Spending Round 2019

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Cormack

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

You have not heard what I have to say yet!

As I was listening to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I could not help but remember a speech that I heard at my first State Opening of Parliament way back in 1970. The Address was moved by the then John Nott, later Sir John Nott, and he made a remark that has always stuck in my mind: he said that the real poor of the 20th century are those without hope. You can repeat that statement and advance the century, because it is still those who have no hope—who do not feel that they have a future—who are the real poor. I very much hope that the various promises made in this document, unsubstantiated in some ways as it is, can be carried forward and expanded.

I really want to talk about something else, because this is an extraordinarily artificial debate. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, hit the nail on the head in his opening remarks. Here we are, back from a brief September session that was, it turns out, illegally brought to a close. I am very glad that, like the Leader of the Opposition, I boycotted what turns out to have been not the Prorogation ceremony. We are now in the middle of a constitutional crisis, the like of which this country has not seen for a very long time indeed. I am not sure I would go back to 1789, with the noble Lord, Lord Davies—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I said 1689.

[Lord Cormack]

The noble Lord actually said 1789, but we will not bandy this across the Chamber. One could say that 1911-12 was a great constitutional crisis. However one looks at it, and whatever one’s views of the decision that was unanimously reached yesterday, I do not think that anybody can deny that this is a great constitutional crisis. I pay tribute to the Justices of the Supreme Court. I think that they did indeed act without fear or favour; they were not taking sides on the Brexit issue. They were ruling—and I say this with some feeling of embarrassment and shame—on the conduct of a Conservative Prime Minister who should not have played fast and loose with Parliament and who should not have sent us packing on 9 September, having himself even said that he might keep us here until 12 September. I believe that the matters we have been discussing today, in an unsatisfactory form, through Statements and now this debate, illustrate the fact that there is indeed an agenda that would have kept us more than busy for most of the five weeks. Now we still do not know what is going to happen. I imagine that there will be a short and perfectly proper Prorogation in a couple of weeks, followed by a state opening and a Queen’s Speech on 14 October. However, we do not even know for certain whether that is going to happen. We have an extraordinary situation: a Government who are in a significant minority and discussing financial plans and promises that they do not know whether they will be able to discharge.

No one wishes the Prime Minister greater success in reaching a deal than I do. As I made public on many occasions, I would have accepted the deal that Prime Minister May achieved, all those months ago. I very much hope that we can have a deal and that we can be out on 31 October, much as I will greatly regret that, because this long saga has to be brought to a close. The fact is that Parliament has now decreed—rightly, in my view; I strongly supported the Benn Act, as it is now called—that we should not leave without a deal. What I have been concerned about this afternoon, in answers to two Statements delivered by my noble friend Lord Callanan, is that he has not come absolutely clean, by saying what will happen if, on 31 October, the deal has not been concluded. I hope that the Leader of the House will be able to do so in a few moments’ time. Parliament has decreed that it should be concluded before we come out. Having had one constitutional crisis because of the way in which the generally accepted rules of Prorogation were neglected, we do not want another crisis because an Act passed in Parliament through both Houses is ignored. I hope that, tonight or before we rise tomorrow—though we are of course back next week—we will have a clear and unequivocal statement. I would appeal to the Prime Minister, though I do not suppose that he will necessarily read—

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Cormack

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I knew that some noble Lords on the other side would not like this but they are going to hear it. We had the heartless expropriations of Catholic property by Oliver Cromwell, and again in the 18th century, contrary to the Treaty of Limerick. We had a series of broken promises—four major historic broken promises—the Treaty of Limerick itself, the promise made to Grattan’s Parliament in 1782, the promise made by Pitt in 1800 to introduce Catholic emancipation and the promise made by Asquith to bring in, live up to and carry out the third home rule Bill. All those promises were broken.

Even at that point the British Government did not get it. We did not get the Easter rebellion. We tried to impose conscription on Ireland. Even when Sinn Fein won every seat in the November 1918 elections except, I think, for two in the 26 counties, we still did not get it and, within two months, we had the Anglo-Irish war. We know what happened to that. After the treaty, we neglected Irish matters in this House. We allowed Stormont to get away with an absolutely scandalous programme of deliberate job and housing discrimination—job discrimination even explicitly encouraged by a unionist Prime Minister by the way—and other breaches of civil rights, and, of course we did not get it. We did not intervene after the attack on the civil rights march by Paisley’s thugs at Burntollet bridge. We then had the appalling violence and terrorism by the IRA.

