European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Chris Ruane Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

After two wasted years of wrangling with her own Cabinet and her own party, the Prime Minister has come back from Brussels with her deeply flawed and unacceptable EU withdrawal deal. And she has achieved the impossible: she has united the country in horror against it. According to all the official forecasts, this is a draft treaty that will make our country poorer. Far from taking back control, the deal we are debating today gives away both our sovereignty and our influence. And as the Attorney General’s advice has confirmed, this treaty gives the EU a veto on our leaving a temporary customs union arrangement even if talks on a new trade deal have irreparably broken down. This is a deal that transforms us from rule makers into rule takers and diminishes our influence in the world.

The Prime Minister promised to provide a detailed and substantive document on our future relationship with the EU alongside the draft treaty. She has actually supplied a half-baked 26-page wish list of banal aspirations that was cobbled together at the last minute and has no legal force. The failure to outline the nature of our future relationship with the EU makes this agreement a blind Brexit, and that is completely unacceptable. The Prime Minister expects this House to endorse her deal without any clear idea of what our future trading arrangements might be. She asserts that there is no alternative to her deeply flawed deal apart from a catastrophic no-deal Brexit, which we know would decimate our economy. This negotiation is an abject failure by a Government who have wasted two years negotiating with themselves rather than doing the right thing for our country.

This could all have been so different. The Prime Minister has badly mishandled the Brexit process from the beginning, making a series of catastrophic misjudgments, and she is now reaping what she has sown. As a newly installed Prime Minister, she could have shown some real leadership. She could have recognised that although the country had voted to leave the European Union in 2016, there was no instruction from the people on what sort of Brexit the Government should pursue. She could have launched a national process of debate and reconciliation to build consensus around the best way forward as a way of healing the raw divisions that the referendum exposed. She could have involved the Opposition parties in this endeavour, recognising that her predecessor in Downing Street had done nothing to prepare the country for what would happen if the leave campaign won. But she did not.

The Prime Minister chose instead to kowtow to the irreconcilable Brextremist ideologues in her own party. In place of a national debate and a hope of reconciliation we were told, “Brexit means Brexit”. In her first conference speech as party leader, she set the tone by lambasting citizens of the world as citizens of nowhere, insulting and worrying EU citizens working in the UK. She has since accused them of jumping the immigration queue. Absurdly wrapping herself in the Union Jack to appease her own Eurosceptics, she then set a course in her Lancaster House speech for a hard, “red, white and blue” Brexit. The Prime Minister interpreted “taking back control” as centralising power to herself and her increasingly dysfunctional Government. Far from reaching out and respecting the sovereignty of Parliament, she attempted to ride roughshod over the constitutional role of this House. She had to be dragged kicking and screaming back to Parliament by the Supreme Court, which confirmed that legislation was required to invoke article 50 and fire the starting gun on the withdrawal process.

Once the Prime Minister had triggered article 50, she promptly called a general election in the expectation that she would win by a landslide—

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

She let me back in.

[Ms Eagle]

And we are all grateful for that. In the event, the Prime Minister squandered three months’ negotiating time and the first Conservative majority for 25 years. This Prime Minister has repeatedly invoked her own partisan definition of “the national interest” when, in truth, she has acted at all times in the narrow sectional interest of her own deeply divided party. That is why her belated pleas for unity and an end to division rang so hollow when she opened the debate on Tuesday. Rarely has such narrow rigidity and authoritarian instinct met a situation that required maximum flexibility and creativity. Rarely has there been such a catastrophic failure of imagination, political judgment and party management. I cannot support this botched blind Brexit deal. It fails to protect jobs and economic prosperity, and it will make us poorer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I wish to speak in this important economy day debate from a Welsh perspective. Wales has received £4.5 billion in structural funds from Europe between 2000 and 2018. I am particularly proud that in 2000 I was able to convince the then Wales Office Minister, Peter Hain, to allow my county of Denbighshire and the neighbouring county of Conwy in on that objective 1 European deal. Since that time, £4.5 billion from Europe and £4.5 billion from UK match funding has been spent in Wales. Thousands of jobs have been created.

In a practical sense, from my constituency’s point of view, that money was invested very wisely. It was invested in the OpTIC Technology Centre in St Asaph in my constituency, a £17 million research and incubation unit that has created hundreds of jobs. That European funding was involved in securing the flood defences and extending the harbour at Rhyl. Some £47 million has been given to Bangor University and £90 million to Swansea University.

The pre-Brexit promise to the people of Wales from extreme Brexiteers who visited Wales was, “Wales will not be a penny worse off if it votes to leave.” Some of the people in Wales believed that but, post Brexit, those guarantees have disappeared. I have spent the past 18 months since being re-elected to this place trying to chase down those guarantees, to no avail.

