European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Pat McFadden and Chris Leslie

Report stage: First Day: House of Commons
Tuesday 16th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leslie]

No one is more proud of being a member of this fine body than I am. Parliament is a great institution: I would say that it is one of the greatest democratic institutions in the world. We are perfectly capable of dealing with many of these issues, but the hon. Gentleman unwittingly went against his own argument when he said “almost” all the rights in the charter were covered or duplicated in primary legislation. Not all of them are covered, as was made clear in some of the evidence that the Select Committee heard.

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

Is there not a fundamental inconsistency here? The Government’s reason for not including the charter is that those rights are covered in domestic law, so it would not add anything, but they propose to include thousands of other directives and rules, many of which we would also be unlikely to change in domestic law. The very same argument could be applied to those thousands of other rules that the Bill goes out of its way to incorporate. The Government say, “We do not want to change the labour laws; we do not want to change the environmental rules; we do not want to change the consumer rights.” However, they apply a different logic to the charter. Why does my hon. Friend think that is?

[Mr Leslie]

The logic of the Government is a mystery sometimes, and I wonder whether the Solicitor General actually secretly agrees that these are important rights that need to be defended and that the Government have got themselves into a bit of a pickle, possibly because they drafted this Bill before the general election and therefore before they saw some of the consequences of these things.