Pat McFadden
MP for Wolverhampton South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“In his review Alan Milburn considered that issue and said that, “the UK’s NEET crisis is much more long-term and deep-seated than any decisions taken in the last few years.” As I said earlier, 400,000 more people are in work this year than last year, and the number of young people in employment is up since the election.”
“Since our last DWP questions, both Alan Milburn and the Pensions Commission have published their respective interim reports on young people and on the current state of saving for retirement. I look forward to receiving their final reports later in the year.”
“As Alan Milburn pointed out in his recent report, the UK’s NEET crisis is much more long-term and deep-seated than any decisions taken in the last few years. There are 400,000 more people in work than last year. The number of young people in employment is up by 74,000 since the election.”
“I thank the right hon. Gentleman and send him commiserations for whatever has left him reliant on his crutches today. I am happy to congratulate the businesses he mentioned in his constituency. He raises a serious point: it is important not only to come up with the right policy, but to make it simple for businesses to use.”
“My hon. Friend is right, and I thank Cardiff football club for being a partner. We are supporting nearly 1 million young people and creating up to half a million opportunities for jobs and training.”
“We are making strong progress on expanding youth hubs, with around 130 already in operation across Great Britain. In March, I announced the locations that we want to open in this year, and I have just announced a further 180 locations for the following two years.”
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“He enjoyed it, the challenge and the back-and-forth. He loved to take interventions, like notes in a song to guide the rhythm of his speech. He would challenge the opposition. Having a master of parliamentary debate at the Dispatch Box cheers the troops. It gave heart to the MPs sitting behind John to see him perform. He came up with some memorable lines. I remember him giving John Major a very hard time when things were going wrong—the grand national had failed to start, hotels were falling into the sea, and he called him: “The man with the non-Midas touch”. —[ Official Report , 9 June 1993; Vol. 226, c. 292.] For all the barbs, there was always a glint in John’s eye as he faced the person opposite. John’s funeral was at Cluny parish church, and I had some part in organising it.”
“It is a pleasure to take part in this debate today. I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) on securing it and on his wonderful opening speech. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr). I did not work for John Smith for a huge length of time—for about a year before he died. One of the truisms of life is that we do not know what we have until it has gone. Many people felt that about John Smith after he died. I remember well the tributes paid in this Chamber by MPs from both sides on that day and how moving and genuine they were. It could be said that the podium at our conference or an outside event was not John’s natural habitat, but this Chamber was—particularly when he was at the Dispatch Box, holding forth in debate.”
“I believe that the causes that called John Smith are still relevant today: the battle for social justice, the battle against poverty and inequality, the battle for community to mean something, the battle for the United Kingdom’s European identity, and the battle for strong defence and keeping people secure—for collective security. These things are all relevant today and, in line with his tradition, there are still people prepared to stand up and fight for them.”
“John was a believer in strong defence, a supporter of the nuclear deterrent and a supporter of NATO. He understood the post-war Labour Government’s achievement in creating a system of collective defence. He would never have found himself parroting the lines of the country’s enemies or attacking NATO as an aggressive or expansionist organisation. That was his politics. That was his democratic socialism. The tradition that he represented was the internationalist social democratic tradition in the Labour party. Of course, those were different times. It was just after the end of the cold war, and South Africa was emerging from apartheid. There was a middle east peace process that people could really believe in, about which he was passionate.”
“John was an internationalist, a passionate pro-European who broke the party Whip to bring the United Kingdom into the European Community within months of being elected as a young and no doubt ambitious MP. The reason he was so passionately in favour of that was fired by social justice: he understood that in a world of international capital, there was a social justice benefit to be gained by controlling markets internationally, and that no country could do that on its own. He would have been very clear in his rejection today of the right-wing nationalism that has driven the Brexit agenda, but he would have been just as clear in his rejection of the ossified fantasy of socialism in one country that drives support for Brexit in some corners of the left, too.”
“He had to face down accusations that if this reform went through, it would mean the end of the union link and a break in the relationship between the Labour party and the unions. That was not true, but it was what opponents of the reforms he was advocating maintained at the time. It took great bravery to carry that battle through. It was not a battle that he always relished, but it was one he was determined to win, and in the end, he did. John was a passionate supporter of devolution. He believed that there should be a Scottish Parliament and he never believed that that should mean breaking up the United Kingdom. His belief in devolution sat alongside a belief that we have far more in common throughout the United Kingdom than anything that sets us apart.”
