European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

No, I want to make two more points. I will now be very brief, and I will not expound on all the points I would have expounded on.

The argument that we are undermining the Prime Minister’s position in the negotiations is equally ridiculous. It is based on the proposition that, out on the continent, people do not know that there are divisions in the Cabinet or what the situation is in the House of Commons, and were a whisper to get out about some slightly unusual votes in the House of Commons, this would undermine the position of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister and make that position much weaker.

I suspect that the feeling among those on the continent at the moment is that they are utterly bewildered by the Anglo-Saxons and that they have no idea what we think we are doing. They are not hostile to this country; they are waiting for us to make up our minds about what we wish to negotiate before the negotiations start. All the other Governments have to get the approval of 27 national Parliaments. What they are watching is an attempt by the real zealots in this House to stop this Parliament playing any part in the process, which is totally unacceptable.

The time has come to say that all Government policies on any subject, great or small, depend on the ability to command a majority in the House of Commons on the key principles and the direction in which the country is going. I will certainly vote on that basis and I hope that the Government regret the rather intolerant response and all the pressure they have been applying on my right hon. and learned Friends in trying to resist such an obvious proposition.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Speaker. It is always a daunting prospect to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), although I am grateful to him on this occasion for warming up the audience a wee bit.

I do not often go along with the tradition of spending the first part of a speech being enormously grateful for getting the chance to speak in this place. After all, speaking here on behalf of our constituents is the absolute right of all Members. Today, however, it is appropriate for me to acknowledge that I am one of the privileged few because I will get to speak today and, who knows, perhaps even tomorrow, whereas the vast majority of elected Members in this place will not have a chance to speak at all.

If we all got an equal say over the next couple of days, every MP would speak for about 10 seconds—and no, I am not going to call time on myself just yet. Each of the amendments, many of them vital for the future, would be debated for about three minutes. In reality, most MPs will not be called and we will be asked to vote on amendments that have never been before this House and that will literally not even be mentioned by name, rank or serial number in the debate because there will not be time. Anybody who believes that that is an example of participative democracy at its best needs to get out of here and spend some time reconnecting with the real world.

The programme motion that the Government got through today is an absolute travesty of democracy, following days and days on which the business collapsed and the Government were inventing things to talk about because they did not have the political courage to bring this Bill or umpteen other Brexit-related Bills before the House. The idea that we can give proper consideration to 160 or 170 amendments in effectively nine or 10 hours of debate is utterly laughable. It is an indication of how far the hard Brexiteer propagandists and sloganisers have parted company from any kind of rational logic that they and, indeed, many in the Government denounced the Lords for approving 15 amendments that the Government did not like, while welcoming the fact that those self-same Lords approved 166 amendments that the Government asked them to approve. One hundred and sixty-six amendments were requested by the Government, and 15 by the rest of the world, and it is the rest of the world who are the villains and the enemies of democracy in this.

It was inevitable but deeply disturbing to see how the battle lines have been drawn on the front pages of some so-called newspapers, and I know that there was a point of order on this exact point earlier today. Their lordships are the “traitors in ermine”, the “enemies of the people”, as, indeed, are judges in the Supreme Court, for daring to do the job that they are there to do. I am not a fan of the unelected House of Lords, but they are there for a purpose and, whether we agree or disagree with the way in which they have discharged their purpose, the abuse that has been heaped on them in the past few weeks is utterly uncalled for and has no place in any kind of civilised debate.

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is right to suggest that, rather than deriding the House of Lords, we should be thanking them for introducing 15 sensible amendments and that the Government should also be thanking them for making hundreds of their own amendments because they made such a Horlicks of the Bill in this place in the first place.

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. It seems like the definition of an enemy of the people is not based on where they take the decisions but on whether the decision finds favour or disfavour with Her Majesty’s Government. That is not democracy, Mr Speaker. We are heading to dictatorship if someone’s integrity or patriotism is judged on whether or not they agree with the minority of people who sit on the Government Front Bench.

As I have said, and I shall come back to this later, I am not a fan of the House of Lords. I do not think that it is a democratic institution, but it is not the real threat to our democracy. The real threat to such democracy as we have in these islands does not come from people who disagree with what I say or with what the Government say but from those who use terms such as “traitor” or “enemy” to denounce anybody who holds or expresses a view that differs from their own.

