Brexit: Parliamentary Approval of the Outcome of Negotiations with the European Union

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I am saying that they have overplayed their hand. I believe, and I think the noble Lord will agree with me, that the EU is about compromise and consensus-building. I know from my own experience in the Council of Ministers that unfair outcomes, often promoted in silken terms by the French and their supporters, sometimes have to be moderated. Other member states to which I have spoken recently are concerned about the damage from no deal and are increasingly seeing the problem. So the climate is gradually improving, and if we returned to Brussels with unity and resolve, we could prevail.

There is also a question as to whether the backstop is really needed. I believe that the Good Friday agreement, which has widespread support everywhere, is a natural backstop, and that it will be taken into account in the future relationship, deal or no deal. An open border is no bar to the enforcement of different arrangements, as I know from operating right across Ireland in my time in retail. We had enforcement of different rates on alcohol and of VAT and other taxes and regulations. My noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford has already made this important point.

A major change to the deal is necessary, in my view, to secure support in the Commons.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I recall that the noble Baroness was a civil servant, I think in Defra. Non-tariff issues are not unimportant in this respect. Animal health regulations across the border will clearly mean inspections. If, for example, there were an outbreak of foot and mouth or BSE in one part of Ireland, the idea that the border would remain open for more than five minutes seems a little fanciful. Borders are not simply about tariffs. Regulations, including phytosanitary regulations, are extremely important.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I agree about the importance of the phytosanitary arrangements, but I would point out that my recollection is that when there was foot and mouth the Irish border closed, in spite of the fact that we were in the single market. These are things that you have to tackle together, and with good will—which is of course what I am seeking—we could do that. I am trying to explain the argument as I see it. Perhaps I can make some progress.

My feeling is that the backstop needs to be taken out of the withdrawal agreement, and a substitute, requiring best endeavours and so on, put into the political agreement or a side letter instead. This is the kind of flexibility that is shown in business negotiations—for example, in a major merger—where both sides want to agree, as I believe they do here. I was in Salisbury Cathedral on Friday for a service for the conversion of St Paul. Saul, as he was then called, was a brilliant, educated man pursuing the goal of destroying the Christians. After his conversion on the road to Damascus, he saw the light. That is what we need to happen in Brussels to move things forward.

Lastly, I have a warning about the work on no deal. The detail of what the Government do is critical and there are two things that we have to worry about: short-term chaos and longer-term interest and damage to this country. I am worried that too much attention is being given to the former and not enough to the latter. The focus is domestic, and not enough attention is being given to the implications for our negotiating position on the backstop and on future trade negotiations with both the EU and third countries. I have a particular concern about an assumption in some quarters that the UK will not impose tariffs in the event of no deal. This would be a disaster because exporting member states would not feel the pain that they need to feel. Our own domestic industries would be decimated—agriculture, for example—as third-country imports poured in at zero tariffs under the most favoured nation rules while we paid charges on our exports. We would have no negotiating leverage with anyone now or in future, as we would have given away our revenue source from our ability to levy or tax at the border or to offer preferential markets in future, as well as our current powerful position in the EU institutions.

All the work on no deal is being conducted in secret, and business leaders have told me they have to sign NDAs for involvement in no-deal planning. I can understand this, but ask my noble friend the Minister to confirm that he accepts some of my concerns and is looking at variable tariffs, such as for imports from both the EU and elsewhere. Obviously they need to be lower on things such as bananas and oranges, which we do not produce, but higher for dairy products, meat and other things that we do produce. We do not want to be in a no-deal situation—I completely agree with that—but there must be contingency planning, which must embrace the wider interest.

I was glad to hear from my noble friend the Leader about the timetable for Brexit measures and the role she saw for our committees. The Government’s approach to organising their scrutiny and challenge in this House is right. We have a duty to progress these measures in an orderly way. It is a vital part of our function in this House, and I will not be supporting the Opposition’s Motion this evening.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, a number of noble Lords, including in particular the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, have remarked that much of Britain’s broader public are longing for an end to these endless debates about Brexit. Some within your Lordships’ House probably share that view. However, leaving at the end of March will not bring an end to domestic debate. The Government have hardly begun to negotiate on the future relationship and there are still deep divisions within the Government and in the Conservative Party about what that future relationship should be. The seven speeches from the Conservative Party that we have already heard in this debate show that it has many different opinions. So we are facing a further two years or more in which domestic issues take second place to European ones while Ministers struggle to decide what their party will accept.

If Theresa May had taken a different position when she became Prime Minister, we might now be in a different place. She could have noted the thinness of the majority and the divisions in public opinion and could have stood up to the hardliners in her party and gone directly for a Norwegian option, membership of the European Economic Area and the closest association possible. If she had, we might well now be leaving with the negotiations almost completed—but she did not. She set out red lines to satisfy her right wing, appointed ideological hardliners to key positions in the Brexit negotiations and divided the country and the party more deeply. Here we are, up against the lines she set, and unprepared either to leave or to stay.

