Brexit: Parliamentary Approval of the Outcome of Negotiations with the European Union — House of Lords, 2019-01-28
Topic: International Affairs
William John Lawrence Wallace (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, a number of noble Lords, including in particular the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, have remarked that much of Britain’s broader public are longing for an end to these endless debates about Brexit. Some within your Lordships’ House probably share that view. However, leaving at the end of March will not bring an end to domestic debate. The Government have hardly begun to negotiate on the future relationship and there are still deep divisions within the Government and in the Conservative Party about what that future relationship should be. The seven speeches from the Conservative Party that we have already heard in this debate show that it has many different opinions. So we are facing a further two years or more in which domestic issues take second place to European ones while Ministers struggle to decide what their party will accept If Theresa May had taken a different position when she became Prime Minister, we might now be in a different place. She could have noted the thinness of the majority and the divisions in public opinion and could have stood up to the hardliners in her party and gone directly for a Norwegian option, membership of the European Economic Area and the closest association possible. If she had, we might well now be leaving with the negotiations almost completed—but she did not. She set out red lines to satisfy her right wing, appointed ideological hardliners to key positions in the Brexit negotiations and divided the country and the party more deeply. Here we are, up against the lines she set, and unprepared either to leave or to stay Last week the Prime Minister declared that to question the outcome of the referendum and ask the public to think again, "could damage social cohesion by undermining faith in our democracy".—[Official Report, Commons, 21/1/19; col. 26.] That is a pretty strong statement. However, the country is already divided. The last referendum damaged social cohesion. The campaign itself brought out underlying divisions—not just about the European Union. A right-wing extremist murdered an MP before the vote. Hate crime shot up immediately after the referendum and has stayed up since then—against eastern Europeans, against people of Asian and Afro-Caribbean descent although born in Britain, and against outsiders of all sorts When Theresa May was appointed Prime Minister, she made an idealistic speech about healing the nation’s divisions, but she then pandered to the nativist elements in her own party, labelling those who opposed leaving the European Union "citizens of nowhere"—this from the leader of a party which receives large donations from financiers with offshore businesses and which has accepted contributions from Russians resident in Britain, but who nevertheless stoops to labelling those British citizens who believe in European and international co-operation as having divided loyalties. That is how English Protestants labelled Catholics 350 years ago and nationalists labelled Jews Of course, the right-wing media went further with headlines about "traitors" and "enemies of the people", attacking judges, the liberal elite and the establishment. I love to hear Jacob Rees-Mogg attacking the establishment because it is the ultimate absurdity. Neither the Prime Minister nor other responsible senior Ministers have deplored such attacks or warned that they are feeding social division. A recent survey shows, not surprisingly, that Britain has become a much angrier society over the past two years. That is partly because of the deteriorating quality of our political debate and partly because of the Government’s failure to address the many other causes of social division, in their preoccupation with internal party rivalries and disputes For more than a century Britain has been a liberal democracy built upon reasoned debate, respect for evidence in policy-making and continued dialogue among politicians of opposing views. We now face, within Britain as well as elsewhere, a surge of "illiberal democracy", as Prime Minister Orbán of Hungary has labelled it, founded on the exploitation of popular fears, antagonism to foreigners and international institutions, the denigration of domestic opponents and a sweeping disregard for consistency or evidence. President Trump is one of the most skilled exponents of illiberal democracy. After all, one of his campaign promises was that Mexico would pay to build a wall along the United States’ southern border. Two years later, without any sense of shame, he shut down the federal Government to try to force Congress to pay for the wall instead We have had similarly illiberal and irrational promises here. We were told repeatedly by Liam Fox and others that the German car industry would force the EU to give Britain whatever we demanded if we left, and that the exit negotiations would be the easiest negotiations ever. We were also assured that leaving the European Union would resolve the problem of immigration, even though in no year did the majority of immigrants arriving come from inside the EU. The leave campaign promised groups within the Asian community that closing off European immigration would leave more space for others to arrive Now we are warned that the will of the people—a phrase that authoritarian and anti-democratic Governments have long been fond of—requires a much harder, nastier and domestically damaging Brexit, because there can be no reconsideration or turning back. We should not be surprised that the most committed Brexiters overlap with those who deny the reality of climate change and those who promise that the best way to increase government revenue is to cut tax, nor that the same people who warn of the threat of violence on the streets of English cities if Brexit is not delivered in full dismiss the prospect of any return to violence in Northern Ireland as exaggerated. They choose what they want to believe Boris Johnson has shown the same happy disregard for consistency and evidence in denying that he played a major role in the Brexit campaign or even raised the spectre of millions of Turks swarming across our frontiers; so has Jacob Rees-Mogg, in switching from a passionate commitment to establishing parliamentary sovereignty again to now calling on the Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament to prevent a democratically elected Parliament delaying an unprepared and un-negotiated Brexit. I am sure that, as a good historian and a Roman Catholic, he knows that King James II prorogued Parliament repeatedly to prevent MPs blocking his pro-Catholic legislation, and ended up in exile as a result. Perhaps the same fate may reach the Conservative Party. I do not know whether he and others would go to Switzerland or Singapore Meanwhile, the regional divide between Britain’s richest and poorest regions remains the widest in Europe, and the overall divide between rich and poor is shameful for an open democracy. London has a structural surplus of housing for non-resident rich—built precisely for citizens of nowhere under London’s Conservative mayor, Mr Johnson—and a structural shortage of affordable housing for British citizens. We are a divided country—economically and socially, as well as politically—and going through with Brexit is likely only to make those divisions worse This country desperately needs constructive political leadership to bring us back together. It is now clear, sadly, that we will not get constructive leadership from this Prime Minister, more concerned with her doomed effort to hold together her own party than with the rest of the country. The task for all of us, in both Houses, is to find a way out of the present political, social, economic and constitutional crisis that can begin to re-establish our damaged social cohesion. That will require cross-party co-operation and a quality of political leadership that has been lacking since 2016. It may also need to include another referendum.