Business of the House

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 4th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

That is very alarming, because I thought that the noble Lord was a very good House of Commons man. When the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said that in the House of Commons there was no functioning Executive, that is because, according to Sir Oliver Letwin and some of his friends in the other place, they are now the Executive. His remarks in the Commons were extraordinary. He said that,

“when this House comes to legislate, as I hope it will and fear it must, it will be, so to speak, a Cabinet. We will be making real-life decisions about what happens to our fellow countrymen—not just legislating in the hope that many years later, subject to further jots and tittles, the law, as administered by the system of justice, will work better. We will be making a decision about the future of this country. How can we possibly make those decisions unless we are properly informed? The process of which we are now at the start will require the fundamental realignment of the relationship between the civil service, Government and Parliament. There is no way we can continue to act as though we were merely a body to which the Government were accountable; for a period, for this purpose, we will have to take on the government of our country”.—[Official Report, Commons, 14/2/19; col. 1110.]

This is what is being said at the other end of this building.

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

I am very grateful to my noble friend for giving way. The point I wanted to make, which addresses the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, addresses the point that my noble friend has just made. It is that, admirable as the Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, brought forward in one day was, it was not on a major constitutional issue.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My noble friend is quite right. The point that I am making is that at the other end of this building we have, in Sir Oliver Letwin’s own words, a revolutionary action taking place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Ridley]

Can my noble friend address this point? The problem that the Bill is trying to address is a disagreement between the Government and Parliament and between Parliament and the country. The idea that you resolve such a thing by ramming something through an unelected House in one day is surely a constitutional monstrosity of an even greater kind.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

My noble friend makes a very strong point. I am deeply concerned at the growing rift between Parliament and the people, with the refusal to accept the people’s judgment, whether you agree with it or not. A very clear judgment was made in the referendum. There is a real danger that undesirable but very often understandable insurrectionary forces will feel that they cannot trust the British Parliament or the British constitution, and a very ugly situation could well arise. Therefore, my noble friend is absolutely right.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Noakes]

No: they are on different amendments to the Motion so they are different issues.

[Viscount Ridley]

This seems extraordinary. We have not heard from my noble friend Lady Noakes before this. I think we should hear her respectfully.

[Baroness Noakes]

I thank my noble friend for that. I had reached the end of reading through Standing Order 46, which is an important foundational part of our procedures. I remind noble Lords that it has been in existence since 1715. It has served us well for more than 200 years, so we should be very careful about tinkering with it. It is the case, in many instances, that those rules can be modified if noble Lords agree. It is usually done through the usual channels, in a way that achieves consensus. That has not been the case on this occasion. It is nearly always done so that there is a minimum of two days. I have been involved in a number of bits of legislation that have been done on an accelerated basis, but I have never seen one rammed through in one day like this.

I have never seen a Bill not leave the other place until just before midnight but be on the Order Paper here for all stages the following day. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, tabled her Motion—in effect, to take over the procedures of the House to do it in one day—only yesterday. Many noble Lords will not even have seen that until they got today’s papers. This is all highly irregular and is working against the ability of this House to scrutinise this legislation properly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly. I really feel that we are not doing this House any great favours today. We have had an orchestrated series of speeches from the ERG and its friends. That does not represent the view of the entire Conservative Party on these Benches, although I am bound to say that, as I listened to some of the speeches, I felt enormous sympathy for my honourable friend Nick Boles. We are at a critical juncture in our nation’s history. It is deeply regrettable that we have this Bill before us. It is not a perfect Bill, but at the time when it was thought up and brought forward the Prime Minister had not made her recent welcome move. I sincerely hope that she will be successful. I know many honourable and noble friends in my party take a counter view, but I think it is desperately important that we hold the interests of our country first, second, third and last.

It is terribly important that we do not carry on with this procedural nonsense, because that is what it is. We have a Bill and at this rate we are not going to get to Second Reading.

