European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Mike Gapes Excerpts

Committee: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leslie]

Before I give way, I have to confess that I am a serial offender when it comes to not necessarily speaking in plain and clear terms, so I am not pretending in any way to be the world’s greatest simple communicator on such things. I am sure I will transgress this afternoon.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

Another advantage of new clause 21 is that it would enable the Government to give us a clear explanation and perhaps say that “regulatory alignment” and “regulatory convergence” mean the same thing.

[Mr Leslie]

My hon. Friend takes the words out of my mouth. He has spotted that the famous paragraph 49 of the phase 1 agreement between the negotiators on the EU side and the negotiators on the UK side talks about maintaining regulatory alignment, which is a phrase that manages to span all sorts of different interpretations. The EU and Republic of Ireland side believes “full alignment” to mean full alignment and that we will essentially have the same arrangements as we have now. But when the Prime Minister returned to the House of Commons, she sort of said, “Oh, no, it is a very narrow meaning in the terms set out in particular paragraphs of the Belfast agreement.” It is amazing how words can mean one thing to one listener and another thing to an entirely different listener.

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[Mr Grieve]

I am afraid that I disagree totally with my right hon. Friend. In the last 40 years, we decided to pool sovereignty as a matter of national interest and necessity. This is a totally different issue; it is about our domestic law. When it comes to matters of domestic law, this House does not have the necessary constraint, which is the very reason why I have asked these questions. I am quite confident that my hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench will be able to provide some cogent answers to the points I have raised.

[Mike Gapes]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

[Mr Grieve]

All right, but this is the last one.

[Mike Gapes]

Is there not also another difference, which is that decisions within the European Union are not just taken by meetings of the Council of Ministers, as there is a co-decision process that involves elected Members of the European Parliament representing all 28 member states?

[Mr Grieve]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I do not want to get dragged into revisiting the way in which the European Union works. The European Union has many flaws, and there are many issues on which I have seen fit to criticise it during my years in the House—including, sometimes, the way it goes about its business. Having said that, this constant conflation of the two issues when we are carrying out scrutiny of what will be domestic legislation is, in my view, not helpful. We need to focus on what we are doing. If we do, we will come up with the right answers.

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[Paul Blomfield]

The worry is that either they are not conducting them or they are conducting them and not sharing them in the way that was required.

[Mike Gapes]

Could not there be another, far more simple, explanation—that the Secretary of State is heading a Department that should be renamed “the Department for Winging It”?

[Paul Blomfield]

That is probably the sort of phrase that the Secretary of State might use on some occasions.

On 2 February 2017, the Secretary of State told the House:

“We continue to analyse the impact of our exit across the breadth of the UK economy, covering more than 50 sectors—I think it was 58 at the last count—to shape our negotiating position.”—[Official Report, 2 February 2017; Vol. 620, c. 1218.]

Was he right? Or was the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) right when he said recently that the Secretary of State

“has never actually referred to impact assessments… These were a fiction of the media and the Labour party”?

If the Government are playing with semantics, claiming that assessments of impact and impact assessments are not the same thing, they should be aware that they are at serious risk of misleading the House. Even more worryingly, have they, as we have heard suggested, actually not undertaken this work at all? Are they hiding these assessments in semantics—hiding them from the House and from the Select Committee—or do they not even have any work to hide?

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[Ian Murray]

That is the key. We will have had 64 hours of debate in this Committee by the time we vote at 10 minutes past nine this evening. If we distil all our debates over those 64 hours, we get to the conclusion that we should stay in the single market and the customs union. I cannot understand why the Government have decided to throw that entire strategy out the window, probably for ideological reasons.

[Mike Gapes]

Is not the reality that all this talk of Canada or Canada-plus-plus-plus is an illusion, and that it would be far better to go for the far better deal that is Norway-plus? We should actually stay in the single market because that will be best for our economy and for our political influence in Europe.

[Ian Murray]

This of course brings us to the crux of the Government’s ideology, and no Government Members can ever stand up again and confidently pronounce that the Conservative party is pro-business.

The Government’s strategy and the red lines they have drawn in relation to the Bill are destroying business and are anti-business. Every sector that gives evidence to the Health Committee, the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee or the International Trade Committee—and on and on—tells us that the only way to resolve these problems is by staying in the single market and the customs union. If such sectors—the people who create the jobs, employ the people and create the wealth in this country—are telling us that, we should listen to them, rather than to those on the extreme right wing of the Conservative party. They claim to be free traders, but they want to throw out 57 trade deals for some aspirational trade deals—no one can yet tell us whether anyone is even in the queue or wanting to speak to us about them—which is surely anti-trade and anti-business, and is destroying the fabric of the economy of this country.