European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Wilson of Dinton Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Dinton (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, particularly on the question of trade negotiations. In the mid-1960s I was a very junior member of the team that negotiated the Kennedy round. I learned some lessons about trade negotiations then, one of which was that they do not bring out the nice side of other people: they bring out hard-headed self-interest and require grind, and the last thing you should ever be is in a hurry. He is absolutely right.

It goes without saying that the House must allow the Bill to pass. It would be unthinkable to try to wreck it or block it: it would do damage and the country could not afford the chaos that would follow if the Bill were in some way to not reach the statute book. That is not worth spending time on. But the Bill does need to be improved, which is where this House is absolutely in its element. This is a great opportunity for the country that we must use. We must protect and promote the sovereignty of Parliament. It is amazingly ironic that a strategy which claims to be motivated by the wish to restore sovereignty to Parliament appears to be trying to do it by bypassing that sovereignty. We cannot live with that.

If I may indulge one prejudice, it is that I hate the word “appropriate”. When I was in government, if I saw any draft in any official document which had “appropriate” in it, I would reach for my red pen. In my experience, it is either an indication of sloppy thinking by someone who has not thought out what they mean, or it is devious—and neither is right. “Appropriate” is inappropriate for this Bill, and I shall lend whatever weight I have to supporting anyone who comes up with better phrasing. That should be one of our agreed objectives.

I would like to ensure that the Bill protects the human rights of people who live in this country and am baffled by the exclusion of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. That needs careful examination. But we must, above all, protect the unity of the United Kingdom. I am alarmed by the position we are in on Northern Ireland and the risks that we are running. The use of slippery language, however clever—and “alignment” is, in a kind of awful way, clever—could lead to terrible consequences and slip over into things which no one ever intended.

Clearly, we have a big task and there is more one could say, but we need to ensure that the task of implementing the Bill is manageable and something that the Civil Service can do. I am constantly impressed by the scale of the challenge which the Civil Service faces now—the biggest challenge of any generation since the Second World War.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds used a lovely phrase, “corruption of public discourse”, which he deplored. That phrase should linger in the air, because it is what we are experiencing at the moment. I put in a plea that the Civil Service should not become subject to the corruption of public discourse. There appears in the press to be a tendency for Ministers, ex-Ministers and MPs to blame or play politics with the head of service and people who work for him. I have great admiration for Sir Jeremy Heywood and the people who serve the Government with him. I have absolutely no doubt that they are putting their very best people and efforts into serving the Government to the extent that they possibly can, and I deplore anyone who imputes lower motives to them.

If a Minister starts blaming his civil servants, I always sense that they are shifting the blame because they sense the failure of their own policies. They should say to themselves, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars”—or in our civil servants—“but in ourselves”. The trouble is that the people who argued for Brexit knew what they wanted to get away from but are not agreed about where they want to go to. That means that we are still in the most divisive phase.

Our membership of Europe has always been divisive. It was divisive in the 1960s, and it has been divisive in the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. There is nothing new about that. But at the moment Brexit is making it a bitter division. If Brexit were to have a successful outcome, it would need by now to have generated a growing swell of support—a sense that, even if you did not like it, something was going to happen. That is not what we feel at all at the moment.

I am not starry-eyed about the EU—I think it has weaknesses and flaws—but I would favour continued membership because I believe that giving up our membership will leave us economically poorer and politically weaker. We should play our part from the inside and not pull out. But we are where we are. We have a flawed Bill and a flawed strategy, we have to try to limit the damage and I intend to lend my vote to that wherever I can.

I have one final point. The eyes of history are on us: they are on everyone involved in Brexit. History will be written by the young, not by our generation. It will be written by the young, and the young are in large part passionate in their wish to remain members of Europe. I think history will be very harsh on people who argue for Brexit and make a mess of it.