UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

Peter Grant Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I rise to speak to our amendment (i), standing in my name and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) and other right hon. and hon. Members—I am grateful for the support that we have received from the Liberal Democrats today. It is a much shorter and simpler amendment than the one we tabled two weeks ago, because above all else we need to get the House, as I hope the whole House will agree, to halt, at least temporarily, the headlong rush towards the cliff edge of no deal. Indeed, I find the degree of consensus developing between the Secretary of State and the no-deal brigade on his own Back Benches to be extremely alarming. I hope that is not an indication of where the Government’s thinking is leading.

Our amendment asks the Prime Minister to seek an extension of at least three months. That is important, because it takes us past the European Parliament elections, which could otherwise cause a significant difficulty, certainly for the European Union.

[Gareth Snell]

I want to ask the hon. Gentleman a similar question to the one I put to those on our Front Bench. If the SNP amendment is adopted today, is the intention for the United Kingdom to participate in the European elections at the end of May?

[Peter Grant]

I think that option has to be open, but it will be very difficult, because the Europeans have already carved up our democratic representation in Europe. I keep an open mind. I want us to continue to be part of the European Parliament and other European institutions. It looks as if, at least in the short term, Scotland will lose that benefit, but I look forward to us getting back in as quickly as possible.

The other amendments that have been selected have a lot of merit to them. I do not think there is anything in them that I would oppose or that is incompatible with our amendment. I would ask the supporters of those amendments to look at our amendment, because extending article 50 has become an urgent prerequisite for anything else. We do not have time to spend tabling motions, having debates or developing substantial legislation, whether on a customs union, a people’s vote or anything else, unless we stop the clock. Contrary to what the Secretary of State said, the Prime Minister has not been trying to stop the clock. She has been trying to let it keep ticking down, while nothing but nothing was happening to prepare us for Brexit.

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

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the Speaker has ruled that all these motions are advisory, including the motion rejecting no deal, and that the referendum itself was also advisory? Why are we hurtling over the cliff on an advisory referendum and not accepting the will of this House that it would be calamitous?

[Peter Grant]

I do not accept the argument that says, “Because the vote was close,” or, “Because the legislation did not say it was binding.” I think we have to accept the results of the referendum in each of the four nations of the United Kingdom. That is why, although I sympathise with where my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) is coming from, I have some difficulty with his amendment, because I do not think we can permanently revoke article 50 unless we have a revised decision in another referendum.

When I say that we have to respect the result of the referendum, we have to respect the results in the four nations. It would be unacceptable for us to permanently revoke article 50 for England and Wales without asking the people of those nations what they thought. It is equally unacceptable and unconstitutional to ignore the express will of the people of Scotland or indeed Northern Ireland. We have the ridiculous situation where Northern Ireland cannot be made to stay in the United Kingdom against the will of its people and cannot be taken out of the United Kingdom against the will of its people, but can be taken out of the European Union against the will of its people. How does that work?

I cannot see any prospect of the Prime Minister’s deal being accepted by Parliament either before or after 29 March. I cannot see any prospect of the European Union agreeing any significant changes in the next month to a deal that it has spent two years with the Government agreeing to, so we are not going to leave with a deal on 29 March. As the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), the Father of the House, has said, there are barely 25 people in this place who would countenance leaving with no deal on 29 March, so surely the only credible, tenable and defensible solution is not to leave on 29 March, but to put back the leaving day until we can sort things out and at least engage in some kind of damage limitation.

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

rose—

[Peter Grant]

I could not give a speech without giving way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Stephen Kerr]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is quite right that the vast majority of people in this House want a deal that we can leave the European Union with in an orderly way. On that basis, and given the urgency of the situation, why did the First Minister of Scotland, our country, refuse to turn up for a high-level meeting involving the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Home Secretary and the First Minister of Wales to avoid a no-deal Brexit?

[Peter Grant]

It really is a bit cheeky to criticise the First Minister of Scotland for missing one meeting when she has been available to meet every day since the Brexit referendum. She and other Ministers of the devolved nations have attended meeting after meeting. They have been invited to express their views and then been told that their views counted for nothing.

Any Prime Minister who was putting the best interests of the people before the narrow, short-term interests of herself and her party would have asked for an extension by now. I want Parliament to say to the Prime Minister, bindingly or non-bindingly, “Ask for an extension.” I also want Parliament to be respected when it said, “Get no deal off the table.”

