Business of the House

Tom Brake Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that paragraph (2), which I have not yet had time to talk about because of taking interventions, does indeed book a slot for Monday. The reason why is that I think there is quite a high chance that at the end of today’s votes, despite the best endeavours of the promoters of each of the motions that fall to be debated and voted on, they may not receive majority backing. Perhaps the hon. Lady was not present, but I said during the debate on my amendment (a), very specifically—this point was echoed by many of her hon. Friends in their remarks about amendment (a)—that we all recognise the fact that the first time round, it is very likely that there would not be a natural majority for one proposition or another and that we should therefore regard this as a process and not as a single point in time. I did also specifically say that I therefore anticipated that we would need a further day. In many discussions and interviews, many of us who have proposed the business of the House motion today and who were supporting amendment (a) have made that point. There is no novelty to it; it is simply carrying through what we said would be the case.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Further to the intervention from the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that given that the Government have spent over 1,000 days on getting to where we are now, it would not be unreasonable for the House to have one more day to try to resolve this matter?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I do rather agree with the right hon. Gentleman about that. This is not the main burden of what I want to say today, but I share what may be his regret that about two and a half years ago, the Government did not take steps to create a cross-party consensus on this matter. The Irish Taoiseach did exactly that and put himself in a much stronger position as a result. When all this is over and hopefully we have arrived at some sensible way to deal with the whole Brexit issue, I hope that the whole nation will learn that lesson and we will realise that when we have great national undertakings, it makes sense to try to get a cross-party consensus about how to take them forward.