Brexit

Lord Livermore Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My Lords, in the House of Commons one week ago, the Prime Minister delivered a Statement demeaning in its tone and inflammatory in its language. Deliberately provocative, it was clearly an exercise in distraction, designed specifically to divert attention from the Supreme Court’s ruling 24 hours earlier that the suspension of Parliament was unlawful. But while the Prime Minister’s Statement was reckless, it was also revealing, providing us with the clearest insight yet into the no-deal playbook, the rhetorical strategy designed to achieve the most extreme form of Brexit.

The first and most pernicious part of this strategy is to question the patriotism of their opponents, duly articulated by the Prime Minister in the phrase “surrender Act”. Although undoubtedly offensive, this phrase also betrays an extraordinarily warped world-view. Like the Japanese soldier emerging from the jungle, unaware that the war had ended some 60 years earlier, members of this Government deploy confrontational language, unable to comprehend just how much the world has changed or where Britain’s national interest now lies. They fail to realise that we are not in a war; that we will not succeed by standing alone, isolated; or that cutting ourselves off from our closest allies will only diminish, internationally and economically, the country they profess to feel pride in. It is not patriotic to knowingly make Britain poorer and less powerful, and the only thing that risks being surrendered by this process is Britain’s prosperity and reputation in the world.

Having sought to undermine the motives of their opponents, the second step in the no-deal playbook is to distort the verdict of the referendum and the mandate it delivered. The vision of Brexit that 52% of voters put their faith in three years ago carried with it some very specific promises. In 2016, Boris Johnson and those who are now leading members of his Cabinet promised that,

“there won’t be a sudden change that disrupts the economy”;

that:

“The idea that our trade will suffer … is silly”;


that,

“we will negotiate a new settlement with the EU”;—[Official Report, Commons, 10/9/15; col. 529.]

and that:

“There will be no change to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic”.


These are the promises made by the proponents of Brexit, and these are the promises their mandate required them to deliver.

However, it is impossible to reconcile these promises with a no-deal Brexit, an outcome that the Government’s own analysis shows will reduce GDP by 9.7%, increase borrowing by £30 billion, disrupt trade to the extent set out in Operation Yellowhammer and inevitably create a hard border on the island of Ireland. Yet still the Prime Minister seeks to misappropriate this mandate, distorting it to impose a totally incompatible version of Brexit, gaslighting us into believing that no deal somehow respects the referendum and honours the result. The reality is that there is no mandate for any Brexit that fails to deliver on the specific promises made. The problem for the Government is that these promises are fundamentally undeliverable; you cannot leave the European Union and retain the benefits that being a member provides.

So, the third step in their strategy is to assert that democracy demands they deliver something else entirely. Despite having no personal mandate and heading a minority Government, the Prime Minister claims that by pursuing a policy nobody voted for, he is somehow upholding democracy. He says that elected MPs who point out that this is not what their constituents voted for should “stand aside”. The truth is that it emphatically is not democratic to promise one thing and then seek to deliver something completely different. That is the opposite of democracy. When we have travelled so far from what was promised in 2016, the only democratic route is to put the decision back to the British people in a confirmatory public vote.

Having failed to deliver their impossible promises, the fourth step in the no-deal playbook is to deflect responsibility for this failure on to anyone but themselves. The Prime Minister and half his Cabinet may have twice voted against a deal, but it is now the fault of Opposition MPs that Britain is yet to leave. The Prime Minister may have acted unlawfully, but it is now the fault of the judges for saying so. The Conservative Party may have spent months on a leadership election, but it is now the Labour Party’s fault that time is being wasted. When the Government are again found to have failed to come up with workable proposals, it will of course be the EU’s fault that a deal remains elusive.

As each of the once-claimed benefits of Brexit have in turn disintegrated, the Government are now left only with the mundane entreaty to “get Brexit done”. Gone are the promised sunlit uplands. Instead, in the Prime Minister’s words, let us “put Brexit behind us”. This is the fifth and final step in their strategy: to pretend Brexit is an event, not a process—a chore that, once completed, frees us up to do the things we enjoy. Yet having first built a fallacy, they are now selling a fantasy. The truth is that, with or without a deal, any form of Brexit would be only the start, not the end, of a long and painful journey. An entire generation would be consumed with a process that would devour our politics and diminish our resources. Gone would be the time and money to tackle the challenges that first drove Brexit or the priorities that have been neglected ever since. In reality, getting Brexit done is yet another attempted deception.

This is the no-deal playbook: a strategy to crash Britain over the cliff edge to achieve the most extreme form of Brexit and fulfil their long-held ideological obsession. It is a strategy designed to bend the facts—to insist black is white. However, let us not be fooled into thinking that this is the strategy of a confident project that believes it is winning. It is the last resort of an ever-more desperate Government; of a project built on lies now colliding with reality.