It would be irresponsible of me to share too much of my story in a way that could be copied by the press and perhaps acted upon to the detriment of what we are trying to achieve. So I will share a little of it and offer to sit down with the clerks to look at what I am saying—quietly, separately, outside this meeting—with a view to seeing whether it can be corrected or we can do something about it. But I do not want to be the trouble-maker I am likely otherwise to be.
All this started on the day when we finished and went home for the election. I went to the clerks’ office and asked a question that I should have asked long ago: “What does it take for this House to be quorate for a vote?”—a question that I used to ask all the time before any board meeting of any of my companies. The reply that I got was: three Peers present to ratify a Statement to be read into the record, and 30 Peers for any part of a Bill. I then asked, “But what do we do with regard to the disallowance of votes from Peers who have become disqualified for failing to live by the oath they took on being signed in?” “No, Peers are allowed to vote once they have taken the oath.” “Yes,” I said, “but a lot of Peers have broken their oath.” “No Peer ever breaks his oath.” I thought, “I know I have, and I’m not the only one.” I have broken the oath because I did not object to the Lisbon treaty when I was here. I am therefore in breach of that oath and have been ever since, and so has anyone else who has been here since that time. I said, “Then do you count my vote when I come in here to vote?” They said, “Yes, we do.” I said, “Then your votes must always be wrong.”
This is much more complicated than that because you then have to go back to the Maastricht treaty. Anyone who was here when that treaty began has Brownie points-plus, because the Maastricht treaty introduced the levy that effectively increased the omnipotence of Parliament, not reduced it. So anyone who voted thereafter and then went to the Lisbon treaty is probably cleared to vote again now, because the Lisbon treaty only took away what had been given by Maastricht in the first place so it is probably a Mexican stand-off.
After that, it is a question of just how many votes are excluded and included. As some of our votes are not that big, it would not take more than a variance of 10 or 20 to be significant in swinging a vote. I think that we ought now to have a new approach to voting in this House based upon the fact that everyone should have a voting code included on the register when we go through the Lobby saying whether we were valid or invalid according to the time when we took our oath and what has happened since. It could be easily fitted and done up in the next few days before we come to a vote, and it would give an accurate and realistic vote that could be unarguable in whatever took place afterwards.
I do not want to go into too much detail and give a hostage to the press to have fun with us, but I am seriously concerned that we have an error in our system. God help us, I hope that we get a right vote and a clear one, with no argument. I will help the clerks in any way that I can to understand my problem.
]]>The first derives from memories of my Scottish history master, who used to come to class wearing his service revolver and say he was going to shoot the first English boy who did not understand and respect the role of Scotland within the United Kingdom. He never shot any of us, but we were very polite. I have a question arising out of what he taught us then. I am trying to verify it by reading back through the Act of Union, and it looks as though he may still have a point, which would be a problem with what we have here. Is it still correct that the union itself requires there to be complete parity and similarity between all taxation imposed on each of the countries, and that any breach of those circumstances that led one country to be advantaged over another would result in the immediate termination of the whole union, and the union would be null and void? The arrangements that we are now proposing for Northern Ireland seem to leave open the possibility, for example, that the VAT rate could be reduced by 5%, outside our control at any time, and that would have the technical impact of breaking the union. That is a huge point and I want somebody to tell me that I am wrong. Some 40 noble Lords have spoken today and nobody has asked yet, so I probably am wrong, but I would like confirmation that there is no hazard in that point please.
My second question is: what are the known unknowns behind the deal? What do the Government know has been agreed privately—hands have been shaken on it and it is subject to some protocol somewhere—that is not set out in the information here for us to be told about? I provided a list of five names to Mr Gove, and asked him to research them and take them to the Prime Minister, of people who were sent by the Cabinet Office to undertake separate negotiations in Brussels on a range of subjects. I will not be mischievous by naming what those subjects are, although I have a fair idea. I want to know what private deals have been done that affect the future of our country and our sovereignty and which challenge all the things that we hold dear in this country. The Government may say that I am talking total rubbish and that there are none, so I want it certified that there are none and that the day we Brexit we cannot have Mrs von der Leyen on the phone saying, “By the way, we hold you responsible for all those deals that you signed up for, and we will implement them as of tomorrow”.
