European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons & Money resolution & Programme motion & Ways and Means resolution
Friday 20th December 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

I intend to be as brief as I can, not least because the Bill before us is, in essence, the one that we debated in principle back in October. I also do not intend to delve into the various ways in which the Government have revised the legislation and abandoned their previous commitments on workers’ rights, parliamentary scrutiny and oversight, and child refugees. There will be time enough for those changes to be debated in Committee. I want to focus my brief remarks on the purpose and intent of the deal that this legislation will give effect to.

There is no question but that it did its job, but after 31 January, the slogan “Get Brexit done” will be exposed as the fiction that it is, because when this Bill becomes law, as it will, it will not mean that Brexit is done, and every single hon. and right hon. Member on the Conservative Benches who parroted that line during the recent election campaign knows full well that that is the case. Brexit is a process, not an act, and the passage of this legislation and the full implementation of the agreement by both parties is only the end of the beginning of that process and a prelude to a far more challenging phase of it.

In that next phase, the threat of a no-deal cliff edge will remain a distinct possibility, but it is not inevitable. There is, in my view, no chance that a comprehensive partnership will be concluded before the end of the transition period in December, but there is a chance that a free trade agreement can be concluded in that time. All it will require, of course, is a multitude of concessions from the Government—concessions that the Prime Minister will no doubt dress up as victories, just as he did with all those concessions he made to secure his deal in October. The reason why I do not rule out the possibility that a trade deal might be secured in less than 12 months exposes precisely the kind of agreement that the Government are aiming for.

If we set aside the very serious implications of this deal for Northern Ireland and the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom, the deal struck in October was the product of a conscious political decision on the part of this Government to break with the approach of their predecessor and abandon the possibility—and it was only ever a possibility, not a guarantee—of a trading relationship premised on a close alignment with the EU, in favour of guaranteeing a more distant one. Ministers are apt to label their objective for the future economic relationship as a “best in class” free trade agreement. That phrase is entirely meaningless. The deal that the legislation before us seeks to give effect to will set us on a path toward, at best, I fear, the most basic form of free trade agreement possible—one likely to be focused only on tariffs and quotas in goods trade, and one that will therefore necessarily involve only minimal coverage of services and significant non-tariff barriers on trade.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) alluded to, voting for this legislation today will leave the door open for the hardest form of Brexit possible, short of leaving the EU without an agreement at all—a Brexit that will entail a decisive break with the EU single market and its customs union, judicial framework and regulations. As the Government’s own economic analysis of previous deals makes clear, it will have a profoundly negative impact on our economy for years to come. We may not feel those economic consequences immediately. Indeed, there is every chance that we will see a surge in investment in the months ahead, but the harm—discernible or not to those it will impact on—will be felt and will take its toll in every constituency and every community across these isles over the coming decades.

I do not believe that a Brexit of the kind that this legislation will facilitate is the right way forward for our country or for those I represent. Indeed, I believe that it is a profound error. Each of those Members here today who share that view—indeed, each of us who served in the last Parliament—will no doubt continue to question whether we could have done more to avert this outcome, but those of us who were returned last week have a chance today to signal our clear opposition to it and to ensure that the deal before us and its consequences are wholly owned by the Conservative party.

The deal before us was a bad deal for our country in October when the Prime Minister agreed to it. It remains a bad deal today, and I am afraid that the scale of the Government’s victory last week has done nothing to alter that fact or my very firm conviction that the right thing to do today is to vote against it in principle.