European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Owen Paterson and Lord Vaizey of Didcot

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds), and I agreed with every word that he said.

Let us go back. David Cameron promised that if people voted Conservative in the 2015 election, there would be an in-or-out referendum; the people would decide—no ifs, no buts, no second choice, they would decide. To his horror, he won and had to deliver the referendum after a botched negotiation. What happened? We had a referendum—absolutely clear. All the processes in the House said, “You, the people, will be sovereign. We the MPs will give you the decision. You will decide.” We then had project fear mark 1. The people were bombarded with propaganda. Leaflets worth some £9 million were sent—crazy stuff from George Osborne’s Treasury—and the people voted to leave. A total of 17.4 million people voted to leave, the largest vote in British history on any single subject. We then had from those who lost: what does leave mean?

[Mr Vaizey]

What does it mean?

[Mr Paterson]

Like me, my right hon. Friend was elected on a particular platform at the general election, because the Prime Minister very helpfully said, “Leave means leave the single market, leave the customs union and leave the remit of the European Court of Justice. Every single Conservative member was elected on that platform and, helpfully, it was endorsed by the Labour party, so 85% of the votes in the general election endorsed the fact that leaving meant leaving those three things.

We then had the Lancaster House speech, which said that there would be no halfway house. What we have in this latest document does not deliver that. If this is passed, there will be the most appalling disillusion with our institutions. The people will have been thwarted and deprived by the establishment. We have seen it this evening: the political establishment hates Brexit; the commercial establishment—the CBI—hates Brexit; and the media establishment hates Brexit. None the less, the damage to our institutions will be grievous.

What we have in this document is worse than where we are at the moment. I was the Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and represented the country in the common agricultural policy negotiations. We worked with our allies in Germany, Hungary and wherever. We stopped some of the more stupid proposals going through in the CAP reform, but we had to swallow an awful lot because we always got outvoted eventually in the qualified majority voting. We will not be there from now on. We will have law imposed on us. We will not be able to amend it or to repeal it in this House. The idea that we can sign trade deals is, sadly, nonsense. I was in Washington two weeks ago. Democrats, Republicans and senior members of the United States Trade Representative made it absolutely clear that countries cannot do trade deals with other countries that do not set their tariffs or their regulatory regimes. We will not set our tariffs and we will not set our regulatory regime.

Then there is the horror of the backstop, so eloquently described by the right hon. Member for Belfast North. This really is disgraceful, especially given the difficulties in getting the Belfast agreement signed. The absolute pillar of the agreement was the principle of consent that the status of Northern Ireland would never change without the majority of the people in Northern Ireland voting for that change. And what do we have? Something ghastly called UK(NI) has been created. Northern Ireland will be under a different regime. That is a breach of the Acts of Union 1800. It is extraordinary that this has been allowed through.

There are only two solutions to the Northern Ireland border. The first is that we stay in the customs union as a full member, as the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) said. The second is that we address the reality that customs has moved on. I have spent a lot of time on this issue. I wrote a paper with the European Research Group that we published in mid-September. I discussed that paper with the Government and sent a copy to Monsieur Barnier, resulting in a very fruitful meeting. The fact is that there is currently a border—a VAT border, an excise duty border and a currency border—and that it is all done with technology.