European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord True Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I had intended to intervene after an hour to don a Wigan shirt against the Manchester City team arrayed in this Chamber. But then my noble friend Lord Lamont rose and scored the goal in a very interesting speech, which went to the core of the matter. I apologise, like my noble friend Lord Hailsham, for having been unable to be present at Second Reading, but I assure your Lordships that I intend to be present for however many days it takes to achieve what my noble friend said he would wish to frustrate, with the result that Brexit will go through as the British people requested.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, took exception to the word “instruction”. As a democrat, I am not quite sure from whom our Parliament should take its instructions except from the British people. I quote the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, who said after the referendum that,

“when the British people have spoken, you do what they command”.

What powerful words and instruction. Another gentleman said—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord True]

I have only just begun. I will give way later to the noble Lord. If I may continue this section of my remarks, I would like to do so. There were many interventions on my noble friend Lord Lamont, who spoke for the Wigan team, but there have not been so many interventions on the Manchester City team.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

This is material to what the noble Lord is saying.

[Lord True]

I will give way to the noble Lord later if he is kind and polite and stops interrupting. I will put on the record what another gentleman said:

“There are people in the party who don’t accept the outcome, who feel incredibly angry and feel it’s reversible, that somehow we can undo it. The public have voted and I do think it’s seriously disrespectful and politically utterly counterproductive to say ‘Sorry guys, you’ve got it wrong, we’re going to try again’, I don’t think we can do that”.


That was Vince Cable, since elected leader of the Liberal Democrat party. I hope that he will stand by those words as leader.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

For those of us who sat through nearly 180 speeches at Second Reading, it is rather galling, when we are dealing with amendments, to hear people who could not make it give Second Reading speeches. If the noble Lord was a Member in another place, he would be drawn to order by the Speaker. Can he not bring himself to order and address the amendment?

[Lord True]

My Lords, the noble Lord goes directly to the point. He wishes to know why I was unable to be here.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord True]

I was honouring an engagement. It was not a social engagement: I was teaching medieval Greek culture on a university course in Italy, which I hope disqualifies me from being either a Little Englander or stupid, as some Brexit people have been described. I am not making a Second Reading speech but I was going to say that I rather thought that we were hearing a Second Reading debate again. Like everybody else, I read the debate. Looking at the groupings list for today, every one of the lead amendments seeks either to reverse Brexit or to delay its implementation. They are not about implementation or about progressing the matter but about obfuscation and delaying matters. I believe that there is a very important question that we need to address on the customs union.

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords—

[Lord True]

If I may, I will continue. The noble Lord has asked me not to talk too much. Let us have a debate on the customs union—a specific debate, not on a wide-ranging group. Let us hear the arguments. Maybe we will hear what the Labour Party’s policy is. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, says that it is one thing and other people say it is another. We will then have a short debate, or maybe a long debate, and we will take a decision on the matter. That is the way to proceed. However, in a debate that has already lasted an hour and three-quarters, we have heard about ID cards, chickens, Ireland, animals and all sorts of things, and we are not even going to have a vote on the matter. We have nine other groups to go through. We are repeating the Second Reading but it is not me who is doing that; it is many of your Lordships.

The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, who made an interesting and impressive speech raising important points, should decide on Report which of those elements he wishes to put to a vote and we will then decide. For now, we ought to get on. This Bill has gone through the elected Chamber and it comes to us from there. That elected Chamber is entirely satisfied with it.

[Noble Lords]

No!

[Lord True]

It passed the parliamentary rules. If a Bill goes through the other Chamber, it must be construed to have been approved by that Chamber. That is our constitutional arrangement. I beg to remind noble Lords that Manchester City is not the most popular football team in this country.

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, if these amendments were adopted by the Government, it is possible that there would be a successful negotiation. Let us look at the possibilities of a successful negotiation, which it is generally assumed there will be.

First, the Government have to make up their mind what their aims are. Having renounced the idea of staying in the single market or the customs union, it seems that they are aiming for a new kind of customs union and for access to the single market under a special kind of bespoke single market. The idea of having a new kind of frictionless customs union without being a member of the single market is wholly unrealistic. Nobody outside Britain regards the arrangements suggested by the Government as in any way credible, and the idea of a bespoke single market arrangement has been rejected by one European leader after another. Therefore, why is it assumed that when the Government come forward with their offer, it will be a serious basis for negotiation? At that stage, the negotiations may well break down.