Last week the Prime Minister declared that to question the outcome of the referendum and ask the public to think again,

“could damage social cohesion by undermining faith in our democracy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/1/19; col. 26.]

That is a pretty strong statement. However, the country is already divided. The last referendum damaged social cohesion. The campaign itself brought out underlying divisions—not just about the European Union. A right-wing extremist murdered an MP before the vote. Hate crime shot up immediately after the referendum and has stayed up since then—against eastern Europeans, against people of Asian and Afro-Caribbean descent although born in Britain, and against outsiders of all sorts.

When Theresa May was appointed Prime Minister, she made an idealistic speech about healing the nation’s divisions, but she then pandered to the nativist elements in her own party, labelling those who opposed leaving the European Union “citizens of nowhere”—this from the leader of a party which receives large donations from financiers with offshore businesses and which has accepted contributions from Russians resident in Britain, but who nevertheless stoops to labelling those British citizens who believe in European and international co-operation as having divided loyalties. That is how English Protestants labelled Catholics 350 years ago and nationalists labelled Jews.

Of course, the right-wing media went further with headlines about “traitors” and “enemies of the people”, attacking judges, the liberal elite and the establishment. I love to hear Jacob Rees-Mogg attacking the establishment because it is the ultimate absurdity. Neither the Prime Minister nor other responsible senior Ministers have deplored such attacks or warned that they are feeding social division. A recent survey shows, not surprisingly, that Britain has become a much angrier society over the past two years. That is partly because of the deteriorating quality of our political debate and partly because of the Government’s failure to address the many other causes of social division, in their preoccupation with internal party rivalries and disputes.

For more than a century Britain has been a liberal democracy built upon reasoned debate, respect for evidence in policy-making and continued dialogue among politicians of opposing views. We now face, within Britain as well as elsewhere, a surge of “illiberal democracy”, as Prime Minister Orbán of Hungary has labelled it, founded on the exploitation of popular fears, antagonism to foreigners and international institutions, the denigration of domestic opponents and a sweeping disregard for consistency or evidence. President Trump is one of the most skilled exponents of illiberal democracy. After all, one of his campaign promises was that Mexico would pay to build a wall along the United States’ southern border. Two years later, without any sense of shame, he shut down the federal Government to try to force Congress to pay for the wall instead.

We have had similarly illiberal and irrational promises here. We were told repeatedly by Liam Fox and others that the German car industry would force the EU to give Britain whatever we demanded if we left, and that the exit negotiations would be the easiest negotiations ever. We were also assured that leaving the European Union would resolve the problem of immigration, even though in no year did the majority of immigrants arriving come from inside the EU. The leave campaign promised groups within the Asian community that closing off European immigration would leave more space for others to arrive.

Now we are warned that the will of the people—a phrase that authoritarian and anti-democratic Governments have long been fond of—requires a much harder, nastier and domestically damaging Brexit, because there can be no reconsideration or turning back. We should not be surprised that the most committed Brexiters overlap with those who deny the reality of climate change and those who promise that the best way to increase government revenue is to cut tax, nor that the same people who warn of the threat of violence on the streets of English cities if Brexit is not delivered in full dismiss the prospect of any return to violence in Northern Ireland as exaggerated. They choose what they want to believe.

Boris Johnson has shown the same happy disregard for consistency and evidence in denying that he played a major role in the Brexit campaign or even raised the spectre of millions of Turks swarming across our frontiers; so has Jacob Rees-Mogg, in switching from a passionate commitment to establishing parliamentary sovereignty again to now calling on the Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament to prevent a democratically elected Parliament delaying an unprepared and un-negotiated Brexit. I am sure that, as a good historian and a Roman Catholic, he knows that King James II prorogued Parliament repeatedly to prevent MPs blocking his pro-Catholic legislation, and ended up in exile as a result. Perhaps the same fate may reach the Conservative Party. I do not know whether he and others would go to Switzerland or Singapore.

Meanwhile, the regional divide between Britain’s richest and poorest regions remains the widest in Europe, and the overall divide between rich and poor is shameful for an open democracy. London has a structural surplus of housing for non-resident rich—built precisely for citizens of nowhere under London’s Conservative mayor, Mr Johnson—and a structural shortage of affordable housing for British citizens. We are a divided country—economically and socially, as well as politically—and going through with Brexit is likely only to make those divisions worse.

This country desperately needs constructive political leadership to bring us back together. It is now clear, sadly, that we will not get constructive leadership from this Prime Minister, more concerned with her doomed effort to hold together her own party than with the rest of the country. The task for all of us, in both Houses, is to find a way out of the present political, social, economic and constitutional crisis that can begin to re-establish our damaged social cohesion. That will require cross-party co-operation and a quality of political leadership that has been lacking since 2016. It may also need to include another referendum.