New Partnership with the EU
Chris Bryant Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr David Davis)
I say to the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), who has just made a point of order, that I spent many years sitting on the Opposition Benches—
Mr Davis
Not making that point, but making a rather more pertinent one, which was that we did not have the opportunity at all to interrogate Mr Tony Blair after he had been on the radio and television. But today is a parliamentary day and I wish to share with Parliament what I think are some important points.
I would like to update the House on the Government’s plans for exiting the European Union. Today, the Prime Minister is setting out a plan for Britain. It is a plan to ensure that we embrace this moment of change to build a confident, global trading nation that seizes the new opportunities before it, and a fairer, stronger society at home, embracing bold economic and social reform. It is a plan that recognises that the referendum vote was not one to pull up drawbridges and retreat from the world, but rather a vote of confidence in the UK’s ability to prosper and succeed.
It is a plan to build a strong, new partnership with our European partners while reaching beyond the borders of Europe, too, forging deeper links with old allies and new ones. Today we set out 12 objectives for the negotiation to come. They answer the questions of those who have been asking what we intend while not undermining the UK’s negotiating position. We are clear that what we seek is that new partnership: not partial EU membership, not a model adopted by other countries, not a position that means we are half-in, half-out. Let me address each of our aims in turn.
First, we will provide certainty wherever possible while recognising that we are about to enter a two-sided negotiation. We have already made announcements about agriculture payments and student funding. Our proposal to shift the acquis—the body of EU law—into UK law at the point of exit is designed to make the process as smooth as possible. At the point of exit, the same rules and laws will apply, and it will then be for this Parliament to determine changes in the country’s interests, for we also intend to take control of our own laws and end the authority of the European Court of Justice in the UK. Laws will be made in this Parliament, and in the devolved Assemblies, and interpreted by our judges, not those in Luxembourg.
We will aim to strengthen the Union between our four nations. We will continue to engage with the devolved Administrations, and we will ensure that as powers are returned from Brussels to the UK, the right powers come to Westminster and the right powers are passed to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. Another key objective will be to maintain the common travel area between the UK and the Republic of Ireland. No one wants to see a return to the borders of the past.
In terms of immigration, we will remain an open, tolerant nation. We will continue to welcome the brightest and the best, and to ensure that immigration continues to bring benefits in terms of addressing skills shortages where they exist, but we will manage our immigration system properly, which means that free movement to the UK from the European Union cannot continue as before. We want to guarantee the rights of EU citizens who are already in this country and already make such a great contribution to our society, in tandem with similar protections for the rights of UK citizens in EU countries. We would like to resolve that issue at the earliest possible moment.
UK law already goes further in many areas than EU minimums, but as we shift the body of EU law into UK law we will ensure that workers’ rights are not just protected but enhanced. In terms of trade, we want to build a more open, outward-looking, confident nation that is a global champion for free trade. Membership of the EU’s internal market means accepting its four freedoms, in terms of the movement of goods, services, capital and people, and complying with the EU’s rules and regulations. That would, effectively, mean not leaving the EU at all, so we do not propose to maintain membership of the EU’s single market. Instead, we will seek the broadest possible access to it through a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU. We want it to cover goods and services and to be as ambitious as possible.
This is not a zero-sum game. It should be in the interest of both the UK and the EU. It is in all our interests that financial services continue to be provided freely across borders, that integrated supply chains are not disrupted and that trade continues in as barrier-free a way as possible. Although we will seek the most open possible market with the European Union, we also want to further trade links with the rest of the world, so we will deliver the freedom for the UK to strike trade agreements with other countries. The Department for International Trade has already started to prepare the ground and it is clear there is enormous interest around the globe in forging new links with the UK.
Full membership of the EU’s customs union would prohibit new international deals, so we do not intend to remain part of the common commercial policy or to be bound by the common external tariff. Instead, we will seek a customs agreement with the EU with the aim of ensuring that cross-border trade remains as barrier-free as possible. Clearly, how that is achieved is a matter for negotiation.
The UK is one of the best places in the world for science and innovation, with some of the best universities in the world, so we must continue to collaborate with our European allies. When it comes to crime, terrorism and security, we will aim to further co-operation with EU countries. We will seek practical arrangements in these areas to ensure that we keep our continent secure and defend our shared values.
