Article 50 Extension

Debate between Mike Wood and Peter Grant

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am grateful for the chance to speak in this debate, and I commend the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) for having secured it.

Despite the Secretary of State’s protestations—I can understand why, out of loyalty to his Prime Minister, he has to make them—the Prime Minister’s deal is finished. She will not get that deal through next week. She will not get any changes to it this week, this month or even this year. She is now acting like a motorist who brings a car back to the garage week after week and then runs to the press expressing her frustration at the mechanic for refusing to take a decision to give an MOT when it is perfectly obvious that she is driving a clapped-out old banger that should have been consigned to the scrapheap weeks before. An extra coat of paint on this deal will not make it road worthy; it should be scrapped, and if there is to be any attempt at a deal, it has to be a deal reached on the basis of consensus and engagement with the whole House, including the 90% who do not agree with the Prime Minister’s vision.

The options are a significant extension, not just for a few weeks or a couple of months; the complete revocation of article 50, which would give a future Government the option of trying again; and crashing out with no deal. It was very noticeable today at Prime Minister’s questions that the Prime Minister repeatedly went through a litany of options that she was refusing to take forward because the House had voted them down. None were voted down by anything like the same calamitous margin as the option she is now determined to bring back for the third time, in flagrant violation of the traditions of the House, which—remember—was supposed to get sovereignty returned to it by this whole Brexit fiasco. Given that the Prime Minister has failed twice to get her deal through the House, surely it is well past time that she and her Government accepted it is not Parliament that is out of step but the Government.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is misinformed. Last week, the House voted down a proposal for a second referendum by 249 votes, which was a crushing defeat for the amendment and demonstrated that there was no support for a second referendum in the House.

[Peter Grant]

One of the Prime Minister’s own allies has just argued very eloquently why the Prime Minister’s deal should also be dead.

With 15 days to go to the cliff edge, Parliament voted to ask for an extension. The Prime Minister quite deliberately used 40% of the available time to do absolutely nothing. Having made a statement on Friday saying she would write this urgently needed letter, it still took her five days. What was she doing? Looking for a pen? A stamp? I could have given her either if she had asked.

UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

Debate between Mike Wood and Peter Grant

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

That is certainly an interesting proposal. Let me say that each and every time I have stood for election I have read, and often contributed to, the manifesto on which I have stood, and I will always honour my manifesto commitments to the best of my ability. I would expect my party colleagues in the Scottish Government to honour the manifesto on which they were elected as well.

The backstop is not the problem for me; in fact, I do not think it is really the problem for more than a tiny minority here. The reason I reject the deal—and the reason it is rejected by the Scottish National party and the overwhelming majority of Scotland’s parliamentarians, both here and at Holyrood—is that it is a rotten deal for Scotland, and changing the backstop will not fix that. It will seriously damage our economy, it will place unsustainable strain on the public services that are so dear to our hearts, and it will cause wholly unacceptable pain to tens of thousands of citizens who have chosen to give Scotland the benefit of their talents.

Let me give just one example of what this means to real people. In November last year I had the privilege of visiting Glenrothes’s twin town, Boeblingen in southern Germany. The occasion was the town’s award of its highest civic honour to my good friend John Vaughan—a constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) across the border—in recognition of the decades of voluntary service that John and his wife Karen had given, and their contribution to the bonds of friendship between our two towns. I later submitted an early-day motion to mark John’s achievement, and I am grateful to all who signed it.

On Tuesday, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife told the House that Karen Vaughan had been told that she must travel to Edinburgh and ask permission to register as a foreigner in her own country. Karen has lived in the United Kingdom for longer than the vast majority of people whom I can see in the Chamber. She has been here for 74 years. Someone whose contribution to these nations cannot be measured—someone who came here as a babe in arms three quarters of a century ago, after the defeat of Nazism in Europe—is now being told by this Parliament that she must make a round trip of nearly 100 miles to ask permission to be registered as a foreigner in the only land that she has ever known, and probably the only land that she will ever know. What have we become, Mr Speaker? And, much more frighteningly, if this is what we have become before Brexit, where in the name of God will we be heading after it if we have a Government who see that as an acceptable way to treat any human being?

Of course, the Government will do as they always do, and say that it is just an isolated case. Everything about Brexit involves “isolated cases”, such as Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan, Ford and Airbus. But those are not isolated cases. The heavy engineering manufacturing industry is not an isolated industry. There have been warnings for years from every sector of the economy and every area of our public and civic life that Brexit would not work, and every one of them has been ignored for years.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

Given the hon. Gentleman’s comments about Jaguar Land Rover, will he join me in welcoming its decision to invest additional funds in the new petrol engine plant in Wolverhampton?

[Peter Grant]

I welcome any investment, but unfortunately employees in other parts of the Jaguar Land Rover network, and their families, do not have so much to celebrate.