This weekend, we will mark the second anniversary of the murder of one of our colleagues. Possibly the last words she heard in this life were “death to traitors”. Surely, in the name of God, we should know that, when we allow the language of hatred to become normalised, the actions of hatred will follow. Today, someone has pleaded guilty to planning to murder another of our colleagues. I say to colleagues on all sides that we can disagree passionately and fervently with each other, but please get the language of violence out of the vocabulary of this debate and of all debates, not just in the few days before we remember Jo’s sacrifice but every day thereafter, so that Jo and others did not die in vain.

As I have mentioned, the SNP are not fans of the House of Lords, but when the House of Lords has passed amendments to turn a bad Bill into a slightly less bad Bill, we will seek to retain those amendments. Let us be clear that, even with those amendments, this is still a bad thing. It will be damaging to all our interests, but if we can make it the least bad thing that we possibly can, we will have achieved something.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that the SNP’s official position is that we should stop Brexit outright?

[Peter Grant]

I am not quite sure how to break this to the right hon. Gentleman, but nothing would please me more than to allow his country to implement the decision that its citizens have taken and for my country to be given the right to implement the decision that the people of my country took.

We support the removal from the Bill of a purely arbitrary and symbolic exit day; it does nothing to improve our chances of getting a less damaging deal and makes the prospect of a cliff-edge no deal more likely. It was agreed to only because the Prime Minister was too weak at the time to stand up to the hard-line minority in her own party, who are a vanishingly small minority across the House of Commons as a whole. Recently, the ubiquitous “sources close to the Prime Minister” have been working very hard to spin the line that she is now prepared to face down some of the extremists in her party. May I suggest that she would make a good start by facing them down by supporting the removal of an unnecessary exit day from the Bill and supporting that Lords amendment?

On the amendments to change “necessary” back to “what the Minister deems appropriate,” I am flummoxed by the idea that it needs to be put into legislation that a Minister only does things that they think are appropriate. Do the Government seriously think that their own Ministers will do things that they think are inappropriate? I know that they do things that I think are inappropriate all the time, but imagine having legally to prohibit them from doing things that they thought were stupid, rather than trying to stop them from doing things that everybody else thinks are stupid.

The Secretary of State, who obviously has much more important things to do than staying to listen to the defence of his legislation, told us twice that “necessary” is not a synonym for logical, sensible or proper. The trouble is that the entire Bill is written on the assumption that Her Majesty’s Government are a synonym for logical, sensible or proper, and, indeed, that the whim of a Minister is a synonym for logical, sensible or proper.

The Government do not have a monopoly on logic, good sense or propriety. A Government who lost their overall majority in this place at the demand of the people of these islands should surely have the humility to accept that sometimes, just sometimes, when the ermine-coated lords along the corridor disagree with them, they have got it right and the Government have got it wrong.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Alister Jack (Dumfries and Galloway) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman confirms that he and his party want to keep Scotland in the European Union. Can he confirm to me whether he wants to keep Scotland in the common fisheries policy as well?

[Peter Grant]

Certainly not, as currently constituted. If there were a common fisheries policy that actually protected Scotland’s fishing industry, instead of it being used by successive UK Governments as an excuse to sell it out, that might be a different matter.

There has of course been a public vote on the possibility of one of the consequences of a hard Brexit: a hard border across the island of Ireland.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Is my hon. Friend aware that the front page of today’s Financial Times refers to a shortage of doctors? The Tories in Scotland have the cheek to blame the Scottish National party for the lack of doctors, when they are the ones not giving them the visas to get in to the country. The Tories sold out fishing once and then twice. They told us that they would not accept fisheries in the transition agreement and now they are talking as if they are saving the fisheries—the people who have sold out fishermen twice!

[Peter Grant]

Few of us can speak on the fishing industry with such knowledge and authority as my hon. Friend.

The nearest we have had to a public vote anywhere on any of the consequences of a hard Brexit was the public vote against the possibility of a hard border across the island of Ireland. The people of Northern Ireland and the people of the Republic of Ireland overwhelmingly rejected such a notion when they endorsed the Good Friday agreement and, of course, the people of Northern Ireland, the only people in the United Kingdom who would be affected by a hard border, voted to remain in the EU. How can anyone argue that the best way to give effect to those votes is for decisions to be taken by Ministers who represent a party with no MPs in Northern Ireland? The people of Northern Ireland have no way of re-electing or not re-electing those Ministers, based on whether their decisions are in the interests of those people.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Is the hon. Gentleman as outraged as I am that it looks as though we will have no possibility to debate those issues today? Is he as surprised as I am that, unless the Department for Exiting the European Union has not kept its website up to date, we do not even have a Minister from DExEU here listening to the debate?

