European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

John Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that if the Government wish to make a change by statutory instrument, that is a parliamentary process? It would be entirely in Parliament’s control. It is a synthetic nonsense to suggest that Ministers are bypassing Parliament.

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is entirely right—it is a point I will elaborate on later—and the editor of the Evening Standard should know that from his own experience.

The key point of this Bill is to avoid significant and serious gaps in our statute book. It ensures that consumers can be clear about their protection, employees can be clear about their rights, and businesses can be clear about the rules that regulate their trade. Workers’ rights and consumer and environmental protections will be enforceable through the UK courts, which are renowned the world over. The Bill provides certainty as to how the law will apply after we leave the European Union, and ensures that individuals and businesses will continue to be able to find redress when problems arise. Without this Bill, all those things would be put at risk.

The Bill must be on the statute book in good time ahead of our withdrawal so that the statutory instruments my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) referred to, which will flow from the Bill, can be made in time for exit day—the House will have time to look at them—and so that we are in a position to take control of our laws from day one.

The Bill provides a clear basis for our negotiation with the European Union by ensuring continuity and clarity in our laws without prejudice to the ongoing negotiations. Without this legislation, a smooth and orderly exit would be impossible. The shape of any interim period will need to be determined by the negotiations, but we cannot await the completion of negotiations before ensuring that there is legal certainty and continuity at the point of our exit. To do so would be reckless.

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[John Redwood]

I entirely agree with the hon. Lady. Does she agree that the EU probably does not want to talk about trade, because, in practice, it will want tariff-free, barrier-free trade if it is at all sensible, and it thinks it can get money out of us for that, when it has to have it for itself?

[Kate Hoey]

The right hon. Gentleman is right: money seems to be the crucial thing the EU is using in the negotiation. I hope our negotiators will stand up to that and stop allowing the media and others to make every little bit of negotiation into some kind of conflict, saying that it is always the EU negotiators who are doing the right thing and that we are somehow not doing the right thing. I want it to be the other way round: I want us to be positive about our negotiations, because, in the end, we can get a good deal by just proclaiming how strong the United Kingdom is, how well respected we are, how strong our City of London is and how, despite the fact that we are leaving in 2019, companies are still coming to invest here. There is a very positive message, but it is not getting out.

I know that lots of people want to speak, so I will end by saying one thing. I am not a lawyer, although there are a lot of lawyers in here who are loving every minute of this, because it is the kind of thing they love. However, I am not a lawyer, and the vast majority of the public are not lawyers. They will be watching today, and they will be judging all of us, whatever our party politics, on whether we are doing what is in the long-term, best interests of our country. I do not believe we should be playing some kind of political game about not voting for the Bill because it might make it look to some people in our party as if we are standing up to the Government. This is about the future of our country. Labour Members should vote for the Second Reading of this Bill on Monday night, and then challenge and change things, if we can, in Committee.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I entirely agree with the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey): we have no legal obligation to pay more money, and there is no moral obligation. There is also no diplomatic advantage in offering money; indeed, if the EU gets the idea that we might pay it a bit of money, it will be even more unreasonable, because that would be the way to try to force more money out of us.

What I wish to say in this very important debate is that the Bill should satisfy most remain voters and most leave voters. I understand that it does not satisfy some MPs, who have their political agendas and political games to play, but they should listen to their constituents, and they should think about the mood of the country—the mood of business and those we represent.

We have had crocodile tears shed for myself and those of my right hon. and hon. Friends who wanted leave and who are very pleased with leave by those who tell us that we must surely understand that we are not getting the parliamentary democracy we wanted as a result of this piece of legislation. I would like to reassure all colleagues in the House that I am getting exactly the piece of legislation I wanted, and it does restore parliamentary democracy.

What is in the Bill for leave voters is that, once the Bill has gone through and we have left the European Union, the British people will have their elected Parliament making all their laws for them. We will be able to amend any law we do not like any more, and we will be able to improve any law. We were not able to do that.

