Author: johnredwood

We are living through a world manufacturing recession. The Fed, Bank of England, Bank of China and the European Central Bank all tightened policy too much in the second half of last year. They spooked the markets and hit borrowing for investment. Several governments, led by the UK, hit their car markets hard with higher taxes, fewer car loans and an attack on diesels.

The Fed has now changed policy. It has ended its rate rises and slashed its Quantitative tightening programme. It has now announced a rethink of its whole approach to rate setting and balance sheet management.The ECB has been slow to respond, ending its Quantitative easing just in time for the industrial collapse. The Bank of China has set out new ways of getting credit into new sectors and ventures to offset the slowdown its balance sheet clean up of commercial banks has triggered. Only the Bank of England has failed to respond despite tightening substantially with its advice to reduce car loans and mortgages, and two rate rises from the low.

We should avoid a global advanced country general recession. Inflation remains very subdued with plenty of spare capacity and competitive forces. The Bank of England should be more attentive to the state of the real economy and get more into line with action being taken to avoid a downturn. The UK needs to end its attack on the car industry.

The government has rightly signed a special covenant with armed forces personnel to look after their interests. They have no right to strike, and can be put in harms way by their government employer, so they deserve special attention and consideration. There is widespread cross party support for this approach.

I have been talking to MP colleagues this week about what more the government could do to improve the reality of the Covenant. There are various issues affecting service personnel lives where improvements can and should be made.

The first is housing. There is a home purchase scheme, but it does not work for many Ministry of Defence employees. There are cases of individuals ending up homeless on departing the armed forces. They have not saved for a deposit or amassed some equity during their time in the forces. Quite often local Councils give them little priority for rented accommodation as they have been mobile during their service careers, not establishing entitlement in any particular location.

Part of the answer to this is to go over to a home base approach for all service personnel, so there is a place they return to regularly between tours of duty. More imaginative and helpful schemes to encourage home purchase, or to provide surrogates for home purchase would ensure on leaving the forces the individual either owned a home or had money for deposit on a home of their own. My proposals include acquiring the room or flat on the base that the MOD owns for the duration of their service or use, and agreeing to sell it back at an indexed price to the MOD on departure. This in normal market conditions would give the individual a deposit sum from the price gains.

The second is employment for the spouse or partner of the uniformed employee. Where there is no home base and frequent moves to undertake new assignments, the spouse or partner can have their careers disrupted or destroyed by the changes.The home base idea would help with this problem, allowing more stability for the family.

The third is the impact on the education of the children. Frequent changes of school can be disruptive to someone’s learning, as they have to adapt to different approaches and curricula. It also breaks friendships and creates more unsettled feelings. Again settling on a home base approach could be of considerable benefit.

I have put ideas into the current review on these issues, and would be happy to add other points if constituents want to join in these conversations.

The decision to delay Brexit is a bad one. The Withdrawal Agreement is not Brexit and is not acceptable to most UK voters. The WA is a long and expensive delay leaving the UK in a very weak position.

Last night just 133 Conservative MPs supported a motion to delay our exit beyond this week. 98 of us voted against and another 77 abstained. Those unwilling to vote for the delay included 4 Cabinet Ministers and senior whips! They were given permission to miss the vote, presumably because they had no wish to vote for it. Many of those abstaining were clearly in and around the Commons chamber, so they could have voted if they wished. When we had a free vote on delay 188 Conservative MPs voted against and 12 abstained, despite the Prime Minister leading the forces for delay in the division lobbies. In the country opposition to delay within the party is even greater.

The Prime Minister has not made a good case for delay. She has enjoyed almost three years in office to reach an Agreement with the EU that the Conservative party with its allies the DUP can support, or to leave without a Withdrawal Agreement. She always promised us No deal was better than a bad deal. The only sensible answer now is for her to lead us out with no Withdrawal Agreement this week. Why should the EU believe she can get agreement to their Withdrawal Agreement in the next few weeks when she has failed to do so ever since the Chequers policy? That policy about turn led to so much anger and so many resignations from the government and Conservative party senior posts and should lead her to drop it and get on with leaving.

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Many people outside this House are losing confidence and trust in us and our proceedings. Tonight is another plunge in how they see us, because we are behaving collectively so badly. My right hon. and hon. Friends who have complained about the lack of time for debating both the Bill and the amendments are quite right. This is a serious constitutional matter. We have not been given time to construct proper amendments and there is no time in this brief hour to do justice to the complex issues raised by the Lords amendments. We had but a short debate on the original consideration of the Bill, when I was able to set out some of the constitutional difficulties involved in groups of MPs seizing the agenda and taking over money resolution and Crown prerogative matters. We are not allowed proper time tonight to consider exactly how all that fits with this Bill.

What we do know, however, is that the very slim majority who have got the Bill this far through this House intend to go against the clearly expressed wishes of the British people in the referendum. All those who voted to leave, two years and nine months ago, had every reason to suppose that all Labour and Conservative Members elected on their 2017 manifestos would see through our exit in a timely way. They should also have expected that from the promises made by both the leave and the remain campaigns in the referendum, the legislation put through in granting that referendum, and the clear statement of the Government at the time, who said that we would implement the wishes of the British people. The Opposition did not dissent from that particular view when the Government put out their leaflet. Indeed, during the remain campaign many Labour MPs endorsed the Government. That is why tonight is another sad night. This Parliament is breaking its word, breaking its promises and letting down 17.4 million voters, but it is also letting down quite a lot of remain voters.

