European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Howarth of Newport

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting
Monday 20th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has remarked on the fact that the ambition and scope of this amendment are quite modest compared to the amendment that we debated last week in Committee. The redrafting has been wise. Gone is the requirement that Parliament should approve the negotiating mandate and stance of the Government and in effect give them their marching orders in the negotiations. The Executive must be allowed to do their job and in turn Parliament should do its job, and we should respect the separation of powers. It is for the Executive to negotiate the future relationship and it is for Parliament to hold the Executive to account. Parliament has numerous means of holding the Executive to account in the form of Questions, debates, Select Committee inquiries and many other procedural resources, and I anticipate that it will use that array of resources very extensively in the months to come.

I would add that I do not think that it is appropriate for parliamentary procedure to be prescribed in statute, and it is particularly inappropriate that this unelected House should make proposals of this nature to the House of Commons, which I suspect will not take very kindly to being told how to do its job.

All in all, I welcome the modification of the approach that is reflected in the amendment and I congratulate my noble friend and her colleagues who have thought it wiser to proceed on this basis rather than the one proposed the other day.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is an unusual Bill in a number of ways. We were debating in Committee that it has a clause which restates that parliamentary sovereignty has been established, so we are talking about some fairly fundamental constitutional issues. The relationship between Parliament and the Government is one about which I have heard Ministers make a number of self-contradictory comments in the days and weeks since the election in the rather triumphalist tone they have adopted. One Minister referred during the Committee stage to restoring the “normal relationship” between Parliament and the Government, by which I think he meant a nice safe majority in the Commons so that it does not criticise too much what the Government want to do.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, talked about the dualist approach to international negotiations whereby treaties, once they have been agreed, have to be transposed into domestic law and thus Parliament comes in, as it were, after the event. Given the importance of this negotiation, if one does believe in the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, the Government need to carry Parliament with them. That is the constitutional set of issues here, and we look forward to further discussions on what the constitution commission the Government are going to set up will be about. If it has the sort of forethought and consideration which was shown in the suggestion thrown out this weekend that the House of Lords might move to York, I have to say that it is not going to be a very good commission because it is quite clear that there was no thought behind that whatever.

It is not just the constitution; it is also about wisdom. Some of us heard the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, remark in Committee that in his long career he had noted that it is when Governments are most self-confident and convinced that they can survive criticism that they are most likely to make mistakes. Here we are after an election in which the Government have established a majority on less than 45% of the vote, but it is a majority in the Commons according to our current antiquated rules. The wisdom of carrying the public and Parliament with them as they negotiate—particularly if they are going to negotiate for as hard a break with the European Union as the Chancellor has suggested—seems to me very powerful.

While I was at Chatham House, I was much involved in the various discussions about establishing the single market, and I remember all the talk then about why the Prime Minister was persuaded that the single market was in Britain’s interest and the extent to which we were taking our regulations for a large number of industrial and other standards from the United States extraterritorially. The Government are now suggesting that we will establish our own independent standards. An editorial in the Times this morning said that maybe we should not exclude chlorinated chicken, so we can begin to see that, if we move away from European standards, we will move under American standards, and that will be part of what emerges from the US/UK trade agreement.

I support this amendment on constitutional grounds and on the grounds of political wisdom. Parliament deserves to be carried along with the Government and the Government need to explain and justify their objectives as they proceed.