EU-UK Summit
Debate between Greg Smith and Meg Hillier(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey, and to take part in this debate this afternoon. Having been first elected to this place in 2019, I feel I missed out on the meaningful votes and the main Brexit wars of a few years ago. However, I had the privilege, for the whole four and a half years of the 2019 to 2024 Parliament, to be a member of the European Scrutiny Committee under the wonderful chairmanship of Sir William Cash. His choice to retire before the last election leaves this debate and indeed the whole House of Commons poorer. I am sure that he would have had many points to make in the debate.
The reason that I refer to the European Scrutiny Committee is the detailed work that Committee did to truly understand the way that EU law pre-Brexit and indeed post-Brexit, and the involvement of the European Court of Justice post-Brexit, still pervaded our nation, our country and the way that many of our laws were made.
After Labour won the election last July, the Government took the deeply regrettable decision to disband that Committee. We lost not just that parliamentary scrutiny, which would have been invaluable in considering the deal that we are debating today, but the expertise of the Clerks and the expert advisers who served that Committee, and who often ensured that parliamentary debate on all matters between ourselves and the European Union was well informed.
If the Government do anything after this new deal has been struck—a deal that I do not support and that I believe sells out the decision of 17.4 million people in 2016—it should be to re-establish the European Scrutiny Committee, so that each and every one of those rules that we will now take is scrutinised line by line, and reported to the whole House and the relevant Select Committees. Then, whatever side of the Brexit debate we fall on and whatever our view of the world may be, we can all understand where those rules have come from and what they mean to our constituents and our country.
Dame Meg Hillier
I am slightly perturbed that the hon. Member says, “whatever side of the Brexit debate we fall on”. As my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) said, Brexit has happened. We are now in the real world of today, in which there is a war in Ukraine and huge issues because of the energy crisis, and it is absolutely vital that we work with partners across the world, whether that is through the India trade deal or this one. Can he not acknowledge that we are now living in a different world and that the word “Brexit” is of no use to us any more?
Greg Smith
I am grateful to the hon. Member for her intervention, but I am not sure that I fully agree with her analysis. This deal is relitigating Brexit. It is reintroducing dynamic alignment and a role for the European Court of Justice in many ways that we thought we had put behind us after the last Government delivered on Brexit, which meant that we left the European Union.