My Lords, I hold the legal profession in high esteem. However, in Committee, it was obvious to me as a lay person—a person on the Clapham omnibus—that the lawyers disagreed and kept disagreeing. That was very upsetting for me, because it meant chaos instead of clarity—and the same thing is happening again. When I support this amendment, all I can do is apply my intelligence and political knowledge and think about what the safest thing to do is.
In Committee, we heard some noble Lords on the Government Benches insisting that the charter was some sort of bureaucratic bogeyman created by the EU to destroy parliamentary sovereignty and create a whole load of new rights that were fundamentally opposed to the British way of life. Now, later, other noble Lords, including the Minister, assert that the charter does absolutely nothing of significance and that all the charter rights exist elsewhere. Both those points of view cannot both be right—and in fact neither of them is right.
I am not convinced that what we heard is a fair representation of what exists. If two views are so opposed, what are we to believe? We are losing rights
that are fundamental to our modern way of life. Very many people outside your Lordships’ Chamber think that Brexit is nothing more than an attempt by elites—that is us and others like us—to tear up everyone’s rights and freedoms. I voted for Brexit, but that was not the Brexit that I had in mind. If we lose the Charter of Fundamental Rights today, I will feel that I have been complicit in doing exactly that. I will leave it to other more learned Lords to try to work out what the exact effect would be of retaining or losing the charter. However, on the Clapham omnibus it feels as if we are spinning round in circles.
I will ask a very simple question. If I am unusually kind and give the Government the benefit of the doubt and accept that the charter rights are all in our law elsewhere, one question would remain. Why would your Lordships’ House replace a simple codified charter with a complex and diffuse legal mess? I simply do not understand that. The general trajectory of good law- making is to take complexity and make it simpler and more elegant. This House often takes a chaotic mix of case law, statutes and treaties and rewrites them in codified statutes which put them all together in one place and make them easier to understand. I cannot think of another example in this or any other Bill where this House has been asked to take a simple legal situation and make it infinitely more complex while seeking to achieve exactly the same thing. It simply does not make sense to scrap the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It is our duty as a revising Chamber to make sure that people outside understand exactly what we are trying to preserve, which is fundamental rights and freedoms.