EU Withdrawal Agreement: Legal Changes

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. All I can say to him is that I hear the same thing from my constituents in Worcester as he hears from his constituents in Gloucester.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

The Minister is asking Parliament to accept that, two and a half years after the referendum, he will give us maybe just a few hours to consider the deal that the Prime Minister may or may not conclude sometime overnight before we have one of the most important votes this Parliament will ever hold. That is not acceptable, is it?

[Mr Walker]

The hon. Lady knows that negotiations often go to the wire, and I think it is absolutely right that the Government should fight for the best possible outcome to those negotiations, especially when we have been instructed to do so by this House. That is what we are doing.

UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful for that intervention, and my right hon. Friend puts his finger on it.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Is my right hon. and learned Friend as astonished as I am that we have a Prime Minister and Government who are willing to take this reckless gamble with the future prosperity of our country, just to keep their rotten party together?

[Keir Starmer]

It is a gamble—

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[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister’s own personal approach to Brexit has created what 40 former ambassadors have today rightly called a “national crisis” that she is presiding over. In their serious and important speeches, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie), my right hon. Friends the Members for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), and the right hon. Members for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman) have risen to the occasion of the crisis that is now facing us. I only wish that the Secretary of State could have risen to it as well.

The fact is that the Prime Minister, from the beginning, has chosen to put the interests of keeping the Conservative party together over the national interest. She chose, because she had decided to kow-tow to the Brextremists in her own party, a hard Brexit to get through her own party conference, without even discussing it with her own Cabinet. She set the hard red lines—out of the single market; out of the customs union—that created the problems with the Irish backstop. From the beginning, she made no attempt to forge a consensus across party lines or, indeed, across the country to define what Brexit would be so that it could be delivered in a consensual way rather than a way that has exacerbated disunity and further divided this nation. She has decided that she has to deliver Brexit with Conservative and DUP votes, and nothing else, to keep her party together and avoid a split.

This has pushed her to a harder and more damaging conclusion than she might have reached if she had reached out, and it will do our country more damage. By her choices, the Prime Minister has further divided the country. She has not sought unity, and we are all paying the price. Unity does not consist merely of being forced to agree with her dubious, partisan choices and her definition of what Brexit should be, which are reckless in the extreme.

[Anna Soubry]

Does the hon. Lady also take the view that given the result of the general election, which resulted in a hung Parliament and the Conservative party actually losing its majority, there is no argument that there is any mandate for a hard Brexit, and in fact, if there is any mandate, it is against a hard Brexit and against no deal?

[Ms Eagle]

Not to my surprise, I find myself agreeing with the observations of the right hon. Lady. The only national poll that the Prime Minister talks about these days is the referendum. Somehow she never refers to the 2017 election in which her party lost its mandate for a hard Brexit.

The Prime Minister’s response to the result of that vote in 2017 and the loss of her majority surely ought to have been to go for a softer, more consensual Brexit that would have kept us in the customs union and avoided all these problems. But instead we have a Prime Minister who characterises disagreement with her own particular partisan choices on Brexit as if it is a betrayal of democracy. She has used those words, and that has further exacerbated the anger that we have in this country. In my view, it is actually beginning to bring democracy itself into disrepute. She flirts with authoritarianism and division, and invites the betrayal narratives that increase anger even more, so she is being reckless with our political stability.

The Prime Minister has ignored Parliament in the way in which she has gone about delivering Brexit. She allowed her attack dogs to attack judges who pointed out that in fact Parliament needed to have a say about the triggering of article 50 in the first place. Indeed, the Prime Minister has allowed her Government to be found in contempt of Parliament. Today’s motion only exists because she was defeated in an attempt to shut down Parliament’s say in Brexit, and yet the Government are fulfilling the terms of that vote by holding this debate according to the letter, not the spirit, of the defeat they suffered. They routinely ignore votes in Parliament. Opposition days have simply disappeared, and they do not deign to vote in Divisions that the Opposition secure anyway, much less take any notice of the result. We are seeing the phrase “non-binding on the Government” increasingly applied, which is why I made the point of order before the debate.

This development would have been unthinkable when I came into the House. The unwritten rules about our constitution are beginning to be ignored. Political gravity, which was always thought to be something that everybody respected, is being ignored. It is the letter, not the spirit, of our constitution and our law that is now apparently more important. We will rue the day we went down this dangerous path.

All agreements are intra-Conservative ones. The Chequers agreement was with the Cabinet, and that did not last the weekend. The ludicrously named Malthouse compromise has already been ruled out by the EU. The alternative arrangements working group, funded by civil service support, is all about trying to get the rabble of the ERG to agree with the rest of the Conservative party, so that the Prime Minister can move forward. It is all to kick the can down the road and let her stay in office another week.

The Prime Minister is deeply reckless, and she has made a deeply reckless decision to play a hugely damaging game of brinkmanship with her own party by threatening the entire country with no deal. We have heard in the powerful speeches so far the real damage that that is doing to our country, trashing our international reputation abroad and doing irreparable damage to our standing in the world.

