Queen’s Speech

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others who have welcomed the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, to her current role. I had never taken her for a masochist, but I notice that she has brought a security blanket, and I suspect that we will probably all need one very soon.

Your Lordships will know, as it is no secret, of my opposition to leaving the EU, but of course I also know what the nation decided, by a very narrow majority of 51.9% to 48.1% in the referendum. I understand the importance of that vote and the multiple reasons for leaving given to researchers by the people who voted to leave. As many noble Lords have said, events in this country have moved on. The Prime Minister went to the country seeking a strong mandate and an effective parliamentary majority to negotiate a Brexit incorporating leaving the European single market and the customs union, all part of the same general proposal. As we know, she lost her majority, and she lost a mandate for what I can only regard as having always been a reckless plan. Indeed, she will now be propped up by the votes of only 10 people, for whom we seem to have paid £100 million to £150 million per vote, if you put it in quantifiable terms.

If noble Lords look at the votes cast for the unambiguous leave parties in the general election—and even then there is the complexity of the DUP’s position on the border in Ireland—they can see that the votes equal 14,556,247, or 45.1% of those voting. The number who voted for parties supporting stay quite explicitly, as the Lib Dems did, or the retention of the European single market or the customs union, or even the slightly slidy ways of describing the same thing, which I am afraid my party engaged in, but who none the less were quite clear about what was being said, came to 16,422,498, or 51%. Given the basis on which the Prime Minister called the election, that seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate way of looking at the result. So there is no inhibition on us, and there is an entitlement to argue this through in every respect—a point made with clarity by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, yesterday.

There is no case for retro-fitting what happened last June, not least the inevitability that we must walk away because a better prospect of settlement is merely whistling in the dark. And there is no case for reverse-engineering the reasons given for calling the election. I have heard people try to describe all sorts of reasons why the Prime Minister called it, but she called it in explicit terms. We all understood those terms, and I do not think that there can be any question about what she was seeking as she described the strong and stable team for the purpose of negotiating an absolute Brexit. Nothing was said in any of the opening speeches that appears to recognise the dangers that she has placed the country in. Maybe we will hear about that in the closing speeches.

The then Government, and today’s minority Government, not least the Chancellor of the Exchequer, have explicitly recognised the dangers and stormy waters ahead. My noble friend Lady Hayter has also recognised this in the amendment that she seeks to move: that no deal is probably the worst possible disaster. Incidentally, as somebody who has spent their life as a negotiator, I understand that you do not give away your hand to the other side, but there are occasions when you just do not say any of that kind of stuff. There is nothing that compels you to put it in those terms in the first place. It is amateur night.

The record numbers who registered to vote on the deadline this year were mainly young people, many of whom were voting for the first time and who had been excluded from the referendum as the amendment to enfranchise them had been defeated. We must face the fact that they have come back to exact revenge. And they will. Our job is both to test the Government, which of course is the function of this House, and to face the challenge of thinking strategically. It is not, and it never was, a matter of simple tactics. Anybody who tries to approach it in that way will miss the key factors and the key opportunities to get to a better position. I strongly support my noble friend Lord Adonis in his amendment, precisely because it is strategic, and it is a strategy guided by principle.

I argue, very briefly, that the leave campaign was driven by two main forces. The first was those who hanker after the past, either because they fell through the holes in the global economic net and felt unhelped and disregarded or because they felt that there was an appeal in reclaiming some of the distant sense of community that was perhaps no longer so apparent. There were others who also felt a distinctive longing for our mercantile past and the historical trajectory of our island people. No matter that the economic structures have changed beyond recognition and that the old way is beyond reinvention. The world of our empire and the way in which we treated the peoples of that empire are long gone—and thank goodness for that.

The second force needs some deciphering. It is a force that I associate with the noble Lords, Lord Lamont and Lord Forsyth, Michael Gove and Liam Fox: that we should abandon almost all regulation and get to a position where we really are like tax havens such as Singapore, without regulation or anything that might be a barrier. This is completely at odds with the first of those motivations, which is an appeal for localism. It is instead an appeal for untrammelled globalism, which is why it is reasonable to say that people who are at the bottom of the economic pile will be as hurt as they will be in the future.

I hope that over the months the Government will spare us a diet of soundbites and platitudes, and on occasion grubby Trumpian lies, and will tell people the truth. People are now fully entitled to know that truth, particularly the younger generation who have come out and become political in these circumstances and who are entitled to know what the future holds for them. They look at young people across Europe and across the world and recognise that many are of them are innovative and want to do significant things in this and other economies. They do not see them as different or alien, so let us get rid of some of the xenophobia that there has also been in this. Let us treat people with respect, and respect their intelligence. That ought to go for all of us. They know, I think, that they will have a much better future with the kind of arrangement that my noble friend Lord Adonis has recommended. I wholly support his amendment. It provides clarity for our route of travel and has a strong prospect of building trust, and I say to noble Lords on my own Front Bench that it will help them to stop hopping from one foot to another in order to try to persuade us that there is a plan when there plainly is not.