European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

I entirely agree, and I hope that the noble Lord will say that to the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, who is sitting right next to him. It provides a devastating response to the noble Lord’s intervention just a moment ago.

We are asking the Government simply to declare the policy of Her Majesty’s Government in the negotiations that are taking place. Since one assumes that our European partners are being told what we are seeking to negotiate—it is quite hard to negotiate something if you do not tell the other side what you are seeking to negotiate—I cannot see that there is any damage to the public interest in telling this House and the public. These are very straightforward questions. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, says that we should not declare our hand midway. Are we or are we not in favour of keeping the European arrest warrant after 29 March next year? If we are, that is a clear negotiating objective of the Government. It will require a straightforward continuation of the current arrangements, and people like me will say all the way through that it is yet another argument as to why we would be much better off staying in the European Union in the first place and not having to go through this hugely complex and difficult process of attempting to replicate arrangements so that we do not end up with a worse situation, when there is every likelihood that we will.

The devastating response to and commentary on all these matters come from the Prime Minister herself—both in her Munich speech, in which she made it very clear that she would regard it as damaging to the national interest not to have a treaty at the end of March, and in her speech on 25 April 2016 before the referendum, in which she was even clearer on these matters. In that latter speech, in which she sought to argue why we should stay in the European Union, she went through in great detail the benefits that the European arrest warrant, the Prüm arrangements and so on gave to the security of the United Kingdom. Those are all points that the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, has raised.

The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, seems to want to will the ends without the means. I understand that he has not had to negotiate these issues himself, but just says, on a wing and a prayer, that he wants these objectives to be secured and is sure that our negotiators in Brussels will be able to do it. If the noble Lord had had any systematic engagement with the Ministers responsible, I do not think he would necessarily have so high a degree of confidence in their capacity to negotiate his objectives.

The Prime Minister herself gave the devastating response to the question of why we should stay in the European Union in respect of these security and justice issues. In her speech of 25 April 2016, when referring to the European arrest warrant and the passenger name record directive, she said that these show,

“2 advantages of remaining inside the EU … without the kind of institutional framework offered by the European Union, a complex agreement like this could not have been struck across the whole continent, because bilateral deals between every single member state would have been impossible to reach”.

Let us be frank: that is why we are in the European Union, why it serves our national interest and why we have a very high degree of co-operation when it comes to justice and home affairs.

We are talking about very large numbers. The Prime Minister herself gave the figures, saying that in the five years prior to her speech—2011 to 2016—5,000 people had been extradited from Britain to Europe under the European arrest warrant, and 675 suspected or convicted wanted individuals were brought to Britain to face justice. She said:

“It has been used to get terror suspects out of the country and bring terrorists back here to face justice”.


Just as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, gave his extraordinary statistics about how long it used to take to get extradition proceedings under way, the Prime Minister said:

“In 2005, Hussain Osman—who tried to blow up the London Underground on 21/7—was extradited from Italy using the Arrest Warrant in just 56 days. Before the Arrest Warrant existed, it took 10 long years to extradite Rachid Ramda, another terrorist, from Britain to France”.


These issues are of the utmost gravity and we need an assurance from the Minister that, in the negotiations for the treaty that the Prime Minister referred to in Munich, we will seek to maintain arrangements that are in every respect as good as those we currently have. If we do not have those in the treaty she presents to Parliament at the end of the year, many of us will say that this whole Brexit process has seriously damaged the security of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

Does my noble friend accept that the reason the Government will not disclose their negotiating objectives is not that this would somehow prejudice their position but rather that they do not know what those objectives are? The truth is that this is an issue of real sensitivity to the Brexiteers. The question is whether these arrangements are intergovernmental or involve the institutions of the European Union and the supervision of the European Court of Justice.

