Leaving the EU: Business of the House

Peter Grant Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to speak this afternoon for Scotland’s national party in this debate. I congratulate the official Opposition and thank them for giving us this opportunity. I welcome the cross-party consensus that has seen, to my reckoning, every party bar one represented on the list of signatories to the motion. I congratulate the Secretary of State. I have always admired his ability, in best debating society style, to speak at great length without hesitation or repetition. This afternoon, however, he managed to add the achievement of not actually saying anything during the whole time he was on his feet.

Let us forget the cries of democratic and constitutional outrage at the very idea that Parliament should decide what Parliament is going to discuss in the future. As my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) pointed out, there are very successful and highly regarded Parliaments not too far from this one where Parliament sets the business, and that seems to work perfectly well. The constitutional experts say it is a bad idea. I wonder what the predecessors of those same constitutional experts thought of the “ridiculous” notion that women should be allowed to vote and sit in this Parliament. No doubt they were telling us that that was a dangerous precedent, too.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that the Secretary of State appeared to be telling us that he agreed it would be wrong to drag the Crown into Parliament by having a Prorogation as political as that suggested by some of the Tory leadership candidates? Does he therefore agree that passing this motion merely puts into our Standing Orders for that particular date an insurance policy to prevent the more unscrupulous of those who are currently standing for the Tory leadership from doing precisely what they are threatening in hustings to do?

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Lady makes a very valid point. I think the more important point is that the motion would allow, on one particular day in two weeks’ time, the elected Members of this Parliament to decide what we will discuss. The Secretary of State and others have said that that would prevent the Government from putting their business on the Order Paper. The Government cannae tell us what they want to be discussing on Monday, never mind in two weeks’ time! Given the stuff they have been using to pad out the agenda over the past several weeks, they can hardly claim that there is a backlog. Well, there is a backlog of massively important proposed legislation that needs to come through, but there is absolutely no sign of it.

I will tell you, Mr Speaker, what would be a democratic and constitutional outrage. It would be an outrage for any Government, either through deliberate malice or sheer incompetence, to plunge us into a disastrous no-deal Brexit against the interests of our four nations, against the will of Parliament, and now, since 23 May, quite clearly against the will of the people. It would be an outrage for the expressed will of 62% of the sovereign citizens of my nation to be cast aside as if they neither existed nor mattered. It would be an outrage if 3 million citizens on these islands saw their basic rights curtailed and undermined as a result of a flawed and corrupted referendum that they were banned from participating in.

All those outrages would pale into nothing, however, compared with the outrage if the first act of a Prime Minister, appointed in an election in which less than one quarter of 1% of the population was allowed to take part, was to abolish this Parliament and reinstate it only when it was too late for us to carry out the duty for which we were elected: the duty of pulling our four nations back from what everyone in this Chamber knows would be an economic and social catastrophe.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

The hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) asked my hon. Friend a question about Prorogation. The last two times it has been used constitutionally—for instance, in the Commonwealth nation of Canada—has been to hide the utter incompetence of the elected Government who were about to lose office. Can my hon. Friend remind the House again that what the motion proposes is a constitutional norm of parliamentary procedure and that the only way to do it is to vote for the Opposition’s motion?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. I agree entirely. Of course, we were told by the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) that the motion is premature. I wonder if she could tell us on which future allocated Opposition day she would like the official Opposition to bring this motion forward, given that they were told last week that they have had their allocation for this Session and that there will not be another Opposition day.

[Mrs Main]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have just been asked to nominate a day. Mr Speaker, you are always a friend of all the Back Benchers. It seems to me that there is a worry about a particular candidate that Opposition Members may or may not like the Order Paper to reflect. If there is a worry about having a choice of how we wish to leave the European Union, I am sure you, Mr Speaker, would find a way to ensure there was parliamentary time. At the moment, however, we do not know what it is we are voting to have a day for. It is a fear of one or two of the candidates. If their fears were to be recognised, I am absolutely certain you would facilitate a debate.

[Mr Speaker]

I always seek to facilitate the House and to ensure that the full range of opinion is expressed. These are matters of debate and, notwithstanding the sedulous efforts to entice me into contributing to it, I feel I must exercise a self-denying ordinance. The hon. Lady has made her own point in her own way, with alacrity.

[Peter Grant]

I say once again that it is not premature for the Opposition to have tabled the motion today. This is the last chance they have, and I, for one, am very grateful they have decided to take that chance. The reason that we need to give Parliament the chance, just once, to set the agenda is that the Government have shown no inclination whatever to do anything to prevent a no-deal Brexit.

Why would a no-deal Brexit be so bad? Let us look at what some of the key drivers of the UK economy have been saying recently. Sydney Nash, from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said:

“For the automotive sector, no deal is simply not an option. Hearing politicians promote a no deal does not fill any of our companies with confidence nor does it fill international investors with confidence. Our strong desire is that no deal be taken off the table.”

Seamus Nevin, at Make UK—many Members will know it better by its previous name, the Engineering Employers Federation—said:

“Our members are quite blunt, they say that a no deal scenario would be nothing short of an act of economic vandalism”.

Tim Rycroft, at the Food and Drink Federation said:

“No deal is something our members are most unanimous about. 45 % say no deal would lead to redundancies.”

Nick Van Westenholz, director of EU exit and international trade at the National Farmers Union, said:

“No Deal would be disastrous for some sectors…It is frankly worrying that that we see it being put forward as a plausible scenario to leave without a deal in October.”

Those are not choice quotes from selected commentators that I have picked up over the last three or four years. All those things were said today, in this Parliament, in evidence to the Brexit Select Committee just over six hours ago. That is what these major economic drivers are saying right now. It is about time the Government and some of their Back Benchers were prepared to listen.

