UK and EU Relations

Lord Jay of Ewelme Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)]

My Lords, the negotiations on leaving the European Union are the most important and complex undertaken by any British Government since the Second World War. The role of Parliament in scrutinising the key elements of those negotiations is essential. I therefore thank the Government for scheduling this debate, and I welcome the Minister’s commitment to future debates. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has said, more detailed scrutiny by parliamentary committees is also essential—at least by the European Union Committee of your Lordships’ House, which I chair at the moment, in the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. That committee and its sub-committees have produced over 20 Brexit-related reports since the referendum, with more to come.

The committee agrees very much with Mr Davis’ comments in his latest letter of 8 September—as part of a rather lengthy correspondence with the committee—that,

“allowing for sufficient scrutiny in these negotiations is crucial”.

However, the committee does not agree with the second half of that sentence:

“but rigidity of providing for Committee appearances at fixed intervals may run counter to the flexibility needed to ensure those negotiations are conducted successfully”.

The committee wants to be constructive. It also wants to discharge responsibility to your Lordships’ House. We hope we can find a way for the Secretary of State—or, when he is unavailable, other Ministers, including the noble Baroness, or senior officials—to appear before us regularly as these crucial, complex negotiations proceed.

I do not for a moment underestimate the weight of the negotiating schedule on the shoulders of Ministers and senior officials. The subjects are extraordinarily complex and touch upon almost every aspect of national life. It therefore seems entirely sensible for the Government to accept the need for a transitional period after we leave the EU formally in 18 months’ time. How long that transition period should be and what form it should take remain for negotiation.

The realistic alternative, it is increasingly clear, is that we simply leave after two years—either because we decide to walk away, or because we have not completed the negotiations on time and the clock stops. Against that background, the EU Committee is about to start an inquiry on the implications of walking away and on the nature of the transition period. These are issues which deserve careful analysis.

My own view is that walking away is an uncertain option because, the following day, we would have to walk back again to talk in our own interest about co-operation—on foreign policy, security, counter- terrorism, cybersecurity, police co-operation and other subjects, too. This seems to be the implication of the Government’s latest position paper, published today, on foreign policy, defence and development, which I welcome. I particularly welcome the reaffirmation of the conclusion of the NATO Warsaw summit, that:

“A stronger NATO and a stronger EU are mutually reinforcing”.


Indeed, I welcome more generally the position papers and future partnership papers produced by the Government over recent weeks. Some of them have real substance, but others have a Cheshire Cat-ish quality about them: the more you look at the arguments in them, the more they seem to disappear before your eyes.

Finally, I want to focus on Ireland. We had a good debate about Ireland last Tuesday. The following day, the Commission’s negotiating paper was published. We now seem to be in a position in which both sides recognise the importance of the Irish dimension of Brexit, particularly in respect of the border, and I greatly welcome that. However, the British Government have put forward a solution which is widely seen as impractical, and the Commission has produced a paper which does not put forward solutions at all but says—surely correctly—that,

“flexible and imaginative solutions will be required”.

I listened carefully to what the Minister said in introducing today’s debate but I should be grateful if, in summing up, she could tell us what happens next in what is one of the most important, seemingly intractable aspects of the negotiations.