PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
European Union (Withdrawal) Act - 25 March 2019 (Commons/Commons Chamber)
Debate Detail
That this House, in accordance with the provisions of section 13(6)(a) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, has considered the Written Statement titled “Statement under Section 13(4) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018” and made on Friday 15 March 2019.
This debate follows as a result of requirements of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 and as a consequence of the decision taken by this House on 12 March. Since that date, the House has spoken on two further occasions: on 13 March, the House expressed its opposition to leaving the European Union without a deal; and on 14 March, the House agreed that the Government should seek an extension to article 50. I might add that, in respect of both those votes in this House, neither was legally binding on the Government, but that in each case the Government have honoured the wishes of the House in response to the resolution. I hope that that might provide at least a modicum of reassurance that in this Government we have not been, and we do not intend to be, dismissive in the least of how this House decides or votes.
During its meeting last week, the European Council approved the legally binding assurances in relation to the Northern Ireland backstop that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister had negotiated with President Juncker a fortnight ago. As my right hon. Friend has explained, that should give additional assurance to Members that in the unlikely event that the backstop were ever used it would be only temporary, and that the United Kingdom and the European Union would begin work immediately to replace it with alternative arrangements by the end of December 2020. The Council also agreed—subject to a vote in this House—to approve the withdrawal agreement this week. The date of our departure from the EU would be extended to 22 May to provide time for the House to agree and ratify a Brexit deal, and to pass the necessary legislation to make that possible.
However, the Council agreed that in the event that the House did not approve the withdrawal agreement this week, article 50 should be extended only until 12 April. At that point, we would have two options: we could leave without a deal, or we would need to have agreed an alternative plan for a longer extension with the European Union, and the EU would have to have accepted that. It is very clear from what EU leaders and the EU institutions have said that that a longer extension would require elections to the European Parliament to be held in the United Kingdom.
On 14 March, I told the House that in the event that Members had not approved a meaningful vote by 20 March and agreed a timetable for the withdrawal agreement Bill, the Government would recognise that the House would require time to consider the potential ways forward. The Government stand by the commitment that I set out that day that in such a scenario, having consulted the usual channels at that time, they would facilitate a process, in the two weeks after the March European Council, to allow the House to seek a majority on the way forward. Since then my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and I have acted on that commitment, and have engaged constructively with Members on both sides of the House in recent days. Between us we have met leaders of all parties as well as other senior parliamentarians, and that process is ongoing; my right hon. Friend met the Leader of the Opposition earlier today. Those discussions will continue.
My right hon. Friend has just said that the Government will facilitate the discussion of alternative arrangements in the two weeks following the European Council should the deal not, for whatever reason, succeed. We are already eating into those two weeks. He urges us to resist the so-called Letwin amendment for various reasons, which I understand to some degree, but he has not yet specified a timetable for when the Government will present their own means and terms of facilitation. Let me ask my him what I asked the Prime Minister: when?
If amendment (a) is voted down and the Government do indeed propose their own slot, will they determine the options on which the House will vote, or will Members of Parliament do so?
Whatever options are put forward—this starts to address the issue raised by the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry)—will need to be negotiable with the EU, and in particular any deal will require the withdrawal agreement that not only we but the 27 other Governments of the EU member states have negotiated. The conclusions of the European Council last week could not have been clearer: EU member states are not prepared to consider any reopening of the terms of the withdrawal agreement which for them, as well as for us, represented the outcome of a lengthy period of negotiation and compromise on both sides. And this is one of the reasons why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was clear earlier this afternoon that the Government cannot simply pre-commit to accepting whatever might come out of this process. It is entirely possible that this House votes for something that is neither realistic nor negotiable; for example, it could vote to seek further changes to the withdrawal agreement, which the EU has been clear is simply not possible. Equally, the House could vote to maintain all the benefits of the single market without agreeing to the obligations, such as alignment with state aid rules or the free movement of people, but the EU has been clear that the four freedoms are indivisible.
Of course we will engage constructively with Members across the House on whatever the outcome of this process is, but we continue to believe that the amendment tabled in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset would be an unwelcome precedent to set, in that it would overturn the balance between Parliament and the Government. In the event that his amendment were carried tonight, we would obviously want to have a dialogue with him and his co-sponsors about how he proposed to take those measures forward.
I want to add a few words to what the Prime Minister said about the statutory instrument that has been published today on the extension of article 50. Now that the United Kingdom and the European Union have agreed an extension to article 50 and it has been embodied in a legal decision of the European Council, the date needs to be amended to reflect in our domestic law the new point at which the EU treaties will cease to apply in the United Kingdom. The Government have therefore tabled today a draft statutory instrument under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 that provides for both of the possible extensions: 12 March and 22 May.
The purpose of the statutory instrument is to reflect the extension agreed between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The Government will now therefore delay the commencement of the repeal of the European Communities Act. A commencement order is required under section 25(4) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act to give effect to this repeal. The timing of that commencement order will depend on the date on which we leave the European Union. As a matter of both EU and international law, the effect of the European Council decision is that we are not leaving the European Union on 29 March. It would therefore be wrong to commence the repeal contained in section 1 of the withdrawal Act on that date. In making that change, having sought an extension, the Government have acted on the basis of the resolutions that were passed by this House. The House did not want to leave on 29 March without a deal, and it explicitly voted in favour of the Government seeking an extension to article 50.
I should like to turn briefly to the amendments that you have selected, Mr Speaker, other than amendment (a), which we have already debated at some length. Turning to amendment (d), the Prime Minister and I have had constructive meetings with hon. Members from the main Opposition party in recent days, and the Prime Minister met the Leader of the Opposition earlier this afternoon. On that basis, I would say to the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) that the amendment is not necessary. I would also say that the official Opposition’s amendment demonstrates one thing very clearly—namely, that none of the changes that it seeks to secure are changes to the withdrawal agreement. The inference I draw from that is that the official Opposition now support the withdrawal agreement, and I hope that when the right hon. and learned Gentleman comes to speak, he will be able to confirm that he and his party accept that all possible deals with the European Union should include this withdrawal agreement and that that is also the clear will of the European Council.
I understand completely the motive behind amendment (f), tabled in the name of the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett). It instructs the Government to report by 9 April on how we would ensure that the United Kingdom did not leave without a deal if the deal had not been approved by that point. Consistently throughout this process, the Government have accepted that we would need to come back to the Dispatch Box if the House had not supported the withdrawal agreement by the end of this week.
I recognise that the House has now voted twice against leaving the European Union without a deal. However, I have to say to the right hon. Lady and her co-sponsors there would be only two options before the House in the circumstances envisaged in her amendment. There would be the option, called for earlier by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), of the revocation of article 50, but that is not a temporary measure; it would not result in a mere stay in the proceedings. The Court of Justice of the European Union has made it clear that revocation would have to be permanent and a decision taken in good faith. The other option would be for us to ask for a long extension, but that would mean running elections for the European Parliament nearly three years after the vote of the British public to leave. Of course, it would also rely on the EU agreeing to such a long extension, which would by no means be assured.
Unless the House were prepared to support one of those two options, the legal default under European law would be that the treaties would cease to apply, whatever the right hon. Member for Derby South might wish, and we would have to leave without a deal. The way forward is for the House to accept the deal, particularly this week, to approve the withdrawal agreement and to secure the extension to 22 May.
If Parliament comes together and backs the Brexit deal, we will leave the European Union by 22 May. We can then end three years of divisive debate and uncertainty, allow the country to move on towards a new future outside the European Union and devote ourselves to the important work of negotiating a deep and special partnership with our European friends and neighbours, which the Conservative party promised in our election manifesto. The Government will make every effort to ensure that we are able to leave with a deal and move our country forward to allow those who voted leave and those who voted remain to come together in looking to the future. It is in that spirit that I commend this motion to the House.
All that must be seen in the context of the Prime Minister losing control of the meaningful vote. In truth, we have no idea when or if it will be put again or whether it is winnable. I listened carefully to the Prime Minister’s statement this afternoon, and she said that she had gauged that there was “still not sufficient support” for the deal, but she would continue discussions so that she could bring forward a vote this week. We have been in that loop since 10 December. She says, “I don’t think there’s enough support. I am going to have further discussions, and I am going to put the vote again.” She has lost control of that process.
The Prime Minister has also lost control of the negotiations. That much is clear from the European Council’s decision last Thursday. When the Government were asked, “What happens if the meaningful vote fails?” there was no answer. That created a real anxiety that we could crash out this Friday without a deal. It was in those circumstances that the EU acted as it did in putting forward the dates of 12 April and 22 May, so the Government have lost control of the very negotiations.
The Prime Minister also appears to have lost control of the Conservative party. There have already been too many jokes about whether the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is the Deputy Prime Minister or the putative Prime Minister, so I will scratch them from my speech, but it is clear that control of the party is gone. Tonight, it is likely that the Prime Minister and the Government are going to lose control of Parliament and of the process in circumstances in which, arguably, they do not need to, because they could have acted last week. The sense that we have to move forward was in the debate last week. It is not new today, because it was clear that many Members want to find a way forward and feel a duty to break the deadlock. That was the subject matter of last week’s debate, but instead of a constructive discussion about how we do it, we will probably divide on this motion.
If we are to find a way forward, we need to be clear about what we are not prepared to do. There is no way forward that includes blaming Members of this House for the mess we are in. There is no way forward that includes whipping up a sense of the people versus MPs. There is no way forward based on the notion that Members on either side of the House who persistently and forcefully advance their views, whatever those views may be, are indulging in some kind of illegitimate exercise—they are not. They are making important points on behalf of their constituents and in the national interest. They are doing their job.
I heard the Prime Minister say earlier that she did not intend her comments last week to have that effect, and I am not sure what I am more concerned about: that she made the comments, or that she did not appreciate how they would be heard in the environment in which we live. Nor can we find a way forward based simply on the proposition of putting and reputting the same meaningful vote. The fact that we are even discussing meaningful vote 3, or even meaningful vote 4, only has to be said to be seen to be absurd. The deal has been roundly rejected twice. We now need to move on, and I hope we can begin that process tonight.
When the letter to President Tusk was written last week, some of us were therefore taken aback and did not think it reflected what this House had decided. That is now one of the problems in relation to this exercise, because there is a lack of trust. If amendment (a) is not passed this evening, we may find that we are not where we thought we would be when we get to Wednesday, Thursday and Friday—it would not be the first time.
The decision of the European Council to grant an extension to article 50 was a necessity and, in truth, the only way to prevent our leaving without a deal on 29 March, but, as I have said, any extension must be for a purpose, which is why we need to come together to decide that purpose. The Minister for the Cabinet Office said two weeks ago, and he elaborated on it today, that the Government would consult the other parties through the usual channels and work to provide a process by which the House could form a majority to take things forward. It seems that the Government agree with what amendment (a) intends to achieve. If it is passed, MPs will decide the options, which is right. The Government say that would give too much control to MPs, but then they say, “If it doesn’t go through, we will provide the time. As for the options, that should be for MPs.” If the Government are true to what they say, MPs will decide the options in any event, so the easiest thing would be for the Government simply to signal that they accept the amendment. We could then foreshorten the debate, move forward and start the discussion on how the process will actually work.
Amendment (d), in the name of the Opposition, seeks to achieve that purpose, and amendment (a), in the name of the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and others, does so, too. We will be supporting both amendments this evening.