What we like about the Bill is that it gets rid of the 1972 Act, which was an outrage against democracy, because, as we have heard, it led to 20,000 different laws being visited upon our country, whether the people and Parliament wanted them or not, and whether their Government voted for them or against them—the Government often voted for them reluctantly because they did not want the embarrassment of voting against them and losing. This is a great day for United Kingdom democracy. A piece of legislation is being presented that will give the people and their Parliament control back over their laws.

[Ruth George (High Peak) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Redwood]

Let me just explain why this is good for remain voters and then I will give way to someone who is probably of that faith. It is good for remain voters because during the campaign a lot of them were not fully convinced either for or against the European Union, but on balance thought we should stay in. They quite often liked some elements of European legislation, standards or requirements. In particular, the Labour party and its supporters liked the employment guarantees that were offered by European employment law, and other parties and interests liked the environmental standards. This Bill guarantees that all the things that remain voters like about European legislation will continue and will be good British law, so they will still have the benefits of them, with the added advantage that we might want to improve them, as well as full assurances from the Government that we do not wish to repeal them.

[Ruth George]

I am very surprised that the right hon. Gentleman is saying how delighted he is that so many rights and responsibilities will now come under delegated legislation. I am not sure if he recalls that on 1 September 2012, as a member of the Delegated Legislation Committee on the criminal injuries compensation scheme, he, with all the other Conservative members of the Committee, called for the then Minister to withdraw the measure before them, and that did not happen. A second Committee was set up—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Forgive me, but colleagues must have some regard to each other’s interests. There are a lot of people wanting to speak. Interventions must be brief; they should not be mini-speeches.

[John Redwood]

Let us come to the secondary legislation point. First, all statutory instruments are subject to a parliamentary process. I am quite happy that there is parliamentary control. If Ministers seek to abuse the power under the legislation that they are offering to the House, then all the House has to do is to vote down the statutory instrument. If it is a so-called negative resolution instrument, surely the Opposition are up to being able to say, “We intend to debate and vote on this issue.” I remember doing that as a shadow Cabinet member. I called in things that the then Government were trying to smuggle through and made sure that there was a debate and a vote. If it is the view of Parliament that Ministers have misbehaved, then they will lose the vote and have to come forward with something else.

That is parliamentary democracy, and I do not understand why my colleagues find it so difficult to understand. Ministers will be bringing forward bits of secondary legislation in areas where they are fairly sure that it is the will of the House that they go through because they are technical, or sensible, or obvious. They will all be in pursuit of the fundamental aim, which is to guarantee all these rights and laws, which are often more admired by Opposition Members than Conservative Members, but which we have all agreed should be transferred lock, stock and barrel, and which in certain cases are protected by pledges in manifestos. For example, my party, as well as the Labour party, has promised to keep all the employment protections and improve on them, because that is something we believe in. We offered that to the British people as part of our manifesto for the last election.

[Lady Hermon]

The right hon. Gentleman has suggested that those who voted for remain, as I did, should be happy with this Bill because it brings over all EU legislation. Yes and no. On the stroke of midnight on exit day, we lose the general principles of EU law such as proportionality, non-discrimination, and respect for human rights. [Interruption.] No, with respect—the general principles go. Does he agree that we should lose those very sound, good, valuable general principles?

[John Redwood]

I think that those excellent principles are already reflected in both European law and British law and will therefore be built into our statutes. They will be inherited from European law through this Bill, and they will often inform the judgment of our judges. I am very happy to trust our Supreme Court rather than the European Court of Justice.

The Supreme Court has not always made judgments I like. I did not like one of its judgments quite recently, but we accepted it and lived with it. We are now in a stronger position as a result, as it happens, because we had a nine-month referendum debate in this House after the country had made its decision. I am pleased to say that after a very long and extensive rerun of the referendum—day after day we were talking about the same subject, having been told we never did so—Parliament wisely came to the decision, by an overwhelming majority, that it did have to endorse the decision of the British people and get on with implementing it.