[Viscount Ridley]

My Lords—

[Lord Cormack]

No, I will not give way—I will in a minute. My noble friend has the next amendment and doubtless he too will speak at some length: I hope it will not be the half-hour or 20 minutes we have just had, because that is far too long. It is really important that we get on to the Bill. We have four more amendments, I think, after this one; then we have a Statement; and then we have my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s important debate—although it is not as urgent as the business that will then be before your Lordships’ House. I wish we could approach this in a consensual, adult manner and do two things. First, I hope my noble friend Lord Forsyth will be willing to have his reports debated next week. There will be plenty of time. The first week of our Recess has been cancelled—I make no complaints about it. Therefore, he has plenty of time and it would be a very good idea.

Secondly, I think that we should have Second Reading today—here, I agree with my noble friend Lady Noakes—and move on, not on Monday but tomorrow. The House has met on Fridays before. The other place is not meeting tomorrow, so there would be no delay whatever in the parliamentary process if we took Report tomorrow. I really think we have to be sensible and I ask noble friends in all parts of the House who were there to remember that April day almost exactly 37 years ago when the House met on a Saturday. That was the most dire of emergencies and both Houses met on the Saturday after the Falklands invasion. So there is nothing sacrosanct about any day other than Sunday as far as your Lordships’ House is concerned. In the war I believe there was one Sitting on a Sunday, but that is beside the point. I urge both Front Benches to talk seriously about this. It does nobody’s cause any service, whether they are a supporter or an opponent of the Bill, to be going bleary-eyed through the Lobbies at 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am or 6 am. It does no service to anyone.

I have two hopes, and I shall not say any more during the debate today. That may please my noble friends but at least I do not blether on as long as some of them do. I hope that we can heal the bitterness to which my noble friend Lord Empey referred a few hours ago. I hope also that we can make genuine progress on this Bill. I beg my noble friends who have amendments to come to withdraw them, to hold their fire and to make their speeches in the main debate, which I hope we will get on to very soon, and I hope that we can finish the Bill tomorrow. That would make abundant sense, both here and outside.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Viscount Ridley]

Leave out from first “that” to the end and insert “the attempt to accelerate procedures on the European Union (Withdrawal) (No.5) Bill is not in accordance with normal practice in either House of Parliament and the provisions of Standing Order 46 (No two stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) should be dispensed with only to the extent necessary to allow the First and Second Readings of the Bill to be taken on one day, the Committee stage on a subsequent day, and the Report and Third Reading to be taken on the same day subsequently.”

[Viscount Ridley]

My Lords, I am getting quite used to losing votes today—but then, as a supporter of Newcastle United, losing never discourages me.

Right at the end of the last debate, my noble friend Lord Cormack refused to take an intervention from me; he has explained that he has to leave his place now. I was merely going to ask him, as an acknowledged constitutional expert, if he did not think that the ramming of a Bill through the House in one day would do more damage to the reputation of this House than these procedural debates we are having, which he said would damage the reputation of the House.

My amendment says that instead of trying to rush this constitutional enormity through in one go, in one day, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, would like to do—and I do not think a cogent answer has been given to the question of why that should be necessary—and to do so based on a flimsy, one-vote majority in the House of Commons of 313 to 312, which is 50.08%, we should take two stages today, two on another day and the final two on a third day. That seems a reasonable way for this House to go about discussing important matters.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I wonder if the noble Viscount has thought about the kind of image he is projecting as the fifth Viscount, a hereditary Peer, trying to subvert the elected Chamber of this Parliament.

[Viscount Ridley]

I was coming to that. If I recall rightly, earlier today the noble Lord referred to me, from a sedentary position, as a “constitutional monstrosity”. I am in this place because my great-great-grandfather was put here by Queen Victoria on the advice of Lord Salisbury. The noble Lord is here because Queen Elizabeth II put him here on the advice of Tony Blair. There is not all that much difference.

