Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Tomlinson Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tomlinson (Lab)]

My Lords, today’s continuation of the debate began with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for whom I normally have great respect. He is a very reasonable man, yet right at the beginning of his speech he put to us the most unreasonable proposition: that the Prime Minister has been a conciliator throughout this process. With great respect to the right reverend Prelate, she has been to conciliation what King Herod was to child welfare among young males. The process has borne no relationship to trying to bring people together.

In 2016, we had a referendum that many regarded as an abrogation of political reasonability by Parliament. Nevertheless, a referendum took place and the clear and overwhelming majority has to be regarded, to a substantial degree. Yet here we are, two years later, having tried to respect the referendum result through negotiations with a litany of failures. Look at the process of the referendum in the first place. We were told that we could solve this on the basis of a simple question—remain or leave—and that we could reduce the complexity of that question, on which we are spending three days of debate. With great respect, most of the people who voted in the referendum did not have a clue what they were voting for in voting to remain in or depart from the EU. That has become clear from public opinion only in the great debates that have taken place since.

Let us put aside the referendum promises, such as the promise on the side of the bus of great benefits for our National Health Service for ever. Let us put aside the ease of predicting that the EU needed us more than we needed it and therefore frictionless trade would continue. Let us put aside the leavers’ claims that countries would be queuing up at our door to make free trade agreements with us. Let us put aside the lies and the deceit. Here we are, two years later, with no progress made but an incredibly regressive deal being brought back to Parliament, which Parliament looks likely to reject next week and to which this House looks likely to add its advisory opinion along the same lines.

We have heard about “taking back control” of our borders, our money and our laws many times. That phrase has been in almost every government document produced and has become the standard response of the Prime Minister to almost every question she has been asked either in Parliament or in television and radio interviews. Let us look at those three component parts. On borders, the reality is that immigration, which was a big concern for the British people during the referendum, from outside the European Union—that is, from the rest of the world—has grown more than from within it. We have always had the capacity to control it autonomously but we have looked at the sources of that immigration, which include students in higher education, academic staff, researchers, IT specialists and medical and nursing staff, and decided that it was in our self-interest not to control the borders in the way that some people expected. Self-interest, not the EU, dictated our policies.

The next part of that phrase concerns the economy. When the Governor of the Bank of England gives his view and the Treasury gives its view, once again, the general repetition of Project Fear starts all over again, as if the only people who can be accused of being part of Project Fear are those who told the truth in their economic forecasts. I saw a good example of Project Fear last week. I think the Prime Minister suggested that unless her package is voted through Parliament, Members of the House of Commons should get used to the idea of having a Christmas holiday limited to Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve because she would cancel the rest of Christmas so that they could come back, have whatever the parliamentary equivalent of a second referendum is and rethink the error of their ways.

Our laws are the third part of the phrase. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, showed us that we have the capacity to control immigration from the EU but we, unlike Belgium, have not done it. Rather than taking control of our own laws, we have spent most of our parliamentary time debating to no conclusion Brexit and all the consequences of it and to the exclusion of much other legislation that we would like to have seen. How many times have we heard the Government say, “We’d like to do that, but we don’t have the time”? It is this obsession with Brexit that has robbed us of our time.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, spoke with great simplicity, elegance and clarity on “taking back control”, so I shall not add anything to what he said, but I will read it again because I liked the sound of it so much.

That leaves us with the options. Clearly, those are to reject the Prime Minister’s deal and the consequential no deal that she foresaw. It seems clear that the House of Commons will not allow that to happen. But more time is needed and there are only a few ways of getting it. They require a greater attempt at consensus among politicians and the political parties in the other House. They can either seek more time by getting an extension of the Article 50 deadline or follow the advice of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Advocate-General that were we to withdraw an Article 50 application altogether, it could be done unilaterally without needing consent from the Council of Ministers, any member state or the European Commission. Whatever the mechanism, I do not care. It can buy us more time. That time has to be used to reach a consensus. If we are forced to issue views on it, I think the arguments being used against having a second referendum do not stand up. On the idea that nobody ever changes their mind, it is a stupid person who makes a declaration at one point in time and says, “I am bound by that for life”. Living life is about having different experiences and gaining different knowledge. As they acquire that, a mature person can sometimes be influenced by the community in which they live. They are entitled to change their mind. That is the vibrancy of democracy and not the stagnation of thinking that we have so much of in government at the moment.

I hope that we will support the Motion in the name of my noble friend the Leader of the Opposition and vote against the ludicrous proposition of a former head of the Civil Service—we should back the majority of the former heads of the Civil Service and vote against that. We should then be prepared to take clear points of view when Parliament has to look at the matter again.