I do not know whether Members will recognise these words:

“We must reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right”.

Those words are from the Conservative party manifesto of 2017. Those were the promises on which every single Conservative Member of Parliament stood and was elected. If no-deal Brexit is not an ideological template provided by the libertarian right, I do not know what is. Those Members have been elected on a promise not to go with the disaster of no deal, so if the Government cannot prevent a no deal, they will have to go, because they will be in flagrant breach of one of the most fundamental promises of the Conservative manifesto.

[Stephen Gethins]

I thank my hon. Friend for making such a powerful case. Colleagues on the Government Benches have made the point about not wanting a no-deal Brexit. Regardless of what anybody wants—I would like a people’s vote and for us to remain in the EU; others take a different view—all that our amendment does is give us an extension, so that we are not rushing this when time is fast running out. I therefore look forward to welcoming the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) in the Lobby with us later.

[Peter Grant]

I never give up on the possibility of anybody in this House or elsewhere finally seeing sense and recognising what is best for the people, so I, too, look forward to welcoming the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) in the Lobby later.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

The hon. Gentleman has reminded me of the party manifesto, on which I apparently stood at the last election, and which is binding on me, I have never seen this document. It was produced some time during the campaign, rather obscurely, and I read about it in the newspapers. No copy was ever sent to me and I have never met a constituent who bothered to get a copy or read it. It had one rather startling policy in it, which was abandoned within about a day and played no further role. There is another myth growing: a new constitutional convention that says that anyone who stands for a party and gets elected here is bound by some rubbishy document that somebody unknown in central office, not the Cabinet, has produced and that is meant to bind them for the next Parliament.

[Peter Grant]

That is certainly an interesting proposal. Let me say that each and every time I have stood for election I have read, and often contributed to, the manifesto on which I have stood, and I will always honour my manifesto commitments to the best of my ability. I would expect my party colleagues in the Scottish Government to honour the manifesto on which they were elected as well.

The backstop is not the problem for me; in fact, I do not think it is really the problem for more than a tiny minority here. The reason I reject the deal—and the reason it is rejected by the Scottish National party and the overwhelming majority of Scotland’s parliamentarians, both here and at Holyrood—is that it is a rotten deal for Scotland, and changing the backstop will not fix that. It will seriously damage our economy, it will place unsustainable strain on the public services that are so dear to our hearts, and it will cause wholly unacceptable pain to tens of thousands of citizens who have chosen to give Scotland the benefit of their talents.

Let me give just one example of what this means to real people. In November last year I had the privilege of visiting Glenrothes’s twin town, Boeblingen in southern Germany. The occasion was the town’s award of its highest civic honour to my good friend John Vaughan—a constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) across the border—in recognition of the decades of voluntary service that John and his wife Karen had given, and their contribution to the bonds of friendship between our two towns. I later submitted an early-day motion to mark John’s achievement, and I am grateful to all who signed it.

On Tuesday, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife told the House that Karen Vaughan had been told that she must travel to Edinburgh and ask permission to register as a foreigner in her own country. Karen has lived in the United Kingdom for longer than the vast majority of people whom I can see in the Chamber. She has been here for 74 years. Someone whose contribution to these nations cannot be measured—someone who came here as a babe in arms three quarters of a century ago, after the defeat of Nazism in Europe—is now being told by this Parliament that she must make a round trip of nearly 100 miles to ask permission to be registered as a foreigner in the only land that she has ever known, and probably the only land that she will ever know. What have we become, Mr Speaker? And, much more frighteningly, if this is what we have become before Brexit, where in the name of God will we be heading after it if we have a Government who see that as an acceptable way to treat any human being?

Of course, the Government will do as they always do, and say that it is just an isolated case. Everything about Brexit involves “isolated cases”, such as Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan, Ford and Airbus. But those are not isolated cases. The heavy engineering manufacturing industry is not an isolated industry. There have been warnings for years from every sector of the economy and every area of our public and civic life that Brexit would not work, and every one of them has been ignored for years.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

Given the hon. Gentleman’s comments about Jaguar Land Rover, will he join me in welcoming its decision to invest additional funds in the new petrol engine plant in Wolverhampton?