[Joanna Cherry]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Redwood]

I am afraid that time is now rather limited.

I am very much in favour of our Parliament making these decisions. The admirable principles we are discussing will often be reflected in British law. They are already reflected in many of the bits of legislation that are the subject of this Bill, and our judges will often be informed by them. If the judges start to use a principle that we do not like very much, it is in the hands of those of us who are in Parliament to issue new guidance to those judges— to say that we are creating more primary legislation to ensure that we have a bit more of this principle and a bit less of that—on our area of disagreement with them. In a democracy, it is most important that we have independent courts, but also that, ultimately, the sovereign people through their elected representatives can move the judges on by proper instruction; in our case, that takes the form of primary legislation.

Much has been made of how we implement whatever agreement we get, if we have an agreement, at the end of the now 19-month process in the run-up to our exit on 29 March. I think people are making heavy weather of this, because the main issue that will eventually be settled—I fear it will be settled much later than the press and Parliament would like—is how we will trade with our former partners on the date on which we depart.

There are two off-the-shelf models, either of which would work. In one, the EU decides, in the end, that it does not want tariffs on all its food products and cars coming into the UK market, and it does not want us creating new barriers against its very successful exports, so it agrees that we should register our existing arrangements as a free trade agreement at the World Trade Organisation. That would be a ready-made free trade agreement.

I do not think that there is time to make a special free trade agreement that is not as good as the one we have at the moment. Either we will have the current arrangements, as modified for WTO purposes, when we are outside the Union, or we will not. If we do not, we will trade on WTO terms when we are on the other side of the EU’s customs and tariff arrangements. We know exactly what that looks like, because that is how we trade with the rest of the world at the moment as an EU member.

The EU imposes very high tariff barriers on what would otherwise be cheaper food from the rest of the world, but if it decided on that option, its food would, of course, be on the wrong side of that barrier as well. We would have to decide how much we wanted to negotiate tariffs down for food from other countries around the world, which may offer us a better deal. It would be quite manageable; food is the only sector that would be badly affected by the tariff proposals under the WTO. More than half our trade would not be tariffable under WTO rules, and services obviously attract no tariffs. I have yet to hear any of the other member states recommend imposing tariffs on their trade with us, or recommend a series of new barriers to get in the way of other aspects of our trade. We will have to wait and see how that develops.

[Nicky Morgan]

Is my right hon. Friend saying that one of the largest and most basic amounts of its income that any household spends—the part that it spends on food—could be affected by these proposals, but that that is okay?

[John Redwood]

I am saying that either way, we could get a good deal. If the EU decides that it wants to impose tariffs on its food exports to us, we will be able take tariffs off food that comes from other parts of the world. Under WTO rules, it is always possible to take tariffs off. We could start getting from the rest of the world food that is cheaper than that which we currently get from the EU, even though it does not attract tariffs. I want to look after customers.

The other thing is that if we just accepted the full WTO tariff rules, we would have about £12 billion of tariffs, and I would recommend that all of that £12 billion be given back to our consumers. They would be no worse off at all, because we would return the money to them. They might even be better off, if we did free trade deals that brought down the price of food from other parts of the world.

My final point to the Government is that there is an issue about how we decide the date of our departure. I think it is clear that our date of departure will be 29 March 2019. It will definitely be so if we do not have an agreement, which is still quite possible, but I think we should aim to make sure that we leave on that date even if we do have an agreement. We still have 19 months left, and that should be the transition for most of the things that need it. That is, surely, what the time is there to achieve. I recommend that we have the argument of substance over that date now, and that it be put in the Bill now. I recommend very strongly that we aim for 29 March 2019, because in one scenario that will be the date of our exit anyway, and in any other scenario it would be highly desirable.