As I say, I believe it vital that we should debate this hugely important measure as freely as possible with as many attempts to get it right as we need. I express my astonishment that so many Members opposite, who normally take the view that the purpose of this House is to scrutinise legislation properly, suddenly want to abandon their principles and shove through a measure that would create a dangerous precedent for the future. This is precisely the sort of case where we need to tread with care.

We have taken three years trying to reach agreement on how to leave the European Union. We have been told again and again, both in this House and elsewhere, that we must get this right, yet now we are being asked to take a whole Bill through in a few hours—a Bill that defies everything the people asked us to do. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth said, this could lead to a slippery slope to tyranny.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Viscount Ridley]

Noble Lords opposite may laugh but that is exactly the point my noble friend made. Bit by bit, we are disentangling a very delicate constitution. If ever there was a time to ask the Commons to think again about shoving legislation through in this unprecedented and dangerous fashion, it is now. The people of this country are watching us and, as the polling evidence makes clear, they are not in favour of this kind of manoeuvre. Given the choice between a bad Brexit and a Brexit with no withdrawal deal, they have clearly expressed a view for the latter, yet this Bill would deny them that.

Moreover, I am astonished that so many Members opposite, who normally do all they can to prolong and encourage debate, and to revise and amend Bills, have suddenly discovered a love of closure Motions—of shutting down debate before it has hardly even started. What an extraordinary volte face. How many times have I come into this Chamber over the past few years to hear the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and others arguing that the Government have not given them enough time to debate an issue? Now, suddenly, they want to shut down debate.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I have not once taken four hours and 31 minutes of the time of the House. If the noble Viscount would compromise between the time I normally take, which is 10 or 15 minutes, and the four hours and 31 minutes taken today, we would have finished about two and a half hours ago.

[Viscount Ridley]

I have taken five minutes so I do not quite understand his point, but there we are.

I am always conscious that the House of Lords should not exceed its powers. It is not an elected Chamber and it does not have the democratic legitimacy of the Commons. That applies to life Peers as well as to hereditary Peers. Our job is not to force through legislation but to tidy up, revise, gently question, and sometimes to ask the Commons to think again. This is surely a case where we should be doing that. We should ask the Commons to think again about shoving legislation through in this unprecedented fashion. I am equally clear that if there is ever a time when the House of Lords suddenly needs to discover its constitutional teeth, it is when the Commons is doing something unconstitutional, egregious, hurried and potentially worrying. This is not an argument about Brexit but about doing things properly.

If there ever was a justification for the constitutional monstrosities of hereditary Peers being still here, it is that we can occasionally cry foul when a despotic majority tries to ride roughshod over the carefully balanced but fragile device that is the British constitution and—if noble Lords will excuse the mixed metaphor—to stand against the sudden and dangerous enthusiasm of a temporary, 50.08%, majority that does not want to do things in the proper way. What is more temporary than the majority exercised by Sir Oliver Letwin? In this case, the despotic majority is the Motion passed by a single vote in the other place at something like the third attempt. A majority is no less despotic for being small if it is allowed to be unconstitutional.

The purpose of the Commons passing that measure was to take control of the House of Commons and force a Bill on to the Order Paper to defy the clear wishes of a huge popular vote of 17.4 million people and deny them what they have voted for—namely, Brexit, if necessary without a deal, on the date they had been repeatedly promised. You can be in favour of that or against it—

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

Respectfully, can the noble Viscount supply the evidence to show that the 17.4 million British people who voted to leave voted to leave without a deal? They were given many options, and many promises were made to the effect that that would not happen. What evidence does he have that they would prefer no deal to any other outcome?

[Viscount Ridley]

Those 17.4 million people voted for Brexit, and it is abundantly clear from what both Houses of Parliament have done since—passing Article 50, setting a date, and the Prime Minister saying hundreds of times that no deal is better than a bad deal—

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

Can the noble Viscount explain why—when we have been telling ourselves for a long time that Parliament and the people no longer speak with the same voice—Parliament having made that decision and said those things is the same as the people having done so?