“It was about the difference between winning and losing elections and the difference between governing and protesting, and that difference was felt in the families of some of the poorest households in the country. John Smith was a champion of the national minimum wage at a time when the cause was not fashionable and there was no consensus, even within the Labour movement. It is great that there is consensus now across the parties in favour of the national minimum wage, but it is one thing to accept consensus and another entirely to create it and John Smith played a great role in creating consensus on the national minimum wage. John was also a party reformer. When I worked for him, he was engaged in a titanic battle with some of the major trade unions in the Labour party on the principle of one member, one vote.”
“The Commission on Social Justice did not issue its final report until after John had died, but many of its recommendations were enacted by the Labour Government who followed. The highly respected Resolution Foundation has recently done some interesting research on the impact of those policies on, for example, child poverty. The research showed that during those years child poverty was reduced by significantly more than was thought at the time, and that—without being too partisan today—it has gone up by more than we first thought in the years since 2010. Those achievements on child poverty had a lot to do with the legacy of John Smith.”
“That body was charged with coming up with a platform of ideas that would challenge poverty and inequality, promote social justice and opportunity and, crucially, do so with policies that were properly costed and not dependent on some mythical magic money tree. Responsibility was written through its remit, as well as ambition. The reason why responsibility was so important was that John understood the importance of trust in politics—of winning the public’s trust—and the truth is that in the early 1990s Labour had a trust problem with the public. We had lost four elections. The trust issues related to things such as taxation, our perceived weakness on defence, and a doubt that we could be responsible in power. He wanted to take away any fears about backing Labour, so those issues of responsibility and trust were hugely important.”
“That is an eloquent reminder of how deeply John Smith’s death was felt in the country. A debate such as this is also a moment to consider what John Smith stood for and what he would make of today. When we think about what he stood for, we think of words such as decency and community, which for him was not just a word but something with real meaning—the basic building block of the good society—and we think about the term social justice. One of his main initiatives as Labour leader was to establish the Commission on Social Justice, chaired by Sir Gordon Borrie and staffed by a bright young man called David Miliband.”
“On giving a welfare policy to the BBC, a lot of footballing metaphors have been used in the past 24 hours, after Liverpool’s glorious result against Barcelona last night, but does my hon. Friend agree that in policy terms this is the equivalent of a hospital pass?”
“The right hon. Gentleman is implying that the BBC was happy with all this at the time, but in the press statement announcing the consultation, the BBC said: “The BBC could copy the scheme… but we think it would fundamentally change the BBC because of the scale of service cuts we would need to make.” That is not the statement of an organisation that thinks it can easily absorb this.”
“At the moment, the policy costs some £660 million a year, rising to more than £700 million in a couple of years’ time, and asking the BBC to fund this out of its own resources will leave it facing a cut of around one fifth of its budget. As has been said, that is the equivalent of the budgets for BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, the BBC News channel and the children’s channels. This will have a major impact and major implications for our national public service broadcaster at the very moment when the broadcasting and entertainment environment is changing and the BBC is under more pressure than ever from Netflix, Amazon and other providers. The direct impact of this on the BBC is that it will be faced with the awful choice of cutting quality or hitting pensioners.”
“It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Laura Smith), and I want to begin where she left off. I agree with her that free TV licences were introduced as a welfare policy. That is very much how it was seen at the time, alongside benefits such as free bus passes and free eye tests. The Government’s decision to pass responsibility for this on to the BBC in the knowledge that the BBC would be under this kind of pressure has two impacts. The first is on the BBC itself; the other is on the pensioners who receive the benefit at the moment. Passing this responsibility on to the BBC is the policy equivalent of a hospital pass. The Government know that the BBC is under pressure.”
“If the Government go down this road, they will incur the wrath and lasting anger of pensioners, who have come to expect and are used to this benefit after the 20 or so years of its existence. It will do the Government no good to claim at the next election, “It wasn’t us; it was the BBC.” There is no evading the responsibility for the decision. It comes from and is owned by the Government, and the Government will pay the political price if they proceed with this policy.”
