My Lords, the other day when we were debating the Bill, a number of people stood up, largely on this side of the House, and said that it was inappropriate to make Second Reading
speeches or grand speeches about politics and that this was not about Brexit. I tried to say that maybe the Bill was a new Bill and we should be able to regardless, and I was told off for that.
What we have just seen demonstrates to me why we have a difficulty, both in this House and in the country, when it comes to what people feel about the Bill that we are discussing and the general political situation that we are in. It is true that I do not blame the blob. However, I blame many of the people in the House of Lords, among others, who tried to say that when the decision was made in 2016, regardless of what you thought of it, the British public had got it wrong. They slowed down the process and did everything to obstruct what needed to be done to extricate the United Kingdom’s law, which it had been decided to take back control of, from the European Union.
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Your Lordships will notice that that is not a popular position in this House in general. We had a rather glib, witty and smug repartee earlier about the tiger Brexiteers and so forth. The serious job of doing what the British public—who are the important people in all this—told politicians to do was neglected for years. The obstructions keep coming. Some of them might be from the Civil Service but I tend to agree, and I even said this earlier, that we should not blame the blob.
Anyway, we have an opportunity with this amendment. I do not agree with many of the amendments but I was interested enough to say, “Okay, let’s scrutinise what we are doing here and go through them all”. As people have said—for example, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, raised some interesting points—I want to be able to understand what is going on.
I understand that it is a task and a half, but what has effectively been said in the last few contributions is that it was too difficult to do this when we decided to do it in 2016. How could we possibly envisage it? We could never do it, but we should not blame the blob because of course Brexit itself was impossible to do. So the British public are effectively being told that it is too difficult. The Bill, for all its imperfections, at least tried to say, “It’s about time, after all that time trying to block it, that we get on and take the instructions of the British public”. We should at least be humble enough to acknowledge that, as far as the British public are concerned, this has been an attempt at blocking their decisions. Let us take the Bill seriously now.