EU Exit Negotiations

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I said that Members who arrived late should not be standing. The message is clear, and it ought to be heeded. It is discourteous to ignore it. End of subject.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement.

About a year ago, the Prime Minister said that we cannot expect a running commentary, but in truth we would not have to run very fast to keep up with the negotiations. The right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) has already commented in similar terms to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, but he might have added that, before pressing the accelerator, we should check whether we are heading towards or away from a cliff edge.

We have seen one humiliation after another for this Government. They tried to drive a wedge between the Commission and the 27 sovereign states from which it takes its mandate and authority, so will the Secretary of State assure us that the Government will stop playing these games and accept the Commission’s mandate, rather than attempting to undermine it and thereby undermine their own position? He claims that the UK is being reasonable, but is it reasonable to go in with red lines already firmly dug into the sand before the negotiations have even started? That does not look too reasonable to me.

The Secretary of State assures us that he has never talked up no deal, but he has not talked it down, either. Other influential voices in his party talk up no deal all the time. The Prime Minister still has not withdrawn her claim that no deal is better than a bad deal. Rather than just not talking up no deal, will the Secretary of State absolutely rule out no deal today as the worst of all possible deals?

Finally, on the rights of EU nationals living here, I had a distressing meeting last week with representatives of the Fife Migrants Forum. They told me of their first-hand experience of immensely talented, hard-working young people who have made Fife their home but who are now making plans to head back to Poland, Slovakia or wherever else, not because they do not like living in Scotland but because they do not think the United Kingdom will make them welcome. Will the Secretary of State commit to guaranteeing in law the rights of those citizens, rather than continuing to use them as negotiating capital?

[Mr Davis]

There were three questions there, which I will take in sequence. First, on separating the 27, nothing could be further from the truth; the worst thing for the UK would be for us to have to deal with fragmentary groups of the European Union, as we would never get an answer and that would lead us to the Walloon Parliament outcome on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Canadian treaty, so we have not done that at all. However, we should also talk to each of the 27 to see what their own interests are, as those of Poland and Lithuania may differ from those of littoral states such as Holland or Belgium, and differ again from those of Spain and Italy. We talk to all of them on a continuous basis to make sure we know what they want.

To pick up the hon. Gentleman’s last point, about his Polish constituents, let me say that we also go to those Governments to explain precisely what we have on offer. There have been times in the past few months when the European institutions have not reflected what we intended to do. For example, in a perfectly legitimate and reasonable mistake, Guy Verhofstadt said that we were not going to give European citizens the right to vote in local elections. That was not true, so we corrected it directly with the Governments.

As for no deal, the issue is straightforward: we are intending, setting out and straining every sinew to get a deal. That will be the best outcome, but for two reasons we need to prepare for all the other alternatives. The first is that it is a negotiation with many people and it could go wrong, so we have to be ready for that. The second is that in a negotiation you always have to have the right to walk away: if you do not, you get a terrible deal.