The optoelectronics sector in north Wales employs about 3,000 people and many of the contracts it has are for defence—they are for platforms; it supplies component parts to a tank or lorry, for example. We need that international trade. We need that European trade. We do not need the Brexit deal put forward for next Tuesday.

Airbus has said that it will “consider” reinvesting in its plant in north Wales because of what the Prime Minister has put forward. It will only consider doing that. There is no guarantee from it that it will invest in aerospace. Paul Everitt, head of ADS and the air industry spokesperson, said that the deal proposed for next week

“doesn’t take us back to business as usual.”

Businesses are scared of what they have seen. They are more welcoming to the Prime Minister’s proposal, but I think that is only because that gives them two and a half years to escape, instead of the three months of a no- deal Brexit.

I also speak from a north Wales perspective on the issue of the sea lanes. We have heard about the 17-mile tailbacks that would affect Dover. Seven-mile tailbacks are predicted for Holyhead. We are already seeing sea lanes open from Cork to Santander and from Cork to Rotterdam. If we lose the sea lanes and lose that trade with Ireland, which is as big as the trade with Brazil, Russia and India combined—it is worth over £45 billion—that will be a problem. We need to preserve this trade.

The predictions that have been made, even by the Chancellor, suggest that the Brexit proposal before us will lead to a 3.9% decrease in our economy. He calls that “slightly smaller.” For me it is huge. There have been predictions that £800 billion-worth of trade will transfer from the City of London to Frankfurt. When these economic facts are put before us, we hear the Brexiteers crying that this is hysteria or “Project Fear 2”, but what are those rich Brexiteers doing? They are salting their money away in Monaco, Dublin and Singapore. Who will pay the true price of a bad Brexit? It will be the poor, just as they have paid the price for austerity. We are in this situation. I feel sorry for the Prime Minister, but she is the author of her own downfall. She put in place extreme Brexiteers. She put the Fox in charge of the henhouse and others, too. In the past two and a half years, they have brought misery, division and disunity to this country. I for one will not be voting for this proposal next Tuesday.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

I have been sitting here all through this afternoon’s debate listening to colleagues on both sides of the House. I welcome the tone of this debate, which has been very mature and stable, especially early on when the shadow Chancellor was speaking. I do not see eye to eye with him at all times, but there was quite a lot we did see eye to eye on. We are working to find a way forward on this whole issue for the UK, and we have to set aside our differences. I have thought about this long and hard, and I am sure a lot of colleagues have done the same, but what are we looking at in reality? If we strip away the political ideology and get down to the business, we find there is very little in this deal we cannot agree with. Had this deal been put on the table at the time of the referendum result, we would have snatched the Europeans’ hands off, but we are where we are now. Sadly, some Members from my party have mixed up this issue with—

[Chris Ruane]

Leadership bids.

[David Morris]

Leadership bids, as the hon. Gentleman said, but that has been and gone. In all honesty, what is going to happen on 29 March is that some people’s political careers in here that hinge on that day will be null and void, because that is all they have talked about for the past two years and, in some cases, for all their political lives. As has been said, we have to grasp this nettle and move forward. I think we heard the finest speech this House has heard for generations from my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames). I had hairs stand up on the back of my head. I want to say that because he is not just my friend; he is an inspiration. He inspired us all. When all is said and done, what does this actually mean? This is about the country. His grandfather led us through our darkest times, and because of his grandfather’s contribution we are still free and we are still working forward as a nation.

If we do not get—[Interruption.] It is nice to hear people giggling on the Opposition Back Benches. It is a pity they are not listening. If we move forward and get into a position where we can get our trade reinstated properly, in a free-flowing way, that would be welcomed by my constituents.

On hauliers, this is from the Department for Transport’s guidance on determining international road haulage permit allocations with the EU:

“There are a limited number of…permits available for UK hauliers. For 2019 there are 984 annual permits for Euro VI emission vehicles, 2,592 monthly permits for Euro VI emission vehicles, and 240 monthly permits for Euro V or VI emission vehicles. Annual permits cover all journeys made using the permit between 1 January and 31 December 2019.”

F. Edmondson & Sons is a haulage company in my constituency—Members should bear in mind that we have a port that relies on haulage—that wrote to me to say:

“We are a family owned and operated international road transport company, established in 1948, specialising in international furniture transport.

For over 40 years we have been delivering furniture made in the UK throughout Europe. If the proposed Brexit deal is not agreed and the movement of freight is compromised through restrictive border controls it is not just the haulage industry that will suffer”—