[Viscount Ridley]

We are here because there is a difference between a remainer Parliament and a leaver majority in the country. That is why we are here; that is the problem we are trying to resolve. My argument is that this Bill does not resolve it because it denies them the clearest form of Brexit, which all the polls suggest an awful lot of people want.

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

Does my noble friend agree that a large number of people who voted remain in the referendum, including myself, have frequently said that they accept the result of the referendum and support the Prime Minister’s deal, and have sought to facilitate our departure? The reason the Prime Minister’s deal has failed is that his friends—the extreme Brexiteers —have put a block on it.

[Viscount Ridley]

I do not agree. What has happened is that we were presented with a deal last summer that the British public, much of the House of Commons and even many remainers did not like. There has been a huge amount of opposition to that deal, and it should have been abundantly clear to the Government that it would not fly.

I said that I wanted to talk about—

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Viscount Ridley]

In a minute—I have not even finished a sentence at this point. I said that I wanted to talk about the procedural points, and I have, but I have been diverted by these interventions on Brexit. I would be quite happy to save these points for the Second Reading later today, if noble Lords would prefer.

[Baroness Andrews]

It is not the interventions which are distracting the House; it is the fact that the noble Viscount himself introduced the Brexit argument. He has made yet another unsubstantiated assertion; this time that the British public rejected Mrs May’s deal. Where does he get that information?

[Viscount Ridley]

From opinion polls, and that is the best evidence we have.

As I said, one can be in favour or against the proposition that we should leave the European Union, or that we should leave it with or without a deal. I am acutely aware that, as we have seen in the past five minutes, most in this echo chamber of remain are wholly against it and are absolutely out of touch with people all over the country. However, we cannot deny that it is a matter of solemn importance, and, if the Bill goes through in the fashion proposed today, without proper debate and scrutiny, a lot of people out there may be very angry. They will be angry with us not because we spent a lot of time talking about procedure; they will be angry because we rammed through something without proper scrutiny and debate. I say again that the integrity of the constitution is the key point.

I am no historian, but I know that, for good reasons, we have arrived over the centuries at the delicate balance of powers we have in this complicated democracy. One of the key points is that all government Ministers are answerable in Parliament. Who is accountable in Parliament for the Bill that we will be asked to pass today? Will it be Sir Oliver Letwin, Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn or Mr Bercow himself? They cannot be dragged to the Dispatch Box in the same way that a Minister can be, and they are not represented in this House by a junior Minister—unless the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is now Sir Oliver Letwin’s junior Minister; I am sure she would be very good at it.

As my noble friend Lord Forsyth said, from the way Sir Oliver was talking in the Commons last night, in a shockingly disrespectful way towards this House, it certainly sounds as though this is the way he sees it. I remind noble Lords that he said:

“My hon. Friend may also wish to know, although I fear that it will also be of no comfort to him, that there is overwhelming support in the House of Lords for this measure”.


How dare he say that in advance of us even seeing the Bill? He went on to say that,

“we therefore anticipate that it will, in all probability … pass through the House of Lords very rapidly”.

He took the House for granted, and I hope that irritates noble Lords as much as it irritates me. He went on:

“To that end, the House of Lords has in fact already passed a motion that provides for the expeditious consideration of exactly this form of Bill”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/4/19; col. 1067.]


Noble Lords will see how precedent works: suddenly, something we did in January comes back to haunt us. He went on:

“My sense, for what it is worth, is that although the House of Lords procedures are arcane and it is impossible to determine from the outside the time that will be taken, there is very substantial support for the Bill there”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/4/19; col. 1071.]


Thus we are dismissed with a wave of President Letwin’s hand.

My time is nearly up. Let me end by saying that I find it peculiar that so many in this House urgently wish to rule out leaving the European Union without a withdrawal agreement, but show none of the same urgency and determination to rule out not leaving the European Union at all.

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, my anxiety about going into Committee on the Bill today is that we will be doing so without the benefit of political commentators writing in broadsheet newspapers, without watching important television programmes and, most importantly, without taking account of academic constitutional experts. We will be sailing blind.