Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I hope that the rest of the House found the previous half hour as life-affirming and helpful as I did. If so, if there is a mass exit to the bar, noble Lords have my complete endorsement and understanding.

I had the privilege of speaking on the second day of the last iteration of this debate, so I shall try to be brief. At the conclusion of my contribution, the speaker from the Government Back Benches who followed me suggested that my observations proved,

“he is not a politician. His view of politics is highly idealistic”.—[Official Report, 6/12/18; col. 1196.]

As a Cross-Bencher who first entered your Lordships’ House in 1982, I am inclined to take that as more of a compliment than a rebuke.

We are in uncharted waters. On the Cross Benches, we are privileged to have colleagues who possess an extraordinary array of talent, experience, intellect and knowledge of government, law and international affairs. Whether they are inclined towards leave, remain or any shade in between, they are more concerned and worried about our current state of uncertainty and national embarrassment than at any point in their collective memories.

Our dilemma was outlined in painful clarity by our ex-ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers, in his speech at Liverpool University last month. I commend it to all of your Lordships with a taste for the kind of enervating entertainment offered by my noble friend Lord Lisvane to his maiden aunts. It is like a bucket of powerful paint stripper being applied to a canvas by a highly skilled diplomatic artist. What is depicted on the canvas is nearer to a Francis Bacon triptych than to “The Monarch of the Glen”. Sir Ivan depicts our fundamental misreading of how the EU operates and the weakness of our negotiating approach. He also inflicts richly deserved pain on so many of us:

“Both fervent leavers and fervent remainers as well as No 10 seem to me now to seek to delegitimise a priori every version of the world they don’t support”.


Where do we go from here, assuming, as seems very likely, that tomorrow’s vote in another place rejects the Prime Minister’s deal? Do we relinquish what vestiges of control we still possess, and accept the glorious defeat offered by departing without any deal at all? I have been doing my homework on the speakers in the two days of the debate last week; of the 19 Conservative Peers who spoke, 50% are in favour of no deal, and only 24% are in favour of the deal on offer. We live in strange times. Or do we—and I refer primarily to our elected representatives in the other place—wrest back control from the embarrassingly inept hands of Her Majesty’s Government and from their unworthy challenger, the equally inept and opaque Labour leadership?

Last Wednesday evening, my inner masochist turned on the television, and I found myself listening—much to my surprise—to a voice of sanity. It came from a fellow Cross-Bencher and an ex-Archbishop of Canterbury —my noble and right reverend friend Lord Williams of Oystermouth. Apart from being reminded that he possesses a set of eyebrows rivalled on the Cross Benches only by my noble friend Lord Lisvane, I was struck by the way he listened and thought carefully before any of his responses to a series of difficult questions about our current impasse. He gave no soundbites, no pre-rehearsed mantras, no entrenched and intractable points of view, just thoughtful, sensitively phrased and carefully considered responses that acknowledge the difficult decisions that we face.

I find myself agreeing with his reluctant but carefully thought through conclusion—that we should follow the advice of my noble friend Lord Armstrong of Ilminster last Thursday, and revoke and withdraw Article 50. We must acknowledge that swallowing our pride and admitting our failure to have defined, negotiated and then enacted a departure from the EU which is acceptable to a majority of our elected representatives requires us to return to the drawing board. No deal will not do. Extending Article 50 will not do. It will simply create yet another deadline, and allow us once again to kick the can temporarily down the road. No more.

Last month I reminded your Lordships of the surreal but uncomfortably pertinent Monty Python scene in which the characters debate their dislike of Rome—for which read the EU—while having to acknowledge a longer and longer list of the many benefits it has brought. Today I am reminded—with apologies to Scottish, Welsh and Irish noble Lords—of the agonised words of the character played by John Cleese in the film “A Fish Called Wanda”:

“Do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of … doing the wrong thing … we're all terrified of embarrassment”.


We have embarrassed ourselves—and our many friends abroad—enough. Let us stop the clock, recover our mental faculties, nurse our emotional dissonance and seek a way forward that does not preclude any eventual outcome, and which prioritises understanding and acting quickly to remedy the deep economic and social divisions which the last two and a half years have laid bare. Let us cease and desist, and face up to our failures and responsibilities.