So we do need to get into Wednesday. We need to have an intense discussion about how the votes on Wednesday are to be taken and see whether we can reach a consensus about that, reach a majority and find where that lies. We need to consider the credible options. Labour has long advocated a close economic relationship, including a customs union and single market alignment, but we have also made clear our support for a public vote as a lock on any deal that the Prime Minister passes. The Leader of the Opposition and I have met colleagues to discuss these proposals and the other ideas that have been put forward by other colleagues. What we need to do now is to agree the process for having a proper debate and to look at those and other credible options.
Let us assume, for the moment, that we can find a process that most Members are content with and that we can then move towards a majority view. It may take some time. I, for one, am troubled by the idea that, in one afternoon, all of this can be solved. It may be that all we can do is start down a process of finding a majority. It would be wrong to rush at this at this stage of the exercise. But assuming that can be done, it raises the million-dollar question: if the House does find a majority, will the Government accept the result?
I understand and respect the position of the Prime Minister, who says, “I need to know what the options are and what the result is before I can answer that question.” I understand the logic of that and it is a fair point, but what I do not want is—wrapped up in that perfectly reasonable, logical answer—to find, in a week or two, or whenever it may be, that whatever outcome is agreed upon by a majority it will never be accepted by the Government and we are back to where we started. That is my concern about the exercise. So when the Government say they will go into it in good faith, that has to mean that, if there is a majority, the Government will look very seriously at supporting where that majority view is and not simply rule it out. The red lines are the very thing we are trying to break. If the Government apply their own red lines to any outcome and say, “It does not fit our red lines”, there is not much point going through the exercise in the first place because it is precisely to remove those red lines that we are going forward.
Tonight really is about the opportunity to bring to an end the Government’s failed approach. For two years, they have not put forward a credible plan, or really listened to other alternatives. I used to say that the Prime Minister was surviving by the week, but I changed that to saying she was surviving by the day; now, she appears to be surviving by the hour to get through to Wednesday. Enough is enough. We cannot go on like this. The country deserves better. Parliament must take back control. We have the chance to do that tonight and we should do it.
As a matter of fact, the idea that it is an ancient constitutional principle that the Government should control the Order Paper is slightly anhistorical, if that is the right word, because the practice started in 1906, so it is not, as far as I am aware, part of our ancient constitution. For about 400 or 500 years, things that either were the House of Commons or were very much like it controlled their own Order Papers. That changed at the beginning of the 20th century, but what did not change was the fundamental point that the way that Standing Orders are decided is by a majority vote in the House of Commons, and therefore they can be adjusted by such a vote and, if so adjusted, the adjusted version is what applies.
Every time there is a private Members Bill Friday, astonishingly, the Government do something that we are apparently now entreated to regard as utterly revolutionary—they hand over to private Members the opportunity to put forward Bills. According to this soi-disant constitutional theory that has been invented, that must be a kind of revolution, because it is not the Government putting forward a Bill, but in fact we have been doing it perfectly happily for years. So there is no revolutionary intent behind the amendment at all.
The second point I wish to make is about what the amendment does do. It does exactly what has been described in the debate; namely, it provides an opportunity, simply and nothing more, for the House of Commons to begin—I stress, to begin—the process of working its way towards identifying a way forward that can command a majority in this House.
I wish to reflect for a second on my own personal history in this matter. I find sometimes from the communications, not always utterly polite, that I receive from various quarters on my iPhone, that it is supposed that I have from the beginning attempted to destroy the Government’s efforts to carry out an orderly Brexit. That is obviously a more amusing story than the real one, but the real one is very sad and ordinary. I started as an entirely loyal member of the Conservative party. I had never voted against the Conservative Whip in my entire parliamentary career—not once. What is more, although I voted remain in the referendum, I was absolutely determined that we should continue our proceedings by ensuring that we fulfilled the mandate of the British people and left the European Union.
For a long while, although I personally thought from the very beginning that the Prime Minister was unwise to set out her red lines, I swallowed my concerns about them and utterly supported her in her endeavour to get her version of leave across the line. Indeed, on frequent occasions, as several of my right hon. and hon. Friends will recall, I acted as a kind of broker to try to bring together my European Research Group colleagues with other colleagues who now sit in various parts of the House, to produce results—some of which are now encoded, as a matter of fact, in section 13 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act. It was my endeavour to make this a process that enabled the Prime Minister to get to the end of the road successfully.
I have fulfilled that endeavour by trying to vote with the Prime Minister on every occasion on which she has brought a section 13 motion to the House. I apologise to Opposition Members for saying that I will do that again if the Prime Minister brings forward a meaningful vote 3, or 4, or infinity. I will go on voting for the Prime Minister’s deal, because I happen to think that it is perfectly okay. I am very conscious that many Members do not agree with me.
The problem we have faced—all 650 of us can agree on this—is that we have not been able to get a majority for the Prime Minister’s deal. That is the fact, and it is a problem, because if there is no majority for that deal and we want to leave the EU, we are forced down only one of two possible tracks, one of which is to find an alternative and the other of which is to have no deal. It was at the point a few months back when I surmised that there was a real possibility that the Prime Minister, I think by mistake rather than on purpose, was going to end up taking us out without a deal and without having adequately prepared for that, that I became so concerned that I started to work on a cross-party basis with many colleagues on both sides of the House to try to find a solution. This modest attempt to provide the House with an opportunity to vote in the majority in favour of an alternative way forward is simply part of that process.
My second answer is that I do not at all discount the possibility that, at a later stage—I am sure that there will have to be a later stage, and indeed I hope that the business of the House motion will book a slot for a later stage—we should resort to some other method to crystallise the majority if we find that it is otherwise difficult to do.
You have a long record, Mr Speaker—previous Speakers have also had a long record—of finding a way of selecting for debate amendments that carry sufficient weight in terms of numbers, cross-party support and so on. That is a perfectly proper process to use. It does not involve any one of us tilting the playing field, and it enables us to proceed without too much further debate about process.
I will end my remarks by mentioning something that comes from personal experience. Liberal Democrat colleagues may recall this, as well as some of my hon. Friends on the Conservative Benches. There was a time, in 2010, when this nation faced another cliff edge. We were within days of the Bank of England discovering that our creditors would not finance the UK any more. It was just after the 2010 election, which no one had won, and it was clear that nobody could form a Government except by coalition. We were very heavily indebted due to what had happened in 2008, and we were told by the Governor of the Bank of England that if a coalition was not formed pretty quickly, he personally felt that the lenders would go on strike and we would have a meltdown.
Of course, there were then discussions between the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party, and between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party. I was a part of the Conservative party team on that occasion and I was informed, when we had finished those negotiations and had brought them to a successful conclusion, that the cleverest and most experienced people in the civil service—incidentally, I do not wish to demean the civil service, and I hardly can because my wife was a senior civil servant—had put their collective minds to the task and formed teams to find out whether it was possible to have a coalition agreement, either between the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats or between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party. They had worked the situation through in awesome detail and had convinced themselves that it was absolutely impossible to form a coalition—that it could not be done.
We sat down, and four days later there was a coalition agreement. And why did that come about? It came about because politicians sat down and were not concerned with the kinds of things that people are concerned with when they are very brilliant administrators, but were concerned with trying to find out how to accommodate the essential requirements of the other side. This is, of course, the process that should have happened two years back in this connection—but we have the opportunity to do it now. I hope and pray that if the House does vote for this amendment, it will not see this approach simply as a set of votes in the abstract, but as the beginning of a process in which, by discovery of where the land lies, we can then come together, find a consensus, get a majority and carry on forward in a sensible way.
We are here for no other reason than an attempt to offset a Tory civil war. This disaster is years in the making, and we are only in this situation because once upon a time David Cameron decided to call an EU referendum so that he could avoid a full-blown Tory civil war. There are many people in the House who will disagree with me.
The Prime Minister continues to appeal to the hardliners in her own party, rather than to face up to the reality of minority government, but this is a lost cause. The Brexiteers who campaigned without any sort of plan are the ones who got us into this mess. And, frankly, the message to the Prime Minister must be that they are unlikely to get us out of it. Now, it is not for me to judge Conservative party management—the voters will have their opportunity to do that in due course—but what strikes me is just how in thrall this Conservative Prime Minister is to the extremists in her own party. With that, I want to praise some Conservative Members, because there are Members who I disagree with and who disagree with me, but who have stuck their necks out, and look at the way they have been treated.
The hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), who is in his place, and I disagree over plenty, including Brexit; he wants us to leave the European Union and I do not. Some Members have tried to make positive proposals, although we do not always agree on them. But even when one of those proposals is accepted by the Government—as was the case with the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa)—we are now in a situation whereby the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford finds himself deselected and the hon. Member for South Leicestershire finds himself sacked, yet all along—I disagree with them over this—they have backed the Prime Minister’s deal. What does that tell us about trying to find some kind of consensus or trying to reach across? This is a Government who are in thrall to the very extremes, and this House cannot put up with that any longer. Just look at the invitation list of those who were treated to lunch at Chequers: the very people voting against the Prime Minister. This tells us everything about a Prime Minister who has lost control of her own party and who has dragged us into this folly.
The Prime Minister is effectively out of power, and we need to move on. Her deal has been rejected twice, overwhelmingly, which means that it becomes more and more pointless to debate it with every passing hour. The Opposition spokesperson was right to point that out. The House of Commons must seize control of this process tonight so that we can hold those indicative votes and start—start—to find a way out of this mess. We know from the UK Government’s own warnings that her deal is not in the best interests of anybody in the UK, and we know that no deal is not in anybody’s best interests either. This Parliament has come together and comprehensively rejected both her deal and no deal. Having wasted almost three years, the Government have run out of options and run out of ideas, and we need to step up.
Where we are today is not a farce: it is a tragedy, and a tragedy that is taking us all down with it. I assure colleagues that, as somebody who fundamentally wants Scotland to be an independent state, it really gives me no pleasure when I speak to colleagues overseas and find that the UK’s international reputation is broken. That hurts us all. When I was working in the European institutions, I saw that overall in the EU, the UK could be a real force for good. Although I did not always agree with everything that it did, I acknowledge many of the positive contributions made by UK citizens to the EU project. It is right that we all acknowledge that.
What was more striking, however, was the way in which the UK and Ireland worked as the closest possible allies and partners in the European Union. For the first time in that troubled history, there was truly a working as a partnership of equals alongside other European states. Now—again, this gives me no pleasure, nor, I suspect, the Irish either—the boot that has historically been on the foot of the UK is now on the other foot. As Robert Cooper wrote in the Financial Times:
“The smallest insiders (Dublin in the case of Brexit) matter more than the biggest outsider (us).”
That tells us everything about solidarity in the workings of the European Union. Yet even on this, the Irish do not crow but have been honest brokers. The best friends any of us can have are our most critical friends—the ones who tell us the truth when we want to see it the least. I have heard, when these matters of truth have come out, Brexiteers getting enraged and annoyed at the truth that people dare speak from Dublin.
Let me remind all Members that Ireland is independent and is not coming back—and it is not difficult to see why. Independent states thrive in the European Union. That is a means of strengthening democracy and sovereignty. The EU is a partnership of equals in a way that the UK simply is not. I want to see Scotland as a full and independent member state of the EU. That would be healthier in our relationship as a modern outward-looking nation in the same way that it has been healthy for the Anglo-Irish relationship.
