I am not quite sure how to break this to the right hon. Gentleman, but nothing would please me more than to allow his country to implement the decision that its citizens have taken and for my country to be given the right to implement the decision that the people of my country took.
We support the removal from the Bill of a purely arbitrary and symbolic exit day; it does nothing to improve our chances of getting a less damaging deal and makes the prospect of a cliff-edge no deal more likely. It was agreed to only because the Prime Minister was too weak at the time to stand up to the hard-line minority in her own party, who are a vanishingly small minority across the House of Commons as a whole. Recently, the ubiquitous “sources close to the Prime Minister” have been working very hard to spin the line that she is now prepared to face down some of the extremists in her party. May I suggest that she would make a good start by facing them down by supporting the removal of an unnecessary exit day from the Bill and supporting that Lords amendment?
On the amendments to change “necessary” back to “what the Minister deems appropriate,” I am flummoxed by the idea that it needs to be put into legislation that a Minister only does things that they think are appropriate. Do the Government seriously think that their own Ministers will do things that they think are inappropriate? I know that they do things that I think are inappropriate all the time, but imagine having legally to prohibit them from doing things that they thought were stupid, rather than trying to stop them from doing things that everybody else thinks are stupid.
The Secretary of State, who obviously has much more important things to do than staying to listen to the defence of his legislation, told us twice that “necessary” is not a synonym for logical, sensible or proper. The trouble is that the entire Bill is written on the assumption that Her Majesty’s Government is a synonym for logical, sensible or proper, and, indeed, that the whim of a Minister is a synonym for logical, sensible or proper.
The Government do not have a monopoly on logic, good sense or propriety. A Government who lost their overall majority in this place at the demand of the people of these islands should surely have the humility to accept that sometimes, just sometimes, when the ermine-coated Lords along the corridor disagree with them, they have got it right and the Government have got it wrong.
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We will support amendments that seek to guarantee Parliament has a meaningful choice and a meaningful vote on the final deal. This gets presented as somehow
usurping the decision of June 2016, but who among us can genuinely claim to have the right to decide whether a final deal, whatever it says, properly delivers the Brexit that people voted for? None of us can because nobody voted for any particular kind of Brexit. They voted for a Brexit. There was not a public vote on membership of the customs union. Nobody voted to leave the single market. Nobody voted to leave Euratom. Nobody voted to damage the United Kingdom economy. People voted for a departure from the European Union. There has been no public vote on the kind of Brexit we should have. The reason there was no referendum on the single market or the customs union is that the Conservative party thought it politically expedient to deny the public that choice.