European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 7th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Grieve]

I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend. I hope that the Government will listen because, as I say, this issue will not go away. It will keep coming back to dominate our politics until we have resolved it satisfactorily. That said, I would be being curmudgeonly towards the Minister if I did not thank him for having listened on this issue, for which I am grateful.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

My right hon. and learned Friend has thanked the Minister, but I think that the Committee ought to thank my right hon. and learned Friend. He has set out the responsible version, which we did not hear from Opposition Members, of how to deal with this issue.

[Mr Grieve]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. He made some of the points that I might have made in his speech. He and I approach the issue from a similar angle.

The Government's Plan for Brexit

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve

Wednesday 7th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

As the Member of Parliament for a constituency that voted narrowly to remain, I have felt ever since the summer that my task is to help my colleagues in the Government to achieve Brexit in a manner that is satisfactory and will lead to the best possible outcome for everyone in the country, and today that is still exactly what I want to do. The difficulty, as I see it, is that what we have heard over the last two months in particular—the vitriolic abuse, the polemical argument without any substance, and the ignorance of some of the basic ABC of our constitution—has reached a point at which I sit in the Chamber and listen to utterances that border on the completely paranoid. The nadir, for me, was to sit one evening and hear a Minister of the Crown—not one of those who are on the Front Bench today—say that one of the Queen’s subjects who was seeking to assert her legal rights in the Queen’s courts, and who was, I might add, subjected to death threats as a result, was doing something, or had achieved something, that was unacceptable. If we continue like this, we are on the road to a very bad place.

In my opinion, while my duty as a Member of Parliament is to seek to uphold Brexit and help the Government to achieve it, that does not mean that I must suspend all judgment. On the contrary, we have a clear responsibility to scrutinise legislation, to ask awkward questions, to express our views and, if necessary, to intervene in the process if we think it is going off the rails to such an extent that it is no longer in the national interest. That is why I felt frustrated by the Government’s apparent refusal to come up with a coherent plan.

When article 50 is triggered, we shall be embarking on a process which, in reality, the Government themselves will have great difficulty in controlling. I certainly do not take the view that it is the duty of the House to micromanage the Government, and it has certainly never occurred to me that we should lay down prescriptive rules for what the Government should be trying to achieve, along the lines feared, I think, by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin). I do not think that that is realistic. However, I do think we are entitled to know what the Government are intending to achieve, in broad terms, so that we can debate it and influence it. Some Members may then have to accept that they are in a small minority in respect of some of the legitimate issues that we can debate within the parameters of Brexit itself, and then help to sustain the Government as they go ahead with their work. The fact that the Government have that mandate and have the approval of the House, will, in my view, help them immeasurably in their negotiations.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

My right hon. and learned Friend is making a powerful speech. Does he agree that if this House and the other place sought to amend the triggering legislation, that would have the effect of making the mandate justiciable?

[Mr Grieve]

It depends on whether we were seeking to limit the mandate in carrying out amendments. As I have not seen what the Government are proposing by way of primary legislation, I have no idea to what extent it might or might not be amendable, but it certainly would not have crossed my mind that one of the sorts of amendments I should produce would involve creating justiciable targets. I think my right hon. Friend knows me well enough from my time as a Law Officer to know that my views about declaratory legislation and targets are probably fairly unprintable—and certainly unutterable in this Chamber—and I do not recommend it to anybody.

On the question of where we are going after that and considering the issues around Brexit, I simply point out that some of the things said, even today by Government Members who I respect, seem to me to be rather fanciful. We have heard a lot about the sovereignty issue requiring us to withdraw from the European Court of Justice. I have to gently point out that if we are going to stay within the mechanisms of justice and security, which the Secretary of State said he believed was in the national interest, although our withdrawal from the EU will mean we will no longer be subject to the direct effect of the ECJ, decisions of the ECJ on interpreting the treaty will continue potentially to have force on us in this country. That is not surprising because we are signed up to over 800 international treaties which have arbitral mechanisms for resolving disputes.

So unless we start getting out of this fantasy element about Europe as a pariah entity, we are not going to start getting down to a realistic assessment of what it is in our national interest to remain adherent to and what it is in our national interest to withdraw from, even though we will be outside the EU and therefore not subject, for example, to direct effect at all.