In the last 20 years we have had the brightest moment in Anglo-Irish history that we have had in 800 years, starting with the Belfast agreement. It may have been prepared before the Belfast agreement in the great co-operation that took place between our two countries after we both joined the European Union. I remember Garret FitzGerald, a very great Taoiseach, saying to me once over lunch that that had transformed the position of the Irish and the British. After 800 years in which we had been the patronising imperialists and the Irish had been the petitioners, we were equals, involved in the same programme and the same agenda in the European Union, or the European Community, as it was originally, and we needed each other’s support and votes to get our business done. That was the basis on which a new relationship was created. That has been a great asset and great achievement of the last generation. It is now at risk if we gratuitously decide to impose a border upon the beautiful country and proud people of Ireland. It does not matter whether the border is a mechanical border, a human border, an electronic border, an analogue border or a digital border, it is a border, a frontier. That is the important psychological fact and we cannot get away from it. There is no way you can get away from it. It is completely and utterly out of the question. The Government are quite good at saying that we had the discussion on the previous set of amendments about them dismissing the idea of our remaining in the single market through being a member of the EEA. Why do the Government not—as they should—dismiss the idea altogether of being a party to the end of freedom of movement in the island of Ireland, let alone, of course, within the United Kingdom itself?

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, we should remember Sir John Major and Albert Reynolds and the fact that my noble friend Lord Trimble shared the Nobel prize with John Hume for what they did to create the foundation for a peaceful settlement. No one in this Chamber needs a lecture from my friend the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, and a rehearsal of Irish history—a very poor rehearsal as my noble friend Lord Trimble interjects.

We have had some very notable speeches in this debate. I pay particular tribute to my noble friend Lord Empey and the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

The noble Lord is very welcome to correct me and if I have made a historical error I apologise, but will he tell the House what the historical error was?

[Lord Cormack]

The noble Lord certainly left out Henry VIII and many other things. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, put the thing beautifully in context and gave a very remarkable speech. We should all be grateful to my friend the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for introducing the amendment in the way that he did but I hope he will not push it to a vote. I say that with great respect. He knows I mean that because I had many dealings with him when he was Secretary of State and I had the honour to be the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in another place. I had members of seven parties on my committee and we remained unanimous throughout, even though we looked at issues such as organised crime, prisons and many others. He knows how closely we worked together as a committee.

What we need today—and I hope we will get it—is an assurance from my noble friend the Minister that the Government truly recognise the importance of the points that have been raised. They recognise that Northern Ireland is not only in many ways the most beautiful part of the United Kingdom but also the most vulnerable. We are not going to strengthen this procedural Bill by hanging this amendment on it. There may well be a time when we return in the context of the negotiations that will follow. There may well be amendments later in this Bill that I will feel I need to support to ask colleagues in the other place to think again, but this is not one of them and I very much hope that my friend the noble Lord, Lord Hain, will withdraw his amendment at the end of the debate.

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Cormack

Wednesday 14th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

On this issue I entirely agree with the noble Lord. As one who was instrumental in persuading the late Reg Prentice, later Lord Prentice, to cross the Floor, I believe that what he says is entirely justifiable.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

All of us are tempted to welcome converts and are delighted when people join the party that we happen, for the time being, to be a member of. We then dismiss as traitors, renegades or worse the people whose judgment goes in the other direction and leave the party we currently happen to be a member of and join another party. I think it is probably human nature to use different vocabulary to describe what is essentially an entirely analogous process.

I was quite shocked because I did not know that my noble friend Lord Foulkes was a secret believer in proportional representation.

Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Cormack

Wednesday 30th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness asks some pertinent and important questions. I had not intended to contribute to this debate, but was moved to do so by the extremely perceptive observations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks, both of whom made some valid points.

We will be constantly reminded in 2015 of those central words of Magna Carta:

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny … justice”.

When the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, talked about access to justice and how important it is that everyone should have it, it reinforced my belief that, although it is entirely proper to ask the sort of questions which my noble friend Lord Marks addressed, I would rather—I have said something similar in this Chamber before—we erred on the side of leniency. One is constantly reminded of that old adage that it is better that 10 guilty people get off than that an innocent person does not. In the context of the judicial review, it is far more important that the sort of people for whom the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, pleaded the other day should not be discriminated against than that somebody who may be a little better heeled should be so. I hope that we can bring a balance to this matter and remind ourselves of that basic tenet of the rule of law:

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny … justice”.

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, I agreed with the very eloquent plea on behalf of the system of judicial review in a country based on the rule of law which we have just heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. I agree also with the remarks of and amendments put forward by the noble Lords, Lord Beecham, Lord Pannick and Lord Marks.

My noble friend Lady Lister has asked a lot of the pertinent questions. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, just mentioned Magna Carta. I draw his attention to another part of that document. Ever since Magna Carta, it has been a principle that the state, the King or the Government cannot seize the property of the citizen except by some very clearly defined legal process and in very sharply legally defined circumstances.