Finally, in terms of our exit, we have said repeatedly that it will be in no one’s interests for it to be disorderly, with any sort of “cliff edge”—the words used by the Opposition—as we leave the European Union. We intend to reach broad agreement about the terms of our new partnership with the EU by the end of the two-year negotiation triggered by article 50, but then we will aim to deliver an orderly process of implementation. That does not mean an unlimited transitional period where the destination is not clear, but time for both the UK and EU member states to prepare for new arrangements, whether that be in terms of customs arrangements, the regulation of financial services, co-operation over criminal justice, or immigration controls.
Those are the aims and objectives we set today for the negotiation to come. Our objectives are clear: to deliver certainty and clarity wherever we can; to take control of our own laws; to protect and strengthen the Union; to maintain the common travel area with the Republic of Ireland; to control immigration; to protect the rights of EU nationals in the UK and UK nationals in the EU; to protect workers’ rights; to allow free trade with European markets; to forge new trade deals with other countries; to boost science and innovation; to protect and enhance co-operation over crime, terrorism and security; and to make our exit smooth and orderly. That is the outline of an ambitious new partnership between the UK and the countries of the EU.
We are under no illusions: agreeing terms that work for both the UK and the 27 nations of the European Union will be challenging, and no doubt there will be bumps on the road once talks begin. We must embark on the negotiation, however, clear that no deal is better than a bad deal. As the Prime Minister has made clear today, the UK could not accept a punitive approach, so let me be clear that we do not expect that outcome.
We are confident that if we approach the talks in a spirit of good will, we can deliver a positive deal that works for the mutual benefit of all. It is absolutely in our interests that the EU succeeds, and it is absolutely in the EU’s interests that we succeed too. That will be one of our central messages: we do not want the European Union to fail; we want it to prosper politically and economically, and we will seek to convince our allies that a strong new partnership with the UK will help it to do that.
Our approach is not about cherry-picking; it is about reaching a deal that fits the aims of both sides. We understand that the EU wants to preserve its four freedoms and chart its own course. That is not a project that the UK will now be a part of, so we will leave the single market and the institutions of the European Union. We will make our own laws and decisions about immigration. Let me be crystal clear, if there has been any doubt: the final deal agreed between the UK and the EU will be put to a vote in both Houses of Parliament before it takes effect.
To conclude, we are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe. We will continue to be reliable partners, willing allies and close friends with our European neighbours. We will be ready for any outcome, but we anticipate success, not failure. The UK will embrace its new place in the world with optimism, strength and confidence.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Russia has been up to its usual tricks in trying to stir up trouble between Serbia and Kosovo this week, and it is of course trying to face down the United States of America and, for that matter, other members of NATO on the border with Poland and Estonia. I believe that the bedrock of our national security is NATO—I hope my party does, too—but on coming back from the EU, successive Foreign Secretaries, Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers have come to this House and said that they are proud to have been able to make sure that the EU keeps strong sanctions in place against Russian territorial aggression. How will we be able to do that in future when we have left the European Union?
Mr Davis
We will be able to do that by bilateral negotiation, but let me go back to the fundamentals of what the hon. Gentleman said. He is right that we need to contain Russian expansionism, and that that is an important part of this country’s role in the world. One of the most important parts of what was an incredibly important speech was where the Prime Minister made it very plain that we will continue to be a good global citizen and a good European citizen, particularly on matters of regional security.
The Government's Plan for Brexit
Chris Bryant Excerpts(7 years, 5 months ago)
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Keir Starmer
I will make a bit of progress and get to dealing with the amendment.
Today’s victory is important, and so is the timing. As we debate this motion, the Government’s appeal is being heard in the Supreme Court. We need to remind ourselves that the Government are arguing that this House should have no say on the question of invoking article 50—that is the argument they are presenting in the Supreme Court; through that argument, they want to remove the prospect of a vote granted by the High Court a few weeks ago. That is the core of their argument and the purpose of their appeal: to remove that vote from us. That is what they are seeking to achieve, but that would be to avoid scrutiny and avoid accountability. If the Government succeed in that appeal, this motion will be very important, because it puts grip into a process that would otherwise have none. We will only have a plan to discuss because we will not be getting a vote.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
However, if the Government fail at the Supreme Court, there will have to be a legislative process. This is not a legislative process today, is it?
Keir Starmer
I am grateful for that intervention and I am coming precisely to that point, so I will press on.
Chris Bryant
The 2010 Act says that a Government cannot ratify a treaty until such time as they have laid the treaty before the House and 21 sitting days have passed. It does not guarantee a vote. In fact, since 2010 the Government have on several occasions refused to allow a vote on treaties even when they have been asked for by the Opposition. Is the Secretary of State now specifically saying that the Government will guarantee a vote at such a point?