[Peter Grant]

I welcome any investment, but unfortunately employees in other parts of the Jaguar Land Rover network, and their families, do not have so much to celebrate.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

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[Peter Grant]

I really must make progress, because other Members want to speak. [Interruption.] I am grateful to the hon. Member for Stirling for pointing out, from a sedentary position, that all those people have said that they will support the Prime Minister’s deal. In fact, they were all approached by the Prime Minister and told, “It is my deal or no deal: ask your MPs to support my deal.”

I was contacted by a number of businesses in my constituency, and I also went to see a number of businesses and civic organisations that were brought over at the request of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Yes, they all wanted us to avoid no deal, but when they were asked what they really wanted, none of them said, “The Prime Minister’s deal, as I read it in Hansard.” All of them—with one minor exception—said that if they could have what they wanted, we would not be leaving the European Union. If the Government were listening to the concerns of business, we would not be leaving the EU, and if we had to leave the EU, we would not be leaving the customs union and we would not be leaving the single market.

Let me make it clear, incidentally, that the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has explained to me why he has to leave. I accept that, and I take no offence from the fact that he is not able to stay until the end of my speech.

I want to refer briefly to the backstop, but only briefly. The backstop is there because the Government have not yet fulfilled the obligation to which they willingly signed up in December 2017 to come up with a solution to the border question that would honour the Belfast agreement while also meeting their own unilateral red lines. It is no surprise that the Government have not yet come up with that solution, because it does not exist. The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose), admitted that from the Dispatch Box just over two weeks ago.

What everyone is calling the backstop would be better described, as it was yesterday by the former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, as a safety net. It is there to make sure that whatever else gets dropped in the chaos of Brexit, the Belfast agreement will not, in any circumstances, be allowed to fall and smash on the floor. It is not a backstop; it is a peace process guarantee. I defy anyone to say that they want the peace process guarantee to be time-limited, or to suggest that any party to the peace process would ever want to walk away from it unilaterally.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman has cited the Belfast agreement, and has talked of its falling and smashing on the floor. Will he at least do us the courtesy of reading it? There is no suggestion that, deal or no deal, the institutions contained in that agreement will be broken. There is no suggestion that the ability of Northern Ireland citizens also to have Irish citizenship will be taken away from them. If the hon. Gentleman is going to make claims, he should at least get them right.

[Peter Grant]

Yes, I have read the Belfast agreement, and with all due respect, if it comes to any arguments about interpretation I would sooner take the interpretation of the former Taoiseach who helped to write it than that of someone who fought tooth and nail for it to be rejected.

I asked Mr Ahern a question that was designed to show the idiocy of some of the suggestions from Conservative Members about how Ireland should be responsible for sorting out Britain’s mess. Many people in Ireland seemed to think I was being serious, which I think is an indication that our friends in Ireland, and even people in the United Kingdom, are so flummoxed by this shambles that they cannot tell the difference between the truth—the reality—and complete parody. It is no wonder, because the reality is that we have had a Brexit Secretary who did not know that lots of boats were going in and out of Dover, a Northern Ireland Secretary who did not know that people in Northern Ireland vote along traditional Unionist/Nationalist lines, a Trade Secretary who cannot name a single country that will give us a better trade deal outside the EU than we have inside it, a Transport Secretary who could not organise a traffic jam, and a Prime Minister who— well, where do we begin? We could begin with “a Prime Minister who ran away from Parliament on 10 December, and then came back and told us that we must hold our nerve.” Mr Speaker, Scotland is holding its nerve.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Peter Grant]

I really must wind up my speech.

We are nowhere near ready to leave on 29 March without a deal, and we are nowhere near ready to get a deal before 29 March. The deal that is on offer does not give certainty; it gives another 18 months of fudge and uncertainty, and during that time we shall need to sort out all the hard bits that we have not even started to talk about. The withdrawal agreement was the easy bit; the future relationship is the difficult bit that we must still look forward to.

I welcome the fact that, two years too late, the Prime Minister and her colleagues have started talking to Opposition parties, although the Secretary of State has still not replied to the request that I sent, just after his appointment, to meet me in my capacity as Brexit spokesperson for the third party in the House. He has written to all the members of the Select Committee asking to meet us, but he has not replied to my specific request.

