Brexit: Deal or No Deal (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Cavendish of Furness Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cavendish of Furness (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Taylor. I enjoyed hearing his warnings on the fate of empires.

Another day, another report from the European Union Committee. I am delighted to thank its members for the time and industry they have devoted to the subject and I thank most warmly the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, who is nearly in his place, and associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Jay, who always brings a polite and helpful tone to debates. Beyond that, I can think of absolutely nothing to say in support of this report or its findings. I also say with sadness that I find aspects of the report to be really disgraceful and unworthy of this House.

EU committees have been markedly Europhile for as long as I can remember. As a member of two of them, I recall that any and all criticism of EU institutions was virtually taboo during our hearings. I do not press this complaint too far since I acknowledge that the membership of the EU committees come close to reflecting the views of your Lordships as a whole. However, I find the report so blatantly hostile to Brexit and so uncritically in favour of the EU that those parts of it which address such legitimate concerns as say, open skies, customs arrangements and, especially, security are accordingly devalued and trivialised.

In paragraph 9 of its summary of conclusions and recommendations, the report goes so far over the top as to trespass into fiction. As has been much quoted, it says of having no deal that it is difficult, if not impossible,

“to envisage a worse outcome for the United Kingdom”.

As many people have pointed out—and as I do, too—that is simply untrue. I can think of innumerable outcomes worse than no deal. Leaving the EU but staying in the single market and the customs union would, I venture to suggest, be a far worse outcome.

Mention has been made made more than once of what the authors refer to as the overwhelming evidence that led to their conclusions. Not only is the committee’s choice of witnesses scandalously selective; reading the transcripts, I was appalled by how little those witnesses were tested. Take for example the CBI, which said in its evidence that its views are a reflection of its membership. Well, I am a member and I certainly do not share its views—a point I often put to it. The truth is that it is a hostage to its major subscribers. Less and less does it represent the SME sector, which I happen to belong to and as such declare my personal interests as listed in the register. Our sector is the real driver of the British economy and it gets no mention at all that I could find. Nor did I find in the transcripts a declaration of the CBI’s interest in respect of the money it received from the EU. But then again, perhaps special privileges apply to it as they apply to others in respect of European affairs. The CBI now enjoys a reputation for being wrong on almost everything; it comes as a surprise that so much weight is given to its testimony.

While it is true that the committee heard evidence from Ruth Lea and from John Longworth, co-chairman of Leave Means Leave, again it comes as a surprise to me that nothing was heard from such distinguished independent voices as Roger Bootle or Professor Patrick Minford. Did it occur to the committee, I wonder, to invite some of our more successful entrepreneurs such as James Dyson to give evidence? No—the committee heard what it wanted to hear.

I do not pretend to be entirely happy with the way that negotiations have gone—here I echo the noble Lord, Lord Teverson—and am certainly not happy with how much we appear to have given away, with not much to show in return. One must sympathise with the Government in trying to run these talks against the background of a chorus of those who seek to reverse the referendum result and want to undermine the Government at every turn. I have also heard the story on good authority of how, during David Cameron’s negotiations before the referendum, every single Commissioner was briefed to the effect that there was a zero chance of Britain voting to leave the EU. It reminds me of the First World War joke about a man walking up Whitehall, looking in confused fashion left and right, and eventually flagging somebody down and saying, “Excuse me, which side is the Foreign Office on?”. “Ours, I hope”, comes the reply. What has changed?

The report says that the policy of nothing is agreed until everything is agreed should be abandoned. A huge amount has been made of this by supporters of the report but, according to my research, unless I am wrong, those words appear in a document in response to the Prime Minister’s Article 50 letter to President Tusk. Those words appear in President Tusk’s letter. That completely demolishes the arguments of about five noble Lords who argued in support of this report.

Where the report is right is that time is very short. In recent weeks, I have begun to notice that some blue water is beginning to emerge between the EU negotiators and the member states, and here is the rub. I tend to agree with the former Greek Finance Minister, who told Radio 5 Live:

“Brussels does not want a mutually advantageous deal and London has not realised it ... the fallacy lies in the presumption that those who are conducting the negotiations from Brussels and their political masters in Berlin and Paris, are interested in an economic outcome. They’re not. They’re far more interested in making an example of Britain so that others around the European Union get a lesson that anyone who opposes their authority gets crushed”.


Perhaps noble Lords would prefer from nearer home the words of the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, the noble Lord King of Lothbury, who warned that the talks are a waste of time:

“The European Union is a political construct and they have political objectives ... I think the idea that we’re going to get soft treatment from the rest of the EU is false”.


The committee discussed the question of whether politics trumps economics or vice versa but reached no conclusion. I found from the transcript that the chairman mused that arguments over the primacy of law or politics will continue. How right he is. It certainly complicates the Government’s task that so many political and economic forces are self-evidently at work here.

If I understand correctly, the distillation of the committee’s recommendations is that we should apply for time-limited extended membership of the EU to hammer out every last bureaucratic detail, paying in as we pay in now, constrained as we are constrained now but with much reduced influence. It leaves no one on either side of the argument in any doubt that the committee ultimately wants us to stay in the EU permanently. As other noble Lords have said, the committee needs reminding that the people and Parliament have spoken and it ill befits this unelected House to try to reverse that decision. It is a course I reject, and I hope it is a course that the Government also reject.

