European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 5) Bill — House of Commons, 2019-04-03
Topic: International Affairs
Anne Margaret Main (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Clerks were very helpful when I was trying to draft my amendment. I said, "Surely we can’t have this open-ended situation?" Very helpfully, the Clerks said to me that the Bill can say what it likes, but at the moment the Prime Minister, in the untrammelled way that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said, can do what she likes. That is the situation. We are in fact sending off a Prime Minister who will be reluctant to deliver this proposal The Bill is supposed to be incredibly flawed, but what I do not want it to be, as we discovered from the Gina Miller challenge, is a nightmare going through the courts. Our businesses deserve better than to have a piece of cobbled together legislation that is rammed through—I gather it will be rammed through the other place, too—just to make sure we avoid no deal. Have hon. Members not done any adding up recently? This House is the tail that is now wagging the dog. There is no pretence on the Government Benches that this is going to be an easy ride—not for this stage, the next stage or any other stages coming down the road. There might be fears from Opposition Members, but they seem to be able to exercise an awful lot more muscle on the political agreement than we can on Government side of the House; they in effect have the whip hand over the Government. The true nature of the House is that it does not really desire to leave. The House will have masses of opportunities over the coming months to ensure that the political agreement is shaped in a fashion that they would like. That is the one thing about which the European Union has said, "We can open that, no trouble." What the EU will not open is the withdrawal agreement, and a withdrawal agreement will be required to achieve many of the things that the House wants to achieve. That is why I reluctantly agreed to support the withdrawal agreement when it was separated from the political arrangements The Bill that we are considering is poor, and badly drafted. I accept the reasons why, and I accept that we are all scrabbling around to try to improve it, but I am disappointed that the Lords may not have much time to consider any amendments that are made tonight. I hope that the other end of the building does not function like a rubber-stamp machine and say, "It doesn’t matter; this Bill is going through regardless." The Bill will come back to haunt the House. If the procedure that we have followed today ends up creating a lawyers’ charter and a nightmare in the courts, it will do huge damage to our industries. Believe me, for every Gina Miller out there launching challenges to make sure that a public vote is listened to in a proper legal fashion, there will be lawyers picking over the Bill and saying that it does not stand up, so can we please ensure that sensible amendments are made tonight I would like to think that my amendment is sensible because, as the hon. Member for Streatham (Chuka Umunna) has pointed out, the only date that the European Union will accept is 22 May. I believe that if we put that date in the Bill, we would be picking a date that the European Union was comfortable with. The House would have the security of knowing that the Prime Minister could not unilaterally accept any other date that the EU came up with, but would have to bring it back for Members’ consideration. If the House chooses to adopt it, fine, and if the House says, "Go back and try harder", fine, but there will be certainty. I hope that Members on both sides of the argument will support this amendment, because it would give them the certainty of knowing there will be no jiggery-pokery and no clever shifting of dates or times. My amendment would oblige the Prime Minister to come back to the House with any new date, and she would not be allowed to accept a date that did not reflect the will of the House. Surely, that is what the House wishes to achieve.