Next, it is assumed that there will be a transition agreement. The Government envisage a period in which there will be an agreement on the framework and we will work out the details. During this period, which they say will last for two years and will include an implementation period, we will continue with the status quo. Maintaining the status quo, with acceptance of membership of the customs union and the single market, of the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and of a continuation of our making contributions, has been described—fairly accurately, I think—by both the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg as meaning that this country will become a “vassal state”. I do not think it can be assumed that there will be automatic agreement by the EU 27—the Commissioners’ negotiators—to this kind of transition agreement. There must surely also be a question as to whether the Conservative Party itself will accept it. And if there is no transition agreement, there will be no deal.

Most importantly, the trade negotiations were allowed to continue because there was an agreement in December about the Northern Ireland border, and alignment of regulations between the UK and Ireland. It was a fudge, which had a completely different meaning to Dublin and to the British Government. To Dublin it meant that Britain would stay within the customs union, and to the British Government it was a way of getting the trade negotiations going and preventing a breakdown at that stage. It is clear that the Government’s frictionless border is not going to be a working proposition—and it seems to me that the negotiation over the Irish border will itself be a breaking point. If there is a breaking point then, of course that means no deal.

My noble friend Lord Newby was wrong when he said that on the whole people had been too optimistic. I think he was being too optimistic, because he assumed that there would be an agreement. All the signs are that we have very good reason to suppose that there will be no deal. If there is no deal the whole economic position will look entirely different—and unless some of these amendments are passed, the odds are that there will be no deal.

--- Later in debate ---

My noble friend Lord Newby talked about the Brexit study, which absolutely must be published. It is an insult to the citizens of this country that they are patronised to the extent that they are denied the knowledge that the Government have about the likely impact of their plans. Why is that? Because they might actually want to say to the Government, “No, we do not want to go in this direction”. I say to the noble Lord, Lord True, that my right honourable friend Vince Cable did not and does not call for a rerun of the June 2016 referendum. What he and the Liberal Democrats, who are solidly united behind his leadership, are calling for is a final say on the deal itself. That is a completely different animal and it would be quite nice if some noble Lords opposite could actually grasp that point.

[Lord True]

If we have another referendum on the question of whether we should leave the European Union, to me that talks like a second referendum, walks like a second referendum and will be a second referendum.

[Baroness Ludford]

As many of the noble Lord’s soulmates often say, it would actually be a third referendum—so you pays your money and takes your choice. But it would be quite different because it would be in the knowledge of the actual detail of what Brexit entails, which people did not have in 2016.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, we have heard some excellent speeches on these amendments. I particularly commend the brilliant analysis of my noble friend Lord Hain and the very penetrating questions asked by him and my noble friend Lord Triesman. I hope that those questions receive a serious response from the Government at the end of the debate on this group of amendments, and that they receive the clear and authoritative answers which Parliament deserves.

I wish to speak briefly about the transition or implementation phase, however you want to describe it, which emerges very much from the issues addressed by these two amendments. I am deeply worried about the way these negotiations are going. The Government seem very muddled in their own mind and have a completely false appreciation of the situation they confront. I will explain why I think those two provisions apply in a moment. There are surely just three logical possibilities. One is that we do not have a transition phase at all and go straight from the present regime of full membership of the EU to some future but permanent post-Brexit arrangement. Another possibility is that we have a special so-called bespoke intermediate regime between full membership of the Union and whatever ensues on a long-term basis in our relations with the EU. The third possibility is what we have by way of a transition period—namely, that we continue with the present regime until after agreement has been reached on the future regime and continue with it for some time—I hope at least a year or two—to give businesses the maximum amount of time to adapt to what they will know at that point is the new regime that is coming.

