European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Committee: 5th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Prosser (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Foulkes and I will speak to Amendment 54, which stands in my name. I will not detain noble Lords for long because much of what I intended to say has already been said and covered. Agreement on the wording of this amendment has been expressed by various Benches in this House, so this is not simply a one-sided argument. It seems to me that this country’s reputation globally will simply go down the Suwannee if we are prepared, at one moment, to say that we agree to certain protections for people who have become embroiled in this dreadful situation in which we find ourselves and then, a moment later, decide that, no, we do not agree with that and will not give those protections. What will people think of us as a nation if that is how the leadership of this country behaves?

My amendment would extend the requirement for certain persons to be able to refer their legal matters back to the European Court of Justice to a period of eight years. I trust that noble Lords will understand the need for such an extension. There is a statute of limitations existing for six years; if we do not include a period of coverage, people whose claims may well start quite late after the leaving date may well find themselves without that coverage, which I hope will be agreed.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I have put my name to Amendment 52, which was spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and I support his comments and those made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, a moment ago. I wish to place the amendment within its context, which is EU citizenship—the citizenship of people resident in the United Kingdom, and on the European mainland. These comments are particularly relevant in the context of the interventions of the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Liddle, a moment ago.

I am a European; that is my identity. I am Welsh; that is my nationality and, as noted on my European passport, I am a citizen of the United Kingdom. I have rights and obligations under each of these three headings. Some of those rights are protected by international law, some by European law, some by UK law and some by Welsh law. Taking established rights away from a citizen is a very serious matter. Citizens are protected in generality against any negative impact upon them that may arise from taking some of these rights away from them.

There is clearly a wide range of such rights but I shall refer to only one. Page 32 of my passport states that if you need consular assistance when you are outside the EU in a country where there is no British embassy or consulate, you can get help from the embassy or consulate of another member state of the EU. That is a right that I have today but which I may lose as a result of the UK leaving the EU. In other words, Brexit may be taking away from me a right that I currently have by virtue of being a European citizen. This is one of many rights that we have as citizens living within the EU. For those rights to be meaningful, there clearly has to be a process of redress whereby a citizen can seek to protect his or her rights through the courts, and in this context Amendment 52 is highly relevant as it would allow citizens to pursue their rights in the European courts after exit day, where that is relevant.

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

The noble Lord is making an extremely good speech with which I agree, so I am sorry to break in. He referred to being a citizen of the UK. Under Maastricht, he is also a citizen of the EU. Is he aware that the ECJ is beginning to receive many messages from British citizens, both here and living in other EU countries, asking for the ECJ to consider giving protection to them even post-Brexit if necessary?

[Lord Wigley]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for his helpful intervention. We are all European citizens; it is a European passport that we carry at the moment. Some of our rights are enshrined in the context of Europe, some in the context of the UK and some—in my case, as I mentioned a moment ago—in the context of Wales.

I am not going to speak at length to this amendment because there are several noble Lords who will speak with greater authority on the legal positions involved. However, I want to use the principles underpinning the rights of citizens in the EU to say a brief word about EU citizenship in a broader context: the rights afforded to us at present as citizens of the EU and the status of those rights once we leave. These matters are highly germane to the amendments before us—and they will not go away.

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

I want to present to the Committee an observation: according to the December agreement reached by the Prime Minister, citizens of Northern Ireland will still be EU citizens after we leave. I am not sure where that leaves the rights of everyone else in the UK.

[Lord Wigley]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for introducing that point; I was going to move on to it a little later but I shall do so now. Northern Ireland creates a precedent, if the undertakings that have been reported are indeed carried out. It is a part of a union of countries that may be retaining its rights after the other parts of the UK may lose theirs. Of course, there is a precedent in the context of Ireland: people in the Irish Republic maintained many of the rights relating to the UK that they previously enjoyed after the Republic was formed, and for many people those rights continue up to today. As the noble Baroness has said, many of the rights relating to the EU of citizens of Northern Ireland may well continue after Brexit. If it is possible to negotiate such rights for some of the citizens of the UK, why cannot such rights be ongoing for all its citizens?