Here in the UK, people are seeing through this mess. At the weekend, as we have heard, hundreds of thousands of people from the length and breadth of the UK marched for our collective future. Since then, at the last look, the revocation of article 50 petition has been signed by 5.5 million people, including 17% of the electorate in my own constituency—and that is not even the highest figure in Scotland. Millions of people can see what this Government cannot. What this Government clearly cannot see, but these people can, is that when you are careering towards the cliffs you slam on the brakes—that is what they are there for. Let us not forget that Parliament has that power, as was recognised by the courts, because the UK Parliament throughout this has retained, and always will retain in these circumstances, sovereignty in a way that the Scottish Parliament does not. Spot the difference, everybody: the UK Parliament, as a member of the EU, retains sovereignty; the Scottish Parliament, as this process has shown us, does not. This may provide a mechanism to stop doing untold damage to those we all represent.
We are told that the biggest problem with this is the European elections. Let me tell the Government something: the biggest problem is not the European elections—not people taking part in a democratic election to elect parliamentarians—but the jobs that the Government’s plans are going to cost, the public services that will be hit by Brexit and the opportunities that we have all had being denied to future generations. Each and every Member of the European Parliament is elected. That Parliament sits at the heart of the European project. We sit in a Parliament where not even half the parliamentarians who serve here are elected. It is a disgrace—it really is. We will be caused a huge amount of damage just because the Government want to avoid the democracy and scrutiny that comes with a European Parliament election. However, I am not that surprised when we have a Prime Minister who, as we have heard today, not only opposes a referendum and giving people a say in this momentous decision but is even opposed to respecting the will of Parliament.
If the Brexit debate has done anything, it has shown that the UK and the way in which it operates is no longer fit for purpose, as the example of the House of Lords amply illustrates. The EU is not perfect—no union involving 28 sovereign and independent member states ever can be—but, critically, it has the checks and balances to protect the smallest members from the largest. Within the UK, we have a constitutional set-up that is somewhat outdated and has not caught up with the momentous decisions that we are having to make now, but in the EU there is a modern and up-to-date relationship between member states—a true partnership of equals. I say this to a Government who have failed to respect devolution throughout this process: the EU would not be allowed to do that; indeed, it cannot be allowed to do that. To the people of Scotland, our message is this: there is a better way to do this that our friends and neighbours—our nearest neighbours in places like Ireland and Denmark—are pursuing successfully. This is not as good as it gets. In the meantime, and until we reach that point, it is up to each and every one of us to continue to work as constructively as we can.
I do not want to see our friends and neighbours south of the border dragged over a cliff edge by an out of touch and irresponsible group of Tory anti-EU ultras—no country deserves that. The easiest thing for us in Scotland would be to say, “We voted against this. It’s not our problem,” but actually it is our problem. We cannot just say, “The Tories made this mess. It’s for them to clear it up,” because it is clear that they are incapable of clearing up the mess they have made. The damage these plans would do to everyone across these islands would be devastating and felt for decades to come.
I again thank Members who have worked constructively. Today’s motion provides a start, but it is only that—a start on undoing this devastating Brexit, which has been brought to us by a Tory party that is out of control.
I will be voting for amendment (a) tonight, but I want to make some general points. It is of the greatest importance for our country that we should now move to a conclusion on what is merely the beginning of a tortuous road that will eventually lead to our departure from the European Union. Like my right hon. Friend, l voted to trigger article 50, despite serious reservations on the timing. I have voted with the Government in every single Division on the withdrawal Act and on every other piece of legislation to advance the delivery of Brexit. I have voted to leave and to honour the referendum many more times than my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois), my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) and many others. I find it ironic that those who apparently wish most fervently to leave are those who have most consistently voted against the withdrawal agreement and thus inhibited any real progress.
I should make it clear that there are no circumstances in which I will vote for a no deal, and nor will I back what would be a deeply divisive second referendum. Both are a recipe for further chaos and division, which should be unacceptable to those on all sides of this argument, for whom it is surely time for logic and common sense to prevail.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), I still believe in sanity. This is a country with a profound tradition of moderation and common sense. Our democratic institutions are elastic enough to be capable of compromise and of moving from the rhetoric of rejection to the painful necessity of an actual deal. It grieves me very much to see our influence abroad being so degraded, as the hon. Member for North East Fife said, as allies and partners who are close friends watch from afar with dismay as we burn up our reservoirs of good will and our reputation for common sense, most especially in the European Union.
Although it does not feel like it at the moment, this ancient country, in which we are so very privileged to live, is in general marked apart from many others by the tolerance, good nature and generally civilised manner of its democracy and institutions. These qualities are envied the world over; they need careful nurturing, but are currently entirely absent from the field. What on earth has happened to our pragmatism, self-restraint and common sense? It grieves me that our reputation is now under such extreme pressure at home and abroad; indeed, our reputation has been gravely diminished.
I greatly regret having to speak in this way in our Parliament; indeed, I cannot believe that I should need to do so. However, like many others, I find myself truly distraught at the painful, difficult and intractable position in which our country finds itself. What I really want, as, I am sure, do most Members of this House, is that the Government should be able to get on with the work of creating a more confident and hope-filled country that really cares for the weakest among us and for those who find their lives complicated and difficult; that encourages opportunity, enterprise and life chances; and that most especially keeps its vision of global service and influence, as a long-standing force for humanity and the general good.
All of us know that many of our constituents are understandably extremely angry that Brexit has so distracted the Government from the serious issues we face—the NHS, education, crime, the reform of social care, housing, the environment and climate change, and all the other great issues that have inevitably had to be neglected as Brexit has gradually sucked the life blood out of the Government. As you very well know, Mr Speaker, the public believe that we have collectively let them down badly, and this is leading inevitably and very seriously to the fraying of the bonds between Parliament and the nation. The national interest clearly dictates that we have to get this done and that we must get on with the vital work of establishing our future relationships with our most important economic partners and allies.
At the beginning of the business of the House every day, the Speaker’s Chaplain reads the prayer that enjoins Members most especially to
“never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind”.
All of us need to pay a little more attention to those wise, profound and humane words, which have guided and succoured this House through thick and thin down the years and in worse days than these. It is now time that Parliament did its duty by the country, for the national interest and for national unity, and regardless of party or inclination, to bring these matters to a belated conclusion.
I am very conscious that today’s is a crowded agenda. Amendment (f), standing in my name and those of others on both sides of the House, is so straightforward that it practically speaks for itself, so I intend to be brief. I am also mindful of how many others want to speak.
I recognise, of course, that the House has voted on more than one occasion against the UK leaving the EU without a deal; indeed, the Prime Minister has acknowledged that. I am also well aware that there are nevertheless Members who feel that, whatever the evidence to the contrary, leaving with no deal would not cause us major problems, and that there are even some who actively support our leaving without a deal or at least regard it as a desirable outcome. Surely, however, few if any believe it would be desirable that the UK should not make such a decision but drift or fall into it by inadvertence—almost by accident. That would be the very definition of irresponsibility.
We still have a very tight timetable, which presently encompasses, in addition, a potential recess period. As I said, my amendment is extremely simple and straightforward. It seeks to ensure that the UK can leave the EU without a deal only with the explicit consent of the House of Commons.
“Unless this House agrees to it, no deal will not happen.”
However, she has not provided for any process to ensure that those safeguards are in place. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we therefore need her amendment, otherwise there is a danger that we will drift by accident into the kind of chaotic, damaging no deal that both the CBI and the TUC have warned against?
The amendment guards against a no-deal withdrawal that lacks the clear and evident consent of the House. It also allows for the possibility of the House being in recess when such a danger arises and provides for the seeking of any necessary extension of the leaving deadline. I was originally very encouraged by the Prime Minister’s statement today, as my right hon. Friend said, that
“Unless this House agrees to it, no deal will not happen.”
That is what the amendment says, so my hope was that the Government might be prepared simply to accept it. That would seem the logical thing to do—I am giving the vehicle by which they can give effect to the statement that the Prime Minister made today.
I listened with care to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. I think he said that, despite the fact that the Government are not taking any steps, as my right hon. Friend just pointed out, to prevent us from simply running out of time, the amendment was not necessary. He said the problem with my proposal was that there would be only two options left before the House, and the legal default would be that we leave without a deal. That is the point—that is why I tabled the amendment. Although I appreciated the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’s explanation, I know that otherwise, we would leave by legal default without a deal. He agreed that the Government will need to come back to the Dispatch Box to deal with these issues. I suggest that the Ministers on the Front Bench pass on to their right hon. Friend that the very simple thing to do—it need take no time at all—is to accept this amendment and ensure that the House does not run the indefensible risk of stumbling out of the EU without a deal.
I am the second signatory to amendment (a), and I want briefly to outline my thoughts on its necessity and why it may help the House. I have obviously approached this in a slightly different way from my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin). As the House will be perfectly well aware, I continue to believe that Brexit is a historic mistake of very great proportions, and I am afraid that at no time since the referendum took place have I felt, despite efforts on my part to do so, that we are moving towards a position where I could ever take the view that the future outside the EU was going to better than remaining in it.
But I certainly voted to trigger article 50. I did it in deference to the result of the referendum and in the full knowledge that we could not even start negotiations unless we did so. Although I have occasionally been characterised as trying to obstruct Brexit, the truth is that, throughout 2017 and 2018, most of the work I did was to try to improve the process because of the concerns I had that it was being shortcut, thereby making mistaken outcomes all the more likely. I think there were only two occasions when I voted on substantive motions about alternatives, but that was because I was rather worried about the extent to which the Government seemed to be self-imposing red lines, and on neither occasion did it come anywhere close to success. I accepted that, and I accepted also that I should reserve my position on what the Government were negotiating and indicated that on a number of occasions in debates.
Where I disagree with or differ from my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset is that, when I finally came to look at the Government’s deal as negotiated in December, I thought it was a deal that was going to condemn us to a third-rate future. That is the basis on which I have been unwilling to support it. In saying that, I am entirely mindful of the fact that it has been negotiated in good faith by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, and I believe that every Member on the Front Bench has exercised as much diligence as possible to get the best possible outcome. Of course, that raises another question. If the outcome secured in December was so unsatisfactory that it was defeated by 220 votes in this House, and defeated because the examination of it from differing directions by Members on both sides of the House found it wanting, that calls into question whether in fact a fundamental error has been made and the entire process has inherent flaws.
A tendency that has crept in ever since the referendum result has been to close down debate on the basis that it is not proper to pursue it, because the referendum result must act as a diktat that prevents such debate from taking place. I have been long enough in this House to have experienced that sort of argument before, sometimes when Governments get very large majorities in general elections. I even remember on one occasion a Member of this House arguing that, because the then Labour Government had such a big majority, there was no real need any more to have the Second Reading debate of Bills, and the matter should be just put through on the nod and we should move on to the detail.
The one thing I am absolutely persuaded of is that we cannot have a working democracy where we close down debates. Democracy is all about the permanent shifting of tectonic plates. It goes on every second of every day, all the time. Just because somebody is defeated on one matter, it does not mean that they have to give up. They can keep going at it—and heaven knows, we have watched Members do just that in this House. In the same way, to argue that the referendum result imposes a permanency that cannot be challenged is, in my judgment, entirely wrong. When I look at the mess into which we have got ourselves, it appears to be at least in part the consequence of pushing that argument and thereby preventing the democratic process from working.
We get criticism that this House is not functioning properly or that democracy is not working. I think that this House has an exceptional capacity to reach sensible outcomes, but, I have to say to my hon. and right hon. Friends on the Front Bench, it has been consistently prevented from doing its ordinary job by the straitjacket that has been imposed on the extent of what is acceptable to debate.
