European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill — House of Lords, 2020-01-13
Topic: International Affairs
David Edward Lea (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I very much echo the basic thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate, has just said. If it is true that on the doorsteps of Widnes and Wakefield, the election reflected a frustration which only Mr Dominic Cummings was able to put his finger on with the second of his brilliant pieces of mendacity—"Get Brexit Done"—that may itself turn out to be a false prospectus. If it does, what will be the position in a year’s time when the same people, on the same doorsteps of Widnes and Wakefield, see that it was a second misleading slogan? "Get Brexit Done", implying a magic solution almost overnight, was an even bigger fib than "Take Back Control"—as if we are going to take back control in Widnes of a multinational corporation such as Google, or as if our workers could get some countervailing power with the world of China, the United States and so on I am also rather doubtful whether the citizens of Widnes and Wakefield would agree if it was put to them that "You’d much rather transform Britain into ‘the Singapore of Europe’, would you not?". I think they would all say, "What’s all that about?". I might say, "Well, let me tell you a little about Singapore works"—but of course it is a slogan. The trouble is that life in this country is now—social media comes into this—getting into a bigger remove from what we have slaved to do in the trade union movement. We had weekend schools trying to talk about how world market share depends on having a better value-added performance, along the lines of what they do in Sweden and so on. We had a lot of those things successfully transformed in the Labour Party and the TUC in 1988 by the famous occasions of Jacques Delors. It is very difficult, as time goes by, to counter the new right’s slogans when it is easy for people to think that this sort of quasi proto-nationalism is what chimes with them, just like support for their local football club. So we have a major problem in how we are going to avoid further disillusionment Only last week, we saw the beginnings of the unravelling of the idea that all this can be sorted out this year. I do not know whether the Minister can confirm this, but it was said by one well-informed journalist on the Spectator—his name is Mr James Forsyth—that a week ago, there was a Cabinet committee that decided that we would not in fact be able to sort all this out this year and therefore that we would have the gloss on this commitment, that it needed to be selective and the deal would be far more focused on goods than services. The punchline in the Spectator article was: "The tight Brexit deadline will be met but, crucially, not all of the Brexit deal needs to be agreed by then. ‘We can do this in stages,’ says one cabinet source. ‘That will kill any talk of a cliff edge.’" But that is not what the president of the Commission has agreed to. What we are saying is make-believe; my noble friend Lady Donaghy called it a pig in a poke. This is becoming absolutely undeniable. George Orwell would have been proud of the doublethink Finally, we are told that we have got to fly the union jack at the end of this month. The union jack is a flag that is being torn up by Boris Johnson. The scenario that is increasingly plausible about what could happen in Scotland, which my noble friend Lord Darling touched on, would mean that the St Andrew’s flag would go and we would break up the United Kingdom. This is what happens when you play the nationalist card and start talking about the flying of the union jack.