Military Action Overseas: Parliamentary Approval

Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Jacob Rees-Mogg

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The Executive are being held to account today. The Prime Minister spent six hours yesterday being held to account in this House and a further hour today.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I give way to the hon. Lady—my neighbour.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I am very grateful to my neighbour for giving way. Surely this debate is about not a collective decision on the action that has been taken and on putting the armed forces at risk, but a process that we in this House are collectively happy with and agreed on. Clearly the fact that we are having this debate means that there is not a collective agreement about the process.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, as the Leader of the Opposition was earlier, to say that today’s debate is about process. What I am trying to say is that the process is established, has been established for centuries and is highly effective. The Executive are only the Executive as long as they command the confidence of this House. It would have been open to the Opposition, instead of going for a Standing Order No. 24 debate, to have asked for a vote of confidence in Her Majesty’s Government. I think that that would have been the right thing to do, having listened carefully to the Leader of the Opposition’s speech. The Opposition fundamentally do not have confidence—or their leadership does not—in the making of this decision. We would then have seen whether this House had confidence in the Executive to make the decisions that are the legitimate business of the Executive.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Jacob Rees-Mogg

Committee: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am extremely grateful for the humility being shown by my distinguished right hon. and learned Friend, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who admits that some of the Bills brought forward by his own former Department are incomprehensible to the lay reader. It is a broader problem of legislation, but it has been a particular problem of European legislation. That is why I have some sympathy for the new clause. As EU law is brought into UK law, which is widely accepted as the right starting point for when we leave the European Union, the Government ought to seek to do it in a form that is intelligible and easy to understand. This is one of the areas where I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield, who said that that is one of the principles of the rule of law. As we do this, we should of course be sticking to principles of basic constitutional fairness.

It is glorious that the second argument of the Eurosceptics has been accepted in this new clause. The first argument is the basic one of taking back control, but the second is that the fundamental nature of the way in which the EU created law, and the whole body of the acquis communautaire, was not comprehensible to most people, was not subject to satisfactory democratic control, and was a bureaucratic monster that rolled on and on regardless.

[Wera Hobhouse]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Of course I give way to the hon. Lady, whose constituency I encircle.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, for giving way. Has he ever tried to put any legislation in front of an ordinary person and ask him or her whether it is comprehensible? Our discussion demonstrates our difficulty, as parliamentarians, in making comprehensible to the people who elect us what we are actually about.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

In North East Somerset, we do not have ordinary people. We have only exceptional, brilliant and talented individuals of the highest and finest calibre. I have a serious point to make in that: we, as politicians, should never use the term “ordinary people”, implying that we are some priestly caste who understand the mysteries of legislation, whereas ordinary people do not.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I apologise for the use of the term “ordinary people”. I accept that it is possibly not a very good way of describing the people who elect us.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for that. I think the point is important, and we should try to remember it.

A lot of the legislation that we pass can be explained to everybody—even to ourselves—in an understandable way. If we look at the Treasury Bench, we see some of the finest brains in Britain. They get up at the Dispatch Box and explain to us what is going to be passed into law, in terms that even Members of Parliament—including those of us who are not learned Members—can understand. I think that laws can be explained simply, and that is a worthy ambition.

New clause 21 makes the important point that during our period of membership, the EU increasingly turned out law that people did not understand. We have a golden opportunity to improve the quality of the legislation that we pass, improve people’s general understanding of it and improve our own understanding of it. Clarity is just and fair. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, that we want to apply this to our own work as well. There is no point in complaining about the European Union in that regard, but making our own laws incomprehensible. As an aside to what he said, one of the reasons why there is so much tax avoidance is that tax law is written in so complicated a manner.

Amendment 348 is important, and as the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) rightly said, it touches on the subject of the Humble Address that was brought forward on 1 November. The Government have dealt with the matter, and it is important to look at what they have done in response to the Humble Address. Many Conservative Members have opposed the European Union on the grounds of parliamentary sovereignty and an understanding of the nature of our constitution. We must recognise that a Humble Address motion is unquestionably binding. That has always been the tradition of this place. It is quite clear from “Erskine May” that there is a profound duty on the Government to fulfil the terms of any Humble Address. It will be interesting to see how often the Opposition use that procedure over the next few years to try to get information from the Government.

It is worth noting why the Humble Address procedure fell out of practice. I think the real reason was that Governments tended to command sufficient majorities in the House that a Humble Address motion they opposed would not get through. In the situation of a very slim overall majority, with the help of our friends from the Democratic Unionist party—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I did go to see the documents, as a member of the Exiting the European Union Committee. I was lucky; I was not told that I had to hand over my mobile telephone, my secret spyglasses or whatever other kit I might have borrowed from James Bond and brought with me so that I could try to take these secret bits of information out to the wider world. I did not have to suffer the great indignity that some other hon. Gentlemen have suffered. I was allowed to sit down and plough through the documents.

I must confess that on that afternoon, I would have been happier reading a P.G. Wodehouse or a similarly entertaining document. I also confess that there was not a great deal in the bit that I read that could not have been found out by somebody with an able researcher or competence in the use of Google. None the less, the information had all been brought together in a usable fashion in one place, and it was an analysis of the sectors covered. It may not have been exciting, it may not have been the read of the century and it may not have won the Booker prize. None the less, it was a detailed sectoral analysis and it more than met the requirements laid down by the Humble Address, which asked for something that did not exist.

[Wera Hobhouse]

The hon. Gentleman is extremely generous to give way again to me. I asked the Secretary of State in the Select Committee where and when he thought the misunderstanding had arisen, but I do not think I got a very satisfactory answer. He had plenty of opportunities in the House to correct us and say, “These are not impact assessments; they are sectoral analyses.” He never chose to do that, and I am still waiting for the answer. Why does the hon. Gentleman think that the Secretary of State did not have the opportunity to clear up that misunderstanding?