Business of the House
Debate between Peter Grant and Jacob Rees-Mogg(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
I know that the hon. Gentleman has suffered personally from skin cancer and I reinforce what he is trying to do to ensure that more people know about it, so there is greater awareness and so that treatment can be faster and quicker. I therefore think it is a very suitable subject for debate, because Westminster Hall debates do have the effect of raising awareness, and I wish him extraordinarily well both in his personal health and in this campaign. However, he knows procedures of the House better than I do, and he is aware that Westminster Hall debates and Adjournment debates are organised, assuming the House is sitting, before recess motions are taken, and that they then get changed. Government business in Government time is not announced unless a recess motion has been either not taken or sorted out. So it is routine for Westminster Hall to have an announcement for next Tuesday, regardless of tomorrow’s motion.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
May I reveal to the House that the Leader of the House unintentionally learned some guid Scots words more than 20 years ago when he was knocking doors in my constituency, and that what he referred to was not a constitutional coup but a constitutional cowp, which I think well describes the position the Government have got us into. May I ask him, even at this late stage, to think again about the necessity to close down Parliament in order for the Conservative party to have its annual conference? I do not think anybody is suggesting that it should be cancelled, because it has been pointed out that that would have serious economic implications for Manchester, among other things, but this will be the fifth year in succession that members of the Scottish National party in this House have had successfully to manage the fact that we are expected to be here as Members of Parliament at the same time as our party members want us to be at our party conference. This year, the conference is in Aberdeen, which is more or less twice as far from here as Manchester is. The Queen’s Speech is right in the middle of our conference, yet we will manage that. My right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) has had to make some extraordinarily difficult and tortuous journeys to combine both duties. If 35 SNP Members can manage that every year, surely almost 300 Conservative MPs can manage it just this once. Let the conference go ahead, but let us have Members of Parliament in the House doing the job they have been elected to do.
Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman reminds everybody that I stood in his constituency many years ago, in1997. Standing in Glenrothes was a great honour and privilege, and the people of his constituency are fantastic people—[Interruption.] They did not vote for me, but that is a separate matter. That does not stop them being good people. I am not so exclusive in my view of good people. I was very touched on becoming Lord President of the Council to get a letter of congratulation from Elizabeth Scott, who in 1997 was chairman of the Conservative Association in Glenrothes—a small but perfectly formed Conservative Association.
I am very conscious of the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. It is a long-standing problem that the SNP conference takes place when the House is sitting. What I would say to him in relation to the Conservative party conference is that we have had no notice of this change, whereas the SNP was aware when booking its conference that the House would be sitting. I therefore do not think that the two are exactly comparable, but I am certainly sympathetic to the situation that he and his party find themselves in.
Legislating for the Withdrawal Agreement
Debate between Peter Grant and Jacob Rees-Mogg(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
We can be more generous. I am in favour of generosity to people who are legally here and who have made their lives in the United Kingdom. There must be some point at which, if they separate their lives from the United Kingdom and have not applied for British citizenship, the status might not be perpetual, but they should be looked after and protected, and we should always remember that they came here legally and that we are not a nation of retrospective legislation.
Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), I think that other continental countries will reciprocate, because they are civilised nations. We are dealing with allies and friends, so this should never have been a topic of negotiation. We should simply have set out our stall and said what we would do. I am glad that it is now clear that in the event of our leaving on WTO terms, we will protect the rights of EU member state nationals who are living in this country. That is the first point on legislation on withdrawing from the European Union, and I am all in favour of generosity.