People are always telling me that we need to reduce uncertainty. If we told them not only that all the laws would remain in place—getting rid of any uncertainty about the law—but that the date of our exit would definitely be 29 March 2019, we would have taken a lot of uncertainty out of the system. I think that that would be very welcome. I find that businesses now, on the whole, just want to get on with it. They are very realistic, and they want to know what they are planning for. They have got some of the details, but they want as many details as possible. If we put that firm date in, we would make it easier still, so I would recommend that change to the Government.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

This has been a very thoughtful debate, and I hope that the Government are in no doubt about the scale of parliamentary concern about the way in which the Bill concentrates powers in the hands of Ministers.

In his opening speech, the Secretary of State recognised that the Bill is not what will take us out of the EU; Parliament has already voted for article 50, which will take us out of the EU—and rightly voted for it, as well. However, Parliament also has a job to do to hold Ministers to account and the Bill, as drafted, stops us doing that. It stops us standing up for democracy in this House, and it stops us making sure, frankly, that the Government do not screw up Brexit in the process they put it through and the decisions they take.

Many of the purposes behind the Bill are right. Parliament will need to repeal the 1972 Act, and Parliament will also need to transfer EU-derived law into UK law. As the Chair of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), has already said, we will have to have a Bill, but not this Bill. There is a choice about the way in which we do this, and we do not have to do it in a way that concentrates so much power in the hands of a small group of Ministers.

Let me run through some of our concerns. The shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), set out a very forensic and powerful account of the Bill and the detailed powers that it will give Ministers, with no safeguards in place. There are the powers in clauses 7 and 17, as well as those in clause 9, and there is the fact that it will reduce British citizens’ rights. Far from allowing Brits to take back control, the Bill weakens protection for employment rights, equality and environmental standards; it weakens remedies and enforcement; and, crucially, it reduces the right of redress. It is both sad and telling that Ministers have chosen to exempt the charter of fundamental rights. I hope that that will be reversed, and that they will change their position.

The greatest concern—I want to focus on this point—is the concentration of powers in a way that, frankly, is not British. Parliament will not be able to do its job to stand up for citizens’ rights against a powerful Executive if the Bill goes through in the way that it has been drafted. The unprecedented powers given to Ministers in certain clauses—clause 7 and, in particular, clause 17 —are powers that would make a Tudor monarch proud. Everyone realises that the sheer extent of the provisions means that we will need both primary and secondary legislation as part of the process, but not to this scale, not with this lack of safeguards and not with this concentration of power in Ministers’ hands.

The Bill will give Ministers the power to change primary legislation for an incredibly broad range of reasons, and the test will simply be whether they think it is appropriate. The test is not whether a change is needed, proportionate or essential, but only whether Ministers consider it to be appropriate. The Bill also includes the power—the Secretary of State made slightly disingenuous remarks in the way he presented this—to create new criminal offences so long as sentences are not more than two years. That is a serious power to give Ministers on such a broad area without parliamentary scrutiny.

Let me give some examples of the things that the Bill would do. I raised the European arrest warrant with the Secretary of State, and his response to my question about what safeguards there would be was simply to point to the Human Rights Act. The Human Rights Act—by the way, Conservative Front Benchers have pledged to get rid of it—is not a sufficient safeguard. We know that we should not rely on the courts to have all the safeguards, and that we in Parliament should provide some of them as well. We also know that within the scope of the Human Rights Act there is a huge range of potential policies on extradition on which Parliament should have a say.

On my past record, I suspect that I am probably closer to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary on what the extradition policy should be than many of their Back Benchers. I still do not think, however, that they should have unlimited powers to decide extradition policy without having to come back to Parliament.

