My Lords, I rise not least to celebrate the fact that I agree so strongly with my noble friend Lord Hamilton. We are as one, and it does not matter what we thought when it came to the referendum. Everybody knows that I am a passionate remainer, but I am one of those who draws a line under that because I want to get on, with Britain, which I believe we have to. I want to do that in the British way and, surprisingly enough, in the Conservative way. That means three very simple things, and these amendments enable us to do them.
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The first thing is that you do not ignore the past. You say, “This is where we are. How do we improve it? What was going wrong and what can we celebrate?” For 40 years we played our part in a particular process. We now do not want to do that, but the process has ended with where we are. A normal way of dealing with this is, as the noble Baroness rightly said, like after a general election. You do not say, “All that was old rubbish; I will get rid of the whole lot and we will start again”. No one has ever done that in Britain, and that has been our strength. You say, “This is where we are and these are the things we have to change”, and you change them publicly so that everybody knows and has confidence. That is how we do it.
That is why I agree so much with my noble friend Lord Hamilton. What he is really saying is that this is the British way and the Conservative way. Others do not want it to be the Conservative way, but the one thing we can all agree on is that it is the British way. We have to say that this is not a Conservative Bill, and I do not think it a British Bill either because it is not like us; it is not what we do. What we do is what is in these amendments.
That brings me to the second thing. We need parliamentary scrutiny because that is what we believe in. We do not want Ministers to make these decisions, because any of us who has been a Minister knows perfectly well that it is very dangerous to leave us with decisions such as this. One of the great strengths you have as a Minister is to be able to say to civil servants, “I can’t get that through Parliament. You may think that’s a jolly good idea but, frankly, if I go in front of Parliament with that they’ll boo me off. I’m not doing it.” It is a hugely important element. There is nothing of that in this Bill. There is no way that anybody is going to say to any Minister, however charming and
remarkable—as the Minister responsible is, in both cases—“Minister, I am afraid we want to do this”, and that he can turn around and say not just “I don’t agree” but simply “I couldn’t get it through Parliament”. But that is among the most important strengths of Ministers. One learns very soon that it restrains not only your own imagination to do ridiculous things—we all have those moments—but the way the whole system tends to believe that it is right. Every now and again, it has to be reminded that it is not.
There is a third reason why we need a range of these amendments. I agree with those who have said that the Government could probably come forward with a mixture of these; we would all be willing to support that. I will concentrate on this tiny example: we have a law that we do not happen to have noticed could be called an EU-derived law. I put it like that because it is sometimes quite difficult to tell. We had an odd way of doing it. Most countries took EU law into their own law automatically. We did not; we were far too snooty for that. Surprisingly, we brought it through Parliament because we thought there had to be a parliamentary mechanism.
Therefore, an awful lot of this law looks like British law, because that is what it is. That is exactly the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge: we wrote it, and very often we wrote it badly. I remember it so often: if we were not very careful, we gold-plated it. Civil servants would come to us and say, “Minister, there is a problem here. If you imagine circumstances where someone does this and someone else does something else, we do not quite cover that. Better not leave it, Minister; put this in for safety.” I am afraid that some Ministers—not me, I hope—agreed to that. In it went, and if it was bad then we blamed the EU. That was how it all worked.
The issue remains that this law is British law and it looks like British law. Much of it has been identified but some has not. What happens if that which has not been identified just drops away? What happens is that the British people have had a really dangerous scam played on them. The first principle of law is that people know it. That is why you cannot say, “I am ignorant of the law and therefore should not be prosecuted.” You have to accept that you know the law, and the law has to be there for you to know it. Here is a circumstance where the law would not be there for you to know it. You could therefore easily not be covered by something or have the protection that you thought you had, and all sorts of other issues might arise, and you would not know until it went to court. When it got to court, what would the courts do? First, they would have to say that there was not a law, and, secondly, they would not be able to allow any of the interpretation of that law when it was there which had been extant.
It is on that point that I want to finish. I am repeating myself because I have said this on an earlier amendment, but it is important. The way in which the law works in Britain is that it is not just virgin; it changes as it is applied. People find difficulties with it and the courts find ways of dealing with those difficulties. If they cannot do so then it comes back to Parliament, but usually they can. It is therefore that law as interpreted over the years that becomes so useful, valuable and in touch with people.
What is worst about the Bill—apart from giving Ministers powers that they should never have—is the idea that we should throw away 40 years of experience of how the law works, how it deals with things, how people have reacted to it, where the problems have come and where the advantages are. That is an attitude towards waste that I as an environmentalist dislike fundamentally. We need a circular economy; in other words, you use and reuse all that can be used and reused. What you do not do is give Ministers powers that they should not have, remove restrictions that they and the law should have and do so pretending that it is democratic, when in fact it is neither Conservative nor British.