The second point is law, which was covered by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), who has great experience in these areas. We were lucky that the Henry VIII clauses in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 were, by and large, removed, as they would have allowed all European law to have been brought back through the back door. It would have gone out through the front door and returned through the back door. Now, primary legislation will be needed, but that primary legislation is dubious, because it will produce a vassal state—Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians; this great nation state tied down by petty bureaucrats, running all over us, tying us down with ropes—because we will have to do whatever the European Union says during the implementation period. Our senior law will be made by a foreign body in which we have no say and no vote, and with which we have no association. Our money will go to—
Peter Grant
Which Europe are we dealing with: the one that is all friends and civilised countries that would never knowingly do anything bad to us; or a lot of miniature people who want to tie us down and, presumably, leave us to drown when the tide comes in? Or does the hon. Gentleman have a way to prevent the tide from coming in?
Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is confusing me with the much-maligned late King Canute, who was accused of trying to hold the tide back when, in fact, he wanted to show that it was not possible to do so. The bureaucracy of the European Union is something to which I am strongly opposed, but that does not mean that I do not admire the individual member states and think of them as great countries and friendly allies. The two are completely different. Even if they were the same, while I may have a great friend, I would not want him to rule my life. There is no logical connection.
Mr Rees-Mogg
As so often, the United Kingdom is leading by example. To paraphrase that great quotation from Pitt the Younger, we have saved ourselves by our exertion and we will save Europe by our example. We should always remember that as we make this great exertion—this worthy and noble exertion.
To have a period of 21 months, however, during which our senior law in this country cannot be stopped and our senior court is the European Court of Justice is a great mistake. It is an aspect of the legislation for which I, for one, will find it extremely difficult to vote, because there was another way—an alternative route. In terms of the courts, it is what we do with our own courts in relation to human rights challenges.
If the domestic court—the Supreme Court—decides that a bit of primary legislation fails to meet the requirements of the Human Rights Act 1998, there is a fast-tracked way of amending legislation through statutory instrument. That means, however, that if the House of Commons is against the change and wills to make the move that is against the Act, it is free to do so. That maintains control under our democratic processes, and that is how the Government should be proceeding in relation to judgments of the ECJ—or the CJEU, if you prefer—during the implementation period. We would, in the normal course, want to accept them, because we would still have treaty obligations, but they should come to Parliament to be passed into our law by statutory instrument. That would give us a straightforward reserve power not to act it if we felt that the proposal was not the right thing.
Equally, the same should apply to new laws. New laws being made by the European Union, over which we will have no say, could do specific damage to areas of our interest. There could be laws affecting the City of London, in which I have certain interests—I draw people’s attention to my relevant declarations in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. They are not just my interests, however; they are the interests of the nation at large, and we want to protect them and to prevent unfavourable legislation over which we have no control from being passed.
What is Her Majesty’s Government’s best defence of this ability of a foreign set-up to make laws for this land, which is something that I cannot think any country has ever voluntarily agreed to before? Countries have become colonies, but normally that is after a little encouragement, usually at the end of a bayonet, spear or some such. It is most unusual—unprecedented, in fact—to volunteer to allow a foreign organisation to make one’s laws.
Mr Rees-Mogg
No, that is not quite true. The hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant)—a great seat for which I once stood, in 1997, although not with enormous success—says that, but Scotland did not do that. Scotland became part of a greater whole, and how many Scottish Prime Ministers have we had who have led this country with great distinction? We became one, rather than simply farming out legislation to somebody else.
What is the Government’s best answer? It is that the EU is so slow—so slothful and sluggish—that in a period of 21 months, it could not institute any new laws and therefore we should not worry our little heads about it. This is a really unsatisfactory answer. It is not impossible for the EU to move swiftly, and it has done so the past. This is a golden opportunity for the EU to legislate in a way that we do not like, and we will have no say at all. I go back to the solution I have suggested for the courts: no new law without a vote in Parliament—and not a scrutiny vote. Although it is a very important Committee, the European Scrutiny Committee has never been able to stop any directive or regulation from coming in, and regulations have direct effect without any vote or scrutiny in Parliament anyway. There needs to be a vote as if for a statutory instrument. It is an abnegation of democracy to allow our law to be changed in this way, and this is a part of the White Paper that must be rejected.