European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 6) Bill

Lord Patten of Barnes Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 5th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My Lords, the word “reveal” is a misnomer. The full reports of the alternative arrangements group exist. The summaries exist. All the background material is available for anyone to read. To what extent it has been pressed by government negotiators in Brussels—Mr Frost and others—I do not know. You do not need to reveal something that has already been published. These things have been worked out and are available. I am not saying that anyone will agree to them, and it pays people at the moment to pretend they do not exist or have not been revealed. They have and they are there.

[Lord Patten of Barnes (Con)]

Perhaps I can encourage my noble friend to help the House on one point. Can he name anywhere in the world where different customs unions share a border, without the sort of hard border which is of concern to everyone? Just name any one. The United States and Canada: no. Switzerland and France: no. Where are there two countries with different customs unions side by side that do not have a hard border?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I think Members of this House and others have visited the Norway-Sweden border.

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[Lord Howard of Lympne]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, with whom I have had the pleasure of jousting over many decades. Occasionally I have even agreed with him. I will not follow his speech in its entirety, but before I address the remarks that I prepared I will deal with one of the observations he made and challenge one of the myths that has grown about the role and achievements of the European Union.

It is often said and rarely challenged that one of the great achievements of the European Union was peace in western Europe after the Second World War. I do not believe that to be true. The peace that has existed in western Europe after the Second World War actually owes more to the Soviet Union than it does to the European Union. It was inconceivable for almost 50 years after the end of the Second World War, when western Europe faced an existential threat from the ambitions of the Soviet Union, that any further fighting should take place in the western part of the continent. They were obliged to unite to face that threat. That was why we had peace in western Europe for 50 years after the Second World War. Of course, happily, after that period had lasted and the Soviet Union had disintegrated, the countries of western Europe had got out of the habit of fighting each other and we have been able to enjoy peace ever since.

[Lord Patten of Barnes]

Does my noble friend seriously think that the only reason for Franco-German reconciliation after the war, which is at the heart of European peace and building a new Europe out of the moral, economic and political rubble, was the Soviet threat? It might have contributed, but there were far bigger political issues that produced that, thank heavens for all of us.

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

We can argue about whether it was the only reason. Of course other factors encouraged Franco-German reconciliation, but the peace of the western half of the continent was an inevitable consequence of the threat those countries faced from the Soviet Union to the east.

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[Lord Patten of Barnes]

My Lords, I had not meant to intervene in this debate—and that is true. Having sat through much of the night, benefiting from the wisdom of my noble friends Lord True and Lord Dobbs while envying my noble friend Lord Forsyth—by then in his sleeper on the way to Scotland as the rest of us dealt with the filibustering that he had launched with his usual panache—I thought that I had probably had enough of all of this. However, one of the dangers of coming in and listening to a debate is that one is provoked into wanting to make one or two contributions. This is particularly the case whenever I listen to my noble friend Lord Howard. I can honestly say that, while I have disagreed with him on many subjects over the years, I have never doubted that he was anything other than a good chap.

I will come back to good chaps in a moment. There were two points I wanted to make as prequels to three points—which I will cover very briefly because they have been dealt with admirably by the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Mandelson.

I want to endorse what was said earlier about the departure from the Government of the Higher Education and Science Minister, Jo Johnson. I will not make the obvious points about Johnsons and one’s preference. However, Jo Johnson was at my university, where I am now a chancellor. I did not always agree with the legislation he brought forward on higher education in the last Session, but he was an outstandingly good and conscientious Higher Education Minister, as well as very intelligent. He is a real loss to the Administration, and I hope he is not a loss to public service for family reasons. He is a very good man.

Secondly, I want to identify myself with the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Cormack earlier about the treatment of some of our former, present colleagues. I am sure it was inadvertence which meant that my noble friend Lord Howard did not refer to them either. We were both colleagues of theirs in government. I am sure he shares my high view of their public integrity and public service. My noble friend has known one or two of them even longer than I have—he was at Cambridge with them. I am surprised that we did not hear about the appalling and hypocritical way in which they have been treated. I hope that will be undone as rapidly as possible; it was not Mr Cummings’s or Mr Johnson’s finest hour.

I shall briefly make three points, which have been touched on in particular by the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson. The first is on the trade negotiations. We have been told again and again that the reason this Bill is so suspect is that it cuts the Prime Minister off at the knees in the negotiations over our future relationship with the European Union but, as my noble friend Lord Hayward pointed out, the question is: what negotiations? There is no rustling in the shrubbery. You ask the President of the Council, the President of the Commission, the President of the French Republic, the Chancellor of Germany and the Taoiseach about the proposals that justify our Prime Minister in his observation that things are going well and the Government are putting forward all sorts of bright ideas, but there is no reply. It would be nice to hear from the Front Bench later this evening what the state of play is in these negotiations and what we are proposing—presumably somebody knows. Maybe we should just take it from Mr Cummings, the éminence grise in the regime—maybe one should call him the éminence—who has brought a new approach to personnel management at No. 10, that all this is a sham. But if it is a sham, that is all the more reason for having this legislation in place. If it is not a sham and we are making terrific progress, it seems very likely that we need rather more time to complete the progress, hence one of the advantages in a reply to a question posed earlier, and hence the advantage of a few more months being built in, if absolutely necessary.

