European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (Exit Day) (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Wednesday 27th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I am extremely grateful to the noble Viscount forgiving us that information and I am delighted to hear it. If we have a new leader, we may well see very different results in our negotiations with the EU.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps it is inappropriate to continue, therefore, with the speech that I was going to make, but I will start anyway. Earlier this afternoon, I was having tea with my son and past the window went a tugboat which was going against the tide. It was really struggling. I know how it felt. But I cheered myself up with the thought that the tide turns. The water goes down stream in the end—the tug was going up stream, I should explain.

Perhaps I can cheer up my noble friend Lord Framlingham by emphasising that 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union and this genie is not going back in the bottle. If we fail on this occasion, there will be another chance to get it right. After the second Punic War, which imposed the Carthaginian peace that Mr Boris Johnson likes to talk about, there was a third Punic war. That did not end well either, but perhaps this one will end better—for the Carthaginians, that is.

As noble friends have said, the Prime Minister said 108 times that she would leave on 29 March, come what may. She said 50 times that we would not extend and she said 32 times that no deal was better than a bad deal. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, talked about the need to heed the will of Parliament. But surely we also need to heed the will of the people. There was a time when people on both sides of this debate, shortly after the referendum, emphasised that that is what they wanted to do. Hilary Benn said:

“You vote to leave? We’re out. That’s it. We’re going”.


George Osborne said:

“There’s no second vote. This is the crucial decision of our lifetimes. Do we stay in the EU, a reformed EU or do we leave?”


Yvette Cooper said, “I don’t think you should be trying to unravel a decision the public has made”, and so on and so on.

The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, speaks of her hope that there will now be a U-turn on the second referendum issue as well as all these other issues. She is hoping for a Government who will do that. Maybe she should heed the will of MPs on this because the Wollaston amendment on a second referendum was turned down a few weeks ago by 334 votes to 85. But now they want a second vote on the second referendum and scheming is going on by Keir Starmer, Dominic Grieve and co to try to avoid an embarrassing defeat of that second vote on the second referendum. I understand that the Beckett/Kyle amendment, which is the result of this scheming, is a strange beast that tries to avoid getting blamed for this second referendum being turned down in Parliament.

Some of us wanted to abide by the result of the first referendum. Some of us are not convinced that there is any need to delay. Some of us are convinced that we were ready to leave. We may never get the chance to know just how wrong the scaremongering about no deal was. But we have known for three years that we were supposed to leave on 29 March. If we were not ready, then some people were preventing us from being ready. We have known for two years that the European Union was interested only in driving a very hard bargain and therefore we should have kept no deal firmly on the table.

Like my noble friend Lord Robathan, I deeply regret having to see this change enacted. I will not support the Government in making this change, but I cannot support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

The resignation of any Prime Minister is an extremely sombre moment, and I think it will not be lost on the House that this is the second Prime Minister in a row who has—