European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Lord Radice Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Radice (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow my fellow “yellow-belly”, if I may call him that —he is wearing a yellow tie at the moment, and rightly so. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Barwell, on a most interesting speech and I look forward to his contributions in this House, especially on housing and on how to run a Government. I also look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Mann, because I want to see where he stands on these matters.

I am not going to give a re-run of old arguments, but as a historian, I would like to put the Bill into some sort of context. I have to say straightaway that as a supporter of the European Union and of Britain’s membership of it for the past 65 years, Friday 31 January, when the divorce Bill becomes law, as it must, will be a day of great sadness for me and, I believe, for millions of others.

I believe that the main reason for our departure lies not so much with the media but with our politicians. If things went well in Europe, it was a victory for Britain. If there were problems, they said that it was the fault of Brussels. With a few notable exceptions, they never spent time explaining the benefits of British membership. In the 2016 referendum result, we reaped what the politicians had sown.

Once the British people had decided to leave, albeit by a narrow majority, I believe that a pragmatic natural leader ought to have limited the damage to the economy by remaining as close as possible to the EU. Instead, both Mrs May, except just at the end, and Boris Johnson, took a different and much harder line. I have to admit that over the last few months the Opposition have made things worse. Under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, a general election was not required until 2022, and despite polls indicating a large Tory majority, Mr Corbyn and Ms Swinson, in a mixture of what I believe was short-sightedness and hubris—I was surprised not to hear this from the Liberal Benches—fell into Mr Johnson’s elephant trap and voted for the election which both he and Dominic Cummings so desperately wanted. That is the background to this. As we now know, the result was not only a landslide victory for the Tories, which gives the Government great power—and great responsibility; it has greatly increased the risk of the no-deal Brexit which the last Parliament worked so hard to rule out.

“Let’s get Brexit done” was a clear and, I believe, clever election slogan that appealed not just to leavers but to voters fed up with three years of bickering over Brexit, as they saw it—but in reality it was seriously misleading. The most important issue, the UK’s future relationship with the EU, has still not been decided. That is where we are today, and it will take some time.

I understand that Boris Johnson is allowing us only 11 months for negotiation, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Barwell, that that will make it very difficult. Indeed, the new European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, has already warned that this timetable does not allow sufficient time to negotiate an agreement satisfactory to both sides. The danger is that there will be either a deal that, in the words of the Financial Times, is “minimal, rushed and last-minute”—a bare-bones agreement that leaves crucial sectors of the economy out—or, even more disastrous, no deal, which could bring Britain to its knees.

Boris Johnson has said that leaving the EU will offer the UK a bright future. We shall see about that. He seems to forget that being a member of the EU has already brought great benefits to this country—I do not think it is rerunning old arguments to remind noble Lords of that—in increased power, influence and security, faster trade, investment and employment, greater affluence and well-being for our citizens, and improved environmental and social protection. Sadly, we are unlikely to enjoy such benefits outside.

I see that my time is coming to an end. Speaking in the House of Lords a year or two ago, I predicted that if we left the EU with no deal or a botched arrangement, the result would be unacceptable to the next generation, and I stand by that prediction. I believe they will have concluded that a medium-sized European power such as the UK should act in partnership with its close neighbours.