Lord Butler of Brockwell, the former cabinet secretary, has told peers that the public should get a vote on the final Brexit deal. Speaking this afternoon during the second day of the second reading debate on the article 50 bill, Butler, who served as cabinet secretary to Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, said:
So, is the outcome of last June’s referendum to be interpreted as meaning that a majority of the United Kingdom want to leave the EU, whatever the terms? The government clearly thinks so. But on a matter of this importance has not the government a duty to be sure before our departure becomes final? My lords, one has to ask why those who base their arguments for Brexit on the will of the people are now opposed to consulting the people on the outcome of the negotiations. One has to suspect that they fear that they will get a different answer.
Butler said that he would back an amendment to the bill to give the public a referendum on the final Brexit deal. But he also said that, whatever happened to that amendment, public opinion might change during the two-year negotiation process, and that if the final outcome was unpopular, Labour would be much less willing to back the government than it is now. The government could be defeated in the Commons vote on the final deal, he said, and that would be seen as an issue of confidence. That would lead to an election, he implied.
If I am right, if there is a prospect of that, by one route or another this government, or a new one, will have to return to seeking the views of the British people. And so they should.
The second reading debate will finish later tonight. But peers almost never vote against bills at second reading and so it is expected to be nodded through without a division.
The Labour peer Lord Liddle was quite harsh about Jeremy Corbyn in the House of Lords earlier today (see 3.12pm) but Liddle’s former boss, Lord Mandelson, was even more hostile when he was interviewed last night at an event with Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle.
The problem with Jeremy though is not that he is a sort of maniac – it’s not as though he is a nasty person. It’s that he literally has no idea in the 21st Century how to conduct himself as a leader of a party putting itself forward in a democratic election to become the government of our country ...
Why do you want to just walk away and pass the title deeds of this great party over to someone like Jeremy Corbyn? I don’t want to, I resent it and I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office. Something, however small it may be – an email, a phone call or a meeting I convene – every day I try to do something to save the Labour party from his leadership.
Turnout in the two byelections on Thursday could be hit by Storm Doris which is forecast to bring heavy rain and gale force winds on Thursday. Both Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central fall within a band where the Met Office has issued an amber warning for heavy rain and 80mph winds.
#StormDoris will bring some very strong winds for parts of the UK on Thursday. Here’s a look at where will see the strongest gusts pic.twitter.com/AzdQHqUCRw
Here are some of the best quotes from today’s debate. I’ve taken them from the Press Association reports.
Lord Liddle, a former adviser to both Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, criticised Jeremy Corbyn for his conduct over Brexit.
Today we are debating this miserable measure to trigger the process of detaching the UK from the most successful peace project in world history.
I hang my head in shame that the leaders of this country, and my party, were not able to win the majority for remain last June, and it will live with me to my dying day ...
Let’s be frank, and I do say this with terrible sadness, the debilitation of our own party contributed to Brexit.
We have a leader who, unlike the vast majority of Labour members including many of those who joined up in order to support him, has never been a European true believer.
And in the referendum he failed the key test of democratic politics, which is to cut through media cynicism and the mass of seething public discontents with a compelling and positive case for Europe which forced voters to listen.
And now I see no clarion call for the fight, only a three line whip in the Commons to force Labour MPs to troop through the lobbies alongside a right-wing Tory government dancing to Iain Duncan Smith’s tune.
Lord Lamont, the Conservative pro-Brexit former chancellor, said it would be a mistake to let parliament have a vote on the final deal that could result in Britain staying in the EU. He said:
Firstly, it would be a denial of the result of the referendum and secondly, as surely as night follows day, it would make it perfectly inevitable that the EU would offer the worst possible deal in order to have it rejected by parliament.
I believe in democracy and I believe that we should proceed rapidly with this Bill without delay.
Labour peer Lord McKenzie of Luton said responsibility for the “mess” of Brexit lay with David Cameron. He explained:
[Cameron] gambled that a referendum would heal the split in his party but has ended up splitting the country. History will rightly judge him harshly.
Lord Willoughby de Broke, a hereditary peer and former Conservative who defected to Ukip, described Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech on Brexit as a “Ukip speech” and said he was thankful peers would no longer have to ratify every EU measure put before them.
The Labour peer and QC Lady Kennedy of the Shaws rejected the claim that peers simply had to accept the result of the referendum, saying this was a “degrading of public discourse and a poisoning of honest debate”. She went on:
I will support vital amendments and if they aren’t accepted I’m going to vote against this bill. This House should be urging a rethink on this whole project. This House should be saying: not in our name.