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[Lord Wigley]

I am sure we shall come on to the position of Gibraltar in greater detail at another time. In many ways this parallels the issues that arise in the context of Northern Ireland. If a solution to Northern Ireland were enshrined which allowed the free movement of people and goods across the border, that might well solve the problem of Gibraltar as well. We need to bear in mind our responsibilities to Gibraltar and to get an amicable settlement which would be acceptable in the European context, and therefore acceptable to Spain as well as to the people of Gibraltar. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for raising this.

I want to use the principles underpinning the rights of citizens in the UK to say a brief word about citizenship in the broader context and about the rights afforded to us at present as citizens of the EU, as well as the status of these rights once we leave. These matters are highly germane to the amendments before us. Incidentally, there is an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons this afternoon, initiated by my Plaid Cymru colleagues, on this precise topic.

By pursuing what may become a no-deal Brexit, the UK Government would, in effect, strip—at least potentially—our citizens of some of their rights. Our rights to travel, live and work across Europe will be curtailed. Our children’s rights—

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord. Currently, a British lawyer, dentist or doctor can practise in any other European country. There is a reciprocal right for nationals of other EU countries to practise here. We are losing dentists and doctors because of the certification process which will be subject to negotiation on the basis of mutual recognition. Is this right, which could be curtailed, justiciable under his amendment?

[Lord Wigley]

Of course, this amendment provides a mechanism to create a redress for people who feel that they are losing these rights. It may not be the only mechanism available. There may be provisions under international law, which I shall mention before I close. It is not only our rights that are being curtailed but the rights of our children—the right to study in any of the other 27 countries across the EU may well be lost. It is questionable whether, in the context of these rights, we shall thereafter be able to call ourselves European in the full meaning of the word. I am a European. I am a Welsh European and no Government should be able to take away from me or from any citizen of these islands their right to their European identity, nor any of the practical rights they currently hold by virtue of that identity.

It is by virtue of their de facto European citizenship that the citizens of these islands currently have recourse to the European court. Stripping people of their citizenship against their will is illegal under international law. I have tabled another amendment which explores the retention of EU citizenship. I hope this will be debated at a later stage. Suffice it to say, at this stage we need these amendments to safeguard the position of people facing such a serious threat after Brexit. I am delighted to support the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, of particular interest to me in this Bill is the way in which ordinary people would be most directly affected by leaving the EU. I have tabled Amendment 210, which asks the Government to support retention of European citizenship where the individual British citizen wishes to do so. Although not explicitly stated in the amendment, it would also cover those who had not yet acquired European citizenship at the time of Brexit. I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, and the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Davies of Stamford.

The importance of European citizenship and the effect of its loss at the individual level has not been sufficiently considered or explored, either before or in the 20 months since the referendum. Nevertheless, its retention has been consistently advocated by Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s representative on Brexit. Last year, it was the subject of a paper by Volker Roeben, then professor of international law at Swansea University, for Plaid Cymru MEP, Jill Evans. From the Government’s point of view, a useful conclusion of this paper was a belief in the feasibility of an associate citizenship, if citizenship rights were to be extinguished after Brexit. Roeben’s belief that this should be so was given some traction following the submission last month of a request to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling in the case brought by British residents of Amsterdam. It is early days yet, but it is worth noting, in the context of my amendment, this statement from the judgment:

“Once legally acquired, EU citizenship is an independent source of rights and obligations that cannot be simply reduced or affected by actions of a national government”.


The loss of European citizenship would not just adversely affect the British abroad and, indeed, European citizens in the UK, but every British person living in the UK. Following the referral to the ECJ, QC Jolyon Maugham, supporter of those who brought the case in the Netherlands, made a particular point of saying that the final outcome of this case would have implications for residents of the UK as much as those abroad. The loss would be of all those rights that EU citizenship embodies, both in terms of the principle of that citizenship—the loss of identity that many would feel deeply, and which cannot be overestimated—and the very real practical concerns about rights and opportunities that would be lost or compromised, including being able to freely travel, work, study and raise a family abroad.