The report underestimates all the benefits and opportunities of leaving the EU, that ossifying, free-trade-hating organisation. It exaggerates all the risks. A conceit among the political and official class is that they somehow have great influence over trade. They have nothing of the kind. I look back on my experience of half a century of trading in some 40 markets of the world. I have never craved certainty or expected it. Markets suddenly collapse and I have to find other markets. Customers are the thing I look for, and that is what I get. Over that long period, I have almost always ignored what Governments said about trade. We have nothing to fear from leaving the EU. I fear that the EU negotiators will put politics ahead of economics, which will bring delays. There must therefore be a case for walking away politely sooner rather than later and starting a new life under WTO rules with the aim and ambition of becoming a new world pioneer in free trade.

UK and EU Relations

Lord Cavendish of Furness Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cavendish of Furness (Con)]

My Lords, how hugely refreshing to follow a speech which is so constructive and given with such authority, hoping to make these negotiations work. I congratulate the Government on their use of the long recess to provide us with a large folder of position papers, and I thank my noble friend the Minister for giving the House the opportunity to debate them. I also thank her for introducing the debate with her customary clarity.

I have tried to read all the position papers as they appeared and, as a result, I feel that I have gained a clearer view of what the Government have in mind in the different areas under discussion. That surely is what they are intended for. They are not dogmatic and frequently offer alternative approaches to problems. They have formed the basis of intelligent debate in various quarters, not least among a number of your Lordships. I have also read them in conjunction with the European Council’s document on guidelines for Brexit which, aside from the usual self-promoting claims that one might want to challenge, held no real surprises. But what I have found striking is how sparse the EU negotiator’s response is. I can understand that the EU will indeed miss our financial contribution, but I would have thought that there were aspects of Brexit, other than money, and especially those set out in the position papers, which merited a greater reaction than has so far been forthcoming.

Much of the criticism that I have seen in the press and which has been articulated this afternoon has been, in my view, largely synthetic. We have heard that there has been both too much detail and too little detail. More broadly, I rather miss the days when convention held that, in international affairs, criticism of one’s own country and Government was measured. Sometimes I hear and read things that suggest there are elements in Britain which appear not to have their country’s interests at heart. Their disappointment at the outcome of the referendum is manifested in an apparent wish for the negotiations to stall or fail.

The message of the position papers suggests to me that Ministers recognise that Brexit has implications for all our EU partners as well as ourselves, and that we stand ready to make the process as painless as possible.

On many occasions since the referendum result, I have paused to reflect on how common ground might be found between we leavers and the almost, but not quite, equal number of my fellow citizens who took the opposite view. Although I continue to rejoice at the decision that was reached and to feel a free man at last, I do not understand the rationale of those who wish to retain membership of the EU. It still eludes me, but I know that I need to keep in mind that 48% of voters represents a very substantial minority. It is for those of us who won by a not-great margin to go on listening to those we disagree with and respect their feelings.

Conversely, the 48% should not seek to derail the decision reached by the British people. As for those who seek to abort the whole process, I invite them to reflect on what might be the reaction. They might also give some thought to the kind of terms Britain would be offered if we crawled back in supplicant mode. Like my noble friend Lord Ridley, I await patiently and with interest for the Labour Party to find a settled position on Brexit. There is little to say until it does. The Liberal Democrats were the only party at the last general election that campaigned to reverse the referendum decision. Voters hardly flocked to support that policy, and unless they are listening only to themselves, one might think that some restraint would be appropriate when the repeal Bill arrives in this House.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord for permitting me to intervene. For his benefit, I will just clarify that we did not seek to reverse the referendum. What we are saying is that the referendum last year was rather like buying a house subject to a survey and that once the details are known, there should be a referendum on the concrete details of Brexit. That is not a reversal or a second referendum.

[Lord Cavendish of Furness]

I will read very carefully what the noble Baroness has said and I hope I will be clearer.

I will now briefly look to the future, because I believe there is a vision for this country behind which we could reunite and thrive—the vision of global free trade. There are people I know devoting energy and talent beyond the minutiae of current negotiations who see in the ancient notion of free trade a means to worldwide prosperity and peace. When we leave the European Union, we will also leave behind a protectionist organisation, whose policies harm the poorest of the world. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, no, trade is not good for all. The European Union is an organisation where the producer is placed above the consumer, where the powerful prosper at the expense of the weak, where huge youth unemployment is deemed acceptable and where government comes before the governed.

On leaving the European Union there is a real opportunity to work towards global free trade. Although no one pretends this will be easy, it has this extraordinary feature: it can be done unilaterally. If a country dismantles tariff and non-tariff barriers while others do not, that still brings benefits that others come, in time, to emulate. That is the lesson of history. It is a vision that offers peace, fairness and prosperity to a country and to a world that has become full of self-doubt. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister has spoken of a post-Brexit Britain becoming the “global leader” in free trade. Can I ask the Minister what the current thinking is on that? I can think of no greater ambition, and it must be ever present in our minds in the months and years ahead.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Cavendish of Furness Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cavendish of Furness (Con)]

My Lords, I support the Bill and hope that it goes through unamended. I should say that I joined the Brexit campaign but only after hearing the proposed deal that Mr Cameron came back with.

