Leaving the EU: No Deal

Peter Grant Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

rose—

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I will give way in a second. The reason for saying, “Would she google?” was that the French Assembly passed a law on the Monday before. There is a host of issues. The hon. Lady can look up what they are going to do to mitigate the problems with flow, but equally the Government have a host of mitigation solutions for this problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I commend the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) on securing this emergency debate, and we are grateful to Mr Speaker for allowing it at such short notice. This is another instance of the parliamentarians of these four nations having the opportunity to debate what is by far the most serious and urgent matter affecting all of our constituents today, yet we debate it not with the support of the Government, but in spite of the Government; not a single Government Back Bencher stood in support of the application earlier.

For more than two years, the Government did next to nothing to plan for a no-deal Brexit, despite constantly telling us that no deal was better than a bad deal. Now, when everybody bar the Prime Minister realises that she has brought back a bad deal, we are suddenly being told that this bad deal is better than no deal after all. Practically the only positive thing that can be said about the Prime Minister’s deal is that it is not quite as bad as no deal. The Government are spending a fortune on a massive propaganda campaign to try to get businesses and constituents to put pressure on us to support the deal. They are touring all around the British Isles—the Prime Minister did not go to Glasgow, but she went to Renfrewshire for 20 minutes—but they are not doing this to talk up the benefits of the Prime Minister’s deal, because that would not take very long at all, would it? They are doing it talk up the likelihood of no deal. They are quite deliberately setting out to scare businesses and institutions, in the knowledge that that will encourage them to put pressure on us.

I can give the House an example of how transparent this is. A few weeks ago, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland arranged for a number of businesses and other bodies from Northern Ireland to come over here for a day, and she invited us all to go and speak to them about their concerns over a no-deal Brexit. They were there at the invitation of the Government to talk us out of no deal. I did not have time to speak to them all, but I asked many organisations from Northern Ireland, “If you could have any result you wanted from these negotiations, what would it be?” Every single one of them said, “Don’t do Brexit.” So when the Prime Minister and the Minister insist that the only way to stop no deal is to support the Prime Minister’s deal, I say no it is not. We can stop Brexit altogether. If we do that, the question of no deal and a bad deal can at the very least be put back to the next time the public get the choice to make that decision. Why have the Government suddenly started to put out so much publicity about the harmful impacts of no deal? The consequences of no deal have not changed. They were there for us all to see on the day after the referendum. Let us face it, they were there for all to see on the day before the referendum as well.

I commend the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), for securing this debate, and I earnestly hope that we can work together, along with a number of Government Members and with other parties here, to try to stop this madness altogether, but we cannot forget that the position we are now in was entirely foreseeable when Parliament gave the Prime Minister unconditional authorisation to trigger article 50. Disastrous failing has undoubtedly followed disastrous failing on the part of Her Majesty’s Government at every stage in the process, but there has also been a disastrous failing on the part of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition. When they needed to oppose, they singularly failed to do so—with, I stress, some honourable exceptions.

I do not propose to spend much time on a line-by-line analysis of the £4 billion that has already been taken away from our health service, our police, our local authorities and other essential services to pay for the Government’s incompetence, because, although that is an eye-watering sum in anyone’s book, it is peanuts compared with the true cost of a no-deal Brexit, or indeed any kind of Brexit at all. I just want to draw attention to one line of that departmental allocation. It is not the biggest sum, by any stretch of the imagination, at less than 0.5% of the total, but to me it is the one that should warn us not to go anywhere near a no-deal Brexit in any circumstances. We know that £16 million extra has been allocated to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. I hope that no one in this Chamber can avoid a shudder at hearing that. A no-deal Brexit means that we need an additional £16 million for the Police Service of Northern Ireland. What do the Government think it is for? I can tell the House that it is not for extra traffic wardens.

I am astonished that we should ever need to remind anyone of what is at stake in Northern Ireland if we leave without a deal that secures the permanent status of the peace process, yet only two days ago, the Democratic Unionist party spokesperson on Brexit, the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), asked the Prime Minister:

“Would it not be far better to walk away now with £39 billion in her pocket and with her hands free”?—[Official Report, 17 December 2018; Vol. 651, c. 548.]

No, it would not. The vast majority of the people in Northern Ireland are saying just now, “Do not walk away with no deal in any circumstances whatsoever.” The price that Northern Ireland would have to pay for a no-deal Brexit cannot be measured in sums of money, but if it could, it would be well in excess of £4 billion.