So the Government have started talking to other people, but they must start listening as well. Their disruptive and unworkable red lines must be taken off the table, because they are getting in the way of any kind of workable deal. We need to ask the European Union for more time so that everyone in this Parliament and the devolved Parliaments and Governments, with their collective skills and talents, can get around the table, without preconditions—and that means no preconditions for the Prime Minister either—to work out a solution and get us out of this mess before it is too late.

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[Peter Grant]

I assure the hon. Gentleman from direct personal knowledge that the story I told earlier, of Karen Vaughan being ordered to apply for permission to become a foreigner in her own country, is 100% true. Does he accept it is true, and does he think it is an acceptable consequence of his Brexit?

[David T. C. Davies]

I do not know the hon. Gentleman’s constituent, but my wife is an EU national, although she would not call herself one. She is Hungarian, and no doubt she will have to apply, as will everyone else. That is perfectly fair, and it will all be done on a straightforward application. It will not cost any money. Why is it so unreasonable for the Government to want to make a few checks on those who have chosen to come and live in this country and take back control of our immigration process? I fully support the Government in doing that, and I believe they have gone about it in a perfectly reasonable fashion.

The real experts at the port of Holyhead told us very clearly that they are perfectly well prepared for a no-deal Brexit. They made it clear that it would cause some inconvenience and a bit of extra work, but they know what paperwork is required. They told our cross-party delegation that they want a message to go back to Members of Parliament to dampen down the fears of Armageddon, which simply is not going to happen. The real experts are prepared.

The 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit in the original and genuine people’s vote did so because they know that this economy is the fifth biggest in the world and that Great Britain can stand on its own two feet, with or without a deal. I will vote for a deal, with its imperfections, because I believe in compromise. I can accept a bit of a compromise, which is why I back the Prime Minister. It is for Opposition Members, and some Conservative Members, also to accept that we all have to compromise if we want to sort this out. If they truly believed their own scare stories, they would be queuing up to back the Prime Minister’s deal.

We should leave at the end of March. We can leave with a deal, but we should not be the least bit afraid to leave without a deal. The 17.4 million people who are confident and optimistic about this country’s future expect Members of Parliament, their political leaders, to show that same optimism and confidence.

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[Charlie Elphicke]

The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. The fact is that Europe is becoming relatively less important in the world and the rest of the world is becoming relatively more important. Is our national destiny best served by more involvement in Europe or more involvement in the world and more globalisation? [Interruption.] I shall not take any lectures from a Member of Parliament who represents a party that wants to tear Scotland away from its biggest market. That is just crass, irresponsible and, frankly, reckless.

We need to bear it in mind that people want the kind of future that they can build, and we need to make that happen. The people whom I represent in Dover and Deal say to me, “What is going on? Why don’t you just get on with it? Why are you still talking about it? Why is Parliament not just getting on with it?” Those are the right questions. We need to get on with it, end the uncertainty, leave the European Union and make the best of it.

[Peter Grant]

Will the hon. Gentleman tell us what his constituents think we should be getting on with? As things stand, we have no idea what our relationship with Europe will be like in two years’ time. What exactly is it that people are telling him to get on with?

[Charlie Elphicke]

They are telling me very clearly that we should leave the European Union. Personally, I think that the Government should fully embrace the Malthouse compromise, which offers us a positive way forward, to make sure that we can have open and seamless trade without being stuck within the European orbit as a form of satellite state. That is why I take issue with Labour Members. They say that they are in favour of leaving Europe, but they want to remain in the customs union, and they want to continue to have freedom of movement. Then they say, “Well, it’s all terribly complicated. Perhaps we should extend article 50 as a bridge.” Anyone looking at extending article 50 as a bridge for three or nine months knows that that is a bridge to nowhere, but the Labour party does not want to build a bridge to nowhere; it wants to build a bridge back into the European Union. It is a bridge to remain. That is the wrong thing to do. We should all come together to make sure that we leave the European Union successfully by reworking the backstop, and by taking the strong and clear position to the European Union that we are prepared to leave, deal or no deal.

Everyone in this House knows that European Union business is really done at 5 minutes to midnight. That being the case, we should press the point strongly and have the courage to see through the demands, hopes and aspirations of our constituents to make sure that we successfully leave the European Union, move on, end these debates and chart our future onwards. We should be spending more time talking about the kind of Brexit Britain we can build after we leave Europe, rather than banging on endlessly with debates in which people are constantly trying to countermand the instructions of the British people because they really want to remain.