EU Referendum


Brexit: Parliament goes AWOL


08/12/2016




If ever there was to be a demonstration of the inadequacy of the Commons as a scrutiny body, it was yesterday's opposition day debate, calling for a plan to be produced by the government before it invokes Article 50.

Taking on board a Government amendment, the motion was also to include a call for a deadline of 31 March, by which – at the very latest – the Article should be invoked. And, in the end, the amended motion was approved by the House by 448 to 75 votes – a majority of 373.

Opened by Labour Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer (pictured), to a dismally unfull House, the debate was characterised by the succession of MPs parading their ignorance.

Thus, the highlight of the debate (or, to be more accurate, lowlight) was Dominic Grieve, former Attorney General, who had expressed his frustration at the Government's apparent refusal to come up with a coherent plan, welcoming its new-found willingness to deliver.

He then complained that some of the things said in the House seemed "rather fanciful". We have, he said, heard a lot about the sovereignty issue requiring us to withdraw from the European Court of Justice, on which he had to "gently point out" that if we are going to stay within the mechanisms of justice and security, decisions of the ECJ on interpreting the treaty will continue potentially to have force on us in this country.

This was also a reproach to a number of MPs who have decided (wrongly as it turns out) that we should not stay in the Single Market because it requires that the UK remains subject to the ECJ, with Grieve pointing out that we are signed up to over 800 international treaties which have arbitral mechanisms for resolving disputes.

Unless we start getting out of this fantasy element about Europe as a pariah entity, he said, we are not going to start getting down to a realistic assessment of what it is in our national interest to remain adherent to and what it is in our national interest to withdraw from.

The logic of what extremists such as Duncan Smith were saying was that we would have to withdraw from all the 800 treaties that were subject to any arbitral mechanism because they undermined our sovereignty.

This is the kind of issue in debate we have got to start to sort out, said Grieve, "because the public out there expect us at least to have some degree of expertise about what we are actually trying to do".

Never a truer word was spoken, only to have the man then continue his speech by drawing on the situation with "regard to the WTO". I may be wrong, he said, but "I think joining, or rejoining, the WTO requires a negotiation with 163 countries, including an agreement with the EU. So that WTO negotiation will also be a matter of great complexity".

Needless to say, Mr Grieve was wrong. We are already a member of the WTO in our own right, so there is no question of us having either to join or rejoin.

As to having "some degree of expertise", though, he could just as easily have been complaining about the facile Steve Baker, who told the House, "We cannot stay in the EEA if we want 80 percent of our economy to be subject to new free trade arrangements with the rest of the world, because one has to put one's domestic regulation on the table".

Given that Efta is a free trade agreement, to which non-EU parties to the EEA Agreement belong, and Efta has 27 free trade agreements covering 38 countries, Mr Baker – as usual – is talking his usual share of tosh.

It is just not good enough to have MPs spouting such unmitigated rubbish, any more than it is acceptable for Peter Lilley to assert that "we will not be members of the European economic area, because all members of the European economic area have to accept free movement", especially when he knows this to be untrue.

There is little between him and Labour MP Heidi Alexander who, like so many MPs has bought into the myth of conflict between Single Market participation and freedom of movement, asking whether the Government's ultimate priority was continued tariff-free access to the single market or an end to freedom of movement.

"They might wish to keep up the pretence that they can have both, but the mood music from Europe suggests otherwise", she asserted. "Tariff-free trade with the EU has to be the priority, and if that means we have to accept immigration from within the EU, so be it".  There speaks the "narrative", imbibed uncritically by the lumpen, unthinking drones.

And what price Emily Thornberry who knows so little of the nature of a customs union that she asserts that leaving it, would mean having to check every container coming in at Dover. It would mean UK firms having proof of origin tests whenever they export to Europe. It would mean chaos and it would mean gridlock for cross-border supply chains"?

Duncan Smith, on the other hand, commits the lesser sin of asserting that staying in the customs union means that the UK cannot make its own trade agreements – making the common mistake of confusing the customs union with the common commercial policy.

Bill Cash is another of those who opposes participation in the EEA. But his mantra is: "because we cannot be subject to that European Court in any circumstances". This is an erroneous belief shared with Owen Paterson who has so much changed his tune that he now believes that the Single Market doesn't even exist.

Ironically, this latter assertion is on the basis of a speech given by Lord Bamford in the House of Lords, saying that there are ten standards for brake lights on tractors within the current so-called single market. "It is a non-problem", said Paterson. "People just punch in the information when they go on the production line".

Of all people though, Paterson should know better. He misquotes Bamford, who actually stated that "farm tractors must comply with at least ten individual - and different - pieces of national road legislation, at great cost to my business, in the likes of Germany, Italy, and certain other EU markets".

Thus, Bamford is referring to regulations in general, and even then he speaks with a forked tongue. His particular and special problem related to high speed road tractors, for which there is not yet a unified standard (although one is on its way). This hardly supports the Paterson claim of a non-existent Single Market.

As for brake lights (or stop lamps, as they are called in the regulation), there is but one technical standard. By reference to Commission Directive 97/30/EC of 11 June 1997 and Directive 2009/68/EC, Mr Paterson should have known that it is not an EU standard, but is produced by UNECE, set out in paragraphs 1 and 5 to 8 and Annexes 1 , 4 and 5 of Regulation No 7.

As to the rest of the debate, it was once said by a Chinese philosopher that, if you sit long enough in one place, the whole world will pass by. That can hardly be true but it is certainly the case that, if you listen long enough to the proceedings of the House of Commons concerning the EU, you will hear just about every single error and misunderstanding in the book – and perhaps a few more.

Yet the MPs, prey to every passing mantra, are the people who want the Government to deliver a plan so that they can scrutinise it. All they are doing is showing us that they are almost completely incapable of so doing. Forty years of subordination to Brussels has left our representatives devoid of understanding, so lacking in knowledge that most of them do not even begin to perceive the depths of their own ignorance.

Funnily enough it was Ed Miliband who observed in the debate that "our feeble system of scrutiny undermines Parliament's ability to check or restrain the Government's action in Europe…We therefore need a system that gives Parliament real powers over ministers, enough time to scrutinise, and the transparency to restore public trust in the process".

But he was quoting the current Prime Minister who in 2007 wrote those words in a pamphlet with Nicholas Timothy, her chief of staff. Nevertheless, he agreed with the words.

Even now, though, it is not scrutiny we're getting out of Parliament, but expensively produced noise. There is no reason to believe that there are any MPs capable of effectively evaluating the Government's plans, or offering sensible comment.

The quality of debate is so poor that one can only think that the Commons is intent on writing its own redundancy notice. And since it has effectively been AWOL for 43 years, who would miss it when it is gone?