The former Met Police commissioner Lord Blair of Boughton said that without a deal on police and security cooperation after Brexit “terrorists, paedophiles and drug barons will breathe a sigh of relief”.
Lady Altmann, the Conservative peer and former pensions minister, said personal attacks had left her reluctant to speak out against Brexit. She said:
For the first time in my life though, I have been afraid of publicly saying what I believe is right.
I fear the personal attacks, social media threats and hate-filled letters that those of us counselling caution in interpreting the results of the referendum are subjected to.
I have listened to politicians admitting that they feared leaving the EU in the manner apparently planned will be economically damaging and could undermine peace and prosperity for the future, but then saying they will vote for it anyway.
In all good conscience, my lords, and despite the consequences I may personally face, I cannot follow that example.
Theresa May’s hope that the border in Ireland could be “seamless and frictionless” post Brexit was a political possibility, the Brexit select committee was told this morning.
Experts told MPs on the committee that a unique arrangement for a unique problem would be difficult but not impossible.
Federico Ortino, a lawyer specialising in international trade told them that “as a minimum” there would have to be a free trade agreement between the UK and the EU and there would have to be a special waiver within that for Ireland. He said:
Outside an FTA agreement it would be difficult that any specific deal that tried to grant some preferences in terms of trade between Ireland and Northern Ireland, it would have to come under a waiver, a specific derogation.
He was responding to questions from SDLP MP Mark Durkan who said he was concerned that “this phrase of frictionless and seamless border gets drained of meaning with more and more repetition without any examples of what it may mean.”
Ortino’s response offered a glimpse of hope to politicians who have been told by experts that legally it would be impossible not to have a border if the UK quits the customs union, while Ireland as a member of the EU club, remains in.
The committee, which was taking evidence on trade arrangements post Brexit, spent almost three hours discussing the complicated details of possible unilateral arrangements and what it would entail.
Chairman Hilary Benn said the discussion “illuminated the complexity” of arrangements Britain would have to enter into post Brexit.
The size of negotiating teams alone was challenging, MPs heard.
Jim Rollo, a professor specialising in trade at the University of Sussex, told MPs that around 900 would be needed to mirror the 700 negotiators and administrators in the European Commission directorate on trade and the 200 in agriculture, he said.
Roderick Abbott, a former deputy director-general at the WTO, believed that teams of about 25 people would be needed for simple trade deals with countries like Vietnam but the teams would need to be double in size for complicated deals with countries like Korea or Canada.
Ortino said not being “in the room with the big boys” could cause difficulties for Britain negotiating trade deals post Brexit. “Negotiating with China and India about their standards, we’re not going to get very far - the EU and US might have more clout,” he said.
But Abbott was more optimistic about the future of British trade post Brexit. Tariffs should not be a barrier in Europe, Abbott told MPs as about half are set at zero with another half set at less than 5%.
Andrea Leadsom, the environment secretary, has said that American food imported under any post-Brexit free trade deal with the US will have to meet British standards. Answering questions after giving a speech at the National Farmers Union conference, she said:
In terms of the free trade agreement and particularly the reference to the Atlantic and the Red Tractor - I’m a huge fan of the Red Tractor, and there’s absolutely nothing that’s going to knock that into a ditch as far as I’m concerned. And of course food standards are key, I already mentioned in my speech we have a manifesto commitment on animal welfare standards in international free trade agreements. We will remain committed to ensuring a level playing field to our high standards.
In her speech Leadsom also implied that the government will restrict farmers’ access to seasonal labour from the EU after Brexit, but that new technology could help them cope instead. She said:
As for seasonal agricultural workers, I have heard loud and clear the vital role they play in many farm businesses, not least in the horticultural sector.
But at the same time we mustn’t forget that a key factor behind the vote to leave the EU was to control immigration.
So I want to find out what kind of labour you need in food processing as well as farming, whilst exploring the role that innovation can play in support of this.
As I’ve travelled the UK, I’ve seen a whole raft of new technologies that complement the workforce.
Cabinet spent the majority of its time this morning discussing the importance of the union, raising suspicions that Theresa May must feel it is under particular strain at the moment ahead of the triggering of article 50.
Her spokesman refused to go into any details apart from to claim that cabinet ministers spent their time underlining how important the UK is as a union. He said ministers “touched on” Scotland’s feelings about Brexit and issues with the Northern Irish border but insisted it was a general and wide-ranging discussion.
Challenged over whether declaring their love for the union was a worthwhile way of spending their time, instead of addressing the NHS, social care crisis and worries about business rates, the spokesman said cabinet was still “most relevant”.
