European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-06-18
Topic: International Affairs
Nicholas True (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I beg to move my amendment as set out on the supplement to the Marshalled List My noble friend Lord Hailsham has just indulged us with some Disraelian oratory on a Gladstonian scale, as far as time goes. I shall try to be a little more direct. I have to say to my noble friend that people outside this House and Parliament are getting a little tired of the parliamentary games here and the arcane language of the parliamentary discussions that go on. They are less interested in the rodomontade that we heard from my noble friend about who said what to whom when. They actually want to know when they are going to get Brexit, when it will be delivered, when it will be done If I may be direct with my noble friend—he is my noble friend—he is wrong. All the talk we have heard today lets the cat out of the bag: Grieve I, Grieve II, Grieve this, Grieve that. All this talk suggests to me that my noble friend is acting as the representative on earth of Mr Dominic Grieve—if your Lordships’ House could ever be described as earth; I would not wish to offend your Lordships by suggesting that it was anything other than heaven to be here. Perhaps I should say Mr Dominic Grieve’s representative here in heaven This House should not be taken for granted as an enforcement posse for any individual, whether in Parliament or anywhere else. It is interesting that the opinions of your Lordships are so taken for granted by that faction in the House of Commons that it is already openly talking about what will happen when my noble friend’s amendment comes back. I submit that in this House’s greatest days, your Lordships were never taken for granted in that way. It was never considered that your Lordships were a tale foretold or lobby fodder for someone else’s interest. This House has made abundantly clear that it is unhappy about Brexit. I do not think you need to be a reader of the Daily Mail to know that the House of Lords is unhappy in the majority about Brexit, although I do not agree on that. But there comes a point when enough is enough Today, having listened to my noble friend the Leader of the House and the very reasonable tones that she used in opening this debate—far from the clarion calls we heard afterwards—we should be cautious about lending support to those whose tactics will inevitably end by weakening the Government and undermining the United Kingdom’s negotiating position. Whatever your position in the argument, no good will come from perpetuating uncertainty by offering Motions and resolutions in perpetuity that might alter the United Kingdom’s position. That weakens our position at the negotiating table, and I do not think that your Lordships should do that. I apologise to the House that this is a manuscript amendment laid before you. That is because my noble friend tabled an amendment last week which gave the House of Commons wide-ranging—one might say Cromwellian—powers to direct the Government by resolutions, which he called Grieve I. They would in effect be the kind of orders beloved of the Long Parliament in the 1640s. That was plainly unacceptable, as my noble friend has acknowledged. I laid an amendment, the defunct Motion F2, last Friday, to prevent any such direction. I thought that was the end of the matter and that we would debate it today. However, a weekend is clearly a long time in politics, because what my noble friend thought on Friday he disavowed this morning. This morning my noble friend telephoned me—from an interesting place, actually; we have heard about these contacts with the party opposite—to say that he was withdrawing his amendment and putting down another one that on the face of it was more limited in scope I do not flatter myself that I had anything to do with this rethink. Indeed, we have heard in all candour from my noble friend the reason for it. He was instructed to make the change by Mr Dominic Grieve.