[Steve Brine]

I realise that the Scottish National party does not like to respect referendum results either north of the border or across the UK, but when those eminent witnesses were giving evidence to the Select Committee today—I have heard from others about that evidence and I share their view; I do not want a no deal, which is why I voted for a deal three times—what did the hon. Gentleman say to them about why he kept voting against the deal? That is what has put us in this position.

[Peter Grant]

I have enormous respect for the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the Chair of the Exiting the European Union Committee, on which I serve, and I know that he would show latitude where possible, but it would be a bit much if Committee members starting taking questions from those giving evidence, as the hon. Gentleman suggested. I say this to him and some of his hon. Friends: if they want to throw out accusations about failing to respect the result of a referendum that meant that Scotland has to keep sending Members of Parliament to sit in the Palace of Westminster, doing that to an SNP MP, or any Scottish MP, while they are delivering a speech in the Palace of Westminster, when we are only here because we do accept the result of that referendum, is not the most credible time for it. I have said often enough that I respect the right of the people to speak in a referendum. I also respect the right of the people to say that they want another go, and I not only expect but demand that the result of the 2016 referendum in my nation of sovereign citizens be respected, rather than simply laughed out of court time and again by the Conservative party.

We already know from previous work done by the Confederation of British Industry and others that the financial cost to Scotland of a no-deal Brexit is more than the entire amount we spend every year on our precious national health service. Up to 100,000 people could lose their jobs, although in this place, some people seem a lot more concerned about who is going to get one job than about who is going to lose the other 100,000.

There was a bit of protest from Conservative Members when I said that a no-deal Brexit was against the clearly expressed will of the people, but it is true. In a democracy, one of the key ways that we find out the will of the people is through the ballot box. For nearly three years, we knew that about 17.5 million people wanted to leave the EU, but none of us knew or had any right to assume what kind of Brexit they wanted. I cry shame on all those who had the arrogance to think that they knew what the 17.5 million people wanted.

We still do not know what Brexit they all want, but thanks to the EU elections on 23 May, we know what they do not want, because the same people who voted in 2016 to leave the European Union decisively rejected the parties whose manifestos consisted of a no-deal Brexit. This was the first time that people had ever been given the chance to turn out and vote decisively for a no-deal Brexit, and even those who voted leave avoided the no-deal parties in their millions: 34%—barely one in three—of leave voters supported the no-deal parties. Of the 17.4 million people who voted leave, 11.5 million refused to vote for hard, no-deal Brexit parties on 23 May.

[Dr Whitford]

Is it not also the case that the current Prime Minister went to the country in March 2017 with her approach, which was towards a hard Brexit, and ended up losing her majority and with a minority Government, so people had already expressed their will?

[Peter Grant]

My hon. Friend makes a very valid point. Unfortunately, on that occasion, as on too many occasions, the soon-to-be former Prime Minister was listening to nobody apart from her own reflection in the mirror. It is not even as though the Brexit party can claim that 11.5 million people wanted a no-deal Brexit but did not vote for it because they disagreed with some other aspect of the Brexit party’s policies, because it does not have any other policies for people to disagree with.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, like me and the rest of the House, recalls the Prime Minister saying before the general election that she was being obstructed by Parliament in getting her deal. That was put to the public, and as we all know, she got her result from the public: she lost her majority. On another point that he made, like him, we have consulted employers, company owners and so forth and they want a deal, as I am sure he would agree.

[Peter Grant]

If we asked a lot of business leaders just now what their ideal option would be if they had a completely free choice, I think most would say, “Don’t leave.” Those who were pushing for us to accept the Prime Minister’s deal previously made it perfectly clear that that was because they thought it was either the Prime Minister’s deal or no deal. If they were presented with a choice of the Prime Minister’s Brexit or no Brexit, they might give a very different decision.

The people had the chance to vote for no deal and chose not to. We can no longer say that pursuing or being willing to allow a no-deal Brexit is the will of the people. The people spoke on 23 May just as firmly and decisively as they did in June 2016. Those who, for the last three years, have been telling us that we have to listen to what people said in June 2016 better start listening to what people said in May 2019, because it was not just about the failure of the no-deal Brexit parties to get anything like a majority of support. The parties who were unambiguous in saying that they were standing on a manifesto of “Stop Brexit”, without exception, had record-breaking successes. The SNP had our best ever European election result, as a result of which, I am proud to say, my good friend Alyn Smith is president of the European Free Alliance and is likely to become the vice-president of a group that has almost 50% more MEPs than the one that Mr Farage wants to lead. Plaid Cymru had its best ever European elections, as did the Liberal Democrats and the Alliance party in Northern Ireland. The Greens managed only their second best ever, but it is 30 years since they were anywhere near the vote that they got this time. Meanwhile in Scotland, the Tories went into these elections telling people in Scotland to send a message to Nicola Sturgeon; I can confidently say that Nicola Sturgeon has got the message.

The purpose of today’s motion is to force the Government to do what any rational, sane and democracy-respecting Government would already have done. We are trying to force the Government to give Parliament a choice and give direction to a Government who are leaderless, rudderless, drifting and utterly lost. The motion is designed to give Parliament a chance to stop a no-deal Brexit, and to stop what would in effect be the non-military coup against Parliament that some would-be Prime Ministers are already openly advocating.

In January, in March and in April 2019, this Parliament voted to take no deal off the table. On 23 May, the people made it clear that they want no deal taken off the table. This morning, some of our most important industries pleaded with us to take no deal off the table. Our duty could not be clearer: whatever our individual views on the European Union might be, it is time to get no deal off the table, and we can start that process by supporting the motion today.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

rose—