UK and EU Relations — House of Lords, 2017-09-12
Topic: International Affairs
William Fletcher-Vane (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, during much of the summer and the Recess, for reasons which I need not go into, I became very much preoccupied with non-political things. At the beginning of the autumn I awoke rather like a slightly insomniac Rip Van Winkle and took stock of Brexit. We are now on the road which, unless something intervenes, inexorably means we head off over the cliff edge of a hard Brexit. I was struck by the irony of how voting to take back control had conferred on the EU a veto over all our subsequent relations with it concerning everything in the treaties. If there is a possibility we go over the cliff edge, we have to plan for that because if it happens and we do not, complete chaos will ensue. All our relationships therefore via the treaties have to be rearranged under public and private international law when the EU law falls away. These new arrangements have to be comprehensive and will almost certainly involve choice and value judgments. At the same time that this is happening, there appears to be a widespread, although not universal, doubt about the wisdom of going off the cliff edge; and the Government appear to be looking, in their own words, for a new "deep and special relationship", which I consider sensible, since we cannot unilaterally decouple from an interdependent world Both these strands are found woven together in the position papers. The inherent problem that we end up with is that we are going to be simultaneously arguing for two separate and sometimes incompatible things, unless and until we know what the final position is going to be. I would hazard a guess that, if the EU were asked what was the best possible deep and special partnership we might have with it, it would say the EU membership that we have now. However, we have rejected that and we are entitled to do so, and we want this new relationship. That being the case, it seems entirely reasonable to me for it then to come back to us and say, "Tell us what you want and we will consider it". It is entirely up to it how it responds and how it might or might not negotiate thereafter At the heart of the position papers, and where we are politically in these negotiations, are these two strands. I would like to briefly touch on two of them. First, I turn back to last week’s debate on the EU Committee’s report on Brexit and Ireland, which seemed very illustrative of the problems that we are facing. I have never spoken in the British Parliament on Ireland although I have a significant Ascendancy component in my background, even though—rather surprisingly—the only members of my kith and kin who anyone may have heard of were really quite prominent nationalists. Nevertheless I follow, and always have followed, what is going on there. Two things emerge very clearly. First, it is fiendishly complicated. Secondly, honourable and intelligent people have very differing, honestly held views. This is symptomatic of the wider background to the quest for our new deep and special partnership. It is not going to be easy Secondly, and it has just been referred to by my noble friend Lord Ridley, is the position paper on Euratom. As a Cumbrian, much of whose political and business life has been associated with and touched one way or another by both Europe and the nuclear industry, I suspect I am as familiar with the criticisms of both—my goodness, there are a lot from time to time—as anybody. Never can I recall, though, any criticisms made of Euratom membership. Listening to my noble friend Lord Ridley and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, it struck me that if ever there was a case that Paris was worth a mass, this must be it. After all, as Alexander Pope put it: "For forms of government let fools contest; Whate’er is best administered is best" We are arguing simultaneously in two slightly different directions in respect of two possibly separate outcomes to Brexit. This is both difficult and hazardous. It is always said of politics, and it was said by Jimmy Maxton, that if you cannot ride two horses at once you have no business to be in the circus. Of course that is true but the problem and the risk is that, if you are trying to ride two and you slip off one, you are likely to end up having fallen off the other as well and find yourself lying on the ground with your face in the mud.