Going to the brink in pursuit of this tactic is reckless with our economic prosperity and reckless with our political stability. Jobs are being lost now. Investment opportunities are being lost now. Growth is being sacrificed now. The Prime Minister has allowed the Tory Eurosceptic virus to infect the entire body politic. We are all ill with it; we are being weakened with it. Her and her party will never be forgiven for the damage that she is causing.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018: Statutory Obligations on Ministers

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

The Prime Minister has been clear that of course we have reached an initial deal with the EU, but she has listened to the concerns of this House and gone back to seek to discuss that deal and to seek assurances on it. I think that means that she will want to put before the House a deal with those assurances and to ensure that the House has its meaningful vote on that arrangement.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I have some sympathy for the Minister, because he is doing his best to give the House assurances about what is likely to happen, but the fact is that he is appearing on behalf of a Prime Minister who has completely shredded her credibility by doing what she did yesterday. She was prepared to send out her Cabinet colleagues to make one assertion with confidence in the morning, while she was plotting to reverse it at the same time as she had them in front of the TV cameras. Despite the Minister’s personal integrity, why should we believe a single thing that he tells us today?

[Mr Walker]

I believe I am standing here on behalf of a Prime Minister who is seeking to do the right thing for the country—to bring us together and to secure an agreement that is in our best interests and that this whole House can support.

Oral Answers to Questions

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I think that my hon. Friend’s interpretation of the withdrawal agreement is slightly different from my own. The first thing I should say is that the backstop is a hypothetical situation; it is not a situation that the Government intend to be in. Let me repeat to the House: if we complete a free trade agreement, the backstop falls away—it is not something that we intend to pursue. [Interruption.] With respect to concluding trade deals, as he knows and as I have said, the withdrawal agreement states that we can sign those deals and they will be—[Interruption.]Forgive me—they will absolutely be concluded, or kick in, after the end of the implementation period.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I repeat the question from the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), because the Minister did not answer it. He surely has to confirm at the Dispatch Box that the deal means that any trade deals that might be signed cannot be implemented until we are out of the customs union and single market. He just has to get up and say that that is true.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I simply reject the premise of the hon. Lady’s question. It is clear, and is stated clearly in the political declaration, that we will embark on negotiations with the EU and we will conclude them. That is our principal objective—to conclude a free trade agreement with the EU before the end of the implementation period.

Leaving the EU: Meaningful Vote

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

It was very inventive of my hon. Friend to get that in through the back door. All I would gently say is that the basic democratic arithmetic suggests that several hundred thousand taking part in what was an impressive protest cannot trump the will of the 17 million who voted in a national referendum to leave the EU.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

I think that the Minister has gone through the looking-glass and left his dictionary behind. He seems to think that “meaningful” actually means “meaningless”, and he seems to think, in his topsy-turvy world, that it is possible to amend motions after voting on them. Why does he not get a grip, get back to the real world, and give this Parliament the meaningful vote that his Government and his colleagues promised us when they accepted that amendment?

[Dominic Raab]

I do not think that the hon. Lady was right in either of her key points. The memorandum that we published sets out very clearly that there will be a substantive motion. It will be, in our view, subject to amendments. What we cannot have is a vote that renders meaningless the outcome of the referendum.

EU: Future Relationship White Paper

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

It is certainly the case, in my view and the Government’s view, that no deal would be better than a bad deal, but what we are aiming for is the very best deal.

My hon. Friend asked about the money. I took some time to set out in my response that we have made clear the need for a link between the obligations that we undertake in the withdrawal agreement and what we then expect in relation to the future partnership deal on trade, security and other areas in which there is co-operation. That needs to be looked at as a whole. If one side, whichever it may be, does not fulfil its side of the bargain, there will be consequences for the whole deal—and yes, that would include the money.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

The White Paper says very little about the service industry, particularly financial services, except that we want to retain our access to integrated markets while not really sticking to the rules. Is that not more like having your cake and eating it, and is it not highly unlikely that the EU will ever agree to such an approach?

[Dominic Raab]

It is clear that the UK cannot remain under the EU passporting regime, which is intrinsic to membership of the EU. Our objective, based on that, is to agree a new economic and regulatory partnership in financial services. The new partnership will set some binding bilateral commitments to give firms certainty and stability in respect of access to each other’s markets, while allowing the UK and the EU to maintain and exercise autonomy when it comes to regulatory decisions and rule-making.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Ping Pong: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I take my hon. Friend’s point, but, at the Dispatch Box and elsewhere, I have always insisted that people vote with their consciences, and their consciences should encompass how they represent the wishes of their constituents.

If the European Union expects Parliament to direct the Government to reconsider its policies, to extend article 50 or even to revoke it, it will have an incentive to delay and give us the worst possible deal just to try to bring about such an outcome.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Davis]

I am not giving way for the moment. I hope the hon. Lady will take that on board.