“The Minister came close to saying in opening that the change was a consequence of the financial crisis and that the Government were ultimately asking pensioners, some of them the lowest-income pensioners in the country, to pay the cost of it 10 years on. That would be unjust and unfair to pensioners in my constituency. The free TV licence is, after all, a benefit. The Government should fund it and keep the manifesto promise they made in 2017 to maintain it. They have told us that austerity is over. What better way to start proving that than by changing their minds about the TV licence fee? The debate is not just a party political joust. Let me act for a moment as the Under-Secretary’s political adviser and give him some friendly advice.”
“We are asked, “After all, what about the very wealthy pensioner with a huge estate?” The problem is that, as with changes to any universal benefit, it will not be just the pensioner with a huge estate who loses out. It is estimated that some 40% of pensioners entitled to pension credit do not receive it. If we go down the road suggested, not only the pensioner with the huge wealth will lose out, but some of the poorest pensioners in my constituency and the other constituencies that have been mentioned in the debate. Then there is the social and cultural impact of cutting much-needed entertainment and information. What is the Government’s justification?”
“I am not going to give way, if that is okay, because there is a lot of pressure on time and others want to speak. The first impact of the policy will be on the BBC itself. The second impact will be on pensioners, and it will be a dual impact—financial and social. The House of Commons Library estimates that there are around 5,600 households in my constituency with someone who is 75 or over. Looking at the options in the BBC consultation, we see that if the free BBC TV licence were restricted to pension credit recipients, 3,390 of those households would lose out, to the tune of £154 a year. If the qualifying age were raised to 80, around 2,200 households would lose out. It has been said that we should means-test and restrict the benefit to those on pension credit.”
“This is a timely debate, and Sikhs should build on their success in the future.”
“He had to face down great hostility to win his battle, and his bravery and that of those who campaigned alongside him paved the way for change that today we take for granted. Even after that great progress, however, there are still struggles. Legislation still has to be amended to ensure that the simple act of observing the five Ks and wearing a turban can be done freely. What can we draw as a broader conclusion? I see a community whose story is overwhelmingly positive. Sikhs have achieved success in business, education, public life and, increasingly, politics, with the historic election of the first turban-wearing Sikh, my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), and the first woman Sikh MP, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill).”
“For example, Anand Chhabra, founder of Black Country Visual Arts, has lovingly collated the Apna Heritage Archive’s photography collection, which records early Punjabi life in the west midlands in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and which was exhibited at Wolverhampton Art Gallery last year. Alongside that hard work, there was great bravery. For example, there is the story of Tarsem Singh Sandhu, who led the fight in Wolverhampton for Sikhs to be able to wear a turban while driving a bus. Unbelievably, that was banned in the past, even when half the bus drivers in the city were of Sikh heritage. Tarsem Singh Sandhu was told that he would lose his job unless he was clean shaven and abandoned his turban, but he took a stand, rightly saying that he was doing nothing wrong.”
“The second contribution by Sikhs is, of course, economic. Many Sikhs came to my constituency and others in the west midlands in the 1950s and 1960s, often to do hard, even back-breaking, work in steel mills and foundries. They often faced barriers of prejudice as they laid down the foundations for their new life. Although we quite rightly associate the Sikh community with social mobility, that mobility rests on the hard work of the first generation of Sikhs who came here. As is the case with so many immigrants, they worked hard to make sure that their children had better chances than them in life. I also pay tribute to those who have worked to record the stories of those early Sikh migrants.”
“The first is the military contribution of Sikhs—the sacrifice in blood and life, with lives being laid down in two world wars, by Sikhs fighting for this country. It is estimated that some 83,000 Sikh soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice. Memorials have been erected to acknowledge that sacrifice, including, as we have just heard, in Bristol. A memorial was unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire in 2015, and another was unveiled in Smethwick last year. We await, however, a national memorial in central London dedicated to their sacrifice. I acknowledge the leadership and hard work of my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi). We want a memorial to be erected and for the bureaucracy to be cut through. The issue has cross-party support, so I hope the Minister will provide a positive response.”