Article 50
Chris Bryant Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Secretary of State accepts that he could publish a Bill next week and we could have it on the statute book long before the judges have done their business, so the reason for taking the decision to the next stage is not to expedite it but some other. I can only presume that it is because, somehow or other, this man—the Secretary of State—a man who has always fought for Parliament, is suddenly fighting for the prerogative rights of the Crown.
Chris Bryant
No, the Secretary of State is fighting for the prerogative rights of the Crown. Would it not be a phenomenal irony if the people who clamoured to bring back control to this country handed it from Parliament to Ministers and the Crown?
Parliamentary Scrutiny of Leaving the EU
Chris Bryant Excerpts(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Keir Starmer
I will come on to the prerogative, and I think that the treaty was debated for at least 20 days.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Is not the prerogative absolutely key here? In 1924, when there was a Labour Government, we insisted that all treaties would be laid before the House for 21 days, so that the House and the House of Lords could take a view on them. That was the Ponsonby rule. When there was a Conservative Government, they got rid of it. When there was a Labour Government again in 1929, we put it back, and in 2010, we put it on the statute book. Is it not really worrying that Ministers have been going to the House of Lords and this Chamber and relying solely on the prerogative in relation to treaties?
Keir Starmer
It is, and I will deal with the prerogative in some detail because it is not fixed. The prerogative changes over time, and in any event, even if it may legally allow the Executive to proceed without scrutiny and accountability in the House, it does not prevent that scrutiny and accountability. It does not require the Government to proceed in that way. It is being used as cloak to avoid the scrutiny that is needed.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr Davis
I see no reason not to help the Select Committee on that basis; that seems an eminently sensible use of time and of the Select Committee’s expertise, so of course we will do that. However, this will be an issue right across the board; pretty much every Select Committee in the House of Commons will have an interest, one way or another, in the progress of Brexit and in what the outcome will be.
Chris Bryant
May I ask the Secretary of State about timing? As I understand it, the Government intend us to have left the European Union by 1 April 2019. The two years allowed for in article 50 will transpire during that period, but he has already laid out loads of different areas that will have to be legislated for as a result of the negotiations. After the negotiations have happened, he might be overturned in this House or at the other end of the building. How will he make sure that he carries the whole country with him on each of the bits and pieces of the detail if he has not produced a draft of what he is aiming for in the first place?
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I want to return to the topic under debate, which is how this House will scrutinise the Brexit process. To do that, we need to go back to first principles. What is the power and authority of this House? What is the sovereignty of Parliament, and where does it come from? Here, I take a view that will be popular with the SNP. I believe that the sovereignty of Parliament is delegated by the British people. We do not have sovereignty in this House in a vacuum. It is not that God suddenly created the House of Commons and said it would be sovereign over the United Kingdom. Every five years, the British people delegate their sovereignty and rights to us, to implement as we see fit; we then present ourselves for re-election when that period is ended.
Within that, we have had a referendum. It is fascinating to hear from all sides, left, right and centre, that everyone has accepted the result and that the will of the British people must be obeyed, respected and followed—[Interruption.] That is the will of the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which, I am glad to say, includes the good people and crofters of Na h-Eileanan an Iar. That needs to be put into practice.
We also know, because this is the legal advice that has gone unchallenged, that the only legal way of leaving the European Union is to exercise article 50. We therefore know that the vote on 23 June was a vote to exercise article 50. All that is under debate is the point at which that is done; the big decision has been taken by the British people.
Chris Bryant
The hon. Gentleman and I are in rather similar positions. The Rhondda voted to leave, but I support remain; North East Somerset voted to remain, but he supports leave. Given what he has said about sovereignty, does he fully accept that all of us in this House are sent not as delegates but as representatives, and owe to our constituents our conscience as much as our vote?
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
It is a delight to follow the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) Like her, I was a remainer—not only that, but I am a remainer, and will remain a remainer until my dying day.
I first want to make a constituency point: last Friday, I visited a business just outside my constituency, in Llantrisant: Markes International, a high-tech company worth about £15 million in turnover a year. It started with two people fewer than 20 years ago, and now has 120. It makes mass spectrometers and thermal desorption—things that I did not really understand. It is all very technical. That is precisely the kind of high-end business that we really want to prosper in this country. The company made two points to me. First, it is really worried about staff recruitment, because a lot of the people whom it recruits are at PhD level. If, after Brexit, the arrangements for EU people coming to this country are the same as those that we currently have for non-EU people, it will find it phenomenally difficult to continue recruiting in the way that it has done, and therefore to grow the company. That is particularly because those people may be here for only five years on a short-term deal. It is very difficult to get a mortgage in this country at the moment, and that makes it much more unlikely that people in areas such as mine in south Wales, where there is not much of a rental market for people at that level, will think it is an option to move to this country.