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[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I know how important this is for her constituency, and I can confirm that that has always been our position.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for giving way. At least he has allowed someone from this side to make an intervention, which the Secretary of State did not have the decency to do. Will he explain what on earth a meaningful vote would mean if there was a Hobson’s choice Brexit—a choice between the deal we have done or no deal at all? Is not avoiding a Hobson’s choice Brexit what this entire debate is now about?

[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, because it goes to the heart of the issue: If Parliament is given a vote on article 50, and if we do not like what the Prime Minister has brought back, we can have something much worse. Even a child could see that that is not an acceptable choice.

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[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) got it absolutely right in his response to the Chairman of the Brexit Committee that the constitutional power of this House to determine who is in Government is entirely unaffected by these amendments or the written ministerial statement that will be laid tomorrow. The powers, the authority and the rights of this House remain intact, and that is not dependent on whether a meaningful vote is amendable or unamendable.

Mr Speaker, as an historian of this House and its powers, you know perfectly well that the Norway debate was held on the Adjournment of the House—whether or not it should adjourn for the Whitsun recess. That great issue of the time—whether we should have a few days off at Whitsun—led to a fundamental change in the Government and the whole history of our nation that flowed from it.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I do apologise to the hon. Lady, but I will not give way, because other people want to speak, and time is very short.

Therefore, the rights of this House are intact. The legislation will ensure that the Government can pursue their objectives, which is very important. The Chief Whip is in his place. I commend him for the tactful way that he has discussed these issues with so many people over the past week to ensure that we could come to something that every Conservative Member is able to agree to and put their name to that maintains the privileges of this House, ensures that the Government can negotiate properly, and sends the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State to the negotiating table with a united House of Commons behind them.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I hear my right hon. and learned Friend—and old friend, because we are still capable of having a dinner for two hours and not talking about Europe throughout it; in fact he paid, and it was lunch.

The simple fact is that we are not just leaving this to a single word. As I said earlier, the House of Lords Constitution Committee looked at the matter, in the context of this Bill and the sanctions Bill, and said that we should require the Minister to give “good reasons”—that was the test—which is what we have proposed in our amendment.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Davis]

If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will make a little progress, because I am quite sure that my next section will provoke quite a lot more interventions than the last one.

Let me turn to Lords amendment 19 and parliamentary approval of the outcome of the negotiations. This is the Hailsham amendment, which Lord Bilimoria described in the other House as the “no Brexit” amendment. What it amounts to is an unconstitutional shift that risks undermining our negotiations with the European Union. It enables Parliament to dictate to the Government their course of action in international negotiations. [Interruption.] Labour Members ask what is wrong with that. Well, I will read them a quote from Professor Vernon Bogdanor, who is not exactly a well-known leaver, but he is a constitutional expert. He described this at the weekend as “a constitutional absurdity” that

“would weaken the position of Britain’s negotiators.”

I agree with him that this is not practical, not desirable and not appropriate.

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[Matthew Pennycook]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The Commission cannot approve the deal on the European Union side until the European Parliament has given its consent, and if it does not give its consent, the Commission cannot move on and ratify.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

My hon. Friend is making the points about a meaningful vote with a great deal of power. Does he agree that if we get to a stage—which I suspect some Eurosceptics want—where we are approaching a disorderly, no-deal, hardest-of-hard Brexits, this House has a right not to be given a fait accompli of a deal that is inadequate, or no deal at all? Is that not what this battle to have a meaningful vote on the deal is actually all about?

[Matthew Pennycook]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is the choice that faces every hon. Member in the Chamber today when we come to vote on Lords amendment 19.

EU Exit Negotiations

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 5th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

Every approach we take will treat the whole United Kingdom as a single constitutional entity and a single economic entity.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Yesterday, our Prime Minister was humiliated by having the rug pulled from under her by the DUP. Was she not naive even to attempt to do a deal of the sort she tried to do, knowing that the DUP would inevitably veto it? With the negotiations in such fantastic hands, will the Secretary of State now admit that the only way to move forward without a hard border in Northern Ireland, to protect the jobs of my constituents, is for us to stay in the customs union and the single market?

[Mr Davis]

No.

Leaving the EU: Sectoral Impact Assessments

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 28th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The trouble with the interest of the hon. Gentleman, which is of great fascination to Members of the House and many spectators beyond its environs, is that it is not even adjacent to the question before us, but I am sure the hon. Gentleman can entertain himself in the long winter evenings that lie ahead.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

This is not my definition of taking back control. This huge mess that the Government have got themselves into shows the limits of their clever-clever tactic of not engaging with Opposition motions by sitting on their hands. Despite what the Minister says, the fact is that a Humble Address, which it is compulsory for the Government to act on, has been carried. It calls not for the documents to be edited and not for them to be changed—that job now goes to the Select Committee. The Government have to get on and publish these documents, and they have to publish them now.

[Mr Walker]

As I made it very clear on the day we debated this issue, the documents did not exist in the form that was requested. We took the motion of the House extremely seriously, and that is why we have made sure that a great deal of information has been provided to the Select Committee.