The first of those possibilities—that we have no transition at all—is rightly regarded, I think on both sides of the House and certainly throughout commerce and industry, as a disastrous prospect which would involve immense risks and costs for our businesses, quite unnecessarily so if a suitable alternative is available. I think there is general agreement on that. I would hope there would be agreement that the sensible thing to do is to choose the third option and continue with the present regime for some years after full detailed agreement is reached on its successor, so there is time for adaptation by everybody concerned. That seems to me thoroughly sensible. Unfortunately, I am told that that has been vetoed by the Eurosceptics in the Tory party. We know that Mrs May is very much under the heel of Mr Johnson and Mr Gove and is terrified that someone is going to send 41, 47 or 48 letters to Sir Graham Brady, and does not know how many have already been written. In these circumstances, she cannot move on that. She cannot accept that because, apparently, the Eurosceptics think that is an extension of our membership of the EU and they do not like it on symbolic grounds. I may misunderstand the situation but I am told on good authority that that is the position, so what might seem the most rational and sensible answer to this problem, which would certainly get strong approval from both sides of this House, is excluded for party-political reasons.

Therefore, we confront what appears to be the Government’s preference at the moment, which is the second possibility: the bespoke regime. I say that the Government are in contradiction with themselves, which they certainly are, because while that arrangement is supposed to reduce risks for business and industry, it actually doubles them. It has already been pointed out by my noble friend Lord Hain that under those circumstances there would be two future regimes for business to go through. There would be two thresholds into that new regime rather than one or two cliff edges in that context, to use that cliché which everybody seems to be so fond of at present. That is a serious matter: a Government who are in contradiction with themselves.

The second problem I have is that the Government clearly seem to have misunderstood the position of their counterparties in these negotiations and, once again, to have been quite excessively euphoric about the impact of any proposals that they would make on their negotiating partners. In short, they are overreaching themselves. That is of course again a worrying situation when you go into any kind of negotiation. I say that because it is inconceivable that our continental partners would agree to have some bespoke intermediate regime; it would be quite extraordinary if they did. It would mean that any member of the European Union could issue notice under Article 50 and immediately negotiate some special bespoke arrangement, maximising, presumably, its own benefits and minimising its own costs at the expense of other members of the Union, quite contrary to the whole purposes of the Union. Therefore I cannot believe that very intelligent and competent people, which the European Commission and leaders of our partner nations certainly are, would go down that road for a moment. That leaves a strong possibility that the Government will find that they have a rough time ahead of them.

I suppose that you can go into a negotiation with a self-contradictory proposal, although that is rather a handicap and not a good augury for the success of the outcome, and you can go into a negotiation making a fundamental misjudgment about the objective situation in which you find yourself. However, to do both is clearly to be at a considerable handicap. I fear that these negotiations will not result at all in a favourable outcome in this country and that there will be a lot of gnashing of teeth, shedding of tears and, no doubt, shouting and imprecations of all kinds. The Government will no doubt say that it is all very unfair, everyone is being beastly to them and that it is not their fault, and there will be a mixture of paranoid self-pity and nationalist demagoguery, which the Tory party seems, sadly, very often to fall victim to. That will be a sad day if it happens to this country. I hope that it can be avoided, that my analysis is wrong and that the Minister will explain to me exactly why it is wrong.

[Lord True]

My Lords, the noble Lord opposite who just spoke constantly makes disparaging references to members of the Conservative Party. I suggest that he might have been better informed about what happens inside the Conservative Party if he had remained a member. I do not consider him a great authority on the subject.

I would also like to deal with a canard which I find offensive and which I hope will not colour the next 10 days of debate. This is this business about people who favour Brexit wanting to repudiate the Good Friday agreement. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, spoke with great passion on the subject, and I agreed with a great deal of what she said, certainly in the emotional content. She referred also to the cases she had taken which involved people in the Brighton case. Some of us were at Brighton on that day and many of us have lived with the consequences of the terrible events that took place and are passionately attached to the peace process and what happened in Northern Ireland. I am very proud that I served under a Prime Minister who had the courage to start the process that led to the peace agreement, Mr John Major. This false syllogism—it is the worst kind—which says, “Somebody who favours Brexit said that we might move away from the Good Friday agreement; therefore, every Conservative who favours Brexit is against the Good Friday agreement” is one that I find evil and offensive, and I hope it will be dropped. Those who express that view can answer for it, but I do not share it and I do not think that many on this side do.

