UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

Debate between Peter Grant and Geraint Davies

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[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.

Leaving the EU: No Deal

Debate between Peter Grant and Geraint Davies

Wednesday 19th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[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.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Peter Grant and Geraint Davies

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[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.

Government’s EU Exit Analysis

Debate between Peter Grant and Geraint Davies

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

At this point, the answer is no: I neither condone nor condemn because I do not know what the circumstances were.

I walked away from a potentially successful career in NHS financial management. I wrestled for six months with my own conscience, seeing things that I knew had to be brought to public attention but knowing there was no way I could do that, and knowing that the public were being deliberately misled about what was going on in the health board that I worked in. The only way I could bring it to public attention was to resign and walk away from the job. So I will never, ever condemn anyone who believes they are acting in the public interest by doing something that they are not supposed to do.

I would be very surprised if there is a single Member in the Chamber today who is not at this very moment considering an important constituency case that has been brought to them by someone who technically was breaking the rules by raising it with a Member of Parliament. There are times when the public interest has to outweigh all other considerations, and until I have seen the full circumstances of why this information was disclosed, I am not going to condone or condemn, and I do not think anyone else should prejudice the case by commenting on it now.

[Geraint Davies]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a distinction between a leak and whistleblowing? Whistleblowing is in the public interest. The provisional evaluation of the economic impacts, be it incomplete or imperfect, and given that good is not the enemy of perfect, should be in the public arena. This is a whistle blow, not a leak.

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. We have to be careful about language. There is whistleblowing as defined in the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 and it is not clear whether this incident would comply with that.

As a council leader, I sometimes found myself having to respond to information that technically should not have been disclosed. I always took the view that, if the motivation was clearly public interest, we should seek to protect those who did that, even if they had not technically done it in the correct way. The question today should not be about the motivation or principles of whoever disclosed this information into the public domain. The question should be first about what the information tells us, and secondly about what the Government’s determination to hide this information from the people tells us about the Government’s handling of Brexit.

I hope that, when the Under-Secretary of State responds, he will do what the Minister did not do earlier, and tell us when the Government started to prepare this analysis. Is this the homework that the Secretary of State had to confess to a Select Committee he had not done yet when the House asked for it? It looks suspiciously like this is not only the Secretary of State’s late homework but that he copied it off his new pal Big Mike in the high school up the road in Scotland. The similarities between the Scottish Government’s analysis that the Government rubbished two weeks ago and the Government’s own analysis are so striking that it would be a remarkable coincidence if the people who prepared those analyses had not been copying from each other.

Brexit Deal: Referendum

Debate between Peter Grant and Geraint Davies

Monday 11th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Geraint Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Grant]

I am just about to refer to the hon. Gentleman, so I might be about to cover his point. He commented on the clash of dates in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which had vital national elections just a few weeks before the EU referendum. It was not realistic to expect all in those elections not to campaign on issues for which the individual Parliaments were responsible and concentrate on the EU referendum.

The franchise has been mentioned; 16 and 17-year-olds, who statistically had more to gain or lose from the referendum result, were the one group excluded. EU nationals were not allowed to vote. Who anywhere in the UK has been more affected than EU nationals? The rules that usually control funding in elections in Great Britain did not properly apply, so a £500,000 donation was able to be channelled into the leave campaign—from who knows where—via the accounts of a political party in Northern Ireland, where, for understandable reasons, there have been more moves to retain the confidentiality of those who fund political parties.

As has been said on numerous occasions, there was no process whatsoever to hold anybody to account for telling the biggest pack of lies ever told during the referendum campaign. The £350 million on the side of a bus was certainly the biggest in terms of the size of the letters, but it was not the only or the biggest lie that was told.

[Peter Grant]

I will give way first to the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) and then come back to the hon. Gentleman.

[Geraint Davies]

The hon. Gentleman likened the situation to a court making a decision, and mentioned the process. Surely the other issue is fresh evidence, and an abundance of evidence is emerging every day that people will pay more and more jobs will be lost. Now that people are realising what the evidence is, they are changing their minds.

[Peter Grant]

I will come back in due course to the wider question of whether the circumstances have changed significantly or whether people simply understand the circumstances better now.

EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement

Debate between Peter Grant and Geraint Davies

Monday 6th February 2017 General Committees

[Peter Grant]

I think that means I have as long as the hon. Member for Brent North had after starting to come to his conclusions, so I will try and keep by comments brief.

The Minister asked what the Opposition’s view of CETA was. Well, there is not just one Opposition—even on this small Committee there are at least two Oppositions, and possibly more, but we will see later. The Scottish National party’s position on trade is that we want it. We form the Government of a country whose exports are worth almost £30 billion a year, excluding oil and gas—that counts as Scottish produce when it is bad news but not when it is good news. That is equivalent to about £100 a week exported for every man, woman and child in the country.

We can do that because we have confidence in our producers to compete on a level playing field with anybody anywhere in the world on quality, whether in food and drink, which have been mentioned, our tourism provision or invisible exports such as higher education. Scotland has nothing to fear from fair trade, which is why we are staying in the single market even after some Members here have chosen to leave, but we have to ensure that removing barriers to fair trade does not create opportunities for the destruction or hijacking of important public services. I welcome the assurances that the Minister has given us today, but I still want to hear them given to the entire House of Commons, not simply because I think that is what should happen, but because a Minister of the Crown promised that it would happen.

