficult precedent. Of course it would. As Mr Speaker Bercow has shown, precedents are there to be broken. I seem to remember that we had two referendums on Scottish independence and two on Welsh independence—

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

On devolution.

[Lord Balfe]

On devolution—the noble Lord is absolutely right.

It is a case of how long you allow to lapse between them, not that you cannot do it. As the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, rightly said, we could have an election. Let me warn my party what is likely to happen. I think it is highly likely that the Opposition would win an election. To people who think that elections are about Brexit, I say, think again. If you want an example, look at the Soke of Peterborough, as it is called. It had an MP who campaigned vigorously for a no vote. He lost his seat. I am not sure that the person who replaced him is in full communion with the party that she was elected for, but none the less, he lost his seat. Mr Stewart Jackson joined the unemployed as a reward for campaigning for Brexit.

You might well get that result in an election. People have reflected on seeing me on these Benches, but I will have a far bigger laugh when I see the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, as a Minister in a Corbyn Government. As she will remember, we were together in Labour First, the right-wing pressure group within the Labour Party. I think she will make an excellent Corbyn Minister. Let us be aware where we are heading.

On Project Fear, all we get these days is, “The drugs won’t come through” and “The ports will seize up”. Of course there will be difficulty, but we will get over it. We are a resourceful nation. People in East Anglia, where I live, say to me—and, I am sure, to my noble friend Lord Lansley—“We heard all this before, Richard. It was rubbish. We had it in the run-up to the referendum: the world was going to collapse. It hasn’t happened. It won’t. We might have a bit of difficulty, but we’ll get over it”.

I counsel that the argument for Europe is a moral and philosophical one. It is not about a can of beans, even a delayed delivery can of beans. Please do not go on with Project Fear. The next step will be negotiations. After this deal, whatever it is, is agreed, there will be difficult negotiations.

Last Friday, I was in Madrid talking to Spanish politicians. It is clear that they are keeping their powder dry. Their demands will come through when it matters, which is when they start negotiating. That is when you will find the different countries of Europe asking for whatever they want for their particular interests, for what is known in Belgium as the Flemish Christmas tree. Virtually every country of Europe will want to hang a bauble on that tree. That is where the difficult negotiations are going to take place. We will look back on debates like this and think, “Wasn’t it simple? We only had to talk to ourselves. Now we have got to talk to all these foreign people about how we survive”.

So I say to noble Lords, by all means let us extend Article 50, but do not believe that another referendum would necessarily change the result; it probably would not. We have to move forward. This is a great country and whichever way we go, we will survive. I would prefer to survive within the EU, but I do not subscribe to the prophets of doom who say that we are going to collapse if we are not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin. I greatly admire his personal courage and integrity, but I say to him that I think nothing is more likely to strengthen the anti-democratic forces in this country or to see the emergence of a strong populist, nationalist party with tendencies to fascism than the economic disaster that would follow from having no deal on our exit from the European Union. It would set off social forces that I really am concerned about.

As we again debate Brexit, I fear I am again part of the “here we go again” consensus in the debate today. I support my noble friend Lady Smith’s Motion. It seems to me that an Article 50 extension is inevitable if no deal is to be avoided. That would be the case even if by some miracle Mrs May were to get her deal through the House of Commons in the next couple of weeks.

So what is it worth talking about today? Something very significant has happened in the last fortnight, and it is about what the Prime Minister gives her top priority to. After the deal was defeated by 230 votes, there was a lot of talk of a plan B, of seeking cross-party agreement for a compromise that could have carried both Labour and Conservative MPs and other parties. I know this was not helped by the leader of the Opposition’s decision not to join those talks, but the true analysis of what went wrong was well summed up by Hilary Benn, the chair of the Brexit Select Committee in the Commons. He said that he had been to see the Prime Minister and that, yes, there was an open door, but he was faced with a closed mind. That is the only conclusion we can come to on what we are told is now the Government’s plan B: to go back to revising the backstop. So I am afraid the Prime Minister has not taken the good advice that I remember the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, offering her: that she should seek to be Sir Robert Peel in these circumstances. Rather, she continues the pathetic performance of the indecisive Arthur Balfour in the Administration of 1902-1905, faced with Conservative divisions on tariffs.

So what does going back to the backstop mean? Will the Minister give some specific answers to questions about that? This seems to be the substantive point of content in today’s debate. Are the Government, as I hope and assume they are, sticking fully to the commitments they made in the December 2017 agreement with the European Commission and to the amendment that was passed by this House to the EU (Withdrawal) Act—that the Good Friday agreement would be adhered to and that as a consequence of Brexit there would in no circumstances whatever be a reinstatement of a hard border in the island of Ireland? Is that still the Government’s position?

Secondly, do the Government accept—I have heard Ministers say at times that they do—what the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Kerr, have said about what would happen in the event of no deal: in other words, that the problem of the border arises from our adherence to the very WTO rules which the Brexiteers go on about incessantly? If we do not stick to those rules, in the absence of a comprehensive free trade agreement, the most favoured nation principle comes into play, and that means that every other country in the world would have the right to trade with us and the EU on the principle of no tariffs, no quotas and no rules of origin. Do the Government accept that analysis?

Thirdly, do the Government accept that for the foreseeable future—and no one knows how long that future might be—while advanced technology and behind-the-border checks may minimise the policing, bureaucracy and delays involved in border checks, they cannot substitute for them? That was the authoritative evidence given to our Select Committee by the customs experts who came from Norway and Switzerland to talk to us.

Fourthly, do the Government therefore logically agree that the only way of avoiding the re-imposition of border checks in Ireland is an agreement whereby the island of Ireland remains within the EU customs territory and regulations on both sides of the border are closely aligned? If not, will the Minister tell us what might be possible?

Fifthly, if the Minister does agree and the Government want to avoid a customs border in the Irish Sea because they want, reasonably, to maintain the integrity of the United Kingdom, is not the logic of that position that it requires Great Britain as a whole to abide by the rules of a customs union and maintain general regulatory alignment with the EU?

The Government have to come clean on these questions. What are their answers? I look forward to the summing up of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, and seeing whether he has anything to say.

If the Government accept these propositions, how can they honestly go back to Brussels and argue that the backstop can be time limited, have a unilateral exit clause or even be eliminated altogether, when as recently as last autumn they agreed to all these things? What credibility would such a request have in Brussels without some clearly specified alternative, of which at the moment there is precisely none? Can the Minister give us an inkling of what the alternative to the backstop might be?

Finally, is it not sad and deplorable that a desperate attempt to restore the unity of the Conservative Party is once again being put ahead of the national interest and continued peace in Ireland?