I do not want to take up too much of the House’s time, but it is for that reason that I have supported the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and worked with him and others on amendment (a). Given that the Government have run into the sand and had their deal rejected, we have to find an alternative. I acknowledge that my right hon. Friend and I may differ in part on that alternative, but where we do not differ is in our willingness to have an open debate. I was greatly helped by the way in which he approached, in his characteristic and tolerant fashion, the examination of alternatives, just as I was by what the Opposition spokesman, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), said about the breadth of the approach that might be adopted. It is clear that, if we are going to make progress, there should be nothing that is forbidden to be discussed. It is equally clear that we have to create an environment in which individual Members of this House do not feel that by supporting one option they thereby close the opportunity to express a view on another.
I will say no more about process at the moment, except to point out that I think it most unlikely that, if this motion is passed, we will come to a conclusion on Wednesday. It is part of a process. It certainly must not be dragged out, because we are so short of time. Equally, however, we have to take it at a sensible pace. Given that we have taken two and a half years to get ourselves into a complete dead end, it is worth taking a few weeks to ensure that we can get ourselves out of it, and that is what we ought to do.
I am the first to accept that the outcome may not be my preferred one, which remains the same: whichever option we take, I happen to believe that the evidence is now very clear that the public would like a final say and an opportunity to express a completely alternative view, which might even be to remain in the EU. I think that is their right and that we should be aiming to achieve that. Whatever the outcome may be, amendment (a) offers, for the first time, an opportunity to do it. I entirely disagree with my hon. and right hon. Friends on the Front Bench that this is some desperate constitutional novelty. It is the House doing its job. I am afraid that the Government have only themselves to blame—through their intransigence over many months of signals being given right across the House—if on this occasion they have lost the leadership to the House itself. They could have had that leadership.
I will finish with a request. The Prime Minister is indeed the leader—the leading Minister—in this country. She is in post. Will she please provide that leadership? If she does that, participates fully in this process and is prepared to open her mind to the variety of options we are going to discuss and debate, and to close her mind to none of them, I believe she will find the solution to this problem and that the House will be able to support her. But that needs a change in mindset, both by her and by some of my right hon. and hon. Friends, to get out of this narrow focus.
I said earlier that I would find it disgraceful if the Cabinet minutes reflect putting party political advantage ahead of the national interest. I do not know whether that is true or not, but it has been very widely reported. We have to put the national interest first and listen to what people are saying to us. It seems to me there is a consistent pattern of wanting to bring this unhappy episode to a conclusion and to do so in a way that reflects majority opinion in this country. We can do that by identifying the options and then putting it back to the public.
I rise to support amendments (a) and (f), which were moved in compelling speeches by my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) and, in this context, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin). We need to remember that we have this opportunity to debate those two amendments for two reasons and two reasons only. First, the Government’s deal was defeated for a second time. We are discussing a motion in neutral terms, and we would not have had the chance to do that had it not been for the efforts of the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield and many other people last summer. Secondly, the European Union decided to give us an additional two weeks.
The fundamental problem, however, has not changed, which is the Government’s inability to get their deal through. Indeed, they are so lacking in confidence about their ability to win a third time that we are not entirely sure whether and when they will bring it back before the House. That means that, if nothing changes in 17 days’ time, either we will leave with no deal or the Government will have to apply for—and be granted by the European Union—an extension. The moment of danger has been delayed briefly, but it has not passed.
“Unless this House agrees to it, no deal will not happen.”
I take that to be a solemn and binding commitment from the Prime Minister, and the inevitable consequence, which she did not want to acknowledge in her statement, is that, unless she gets her deal through, she will have to apply for an extension prior to 12 April.
Why has amendment (a) been tabled? We are discussing it because the Government’s deal has been defeated twice, no deal has been defeated twice, and the Prime Minister has said twice and more, “We know what Parliament is against; what is Parliament for?” The purpose of the amendment is extremely simple: it is to give us the chance to show what we might be in favour of. If the Government were doing their job, the amendment would not be necessary; it is because the Government are not doing their job that it is required.
The Minister for the Cabinet Office is a very charming man, but his arguments against the amendment were, frankly, hopelessly confused. I will summarise the Government’s position. They are opposed to the amendment, but they want there to be a process. If the amendment is defeated they promise their own process, but that appears to consist of a debate later in the week and then something later on, the precise form of which we do not yet know. They seem to want Parliament to agree on something, but they cannot promise to accept any consensus that might emerge out of this process. They castigate us for not having reached an agreement, but oppose tonight the very proposal that is intended to enable us to do precisely that. The situation is frankly absurd. If I may say so in his absence, I do not think that the Minister’s heart was really in his argument tonight, because the Government seem to be saying, in effect, “Well, if it passes, we’ll get on with it.” Let us break out of the circular argument—my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) expressed it brilliantly—and get on with it.
I simply want to encourage every Member who has a realistic proposition to put it forward on Wednesday if the amendment is carried. In the report that the Select Committee on Exiting the European Union published the very day after the first defeat of the Government’s plan, it set out the broad options. This is not about the withdrawal agreement, because the Prime Minister could not have been clearer today when she said:
“Everyone should be absolutely clear that changing the withdrawal agreement is simply not an option. This is about the political declaration.”
There was an exchange across the Chamber about that, and there is a fundamental flaw in the suggestion that the withdrawal agreement alone—not the political declaration—might somehow be passed this week. If that happened and the EU responded by saying, “Ah! You have passed the withdrawal agreement alone this week. Okay, we will give you till 22 May”, what would happen if we then asked the EU in the week leading up to 22 May whether we could have a bit more time? The EU would say, “No, you can’t, because you didn’t take part in the European elections.” I am afraid that the proposition of a separate vote on the withdrawal agreement as a way out of the crisis falls at the first hurdle.
On Wednesday, when our pink slips are distributed, I am looking forward to voting Aye to remaining in a customs union with the EU; Aye to a Norway plus-type arrangement, which could embrace Common Market 2.0; and Aye to a confirmatory referendum. Other Members may be looking forward to voting for things that they would be prepared to consider.
My final point is that the word “indicative” is important. This Wednesday is about indicating a direction of travel that Members might be prepared to support. It is not definitive. We may well need to get to that point in the next stage of the process. So Wednesday is not the end, merely the beginning. It is long overdue, and I hope that the House will enable it to happen by carrying amendment (a) tonight.
It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the Chairman of the Brexit Committee. He made the clear point that we have shown what we are against, but at some point, we as a House will have to show what we are in favour of. Speaking personally, I still think that the best deal on the table is the Prime Minister’s deal. It respects the referendum result, which is critical, and it deals with the complex problem of how on earth a country that has such integrated supply chains, with thousands of lorries coming through Dover, can maintain frictionless trade as far as possible, yet take back sovereignty in the key areas of the single market and the customs union. It is very difficult, but that circle has been squared in the Prime Minister’s proposal and I would like to vote for it again. However, I have to accept that it may not come back, and that so far it has been defeated very heavily indeed.
Although procedure is important—the amendments before us are about how Parliament brings forward the next stage of the debate—I do not want to focus on it. I believe that we must focus on first principles—the underlying principles of how we will deliver on the referendum result.
The right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) said that we should consider a second referendum, a single market plus customs union and so on. However, there is one fundamental problem with all those proposals, which my constituents who voted to leave would raise. It is an issue that we all have to grapple with—free movement. I want to focus on two principles: free movement and free trade. Free movement is not an easy one, because it forces us to discuss immigration, to which we have so far failed to give anything like enough attention.
I feel strongly about the subject. In justifying a second referendum, it has been said that the facts have changed since the 2016 referendum and that therefore there should be another vote. We must consider what has changed, and whether, if it had been known in the referendum campaign of 2016, it would have led to a different result. I suggest that the single fact, if it had been known in advance, that would have had the most impact—whether we like it or not—is that Brexit has directly led to an unprecedented increase in immigration into this country from outside the EU.
Let us look at the facts. The latest figures show that net migration into this country from the EU is down to 57,000. Net immigration into this country from outside the EU is up to 261,000. A year ago, the two top countries in the list were Poland and Romania, and they are now India and China. We are not talking Liechtenstein in population terms here. That is a serious point.
I remember the referendum campaign, in which I took an active part. I did home and away debates with my neighbour my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). To anyone who claims that immigration was not a reason for the vote, I say that, yes, there are many people who for many years believed in leaving the EU for reasons of sovereignty—I strongly respect that view, which is based on a noble principle of democracy—but I know that what swung many undecided people in my constituency was house building in the countryside. Why? Because they believed that if we left the EU, there would be no immigration and we would not need those houses. It sounds crazy, but I have got the emails to prove it, and colleagues will know it.
Immigration was front and centre of the leave campaign. We remember Nigel Farage standing in front of a poster of the new Untermenschen. Mr Speaker, you know the meaning of that word—it has a very serious meaning. The poster showed a whole column of people and the implication was that if we left, what it depicted would not happen. We know that that campaign played with fire. It opened Pandora’s box, and somehow we have to put the lid back on. When I raise the matter, I do not do it happily. I am personally relaxed about immigration to this country because I recognise the huge contribution immigrants have made and will continue to make.
However, we must now be honest and say to the country that in the coming days, options will come before us in which free movement is back on the table. What if it is the case that keeping free movement will enable us to control immigration in future by having the strictest possible rules on immigration from 90% of the world population?
The reason we have the situation with immigration is that it is a discriminatory system. We allow free movement from the EU, but not from non-EU countries. The reason it is discriminatory is that we have a trade deal with the EU called the single market. Of course, it was in the Lancaster House speech that the red line on the single market was first stated, but I want to return to a Lancaster House speech in which the Prime Minister was addressing an audience of business leaders. She said:
“Just think for a moment what a prospect that is. A single market without barriers—visible or invisible—giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of over 300 million of the world's wealthiest and most prosperous people. Bigger than Japan. Bigger than the United States. On your doorstep. And with the Channel Tunnel to give you direct access to it. It’s not a dream. It’s not a vision. It’s not some bureaucrat’s plan. It’s for real. And it’s only five years away.”
That was the Lancaster House speech of Mrs Thatcher in 1988. There are only three MPs left in the House who voted against the Single European Act. One is the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell), one is the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner), and the third one is the Leader of the Opposition. The single market is not some socialist conspiracy; it is capitalism and it is free trade, and I believe fundamentally in free trade.
In the days to come, we will have to look at other issues. We will have to be prepared to flex our red lines, to be blunt, to deliver on the referendum result in a way that preserves free trade and gives us the best possible deal for our constituents.
A month ago, the Father of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), and I proposed using preference votes as we do for Select Committee Chairs. We were probably a bit premature with that idea, and I am extremely pleased to be able to support the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) tonight. It is clear that the Prime Minister’s brinkmanship has brought us to this self-inflicted crisis. It is now essential that Parliament takes control and uses a new process. I am also pleased that the right hon. Member for West Dorset has agreed that we should be moving to paper ballots, voting on all the options in parallel. That will reduce considerably the scope for the gamesmanship that is bedevilling this process.
It is also obvious that building consensus will be painful, because it inevitably involves compromise. That, however, is essential on a major national project such as Brexit. It is much better for us to acknowledge those difficulties and take a calmer approach to reconcile Parliament and the public than to be driven into a high-conflict situation with the rising tone of anger that we see at the moment.
The one thing that the right hon. Member for West Dorset said that surprised me a bit was that the business motion on how we are going to do this will, in his schema, be on the same day as the first round of indicative votes. I had not planned to speak today, but I thought that I had better set out what factors I would like to be taken into account in the drawing up of the process and the design of the system.
The first issue is the status of the votes: are they indicative or definitive? Indicative is good, because it allows people to feel flexible and more open-minded. However, we will move to definitive at some stage, to bind the Government, because we cannot continue with the situation where the Government defy the will of the House.
