United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 19th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, on her excellent maiden speech.

I want to confine my remarks to Part 5 of the Bill. I find myself swayed by two completely opposite accusations of bad faith.  The Government accuse EU negotiators of bad faith in seeking to erect unreasonable customs barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Opponents of the Bill say that the bad faith is our own Government’s. The withdrawal agreement set up a joint committee to resolve trade issues. The Government have chosen not to use it.  So, as Ed Miliband argued in his powerful philippic in the other place, the Government were proposing to breach international law for bogus reasons. 

However, having reflected on all this, I cannot support the amendment to the Motion and would like to explain why. To my mind, international law is not the main issue. Never before, many noble Lords have said, have a British Government sought to break international law, but never before has Britain faced a problem of extricating itself from as complex a political, economic and legal structure as the European Union. Law, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, explained, has to take account of political context, and as my hero, John Maynard Keynes, once said in answer to legal fundamentalists of his day:

“I want”—


lawyers—

“to devise means by which it will be lawful for me to go on being sensible in unforeseen conditions.” 

Noble Lords know very well that not every contingency can be foreseen.

So I ask noble Lords to judge the legislation before the House on three different grounds: sufficient reason, motive, and consequences. On the first, I agree with the argument that sufficient reason has not been established for the override of Part 5 at the Government’s discretion. However, by Amendment 66, the Government have agreed to obtain parliamentary approval before activating Part 5, and I think that is a reasonable compromise between those who think that Part 5 is unnecessary and those who think it is essential.

Secondly, I sympathise with the argument that the Government signed the agreement in bad faith in order to meet the Prime Minister’s political requirements. However, most noble Lords have ignored the argument that it was always going to require some bad faith and legal creativity—to coin a phrase—to make the Brexit decision consistent with the Good Friday agreement. When Ed Miliband said

“A competent Government would never have entered into a binding agreement with provisions they could not live with”,—[Official Report, Commons, 14/9/20; col. 52.]


I am afraid that he set the bar of competence much too high. Contrary to the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, deliberate ambiguity has always been the hallmark of statecraft.

Finally, what will the consequences be? The legal fundamentalists say it will damage our ability to get an agreement, because it will damage trust in the Government’s word—a powerful argument. The pragmatists believe it will force the EU negotiators to come up with a workable exit formula. Time will tell whether the Government have calculated the balance of risks properly. My own feeling, contrary to much noble rhetoric, is that we are still largely in the world of posturing. That is the way the EU and many other international negotiations work: public posturing followed by a last-minute outbreak of common sense. I think that is the way it will turn out, and I do not want to do or say anything that will weaken the hands of our own negotiators.