My Lords, I add my congratulations and welcome to the maiden speakers, whom I look forward to getting to know. I sincerely thank our committees, on the constitution, EU affairs and delegated powers, for their expert and powerful reports. Part 5 of the Bill, with its attempt to override an international law commitment, in an agreement the Government themselves signed and then enshrined in domestic law less than a year ago, is breath-taking. The comment by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland that the Bill breaks international law
“in a specific and limited way”
is destined to go down in history alongside “economical with the truth”.
It was commendable, if regrettable, that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, felt compelled to resign, as did the Treasury Solicitor Sir Jonathan Jones. I regret that this means we do not have a law officer here to answer the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, pithily summed up the situation in testimony to the Constitution Committee when he said of the Bill that
“the constitutional position is that it is an outrage, and the political position is that it is hugely damaging to our reputation internationally.”
The Constitution Committee concluded that Part 5 clauses
“represent a disregard for the rule of law”.
The Bill is only one aspect of the cavalier attitude of Conservative Governments in the last few years to the law and constitutional convention. Examples include:
trying to trigger Article 50 without parliamentary approval; illegal Prorogation; and launching attacks on lawyers as “lefty human rights lawyers”, “activists” and “do-gooders”. Was it a coincidence that a knifeman threatened to kill a solicitor last month?
Then they are grossly under-resourcing the justice system; and “taking back control” not for Parliament but for themselves, through an accumulation of executive power and overuse of statutory instruments, to the extent that the legal commentator for the Financial Times, David Allen Green, called it “government by decree”. He quoted Lord Hewart, a Liberal politician and judge who became Lord Chief Justice and who said, in his 1929 book The New Despotism:
“The strategy is different”—
from the “old despotism” of Charles I—
“but the goal is the same. It is to subordinate Parliament, to evade the Courts, and to render the will or the caprice of the Executive unfettered and supreme.”
It sounds very modern.
The Government’s claim that the Bill is simply an insurance policy or safety net has spectacularly backfired. As our EU Committee observed, it has
“in effect, placed the United Kingdom in the wrong”.
The EU responded accordingly by insisting on tougher enforcement provisions and sending a letter of formal notice—the first step in infringement proceedings. The Irish equality and human rights commissions from north and south, as well as the Anglican Primates, have expressed deep concern that the Irish protocol to the withdrawal agreement might be breached, and the human rights and equality provisions of the Good Friday agreement overridden.
The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law notes:
“The ideal of Magna Carta—that no one is above the law—is a source of global inspiration”,
and the Bar Council and the Law Society highlight the prejudice to the position of London as a centre for international practice and dispute resolution, and to our attempt to accede to the Lugano Convention.
The 20th anniversary of Human Rights Act has just passed, and it is the 70th anniversary of European Convention on Human Rights in a few weeks. It was a Conservative lawyer and politician, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, as he then was, who was largely instrumental in drafting the ECHR. It is shameful not only that the modern Conservative Party is weakening its commitment to the convention and the HRA, but that our Prime Minister had to be forced by the EU, in order to protect security ties, to pledge not to “materially alter the spirit”—whatever that means—of the Human Rights Act. This was billed as a “compromise” by Mr Johnson.
Part 5 of this Bill is a disgrace. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, was quite right to say that Parliament should fix this Bill and not leave it to the courts; hence the amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, should be supported.
8.57 pm