The second point we need to be clear about is that this vote may be on paper, but it is not a secret ballot. We want transparency. We want to be accountable to the public and to our constituents. And, of course, the Whips need to be able to do their job as well. That, too, requires some transparency.
The third issue is how to get on the ballot. I was slightly concerned in the middle of the day when I was hearing that the Government were planning to draft up for every Member what their view of other Members’ options would be. That seems to me to be completely inappropriate. Groups of hon. Members must be allowed to say for themselves what their options should be. I appeal to Mr Speaker to allow more, rather than less, on to any ballot paper, if we get to that.
The fourth point we need to think about is how to vote: preferences or standard crosses. I think the right hon. Member for West Dorset is considering a traditional cross by the side of the option or options we like, rather than preferences. I am happy for us to embark on that, but, as he acknowledged, we may need to move to preferences as time goes on.
There are two other points that we need to bear in mind. First, how many votes are we going to have? How many preferences can we expect to be allowed to use—two or three? We need to consider explicitly whether people could use the same number of preferences, or whether that could be something that people would want to flex. My feeling is that everybody probably ought to have the same number of votes. Connected to that is how many voting rounds we go through. We know we have to do this in a fairly speedy way, because of the 11 April deadline. We may need more than one, but we cannot have a completely open-ended process going on ad infinitum. We need to bring it to closure at some point.
If people think that this is highly innovative, they should not be quite so alarmed. We vote on paper regularly. We have done indicative voting before. We have given preferences before. What we are proposing to do on this occasion is bring them all together. [Interruption.] The most important thing, as I can hear the Minister saying, is that we have some speed, not just for the political process but to end the uncertainty facing businesses up and down the country. To be three weeks out and still to have no deal, a soft Brexit or a public vote to remain on the table is shameful.
Our international reputation has taken the worst hammering in living memory. The Confederation of British Industry said that it has lost confidence in the political process. The TUC has specifically asked us to look for a new parliamentary mechanism. MPs are always telling other people to change and adapt. Now, perhaps it is time for us to do the same. Confidence in our parliamentary process will be restored only when we show that we can act constructively and creatively.
The attitudes out there in the country are hardening. Constituents of mine who told me three years ago that they voted leave and that they were happy to leave on whatever terms Parliament deemed necessary, as long as we respected the result, are now telling me daily that they want to cut all ties and leave with no deal at all. Constituents who voted to remain and who said that we had had the debate, that the other side had won fair and square and that we just had to get on with it are now telling me that they want to halt the process altogether and remain in the EU. Having spent a lot of time with colleagues trying to find a way through this in here and behind the scenes over the past few weeks, I feel that exactly the same thing is happening in Parliament. If we do not start to move, they will not start to move and there is absolutely no prospect of repairing this country.
That is why I very much welcome what the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) has done with the amendment, particularly the way in which he presented it. He is not seeking to control the outcome of this process. He is not seeking to do what many of his colleagues on each extreme of this debate have done for several years, which is to knock out any preferred option that is not theirs and undermine any of us who are trying to find a solution by questioning our good faith, intentions and motives.
As somebody who represents a constituency where two thirds of people voted to leave—they did so largely in full knowledge of what they were doing and still feel strongly about it—but where a third of people also voted to remain and have every bit as much of a stake in the future of this country as the rest, I have to say that that bad faith is operating on both sides of this debate. Those threats and the abuse are coming from both sides. I and many hon. Members face them daily, and to seek to pretend, as some Members just did in this debate, that it comes only from one side is quite simply not true. It is insulting and it will not stick.
I am very dismayed today about the Government’s position. I do not think that Ministers understand how little trust there is left. As we stand here in this Chamber, right now—according to lobby journalists who are briefing things out over social media—the Government are sitting in closed rooms trying to persuade Members on their own side to vote down this amendment in favour of guarantees. We have been here before. Time and again, they come to the Dispatch Box and they tell us they are serious. They tell us they are listening and that the House must make a decision, and then, when we get up and speak with one voice about what we want, they say, “Okay, we will go away and think about it.” They make some promises and pick off Members on their own side, and then, lo and behold, where are those promises when they most count? They are nowhere to be seen.
Given the mess that has been created in this country, what is wrong, honestly, with giving Parliament the right to consider the options that we want to put forward? We speak for very different communities in this country. When the Government seek to deny us a voice, they are not denying me a voice—who cares whether I have a voice?—they are denying the 75,000 people I represent in Wigan a voice and all other hon. Members besides.
I say to both Front-Bench teams that if we are to consider the options in good faith, given the very different needs and priorities of constituencies, a free vote has to be offered on those options. I understand the discomfort. I have served in the shadow Cabinet. It is not an easy thing to do, but when we have this strength of feeling and these very divergent views and experiences across the country, all those have to be heard if we are going to find a way through this.
I say to Ministers, too, that almost entirely absent now is not just the trust, but the good will. Last week, I could not believe what I was seeing when the Prime Minister took to the steps of Downing Street and tried to pit the people against Parliament. The public follow our lead. When we stand in here using language such as “betrayal” and “traitors”, is it any surprise that we step outside and find that same language levelled back at us? If she wants to restore good will, the first thing that she must do is apologise to Members of this House, who are all, in our very different ways and positions, trying to find a way through this in good faith. She must rule out no deal.
We will not believe that the Prime Minister is serious about the interests of the country if she is not—[Interruption.] The Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) is asking me why. Last week, I had a constituent on the phone whose son was in line for a clinical trial in the European Union that could save his life. They do not know now whether he will get it. This is a child who has no certainty about what is going to happen next. I have a constituent who is on dialysis, who rang me to say that she has been told to expect some disruption in the event of no deal. When I went to a Minister to ask what the advice was, he said, “We are doing our best, but we cannot make any guarantees.” My sister is diabetic and has not slept for months because she does not know whether she will be able to access insulin. People can accuse me of scaremongering all they like, but the Government’s technical notice cannot tell us what will happen in the event of a no-deal Brexit. What sort of Government cannot guarantee access to medicines in just a week’s time?
I will finish with this point, because I know that many Members are desperate to speak. In the next stages, if we get to them—if this shabby Government somehow manage to cobble together a majority for the withdrawal agreement and get us into the next stages—I would just say to hon. Members: look at what we have just witnessed in this House. Do not trust that they are acting with the interests of the whole country in mind. This House has no guaranteed role in those next stages of negotiations. If we do not insist on that right now, we will not get it.
For four months, I have been talking to the Prime Minister and to Government Members about giving Parliament the right to set out the terms of the negotiating mandate in the next stages and to guarantee a vote about the future relationship at the end of that process. They have resisted that. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) and I will be bringing forward an amendment on that when the meaningful vote materialises, because we have to have a reset. If we are going to get to the next stages of those discussions, that discussion has to involve every single part of this House. We cannot allow the Prime Minister, whoever he or she may be by that point, to go off and negotiate away our rights, freedoms and protections that have been hard fought for for 100 years without any say in it.
This has become a tug of war between two groups of people who I know, from speaking to them every day in my constituency, are quite reasonable people who want this resolved. We are breaking our democracy. I commend the right hon. Member for West Dorset for tabling amendment (a) because he is seeking a way to bring the House together, to compromise and to find a way through this impasse. We as a House have to rise to the occasion, because, my God, I have just seen a perfect example from the Government Benches of why they are not capable of doing it.
Like others, I have been bombarded in recent weeks with emails and other communications telling me to vote in diametrically opposed directions. Many insist that if I vote differently from the way they wish, I will be acting against the will of the people. I have not had the same level of aggression from all quarters, but some of it has been pretty extreme. I have been compared to a range of bodily parts of both the female and the male variety. Some have called me a traitor. A few have gone further. One email I read yesterday expressed the hope that this place would be burned to the ground with me and other hon. Members in it. I know that several hon. Members have received worse and in far greater quantities. There is no excuse for such threats and abuse. Neither I nor other hon. Members will be intimidated, but we have to face up to what is happening.
This kind of toxic atmosphere in politics is not unique to the UK—it is happening in other countries—but Brexit gives it a focus, and it can lead to violence against people regarded as believing the wrong things or simply because of who they are. My plea is that all of us who have the privilege to speak from public platforms, which can create headlines, think carefully about how we conduct ourselves and the way we frame political debates and take care not to contribute to that atmosphere of toxicity and intolerance, which undermines democracy and can lead to violence.
There is a deeper problem here. All too often people feel the political debate in this place happens at a level that does not speak to them and bypasses their concerns. They look aghast at how we have got stuck in a logjam over Brexit. Yes, the Prime Minister has made that worse, not better—her attempt last Wednesday to shift the blame on to everyone other than herself was unworthy of her office—but we need to look at ourselves too and understand that too often we appear to embody the stereotype of an institution that talks only to itself, not to the outside world. We need to learn from that, not only in relation to Brexit, but more generally.
What does that mean for the decisions we face tonight? The bottom line is that no deal cannot be allowed to happen by accident any more than by design. As chair of the all-party motor group, I know that all the warnings—from BMW, JLR, Nissan, Toyota, Vauxhall, and Aston Martin—could not have been clearer. Investment decisions are on hold now and our reputation in the international community is being trashed before our eyes. A no-deal Brexit would jeopardise the future of the plants of several of those car manufacturers and many thousands of jobs, and similar warnings are coming from other sectors, as others have said.
The priority has to be avoiding the nightmare of no deal, and that means agreeing a procedure that allows us not so much to vote for or against our perfect or worst options, but to do as the right hon. Member for West Dorset has urged and express preferences for ways forward we can live with. The idea of doing that through paper ballots is exactly right because it would allow people to express preferences and vote for several different options. This cannot be a zero-sum game. The objective has to be to find a centre of gravity through which we can move forward.
The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) are right that, as we move through that process, which may take some time, some kind of preference balloting is likely to be necessary. I suspect that, if we find that centre of gravity, it will involve jettisoning some of the Prime Minister’s red lines, so there is a question for her there, and a decision for her to make. If the centre of gravity in this House becomes a place that is beyond and different from her red lines, she must answer that question. Will she abide by the will of the House, and will she take that forward in negotiations with the European Union? Unless she is prepared to do so, the sustainable majority to which the right hon. Member for West Dorset referred will not be allowed to have its voice, and if it is not allowed to have its voice, democracy will be the poorer, the House will be the poorer, and the debate about Brexit will be set back.
In the few moments that I have left, I want to say a few words about the idea of a second referendum. It seems to me that when a million people take to the streets, that is not something we should ignore. In my view, arguing for a final say on any deal eventually arrived at, or against the possibility that the House is unable to achieve a way forward, has a logic to it, but let us not kid ourselves that the passions aroused in favour of a second referendum—or a people’s vote—are not also aroused in other directions. The risk that a referendum will be conducted in a divisive atmosphere is a real risk, and we must recognise and address it. To me, that does not mean moving away from, or rejecting, the idea of a second referendum, but it does constitute a further indication and a further reminder to us that we must at least approach the coming weeks and months in a way that makes clear the kind of politics that we want to develop in this country. It must be clear that this process is about resolving differences, not about exacerbating them,
Our approach must demonstrate our commitment to equal respect for all our citizens, irrespective of their background, and our determination to ensure that whatever else happens, democracy wins through.
Earlier today, during Defence questions, Ministers could not recognise the element of diminution in defence and security, but I think the right hon. Gentleman would agree that it exists. The Secretary of State for Defence rightly has a lot to say about Russia and China, but seems to have very little to say about our future defence and security engagement with our closest ally, with which we will have a land border: the European Union.
