European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Viscount Hailsham Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hailsham (Con)]

My Lords, I begin with an apology to your Lordships’ House. Because of professional engagements I was unable to be present for the opening speeches of the debate at Second Reading, but I have been able to reassure my Front Bench, and most particularly the Whips, that they can be certain of my presence throughout the Committee and Report stages.

I should like to speak briefly on those amendments, particularly Amendments 6 and 7, that deal with the customs union and the single market. I wish to express my deeply held view that we need to remain members of the single market and the customs union, or something very like them. That is absolutely essential if we are to retain our national prosperity. I agree precisely with what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said on this subject, and all the analyses thus far bear that out. Indeed, we are seeing current prejudice being caused in terms of reduced investment, reduced growth and reduced spending. You do not have to look into a crystal ball; it is happening now.

Perhaps I may also say—with some regret, because I am talking about colleagues of mine in the other place—that those who have criticised the analysis produced by civil servants have in my view brought discredit upon themselves. As a Minister, I worked with officials for more than 10 years. I never knew or encountered a conspiracy to frustrate the policy of Ministers. I believe profoundly that those analyses were made in good faith and broadly speaking are correct. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that they should be published. They may not be right to the nearest decimal point, but I am certain that they correctly identify the direction of travel. I have never thought that Brexit was a car crash, but I do believe it takes the form of a seriously deflating tyre and will cause the same kind of trouble.

Turning to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, on Northern Ireland, I wholly agree with him and, if need be, I shall be voting accordingly in the same Lobby as him. We have talked about and agreed to a frictionless border between the Republic and the Province. I do not see how that can be achieved other than by the customs union or something very like it. Those who talk about technology are, I think, talking rubbish. I know of no technology that would achieve that purpose, and if there was such technology, I do not believe it would be affordable by a whole range of smaller businesses.

Incidentally, although it is to digress a little, I think that one of the surprising consequences of Brexit is that we will be asked to consider identity cards for British citizens. Once we have a frictionless border in Northern Ireland and once we have migration—as will happen—how can we operate our immigration controls without identity cards? That will be a very considerable consequence.

I want to make one final point, which echoes one made by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. Nothing was said in the referendum that obliges this House or Parliament in general to do something that is deeply prejudicial to our national interest. Nor, indeed, is that the consequence of the general election, which was not, in all conscience, a great triumph for the Conservative Party. From time to time, one has to put one’s assessment of the national interest before any other consideration, most particularly before one’s assessment of one’s party interests. That happens at various times in one’s career. It happened early in my father’s career, 18 months after the Oxford by-election, when he was compelled to vote against Chamberlain. He was much criticised then. It happened at the end of my career in the House of Commons with regard to the second Iraq war, which I deeply deplored. I helped to craft the anti-war Motion and acted as a Teller to make sure that Motion was voted on. Both of us were criticised at the time, but I am bound to say that those criticisms have not survived the historical experiences that we have all seen.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend entirely about putting the country before party. He mentioned that nobody had said that we must leave the customs union and single market, but I recall very well that David Cameron—who I rate enormously—George Osborne and Michael Gove, from different sides, said that we must leave not only the single market but the customs union if we voted to leave.

[Viscount Hailsham]

It is the business of Parliament to form a judgment. We will come to other debates fairly soon—in the next group of amendments—that intend to give Parliament the decisive say. That is our function and we must not shelter behind constitutional niceties in order to refrain from doing our duty. I will certainly do whatever I can to ensure that we remain as close as possible to the customs union—and if I could, I would also frustrate the policy of Brexit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Hailsham]

My Lords, the noble Lord concluded his remarks by saying, effectively, that it should be Parliament that decides the terms. I am wholeheartedly in favour of that. It is an essential part of representative democracy, by which I mean that Parliament, at the end of the day, should be in a position to determine whether the terms that have been negotiated are acceptable, whether the absence of terms is acceptable, whether no deal is acceptable or whether we should remain in the European Union. It is Parliament, not the Executive, that should make that decision.

The amendments that have been tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Hain—it is remarkable that I find myself in agreement with the noble Lord, having been in disagreement with him for, I suppose, 25 years or so—are absolutely right. Give Parliament the power to determine the exit date and you greatly reinforce the control that Parliament has as to the outcome.

