Queen’s Speech

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I spent last weekend at a conference in Italy of experts on European international politics, where I met people from many different European countries with whom I had worked for many years, and one by one they all asked me to explain what seemed to them to be the complete incompetence of the British Government, their failure to develop a coherent approach to negotiating Brexit in the year since the referendum and their illusion that the UK holds all the cards and that other EU Governments will have to agree to its terms when it finally sets them out. I was particularly struck by the comment two Irish participants made—that they see a sad contrast between the sense in Dublin of a political culture at last breaking free of its past, while in England we seem to be wallowing yet again in imperial nostalgia.

We have now reached the point when the Government cannot avoid grappling with the hard detail of the future relationship between the UK and the EU. All trade negotiations have to grapple with hard detail: trade-offs struck, concessions taken and granted. Every time a Minister attacks those who ask questions about the details of Brexit as “unpatriotic”, people on the continent, as well as here, become more suspicious that the Government still do not know the answer: that the phrase in the Queen’s Speech that promises,

“a deep and special partnership with European allies”,

which we are told will somehow guarantee “seamless” cross-border trade without membership of the customs union or the single market, continuing co-operation on internal security without membership of Europol, and continuing co-operation on foreign and defence policy without participating in the EU’s multilateral meetings, is as meaningless as “Brexit means Brexit”. David Davis told the CEO summit yesterday that negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement will be “simple”. That is nonsense: all multilateral trade negotiations are fiendishly complicated.

One of the justifications given for this early election was to prevent the House of Lords obstructing the Government’s path to Brexit by asking awkward questions. The justification for a second Chamber is precisely to ask difficult questions, to require the Government to provide coherent answers and to ask the Commons to think again if they cannot provide such answers. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, as the Minister who will attempt to provide those answers; she is very brave to step into the breach and to take this on—I mean that in the best “Yes Minister” way. This House is entitled to ask for sufficient time to examine the necessary legislation in detail. I hope that in winding up the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, will provide us with some idea of when the Bills will reach this House and will give us an assurance that delays in Bills reaching this House will not provide an excuse for the Government to attempt to rush them through at the last minute.

The Prime Minister in her preface to the Conservative manifesto for the election stated, bluntly:

“Brexit will define us: our place in the world, our economic security and our future prosperity”.


So we might have hoped for some indication during the election campaign of what Britain’s future place in the world might be. “A global Britain” is as empty a phrase as “Brexit means Brexit”. Liam Fox’s travels suggest that he thinks closer links with New Zealand and the Philippines can replace trade with France and Germany. The illusion that Indian leaders retain so much affection for British rule that they will offer us a special trade deal still hangs around the Department for International Trade. A Canadian has told me that one British Minister recently referred in conversation with them to strengthening the ties that bind “the white Commonwealth”; at least he did not talk about “the Anglo-Saxon races”, though there are echoes of that concept on the Europhobe right.

There is an enormous gap between the windy rhetoric of global Britain regaining its status as a great power and the way our allies see us. The Financial Times last Saturday quoted one Washington expert’s view:

“For the foreseeable future, the US-UK special relationship is irrelevant … Britain has decided to remove itself completely from the chessboard”.


Boris Johnson has irritated all his European colleagues without impressing Governments from elsewhere. He promised last December that he would be making a series of speeches on Britain’s future international strategy, but I have not been able to find anything coherent in his speeches since.

Last Sunday’s Telegraph had yet another article suggesting that Hong Kong should be our model in our future role. Daniel Hannan MEP—the leading Conservative ideologue of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism —declared in last Thursday’s Daily Mail that our future relationship with the rest of Europe should be modelled on Switzerland or Guernsey. Great Britain as a “Greater Guernsey”—what wonderful ambition. An island to which rich people emigrate to avoid taxation: the real citizens of nowhere, moving to the Channel Islands to escape national control. Of course, the leave campaign was funded largely by such citizens of nowhere, who made their money through offshore companies in Gibraltar and the Caribbean and want to promote a deregulated British economy that would become an offshore financial centre.

The promise of the repeal Bill shows that the Government have so far resisted the pressures from hard Eurosceptics for the bonfire of regulations which they promised would follow, so “taking back control” will in practice mean wholesale incorporation of European regulations into domestic law. This House will wish to examine closely how far the Government intend to follow the evolution of European regulations after we have left in order to maintain the “seamless” cross-border trade they assure us they will maintain in the same way that the Swiss, not to mention the Channel Islanders, follow the rules negotiated by others in Brussels. If so, we lose, rather than regain, effective sovereignty, and we continue to follow the judgments of the Court of Justice of the EU, in spite of the irrational hatred which Conservative Europhobes have for that “foreign” court.

I note the contradiction between the Government’s declared support for the rule of international law in all other areas and the passionate hostility to the European Court of Justice, on which British judges have sat since we joined the EU. London is a global centre for international arbitration and civil and commercial law, including European law. We will clearly need an agreed legal framework for future relations with the EU in which the ECJ will have to play a role to,

“provide certainty for individuals and businesses”—

again, to quote the Queen’s Speech.

The Government have said very little so far about the costs of Brexit, which will be considerable. One of the most blatant lies of the leave campaign was that leaving was a one-way bargain—all benefits and no costs. European agencies, which served British as well as other national needs, will have to be replaced by new national agencies. If the Government are serious about taking back control of our borders, we will need a substantial increase in border agency staff, coastguards and maritime patrol ships and aircraft. There will, of course, also be indirect costs, but the direct costs of replacing the common services which the EU has provided, from aviation to pharmaceuticals, must be capable of estimation, and the Government should offer Parliament that estimate.

No senior Minister has yet touched on the importance of maintaining the good will of our continental neighbours through these negotiations and after our departure. Over the last year some Ministers have appeared to believe that relations with China and Saudi Arabia will become more important than those with Germany, France, Italy or Spain and that authoritarian countries are more natural partners for Britain than our immediate and democratic neighbours. That is one of the greatest illusions—or lies—of the Eurosceptic camp. British prosperity, British security and British values are most closely linked to the interests and values of our democratic neighbours. Over the last year, the Government have lost the respect of our continental partners. This House will wish to press the Government to work to regain that respect and good will as vital to a successful negotiation and to our future relationship after we leave.