Last week, the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), who has just left the Chamber, gave a clear analysis of the process so far. I hope he will forgive me for saying that only one slight element was missing from it: history. Another Member on the other side of the House—I believe it was the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who has also left the Chamber—seemed to exclude history in a more robust fashion, expressing utter disgust at the way in which the Government had brought them to this position.
I think both Members would probably agree, as would many other Members, that that is nothing new in this place. The civil war at the heart of the Conservative party is certainly nothing new, especially when it comes to the last 40 years of membership of the European Economic Community, the European Community or the European Union. In many ways, the discourse at the heart of the Conservative and Unionist party is fundamentally exposed by what it has done in walking through the doors with the Democratic Unionist party. Now of course the DUP are not here to defend themselves, but I think we would all agree that they have played a blinder when it comes to Brexit, because the history of the Conservative party with the ancestors of the DUP more or less has made the Prime Minister a modern-day Pitt the Younger, and we all know what happened in 1800 with Pitt the Younger and the utter disgrace that unfolded in Unionist history. So if the Conservative and Unionist party wishes to pin its hopes on doing deals with the DUP it should learn a lesson from its own political history. It is one it has clearly forgotten; it has no collective or institutional memory of its own history, and it is extraordinary to see it unfold before it.
The two main parties, both the Government and the official Opposition, had a commitment in their manifestos in 2017 to deliver Brexit, and the Prime Minister keeps coming back to that, but what was not in the Prime Minister’s party’s manifesto was giving a £1 billion bung to the DUP. That was hidden; there was nothing about that. No one wanted to talk about it, but that is where they are.
There is another issue that has gone about the nation. As you know, Mr Speaker, when I first stood in this House I made it clear that I was neither a Unionist nor a Home Ruler and I think that is self-explanatory, but I do have regard for both the Unionist Members and the Home Rulers in this Parliament and their position. So when it comes to a people’s vote, for example, I am utterly delighted to support it. My party has been supportive of it, and the First Minister was at the march as well as our leader here in the parliamentary group in Westminster. I hope that when push comes to shove in respect of the mandate that already exists in Scotland in its own Parliament where there is a majority that a section 30 order—of the Scotland Act 1998—is requested, those on all sides recognise any hypocrisy if they would not support a second referendum on Scotland’s constitutional position, whether they agree with that change or not.
Mention has also been made in this debate of the constitution. What constitution of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? There is no constitution of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I have heard about precedent; that precedent comes from the Parliament of England pre-1707. Before 1707 I would be a shire commissioner in the Parliament of Scotland sitting in the ancient Parliament that sits there, probably the oldest parliamentary building in these islands, and a member of the three estates. But I am not; I am here in this place. So although I support the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), who is not in his place, I am hopeful that if there is a second referendum all those calling for it will be supportive of the mandate in the Scottish Parliament, and not just from my own party as there is a wider majority in the Scottish Parliament, calling if we are dragged against our will out of the EU for a referendum on our being again an independent sovereign nation state within the family of European nations.
The hon. Gentleman was also in the House when we had the claim of right debate, and his own Members were cheering on when I was saying that Scotland was a nation. I did not hear him disregard that ability to be an independent sovereign nation. So I find his question bizarre, because I am not standing up to speak for Scotland; I am standing up to speak for my constituents who not only voted for their country to be an independent sovereign nation but also voted for the UK to remain within the EU. We were told by the first Brexit Secretary in his first speech that the industrial working class of this political state voted to leave the European Union. I took great delight in reminding him then, as I remind the House today, that the industrial working class of West Dunbartonshire voted overwhelmingly to remain. They also voted overwhelmingly for their country to be an independent sovereign state.
I hope that Members understand that in a modern democracy, we can change our mind. How can so many people be affronted by the proposition that mature adults who are able to go to a ballot box and vote can change their mind? I know that my country will do so, and that it will be an independent one at that.
Amendments (g) and (e) have been tabled in support of a people’s vote. Amendment (g) was tabled by the Liberal Democrats with the support of the Independent Group; amendment (e) was tabled by the Independent Group with the support of the Liberal Democrats. It is important to continue to maintain the profile of a people’s vote, if only because absolutely nothing is predictable when it comes to what takes place in this House and whether votes will take place at the agreed time. It is also important because the 1 million people who marched on Saturday will be confused that no amendment relating to a people’s vote has been selected this evening. Others have mentioned the passion, enthusiasm and energy represented on the march, which was attended by people from all over the country and all walks of life. They came from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England and they were really representative of the United Kingdom as a whole. It was a fantastic occasion. I guess we have to apologise for the fact that a few stickers were left on the Cabinet Office front door, but they had been cleared by the time I attended the no-deal briefing there earlier today.
I am happy to support amendment (a), which has been tabled by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) to facilitate indicative votes. I hope that it will enable the House to find a way forward because the Prime Minister and the Government are clearly incapable of doing so. Once the Prime Minister had set out her red lines, it became impossible for her to come up with an outcome that the House could support. That was made even harder when she blamed the House for her failure to find a way forward. It is regrettable that, when the deputy Prime Minister opened the debate today, he did not simply accept amendment (a). From what he said, it seems to represent what the Government want to do. He will know as well as anyone else that it is perfectly in order for the Government to commandeer an amendment put forward by the Opposition if they find it attractive, and that Governments normally do this. Despite opposition from his own Benches, he had the option today to grab that amendment and put his own name to it. Given that it would deliver what he says he wants to do, that would have been in order. I am also happy to support amendment (f), tabled by the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett). It would give the House some certainty about what would happen in a no-deal scenario.
On the indicative votes, we need to ensure that the Prime Minister is not able to claim at the end of the process that Parliament has come no closer to securing a way forward than she has. The process must enable a strong option to emerge. The Liberal Democrats, like the SNP, would like not only an option to revoke article 50, but something that would ensure a people’s vote as a lock—something that would apply in relation to any proposals that come forward.
To conclude—hopefully well within your time constraints, Mr Speaker—the Prime Minister has lost not only legitimacy and credibility, but support both within and outside her party. She clearly cannot lead this process, so Parliament must now grasp the reins and lever the UK out of the quagmire into which we are gradually sliding. We are up to our necks and we will be in over our heads in a matter of days. We are very much in the last-chance saloon tonight, and shortly after the votes at 10 pm we will know whether we have come out of it alive.
I rise to support amendments (d), (f) and, in particular, (a). Finally, Parliament is taking control of the process; the Government should have set that in train two years ago. We are finally about to decide what Brexit actually is. The fundamental dilemma of the 2016 referendum was that it allowed everybody to project all their fears, anger, hopes and fantasies on to a simply binary question, and the result has been interpreted by many different people to mean many different things. As a consequence —we will have to get used to this—whatever option the House supports will be met with cries of “Betrayal” from those who do not get the version of Brexit that was in their mind when they voted, or even the version that they have developed over the past two and a half years.
The narrative of betrayal, which the Prime Minister stoked up last week, is toxic and needs to be confronted with honesty and courage. Whatever version of Brexit comes out the other side of the parliamentary mangle, MPs need to acknowledge that people will be disappointed, upset and even angered. Whatever we do risks losing votes, and possibly even seats, for all parties. That is why we need to be brave and vote in the country’s best interests.
Those who bandy around the word “betrayal” must be honest that the betrayal of the British people has already happened. The betrayal was to ask people to make a vague and over-simplistic decision, with insufficient information that was not honest about the real choices facing our country or the complexity of our economic integration with the European Union. The betrayal was rooted in the lies and fantasy promises that were told without any intention of being kept—like those on the side of the bus. The betrayal was the exploitation for personal and political ends of the justifiable and understandable grievances of left-behind areas and working-class communities such as mine. The betrayal was the legitimatisation of prejudice, hatred and division that we saw during that debate and have seen since. The betrayal was not to be honest that major constitutional changes should not be put forward to the public unless the work had been done to prepare for them. All that comes even before we have a proper inquiry into the potential law breaking.
Why is the Prime Minister continuing to drive people to a destination that is not where they were told they were going? We do not even know whether many of them still want to go. She continues to talk about the will of the people, but she ignores not just the 48% but those who did not vote because they did not feel strongly enough to want to change the situation. Some 29 million people either voted to remain or did not feel they wanted to change things. None of them asked to get where we are.
No wonder the public call it betrayal when they are not getting the things they were promised, or when responsible politicians step up to try to stop this carnage. This is the ultimate Brexit paradox. The further we are from Europe and the more abrupt our break, the worse it is for our economy, particularly for areas like mine that voted most strongly to leave. Yet the closer we remain to the EU, with Norway-plus or a soft Brexit option, the more we concede British sovereignty and dilute the so-called will of the people, which is now hardening among many leavers for a no deal.
No one will be getting what they were promised and I believe it is a deceit to vote for Brexit in name only in the hope that people will not notice or to try to get them off our backs. All we would be doing is continuing to reinforce the lie to the public and failing to be honest with them about the reality of our situation. Worse, I hear the Prime Minister patronising them and telling them there is nothing that can be done to prevent it because this is what they wanted two and a half years ago. Denying them the right to change their mind or to have their say on the outcome now that the evidence is clearer is a real betrayal, both of them and of future generations.
Record numbers have marched and signed petitions in the past few days. They, too, are the people, and they, too, deserve to have their voice heard. A new referendum or a vote to ratify a deal that comes through our range of options must be put to the people in the cold light of day. We must be brave enough to ignore the calls of betrayal and do the right thing, and not continue the deceit that we will be able to please everyone with our Brexit outcome. We must do what is in the best interest of our constituents’ jobs and livelihoods and in the national interest of our country. Parliament needs to come clean that we have made a catastrophic mess. We must give the public the chance to help us clean it up.
Is the right hon. Lady as angry as I am that the advocates of hard Brexit—those who led the campaigns that were fined many tens of thousands of pounds for lying and cheating during the referendum—are very rarely here to defend their views but are quite happy to defend their views from the safety of a newspaper column?
My constituents who are watching at home, reading the reports or, in any event, aware of the current situation are aghast, and I know I am not alone. Other right hon. and hon. Members have received emails and letters from constituents who are worried, and we have already heard about the availability, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, of medicines or, in one instance, of special food for a child with a particular allergy. Yet there are Conservative Members who actually look forward to and welcome a no-deal Brexit. It has to be said yet again that, in the words of the Business Secretary, that would be the most “ruinous” of outcomes for our country.
On that lack of certainty for businesses, let us consider a pharmaceutical company in Broxtowe. It is just in my constituency, although the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) might want to claim it as well—it is all about a line that goes through a car park. However, I know that she shares my concern for this real-life business that employs real people. At the moment, such is the crisis that it does not know what to print on its boxes, because it does not know what the outcome is going to be. That may sound minor, but it shows the problem, because too many Conservative Members do not understand the real crisis facing businesses. [Interruption.] One Conservative Member seems to find this amusing. I think this is the problem: some hon. Members actually think that a company of that scale, with 850 workers—one can imagine the huge amount of pharmaceutical products that they produce every day—can go down to Prontaprint on a Friday and order all these boxes with all the right markings on, and they will be ready on a Monday. I gently say to Conservative Members—
In our efforts, we made direct pleas to the Prime Minister in meetings with her and offered her a solution, knowing, for example, that the Scottish National party would have voted for the single market and the customs union, as would Plaid Cymru and many Labour Back Benchers. We would have won a consensus, but she point-blank refused to engage in that. Instead, this Prime Minister has led us—it is the only thing on which she has led—to this terrible situation. She was dogmatic in laying down her red lines, and at every twist and turn when she had the opportunity to change those red lines or just rub them out a little she refused.