One of the functions of parliamentary democracy is to provide means of resolving differences that citizens cannot be expected to resolve among themselves. By their very nature, those differences tend to be intractable. People hold very different views on the legitimate reach of government. I happen to believe in small government, not least because whatever Governments do, they do it expensively and often not very well. However, I wonder if the tendency on the part of modern Governments to overreach has not perhaps led indirectly to the divisions that shook the UK last June and which still persist.

I was born in an age when, whoever was in power, we enjoyed a comforting sense that we received governance from one another’s hands. The administration of these islands had a national flavour and, broadly, enjoyed public support. Authority was all around us, and it seemed on the whole to be benign and on our side. Much of that has been lost. In my life and work I feel that authority has come to be seen often as hostile, remote and even menacing. This has produced a public malaise that it strikes me has grown as the influence of the EU has grown.

To make sense of that malaise, we have to look back. As a lifelong member of this party, I was among those who genuinely felt cheated when the deal that we voted for not only turned out to be something quite else but undermined some fundamental freedoms and values, things that my father and grandfather had fought and suffered to defend in two world wars. Of course, for most of my youth Britain was weak and tired and I think it is safe to say that a well-meaning official class took it upon themselves to steer us, not without a degree of stealth, down the road that led to where we stood on the eve of the referendum; that road, as we now know, was labelled “managed decline”. It took no account of the possibility that the decline might be reversed, as in fact happened. This is not the place to say how it happened and at whose hands.

The party opposite’s journey in its approach to the Common Market and its successor entities is very different and completely fascinating. The Labour Party of my youth, as I remember it, believed passionately in the British parliamentary system and was loath to see its participation, won at such cost, assailed and diluted. Then suddenly the orthodoxy changed. Even before the famous Delors speech, I remember reading tracts by socialist authors, saying in effect: “Listen up, brothers; this is a new, global world. Socialism will become an increasingly hard sell with the voters. We must infiltrate the institutions that will give effect to our agenda of redistribution”. All I can say is that I salute them; it has been a triumph for Labour. Shedloads of British taxpayers’ cash is doled out by unaccountable officials without the need for politicians to explain to voters where their hard-earned cash has gone

For the Liberal Democrats, the journey has been different again. There is something counterintuitive to me about seeking political power only to give it away again. It is also insulting to those who entrust power in the first place. Pro-EU politicians seem to be seduced by the superficial attractions of holding office without shouldering the responsibilities that their electors conferred on them. Voters, it now appears, expect more of them. Those I spoke to in Copeland last week certainly understood why, for example, the country had to endure austerity, even if the opposition parties cannot. “That is why we elected them—to make the difficult decisions”, one man said. This Copeland man’s insight suggests to me that many politicians, and probably all Liberal Democrat ones, fundamentally lack the confidence to govern in the modern age—the confidence and the competence. It is hard not to sympathise and agree with them, but the solution does not lie in handing powers that rightly belong to Parliament to a cadre of officials, most of whom have scant understanding of Britain’s needs and aspirations.

It is time, I feel, for those who feel oppressed by the heat in the democratic kitchen to leave it and make way for those prepared to give electors the bad news as well as the good, those who will find solutions to those intractable problems. I have a glorious vision of a new generation of post-Brexit men and women entering public life, valued perhaps as much for their experience outside politics as for their contribution within the Palace of Westminster.

Time allows me to say very little about trade, but once again I remind Ministers that it is the SME sector that is driving UK growth. I declare my interests as an operator in the SME sector, as given in the register. There can be no doubt that regulation impacts on the SME sector disproportionately. It hinders small business by magnitudes more than it does large businesses. The EU has been, and remains, the enemy of small business. It is an enduring stain on EU practice that some 50,000 lobbyists representing large multinationals have been made welcome in Brussels, where in effect they buy regulation to benefit their clients and to damage their smaller competitors. I have always found it odd that EU supporters are so uncritical of this widespread corporate venality.

However, all the defects of the EU pale into insignificance beside the constitutional issue. Anyone with experience of the real world understands that when the discipline of accountability falters, a car crash ensues—not possibly, not probably, but inevitably. In terms of accountability, the European Union is a scandal. Its failures threaten personal freedom. It has contempt for democracy. The ancient settlement under which the citizens of these islands are free to do what they will until Parliament decrees otherwise, and under which government is by consent, this priceless legacy, has been taken apart piece by piece and replaced by forms of governance entirely alien to us.

People may patronise Brexit supporters, characterising them as Mr Blair did over the weekend as having “imperfect knowledge”. Let me tell him what experience should have taught him: the people do understand and a majority spoke last June. Those people I talked to in Copeland understand. They are not rude about immigrants; they are not inward-looking; they are not xenophobic. They want, as I want, our children and grandchildren to walk in freedom under the law. Put simply, they want their country back, and so do I. Let us give a fair wind to the Bill, unamended.