Queen’s Speech

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, to her new post. I know that she will roll up her sleeves and get on with it, as she always does.

As we approach today’s debate on Brexit legislation in the Queen’s Speech, it must surely be obvious by now that the very prospect of Brexit is contaminating the British economy, institutionalising uncertainty, making investors pause, discouraging the import of skills and students and sharpening prices in the shops. This is not so much a case of straws in the wind but tumbleweed beginning to blow down every high street in the land. Meanwhile, the reality of Brexit continues to provoke stress and confusion among all those thousands—indeed, hundreds of thousands—of Poles, Portuguese, French and Spanish, who have come to Britain to work, pay taxes and build families. Brexit has put them in limbo.

I for one was glad to hear the PM putting her opening position finally on the table in Brussels last week, and I hope that it will bring some reassurance—a measure of reassurance, at least—to EU citizens here, and reciprocally to UK citizens abroad, but—it is a very big “but”—settled status for life for individuals still raises myriad questions for people over extended family entitlement, political rights and the nature of the court that will oversee their legal rights as well as the all-important cut-off date and how much this will all cost EU citizens, as my noble friend Lord Cashman asked.

While Monday’s Statement sought to clarify the PM’s offer, it raised just as many further questions and will inevitably do so as it falls short of freedom of movement. Meanwhile, according to Le Monde this week, there has been a 254% increase in British people currently resident in France applying for French citizenship. Everyone in this House has a friend exploring whether, as Brexit looms, he or she can find a way to claim Irish citizenship—I speak as a dual national—Italian nationality or Danish nationality. Doubtless some people will wonder whether that fortnight spent on the Costa Brava as a teenager in the 1970s might just be enough to persuade the Spanish authorities in this regard.

Economically and socially, we have already fallen under the thrall of Article 50. Although it is a good thing that we have moved from a prime ministerial Brexit to a parliamentary Brexit, which at least offers some hope, we must not be naive about the tough road ahead as we try to preserve the richness of, for instance, our continental academic networks and our scientific collaborations, which are now under threat, and as we try to allow companies, for instance in Birmingham, to benefit from continuing to trade with their counterparts in Bordeaux and Berlin without one job being lost and without having to fill in an extra form, without one fresh tax to pay and without one moment of delay at a newly erected customs post somewhere along the way. All this is now under threat if we continue down the road of no access to the single market and no membership of the customs union. In this I very much support the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.

We must not be naive about the tough road ahead in trying to deliver enhanced security and defence co-operation in an extremely troubled world. That delivery is now under threat. Of course, the Government will try to secure these things, but the Heseltine maxim continues to hang around this whole process—namely, we are simply not in charge of these negotiations. The EU is very much in the driving seat and will continue to be so, as my noble friend Lady Symons said. There is just no chance of emerging from these negotiations, despite all our best efforts, with the UK in a better trading position than the one we currently, but transiently, occupy. In truth, there is no such thing as a smooth and satisfactory withdrawal from the EU. Does anyone really think that Mark Carney is being wantonly alarmist when he tells us to expect from now on “weaker real income growth”? Is anyone juxtaposing the Brexit process with the fact that the UK economy is struggling to maintain a growth rate of 1.5%? The blunt truth is that the UK is not in good shape to take the Brexit hit, and hit it will be.

As it stands, we are due to cut ourselves off from the European Union at midnight on 29 March 2019, creating our own generation of midnight’s children, pointlessly partitioned out of their continental destiny. One can only hope that better wisdoms will prevail before that midnight hour.