I say to Conservative Members that what almost all of them have also spectacularly forgotten is that when we had the general election in June 2017, more than 30 Conservative Members of Parliament in England and Wales lost their seats. The Conservative party lost its majority; there is no mandate for hard Brexit. That was the perfect opportunity for the Prime Minister to abandon the red lines and seek to form the consensus that the country was crying out for, but, yet again, she absolutely refused to do it. It ended up with people, not just those like me, leaving the Conservative party. I represent many sensible, moderate, pragmatic, one nation Tories who are leaving the Conservative party as they see it moving to the right, no longer the party of business and enterprise, and no longer having the one nation Conservatism that so many of us held so near to us. Having failed to persuade the Prime Minister to reach out and build a consensus, we ended up in a position where the only way out that we could see for our great nation was to have a people’s vote.
Others have spoken about what happened on Saturday. It was a real honour and privilege to be here in London and go on that march with people from all over the UK. These were not, as one Conservative Member described them, just fans of the Glyndebourne opera; they were real people from not only my constituency—and of all backgrounds and all ages—but from, for example, the constituency of the hon. Member for Redcar. I know she was heartbroken that she had another engagement and so she could not be here. We know that workers came down from the north-east. The really striking thing was not only people’s background, but to see children with their parents and grandparents, all of them marching in a spirit of hope and happiness, even though they were upset about the referendum result.
I am going to vote for amendment (f), tabled by the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), and amendment (a), tabled by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin). I gently say to Members how important it is that, here and now, we take control of this process and do the right thing. The other thing we need to do is heal the huge division that this ghastly Brexit has created. That is another huge priority of ours, as well as taking it back to the people, which is the only way forward.
It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry). I agree with everything she said, especially about Saturday’s march. It was a huge privilege for us all to be here in London to march alongside a million people. In our case, there were huge numbers of Labour members and Labour MPs, marching for what we believe is right for our country and our constituents. We have had a great debate this evening, but that has been most missing from today’s speeches, and the debate has been marked by its absence. Perhaps it is a function of the extraordinary times in which we live that there has been so little mention of the fact that a million people, some of whom travelled for many hours to get to London, came from every corner of Great Britain to take part in the march. It ought to have been given much greater attention. I put on record my personal thanks, and the thanks of many of us in the Labour party, to the People’s Vote team who organised the march and who have performed a great service to our country by keeping alive the democratic dream of a people’s vote. I hope they will continue to do so.
I first spoke in favour of a people’s vote two and a half years ago, when I contested the Labour party leadership with the leader of the Labour party, my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). Unfortunately, he defeated me, but he did not defeat the democratic dream of a second referendum. I am absolutely convinced by the volume of people who turned out on Saturday that all of us who have kept alive that flame of democracy over the past two and a half years have been entirely right. What people were marching for on Saturday—people who voted leave, people who voted remain and people who may not have voted at all—was nothing less than that. It was a chance to exercise their democratic right, having started Brexit, to end Brexit; and having given the Government a mandate to pursue Brexit, to then have a say at the end of the process when we know what the Brexit reality looks like.
I fear that, marching on the streets on Saturday, what I encountered was a huge amount of frustration and a huge amount of anger gently expressed but powerfully felt. There was a massive degree of despair at the dysfunction of our Parliament and our politics and, frankly, at the breakdown that many people see and feel in our very democracy. I fear that they are to be denied a chance to have their say on the outturn of Brexit, as they had their say on the starting of Brexit. If those people—some of those 1 million people on the march or the 5.5 million people who have signed the petition to revoke Brexit—were listening to today’s statement from the Prime Minister, I fear that they will have been doubly disappointed and despairing, because what they would have heard is more doublespeak. I fear that what they are likely to see tonight is more double dealing, with promises being made to Conservative Back Benchers to try to get them to back off supporting amendment (a) in return for a nebulous promise from those on the Government Treasury Bench that they will offer something similar. The truth is that we have been here before. We have seen countless false promises made from the Dispatch Box, but when it comes to the crunch, we see not just hon. Members but the country let down.
I want to say a few things before I close about the process that we are debating in respect of amendment (a)—the idea of indicative votes. The truth is that we have got to this point far too late in the process. It strikes me as extraordinary that the Government are effectively, in a rushed and desperate fashion, seemingly set to concede at the very last minute a demand that has been made by many on these Benches and across the House for several years, let alone months. I suspect, too, that this will be done in a fairly cack-handed and haphazard fashion. We do not know when it will be debated or what the process will be. The Government say that they cannot lose control of the process, but they are going to afford Members the opportunity to determine what that process is and what the options are. It seems to be an utterly shambolic state of affairs and entirely reflects the way in which the Government have handled—or rather mishandled—this for more than two years.
Worst of all, the most likely scenario and outturn will be a lowest common denominator, second-rate proposal that the Government will not even be bound to follow. Earlier on, we had the extraordinary statement that we were going to have these indicative votes, but then we heard that the Prime Minister was not necessarily going to pay any attention to them at the end of it. Again, that strikes me as entirely reflective of the shambolic way in which the Government have managed this process. If we get to the point where we have a second-rate compromise Brexit deal on the table, it will make with absolute eloquence the point of the 1 million people who marched on Saturday—that if there is a poor Brexit arrived at in this House, the only way in which the Government can honour democracy and honour the will of the people is to give them a chance to cast their vote as to its merit. I hope and anticipate that the people, in their wisdom, will reject such a deal, but they do at the very least need to be given a chance to reject it.
I have one final point on the process. One of the ways in which the Government will, I fear, try to bamboozle Members of Parliament in the coming days is to present a smörgåsbord of options: Canada plus; no deal; Norway; and a customs union. All these things will potentially come alongside options such as revoke and a people’s vote. That is no way to honour the will of this House or to properly conduct the democratic business of this House. We need to be absolutely clear that a people’s vote—a vote on the Brexit deal—is entirely separate from any of the options that we might vote on in this series of indicative votes. It would be completely tricksy and deceitful of the Government to try to confuse those two things in the public’s mind or in Parliament’s mind. The democratic, principled thing to do is to afford the people a say on whatever sort of Brexit deal is agreed on by this House, and certainly not to present an alternative between a referendum and one of those Brexit deals. That would be the wrong way to proceed, Mr Speaker, and I am sure that you will make sure that that does not happen.
We are in a bizarre situation whereby the Government have brought their proposals twice to this Parliament, and twice they have been roundly rejected. Now, not only do the Government say that they will not bring their proposals back for a third time—they are taking their ball home with them, it seems—but they say that they refuse to change their mind and vary those proposals so that there might be a route to a majority. In those circumstances, there is no option left but for people other than those in the Government to take control of the situation.
Make no mistake, if amendment (a) is passed, it will most definitely be an indictment and a censure of this Government and the way in which they have conducted themselves over the last two and a half years. What we need to know from the Government is whether they are prepared to try to win back our trust—whether they will enter into this process with good faith in the attempt to see whether there is a majority in this House that they can be part of, or whether they just want us to exhaust ourselves running around in circles, so that they can come along two weeks later and bring plan A back again to be defeated.
As others have remarked, we should have been engaged in this process two and a half years ago, rather than leaving it to this last moment, but the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) put his finger on the button when he said that the problem is that, from the word go, the result of the 2016 referendum was hijacked by the winning side and used to close down any debate about how the mandate should be interpreted or what it actually meant. Therefore, for the past two years, there has been a dialogue that has involved only the Government, the ERG and the Democratic Unionist party. Thankfully, we are not yet in a situation whereby that political axis commands a majority either in this House or in the country. I appeal to the Government for the umpteenth time to reach out beyond their own narrow political confines and see whether it is possible to build a political consensus in this country that can put our fractured politics back together.
Time and again, we have heard the mantra of 17.4 million, and we really need to confront this point. In a democratic society, people do not just get one vote; they get a series of votes. In a democratic society, each vote qualifies and updates the ones that came before. What we need to know is what the views of the people are now, not what they were three years ago. I firmly believe that, although 17.4 million people voted for us to leave the European Union, they did not vote to endorse the prospectus that the Government have brought to this House, and they did not vote for the Government’s harsh interpretation of that decision. For example, I do not think that 17.4 million people voted to deny themselves and their children the ability to move freely around the European Union. I just do not believe it; I think that was part of the hijack.
Most importantly, however, it is clear to anyone who wants to see that many of those people have changed their minds. In a democratic society, people have the right to do that, so we need to test the decision again, and that means we will have to put this matter back to the people. We do not need a short break in this process—a short extension—to tweak what is already there; we need a fundamental rethink. We need to go back to the drawing board. We need to scrap the phoney red lines that were imposed by this Government and see if it is possible to come up with a new proposal. To do that, and to give time for that to be put before the people, we will need a serious extension to this process.
Thankfully, the European Union—President Tusk and others—has indicated that it would be happy to look at a much longer extension and at going back to negotiations if the Government change their red lines: their restrictive insistence on what the agreement had to do. So that option is there, but if there are complications in getting that level of extension, the answer is quite simple, and the power lies with us. All we need to do is to revoke article 50—not as a means of getting closure on the whole process but to take back control of it and give ourselves whatever time we need to formulate proposals and to democratically put them before the people.
Of course, we will go beyond 22 May and will therefore get into having the opportunity to elect representatives to represent us in the European Union, of which we are still part. What is wrong with that? How can it be that a bunch of people elected in a democratic election are so scared of having one in two months’ time? Let us put this back to the people in an election. That will give us the opportunity to begin to redefine the narrative in this country—to try to explain to people that we gain most by common endeavour. We need to put hope in front of hate and to put hope back where there is currently despair. We can take a positive message to the people in those elections. My party stands ready to do that, and I do not see why others are not ready to contest them, too.
When we get the opportunity to run these elections in Scotland, you can bet, for sure, that we will also be taking the opportunity to explain to the people of Scotland that this process could have been avoided for them and they did not need to go through this if they had had the confidence to take the power for themselves, take back control and become a normal independent country like the others in this world.
We are now fractionally under 98 hours away from leaving the European Union without a deal. On Friday night, we are out without a deal unless the Government do something. When the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), who is not in her place just now, listed some of the catastrophic impacts of a no-deal Brexit, the Minister, true to form, was sitting there mouthing across to her, “Thanks to you. Thanks to you. Thanks to you.” Even at this late stage, it is the fault of the hon. Lady, the fault of the Opposition, the fault of the Supreme Court: the fault of everybody apart from the Government, who claim that they have a mandate from the people from the referendum in 2016 and who have failed dismally to bring forward a credible, workable, sensible, rational or even sane way to implement that mandate.
Today, I heard an avid Brexiteer describe the withdrawal agreement as a stitch-up between the Prime Minister and the European Union. Well, that may be the case, because from day one she has sought to exclude anybody who might have been able to help in those negotiations who wanted anything different from her calamitous red lines. The Government still try to put forward the line that her deal is the only one the European Union was prepared to offer, but that is not true: it was the only one it could possibly offer within the confines of the red lines that she had used to paint herself and us all into a corner.
It has become quite clear that those red lines stand in the way of any deal being acceptable to anything close to a majority of those in this House and stand in the way of a deal that comes anywhere close to commanding a majority of support among the citizens of these nations. The red lines have to go. If that means the Prime Minister has to go, then she has to go. It is not only the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) who has to be prepared to say that this is much more important than one person’s political career.
The Prime Minister promised herself a free vote, whipped herself to vote against it and then lost. Government Whips have been giving contradictory advice to different Ministers about whether the Whip existed and whether it was one, two or three lines. Good luck to them trying to count whether they have 325 votes for tonight if they sometimes struggle to count up to three.