“Thank you, Sir Edward, for that ruling and for your chairmanship today. I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) on securing this debate. As she said, it comes at the end of our first ever National Sikh Awareness and History Month. There have been lots of events, including the Vaisakhi celebration, Turban Awareness Day, the lecture on Guru Nanak and feminism—which I am glad to say was given by Dr Opinderjit Kaur Takhar, the director of the Centre for Sikh and Punjabi Studies at the University of Wolverhampton—and many others dedicated both to acknowledging the Sikh contribution and to teaching more about Sikhi and what it stands for. I will mention a few things relating to that contribution.”
“I thank the Minister for his opening remarks, and I am sure that the Sikh community will be very grateful for his Vaisakhi greetings, but the Government missed an opportunity a couple of weeks ago, on the 100th Vaisakhi since the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, to respond to cross-party calls for an official Government apology. Was that the last word on the subject, or can we expect to hear more from the Government, perhaps at the Vaisakhi celebration that he mentioned?”
“Father MaGill spoke for many last week when he called for new urgency on behalf of Lyra McKee’s generation—what we might call the “post-Good Friday agreement generation”. As an observer when the Labour Government was deeply involved in this, my reflection is that this process of bringing the parties together only works if there is real focus, grip and determination on the part of the Prime Minister. That is no reflection on the Secretary of State; it is just a reality of how this works. Can the Secretary of State assure the House that we will now see a step change in the Prime Minister’s involvement in this, and that there really will be that focus, grip, doggedness, and refusal to be defeated, even alongside everything else that the Prime Minister is currently dealing with?”
“This leak is not only embarrassing, but, I am afraid, symptomatic of a wider breakdown of discipline and collective responsibility in the Government. This decision should be taking into account both our national security needs and our technological requirements for the future. Those should be the only two things under consideration by Ministers, not their own political share price or anything else. Can the Secretary of State assure the House that, in our altered post-Brexit geopolitical position, there is no question of future trade requirements or the urgency of a trade deal with China influencing national security judgments?”
“I thank those on both Front Benches for their response today and particularly for their defence of pluralism. They outlined their horror, which we all share, of innocent people being attacked in their place of worship, where they should feel safe. I agree with the Foreign Secretary about the importance of religious freedom and of the capacity of different faiths to live together and coexist in peace but, given these attacks, there will be people even in this country who are now more nervous about their own places of worship. What assurance can he give to people here that the maximum measures are being taken to defend the pluralism and freedom of worship that we enjoy here in the UK?”
“The Prime Minister has applied for and now been granted two extensions to the article 50 period. She did that to avoid the consequences of a no-deal Brexit. Those consequences were laid out by the Cabinet Secretary two weeks ago: rising food prices, shortages of food, stockpiling medicine, huge damage to manufacturing and the weakening of our national security. Yet for two years she talked up that outcome, saying that no deal is better than a bad deal. That irresponsible rhetoric helped to normalise those consequences in the minds of the public. Does she regret talking up no deal, legitimising an outcome that she knows is bad for the country and which, through the acceptance of these extensions, she is desperate to avoid?”
“I hope that the Minister will heed the calls made in this debate—on a cross-party basis—for an apology. If he cannot personally issue the apology today, I hope the Prime Minister makes one soon on behalf of the Government and the country, 100 years on from this terrible crime.”
“In any case, what kind of argument says that, as we cannot do everything, we should do nothing? This demands far more than a cycle of whataboutery in an attempt to change the subject. It was a particularly heinous and appalling act, and had enormous historical as well as human significance. A lack of an apology has continued to be a thorn in the side of the relationship between the UK and India, even though great progress has been made—today we are friendly and cordial diplomatic powers with good relations. The Jallianwala Bagh atrocity still lives on in memory. As we approach the 100th anniversary this weekend, the time is right for an official apology. It should not take 100 years to say sorry for such a terrible crime, but saying sorry 100 years on is better than not saying sorry at all.”
