Brexit — House of Lords, 2019-10-02
Topic: International Affairs
Tom McNally (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, the three years since the 2016 referendum have stress-tested every aspect of our parliamentary democracy. At times we seem to have been living out Yeats’s words in his poem "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity". I was in the room at Transport House in 1971 when Anthony Wedgwood Benn proposed that the Labour Party, when returned to office, should hold a referendum on our membership of the European Common Market. He could not get a seconder for that proposal; referendums were held by tinpot dictators and banana republics, not by mature parliamentary democracies. My old mentor, the late Lord Callaghan—no relation—remarked sagely at the time, "That’s one lifeboat we may all have to climb in one day". So we did in the 1975 referendum, which was an exercise undertaken to hold a divided Labour Party together. The 2016 referendum was held for exactly the same reason, this time to paper over the yawning divisions in the Conservative Party over Europe All too often, in all our parties, expediency has topped principle in presenting the case for Europe. In the end, we have been hoist by our own petard. Successive British Governments have used the same tactics the SNP has used in Scotland: it takes credit for everything that goes right and blames Westminster for everything that goes wrong. For 40 years, successive British Governments have taken the credit for the influence and prosperity that membership of the EU has brought, while blaming the Brussels bureaucrats for any tough decisions that had to be implemented. It was perhaps not surprising that the case for Europe, which has been undersold for 40 years, fell victim to a Brexit campaign of such mendacity and falsehood Some of the damage we are now experiencing could perhaps have been avoided if we had not rushed to engage Article 50. In so doing, we have arrived at a point where we are in very real danger of crashing out of the EU without a deal—something which was never put to the British people in 2016. It is absurd to pretend that the 2016 decision was as informed about the truth and consequences of us leaving Europe then as we are now by the realities that have been laid bare over the past three years In the Times on Saturday, Philip Hammond—only recently Chancellor of the Exchequer—wrote: "The radicals advising Boris do not want a deal. Like the Marxists on the Labour left, they see the shock of a disruptive no-deal Brexit as a chance to re-order our economy and society" He points out very clearly that the Prime Minister is backed in this strategy by, "speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit—and there is only one outcome that works for them: a crash-out no-deal Brexit that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring" We are told by the political analysts that it was the elderly and the left-behinds who provided the Brexiteers with their majority in 2016. In my youth I read a book called The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which tells of how those who have the least are complicit in their own exploitation. If we crash out without a deal it will be the elderly and the left-behinds who bear the brunt of the consequences that follow, while speculators make a killing in the chaos that follows This is not the Eton wall game: get over the line any way you can, dust yourself down, all shake hands and move on. This is about the future of our country for the rest of this century. Those who have to live with the consequences of that decision—the young—have the right to vote again on the matter, and those who will not live with those consequences should at least be given the opportunity to think again about whether this is the future they wish to bequeath their children and grandchildren We should be able to make those decisions protected, as far as possible, from the black arts of modern electioneering. In the last month, Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings have been working to the Trump-Bannon playbook. Only the intervention of Parliament and the Supreme Court saved us from an illegal Prorogation, a bounce-out of the EU and a general election fought on a phony people-versus-Parliament basis. Leaving the EU without a deal or via some loophole hinted at by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, which subverts the will of Parliament, will leave an open wound in our politics that will take a generation to heal. There is still time for the one-nation Tories, the liberals and the social democrats to speak for the liberal and tolerant society that is at ease with itself and its neighbours. But time is short and the time for action is now Fifty-odd years ago, I visited Strasbourg for the first time as a junior official of the Labour Party. I remember how we were greeted then: not as people who had won the war, but as a country admired for its good governance and the rule of law. There was a desire to see this country play a leading role at the heart of Europe. My son—now about the same age as I was then—works in the space industry in Germany as part of a multinational European team. I asked him what the reaction of his colleagues was. He said, "Dad, it’s a kind of bemused sadness". From how we were met in the 1960s to that bemused sadness now is something that we should all ponder.