Those are general points; the noble Lord, Lord Davies, took the debate a little wider, but I thought that, admirably, this debate had focused on a precise subject, which was raised clearly and forensically by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and by the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Triesman, which is how we deal with this question of a date. The problem of the date is that exit day for the purpose of the Bill—it is in the Bill, although I note that there are now amendments to these clauses—is mentioned in Clauses 2(1) and 3(2)(a), which define laws which are retained as those which are in effect “immediately before exit day”. If exit day were not on the same day as the Article 50 date, as my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom said, there would potentially be confusion. You would have a position where the UK had left the European Union but it was not clear what would happen with regard to retained law. This would create the very kind of uncertainty that noble Lords opposite say they wish to avoid. Therefore those two things have to march in parallel.

Here we come to the crux of the real argument behind these amendments and suggestions, which is that we should not leave so quickly as 29 March 2019; we should delay the matter; we should delay the implementation and extend the Article 50 period. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said in one of our recent debates, we might want to be members again and might come back to reapply. In the first place, as has been pointed out in this debate, those things would require unanimity on the other side, and in the second place it would require legislation in this House and an Act of Parliament, as the Gina Miller case suggested. The reality is that we would have an Act of Parliament if we were taking the thing further down; we are already having an Act of Parliament on the withdrawal agreement. The two things have to march in parallel. At the moment that date is set, accepted and understood in this Parliament and across Europe as 29 March 2019.

This is an Act of Parliament, so if Parliament wanted to define a date—we may not like the date of 29 March 2019, but it is the one in the process that has been set in motion—it would be legitimate. I do not particularly care for the amendment that was put in in the House of Commons—at the last minute in Committee, as someone pointed out—to give a power to the Secretary of State, but that is what the House of Commons has sent us. If that needs to be dealt with, deal with that question directly: ask the House of Lords. But do not decouple the date in the law from the date that is working in Article 50. That would create uncertainty and difficulty. It does not require a further Act of Parliament to set the exit day because this is an Act of Parliament; the Bill has already been approved by the other place and it is already there—we can just do it.

However, of course that is not the course that is being taken, because both these amendments seek to strike out the phrase “on exit day”. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has got out his dandelion clock—you used to blow on it when you wondered whether you would ever have a girlfriend, when you first came to be aware of those things. “This year, next year, sometime, never”, was it not? Many of the British people rather thought in 2016 that it might be this year. It has now been two years; many people in this House would agree that we have not got that far in two years, which is a bit disappointing, but it will not be this year. At least the Bill says that it will be next year: 29 March 2019. But along comes the noble Lord, Lord, Adonis, and—next year? No. It is now sometime. His amendment gives the impression that it will be on a date to be determined sometime, but we know that he means “never”. I know, the House knows, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, knows, that he would never vote for any exit day to be voted for by this Parliament.

Therefore we should not support a dandelion clock amendment. If we want to deal with the Secretary of State issue, that is a separate debate, but let us not create new and unnecessary uncertainty by removing the date and uncoupling the exit day and the Article 50 day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

To respond simply to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, it would be a political issue, not a legal or a treaty issue. My view has only the same weight as anybody else’s, but I would say that if one sought an extension in order to carry on a negotiation, it would be very doubtful that one would get it. However, if one sought an extension because Parliament had decided that the terms of the deal available were such that they should be put to the country at large in a second referendum, I am convinced that that request for an extension would be granted.

[Lord True]

It is very interesting that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has added a fifth element to the dandelion clock: this year, next year, sometime, never, and a second referendum. The idea of a second referendum is spreading across the Committee. However, returning to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made, I was taken up for using a phrase as a lay man, just as my physics teacher used to take me up for not really understanding “light”. When I talk about an Article 50 date, it is the date that flows as a consequence of the article and the decision that Parliament has taken by an overwhelming majority, as my noble friend Lord Hamilton said. The date of 29 March is the date that everybody, from Monsieur Barnier to everyone else, is working to. Therefore, in lay man’s terms, that is what I mean by the date which would have to be changed, and I submit it would have to be changed in tandem. That is why I oppose moving “exit day” and the date out of the Bill.