“I am currently co-ordinating a cross-party letter calling for an apology, which has been signed by the hon. Member for Harrow East, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, and many of my hon. Friends. Some people ask why we should apologise for one atrocity, when there have been many more in history. “Why should we judge the past by the standards of today?” The crucial point is that this massacre was not judged by the standards of today; it was widely condemned at the time by Churchill, Asquith and Josiah Wedgwood. In response to what happened, the first Asian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, returned his knighthood in disgust. The exceptional horror was there for all to see in 1919 and 1920, and not just today.”
“Those horrific details ensure that it is remembered 100 years later. Many see Jallianwala Bagh as the moment when the movement for Indian independence became unstoppable—the moment when many people in India gave up any hope for colonial rule—and perhaps even as the beginning of the end of the empire itself. The episode was not only outstanding in its brutality; it achieved the very opposite of the intention of General Dyer. Let us turn to the question of an apology. When Prime Minister David Cameron visited the site in 2013, he described this as a “deeply shameful event in British history”, but stopped short of an apology. Now, as we approach the 100th anniversary, there are growing calls for an apology, as we have heard in this debate. I add my voice to those calls.”
“Member for Harrow East read out the horrific details, and I will not dwell on them, because we now know them: a peaceful crowd of thousands; the attempt to bring in an armoured car that was foiled only by the narrowness of the alleyway on the approach to the Bagh; the lack of any warning or any attempt to disperse the crowd by peaceful means; 50 soldiers, armed with Lee-Enfield rifles; 10 minutes of firing; 1,650 rounds fired; people vainly jumping into the well to try to escape the bullets. Official estimates were that 379 people were killed and three times that many injured, but other estimates suggest many, many more of both. The rounds fired were indiscriminate—Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were all among the dead. We know of Churchill’s verdict that it was a “monstrous event”.”
“However, when they went home, they were not treated as heroes, but found themselves subject to harsh colonial laws such as the Rowlatt Acts, which were passed in March 1919 and deprived people of their liberty—they sanctioned indefinite detention and incarceration without trial. All of that is the backdrop to the protests that were happening in the Punjab at the time. The hon.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing this timely and important debate. The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh stands out as one of the most appalling and significant episodes in colonial history, not only because of the brutality of what happened there, but because of the context and its huge and long-lasting effect. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) said, the context is that it was just after the first world war, when Indian soldiers had made huge sacrifices in fighting side by side with British soldiers. Many of those Indian soldiers came from the Punjab, which has a long and proud military history.”
“Now, we are being asked to mortgage all this to the outcome of a Tory leadership contest, where the battle will be between candidates trying to prove that they are the truest believer of all. The question will be “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most right-wing nationalist of them all?” That is what the candidates will be asking. If the Prime Minister wins tonight, I contend that the battering ram approach to parliamentary democracy will still not bring the country together. This has not been good enough as a process. If she loses, she will have a decision to make. This House has made clear its opposition to no deal, so the Prime Minister will have to decide on the future, a longer extension and a recasting of the process, if this goes down tonight.”
“The first is the separation of the political declaration from the withdrawal agreement. The second is the starting gun being fired on a Tory leadership contest. The political declaration was already vague, but separating it out from the withdrawal agreement makes this the most blindfold Brexit. We are being asked to vote to leave with no idea at all of what the future relationship between the UK and the EU will be and no attempt to answer the fundamental question that Brexit poses: do we want a more distant economic relationship where, in all likelihood, Northern Ireland will have to be treated differently from the rest of the UK; or do we want a close economic relationship where we continue to obey the EU’s rules, yet give ourselves no say over them? That question must be answered.”
“This is the third time that we have considered this issue. The Government say that this is not meaningful vote 3 and they will not count it as meaningful vote 3 if they lose today, but they would certainly count it as meaningful vote 3 if they won today. A number of right hon. and hon. Members have said that they have changed their minds between vote one, vote two and vote three. There will be many people in the country asking themselves why is it that MPs can vote three and maybe four times, and are entitled to change their minds, but it would be the greatest democratic calamity of all, according to the Prime Minister, to give the public one vote on this deal and give them the right to change their minds. Two things are different about how we are doing this today.”
“Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Pitching Parliament against the people undermines parliamentary democracy and feeds the far right. Does the Prime Minister regret her use of words last Wednesday?”
“It is thoroughly irresponsible and it is not the leadership that we need through these troubled waters.”
