Brexit: UK Plans

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 9th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I have no doubt that the Prime Minister does and will continue to exercise her authority. I want to reassure noble Lords again: the Cabinet is united. We want to get the best possible deal for the UK and the EU, and to ensure a smooth and orderly withdrawal, and that is what we are all working towards.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s acceptance now that there are broad security dimensions of leaving the European Union and that the European Union has always had large security elements involved with it. I recall the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, denying that that was the case, and the leave campaign certainly did not accept it. Can the Government begin to tell us something about how they will maintain the relationship both on cross-border security and in terms of defence, foreign policy and intelligence, after we leave? Looking round the Chamber, I think there are one or two Members old enough to remember, for example, a body called the Western European Union. It existed solely to allow the United Kingdom to have conversations with the then six members of the European Community on foreign and security policy when we were otherwise outside the room. Do we imagine that we are going to try to persuade others to set up some sort of special arrangement of this sort or will we hope to maintain, for example, the current multilateral intelligence arrangements through associate membership of Europol? As the position paper on this said, these are clearly in our national interests.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I entirely agree with the noble Lord that this is an extremely important area. As I said, it is very encouraging that the European Council’s negotiating guidelines also identify the importance of partnerships against crime and terrorism. The specific details will obviously be for the negotiations but I say again that no pre-existing model of co-operation between the EU and third countries replicates the scale and depth of the collaboration that exists between the EU and the UK in this area. We want to maintain that, which is why we want to work towards new arrangements that go beyond any arrangements the EU has in this area at the moment.