European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Tulip Siddiq Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

When a Conservative former Attorney General looks at a Bill and describes it as an “astonishing monstrosity”, it is clear that somewhere something has gone wrong. When a Conservative former Chancellor of the Exchequer says that we are facing the prospect of frittering away parliamentary democracy, something is not as it seems. When hundreds of thousands of people, whether it is June Barnes in Kilburn or Peter Singer in Hampstead, feel compelled to email their MP saying that they are in shock at the Government’s tactics, it is clear that the ministerial power grab at the heart of this Bill is unacceptable and brazen.

I am told that the Prime Minister campaigned to remain in the EU, and that has made her transformation into Brexiteer-in-chief even more difficult to stomach. The hard Brexiteers back-slapped and sneered their way through the referendum campaign saying that they would “take back control”, but the irony is that what the Government are asking for in this Bill actually takes control away. It proposes taking away control of the law from Parliament, taking away control of governance from all our regions, and taking away hard-won rights from those who live and work here. Not only will this Bill be dangerous to our country’s integrity; it also poses a serious challenge to hard-fought-for rights of my constituents and many across the country.

Let me be clear that my opposition to the Government’s intended mass deployment of secondary legislation is due not to a prosaic attachment to the purest form of primary legislation but to the very real consequences it could have for my constituents’ lives. The decision to withdraw from the EU charter of fundamental rights is, at best, problematic and, at worst, actively contemptuous of the rights that protect all aspects of citizens’ lives. The EU charter of fundamental rights covers a broad set of protections that guarantee individual freedoms and rights, from the prohibition of torture and the right to life to holiday entitlement and working conditions. Without it, for example, workers in London, whose air quality is already at an illegal level, would lose layers of protection.

I would like to know which rights in particular the Government object to; perhaps the Minister can tell me. Is it the right to life, or the prohibition of torture and degrading treatment and punishment? Perhaps the Government take issue with the charter’s codification of equality rights, or perhaps the Secretary of State has a new-found disregard for privacy laws. Paying lip service to human rights is no guarantee of human rights, and introducing legislation that cannot be properly scrutinised is no way to govern people’s lives. The explicit disregarding of the charter risks the rights of working people.

The Government may ask why the British people should not simply trust them to replicate any protections and rights in forthcoming legislation. Well, when certain Conservative Members believe that rape victims should not have access to abortion, I do not blame the public for being sceptical of the Government and their ability to rule.

The Bill not only poses challenges to parliamentary scrutiny and people’s rights, but sends a stark message about the trajectory of devolution in this country, if one examines clause 11. The Government could have used the Bill as a real opportunity to address the governance of our regions. If there was ever a time to empower the newly elected representatives, it is now. As with the rights of the EU charter, it seems as though the Government are asking devolved nations to take their promises in good faith, and asking individual nations and regions to accept Whitehall control again. Curbing the scope of devolution and the ability of devolved bodies to act, particularly at this time, sends out a troubling message.

I am a London MP, and there is no doubt that Brexit will have a disproportionate impact on London, with 1 million EU nationals living in the city and making up 15% of the employment force.

[Catherine West]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way on the point about the London economy and EU nationals. Does she agree that an increasing number of EU nationals are very concerned, not just about the cost of their citizenship but about the constant changing of the goalposts by the increasingly incompetent Home Office?

[Tulip Siddiq]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s point. There are 17,000 EU nationals who live in my constituency, and they constantly come to my surgery because they are worried about the half-baked practice papers that are being put in front of them. In terms of the London economy, which my hon. Friend also mentioned, by 2020 a quarter of the GDP of the entire country will come from London alone. We have 800,000 private sector businesses. The Bill gives Ministers the power to modify retained EU law, and clause 11 stipulates that such powers should not be handed to the devolved authorities.

With the EU charter a thing of the past, London’s EU nationals will, as my hon. Friend suggests, have the right to question what their future holds and what rights will be guaranteed. An honest conversation is urgently needed on post-Brexit immigration arrangements and migrant protections for the huge population of non-EU citizens in London, and the Bill does not provide that. A lukewarm commitment to seek consent from devolved bodies will not do. Serious steps must be taken to mitigate the disproportionate impact that Brexit will have on the city where my constituency is based.

I will proudly vote against the Bill today with my Labour colleagues. The display put on by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) last Thursday revealed this Bill to be everything that campaigners warned it would be. It is a shoddy power grab that disrespects the democratic traditions of our country and throws hard-fought rights into total jeopardy, and the Government should be ashamed of themselves for introducing it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the energetic speech of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). This is of course a Second Reading debate and we should properly be considering the general objectives and principles of the legislation. I think there is in fact some measure of consensus around the fact that such a Bill, or one similar to it, is required to give practical effect to our leaving the European Union. Even the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) admitted in his speech on Thursday that something like this was required, and even the House of Lords Constitution Committee accepts that something like this is necessary. It is clearly reasonable, when we have to pass 1,000 statutory instruments to effect leaving the European Union, that we do something like this Bill. I remind Opposition Members that all those 1,000 statutory instruments are votable, should they wish. The idea there is no democratic scrutiny is not accurate.

On Thursday and today, we have heard Opposition Members claim that the Bill gives unfettered power to the Executive, but it is very clear in both clauses 7 and 9 that the powers are circumscribed. Clause 7(1) states that the powers can be used only to correct a

“failure of retained EU law…or any…deficiency”.

Clause 9(1) clearly states that the powers can be used only to implement the exit agreement, an agreement on which this House will have a vote. The idea that the powers can be used across the board does not bear scrutiny.

Clauses 7(6) and 9(3) make it completely clear that a whole range of things, such as introducing new criminal laws, cannot be done under this Bill. The powers are fairly clearly circumscribed. To top that, there are sunset clauses that mean the powers are strictly time-limited, which gives further reassurance.

Clauses 7(4) and 9(2) mean that the Bill itself can be amended by regulation. If there is one little tweak we might consider, it is exempting the sunset clauses from that provision, but that is the kind of fine tuning that can quite properly happen in Committee, rather than on Second Reading.

I have heard quite a lot of extraordinary hyperbole and crocodile tears from some Opposition Members in this debate. The right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras, who is not in his place, said on Thursday that he feels the Bill disenfranchises Parliament, but for the last 40 years he has been perfectly content for regulations and laws passed in Brussels by qualified majority voting, with no veto or definitive say by the UK Government, to be implemented in UK law by Orders in Council without so much as a sniff of a vote in this House. Where was his righteous indignation for the whole of the last 40 years?

The hon. Member for Holborn and Kilburn, who is in her place—[Interruption.] Sorry, Hampstead and Kilburn. I should know, having stood in that constituency in 2010. The hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) said the Bill is a wholesale threat to rights under EU law, but the Bill copies and pastes wholesale those rights into UK law. Any material amendment to those rights would have to be passed by a vote of this House. She specifically referenced human rights law. She obviously has not read clauses 7(6)(e) and 9(3)(d).

[Tulip Siddiq]

I have read them.

[Chris Philp]

The hon. Lady should know, then, that the Bill expressly prohibits these powers being used in any way to interfere with human rights law. She will have seen that the Bill expressly precludes her concerns.

The Scottish National party is going into paroxysms of apoplexy at the merest hint that London might exercise even a smidgen of the powers currently exercised in Brussels. I have not heard a single word of protest in the two years I have been a Member about those self-same powers being exercised in Brussels. Where were the SNP’s shouts of indignation then?

Everyone seems to agree that the Bill is necessary. No doubt there are points of detail that can and will be improved on, but anyone who is serious about implementing the British public’s decision should vote for Second Reading this evening.