The Minister and some of his colleagues on the Government Benches keep talking about debating the process as if that did not matter. We should remember that the European Parliament, the Court of Justice and the European Commission are processes. If we are not interested in processes, why are we going through the chaos of Brexit to change the process by which our laws are made and interpreted? The process matters. Strange though this may seem coming from somebody who, as hon. Members will have gathered, is not a great fan of this place, I think that the principle of Ministers’ accountability to Parliament is so important that I would be prepared to see a delay in a trade deal that I was 100% in favour of if that would ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny. When I am here, I am not just speaking for myself. When the whole House is assembled, we are all speaking for others, and those others have raised significant concerns, whether they are well founded, based on misinformation or based on good information. Those concerns can be addressed without scuppering the whole treaty.

This issue is too important to be discussed late on a Monday evening in an upstairs Committee room in the House of Commons. I had a look at the BBC website a few minutes ago. There are 11 different headlines on the politics page, but this debate does not feature—that is how successfully it has been hidden away. I cannot see into the minds of the managers of the Government’s business. It might just be a coincidence that we got notified of the date, time and place of this meeting on exactly the same day as the programme motion for Committee stage of the Withdrawal from the European Union (Article 50) Bill appeared on the Order Paper. It might just be a coincidence that after five months of waiting for an urgent debate, it suddenly gets programmed for a day on which nobody but nobody is going to be paying the slightest bit of attention to it.

If the Minister is concerned that delaying the signing of CETA will somehow damage Britain’s reputation in trade circles around the world, what does it do to the Government’s reputation when a Minister goes before a Select Committee and says that he agrees that there needs to be an urgent debate before the full House of Commons, yet months later it still has not happened, and then another Minister comes along and says, “Well, yes, the Secretary of State gave that commitment, but it really doesn’t matter because we’re far too busy getting out of the European Union to worry about parliamentary democracy”? I do not think anything can make us too busy for that.

I simply do not believe that it is purely due to a lack of time that after five months we have not had an urgent debate on a major issue that has caused a lot of concern to well-meaning, sincere and genuine citizens the length and breadth of these islands. I simply do not believe that, if the Government wanted to schedule a debate on the Floor of the House at some point since 7 September, they could not have found a way of doing so. If that is not the case, and if five months genuinely was not long enough to schedule a three-hour debate on the Floor of the House, we should remember that the same Government tell us that they can negotiate an entirely new relationship with 27 different countries in just under 18 months. If that does not send a chill down the spine, I do not know what will.

Incidentally, I do not care what amendments the hon. Member for Swansea West doodled down, submitted and decided not to follow through with. Perhaps Government Members should think more about articles that were written about the case for staying in the European Union, which were somehow never published, by someone who had a kind of road-to-Damascus conversion and is now one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Brexit. We should remember that he has also changed his opinion about Donald Trump since he got elected to the presidency.

We are not debating amendments that were drafted and never submitted or amendments that were submitted and then withdrawn; we are debating the amendment before us. I ask this of Conservative Members. I know that the Government and the Whips have told them what they want to do, but if they seriously believe that a major reason for exiting the European Union was to restore parliamentary democracy—I will not refer to parliamentary sovereignty, because that does not exist equally in all four parts of these islands—and if they want to restore parliamentary supremacy over Europe, surely we should also be maintaining parliamentary supremacy over Ministers of the Crown.

This is not an isolated case. I have sat beside the hon. Member for Swansea West many times in the European Scrutiny Committee, and I have lost count of the number of times that that Committee, which has a built-in Government majority, has savaged Ministers one after the other for their complete failure to show any respect whatever for the due processes of the House. If the Government do not like the processes, they are perfectly entitled to bring forward changes and to ask the House to agree to them.

[Geraint Davies]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if our Chairman, the hon. Member for Stone, were here, he would demand a full debate and full scrutiny, as we do today?

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. I rather suspect that the hon. Member for Stone is more than capable of speaking for himself. We disagree significantly on a number of issues, but on this issue he and I agree entirely. Given that he has never opposed any of his Committee’s reports, and that we have had report after report severely criticising the Government for failure to bring important matters of public policy forward for debate, either in Committee or in the House, it is reasonable to take it that not only the Chair, but members of that Committee across the parties, agree that the Government, for far too long, have not been interested in being held to account by the House of Commons.

I make a final plea to those on the Government Benches. I am not asking them to support the amendment because I want to give the Government a going over, because, quite frankly, they are doing that well enough themselves just now. I am not doing it because I want to block the treaty, because my view is that, with a few changes, the treaty could be a good thing for the vast majority of people on these islands. I am asking them to do it because it is what they believe in.

Tory Members are taking us out of the EU. Some of them did not support that at the referendum, but last week only one Member on the Tory Benches voted against the Bill, so they are now accepting that the UK is leaving the EU, and a major purpose in doing that is to restore what they term parliamentary sovereignty. If they are not prepared to stand up for parliamentary sovereignty when it relates to Ministers in the UK Government, we have no chance of restoring parliamentary democracy anywhere else. I make a final plea: please do what you know is the right thing to do. We are not talking about holding things up. We are simply talking about giving the House of Commons its proper place in oversight over Government decisions that will continue to affect all our lives, and the lives of future generations for many decades to come.