This is likely to have the greatest effect on young people living in the UK—an effect with no silver lining and which can only register negatively, as a loss. At the level of the individual citizen, it is not replaced by anything. European citizenship is additional to British citizenship, and that is the reality, whatever the outcome of the case begun in Amsterdam. As Sunday’s Observer editorial responding to Theresa May’s speech, but which might just as well have been referring to the potential loss of citizenship, put it:

“It was a defeat for young people, British and European, who, more so than older generations, will perforce inhabit an ugly new world of harder borders, work permits, bureaucracy and pervasive state intrusion”.


The referendum notwithstanding, many British people, both abroad and in this country, are angry that they should be stripped of their European citizenship without their own individual consent. For all these reasons, a Brexit that does not allow the retention of individual European citizenship for those who wish to retain that citizenship is a hard Brexit—more than that, it is a brutal Brexit, whatever the outcome on the wider national scale in terms of any trade deals.

What is being asked for in this amendment is very simple, and the precedent already exists, as this is no different from the dual citizenships that some in this House possess. The amendment asks only for the continuing acknowledgement of that additional citizenship. Do we now wish to start stripping people of all citizenships that are not British—for example, Australian, Canadian, American, Indian, Chinese? The list goes on.

At the level of the individual, the only solution that would be realistic or fair is that the 52%—or whatever the figure is now—may hand in their European passports and renounce their European citizenship, and the 48% retain theirs. The reality, of course, would be quite different. We have heard in the news about noted leavers who have bought, or are buying, EU citizenship as we speak. As I am sure others in this House do, I know of those who voted leave who, in circumstances where they are lucky enough to do so, are applying for European citizenship for themselves and/or their children, sometimes through having a husband or wife who is an EU citizen. Hypocritical? Of course it is, but it is also testament to the significance and desirability of retaining that citizenship and the real loss involved, with those who are lucky or rich enough becoming the first-class citizens of tomorrow, when previously it was an entirely equal arrangement for all of us.

The loss of European citizenship will in itself create an unequal society within the UK. Look too at Northern Ireland, as has been remarked upon: all those born there—about 89% of that country—will retain European citizenship, further turning the rest of us in the UK, in effect, into second-class citizens. Of course, I am not suggesting that Irish citizenship be given up. Late last year, Theresa May gave her agreement to an understanding that goes back to 1917 and that was rightly confirmed in the Good Friday agreement. Better, surely, that all of us who wish to should be able to retain our individual European citizenship. The Minister may say that that offer is not on the table, but a Government and a Parliament that really want to bring this country back together and heal the divisions would take the initiative and put it on the table. That is the right course of action, and I hope that the Government accept this amendment.

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The question of Irish citizens has been raised. I want to be a little clearer about that point. This is something that predates the Belfast agreement but, to put it into context, the position is not that Northern Ireland citizens will remain citizens of the European Union. The position is this: since 1921, although I may be corrected on that, but certainly since the Belfast agreement, certain residents of Northern Ireland are entitled to apply for and be granted citizenship of the Irish Republic and therefore to hold a passport from the Irish Republic, although not all do, for reasons that we do not need to go into in any detail. Where a citizen or resident of Northern Ireland also holds a passport of the Republic of Ireland, post Brexit, in their capacity as a citizen of the Republic of Ireland they will retain their EU citizenship. Let us be clear that EU citizenship is linked directly to citizenship of a member state.

[Lord Wigley]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord and I am following what he is saying. Is he in fact confirming that there will be two classes of citizen in Northern Ireland: those who hold Irish citizenship as well and will be able, if there is a border, to cross it totally freely and thus into the rest of Europe, and a second class of UK citizens in Northern Ireland who will not be able to do so?

[Lord Keen of Elie]

No, my Lords, there will not be two classes of citizens. Let us take a simple example. If I hold USA citizenship and UK citizenship, I can pass between the UK and the USA because I am a citizen of both countries. If I am a citizen of the UK and a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, I can pass between the two countries because I am a citizen of each state. It is not a case of classification; it is simply a matter of status.