United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Lord Pannick Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 19th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB) [V]]

My Lords, what an extraordinary series of speeches so far. The Minister’s speech was itself extraordinary because he ignored the elephant in the Chamber—that is, the elephant which is trampling through Part 5 on the rule of law.

The noble and learned lord, Lord Judge, in his powerful speech, referred to the report of your Lordships’ Constitution Committee. I am a member of that committee. We unanimously concluded that for this Bill to set out to break international law is without precedent. We described Part 5 as “constitutionally dangerous” . We said that the Bill is

“fundamentally at odds with the rule of law.”

We reached those conclusions not just because Ministers want to give themselves this unprecedented power to breach international law—as the noble Lord, Lord Howard, said in his eloquent remarks, this country is looked at by other nations as a beacon of legality and it is therefore extraordinary that Ministers should want such a power—but because Ministers are seeking to immunise the regulations that they make from challenge in the courts on any ground “whatsoever”, the word used in Clause 47(8).

The Constitution Committee is not a group of “lefty lawyers”—the Prime Minister’s term of abuse in his recent speech to the Conservative Party conference. Nobody, I think, has ever described my esteemed colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, in that way. There are some lawyers on the Constitution Committee, but most of the members are politicians and political observers from across the House with decades of political experience. The Government should be ashamed to be responsible for producing and pursuing a Bill that attracts such condemnation from such a committee of your Lordships’ House.

Like those unfortunate people who do not feel pain, and who are therefore at grave risk of injuring themselves and those around them, this Government do not feel shame. It is therefore the responsibility of this House to shout out a warning to the Government that Part 5 of the Bill will, if enacted, endanger the rule of law. I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, because his amendment gives us the means by which that warning can, tomorrow, be communicated loudly and clearly.