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to make clear my unequivocal support for the last three speeches. The critical issue that my noble friend Lord Adonis raised on the interplay between the various clauses that deal with the timing and the possibilities of how that could go wrong and the points made by my noble friend Lord Hain and also the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, on the sovereignty of Parliament seem to me to be right at the very heart of what the whole process in this House is about. It is either about us assuming the responsibilities that we are supposed to have and display, or it is about giving Ministers what they have plainly wanted throughout, which is the ability to take decisions irrespective of what Parliament might wish. I hope that Ministers will not be tedious enough to get up and deny that this is what they have been trying to do. At every key stage of this process, whether in front of the Supreme Court or elsewhere, it has been essential to force out of the Government an understanding of the role of Parliament and that Parliament will not be set aside.

Like everybody else, I have of course thought hard about why anybody would put a hard date into a clause of a Bill of this kind. Why would you do it? The answer is that it is a party management issue—and only a party management issue. I am sure that many noble Lords on the Government’s side of the House will recognise that there are costs and disadvantages alongside what they might regard as advantages in taking the steps that they have taken. But the advantage they perceive—which seems to outweigh everything else—is that they can say with conviction to the people who are determined that we leave, crash out, or go any which way out of the European Union that they have set a hard date and have in some sense given certainty by virtue of that. I believe—and I think in this debate the House overall is likely to believe—that the complexities with which this country and this Parliament are faced in trying to deal with this absolutely massive constitutional, economic, security and every other kind of issue means that the setting of a hard date is about as arbitrary a thing as you could conceivably do in the circumstances.

In his response to the last debate, which I regret I found very limited, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said of a number of the amendments that they required reports to be made and the dates for many of those reports were arbitrary. There could scarcely be a more arbitrary date than this date, when almost nothing has been learned so far about the Government’s intentions and when there is absolutely no certainty that we will learn any more about those intentions. The fact is that setting a date makes it more or less impossible to conceive of all the different elements being drawn together with sufficient coherence for any of us to exercise that final act of parliamentary authority that we have all been promised.

I recall just three, four or perhaps five weeks ago, the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, spoke on industrial strategy. He made the telling point that, whenever we deal with people from other countries who have strong industrial strategies, strong industrial histories and a great deal of success in all those, we go about it believing that our native wit and wisdom is so superior to all of them that we can constantly get exactly what we want from them and they will never have a presentable argument to put to us. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, quite rightly said that if you look at the countries where we tend to take that view—Germany, Japan, China now and the United States—you come across people who are extremely competent at developing industries and strategies, who have views and will argue for those views and who may very well prevail. In this discussion about what future trade will be like, those arguments will be displayed with great ability and, I have no doubt, will not be the pushover that many on the Government Benches seem to think they will be.

I suspect that one argument that will be made about having a hard date is that it focuses negotiation and is a means of drawing a negotiation to some sort of conclusion. I have said before in your Lordships’ House—and I do not say it to cause offence—that my experience is that, by and large, politicians are not the best negotiators that you ever come across. Many of us have spent parts of our lives as trade union negotiators or general secretaries of trade unions, have done negotiation in government, in the Foreign Office—in my case—and so on or have spent a great deal of their lives negotiating in business and in industry. I say without any doubt in my mind that if I wanted to make my life more difficult in any negotiation, I would say, “Here is the deadline”, and let everybody else stretch me out across the rack that I had made for myself, because that would be the easiest thing that they could conceivably do—and they will do it. If you are in a position of enormous strength, I guess you could say, “Well, we have set a date, we are going to push everybody else along”. But if you are not in a position of enormous strength and if, peradventure, you are in a position of enormous weakness, everybody else will take the maximum possible advantage and they will succeed.

I have heard some of the comments made by others who have business experience, and I draw attention to my entries in the register as well. In business, I have never once seen the weaker party in a negotiation have any advantage out of a fixed deadline. If we ever needed to learn that in spades, we would look at what is happening in Northern Ireland now and the constant setting of deadlines—which has happened in the past—only to find that the people of violence, or the people who have been prepared to allow people of violence to push the envelope further, have always been those who took the greatest advantage of it and made it more or less impossible for anybody else to make real progress.

I hope that we will not trap ourselves in that way. These amendments give us a means of not trapping us in that way, and I urge all noble Lords to give us the best chance we can have, rather than the worst.