“As for timing and other conditions, far too often in our discussions we forget that there are two sides at the table. An extension has to be applied for and agreed unanimously. It will not just be up to us how long it is for. Whatever happens in the votes tonight, it is important that we understand that. I understand the public impatience with politics right now. It is our job to get stuff done, but the leadership response to parliamentary votes matters. We heard a great speech yesterday from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who defended parliamentary democracy. It is just a pity that our Prime Minister, the leader of our country, never defends parliamentary democracy. Continually setting Parliament against the people is at best disappointing.”
“That is the reason why we should extend. For four months we have been having the wrong conversation with Europe. Instead of disappearing into five different levels of legality over the backstop, which looks to the rest of Europe as if we are trying to wriggle out of our commitment to no hard border in Northern Ireland and to supporting the Good Friday agreement, we should have been having the conversation that we need to have about what Brexit really means, what the choices are and what the trade-offs are. Let us not pretend that the reason that has not happened is that somehow it is impossible until we leave. The reason it has not happened is that to do so would expose the deep divisions within the Conservative party, but the public deserve better than that. That is why extension should be for the purpose of clarification.”
“When the Prime Minister set out the timetable for this week a couple of weeks ago, she did not say that the vote on an extension was to be linked to acceptance of the deal. When she set out those arrangements, the premise was that we would come to this point after the defeat of her deal, which is what has happened. Now we find, from her reaction to the vote last night, that the Government’s proposal to extend article 50 is linked to their strategy of one more heave, two more heaves, however many more heaves it takes. The amendments that I will support tonight are the amendment tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench or the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). They seek to remove that conditionality and to extend instead for the purpose of clarifying our future direction.”
“We should have a clean vote on instructing the Government to apply for an extension to article 50 without having to approve her deal beforehand.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. When the Prime Minister spoke at the Dispatch Box a couple of weeks ago to set out the arrangements for this week, she said that if the House voted down her proposed deal there would then be a vote on no deal. That has happened today. She said that if the House voted against leaving on a no-deal basis, we would then have an opportunity to vote to ask the Government to seek an extension to article 50. She did not say that was conditional on passing her deal between this week and the application for the extension. The motion that the Government have now tabled is a breach of the letter and the spirit of the assurances that were given at that Dispatch Box a couple of weeks ago. This is an attempt to stitch up the decision tomorrow, and the House should not stand for it.”
“We know the pros and cons of remaining; it is time that the choices and the trade-offs of leaving are laid out before the public. That is the opportunity of extending article 50, not simply another few weeks of the same parliamentary merry-go-round.”
“We have heard plenty about elites and the people in this debate, but there is nothing more elitist than driving through a withdrawal agreement while deliberately keeping from the people the true nature of the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom after that happens, and that is precisely the strategy of the Government. Let me say to Ministers that if they lose the vote tonight and we are in the position of looking at an extension of article 50, let us not have a sterile debate about whether that is for one month, two months or a particular number of weeks. Let it be for a purpose. Let us recast this process so that we can level with the public about the choices that Brexit entails. Let us lay them out, all their pros and cons.”
“The question should have been about not the backstop, but the future of our relationship with the European Union. Our main objections to this agreement are that it leaves this country less empowered than we are at the moment, that it leaves us poorer than we would be otherwise, and, most of all, that there is no clarity on the future. The Prime Minister said so today. What is the answer to the car industry or the aerospace industry that says, “What does the future hold for us?” What is the answer to a young person who says, “What will happen to my rights in the future?” The Prime Minister told us today, after three years, that the answer is that there will be a spectrum of different outcomes. That is the answer: a spectrum of different outcomes. That is not good enough.”
“This happens only if there is a proven accusation of bad faith, as distinct from a political disagreement, and only then if one party—the European Union—acts in defiance of a ruling of the arbitration process. That is highly unlikely to say the least. Otherwise, if there is no agreement on the future relationship reached by the end of the transition period, the backstop kicks in. For us, it has never been about the backstop, because we understand that this is a necessary consequence of a commitment that the UK Government have made to having no hard border, and we should value that commitment and we should value the Good Friday agreement. For all the energy in the discussions with the European Union since November, those discussions have been about the wrong question.”