European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Newby Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Newby]

3: Clause 1, page 1, line 3, at end insert—
“( ) No agreement with the European Union consequent on the use of the power under subsection (1) may be ratified unless—(a) it has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament;(b) the Prime Minister has obtained authority to put it to a national referendum; and(c) it has been approved by such a referendum.”

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, this simple amendment would require the people to ratify in a referendum any agreement reached by the Government pursuant to triggering Article 50, and I thank my co-signatories from across the House who support it.

I set out the arguments for such a confirmatory referendum in my Second Reading speech. Fundamentally, we believe that the people, having initiated the Brexit process, should have the final say. It is clear that the Government’s preferred option is that they should have the final say. Under pressure, and no doubt as a result of votes that we shall have in your Lordships’ House, they will be dragged slowly but inexorably towards giving Parliament a final say on all the options. However, while that is better than the Government simply taking the final decision themselves, it simply will not do.

As we saw with Parliament’s votes in advance of last year’s referendum, the Government’s track record in judging the public mood on this issue is poor. While as a general principle it is accepted that parliamentarians should exercise their own judgment and not simply echo that of public opinion on this issue, Parliament has already said that our membership of the European Union is for the people to decide. Trying to take back power at the end of the process having ceded it at the outset is both devoid of principle and likely to stoke further public dissatisfaction, whichever way the decision goes.

Secondly, and flowing from this, is the fact that in contradistinction to what the Prime Minister asserted in the White Paper, the country is more divided than ever over Brexit. That is largely because those who were in favour of remaining in the EU were relatively passionless in advance of the referendum because they complacently thought that they would win it. They were wrong, of course. Now many of them are angry about the issue for the first time. No small part of that anger is caused by the fact that they believe that many people were decisively influenced in the way that they voted by what they see as a number of misrepresentations, most notably on NHS spending, which were assiduously asserted by the leave side, including of course a number of members of the current Cabinet. They are also angry that, by leaving the single market and customs union, the Government have chosen a particularly harsh form of Brexit. As a result, they believe that the people should have a vote on the final deal, when it will be impossible to conceal the real consequences of leaving the EU—as happened last summer.

At Second Reading, the Minister asked me why such a vote would help to bring the country together. The answer is that such a vote, conducted in the full light of the facts of the deal, would produce a result that could not be questioned, in the same way as last June’s vote, on the basis that the people were misled. I believe that that would apply to the losing side as well as to the victors. At Second Reading the noble Lord, Lord Butler, asked why,

“those who base their arguments for Brexit on the will of the people are now opposed to consulting the people on the outcome of the negotiations”.

As he said:

“Do the Government regard the views of the British people on the outcome of the negotiations as irrelevant to our departure?”.—[Official Report, 21/2/17; col. 208.]


In reply, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, said that the Government opposed a referendum on the terms on the grounds that it would dash the certainty and clarity that we need. I agree that we need that too, but nothing would give greater certainty and clarity than the people having expressed the final view on the deal. The Government’s attitude is that if the views of the people were to change significantly against Brexit over the next 18 months, the Government would still ask Parliament to ratify any deal it reached, or simply crash out of the EU. How could that be justified? They are saying in effect that the people are not allowed to change their mind—an approach that is the antithesis of democracy, which is that the people are regularly asked to express their preferences and do indeed regularly change them. This is from a Government with many members who have very publicly changed their minds from being convinced remainers to being cheerleaders for Brexit.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, the noble Lord may be coming to this in his speech, but the first requirement of his amendment is that any agreement must be,

“laid before and approved by”,

both Houses of Parliament. I ask him: if one House says, “Yes, we agree with the agreement that has been negotiated”, but the other House says no, what happens next?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, we will spend a lot more time on Wednesday discussing the role of Parliament. The point I make in my amendment is that Parliament will want to express a view before the vote goes to the people again. We will talk in great detail on Wednesday about how it might do that. That part of the amendment is not its most central part.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Newby]