Although I think that the rules about making third parties financially liable for court cases are not as clear in the law as a whole, particularly since the Hamilton v Al Fayed case, as they should be—and it would very good if we could have those codified more precisely—what would happen to the law in the matter of judicial reviews if we passed this Bill as it is would be quite horrifying. Clause 66 (3) states that a,

“court or tribunal must consider whether to order costs to be paid by a person other than a party to the proceedings, who is identified in that information as someone who is providing financial support for the purposes of the proceedings or likely or able to do so”.

I repeat,

“or likely or able to do so”.

That is in no sense precisely defined—it could be anybody. It could be any of the people listed by my noble friend Lady Lister. It could be—could it not?—someone who is a member of a corporate body, even though he or she had played no particular part in preparing for, or promoting, that application for judicial review. It could be—that would be a fear—someone who was a known supporter of a particular NGO which itself was an applicant; but, again, without he or she having played any part in supporting that application, or perhaps without even knowing that the application was being put forward. That is a perfectly possible scenario. We need to make absolutely sure that none of these obvious perversions of justice could occur.

I totally agree with the implication of the rhetorical question posed in the House this morning by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, which is: why are the Government doing this? Clearly the Government are doing this in order to close down the judicial review system to the greatest degree possible, with the intention of protecting the Executive branch—it is a very dangerous tendency. What they are doing here, however, is drafting a law which simply does not meet the elementary requirement to be precise, clear and unambiguous. I think this phrase,

“or likely or able to do so”,

is really quite terrifying, and I hope we get some clear definitions from the Minister. Just a statement from the Front Bench will not do: we need to remove these very offensive—very dangerous—words, and replace them with something much more precise.

Since this group of amendments encompasses two clauses and two clause stand part debates, on Clauses 65 and 66, it is probably the right moment for me to raise Clause 67. It is probably also right for me to raise another matter that is coming up: Clause 68. Perhaps Clause 68 is coming up in another group of amendments. Is that the case?

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Cormack

Friday 24th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, each of the last three speakers has put very significant questions to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, and we all look forward to his response. The House will have listened with particular attention to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, as he has long experience of public life and the logic of his intervention seems to me very compelling.

I very much enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan. I agreed with every word of it. He and I have had pretty much the same views on this subject during the 25 years we have known each other. I am as confident as I ever was that the judgment that we have taken on these matters over the years will be vindicated by history.

The noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, said some very wise things that I hope have been taken good note of. It will have struck the House—and I trust that it will strike the public—that we have heard in the course of the past two or three hours from the four Members of the House who have the greatest experience of dealing with the European Union and European Union affairs— that is, the noble Lords, Lord Kinnock, Lord Tugendhat, Lord Hannay and Lord Kerr, coming from the two major parties and from no party. All that they said and the advice they gave to the Government, which I think was very sound, was strikingly in harmony. That is probably a very significant point.

I put my name to several amendments in this group, a number of which—Amendments 13, 14 and 15—I saw, and continue to see, essentially as probing amendments designed to illuminate the issue and clarify the options. In that respect, as I shall explain in a moment, my expectations have been more than fulfilled. However, if we want to make the Bill a little more viable and a little less absurd, the right agenda for the House now is to agree Amendment 10 of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and Amendment 16 of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, to which I put my name. That would produce a coherent solution to the problem the House now faces.

There has been a lot of comment in the course of these debates to the effect that what we are faced with in the Bill is a series of absurdities. It is absurd to have a referendum that is supposed to take place up to four years after the decision to hold it is taken. I do not think that in the whole history of referenda, which as far as I can recall started with Napoleon I’s plebiscites, anybody has ever had such a ridiculous notion before. How could the Government possibly have come up with such an extraordinary notion? The whole thing looks suspect from the start.

What also looks very suspect from the start is the fact that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary and the other Conservative members of the Government have all apparently had this damascene conversion over the past year and a half in favour of having a referendum Bill when a short time ago they opposed it, using very much the arguments that we continue to use quite genuinely against the whole idea.

It is also very suspect that intelligent men—they are intelligent men; they are not fools—cannot have worked out for themselves the compelling logic set out by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, which makes this date an absurdity if there is to be a renegotiation or some sort of change in our relationship with the European Union as a result of the initiatives launched by this Government. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has persuaded everybody, including—this is the point that I am coming to—those who have brought forward the Bill, have pushed for it and have forced the Prime Minister to go along with this initiative: that is, the people who have been described in this House several times already today as the Tea Party.

