UK Withdrawal from the EU and Potential Withdrawal from the Single Market

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in a debate of such vital importance to the millions of European citizens living and working in the UK and, consequently, to the future of our public services and the performance of our economy. The Motion makes specific reference only to EU citizens in the UK but, like other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness who moved the Motion, I hope we will not forget the plight of British citizens who have made their home elsewhere in the European Union.

The EU Justice Sub-Committee, on which I am privileged to serve under the expert chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, notes in its recently published report on Brexit and acquired rights:

“The anxiety of EU nationals in the UK is matched by that of UK nationals in other EU States—the evidence we received of their distress is compelling”.


This is not some abstract debate about technicalities or government processes. It is about very real fears and uncertainties for millions of people who, in good faith and reasonable expectation, have made their lives in EU countries other than their own. It is about people who are now afraid that they will no longer have healthcare cover when they are sick or infirm, and will be forced to leave the place that has become their home. It is about children who are uncertain what their future holds: whether in a year or two they may be uprooted from their schools, their friends and all they have come to know.

It is about husbands and wives who are unsure whether they will have the right to continue to live in the same country because of obscure rules relating to comprehensive sickness insurance. It is about people such as Jet Cooper, a Dutch citizen resident in our country for 30 years and married to a British citizen who is, sadly, seriously ill, who has been told by our Immigration Minister that she may not be eligible to remain in the country after Brexit. It is about British pensioners living abroad in the European Union fearing that their pensions will no longer be uprated after Brexit. It is, above all, about millions of people who are unable to get on with planning their lives and are afraid for their futures because, through no fault of their own, they have no idea of the rules which will govern them.

At the time of the referendum, leave campaigners claimed—rather as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, did today—that questions about the future status of EU citizens were nothing more than scaremongering. The leave campaigners claimed that EU citizens had nothing to fear because their rights would be protected under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The anti-EU campaigner Peter Bone MP said:

“Clearly any EU citizen that is legally here would absolutely have the right to remain here. Any other suggestion is just absurd. It is a scare story, full stop. It just shows how desperate the government and the remain campaign are”.


Gisela Stuart, the chair of Vote Leave, similarly dismissed fears, claiming:

“You have got the Vienna convention, which guarantees the rights of existing citizens and existing arrangements”.


Tim Loughton, another Brexit Tory MP, said:

“The entitlement to residency for existing expats after Vote Leave would be unchanged and protected under the Vienna Convention”.


Not for the only time in the campaign, the protagonists of the leave campaign were peddling falsehoods—or alternative facts, as I believe they are now known. As the report of the EU Justice Sub-Committee, drawing on expert and undisputed legal evidence, states:

“In no sense, therefore, can this provision”,


of the Vienna convention,

“be said to safeguard individual rights under EU law that will be lost as a consequence of the UK’s withdrawal”.

With the legal guarantees asserted by the leave campaign proving, like so many of their claims and commitments, to be a mirage, and in the absence of any certainty from the Government, EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU are left in limbo and beset by uncertainties. Millions of lives are being blighted by distress and fear.

The truth is that very few senior members of the Government seem to recognise the devastating impact of their failure to act to address these uncertainties. Indeed, the Minister for International Trade is so indifferent to this human aspect that he referred to the status of EU citizens as our “main cards” in negotiations. How shameful—how scandalous—and what callous indifference it shows to the impact on the lives of so many people. What a blot on the reputation of this country.