I want to know that there are none or I want to know what they are. I believe that there are at least five or six out there. I have provided the names of the people who I believe led those negotiations and I want those deals either identified to us or it confirmed that they will never apply. Then I will support this deal and I believe many noble Lords will join me in doing so.
]]>I did not know what to do with these, so I suggested on the places where this was occurring that we should put up a copy of a report I had written called the Black Vulture—the Black Vulture being the most obvious alternative I could think of to the Yellowhammer. Yellowhammer deals with the problems that come from a no-deal Brexit; Black Vulture is to deal with the problems that might come from not doing a no-deal Brexit and what would come if we got put into a remain situation instead. I set out 19 questions to which I did not give answers and asked people to consider them for themselves. I expected to get very little response, but I got a flood of mail through the letterbox as well, usually very deeply considered.
Whereas I would have had a bet that the first question they would have dealt with was, “What’s going to happen with defence? Tell us what the EDU is”, it was not. It was my fourth question, which asked, “What is your situation with regard to the possible imposition of the euro as an alternative to the pound if we remain and how do you think it will affect us?” The result on this one was almost unanimous: if this happens it will be a disgrace because they will use qualified majority voting to impose it on us and we will have no choice. This will mean that all our taxes in this country will be sucked in by Europe. We will not have anything left for our own defence forces, our schools, our education or our welfare. All this will be taken by Europe to fund bust European countries. We will not have it. That was certainly the number one point I was getting back.
The next point was, yes indeed, what do we do about the EDU? Are we really giving them our Army, our Navy and our Air Force? They have not had that one for me, but they have got it from a lot of very careless stuff coming out of the EU itself, in which it is pretty well saying that it is going to get so much co-operation from us post remain that they will effectively have control of our Armed Forces and our own security and intelligence services as well. If you ask around and say, “What’s the answer to this?”, the official answer from within government is, “It’s rubbish, of course it couldn’t happen. We shall still be in NATO and we have the protection of NATO”. But people out there have seen that one coming and they have an answer for it. “No”, they say, “if we go into it with NATO then Europe will say, ‘Goody, we’ve got NATO now’, but America will look across and say, ‘If you’re going in with the EU defence and taking your NATO connection with you, we’re out of NATO, and, by the way, we’re out of Five Eyes as well. You can’t do that on the side’”.
All of this would coincide with a lot of the stuff coming out from Madam von der Leyen and her successor in European defence. They ran a conference in Munich in the spring of this year at which they said, “Look, all of this started with the Maastricht treaty. We said we were going to do this and we said we’d have it done by 2019-20. We’re nearly there. Now we’re going to be able to do this once we’ve got past discussion with the UK and we shall go into 2019-20 with everything that we’ve ever wanted”. They are standing on a platform saying this and Mrs von der Leyen or her successor is saying, “And it’d be lovely to have two such beautiful aircraft carriers”. Oh yes, that will go down well with the British public. Then, who is standing beside her but a former Prime Minister of this country? He is not showing dissent, but he is not showing assent either, but what a presence to put on the platform at that time. This has a profound effect. The public out there want to know.
I have a big suggestion to make to the Government, whether they stay, go or whatever they are going to do. They should issue a definitive statement on these two contentious issues and say categorically whether, as the pubic clearly suspect, they have done a private deal with the European Commission to relinquish control of our Armed Forces and our intelligence services. If they have not, they should say categorically that they have not: there is no binding issue which could be triggered post Brexit or if staying on a remain basis or anything; it is simply not an issue. Otherwise, it is going to be a running sore which will disrupt and destroy anything that the Government were going to do on the subject.
I return to my original point about the need to restore our sovereignty. It is the one great unanimous issue. There is no longer a population out there saying, “We want to take back control”. They are saying, “We want our sovereignty back”. They are saying it in every nook and cranny in our national debate. We should not be in doubt: we cannot do anything—either Brexit or remain—without cracking those problems. I thank noble Lords for their time and wish them well in the rest of the debate.
