European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-04-23
Topic: Civil Rights
Alan Thomas Howarth (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, two main arguments have been put forward today and in Committee for writing the Charter of Fundamental Rights into our law. One is that we must bring the charter across into our domestic law because it would be anomalous not to do so; it would be inconsistent with the Government’s purpose in this Bill of transposing the whole body of EU law that presently binds us. It would be offensive for me to pray in aid Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen", and peculiarly inappropriate when the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is the most ardent advocate that consistency should be our guiding principle here, supported by his distinguished co-signatories. Nevertheless, consistency is a poor justification for incorporating the charter. Schematic approaches will not serve us well in these impassioned and volatile political times I recognise the compelling practical reasons for transferring existing EU law into our domestic law, so that we are not sucked into a legal void at the moment we cease to be a member of the EU. However, it does not seem a necessary or desirable consistency to include in that transfer a charter which does not have value as the fountain-head of human rights and whose title, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, portentously symbolises the very jurisdiction that the people of this country have voted to reject and which will be a diminishing element of our law as they are progressively released from it through their Parliament’s future legislative work The other main justification offered is that we need to hold on to hard-won and precarious human rights. That is a good motive, which I share, but it does not follow that we should transpose the charter. People who want to do so say that our constitution has saddled us with an elective dictatorship, that Parliament cannot be trusted in these days of political extremes, and that the charter should be valued as a foundational document in a developing written constitution. It is suggested that we need more checks and balances, not so much against the Executive as against Parliament itself. Happily, for those of this cast of mind, the judges are available. They, it is hoped, will imbue our polity with a higher wisdom than that of the people’s elected representatives, disapply statute when Parliament gets it wrong and rescue us from ourselves and our tendency to excess Have we, as parliamentarians, entirely lost confidence in the institution that we have the honour to serve and of which our country was once so proud? As we debate Brexit it sometimes appears that for many remainers almost anything is preferable to resuming full responsibility for our own decisions in our own parliamentary democracy. "Yes", they say, through gritted teeth, "of course we respect the vote of the people on 23 June 2016, but actually it would be safer to stay in a protectionist customs union and a single European market in whose governance our elected representatives will have no say, and with Parliament trammelled by unelected judges constrained to follow the developing practice of the European Court of Justice". If parliamentarians do not trust Parliament, why should the people do so, and then what happens to our democracy? I say gently to my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith that this is not about ideologically driven hatred of the European Union, as he suggests in today’s Guardian, but about commitment to the renewal of parliamentary democracy.