The most eloquent spokesman I know of the so-called Tea Party—the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—appears to have accepted the logic of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I noted that in his intervention, which was a dramatically important one, he said that the referendum might take place before the renegotiation. He had obviously abandoned the idea of making anybody believe that there was a reasonable chance of concluding the negotiation before the referendum, so he decided to switch it round and say that the referendum might take place first. I think what has happened this afternoon is that one more cat has been let out of the Tea Party’s bag, because a referendum which took place before the negotiation would make our leaving the European Union almost inevitable. Why? Because, in having a referendum, the Government would have to get a mandate for a particular negotiating agenda. They would have to say, “We are going to change this, change that, demand this and demand that”, and that would be the agenda that the public would then endorse.

Unless the Tea Party believes, rather like Napoleon I, that we could proceed in our European policy on the basis of diktat and simply lay down to 27 other nations exactly, in the finest detail, what they will and will not do, and what they will and will not subscribe to, there is no way in hell, if I may say so, that we would ever end up with a final agreement that corresponded exactly with the negotiating mandate that the Government had obtained the consent of the British people to pursue. In other words, such a referendum would be doomed to certain disaster. It could not possibly lead to a successful conclusion or any position other than there being a gap between what had been promised at the time of the referendum—and the deal that the British people had presumably endorsed if they had accepted the referendum and supported the Government’s negotiating agenda—and what emerged from that negotiation.

This is another example of the cat being let out of the bag. These are people who are devising methods, fair or foul, to ensure that, whatever happens, we come out of the European Union. Another cat was let out of the bag last week. A letter from 95 or, as some people said, 100 members of the Tory Party told the Prime Minister that the Government should introduce a Bill that would give the British Parliament the right, whenever it wished, not to fulfil but to derogate from any rule, directive or resolution of the European Union.

Again, these are not stupid people. They knew what they were doing. What would happen if we were to pass such a Bill in this Parliament? De facto, we would have left the European Union, because immediately we would be in breach of the treaty of accession. De facto, we would be out, but without a referendum. We would be out without the British people having realised what the process was that was leading to our inevitably having to get out. Unfortunately, they still have not woken up to that.

So much for democracy and for the idea that you cannot make such a move without the consent of the British people. We must be quite clear what the agenda of members of the Tea Party is in taking over the Conservative Party in this way, which they have done so successfully—to get us out of the European Union by hook or by crook. It is therefore important that in our debates we throw light on that and open up the truth, because it is a terrible truth, about which the British public should be in no doubt.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, could accuse me of being a member of any Tea Party. I well remember when he was a Conservative and enthusiastically cheered on the party, sitting by my side in another place. He has had a dramatic conversion, but I do not want to talk about that.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I have to ask the noble Lord to let me intervene because he said something about me that I cannot accept. Of course I have never suggested that the noble Lord is a member of the Tea Party, and I do not know why he supposed that I was saying that or could draw any such imputation. He has indeed known me for a long time in two parties; he reminds me of an embarrassing part of my past. However, I hope he will acknowledge that I have never changed my views on this subject, and I am glad to say that many other Members of this House here, including on this side of the House, will vouch for that. I have not moved on that question, and any imputation to the contrary—the idea that I was cheering a contrary view at some point—is utterly wrong, and I hope that he withdraws it.

[Lord Cormack]

I did not suggest any such thing. The noble Lord should keep his cool. He may always have supported Britain’s membership of the European Union, and so have I. I made it plain at Second Reading that I had advocated an “in or out” referendum since the Maastricht negotiations. I felt that the boil needed lancing. I also made it plain that in any such referendum I would campaign enthusiastically for our continued membership. If I had to give a single reason for that, it is that I was in the House of Commons long before he was. I remember when Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and all those Eastern bloc countries were in the Soviet bloc and under the grip of the Soviet Union. I rejoice that they are members of the European Union today. That alone is a reason for keeping the European Union in being.

I have been somewhat chided today by the noble Lords, Lord Grenfell and Lord Richard, for what I said at Second Reading. I take it in good part, as they meant it in good part. However, in my speech I sought to put a case for giving the Bill a fair wind. I think it was a reasonable case and anyone reading the whole of the speech, and not merely quoting selectively from it, could come to only that conclusion.

I wanted to intervene at this point today because we are now in a rather different place. The advice that I gave was certainly not heeded. It was comprehensively unheeded in the first vote. I say to my noble friend Lord Dobbs—whom I have been very glad to support and will continue to support and who has been doing a valiant and very difficult job—that the Bill has not been ruined by the two amendments that have been passed, and it is now up to the House of Commons to grasp that fact. When the Bill goes before another place on 28 February, all it has to do is to accept our amendments and the Bill will pass into law. I hope that that counsel of pragmatism will prevail and that is what will happen.