We debated the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 forensically—in fact, it was an example of Parliament at its best. We gave that Act detailed consideration that balanced security and liberty and changed it as it went through. Given, however, that some of the Act’s genesis depended on ECJ judgments and its relationship with EU legislation, the Bill today could give Ministers the power to reopen the Act and change the primary legislation that we put forward with great care, and—again—to do so through secondary legislation only, without there being proper safeguards and checks in place. Ministers will have the power to rip up the working time directive, too, if it does not fit with what they think should happen under the appropriate arrangements after Brexit.

I do not trust the Prime Minister and the Cabinet with these immense powers. One would expect me not to do so, but no parliamentarian should trust them with these powers. None of us knows who the next Prime Minister will be or who will be in the next Cabinet. This is about the powers in principle, not who is doing the job right now. Clause 9 is particularly disturbing; it should not even be in the Bill. We should be legislating separately for the withdrawal agreement. We should have a separate Bill—and, yes, it would need to provide for secondary legislation; we should not be doing it now, when we have no clue what the withdrawal agreement will be, when we have not had a vote to endorse the Government’s negotiating strategy—we do not even know what it is on a whole series of different areas—and when there is not even a statutory commitment to a vote on the withdrawal agreement.

We could start legislating later, in the summer perhaps when we have a bit more of a clue where on earth this is all going, or perhaps in the autumn when the withdrawal agreement supposedly will have been signed. Then we could put the exit date, which some Government Members are concerned about, into primary legislation and legislate without giving Ministers any more powers than is strictly necessary, rather than hand them unrestricted power to do the job.

[John Redwood]

Does the right hon. Lady not accept that the Government are conducting the negotiations? Parliament can say, “We like the result,” or “We don’t like the result,” but we cannot amend it; it is what the negotiation is.

[Yvette Cooper]

I am not comfortable with the right hon. Gentleman’s enthusiasm for giving the Government blank cheques. Even if he is happy to support the Government and let them do whatever they want on the negotiations, he should be deeply uneasy about giving Ministers unrestricted powers to implement the withdrawal agreement in whatever way they so choose.

The Prime Minister has no mandate to do it this way. To be fair, she asked for one—that is what the election was all about; it was about subverting the Cabinet, her party and this Parliament—but she did not get one. In fact, the Conservative party lost seats. We now have a hung Parliament, and it would be even more irresponsible for a hung Parliament to hand over such huge powers to the Executive than it would be in any other circumstances.

We do not need to legislate like this. This is about more than just Brexit. It is about the precedents we set. Many hon. Members have quoted precedents about different kinds of secondary legislation, but that only strengthens the argument: we should not be setting a precedent in Parliament that hands this stonking great lump of powers into Ministers’ hands without any safeguards. This is about who we are. It is about what kind of democracy Britain should be.

Even before the Brexit legislation, the former Lord Chief Justice warned about the steady diminishing of Parliament, about the handing over of power and control, year after year, to the Executive—to be fair, that includes previous Governments, not just this one—and about the number of statutory instruments and the fact that since 1950 Parliament has said no to only one in 10,000 of those laid before it.

Henry VIII’s Parliament had an excuse. The man had a habit of chopping off people’s heads. What is the excuse for this Parliament? How can we possibly, in this generation, allow ourselves to become the most supine Parliament in history by handing over powers on this scale? We sit in the Chamber and listen to maiden speeches with great respect because we all still think that there is something special about being sent here by our constituents—sent with the power of democracy; sent on the wings of all those many thousands of ballot papers folded up with the crosses by our names. We think that we have a responsibility to hold the Executive to account, and not to hand over to Ministers, in an unrestricted way, all the power given to us by our constituents to do what they like with. Yet that is what the Bill is doing.

History will judge us for the decisions that we make now, for the precedents that we set and the choices that we make. Six months ago, I voted for article 50 because I believe in democracy, but now it is that same faith in democracy that means I cannot vote for the Bill. Let us not choose to be the most supine Parliament in history. Let us be the parliamentary generation that stands up for Parliament: the generation that pursues the article 50 process, but does so in a way that holds Ministers to account.