Secondly, the company is passionate about us staying in the single market, as members of the single market, because it wants full access, as members, to all the organisations that establish the technical standards for the things that it makes. Otherwise, the company is absolutely certain that the Germans, French and Italians will make sure that those things are made in the way that German, French and Italian companies make them, and that we do not. They are anxious because, if this goes wrong, they will simply have to move all their business to Germany to continue growing the company. That will be an enormous loss to the local economy.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I very much agree with the points that my hon. Friend is making. Is it not also the case that manufacturing of that kind is integrated across the EU, with an EU integrated supply chain? If the UK is not part of that, that is another reason why a lot of jobs will be lost.
Chris Bryant
That is an extremely good point. It is often Europe that enables people to think of opportunities in the UK because of cross-border co-operation on education and research skills.
I would like to come on to the process. The Government have to take the 48% with them. It will not be good enough if, when we leave at the end of the process it is still only 52% of people who think that we have made the right decision. That will be a recipe for disaster and lack of confidence in this country. I would also say to the Government that I have never believed royal prerogative to be absolute. We have fought wars—quite a lot of wars—about this. Even on the question of going to war, the royal prerogative barely exists any more. One could argue that, after the war of American independence, when Parliament, rather than the Government, decided to stop fighting the war, we abandoned the royal prerogative on war-making powers on 22 February 1782. In recent years, it has become absolutely established that we do not send troops to war, except in extreme situations, without the permission and say-so of Parliament. Mr Cameron and William Hague explicitly agreed as much when they lost the vote on Syria in the House and decided not to proceed with the action they had intended to take.
Prerogative is not absolute in relation to war, and it is certainly not absolute in relation to treaty making. The 1713 treaty of Utrecht had to go through Parliament, and only got through the House of Lords because Queen Anne was persuaded to introduce 12 more Members of the House of Lords. The Government are rapidly increasing the number of Members of the House of Lords, but I hope that they do not do that.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The hon. Gentleman is widely acknowledged as a capable historian, so he will know that treaties, under any kind of Lockean or mixed constitutional thinking, were always matters of federative powers.
Chris Bryant
That is completely wrong, I am afraid. The hon. Gentleman, too, is an historian, and doubtless an impressive one: I have never got round to reading any of his books, but I am sure that in my present retirement I will have an opportunity to do so. Under the Ponsonby rule of 1924 it is absolutely clear that all treaties are laid before both Houses, and if either House votes down a treaty, the Government will not proceed. I do not think that even in relation to treaties, the Government’s argument stands.
On timing, the Government seem to anticipate that we will leave the EU, at the very latest, on 1 April 2019. Let us work backwards from that date. Any new domestic legislation resulting from the negotiations would require Royal Assent at least six months before so that it could be implemented in law around the country. That means that a treaty Bill implementing the negotiations would have to be introduced in the Commons or the other place at least 12 months before 1 April 2019 on 1 April 2018, which would fall in the previous Session. I do not think that the Lords would like such a Bill to be carried over, so we may well have to have a two-year Session running through 2017 and 2018.
Finally, I will die trying to persuade people that we would be better off in the European Union, but that does not mean that I intend to stand in the way of the will of the British people.
Next Steps in Leaving the European Union
Chris Bryant Excerpts(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Davis
I think Mrs Merkel will have read the Prime Minister’s speech last week and will know exactly where our priorities on the control of borders lie. I will not get into tit-for-tat rudeness with our European opposite numbers, because I do not think that that would be successful. I will say, however, that these are the first days of a two-and-a-half-year negotiation, and the first days of negotiations are always tougher than the endgame —[Interruption.] Well, I speak as someone who has done one or two of them, unlike many of the people chuntering on the Opposition Benches. I think we can take it as read that what our European opposite numbers are saying today is not necessarily what they will be saying tomorrow.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I cannot think of any major treaty in history that this country has signed in which the Government have not come to Parliament to get a mandate for their negotiating position. They have done that every single time over the past 400 years. If the right hon. Gentleman really wants to make a success of these negotiations, he needs to gather as much support as he possibly can across the whole country, including among the 48%. That will involve at least a White Paper and preferably a draft repeal Bill before the final repeal Bill.