[Peter Grant]

I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that we are quite used to seeing Government Ministers abandoning their posts as soon as anybody from the third party in Parliament gets up to speak. He will have to take it up with them why that might be.

At the end of this entire process, we owe it to ourselves, to each and every one of us, to acknowledge that later this year some Members of Parliament—possibly those on the Conservative Benches, possibly those on the Opposition Benches—may in all conscience want to go back to their constituents and say, “I recognise the way that you voted in June 2016. I respect your right to take part in that vote, but in all conscience I cannot be part of a decision that I believe in my heart of hearts will be deeply damaging to your community and to these islands and nations.” Members of Parliament must have the right to say to their constituents, “On this occasion, what I fundamentally believe to be in your interests differs from what you believe to be your wishes.” Each of us should be given the right to go back to our constituents and face the potential political consequences. I have no qualms whatever about the political consequences of following my own conscience if it is against the wishes, expressed or otherwise, of my constituents. That is a decision we all have to be prepared to take from time to time.

This is possibly the most important occasion of this Parliament—and of many previous Parliaments. Members of Parliament must be given the opportunity to decide for themselves where they place the balance between what we believe is best and what our constituents have told us they want. If Members of Parliament are not prepared to face up to that very difficult dilemma, there is a question whether they should be Members of Parliament at all.

[Sir Mike Penning]

The hon. Gentleman has been very generous in giving way. Surely we cannot ignore a referendum that was voted for by this House. The people made a decision and we cannot go against that decision. To say that perhaps they did not realise what they were doing when they voted to leave the European Union is an insult to the electorate.

[Peter Grant]

I never suggested that, although it is perhaps worth remembering that at least one of the right hon. Gentleman’s own colleagues, a Conservative MP, has admitted that they did not vote in the referendum because the question was too hard for them to understand. I wonder how many other people were in the same position. There is a big, big difference between not fully understanding and being stupid. It is an insult for Conservative Members to suggest that anyone who admits they did not fully understand it, or still do not feel they understand it, is stupid.

My comments were not based on suggesting that people did not understand. My comments were based on the fact that the ultimate responsibility we have is to act on what we believe to be the public’s best interest, not simply to follow what we think will get us re-elected next time around. The fact that so many Brexiteers are horrified at the idea that Members of Parliament should be given the chance to make that statement to their constituents suggests that an awful lot of them think that such a statement may be needed. They think that we will get to the end of the process and a large number of MPs will want to go back to the people and say, “I’m sorry. I supported it this far but I cannot support it any longer because I can see the damage it will cause.” I will leave that for Members to think about. I do not expect anybody to be persuaded just now, but I appeal to Members to think about that over the next wee while. It is fundamental to the nature of the representative democracy we have in this place.

Of course, it goes without saying, on the other amendments the SNP will be supporting, that, in this partnership of equal nations, the elected Parliaments of all the equal nations must have a say on the final deal. They must have a much greater say than they have had up until now. With the contempt shown for the devolved nations through the process so far, it is difficult to believe that the intention has been anything other than inflammatory.

[Mr Simon Clarke (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Con)]

rose—

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Peter Grant]

I will not give way because I know a number of people who did not support the programme motion will struggle to get in.

The mantra of the “most powerful devolved Parliament in the world” has never been true, but it sounds even more hollow if that “most powerful devolved Parliament in the world” can be stripped of its powers by a party that never wanted it to have those powers, never wanted it to exist in the first place and are intent on acting not just against the majority view of the Parliament of Scotland but against the majority view of Opposition Members of the Parliament of Scotland.

In their continued belief that they and only they are the guardians of common sense, the Government are determined to force this place to have a binary decision on whether we accept the final deal. This is the same Government who keep telling us that the customs union is not a binary decision, the single market is not a binary decision and controlling immigration is not a binary decision. The only time it is a binary decision is when they have to make a decision. The Government are determined that the final decision this Parliament will have to take on what the future will be is “take it or leave it”. For some of us, other futures are available. The Government would do well to reflect on that fact before it is too late. If the only choice they offer is take it or leave it, they may find that the people of Scotland, the people of Wales and the people of Northern Ireland will interpret take it or leave it in a very different way from that which the Government intend.

[Several hon. Members rose—]