European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Peter Grant Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

On 18 July 2018, the SNP became the first party in this Parliament to call for an extension of the article 50 deadline. The need for a real extension is more urgent now than it was then. Although we have a number of concerns about the wording of the Bill, we will compromise on those concerns just now, and support it. Hopefully, we can improve it at the next stage.

The Government are still trying to blackmail the House by insisting that the choice is between the Prime Minister’s rotten deal and no deal at all. That claim is simply not true; revocation is still an option. We hope to amend the Bill to make that perfectly clear. I commend my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) for the part she played in confirming that point in a court case on which Her Majesty’s Government spent £150,000 of our money; they sent lawyers to the European Court just to tell it that the Government did not have a view on the matter under discussion, which seemed a good use of money.

Ironically, in the long term, possibly the best way to get the Brexit that people actually voted for would be to stop this insane process and start all over again before it is too late. I was disappointed that Labour did not fully support a motion that my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) put forward that would have done that. I hope that Labour accepts that that was a mistake, and will support a similar motion if they get the chance. Our concern is that the Bill leaves too much in the hands of a Prime Minister who cannot be trusted to get anything right; we will seek to get that amended as well.

We need a clear reason for the extension, and that will dictate how long the extension has to be. Our preference would be for an extension to allow a people’s vote—not a rerun of the 2016 referendum, but a different vote on a different question. If the Government were confident that their withdrawal agreement had the support of the people, they would not run away so quickly from the chance to give people a say.

Earlier this afternoon, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber held up a copy of “Scotland’s Place in Europe” in the House, and it was howled down by the Conservatives. They can laugh at it, but Scotland’s place is in Europe, and Scotland will retain its proper place as a full, sovereign member of the family of European nations.

European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill

Peter Grant Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir William Cash]

That is a very good question, because it may well be after exit day—on my proposals. That is the point. I am proposing amendments intended to provide that democratic element, which is needed by the people of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for being so clear about what is in Scotland’s best interest. Will he remind us as to whether he supported the need for a legislative consent motion or for the consent of the Scottish Parliament before the European Union Referendum Bill was passed, before the article 50 Act was passed or before last year’s great repeal Bill, all of which he supported? It seems to me that he supported an awful lot of EU-related legislation that has been extremely damaging to Scotland, not caring a jot as to what the Scottish Parliament or the other devolved institutions thought about it. Why is it that he now suddenly wants to invoke the right of the Scottish Parliament to be consulted, given that he and his party have trampled over that right ever since the Brexit referendum was thought of?

[Sir William Cash]

I want to make some trouble. The people of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland might well have strong interest in the extent to which they are involved in this process. My amendment is a means to provide them with that opportunity. I will not contradict what the hon. Gentleman says. Under our constitutional settlement, there is a Scottish Parliament, a Northern Ireland Assembly and a National Assembly for Wales, so I would have thought that they will be extremely interested to know whether they were being cut out of the process prescribed in the Bill. It is not my fault that the Government made proposals and had all the joint committees that the various leaders of the devolved Assemblies complained that they had not been properly involved in. I am giving them a chance to be involved. He may be right about the legislative consent point, but I am right to think that in relation to this crazy Bill it would at least be useful for the people of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to be able to make their contributions in their devolved legislatures. I think that point is worth making, and I therefore intend to press amendment 6 to a vote. Of all the amendments I tabled, that is the one that I want to move most.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant]

Well, how do I sum that up in 10 minutes or so? I think that “a pile of mince” would do it, in a handful of words.

I want to address some of the absolute nonsense that we have heard from the no dealers across the Chamber, but let me first welcome the fact that they are finally coming out for who they really are. These are the people who campaigned for the various leave campaigns, promising us that we would leave with a good deal—that we would still remain part of the customs union and the single market. That is what the leave campaign was saying. As for the story that there has been no leave campaigning recently, has the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) not seen the revelations in the media in the last couple of days about intensive, targeted social media campaigning, funded from who knows where? SNP Members do not know, but I wonder how many people on the Conservative Benches know where that money is coming from.

As for those who complain that we have not had enough time to debate the big issues of Brexit, these are the people who did not want Parliament to have any say at all. They went to court to prevent Parliament from being allowed to see the Prime Minister’s deal before it was too late to change it, and now they come along and complain that there has not been enough time to scrutinise it. These are the people who allowed 19 minutes of debate before the biggest power grab from Scotland ever seen since the introduction of the Scottish Office—19 minutes of listening to one Conservative Minister droning on, and then the measures were pushed through. How many Conservative Members complained about the lack of time then?

I am disappointed—although I obviously accept the decision—that the amendments that would have given some kind of firm reason for extending article 50 have not been selected. The House will need to come back to that in due course. I hope that at some point the House will agree not only that article 50 needs to be extended, but that whatever deal the United Kingdom intends to leave under is put to the people, so that they can confirm whether it is what they thought was meant by Brexit. I can tell the House what most of them did not think was meant by Brexit: they did not think that Brexit meant no deal, because even the leave campaign never said it was campaigning for that.