The Government’s motivation for suddenly turning up the heat on no deal is as transparent as it is manipulative. They know that they cannot get a majority in Parliament for the Prime Minister’s deal. Instead of accepting that and seeking to build a consensus that could get parliamentary support, which incidentally is something the Prime Minister of a minority Government should have been doing from day one, at the last minute the Government are seeking to coerce Parliament—some people might go as far as to say that they are seeking to blackmail Parliament—into voting for the Prime Minister’s deal by making no deal the only other option.

The Prime Minister still insists that no deal is the only alternative, but that is not true, and we know from her own words that it is not true. She has tried the usual negotiating tactics. For example, when someone negotiates with two different sets of people in different directions, they put them in separate rooms and give the first set a scare story to persuade them to move towards them, and then they give the second set a scare story to persuade them to do the same. However, the Prime Minister made the mistake of telling everyone the same scare story at the same time. In the Chamber, when everyone was here, she warned the no-Brexit brigade in her own party, “If you don’t vote for this deal, there will be no deal.” Then she warned the no-deal brigade, “If you don’t vote for this deal, there will be no Brexit.”

The Prime Minister has put three options on the table. When we come to a meaningful vote, whether in this place or whether the public get a say, the third option of not leaving must be put back on the table. If she thought for one second that her deal would get more support in this House, or among the citizens of these four nations, than not leaving at all, she would be the first to put that question to a vote. The reason she will not ask the people again about Brexit is that she knows what the answer would be.

There have always been other options, but the Prime Minister has been too blinkered and dogmatic to recognise that they existed. Compromises were available. Some were offered two years ago by the Scottish Government, but she paid so little attention that I think she has forgotten they even existed. She must have forgotten that they existed, because when she came here to present her deal and said, “Nobody has ever put forward an alternative option,” she of course spoke in good faith—because everybody who speaks in Parliament does so in good faith. The only explanation must be that this document, presented to her by the national Government of one of our four nations, meant so little to her that she forgot it even existed.

[Dr Whitford]

Was not the Prime Minister’s fatal mistake to have painted herself into a corner with red lines before doing the first impact assessment, because otherwise she could have looked at what the best alternative was?

[Peter Grant]

I accept that is one of the disastrous mistakes the Prime Minister has made. We must remember that over the past few weeks, while the Government kept telling us, “But everyone in Europe has said that this is the only deal possible,” what they said was, “This is the only deal possible, given the firm negotiating stance that the United Kingdom has set.” That has been made perfectly clear, and I have no doubt that the Government have been told that by their contacts in Europe as well. Had the Prime Minister not painted herself into a corner with the stupid and unnecessary red lines, she would now have a much more workable deal that might well have got the acceptance if not the support of a significantly greater number of Members of this House.

One of the many examples of the almost despotic arrogance that we have seen from the Prime Minister is the fact that she, and she alone, appears to know exactly what was in the minds of the 17.5 million people when they put their mark against “Leave” on the ballot paper. None of us can know that for certain. I would never have the arrogance to say that I know what was in someone else’s mind, which is why I never call into question the motivations or integrity of those who happened to vote a different way from me. None of us can know for certain, but does anyone seriously believe that even a tiny fraction of those 17.5 million people voted for lower living standards, for food shortages, for the possibility that patient safety, and even patients’ lives, will be put at risk as a result of difficulties in getting essential medical supplies to them, for the possibility of troops on the streets to quell violent civil disorder, or for the likelihood of God only knows what for the future of Northern Ireland? I do not know what those 17.5 million people voted for, but I would be astonished if anything more than a tiny fraction voted for that kind of nightmare scenario, all of which is taken either from official Government statements or from unofficial and unattributable Government briefings.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I have said that again and again. Some 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union. As we know from Government Members, within that leave vote people are split. So can the Government tell us—I would be interested in the hon. Gentleman’s views—how many of those 17.4 million people voted to leave without a deal and how many voted for the deal that the Prime Minister has brought back? Taken together, when we consider the split in the leave vote, the majority of people are actually for staying in the European Union, which is why we need a people’s vote.

[Peter Grant]

The referendum was a choice between one very definite answer on one side and an infinite number of possibilities on the other. One of my hon. Friends said at the time, “We know people have voted to leave, but we have no idea where they have voted to go.” The Prime Minister quickly shut down that discussion by defining what people had decided to do, and then she has the cheek to tell us that we are somehow being anti-democratic if we think perhaps the 17.5 million people voted for something else.

[Deidre Brock]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the first EU referendum was won on a tissue of lies, undeliverable promises and illegalities and that we should undo the rough wooing of the Brexit referendum and rededicate the decision to the people?