Although no details of the discussion are being made public, it will be interpreted as a sign of jitters within cabinet about the possibility that Nicola Sturgeon will start loudly demanding another Scottish independence referendum after March.
Britain faces hefty bill for Brexit, says European commission president
Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, has said Britain will have to pay a hefty price for Brexit. He was addressing the Belgian federal parliament in Brussels and he used a French slang term which, according to the Press Association, translates precisely as “salty”, but means hefty or pricey.
According to the Press Association, Juncker said:
Our British friends need to know - and they know it already - that it [Brexit] will not be cut-price or zero-cost. The British will have to respect the commitments which they played a part in agreeing. Therefore the bill will be - to use a rather vulgar term - very salty. It will be necessary for the British to respect commitments which they freely entered into.
This is from the Press Association’s Andrew Woodcock.
There have been reports claiming that, when Britain triggers article 50 and begins the two-year Brexit process, the EU will demand that Britain pays a bill that could be as high as €60bn, to cover its share of proposed EU spending commitments, as well as liabilities including pensions. The Financial Times journalist Alex Barker explains the potential cost in more detail in this recent Centre for European Reform report.
In his speech Juncker also repeated the Brussels conviction that the UK will find it impossible to renegotiate a new trade deal with the EU within the two-year Brexit timetable. He said:
This will be a difficult negotiation, which will take two years to reach agreement on the exit arrangements. To agree on the future architecture of the relations between the UK and EU, it will need years.
He also said he was “sad” about the UK leaving and that he wanted the Brexit negotiations to be friendly. He said:
We need to settle our affairs not with our hearts full of a feeling of hostility, but with the knowledge that the continent owes a lot to the UK. Without Churchill, we would not be here - we mustn’t forget that, but we mustn’t be naive.
Our British friends will need to understand that we want to continue to develop European integration.
After Foreign Office questions James Duddridge, the Conservative MP who tabled the early day motion expressing no confidence in John Bercow, the speaker, used a point of order to ask if it would be debated. He acknowledged that he had received an “underwhelming” amount of support (only four other MPs have signed it), but asked if there would be a debate and vote on his no confidence motion.
Bercow replied saying there was “absolutely no reason” why the government or the backbench business committee should be allocating time for a debate on this. He said advice from the clerk of the Commons said there was no need for such a debate.
The other four MPs, all Conservatives, who signed the motion are: Karl McCartney, Andrew Bridgen, Daniel Kawczynski and Alec Shelbrooke.
In response to an earlier question, Boris Johnson told MPs that the arrival of President Trump in the White House offered the possibility of “new thinking” on Syria. He said:
I do think that the advent of the Trump administration does offer the possibility of new thinking on Syria and the hope of a new way forward.
After what has been a lacklustre election campaign in Northern Ireland things have turned a whole nastier this week with a petrol bomb attack aimed against a Sinn Fein election agent.
On Monday night the window of a black Citroen C4 Picasso was smashed and a petrol bomb thrown into the car belonging to the Sinn Fein official in staunchly unionist Bangor on the Co.Down coast.
The party’s candidate in North Down, Kieran Maxwell, condemned the attack on his agent’s car. “These mindless thugs will not stop the party in delivering its positive message to the voters,” Maxwell said.
Party leader in Northern Ireland Michelle O’Neill described the incident in North Down as an attack on the entire democratic process.
Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, says American foreign policy is under review. We have yet to see anything coherent coming out, he says. The vacuum is being filled by Russia, she says. She asks if Boris Johnson will be proposing his own agenda.
Johnson says that the UK has been in the lead in areas like Yemen and Somalia. And the UK has advocated the approach being followed in Syria: separating Russia and Iran, and moving towards a political settlement.
Thornberry says, if that is a plan, she is a “monkey’s uncle”. When will Johnson show leadership?
Johnson says the UK wants peace negotiations for Syria to resume again as soon as possible in Geneva.
In the CommonsBoris Johnson, the foreign secretary, is taking questions. The Labour MP David Hanson has just asked him if the told Rex Tillerson, the new US secretary of state, when they met last week that Britain was firmly opposed to President Trump’s travel ban.
Johnson said the government had made it clear that it did not support Trump’s policy, although he answered the question generally, and did not specify whether or not he raised this with Tillerson last week.
The Conservative MP Crispin Blunt asked Johnson if he had suggested to Tillerson that Trump’s state visit should take place in 2020, to mark the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrim Fathers.
Johnson said that that was an interesting idea, but not one he raised with Tillerson.
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