European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Peter Grant and Dominic Grieve

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 15th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Grieve]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important and interesting point, to which I have no doubt the Government will respond. As I have said, however, I do not wish to be prescriptive. I want an assurance from the Government that this matter is being looked at, and that it cannot really be divorced from some of the things we will look at next week, or whenever the Committee sits again.

My desire is that we should have such debates. I do not wish to force the Government’s hand, even though that may appear superficially attractive. I do not actually wish to put new clause 55 to the vote; it has problems of its own. However, I put the Government on notice that we are going to have to draw together the issues we are debating today, and I am convinced that we will debate similar issues next week.

All those issues derive from the same problem about the way in which the Government have approached and have at the moment drafted the legislation, and that problem must be remedied. It can be remedied, and I am happy to work with the Government to try to ensure that it is remedied. If necessary, we can come back to this on Report—on the assurance that we will have a real opportunity to do so on Report—and then pull the strands together and produce a package that will command some consensus across the House. I very much hope to hear that from the Government this afternoon, if I am not to be tempted to put my new clause to the vote.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I rise to speak to amendments 200 to 201 in my name and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends, and to new clause 45, which will be decided on at a later date. I also want to support amendment 217, tabled by our colleagues in Plaid Cymru.

Last week, with several members of the Brexit Select Committee, some of whom have already spoken about this, I went on a very informative visit to Brussels and Paris. It was very informative partly because the people we spoke to were so well informed and so forthcoming. They appeared to be a lot better informed and more forthcoming about what Brexit is really going to mean than a great many Conservative Members and, indeed, than some Conservative Front Benchers.

In about 20 hours of meetings, the shortest and most perceptive comment we heard—this sums up where we now are with Brexit—came from a member of the European Affairs Committee of the French Senate. He quite simply said, “Quelle pagaille!”—“What a mess!” I replied that if he thought it looked like a mess from the French side of the channel, he should try looking at it from the United Kingdom’s point of view.

We have a Government who rushed into a referendum too soon, at a time when the UK population was the least well-informed in the whole of Europe of what Europe is actually about. Article 50 was triggered in indecent haste—far sooner than it needed to be—simply to pacify some of the more rabid Brexiteers on the Government Benches.

English Votes for English Laws

Debate between Peter Grant and Dominic Grieve

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to be able to participate in this debate. It is a particular pleasure to do so at a rather later stage, because that obliges one to sit on the Benches and listen to the speeches, which I have found very illuminating.

What we have heard in the debate is an extraordinary celebration of the Union of the United Kingdom. We did not just hear it in the contributions of the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) or my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), whose maiden speech I was delighted to hear, or, for that matter, in those of Labour MPs from Welsh constituencies. The most compelling argument for the Union of the United Kingdom came from the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). His argument against these proposals was that it is, in effect, impossible to dissociate decisions of any kind taken in this House from knock-on consequences north of the border. He is right. Ultimately, every decision that is taken by an Assembly or Parliament in the United Kingdom has a knock-on effect elsewhere, outside the area of its jurisdiction.

During my years as Attorney General, it was apparent to me how relevant that point is. For example, crime is an entirely cross-border issue. Criminals move freely between Liverpool and Glasgow, and indeed every other part of our United Kingdom. One of the tasks I had as Attorney General was to work closely with the Lord Advocate—an association, I might add, entirely dependent on goodwill and almost nothing else—in order to make sure that in tackling crime, the interests of the United Kingdom, not just those of England, England and Wales or Scotland, were properly addressed.

I have to say to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire that while I understood the thrust of his arguments, they came as a little bit of a surprise, considering that for the past 18 years this House, with his enthusiastic participation, has been progressively deconstructing the United Kingdom and making such co-operation harder and harder to achieve.

The whole reason why we are having this debate is, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa) so rightly said, that our constituents in England are increasingly irked by what they see as a lack of comity, which is the direct consequence of the way in which we have decided to operate devolution.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) is absolutely right. A lot of these issues were trotted out in the 1998 devolution debates. I spent hours on the Benches in this House teasing out these points with Donald Dewar. We pointed out to the then Labour Government that they were not taking—to use a word that has buzzed around today, but which I have never liked—the holistic approach. They kept on talking about holistics, but no one was prepared to think through the overall consequences of the massive constitutional changes we were initiating.

In particular, this country has an unwritten constitution that is ultimately entirely dependent on sovereignty residing in this place. It is extremely simple and extremely subtle, but it breaks down extremely quickly once power starts to be diffused elsewhere.

[Peter Grant]

Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman not understand that he has put his finger on one of the most fundamental differences between our nations? In my nation, the sovereignty of Parliament and the sovereignty of the monarch do not exist; the people are and always will be sovereign in Scotland.

[Mr Grieve]

No. I am afraid that distinction exists only in the mind of the hon. Gentleman. If I may say so, that is entirely illustrative of the sort of myth that illuminates the lives of Scottish nationalists, but has no relation to reality whatsoever. The Queen is the servant, through her coronation oath, of the citizens of this country, and we in this Parliament—and, indeed, Ministers—do our best to serve the Queen in the fulfilment of her oath. That serves the people just as adequately as any of the other rationalisations that the hon. Gentleman may have, so I will not hear any more of that, thank you very much.