European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Sam Gyimah Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening (Putney) (Ind)]

I would like to make a brief contribution on what is planned in the Bill, how the Government propose to take it forward, and where they are taking our country. They seem to be the pertinent questions tonight.

On what is planned in the Bill, I have deep concerns. The situation as the Bill pertains to Northern Ireland should not be just brushed away by Members of my former party, the Conservative and Unionist party. They are real issues that affect real people. To simply ignore them because it is inconvenient to take them on board is not only inappropriate but ultimately dangerous. I was very much struck by the speech by the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), a representative from Northern Ireland. He talked about two issues that go to the heart of the problems we are trying to grapple with, which affect Northern Ireland but have wider application. On cross-community concerns, the understanding in the Good Friday agreement was that communities had to go forward together if that agreement was going to work. We in this House should learn from that. We are a United Kingdom, yet we seek to go forward with this Brexit deal in a way that ignores the very clear concerns of the other nations in the United Kingdom—not just Northern Ireland, but Scotland and Wales.

[Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (LD)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a seminal moment? The Conservative and Unionist party is handing over legal, political and administrative control of Northern Ireland to the EU—almost like the United States handing over control of Alaska to Russia—and giving the people consent six years after this has taken place. That surely cannot be acceptable.

[Justine Greening]

It is very concerning that the rules Northern Ireland will have to live under will, in many regards, be set by the European Union, a body in which it will not have representatives. Ultimately, that is a recipe for something failing politically.

The point about consent matters. It is absolutely unacceptable for people in Northern Ireland to be thrown into an important new political arrangement and mechanism, with no say over whether it happens to them. Equally, it is unacceptable for the rest of the UK to face the same situation, going into a form of Brexit that many people who campaigned for Brexit, including Nigel Farage, who heads the Brexit party, feel is not the Brexit they campaigned for. He has called this deal Brexit in name only. I obviously understand that there is disagreement over what Brexit means, but that is one of the reasons why, three and a half years later, we are reaching this moment today.

Many Members who campaigned for Brexit, not least the Prime Minister, held up a Brexit deal by voting against one they felt did not deliver on that referendum result. I respect their view, but that brings me on to my point about how the Bill is being taken forward. Frankly, it is absolutely hypocritical for people who held up Brexit because they thought it was the wrong one, to then decide that their version should be fast-tracked and steamrollered through this House because we have run out of time. It is down to their actions that we are three and a half years down the road and we have not moved forward. It is entirely unacceptable to ram this through in two days, and it simply stores up problems for our United Kingdom by doing it this way.

I see no problem with taking longer and giving this House of representatives time to genuinely air the important issues about this proposal, have them understood, and have the Government able to respond to them. We have heard some of them today, but we have not heard, for example, about clause 29, which talks about what could be an important role for the European Scrutiny Committee in raising issues on EU legislation that comes through during the withdrawal agreement period, when we will simply have to take those rules but have no say about how they are set. The clause says that a motion can come before the House and be voted on. What happens then? Nobody knows.

Those are significant issues, but perhaps my biggest problem with the Bill is that it does not address the underlying issues of inequality of opportunity, which I believe sat behind and drove many of the concerns that resulted in people voting for Brexit in communities such as the one in which I grew up in Rotherham. In the end, I believe that we will have to come back and tackle those, and my concern is that Brexit does not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

The argument for the Bill is that it will get Brexit done. Having listened to the debate, that appears to me to be the only argument for it; I have heard very few people advocate for the measures in the deal. I understand that, because we are all tired and a bit sick of this. I think we would all like to talk about other things, but there are two things that we should acknowledge and be straight with the public about.

The first is that this deal—or any deal—does not get Brexit done. We have years of this to come, and we all know that. This is only the end of the beginning. We have the future relationship with the EU to negotiate, and then we have future trade deals, all of which will raise the same issues of national sovereignty up against economic integration. The journalist Helen Lewis said yesterday that voting for this deal to get Brexit done was like someone saying they want their pregnancy to be over so they can get back to going to bed early and reading their favourite novels. I could not have put it better myself. The Conservative party needs to acknowledge that, to own that and to be straight about it. As MPs, our job surely has to be to ask, “Is this deal good for our constituents and for the country?” We will never make a bigger decision, and if we get it wrong, we will never be forgiven.

[Mr Gyimah]

On getting Brexit done, does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that if this deal passes the House, we will quickly be in transition negotiations and negotiations on whether the transition is to be extended? That could cost around €10 billion a year. We should be honest with the public about that, rather than pretending it will get done this month.

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I am reminded of the debate on article 50. There was tremendous pressure to trigger article 50, and I personally voted for us to do that. It was a test of whether we accepted the referendum result. It is now widely recognised that the measure, the timetabling and the timescale that we imposed on ourselves were disastrous for the national interest of this country.

There are three things—just three things—that I want to know: what does this deal mean for manufacturing; what does it mean for services; and what does it mean for the Union? I recognise that not everyone voted on economic grounds. Indeed, yes, there will be a short-term boost to the economy because of investment decisions that have been deferred through the process so far, but that is not the issue. That is not the measure of success. It is about the next 10, 20 and 30 years. If we get this wrong, it will be like a slow puncture at the heart of our economy, and we will regret everything that we have done to get to that point.

Let us start with manufacturing. There is a big difference between this deal and the previous one. Essentially, the previous one offered some sort of voluntary single market alignment on goods, and that has been taken out of this deal, so what does that mean? This is quite a hard Brexit for Great Britain, so what does that mean? I genuinely ask that because no one has given anyone in this Chamber an explanation of that decision. Does it mean that just-in-time supply chains will no longer function? Does it mean that rules of origin will now be required? Looking at the evidence, I think the answer must surely be yes. Does it pass the Nissan test? Will we see the continuation of Nissan’s business model, which has been a huge success story for this country? I have no answers to those questions, and I have 3,500 jobs of my constituents that depend on that.

Let us talk about services. The biggest problem with a bare bones FTA is what it does on services—we are a services economy. The previous deal was poor on services. This deal is equally poor. That is not a reason to walk away and pass it. So what is the plan? For all the imperfections of the single market in services, we should remember that trade in services between EU member states is freer than it is between federal states in the US or between different provinces in Canada. Moreover, the UK is a powerhouse of financial, business, legal, accountancy, consultancy and tertiary education services. What does this deal mean for them? We hear so much about fishing. With respect, the UK computer games industry is worth 10 times the value of the UK fishing industry, so let us talk about the things that really matter.

Finally, let us talk about the Union. I do not want to vote for anything that will lead to the break-up of my own country. I do not think that that is a dishonourable position to take. It is proposed that Northern Ireland should have a totally different Brexit deal. I admit that it could be a lucrative one; it could be very lucrative at the expense of the north-west of England. I can see why the Good Friday agreement requires something different for Northern Ireland. To be honest, I can also understand why it is a huge issue for colleagues in the DUP to accept and sign up to a deal in which a customs declaration is needed to export from Northern Ireland to Great Britain. For me, the bigger danger is in relation to Scotland. It is about the precedent that this sets for Scotland. I believe that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are stronger together, and I do not want to undermine that. We have no answers on those things.

Let me just say this in my final few seconds of the four minutes that I have had to discuss the biggest issue that we will ever be asked to vote on: I recognise that it is possible that any deal could have these problems and that even the best deal possible to negotiate could be a bad deal for the UK. In that situation, the public have to absolutely be told what they are getting, and they must take responsibility for that. They have to have their eyes open about this and know what it will mean. At the minimum, that requires a scrutiny process in Parliament and, frankly, it now requires the people having the final say on this matter.