I know all about this because, as an adviser to the then Prime Minister, I went through many iterations of this issue. When justice and home affairs first became a subject of the European Union, and a pillar of the Maastricht treaty, it was all at an intergovernmental level. Gradually, it became more communitised, as it were, for the simple reason that that was the way to make it work. We could not make it work as an intergovernmental mechanism. We could not get the degree of co-operation needed to make something like the European arrest warrant work without having some judicial supervision mechanism, so the Labour Government agreed to it—somewhat reluctantly because some of the people involved were not the greatest supporters of civil rights in many respects, but they agreed to it.

What is happening in Brussels at the moment is that the member states are discussing among themselves what framework they are going to set for the negotiations for the rest of the year. That will be coming out at the end of March.

[Baroness Goldie]

Is the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, making an intervention? I want to be clear what the order of speaking is.

[Lord Liddle]

I was responding to my noble friend’s point.

[Baroness Goldie]

I think your noble friend thought that he had been usurped.

[Lord Adonis]

My noble friend’s intervention is excellent and gives the Minister more to respond to. I know he is short of points to deal with at the end of this debate.

[Lord Liddle]

This is Committee stage. We are allowed to go back and forth. What are the Government saying to other member states at the moment about the nature of the agreement on this that they are prepared to contemplate? Are they saying to our current partners that they are prepared to see judicial supervision in these arrangements or not? I hope the Minister will answer that very simple point.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading; I took the view that I was unlikely to add anything new, bearing in mind the number of speakers. However, I have a few new things to add as a result of today’s debate. I had more than 30 years of service in the Metropolitan Police Service—which pales into insignificance when you consider the experience of the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe—but I have also been briefed by the National Crime Agency lead on Brexit and by the director-general of the National Crime Agency on these issues.

It might be considered a technical point, but there is a difference between counterterrorism intelligence exchange and law enforcement. The counterterrorism intelligence tends to be of such a sensitive nature that it is exchanged on a bilateral basis and therefore is nothing to do with the European Union. When sensitive data, for example, are shared by the United States with the United Kingdom, the United States would not do that if it was on the basis that the United Kingdom would then share all that intelligence with the EU 27. However, there is a technical difference between counterterrorism in terms of intelligence and counterterrorism in terms of bringing terrorists to justice, and here we are talking about bringing people to justice using these various mechanisms.

My noble friend Lady Ludford referred to the European Court of Justice and the Charter of Fundamental Rights as two important mechanisms which allow this co-operation to take place within the European Union. In her Munich speech, the Prime Minister tantalisingly mentioned the European Court of Justice and the potential for a role for it after the UK had left the European Union in relation to things such as the European arrest warrant. The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, made the point that this is not about relationships between two sovereign nations, it is about individual rights in terms of whether an individual is going to be moved from one country to another. Perhaps the Minister can give us some clarity on the Government’s position on the European Court of Justice by explaining what the Prime Minister meant in her speech.

The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, talked about the need for the closest possible co-operation, which is what the National Crime Agency would say, and that the measure of the success of the negotiations would be how closely we can replicate the existing arrangements. I believe that the Government’s position is that they want to replicate all of these things as far as possible, and that is what I took from what the Prime Minister said. So to say that the Government cannot give away their negotiating position by saying what the objective is going to be is not, I think, true in this particular case. Perhaps the Minister will tell us that what the Government seek to achieve is as close as possible to the arrangements we have, but that is not the question. The question is how the Government are going to secure those arrangements; that is the critical question, not what they are seeking to achieve, but how they are going to do it. That is because there seems to be a contradiction between not wanting to have any jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice on the one hand and yet wanting to participate in things such as the European arrest warrant on the other.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, helped the House to introduce the very important issues around protected persons. For example, the victims of domestic violence have the protection of orders that are made in one country enforced in another, which brings a new dimension to the importance of these arrangements. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, talked about the importance of the protection of children through the European arrest warrant and the other measures, in particular the European Criminal Records Information System, which enables law enforcement to quickly check the antecedents of people who are suspected of these sorts of offences. These are extremely important issues in terms of bringing people to justice and in terms of protecting citizens not only of the United Kingdom but of other European states. We have heard from my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford how extradition can take years—four and a half years in the case he mentioned—whereas under the European arrest warrant justice can be brought far more swiftly.

