Brexit: Green Paper

Lord Myners Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

As the Prime Minister made clear yesterday, a range of options is open to us and we are looking for the best possible deal for this country.

[Lord Myners (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

I can certainly assure the noble Baroness that it remains the Government’s intention to build as strong a national consensus as possible around our negotiation position, to treat this House and the other place with the respect they deserve as the negotiations continue, and to give the information required for scrutiny to be meaningful and worth while.

[Lord Myners]

My Lords, we all try to understand why the Government wish to keep a close hand on their negotiating objectives with Europe—we must remain very hush-hush about this in case Johnny Foreigner understands what we are up to—but would the Minister like to hazard a guess on the negotiating objectives of the 27 countries, the European Commission and the European Parliament? Surely that is not a matter on which we cannot comment.