European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, I support most of this Bill but worry that it may never be used if those who want to reverse the decision of our referendum succeed. I fear they may do so if the Government do not radically change their negotiating strategy in Brussels, so I have some advice for them in that regard.

The Brexit saga brings home to us the chasm between our politicians and their bureaucrats in one camp and our business community in another. Each camp tends to look down on the other, with the politicians and bureaucrats regarding our businessmen as rather grubby people, driven by the profit motive and often open to shady deals in its pursuit. In this, they overlook the fact that their own salaries and way of life, the NHS and other services of the state are supported by the taxes paid by our business community. That community, in turn, tends to despise our political class as not living in the real world and for not being exposed to redundancy or ruin if they fail. “They’ve never had to do a deal in their lives, so no wonder they’re making such an appalling mess of Brexit”, is a view I hear nowadays from every leading businessman to whom I speak.

To do a deal, you have to know what you and the other side want out of it. You have to know their and your strengths and weaknesses, what you are prepared to concede to get what you want, and at what point you really will get up and leave the table. I fear the Government are failing on all these fronts. Their worst mistake is underestimating the strength of our hand in Brexit’s four main issues: mutual residence, trade, security and cash—which should be taken in that order, not the other way round. On mutual residence, there are some 4 million EU people living here against 1.2 million of us living there. On trade, if we end up on WTO terms, EU exporters will pay us tariffs of some £13 billion per annum while ours will pay them only some £5 billion. On security, we are part of the “Five Eyes”. On cash, we give them £10 billion in net cash every year, or the annual salary of 1,000 nurses every single day.

However, the Government have allowed the Eurocrats to take these issues back to front, and they appear to have done so thanks to a basic misunderstanding of the meaning and force of Article 50 in international law. I am no expert in international law but I draw noble Lords’ attention to the opinion of someone who is: Professor Ingrid Detter de Frankopan, who holds a doctorate in European law and two others. She wrote an article in Money Week on 22 November 2016 entitled, “Don’t trigger Article 50—just leave”. I will put copies in your Lordships’ Library and can send a copy electronically to any noble Lord who feels he should read it. The core of Professor de Frankopan’s advice is that we did not and still do not need to go further than paragraph 1 of Article 50, which says:

“Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”.


She points out that the UK does not have a written constitution but that a referendum of the people and votes in Parliament nicely fill the gap.

So the Government should now change direction. They should sit the Eurocrats down and tell them we have done our best to make paragraphs 2 to 5 of Article 50 work but they have abused our trust, and we see no future in going on like this.

So we are, unilaterally, taking back our law, borders, fisheries, agriculture and so on, but we will also be generous. We will give them wide mutual residence; we will allow them to continue in free trade with us; we will go on helping them with security; and then we will decide how much cash we will give them, which may be nothing after 29 March next year if they do not behave themselves and fall in with the above—or, if they do, it may be quite a lot. The Eurocrats will do almost anything for our cash.

Our biggest negotiating difficulty is that the Eurocrats’ main priority is to keep their failing project of European integration going. If we make a success of Brexit, that becomes even more difficult. But we have to take that head on; it is not our problem if the Eurocrats lose their plush but pointless lifestyles, their fraudulent budgets and their silly mirage that the EU has brought peace to Europe. They could not care less about the real people of Europe, as witnessed by the misery caused by their euro. We should make more of an effort to talk directly to those real people: the French wine growers, the German car manufacturers and the others who will pay us those tariffs if we do not continue in free trade together. We should divide the real people—who all have votes, incidentally—from the doomed Eurocrats.

I end by pointing out how dishonest is the position of those who now want Parliament to have a say in Brexit’s outcome but who, in truth, want to reverse the referendum’s result. May I remind noble Lords that they have stood affectionately by while some 20,000 EU laws have been imposed on this country since 1973, without the Commons or your Lordships’ House being able to do anything about them? Why do they now care if our elected Government repeal or amend some in the national interest?

I remind noble Lords that our democracy has also been betrayed in the Council of Ministers, where our Government have been outvoted on every single one of the 77 measures that we have opposed in the last 20 years.

I finally remind noble Lords, yet again, that the whole project of European integration was designed to deprive the people of their democracy. As Jean Monnet said in 1956, “Europe’s nations should be guided towards a super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will irreversibly lead to federation”.

The problem for the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and his supporters is that the British people are not fools—they have seen through it.