For me, the essential question is not what the Government want the end position to be, because that is quite clear—and it is certainly what the National Crime Agency and other law enforcement officers want, and indeed what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, has also said. The question that the Government need to answer is this: how on earth is this going to be achieved, bearing in mind their apparent contradictory stances on other issues such as the European Court of Justice?

Queen’s Speech

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, to her new role. I have always seen her as a voice of pragmatism and realism—by God, that is what we need in the present situation.

It is four and a half years since David Cameron made his fateful Bloomberg speech which promised a referendum. His political motive was to preserve the unity of the Conservative Party and he also claimed that this would resolve the European issue for all time. Now, does anyone think that the Conservative Party is united as a result of the referendum? More importantly, does anyone think that we are any nearer national unity on this question? In fact, whereas in 2013, according to the opinion polls, only 10% of the public regarded Europe as one of the most important issues that they cared about, today remainers and leavers are at each other’s throats. It has not resolved anything.

What has the general election resolved? The Prime Minister chose to frame her pitch as being about Brexit. That is what she said on the doorstep of No. 10 Downing Street. She asked the British people for a strong, increased majority to deliver her version of Brexit. She attacked the Labour Party, the House of Lords and our European partners as obstructive forces in her way. What did the British people do? The Conservatives lost seats. They are now a minority Government and it was only in Scotland, where the Scottish Conservatives take a pro-European position, that they gained seats. Surely after this it is time for a thorough rethink of where we are.

The Government need to face up to the total unreality of their present negotiating position. David Davis claims he is going to achieve “exactly the same benefits” as we have in the single market, and it is all very simple because we already conform to EU rules. This is a completely unnegotiable proposition. It claims that we can have all the benefits of single market membership without fulfilling any of its obligations in terms of money, rules or jurisdiction. There is a massive trade-off between sovereignty and market access. The question of whether or not we accept ECJ jurisdiction is of fundamental importance because that is what the Europeans are worrying about with regard to the rights of EU citizens here, and it is also at the heart of the economic relationship because if our European friends think that we can go in for regulatory competition without any judicial check, they will not allow us free access to their markets. I am sceptical about the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, that we can negotiate a satisfactory bespoke arrangement. At best, it will be a trade agreement in which perhaps we avoid tariffs but even to avoid tariffs I think we will have to accept membership of the customs union and some form of arbitration mechanism. Of course, it would leave out services, which is the United Kingdom’s main competitive advantage.

I think that the only way forward for us is to go for continued membership of the single market, not just as a transition but as a permanent arrangement. The noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, said that this would be wanting to be half-in, half-out. I do not take that view. I regard it as a precondition for a continued close relationship—the deep and permanent partnership that we seek with our European friends. I know that it is politically difficult, because it involves acceptance of free movement, but I would argue that we can still go for a reformed free movement if we have the right political leadership. We need to convince voters at home of this—that jobs matter more than immigration. We need to convince our partners that while we accept the fundamentals of free movement, important reforms are necessary; and we need ourselves to make domestic political changes in areas such as training and employment protection to deal with abuses of free movement.

That is why tonight I shall support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I know that my colleagues on the Labour Front Bench have some reservations about this. Let it be said that I will always be their strongest supporter in this House. We have a wonderful Front Bench here. But the argument is made that we in the Labour Party should not be talking about Europe but talking about austerity. Let me tell your Lordships that if we come out of the single market on a hard basis, austerity will be a far bigger problem for Britain than anything else.

Secondly—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Liddle]

I am just concluding.

Secondly, I am not prepared to listen to people who regard Europe as a capitalist club. I am not prepared to listen to a leadership that did not put its heart and soul into campaigning for our continued membership of the European Union. I do not regard it as having any moral legitimacy on this subject, and I urge my colleagues to vote for the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.