Privilege (Withdrawal Agreement: Legal Advice)

David T C Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I commend those hon. and right hon. Members who secured this debate and thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing it. I also pay tribute to the stamina of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) and of other colleagues who ensured that you had ample time last night to consider the response to the original application.

Later today, we begin five days of debate on possibly the most important peacetime decision that this Parliament will ever take. Also today, Ofsted has described the Government’s treatment of thousands of vulnerable schoolchildren in England as a “national scandal”, we have a major investigation into alleged profiteering by funeral companies, and we have had reports from the UN special rapporteur and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation highlighting the appalling poverty that exists here in one of the wealthiest economies on the planet. What does all that have to do with the motion before us now? The only reason why we are allowed to know and discuss those things openly and without fear is because the power of the state to prevent us from knowing about them is tempered by the rights of this democratically elected Parliament—not tempered nearly enough in my humble opinion. Elections to this Parliament are not democratic enough, but we do have an elected Parliament to hold back the excesses of the Government, and that is what today’s motion is all about.

We have a Parliament of 650 people, and each of us is entrusted to exercise sovereignty on behalf of those who have sent us here. A contempt of this Parliament is a contempt for the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the people. A Government who seek to place themselves above the express will of Parliament are a Government in contempt of the people. They are a Government who have already taken a dangerous step down the road from democracy to dictatorship.

Today’s debate is not about the rights and wrongs of the original motion presented to the House on 13 November. Astonishingly enough, the time for debate on those questions was on 13 November. Let us not spend time today on questions of convention and precedence, of the confidentiality of legal advice or of when that confidentiality should be waived. The time for opposition to the terms of that motion was when that Question was put to the House, but the Government instructed their MPs to do nothing. They instructed their Members not to oppose the motion. I welcome the degree of humility that they have shown in admitting that they got that wrong, but that admission is not an excuse for the Government unilaterally to seek to change the wording of or meaning behind a binding decision of this Parliament. They have the audacity to come here yesterday and today and say that they, not Parliament, know what Parliament decided. They are placing themselves above Parliament. That is a contempt of Parliament.

As for the “legal position” document published yesterday that was going to fix it all, it could hardly have been more patronising if they had included pictures to colour in and wee join-the-dots puzzles every so often just to keep us interested. It was not a legal position by any accepted definition. It was possibly an attempted sop to some Conservative MPs, who are in a very difficult position—struggling between their understandable loyalty to their Government, to their party and to individual Ministers and their overriding loyalty to the people and to this Parliament.

As the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) said, the Government have made a habit of not turning up if they think they are going to lose. Maybe the problem is that they are so used to being allowed to ignore the views and opinions of Parliament that they forgot that sometimes Parliament takes decisions they are not allowed to ignore. Maybe that is why they are so upset now. Maybe it is because, alongside the issues of what should and should not be made available to Members of Parliament and to the public, this decision has laid bare the incompetence at the heart of a Government who do not even know the basics of parliamentary procedure.

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman’s commitment to openness now mean that he will be asking the Scottish Law Officer to publish all her advice to the Scottish Parliament in future?

[Peter Grant]

I have absolutely no doubt that, if the Parliament that represents the sovereign people of Scotland gave a binding direction to the elected Government of Scotland, the elected Government of Scotland would comply with that binding direction. No such binding direction has been given, so let us not try to deflect attention from the clear and blatant contempt that has been committed against this House with completely false accusations of contempt elsewhere.

We have a Government who are behaving like a football team who do not turn up for friendlies if they think they will be beaten and then discover that they have missed a cup final and have forfeited the tie with a notional 3-0 score. Not only are they asking to be allowed to replay the final, but they are complaining that the score is void because the three notional goals would all have been offside if they had been there to defend them.

We are not talking about a game of football with a trophy at stake, and we are not talking about the sanctity or non-sanctity of the confidentiality of legal advice; we are talking about the most fundamental principle that governs our nations, the principle that Parliament can tell the Government what to do, not the other way around. This is not just some temporary individual aberration; it is part of a pattern of Government attempts to keep Parliament out of this altogether. They want to restore sovereignty to Parliament by keeping Parliament out of its own sovereignty.

The Government went to the Supreme Court to stop us having any say on the triggering of article 50, and they lost. They did their damnedest to stop Parliament having any say on the withdrawal agreement, and they lost. They spent thousands of pounds of our money trying to prevent a group of Scottish parliamentarians from finding out whether article 50 can be unilaterally revoked, and they lost. The Court of Justice of the European Union will now almost certainly find that article 50 can be revoked.

I pay tribute to the parliamentarians from five political parties and three national Parliaments who took that case to the Court. What they have won will prove to be a pivotal victory, but it raises a question that is too important to be treated as rhetorical, and a question that is highly pertinent to the substance of today’s debate. What kind of Government go to court to prevent their own citizens from knowing that the Government have legal powers but have chosen not to use them? What legitimate reason can there be for a Government to want their people to believe something is legally impossible when the Government already have legal advice telling them it is perfectly possible?