The Prime Minister cannot control her own party, but she now cannot even control her own Cabinet. She cannot go in one direction, because half the Cabinet will quit, and she cannot go in the other direction, because the other half will quit. Well, perhaps it is time the whole lot of them quit, so that we can take this issue back to the people. In any other democracy, if the Government failed to get their flagship policy through Parliament, the Head of State would have two options: a new Parliament or a new Government. Of course, in this democracy—or supposed democracy—when we have a chance to have a new Parliament, we also have a chance to have a new Government.
I find it astonishing that growing numbers of Conservative Members are saying they should be allowed a third chance at the meaningful vote because they did not understand that no deal might be taken off the table. They say that the circumstances have changed and that if they had known that the second vote was the last chance they would get, they might have voted differently. Is that the case? Is it the case that if people realise that circumstances have changed and that they had not understood what they were voting for, they should be allowed another chance? That is a good idea, and if it is okay for a few hundred Tory MPs, it sure as heck is good enough for the 60 million citizens who put all those MPs in place in the first place.
We hear Members talking about the number of people who took part in the referendum. I remind Members that the referendum did not ask what people wanted. Three years on from the referendum, with fewer than 100 hours left before we crash out without a deal, none of us can claim to know what any of those 17.5 million people were voting for. We know that they were voting to leave, but none of them was asked to vote on where they wanted to go. That is why we have to come up with a solution that commands the respect of the House and then put it to the people. It may not be the solution that I think is preferable—it may not be my first choice—but those who voted to leave, those who voted to remain and those who did not vote at all have to be given a choice.
I finish by saying that I have been reluctant to endorse wholeheartedly the campaign to revoke article 50, but if it becomes a choice between my nation being dragged out against the wishes of 62% of our people, and two other nations having to revoke article 50, with the option of coming back for another go later on, then article 50 has to be revoked. If we do not do this, in future another treaty will be revoked, thanks to the sovereign will of the people of my nation.
We have had months of delay, with the Government kicking the can down the road, putting off the inevitable, delaying reality and trying to pretend that their shabby deal was the only way of resolving Brexit. That is even though the proposed deal would have resolved only the withdrawal agreement with the EU and, indeed, offered only 22 pages of non-legally binding text to outline the whole of our future relationship with the EU. In other words, it set up several years—possibly six or even 10 years—of further botched negotiations, when the UK would have been in a very weak negotiating position.
Given the weakness of the Prime Minister’s deal, it was not surprising that it was rejected by both ardent leavers and those with deep concerns about Brexit. I sincerely hope that we have now moved on beyond the charade of this Government trying to put the same deal back to Parliament again and again. That is why it is time for Parliament to take control of this process.
As you know only too well, Mr Speaker, in a parliamentary democracy, when a Government lose the good will and support of a majority in Parliament, they should rethink their approach. That is what I hope will happen tonight. It is my sincere hope and belief that we have a real opportunity to break this dreadful impasse. It is now incumbent on the Government to listen to MPs and the millions of people who marched on Saturday. I urge Ministers to listen and consider the very real merits of thinking again. It is time for indicative votes, including on a confirmatory referendum. We have to put this serious matter back to the people, and the Government have to fundamentally rethink their approach.
Tonight the House must make an important decision: to take the reins from the hands of the Prime Minister and find a way out of this Brexit impasse. I know that that is not an easy decision for many Members, particularly those on the Government Benches, but we have seen how the Prime Minister has responded to losing two meaningful votes by two historic margins. First she hoped to push through the same deal again without meaningful changes, no matter the rules of the House or the obvious hopelessness of her strategy. Next she tried to pitch the people against MPs, with all the consequences that that has for parliamentary democracy. Then she went to the European Council without a viable strategy and had to have a plan to extend article 50 and avert no deal written for her and for the United Kingdom. Finally, when she should have been seeking consensus across the House, she spent the weekend further trying to placate the very people manoeuvring against her. At every turn, she has made a crisis of her own making even worse.
Well, enough is enough. There is a void where coherent leadership ought to be, exemplified by the Prime Minister’s statement earlier today. Tonight Parliament must step into that void to find a consensus on the best way through. That is what amendment (a) from the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) and amendment (d) from the Leader of the Opposition seek to achieve. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said, if the Government were doing their job, those amendments would not be necessary. The European Council’s decision to grant the UK an extension to the article 50 process was a necessity—it was the only way to prevent leaving without a deal on Friday—but any extension must be for a purpose.
Parliament must rapidly decide how we wish to proceed if we are not going to face the cliff edge again on 12 April. Indicative votes are not ideal, but these are extraordinary circumstances, and indicative votes would allow MPs an opportunity to express their view on a way forward. Labour recognises that Members across the House have different views on how the process for indicative votes should be carried out. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) outlined her view based on her distinguished service on the Procedure Committee. Finding a consensus will not be easy. Different processes have different strengths and weaknesses, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) said, a key merit of amendments (a) and (d) is that they do not close off options for how we conduct that process.
Labour will be supporting both amendments, and I encourage Government Members to stop giving the Prime Minister, who is so evidently out of control, the benefit of the doubt. This is a chance to put the country before party.
However any indicative process is conducted, this House must reach a decision on the substance of the matter. What future relationship with the EU do we want, and how do we want to get there? We must start by eliminating the bad options and the unicorns. Labour and the House are clear that we cannot accept the Prime Minister’s blind Brexit. Nor will we sign up to a distant and arm’s-length economic relationship along the lines of Canada. The Brady amendment, which proposed replacing the backstop with alternative arrangements, was an irresponsible, Government-sponsored unicorn. Neither we nor the House will countenance no deal, described by my right hon. Friend the Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) as the very definition of irresponsibility. How right she is.
As far as Labour can see, that leaves two credible options. The first is a close economic partnership based on a customs union and single market alignment, with dynamic alignment for rights and protections. The second is a public vote between remain and a credible leave option. The Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Brexit Secretary, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), have met colleagues to discuss those ideas. They are engaged in good-faith discussions to find where a majority lies in this House—a majority that I hope will be expressed through the indicative votes process.
Let me finish by saying this: today the Prime Minister said that even if a majority for a way forward is found through the indicative votes process, she cannot commit to implementing it. How characteristic and typical that is of a Prime Minister who confuses the vices of blinkeredness and intransigence with the virtue of steadfast determination, whose first instinct is to ignore and push away the views of others, and who seems incapable of accepting that in our parliamentary democracy the Prime Minister must bring a majority of the House of Commons with her. It is an approach that has brought about a national crisis and brought us to a point where Parliament must now step in and take control of this process.
The House has also been asked to consider amendment (f) in the name of the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett) regarding the recalling of the House in the event of a no-deal exit being imminent. The House has been further asked to vote on amendment (d) in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, which calls on the Government to provide sufficient time this week for a series of votes, including on the Opposition’s plan. The Government have committed to providing that time, but that does not change the fact that the plan from Her Majesty’s Opposition has already been rejected by this House and the EU has suggested that key aspects are not negotiable.
Let me turn to amendment (a). My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said that his proposal was little different from established practice on a Friday in respect of private Members’ Bills. I gently suggest to my right hon. Friend, who is an experienced and senior Member of the House, that there is a difference between the Government choosing to make time available to Members for private Members’ Bills and Members taking time from the Government to control the very business of the House.
The real issue is the constitutional significance of amendment (a) because it is unprecedented in its nature. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has already addressed the kernel of the matter, which is whether the Government will make time available this week. Indeed, he set out at the beginning of the debate that, in good faith, we will have discussions with my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset, Opposition Front Benchers and Members from across the House on how the process should look. Amendment (a) does not set that out in detail, so the Government have undertaken to have that process and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster addressed that in his opening remarks.
On amendment (f), I reassure the right hon. Member for Derby South that the Government will return to the Dispatch Box in the event that the withdrawal agreement is not approved this week. We will also return to the House to consider plans for the week of 5 April after any indicative voting. As the right hon. Lady will know as a senior Member of the House, the decision on whether to enter recess is in the control of the House. Although we do not think it is sensible to try to set the Order Paper now for a date in two weeks’ time without knowing what will happen in the interim, I hope that she is content that the House will certainly have a say on the matter.
Let me turn to amendment (d) in the name of the Leader of the Opposition. The shadow Brexit Secretary said that many Members want to break the current deadlock, yet his amendment raises no objection to the withdrawal agreement and, as he well knows, it is the withdrawal agreement, not the political declaration, that needs to be approved to meet the tests that the European Council set for an extension to 22 May. He went on to criticise the Government for not giving a commitment to be bound by any indicative votes, yet, as I pointed out earlier, when the Father of the House challenged the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras on that very issue, he was unable to give such a commitment for Her Majesty’s Opposition to be bound in that way. Indeed, despite many of his own Members pressing for free votes from the Government in respect of those votes, he was again unwilling to give such a commitment on behalf of the Opposition. The Leader of the Opposition’s amendment notes that the Government’s deal has been defeated, but it is silent on the fact that his own deal has also been rejected by the House.
Regardless of any other votes, if the House does not approve the withdrawal agreement this week, it risks a longer extension, potentially resulting in Brexit being revoked, at odds with the Government’s manifesto. The uncertainty of any longer extension would be bad for business confidence and investments. It would also have lasting implications for our democracy, including our reputation around the world as a country that respects the votes of its citizens.
If this House can find the resolve, we could be out of the European Union in a matter of weeks. This is the ultimate mandate: the one handed to us by the British people; the one that reflects the manifestos that the Labour party, as well as the Conservative party, stood on. The Prime Minister’s deal is the way to deliver what the people voted for in 2016 and 2017. That is why it is right that the Government maintain control of the Order Paper, in line with constitutional convention, and why the amendments this evening should be defeated.
Amendment proposed: (a), At end, add
“and, given the need for the House to debate and vote on alternative ways forward, with a view to the Government putting forward a plan for the House to debate and vote on, orders that –
(a) Standing Order No. 14(1) (which provides that government business shall have precedence at every sitting save as provided in that order) shall not apply on Wednesday 27 March;
(b) precedence on that day shall be given to a motion relating to the Business of the House in connection with matters relating to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union other than any Business of the House motion relating to the consideration by the House of a motion under Section 13(1)(b) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, and then to motions relating to that withdrawal and the United Kingdom’s future relationship with the European Union other than any motion moved under Section 13(1)(b) of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018;
(c) if more than one motion related to the Business of the House is tabled, the Speaker shall decide which motion shall have precedence;
(d) the Speaker shall interrupt proceedings on any business before the Business of the House motion having precedence at 2.00 pm on Wednesday 27 March and call a Member to move that motion;
(e) debate on that motion may continue until 3.00 pm on Wednesday 27 March at which time the Speaker shall put the questions necessary to dispose of proceedings on the motion including the questions on amendments selected by the Speaker which may then be moved;
(f) when those proceedings have been concluded, the Speaker shall call a Member to move one of the other motions having precedence;
(g) any proceedings interrupted or superseded by this order or an order arising from the Business of the House motion may be resumed or (as the case may be) entered upon and proceeded with after the moment of interruption on Wednesday 27 March.”—(Sir Oliver Letwin.)
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Amendment proposed: (f), at end, add
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Main Question, as amended, put.
The House proceeded to a Division.
The Government must take this process seriously. We do not know what the House will decide on Wednesday, but I know that there are many Members of this House who have been working on alternative solutions, and we must debate them to find a consensus. This House must also consider whether any deal should be put to the people for a confirmatory vote. Where this Government have failed, this House must—and I believe will—succeed.
Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.