My Lords, I will speak in favour of Amendments 52 and 62. Given the strictures on repetition, I will not rehearse again anything on Amendment 52, which would allow the British Parliament to have its say before the European Parliament is asked to approve any deal. I already made plain my views on that in Committee so I will stick to Amendment 62. With this amendment we are seeking to safeguard Parliament’s ability to have a “meaningful” vote. It would have been handy if it had been linked with Amendment 49, but I realise the conflicting pressures that are on the Front Bench to decide the groupings. Nevertheless, Amendment 49 has taken a huge stride tonight in underpinning a meaningful vote. However, it is by no means perfect, and it has gaps.
Parliament’s consideration of the withdrawal agreement will be a serious task—we all know that. Our debates this evening alone have shown the level of complexity and sheer number of issues which the withdrawal agreement will have to address in detail. Yet as the clock ticks onwards that exit day comes ever closer—it is now within a year—and if there is no withdrawal agreement, we lose guaranteed access to our biggest market, certainty on the Irish border, and confidence
for British citizens living and working in the rest of Europe and for the European citizens who are here. Given the timescale, those are immense risks.
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Amendment 62 is pretty straightforward by comparison with many of the amendments this House has had to consider. It would mean that, should Parliament, which means the House of Commons, decline to support the withdrawal agreement, and only in that circumstance—so let there be no objections about complexity, deadlines or the obfuscations that might take place—the United Kingdom would retain our current relationship with the EU and the Government would request an extension to Article 50 so negotiations could continue. I do not pretend, particularly after the learned contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, this afternoon, that there will be an automatic response to that, and I suggest that we do not enshrine it in a request for constant visits from the Secretary of State for Brexit, since that is unlikely to lead to conducive circumstances. However, I put it to the House that compared to the alternative, which is to fall off the edge of the cliff, that ought to be done by any responsible Government under those limited circumstances in which Parliament declines to support the withdrawal agreement.
The intention behind this amendment is to give certainty and continuity to our businesses, economy and jobs, and it would also give reassurance to the House of Commons, and the whole Parliament, that would allow it to focus on the detail of the withdrawal agreement without the added pressure of a no-deal exit.
It is by now obvious that Parliament could have reason to decline to accept the withdrawal deal. It is increasingly clear that untangling the United Kingdom from the European Union has raised more challenges than were envisaged and, some would argue strongly, more challenges than opportunities, and the latest draft withdrawal agreement has done little to give any reassurance on that point. It could not give us a solution to the Irish border question, and we do not have any detail on our future trade relationship with the European Union.
It is not as if items such as that were unpredictable. Indeed, they were not only predictable but predicted by any number of noble Lords in this Chamber. Yet we arrive, some 18 months after we started, and are hitting the obstacles that so many people predicted. So there is no assurance for anyone that the knowledge that they are a problem will mean that the Government will be able to resolve them, since they have not done so up to this point.
There are two key issues for our future. They should be the central planks of the agreement, and we cannot afford to get them wrong. As it stands, what we have is not a withdrawal deal but a transition plan. On the day the latest draft of the withdrawal agreement was published, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union—God bless him—told us that the implementation period, after exit day, is,
“a platform on which we build our future relationship”.
Therefore, during the extended transition plan we will not have a deal but a platform on which a deal may be built at some unspecified point in the future.
Moreover, there have been reports in recent weeks that our future relationship with the EU might be an annexe to the agreement and not within the agreement itself. We are now a year away and we do not know for certain whether or not we will have the detail of our trade relationship with the EU in the withdrawal agreement, or, even if we have some detail, whether it will officially be part of the agreement which Parliament will be asked to approve. It is conceivable that the actual withdrawal agreement may contain little more clarity than we already have. We may be a further year on, but no nearer the objective of clarity of what the deal is.
Offering reassurances on the Irish border and good intentions to finalise the detail of our future trade relationship are warm words, but having those warm words in some unspecified agreement after we have left the EU is liable to leave us in a very dangerous limbo indeed. In those circumstances, I believe Parliament would be justified in saying no and asking the Government to go back to the negotiating table—not to conduct negotiations and not even necessarily to set the direction of negotiations, but to go back to the table rather than fall off the cliff with no deal.