A lot of remain voters are good democrats who fully accept the verdict of the British people. Quite a lot of people in our country were only just remain voters or only just leave voters and are prepared to live with the judgment of the majority. They too are scandalised that this Parliament is insisting on a second needless delay when we have had two years and nine months to prepare for exit and when our Government assure us that they are fully prepared for exiting without signing the withdrawal agreement.

I find it very odd that Members of this House think that the withdrawal agreement is, in itself, Brexit or in any way helps Brexit. The withdrawal agreement is a massively long delay to our exit, with the added problem, which the Opposition have rightly identified, that it entails signing up to a solemn and binding international treaty to undermine our bargaining position in the second part of the negotiations envisaged by the EU’s process.

Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con): My right hon. Friend is making an extremely good speech. Is he aware that, as I have been informed today, the withdrawal agreement and implementation Bill, which is supposed to put this appalling withdrawal agreement into domestic law, is around 120 pages long? That is what we are heading for in the next couple of weeks.

John Redwood My hon. Friend is right. The nature of that solemn and binding treaty will be to lock us in, for 21 or 45 months, to every feature of the European Union without representation, vote or voice. It might mean that we end up in large sections of it—the customs union and single market alignment—in perpetuity, thanks to the Irish backstop.

It is a massive delay, and I say to my hon. and right hon. Friends on the Front Bench that, if they are offering the public either a guaranteed delay under the withdrawal agreement or a shorter delay that they wish to negotiate, a lot of leave voters would rather have the shorter delay. All of us leave voters do not want any delay at all. That is why people will be scandalised by what this House is rushing through again this evening.

The shortage of time is completely scandalous. This is a massive issue that has gripped the nation for many months. It dominates the news media, it sucks the life out of this House on every other issue and now, when we come to this big crunch event and when leave had been led to believe that we would be leaving the European Union without an agreement if necessary, they are told at the last minute, for the second time, that all their hopes for their democratic outcome will be dashed again. This Parliament does that with grave danger to its reputation.

I urge all those who wish to get this lightning legislation through again to ask themselves what they are going to say to all their leave voters, and what they are going to say to their remain voters who are also democrats and who join leave voters in saying, “Get on with it. Get it over with. Why do we have to sit through month after month of the same people making the same points that they put to a referendum and lost?”

This Parliament needs to wake up and get real. It needs to move on. It needs to rise to the nation’s requirements and deal with the nation’s other business, and it needs to accept that this was decided by the public. It is our duty to implement it. Leaving without this agreement is going to be just fine. We are prepared for it. Business is ready for it. Business has spent money. Business has done whatever it needed to do and, in many cases, feels very let down that it is not able to use all its contingencies, on which it has spent good money.

I would say this to all Labour MPs, particularly those with a majority of leave voters in their constituency: understand the damage you are doing, understand the damage you are doing to this institution, understand the damage you are doing to our democracy and vote for us to leave the European Union.

Before the referendum pro Remain commentators and MPs delighted in telling us we were a free and independent country whilst still in the EU. They explained that the EU did not have much power over us, just a few necessary details to allow trade to take place. Since we voted to leave some of these same people have explained how crucial EU laws and controls are, and how they penetrate most features of our public life and law codes. They now claim the control is so wide ranging we cannot live successfully without it.

The supremacy of EU law over domestic law has been at the centre of recent disputes over the matter of delaying our exit. The Prime Minister requested a delay of Brussels at the last Council. She wanted to leave on 30 June. The EU Council instead gave her the ultimatum  of a delay until April 12th, unless she could carry the Withdrawal Agreement which could hold up  our departure  until May 22nd. These different delays had not been agreed by Parliament or even explained to Parliament. As soon as the PM said Yes to the Council we were told they were good EU law which trumped all that Parliament had enacted to get us out on 29 March. After a legal wrangle the government decided to put it beyond doubt by legislating in the UK as well, whilst claiming the supremacy of EU law.

The upcoming Council on Wednesday raises the same difficult issue again. The Prime Minister is requesting a delay until June 30th for a second time. If the EU grants it she will tell Parliament we have to put up with it whether we like it or not. Treaty law is superior to UK law, and apparently a mere written statement by the EU Council can flex this Treaty.

The question is how will the EU want to respond this time to a request for yet more delay? The EU minus the UK has big plans to press on with greater political, monetary and economic integration. Many of its members will be pleased to see the end of UK resistance to these centralising plans, as the UK has for years been trying to slow down the movement to greater integration. France may be tempted to get rid of the UK more quickly so she can press Germany harder for a closer union. Germany may be more attracted to delay so the UK has to pay in money for longer which helps Germany most as the biggest paymaster, and dilutes French and other centralising influences as well.

What will be clear is that once again our future will be settled by the rest of the EU, probably under the influence of Germany and France.They will decide whether the UK can delay, and if so on what terms. They after all have encouraged the Commission to settle the penal terms for long delay that are represented in the Withdrawal Agreement at great cost to the UK.  The UK public has been too wise to fall for thar so the EU does need to think again. The UK government us humiliating our country by putting us through this repeated begging to the European Council.