[Peter Grant]

There is no doubt at all that the EU referendum, as well as having the biggest participation of UK citizens in any democratic test, was also the most corrupt and most dishonest there has ever been and, I sincerely hope, we will ever see. Revelations are still coming out, even today, about the illegalities, some of which I suspect will never be brought to account. The penalties imposed on those who corrupt the democratic process are puny compared with what happens to a person who is found to have attempted to corrupt the full course of justice, so there is clearly a question that has to be addressed in future legislation.

We know that the calamitous effects of no deal are not what the majority of leave voters voted for.

[Tom Brake]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Grant]

Not just now.

It is not what they were promised either in the Government’s information or by the leave campaign. It is not what they voted for, and I believe it is the absolute duty of this Parliament and of this Government to make sure it is not what they get. It would be an unpardonable dereliction of duty for the Government, or anyone else, deliberately to use the procedures of this House in such a way as to maximise the danger of the worst possible outcome, the least-favoured outcome, simply because it is the only conceivable way to deliver an outcome that the Prime Minister has decided she wants but which practically nobody else in this Parliament wants.

In the past few days, as was mentioned earlier, a number of Conservative MPs have said publicly that they are likely to resign the party Whip if it looks as though the Prime Minister is herding us towards a no-deal Brexit. I would not want to see anyone put in that position.

I have respect for a number of Conservative MPs—for most Conservative MPs, in fact—even though I disagree with them, and I do not think any of them will hand back their party card easily or with a light heart, but think about it. It would not need many more Tory MPs to do that before suddenly, even with the Democratic Unionist party, the Government no longer have a working majority. There is already a motion of no confidence in the Government on the Order Paper, and it would take only one signature on that motion, and a few more people in the Conservative party to decide to put the countries of this Union before narrow party advantage, and suddenly the entire Government, not just the Prime Minister, would find that their jaikets were on the shoogliest of shoogly nails. That might be what concentrates minds, which would be welcome, but what does it say about the state of British politics when hundreds of thousands of other people’s jobs can be sacrificed by the Cabinet for an ideologically driven hard Brexit but a threat to their own jobs suddenly makes them sit up and take notice?

Ultimately, whatever voting procedure the Government decide to use whenever, if ever, we get to that vote, Parliament will be faced with a choice between two final options, and no deal cannot be one of them. Think about what happens in, to take a random example, a Conservative party leadership election. I understand that quite a few Conservative Members had reason to check the rules recently. If there are more than two candidates, they go through a series of eliminations, with the least supported candidate dropping off at the end of each round and the election finishing with a run-off between the two most supported candidates.

If that process is good enough to pick a temporary, sometimes extremely temporary, leader of the Conservative party, why cannot we do it for the most important peacetime decision these islands have ever taken? If we did that, no deal would be off the table before we started, which would ease a lot of the concerns that the Government are now quite deliberately fuelling.

[Geraint Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman then confirm his support for my European Union (Revocation of Notification of Withdrawal) Bill, which I presented yesterday? The Bill would basically rule out no deal, and unless a deal is agreed in a public vote, we would stay in the EU.

[Peter Grant]

I think the hon. Gentleman knows the answer to that question, because I have co-sponsored his Bill, although if I had realised that that meant I was expected to be here to speak on his Bill on Burns Day next year, I might have thought other about it.

I do not think it is acceptable, and it will be forever held up as a mark of shame on this entire Parliament, that it is left to Opposition Back Benchers to try to use procedural methods to force the Government to allow Parliament to give the decision that Parliament wants to give, rather than trying to force Parliament to give a decision that we really do not want to give in preference to a decision that we really, really do not want to give. When it comes to a decision, by whatever process, it is not acceptable, it is anti-democratic and, in terms of sovereignty of the people of Scotland and the rights of the people of Northern Ireland, it is unconstitutional to force us into a situation where no deal is one of only two deals left on the table. No deal can be ruled out and should be ruled out. For all the parroting of this and other Ministers, it is not up to Parliament to take no deal off the table by accepting an unacceptable deal. It is up to the Government to take it off the table right now by saying that no matter what happens, they will not impose it on us and on everybody else.

When it comes to a final decision, the two options available to us have to be the ones most likely to be accepted by as many MPs as possible, even if they are not supported by as many MPs as possible. I will not support anything that takes us out of the EU, but I might be willing, reluctantly, to accept something that is less disastrous than what we are faced with just now. The final choice cannot be between the Prime Minister’s deal and no deal. The combined Parliament of our four nations and the citizens of our four nations must be given a choice, and that choice, if it is to be a fair choice, can only be between the Prime Minister’s Brexit and no Brexit.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Kinnock]

I agree entirely. Let us not forget that this will impact on people’s lives and citizens’ rights—the rights of EU citizens in the UK and British citizens in the European Union. What will happen to the European arrest warrant? What will happen to our entire security apparatus across the EU? It is not just about trade and the WTO; it is much bigger than that.