The second point, related to that, is touched on by the “good chaps” theory, which, to be operable, needs a sense that the people you are dealing with are good chaps. One thing we know, and which underpins some of the discussions about when there should next be an election, is that there is a strong sense and suspicion—I put the point no more firmly than this, but I use a word used by my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke—of the disingenuousness of the Prime Minister. Maybe there are those who are not absolutely sure that he and the people who surround him are good chaps. We know that eight of them voted again and again as bad chaps against the proposals that the last Prime Minister brought forward. One reason we have had this long period of delay is the activities—the high productivity rates—of the ERG during the negotiations so far.

There is another aspect of the “good chaps” thesis of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, which needs touching on. I thought my noble friend Lord Howard was rather curious in the division he drew between the Executive and the legislature in international affairs and international negotiations. I, like him, was a Secretary of State for the Environment. I used to go to international negotiations on the environment with the reports of Select Committees and with legislation from the House of Commons determining what I should try to do about ozone-depleting substances, or water or air quality. When I was a Development Minister, I had to operate within the terms that the House of Commons had agreed on the proportion of our GDP to be spent on overseas development. I had to comply with what the OECD said about that as well. When I was a colonial despot, I had to implement what Parliament had decided about the joint declaration and the terms within which Britain should exercise its stewardship in our last colonial dependency. So do not tell me that there is an absolute division between what Executives can do abroad and what the legislature has a right to determine.

My final point is about Northern Ireland. I shall not repeat the points made very well by the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Mandelson, nor shall I repeat what I have said on other occasions in this House about the Northern Ireland border. It is a sign of the beginning of dementia when you start quoting your own speeches. However, in the second speech I made on the withdrawal Bill, I said that one of only two interventions made by the last Prime Minister during the referendum campaign was about the appalling difficulties of managing the border if we leave the European Union, which was true. Two points have regularly been made about the border. First, there are terrible difficulties as soon as you leave the single market for the customs union. Some of us posed a question to the intellectually sprightly Lord, my noble friend Lord Howell, about where else in the world one could find two countries side by side with different tax regimes and different customs unions that do not have a border, and the answer is that there are none. There are ways of making it easier to deal with a border, but when you have different customs unions and different tax arrangements side by side, there is no way that you cannot have a border. The problem with that in Northern Ireland is very simple.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

There are different arrangements either side of the border; there have been for years. The VAT is different, the currencies are different, there are all sorts of differences, and many similarities. You cannot just brush these things aside with generalities.

[Lord Patten of Barnes]

The point I continually make is that absolutely everywhere, whether it is in Switzerland and France, Norway and Sweden or the United States and Canada, if one is in a different customs union from one’s neighbour, there is a hard border.

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

I am most grateful to my noble friend for giving way. I would be very interested to know how he reconciles what he has just said with the fact that when, for a few weeks earlier in the year, it looked as though we might be leaving the European Union without an agreement, the Government said that they had no intention of putting up a hard border on the island of Ireland, and Mr Varadkar, Mr Barnier and Mr Juncker also said that they had no intention of putting up a hard border on the Republic side of the border. If no one intended to put up a hard border in the event of no deal, there must be a way through.

[Lord Patten of Barnes]

My noble friend knows perfectly well that under WTO rules, and for other reasons as well, if the Republic of Ireland is in a separate customs union from Great Britain, there has to be a border. It is a WTO rule. There is a border and traffic is stopped there.

There is a point that resonates even more than the economic argument, which is the question of security. I am sorry to personalise this, but a lot of our knowledge—and our prejudices, perhaps—in politics come from our personal experiences. The first time I saw dead bodies, apart from those of my parents, was near the Newry customs post in Northern Ireland, where I saw part of a leg on top of a rhododendron bush. We know perfectly well that if we do not get this right, there is a danger of people being killed—not just of businesses being destroyed or communities being devastated, but of people dying. If people do not believe that, they should read what is said again and again by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Garda Síochána.

These are terribly important issues and I just hope that we will bear in mind these facts, as well as the questions of economics and trade, when we are determining the relationships between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, which many people still seem to treat as though we have viceregal authority over it. These are great friends of ours and we should treat them rather better than we do.

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[Lord Callanan]

As far as I know, the latest information is that that meeting is still going ahead. Even if an election is happening, the Government and the Prime Minister remain in office and there are still live issues to be discussed. I am sure that there will still be intense value in having a meeting.

[Lord Patten of Barnes]

May I be, as usual, of assistance to the Minister, help him to develop the strength of his argument and encourage him to be a very brave Minister? Would he like to tell us that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Mr Cummings, who has featured quite regularly in this debate, did not say that the negotiations were a “sham”?

[Lord Callanan]

I am always wary when the noble Lord wants to be helpful, particularly when he quotes things taken straight from “Yes Minister” about being brave. All I can say is that he has not said it in any of the meetings that I have been at with him. Obviously, I am not at every meeting with him and I cannot comment on whether he said it. He says that he did not and nobody else in government has said to me that he did. I know Dominic well and I take his word when he says that he did not say that.

We know that member states want to avoid a no-deal exit. As set out by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the other place on Tuesday, we have accelerated our preparations for no deal. For example, as I informed the House in repeating the Statement on Tuesday, there is additional expenditure of £16 million to train thousands of customs staff, traders and hauliers, and an additional £20 million to ensure that traffic can flow freely in Kent and that trucks arriving in Dover are ready to carry our exports into the EU. In addition, the Chancellor has made all necessary funds available to support other preparations.

Perhaps I might say a few words about the Bill itself. Although today’s debate has been of the usual high standard, it was remarkable that very few noble Lords addressed the legislation that we are talking about. However, it is true that continued EU membership would cost the UK roughly £1 billion net a month. The Bill, as it currently stands, would require the Prime Minister immediately to accept any offer made by the EU of an extension to 31 January 2020.