I am grateful that you are in the Chair today, Dame Eleanor, and that I have the opportunity to speak in this debate. As the new Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Shailesh Vara), is in his place, may I start by welcoming him to the job? I hope that we will have the chance to have exchanges into the future. As I have already reassured him, when this divisive period—which includes the contents of this Bill—passes, I hope that there will be more opportunity to find common ground. His predecessor, the right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), was present a little earlier; that would have been a good opportunity to pass on my sincere gratitude for the way in which he dealt with me when he was in the Department.
Clauses 1 to 3 of the Bill deal with the intention and the main powers. New clause 10, which I will be pushing to a vote, attempts to inject at least some respect for the rule of law into the Bill. The Opposition are also supporting the SDLP’s amendment 8.
The Bill tells us everything we need to know about the Tory party of today, because it represents an abdication of all responsibility—the responsibility to play by the rules, the responsibility to be honest about our actions and their consequences, the responsibility to honour our commitments made on behalf of our country. On Second Reading, the Foreign Secretary declared herself a patriot. Patriotism includes our flag, of course, but it
is also about our values. To me, those values should unite all democratic politicians, irrespective of political party. They include respect for the rule of law and equality before it; respect for human rights and the institutions that defend them; and respect for commitments, foreign and domestic, voluntarily entered into and collectively applied.
It says a lot that simply describing those values sounds like a criticism of the Conservative party, the current Prime Minister and almost certainly the next. It is most certainly a criticism of the Bill, which not only breaks convention—the law—but betrays our values as a Parliament and as a country. The Bill exists because the Prime Minister was not honest about the full nature of the Brexit deal. That was followed by a manifesto that promised that his deal was “oven-ready” and vowed to the public that there would be no renegotiations of it.
It is easy for Ministers to dismiss my criticisms, because they are the words of an Opposition spokesman, so how about the words of one of their leadership contenders—of someone running to be their next leader and our Prime Minister? All the contenders have trashed the Tory record in office, so let us take just the most recent example. This morning, the right hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) said:
“The British people…are fed up with us not delivering, they are fed up with unfulfilled promises”.
She is right, and the Conservative manifesto promise not to renegotiate is presumably part of the problem that she describes.