Thank you, Mr Speaker. I shall endeavour to practise courtesy by act rather than by anything else, in being brief.
It is a pleasure again to participate in this afternoon’s debate, which is wide-ranging and has moved away from the rather narrow focus of some of the perfectly sensible amendments that have been tabled and that are designed to explore the undoubted deficiencies in the legislation; for example, the Opposition have put forward sensible proposals in new clause 1. Those are matters that we have looked at for a considerable number of days.
I wanted to focus on an issue that has arisen this afternoon and is a particular concern to me. In doing so I do not want to repeat what my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) said. I agree with every word he said, and there is no point in my saying it again. There is a separate angle, however,
on which we might pause and reflect. New clause 17 raises the issue of whether we should have continued participation in the single market and customs union.
If we look at the Bill as drafted and at its original intention, particularly now that the pernicious effects of clause 9 have been removed, we can see that it is about the legal order of the United Kingdom after we have left with no deal at all. So an argument can be made that this legislation is perhaps not the most satisfactory place to try to bring in the single market and customs union. However, that raises an entirely legitimate issue. Ultimately, as we trundle on with the legislation it becomes more and more apparent how different it is from the Government’s intention regarding the end product that it wants the country to enjoy.
The Prime Minister set out her vision in the Lancaster House and Florence speeches. As I have said before, but it is worth repeating, if she succeeded in achieving everything that she set out, there might well be broad consensus in the House, because we would lose those aspects of EU membership that we do not like and at the same time we would retain all the benefits of EU membership that we—or at least many of us, the vast majority of hon. Members—consider desirable.
The truth is that most of us—again, I suspect—in the House know that that is unlikely to be achieved. We are asking our EU partners to engage in the bending of the rules of the legal order, which is not something that can be readily obtained. We started out on this negotiation with a major fallacy: the EU can somehow be twisted around from matters of self-interest into entirely changing its nature. In fact, it is an international treaty organisation underpinned by law: that is what it is. Having visited Brussels on Monday, it was brought home to me—I already knew it—very clearly that that is indeed the nature of the entity with which we are dealing. Unless we are realistic about that we cannot hope to secure a reasonable outcome to our negotiations.
What troubles me particularly is the timing of all this. The reality is that the EU, for very good reasons, wants order. It is a legal order, and it wishes order to exist, even when countries are leaving it. The point was made to us that ultimately it would negotiate according to our red lines and, if we decide to put red lines down that make it impossible to reach the sort of agreement that the Prime Minister wants, we will not secure that agreement—it is very simple. On top of that—I would like to add this point to the one made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe—all of this is likely to come to a head at a very late stage indeed for rational judgments by the House about what is in the national interest.
3.15 pm
Some of my right hon. and hon. Friends on this side of the House seem positively to relish the prospect of the negotiations collapsing and our leaving the EU with absolutely no deal at all. I believe that that would probably be the single most catastrophic act perpetrated by any Government on this country in modern history, so I do not intend to allow that to happen. I simply make this point to my friends on the Front Bench, who have the difficult task of taking this project forward. On the point that is raised in new clause 17, this may not be the right place to amend the legislation, which is not particularly germane to it but, my goodness, it is a
relevant point. At what point can the House and, indeed, the public have a proper understanding of what the Government have succeeded in negotiating? At the moment, it reminds me very much of the company set up at the time of the South Sea bubble in the early 18th century that said: “A company to be of great and inestimable value to its shareholders. Nobody to know what it is.”
That is what we have been asked, regularly and on a daily basis, to continue signing up to while the negotiations proceed. Furthermore, on the timings, it is likely that when we are finally told a bit more it may be too late to take the sensible decisions that the House ought to take in the national interest and in conformity with what the referendum result was all about.
We cannot abdicate that responsibility. In truth, we have been left completely in the dark. Indeed, the Government themselves are in the dark, because we do not even really know whether we can secure a withdrawal agreement, for the reasons I gave in an intervention regarding our relationship with Ireland. The transitional arrangements look pretty clear, but I fear—the pejorative term might be the vassalage that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary dislikes—something that inexorably takes our country towards continuing membership of every institution of the European Union without our having any influence over policy making.