This morning’s preliminary opinion from the CJEU is simply another example of this Government’s attitude that the path they have chosen unilaterally is the only one worthy of consideration and that nobody is even allowed to know that other paths might be possible. They have their priorities completely wrong. They repeatedly tell us, and the Leader of the House said it often enough in moving the amendment, that their ultimate duty is to act in the public interest, but in fact they are demanding that Parliament and the public act at all times in the Government’s interest—that is not the same thing at all. The Government, and not the Parliament that holds sovereignty on behalf of the public, have taken upon themselves the right to decide what is in the public interest. The Government declare they know better than Parliament what is in the public interest. The Government place themselves above the decisions of Parliament, and they place themselves in contempt of Parliament.

Early next year we will see the 370th anniversary of the day when a crowned king of Scots was executed, just a few hundred yards up the road from here, for defying the will not of this Parliament—this Parliament did not exist then—but of one of its predecessors. I do not think anyone is suggesting a similar fate for those who are found in contempt of this Parliament, but we should be under no illusions about the gravity of what we are discussing, and we should be under no illusions as to how the mockery from the Conservative Benches is being perceived by those who believe this Parliament should be allowed to tell the Government what to do.

The elected Parliaments of our four nations, for all their faults, flaws, imperfections and ridiculously outdated, arcane procedures that the Leader of the House sometimes does not like, represent the rights of our citizens. No one, but no one, has the right to wield power over the people without the consent of the people. In a parliamentary democracy, that consent is expressed through Parliament, not through the office of the Prime Minister or any other office of state.

When Parliament speaks, it speaks on behalf of the people and the Government must listen. When Parliament instructs, it instructs on behalf of the people and the Government must comply. Parliament has spoken, and the Government must listen. Parliament has instructed. It has not asked, opined or suggested; it has instructed. The Government can disagree, moan or complain as much as they like, but they must comply with the instruction of Parliament.

Instead, the Government seek to defy the instruction of Parliament. They seek to defy the sovereignty of the people, as expressed through their elected representatives. It is now for Parliament to take the only course of action open to us to compel the Government to back down.

--- Later in debate ---

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

Publishing the legal advice on the Brexit Bill would be a “dangerous precedent”. Those are not my words, but the words of Mike Russell, MSP, who back in March was the Scottish National party’s Brexit Minister. He was talking about the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Legal Continuity) (Scotland) Bill. He refused to publish the legal advice because, he said, it would set a “dangerous precedent”.

[David Linden]

Can the hon. Gentleman tell me whether there was a motion in the Scottish Parliament advising Mike Russell that he had to do that?

[David T. C. Davies]

I am sorry; I did not quite catch that.

[David Linden]

The hon. Gentleman was clearly too busy trying to plan how long he will speak this afternoon. Can he tell me, for the record, whether a motion was passed in the Scottish Parliament asking Mike Russell to do that?

[David T. C. Davies]

I am not an expert on the Scottish Parliament—[Laughter]—but I do know that the Scottish National party Minister was refusing to publish that advice. The hon. Gentleman laughs, but it was on the front page of The Scotsman back in March. Mike Russell refused to publish it because he said it was a dangerous precedent.

The fact of the matter is that Governments across the United Kingdom—Governments of all political parties, the SNP included—know that they must have the right to be able to obtain legal advice without that advice being published. Not just Governments but local authorities—even, dare I say, the House of Commons authorities—can get hold of legal advice, and it is very important that that advice remains confidential. If it does not, the danger is that at best it will become a political football, kicked around by members of all parties using the information to try to buttress the arguments that they wish to present, and at worst it will become a stick which can be used to beat our own Government by the Governments of other nations who may, during complex negotiations, have aims that differ very much from our own.

What the Government have been doing is not defending the information about Brexit, because we already know what the problem is. I am an ardent Brexiteer. I already knew that the problem would be over the backstop. None of the information that has come out since then—none of the information that was leaked, rather unhelpfully, over the weekend—has changed anything. We already knew that the problem was the backstop, and we will no doubt spend more than a few minutes debating that over the next couple of days. If anything, however, I have been reassured by what I have seen—reassured that the Government have at least been behaving honourably, because we have not learned a single thing from the leaks that came out over the weekend that we did not already know about. There has been no smoking gun, and no hidden information.

The principle is what the Government have been defending: the important principle that the information that they access remains confidential. It is not only SNP Members who are being inconsistent; so are Labour Members. They already have a Labour Government in Wales, and that Labour Government are not known for their approach to openness. I can certainly tell Opposition Members that I have submitted numerous freedom of information requests to the Welsh Labour Government that have not been properly dealt with, and I am pretty certain that they are not going to start publishing the information that they receive from their legal officers. Let me also say to my Liberal Democrat friends that there is not just a Labour Government in Cardiff; there is a Liberal Democrat Education Minister. Wonderful though she is, will she start publishing the information that she gets from her law officers when she decides to close down school sixth forms, as has happened in my own constituency? I would like to think that she might, but I doubt it very much, and I doubt whether the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) will be asking her to do so.

What I detect here is a whiff of inconsistency from Members opposite—a whiff of inconsistency from those who for years have accepted that Governments and public authorities have the right to independent, impartial, confidential legal advice, and who know perfectly well that if that advice is going to be offered up in public it will no longer be sought.

This is a not an attempt to get openness; this is yet another attempt to subvert the will of the people, who in a referendum in 2016 clearly voted to leave the EU, and that is why I will be supporting the Government amendment tonight.