European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Justine Greening Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 22nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening (Putney) (Ind)]

I would like to make a brief contribution on what is planned in the Bill, how the Government propose to take it forward, and where they are taking our country. They seem to be the pertinent questions tonight.

On what is planned in the Bill, I have deep concerns. The situation as the Bill pertains to Northern Ireland should not be just brushed away by Members of my former party, the Conservative and Unionist party. They are real issues that affect real people. To simply ignore them because it is inconvenient to take them on board is not only inappropriate but ultimately dangerous. I was very much struck by the speech by the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson), a representative from Northern Ireland. He talked about two issues that go to the heart of the problems we are trying to grapple with, which affect Northern Ireland but have wider application. On cross-community concerns, the understanding in the Good Friday agreement was that communities had to go forward together if that agreement was going to work. We in this House should learn from that. We are a United Kingdom, yet we seek to go forward with this Brexit deal in a way that ignores the very clear concerns of the other nations in the United Kingdom—not just Northern Ireland, but Scotland and Wales.

[Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (LD)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is a seminal moment? The Conservative and Unionist party is handing over legal, political and administrative control of Northern Ireland to the EU—almost like the United States handing over control of Alaska to Russia—and giving the people consent six years after this has taken place. That surely cannot be acceptable.

[Justine Greening]

It is very concerning that the rules Northern Ireland will have to live under will, in many regards, be set by the European Union, a body in which it will not have representatives. Ultimately, that is a recipe for something failing politically.

The point about consent matters. It is absolutely unacceptable for people in Northern Ireland to be thrown into an important new political arrangement and mechanism, with no say over whether it happens to them. Equally, it is unacceptable for the rest of the UK to face the same situation, going into a form of Brexit that many people who campaigned for Brexit, including Nigel Farage, who heads the Brexit party, feel is not the Brexit they campaigned for. He has called this deal Brexit in name only. I obviously understand that there is disagreement over what Brexit means, but that is one of the reasons why, three and a half years later, we are reaching this moment today.

Many Members who campaigned for Brexit, not least the Prime Minister, held up a Brexit deal by voting against one they felt did not deliver on that referendum result. I respect their view, but that brings me on to my point about how the Bill is being taken forward. Frankly, it is absolutely hypocritical for people who held up Brexit because they thought it was the wrong one, to then decide that their version should be fast-tracked and steamrollered through this House because we have run out of time. It is down to their actions that we are three and a half years down the road and we have not moved forward. It is entirely unacceptable to ram this through in two days, and it simply stores up problems for our United Kingdom by doing it this way.

I see no problem with taking longer and giving this House of representatives time to genuinely air the important issues about this proposal, have them understood, and have the Government able to respond to them. We have heard some of them today, but we have not heard, for example, about clause 29, which talks about what could be an important role for the European Scrutiny Committee in raising issues on EU legislation that comes through during the withdrawal agreement period, when we will simply have to take those rules but have no say about how they are set. The clause says that a motion can come before the House and be voted on. What happens then? Nobody knows.

Those are significant issues, but perhaps my biggest problem with the Bill is that it does not address the underlying issues of inequality of opportunity, which I believe sat behind and drove many of the concerns that resulted in people voting for Brexit in communities such as the one in which I grew up in Rotherham. In the end, I believe that we will have to come back and tackle those, and my concern is that Brexit does not.