Some have argued that if Parliament rejected the Government’s Brexit deal, the will of the people could be tested in a general election. I think that that would be extremely unsatisfactory. We all know that general elections are about many things. For example, any election called by the present Prime Minister with the same leader of the Opposition would not be simply or even primarily about Brexit, but be about who was best fitted to lead the country. We all know the answer to that. If the people are to be consulted, therefore, it must be through another referendum—and the people should certainly be consulted.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

The noble Lord was talking about people changing their minds. Given that he campaigned for a real referendum in 2008—in or out of the EU—could he tell us when he then changed his mind to decide that we should not accept the judgment of this last referendum?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I am arguing in favour of the principle that, when events change, people change their minds. I do not consider that to be a dishonourable practice. When I look at the Government Front Bench in either this House or another place, I see person after person who apparently had a miraculous change of mind either just before or just after the referendum; I accept that that is sometimes what people do. The noble Lord possibly has never changed his mind, but most people in your Lordships’ House have a greater flexibility of approach, which is to be welcomed. I beg to move.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, although I oppose this amendment, I can imagine two circumstances in which a second referendum might be justifiable. The first would be after we had actually completed the negotiations, left the EU and then people decided they wanted another referendum. That would seem perfectly justifiable.

The second situation where a second referendum would be well justified would be if the original referendum question had been framed in such a way as to say, “Do you wish the Government to enter into negotiations about leaving the EU, and then to put the result of that referendum to a second referendum later on?”. However, that was not the question on the ballot paper. As we have heard endlessly, the question was whether to remain or leave; it was quite unambiguous. It seems that we are slipping into the habits that the EU itself has with referenda. Mr Juncker on one occasion famously said, “If the people vote the wrong way, we must go on voting until we get the right answer”. I suspect that that is the real motivation behind the amendment. We saw this in the EU with the referendum on Maastricht. After the Danes said no, they had to vote again. We saw it with the treaty of Nice: when Ireland said no, we had to have another vote and that reversed the first one. We saw it most blatantly of all with the European constitution, as proposed, which was rejected in recommendations by both France and Holland. In order to avoid a referendum, that was then translated by a device into the Lisbon treaty. We absolutely should not go down that road.

--- Later in debate ---

[Noble Lords]

Answer!

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the Minister is entitled not to wish to answer the question—and I can understand why. I will make just three points. First, I am sorry to the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that I was so hard on him earlier on. I should have welcomed—and indeed do now welcome—his intervention because he has given me some very helpful drafting advice for the amendment that I will be bringing before your Lordships on Report.

Secondly, I have never heard the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, sound so defeatist. If this House took the view that the House of Commons might not accept an amendment that we passed, we would hardly ever pass any amendments. We would certainly not have passed the amendment on tax credits. Therefore, I urge him to take that as a precedent and think that, so impressed by the quality of our arguments, those 20 Conservative Back-Benchers might change their minds in an instant on reading Hansard and that we would get our victory when it went to the other place.

Thirdly, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Empey—a number of noble Lords spoke about the parallels with or differences from Scotland—this is a completely different situation from that which obtains in Scotland. The SNP wants a second bite at the same cherry. We want a vote of the people on a firm proposition, rather than the vote which did take place on 57 varieties of proposition that were assiduously and separately propounded by different people on the leave side. So it is a completely inapt parallel and I cannot accept it.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

The noble Lord says that the Scottish situation is completely different. The Scottish nationalists argue that people did not know what they were voting for because of project fear. Surely that is precisely the same argument that is being used by the noble Lord.

[Lord Newby]

I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord but I am afraid that that argument simply does not hold water. The principle that we are putting forward in this amendment is straightforward: who decides at the end of a process initiated by the people? Our view is that the people should decide and nothing that any noble Lord has said this afternoon has made me question that principle in any regard. For today, I will withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 3 withdrawn.