My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dykes. I was delighted to hear his positive comments on immigration.
Today’s Motion refers to the,
“ongoing discussions with the European Union”;
“interminable” might be a more appropriate adjective. If kicking the can down a dead-end street was an Olympic sport, we would have a gold medal winner. But it is not a sport. Brexit has become a constitutional crisis. I am staggered by the contempt with which Parliament is being treated in this process. It has now been suggested that the real meaningful vote on any deal might be put back until just days before exit day. That would be a travesty. I would support anything they can do in the other House to bring back some parliamentary control over this process. Brexit is not a sport, a mere matter of tactics— which seems to be the way it is being played at the moment. It is about our place in the world, and every day this fiasco goes on our stature in that world is being damaged, as is our economy.
Some noble Lords might have taken heart this morning from banner headlines. The Daily Telegraph trumpeted:
“Bank chief says Brexit can kick-start golden era of trade in contrast to earlier warnings”.
The Sun told its readers that the governor of the Bank of England admits that Brexit could “spark a golden era”. I fear that Mark Carney has not discovered a new vat of optimism. These headlines were exactly like the deftly edited posters that appear outside theatres. The reviewer wrote that the play was “stunning in its ham-fisted approach, the acting amazing in its mediocrity”, and the poster simply boils down the review to “stunning, amazing”. Alas, the speech from which Mark Carney’s “golden era” was extracted was a heavyweight one on global trade, delivered yesterday in the City. On reading it, the phrase “golden era” seemed to be missing; the closest I could find was:
“Brexit can lead to a new form of international co-operation and cross-border commerce”.
Well, that must be a possibility. But in the meantime, the governor pointed out that:
“With fundamental uncertainty about future market access, UK investment hasn’t grown since the referendum was called and has dramatically underperformed both history and peers”.
The Telegraph and the Sun are cherry-picking on a heroic scale. They have been taking lessons from our Brexit negotiators, and they are misleading the public still in pursuit of their Brexit ideal.
Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics reeled off a set of gloomy numbers, including a 0.4% drop in GDP. We are already getting poorer. A trade deal with the Faroe Islands will not save us, although at least it amounts to some progress for Dr Fox. It is also great news for lovers of crustaceans. Our main imports from the Faroe Islands—£200 million of them—are fish and crustaceans. Our GDP, however, is not going to benefit hugely from this deal. In 2017, our trade deficit with the Faroes was £167 million. We buy £200 million-worth of their shellfish; they buy just £33 million-worth of goods from us. So it is a trade deal, but hardly a triumph.
The time has come to stop this nonsense. Opinion polls now show a consistently significant majority in favour of remaining in the EU. Yet the Prime Minister persists in pursuing Brexit, even declaring it, as my noble friend Lady Altmann reminded us, her “sacred duty”. I applaud her sense of duty, but I see the Government’s duty as safeguarding the best interests of this country, not deliberately leading it into decline. Where is the sense in pursuing this crazy course? It is, one might say, “Jacob’s folly”. Follies, I remind the House, are rich men’s fantasies. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, they are, “costly, generally nonfunctional”. Why on earth are we indulging this rich man’s folly when it is clear that it is already endangering the livelihoods of ordinary working people and will further impoverish them?
As the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and others have pointed out, European workers are quitting the UK in droves every day—nurses, doctors, vets and even vegetable pickers. The cost of a broccoli harvester, I am told, is now up to £13.50 an hour. The effects on broccoli prices are soon going to be feeding through into the shops: your five a day will soon be costing you a great deal more.
It is not just the economic effects of Brexit that we have to be conscious of. One of our major cultural institutions had until recently 40% of its front of house staff from overseas. It is losing them at a rate of
2% a month and one of the reasons they are going is because they are encountering such hostility. People are horrible to them because they have foreign accents. It is so bad that the institution has offered to swap their name badges, which currently have just their Christian names on, for one with a name of their choice, so that instead of Emile they might choose to be Len and they might get a better reception that way. We have become a horribly xenophobic country in some quarters, but what are we doing pandering to that tendency? We should be fighting it, not being bullied by it.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister held a conference call with business leaders. They made very clear to her that the possibility of no deal should be taken off the table straightaway. They stressed the need for certainty. The withdrawal agreement gives them no certainty at all. It is better than no deal, but it promises, as others have said, years of more negotiations, and the one thing that is certain is that while those negotiations go on we will continue to see business and investment drift away from this country. Parliament is spending all its time pursuing a course that, even if it succeeds, amounts to failure.
I do not think that I have ever done this before, but I want to quote the very thoughtful recent words of the Leader of the other place, Andrea Leadsom. She wrote:
“my constituents … are increasingly concerned that the business case is being undermined from all angles, and the basis for which Parliament gave its support to the project may no longer exist”.
She mooted the idea that it might be wise therefore to abandon the entire project. How wise. When new evidence appears, sensible people respond to it and, day by day, the damage that any Brexit does becomes more apparent. To be fair to Mrs Leadsom, she was actually referring to HS2, but she has seen the light over that and if she can see the light over that, I hope she might see the wisdom in applying similar logic to Brexit. The case made for it was flawed. The evidence has changed.
The public should be given the opportunity to vote against Jacob’s folly. I dislike referenda for the same reasons as my noble friend Lord Cormack, but when you have got into a mess through a referendum, the only way out may well be another referendum. Otherwise, we just pursue a course of self-harm. To leave without a deal would be disastrous, and that is why I shall be supporting the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, this evening.
8.05 pm