European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Willoughby de Broke Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, but it is a pleasure also to disagree profoundly with her suggestion of having a second referendum.

I would like to begin by congratulating the Prime Minister on her excellent Lancaster House speech; it had vision and clarity, and was exactly what we have been hoping to hear for many, many years. She was quite clear that she accepted the result of the referendum and that the result was “out”—no ifs, no buts, no EEA, no one foot in and one foot out, but a clear and clean Brexit. That was what the referendum called for and that is what this Government are going to deliver; I am very pleased with her for doing that. It was, as the noble Lord, Lord Lang, called it yesterday, a transformative speech—it was actually a UKIP speech, and I am very pleased with her for delivering that, too.

Some of us in this House have been waiting for very many years—it has been more than 23 years since we debated the Maastricht treaty in this House—to hear a British Prime Minister at last saying what Mrs May said at Lancaster House. We asked for a referendum during the debate on the Maastricht treaty but were sadly defeated in the Lobbies due to the very effective whipping of the hereditary Peers by Lord Hesketh, who later saw the light and joined UKIP. I am only sorry that many of the Peers who took part in those debates with us are not here today to see history made. I think in particular of Lord Bruce of Donington, Lord Shore, Lord Moran and Lord Harris of High Cross, who were effective speakers against our membership of the EU long ago, and they should be remembered for that. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, who for the whole of his political life has been an opponent of our membership of the European Union. He was taken ill two weeks ago in the House. I later saw him in hospital and he said he wanted to be here today but sadly his doctors have told him that he should not travel to come and speak today—I think it may be something to do with Mr Blair crawling out from under his wallet and telling us to rise up.

I should remind your Lordships that this House already voted to leave the EU during the passage of my noble friend Lord Pearson’s European Communities (Amendment) Bill of 1997; here it is. This House—the House of Lords—voted to leave the European Union. In spite of the attempt to torpedo the Bill by the Lib Dems—for whom no surrender to Brussels is ever enough—we won that debate. I say to noble Lords today that they have already swallowed the camel; they should not now strain at the gnat in passing this Bill.

Reading this debate now, it seems to me striking how the arguments we made then are still relevant today—we have been making them for 20 years. The problem we then had was that we were making such arguments to Governments who, for whatever reason, were committed to what they laughably called our European destiny. So we did not get anywhere making those arguments to Governments, but, last summer, we were finally able to take those arguments directly to the electorate, with the result we saw in the referendum: an out vote.

Thankfully, we are coming to the end of the days when we had to ratify every EU measure that was put before us in this House or in the other place—we could oppose them; we could debate them; we could even occasionally convince, although perhaps only ourselves—but, at the end of the debate, we had to listen to the noble Lord or the noble Baroness the Minister telling us that it was “the Government’s treaty obligation” and that was the end of the story.

From a historical perspective, when we look back and think that it was only in 1926 that women were given the vote in this country, we should be rather surprised and perhaps shocked at that. I was equally shocked, and still am—I did a little research—to find that it was only in 1965 that President Johnson gave African Americans the vote in America. In 50 or 100 years, when people come to look at this debate here, they will be equally shocked and surprised that, until 2016, this country of Britain was still contracting out its laws to be made by people whom we did not elect, we did not know and we could not sack. The time of “pay and obey” is done, and not before time.