I have been deeply impressed by the professionalism and dedication of every one of those who have come in to speak to the Select Committee to give evidence. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that they are engaged in a charade. Let us take the state of preparedness at our ports. Jon Thompson, the head of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, told us that his French counterparts have categorically refused to engage in bilateral discussions about how to plan for a no-deal exit, because bilateral contacts are not permitted under the terms of article 50. We can continue, should we wish to do so, to allow in goods from the EU at Dover without checks on 30 March, but we have absolutely no idea what the French are going to do at Calais in the event of no deal.

On our customs processes, Mr Thompson told us that there are 145,000 businesses across the UK who currently import or export their goods solely within the EU. Thanks to our membership of the customs union, not one of those businesses ever has to complete a customs declaration form because all the checks are done at the point of departure—that is, at the relevant factories, warehouses and farms. If we exit without a deal, every one of those businesses that wishes to continue trading with the EU will need to know how to complete a range of complex customs declarations. According to Mr Thompson, however, to date only 2% of the 145,000 have contacted the HMRC to seek guidance on what they should do in the event of no deal.

On health, Sir Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care, told us that there is no clarity on reciprocal healthcare arrangements for UK citizens in the EU and EU citizens in the UK. This will end in the event of no deal. A British tourist in Paris needing medical treatment is currently entitled to full access to the French public healthcare system, but as of 30 March 2019 he or she may be required to hold a private insurance policy.

On legislation, Jill Rutter, director of the Institute for Government, told us that, in order to ensure that UK law is operable on 30 March 2019 in the event of no deal, a mountain of primary and secondary legislation would have to be passed. The Government have so far managed to pass six of the 13 currently announced Brexit Bills. Without a deal, they will need the Trade Bill to complete its passage through Parliament, along with other key Bills in areas such as agriculture and fisheries, as well as legislation to secure EU citizens’ rights. And then there is the mountain of secondary legislation, with between 800 and 1,000 statutory instruments having to be passed by 29 March. Even if MPs were to start working on all this primary and secondary legislation now, it would be a herculean task but, as we are not even going to have the vote until the 15 or 16 January, there is no sign at all of this being able to be brought forward. We are in the realm of the impossible.

[Peter Grant]

Does the hon. Gentleman fear there is a significant risk that, just as the Government are trying to put unacceptable pressure on Parliament to accept a bad deal by holding up the threat of no deal, so, as these major and often contentious pieces of legislation come through, Parliament will be put under intense pressure to agree bad legislation without proper scrutiny just because we have to get something on the statute book in time?

[Stephen Kinnock]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. This is a steamroller. The tactics and strategy are based on steamrollering, bullying, blackmail and holding a gun to Parliament’s head. The purpose of this debate is to show that Parliament will not have it. We will not be bullied. We will not be presented with a false choice. We will not be blackmailed in the way the Government are attempting. It is a constitutional and democratic outrage.

Secondly, we have no idea how the EU27 would react to a no-deal exit, but draft legislation recently tabled by the French Government contains this sentence:

“In case of withdrawal of the UK from the EU without agreement, British nationals and their family members currently residing in France would be staying illegally”.

This leaves little room for doubt as to the mindset of member states’ Governments or the profound challenges that would be created for the British Government and for British citizens and businesses.

Thirdly, but not least, it is absolutely clear that there is no parliamentary majority for no deal. It is equally clear that it is impossible that the Government could consider a no-deal exit without the support of Parliament for such a course of action. The conclusion is, therefore, that a no-deal Brexit is simply not on the cards, and a responsible Government would be making that statement clearly today.

As no deal is not going to happen, and given that the Prime Minister’s deal is dead in the water, it is finally becoming clear, I hope, that there is an option that can bring Parliament together and get us through this difficult time. It is an option I have been talking about for two years now—many of my hon. Friends and colleagues from across the House will be sick to death of me banging this drum, but I will continue to do so. An EFTA-EEA-based Brexit combined with a customs union—otherwise known as the Norway-plus option—is the only option that resolves the Irish border issue and protects the jobs and livelihoods of the people we were elected to represent. It is the only option that I believe can command a cross-party parliamentary majority and which has a hope of reuniting our deeply divided country.

It is vital that Parliament hold its nerve. This is not a choice between the Prime Minister’s deal and no deal, because no deal is simply not going to happen; this is a choice between the Prime Minister’s deal and the right deal; it is a choice between caving in to the Prime Minister’s empty threats and scaremongering and standing up for the interests of our constituents; it is a choice between capitulating to a bully and asserting our sovereignty. I am confident that when the time comes Parliament will step up and do what is right for the country.