I will not go through all the individual amendments, but we will oppose anything that says that the extension can only be for a matter of days or weeks, because it is nonsensical to think that the Prime Minister’s bad deal will get significantly better in a matter of weeks. If there is going to be an improvement to the deal, it can come only if we get a longer extension and reset the whole process. The Prime Minister can then do what she should have done almost three years ago, as soon as she became the leader of a minority Government. She can act like a leader of a minority Government, and talk to politicians and parties across the House to find areas of agreement and consensus, before she starts to draw her red lines and paint herself into a corner. Let us remember that the EU has never said that the current agreement is the only one possible; it has said that it is the only one possible given the Prime Minister’s red lines.

The hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) was so enthusiastic about his amendment 6 that he spoke to it for over half an hour—and it felt like just as long again when he intervened or raised points of order—but he forgot to mention that its real purpose is not to give Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland a chance. If he was that bothered about giving the devolved nations a chance, he would have moved similar amendments to all the legislation that is leading to us being dragged out of the European Union in the first place.

The crux of amendment 6 comes right at the end, when it proposes that, consent having been given by the devolved Assemblies—including the one that does not exist at the moment—the Act will come into force on such a day as a Minister of the Crown may decide. Even if Parliament imposes its will on the Government, the Government could completely ignore the Act simply by not bothering to bring it into force. The amendment has some sugar coating to try to fool the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish, but we are not going to be conned by that. We will not support the amendment.

I also have a big problem with new clause 13, which would effectively allow the Government to change the date unilaterally. I hope that the Minister can offer some kind of assurance on the circumstances in which that power would be used. We know that instruments have previously been prayed against by hundreds of right hon. and hon. Members, yet their objections have been ignored and the instruments have been implemented anyway. Can we therefore have an assurance that if the instruments are prayed against by any of the major Opposition parties, or by a given number of individual Members of Parliament, the Minister will guarantee, on his honour and that of the Government, that they will not be proceeded with? We need something as firm as that. It is one thing to get promises from this Prime Minister, but we do not know who will be Prime Minister when the provisions will be considered.

One amendment is intended specifically to ensure that we cannot take part in European parliamentary elections, which have been described as a waste of time. Who on earth is scared of taking part in elections? Who would want the entire nature of our future relationship with the European Union to be defined purely by the fact that we had to get out before—horror of horrors—we gave our people a chance to participate in its democratic processes? Brexiteers have been telling us for 10 years that those democratic processes do not exist, because they deny that the European Union is a democratic institution.

[David Linden]

Brexiteers say that the 2016 referendum was about giving back control to the people, yet we see the Conservative party running scared of the electorate. Is that not just going against the wishes of the people in 2016?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. As for the idea that we should not take part in the elections because we do not know how long our MEPs will be there, let us remember that some of them are never there anyway. I remember the Scottish regional elections in 1994, which we knew were for councils that would exist for a very limited time, but they actually had a higher turnout than was previously the case, because people were energised and motivated and understood what they were about. If the hard-line Conservatives do not want to take part in European parliamentary elections, that is entirely up to them, but I do not want my constituents to be denied an opportunity to vote for their representatives in Europe, whether that is for two days, two years or a full parliamentary term.

We will certainly support the drafting amendments tabled by the right hon. Members who introduced the Bill—given how many Lords amendments are often required to sort out the mistakes in Government legislation, despite all the resources that the Government have at their disposal, it is a bit much to be nitpicking about the fact that there were a couple of drafting errors in this Bill. It would have been nice not to have to rush the Bill through the House in such a hurry. It would have been nice if the Government had actually listened to what Parliament has been saying, in Back-Bench business debates and Opposition day debates, for the past three years. They have refused to listen, which is why the only way to make them listen is by Act of Parliament. That is why we will support the two amendments I have mentioned, and I hope to see the Bill go through to Third Reading.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I will not repeat the general points I made on Second Reading, but I want to briefly outline the Opposition’s views on the amendments.

We will obviously support amendments 13 and 14, which are helpful drafting amendments, and will vote for clauses 1 and 2 to stand part of the Bill. We will support the Government’s new clause 13 with a clarification from the Minister. Normally we would support the affirmative procedure, but we accept the Government’s reasoning in this case, given the fast-moving situation and the need to ensure consistency between EU and UK law. We will support the new clause subject to an assurance from the Minister now that if one of the principal Opposition parties prays against the statutory instrument, the Government will urgently facilitate a debate on the Floor of the House.

We will oppose all the other amendments. Let me explain briefly why. Amendments 20 and 1 and new clause 5 seek to impose different dates. We should have learned from the withdrawal Act that putting exit dates in statute denies the flexibility we might need, and those amendments are clearly designed to frustrate the Bill’s objectives. We oppose amendment 21 because we believe it is right for the Government to come back to the House if the EU offers a different date. We oppose Government amendment 22 because it undermines the purpose of the Bill in relation to parliamentary approval to seek or agree an extension.

We oppose amendment 6 because it is designed to frustrate the process and, as Members have pointed, the Northern Ireland Assembly is not sitting. We oppose new clause 4 because it would limit Parliament’s opportunity to shape decisions. I am surprised that, after his lengthy contribution, the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) is not here to hear our views on these points.

We oppose new clause 7 because it seeks to put a date in the Bill without saying so. It puts the cart before the horse. We should determine what extension we need and then deal with the consequences—even if that means elections, although that is not ideal—and not limit ourselves in that way. If we need a longer extension, we will presumably want the UK to have a voice in EU institutions—not simply the Parliament, but the Council and the Commission—and a judge in the Court of Justice. On that basis, we oppose that new clause and the other amendments that I have identified.