]]>Amendment 1 withdrawn.
Clause 2 agreed.
Clause 3: Duties in connection with Article 50 extension
]]>If the Lisbon treaty is allowed to stand and is not wiped away at midnight on
What I am going to say is that I think the basis on which we are going forward from here is wrong because we have a situation in which we are facing a choice between remain, the no-go solution and, as came very much into focus in the latter stages of yesterday, the possible resurrection of the May deal. The May deal and remain both carry the same consequence that they would still leave us in breach of our oath. We need to have our oaths restored to us, which would happen if at midnight on
The first person we need to be concerned about in that respect is Her Majesty because we have the power of government placed in our hands by the coronation oath which she swore never to diminish, but we have diminished it for her. In those circumstances, do the British public realise they are being asked to consider a situation which might create a position in which Her Majesty would consider it was essential for her to abdicate? If that occurred, would it ever be possible to resurrect the monarch because nobody else could swear the same coronation oath? Let us be realistic about this. My whole criticism of the situation of opposition to no-go at the moment is that we simply have not informed the British public of what is at stake. It goes way beyond this.
We have this wonderful paper called Yellowhammer, which tells us all the dreadful things that will happen if we do go no-go. My secretary has an alternative list that I have complied called the Black Vulture, which is my list of the things that people do not know about which will happen if we do not go no deal. The first is the hazard it creates for the Crown. The second is: will somebody please tell us the truth about the European defence union? This is by far the biggest issue facing the British public and they know nothing about it officially. Can we please have a proper account of what it entails? Is it really true that the Government have entered into private agreements with the European Community that they will, on completion of remain or whatever it is to be, transfer to the European Union in Brussels the entire control of our entire fighting forces, including all their equipment? [Laughter.] Noble Lords may jest, but it has been done and they should check it out. It is too important to ignore. We must know the truth of this. We must have it clear for the whole public to know. I believe it is true, and I think we should be told. I understand that it is intended that the oath of every serving member of our forces will be cancelled and they will be required to undertake a new oath of loyalty to Brussels. I understand that in recent months, we have had a series of people sent from our Armed Forces to create and install the command and control centres to be used for the control of our troops once we have ceased to have any control over their use, application or deployment. It goes beyond this. They are to take control of our intelligence services, the whole core of Five Eyes. They will have MI6 and the Cheltenham monitoring centre, and we will be completely excluded from it under the new arrangements and have no access either to the—
]]>Where do I stand on this? I was a Brexit voter at the time and I have seen nothing whatever to alter my opinion since. I think there would be a big surprise for all noble Lords contending the need for a new vote. I think the mood of the country has hardened, and the vote for Brexit would go up, not down. That is my gut reaction.
I took great interest in the comments of my noble friend Lord Robathan earlier this afternoon. He made two wonderfully perceptive comments. He noted that every previous attempt by anybody to run a referendum against the European Union’s interests had resulted in it being taken to a second referendum and defeated. Yes, the circumstances were different, but the unique feature is that nobody has ever gone on to run the second referendum. I think we would find ourselves with a very different issue.
The best outcome I would prefer to see is that for the present we do nothing but carry on negotiating. Europe has never had to put up with a second innings; it has never followed on. They do not play cricket over there. I would like to see them follow on and have to put up with a very big score against them this time round. I think we should do that. They have no experience of how to run a debate on a second round, and I think we should really hammer it to them. And this time, can we please have a bit of respect? We have had no respect yet. They have treated us completely as though we can be pushed around as they want, and we cannot. It is time to stand firm on all of that.
They do not recognise two important factors about us, and they do not want to know. First, we are a sovereignty, and they do not know what sovereignties are. They are all republican—they are republics. There is no collective word for republics, but I offer the word snaffle as a good descriptive word, because they are a bunch of snafflers. From my point of view, we should give them the lesson of inflicting on them another round of intense and very annoying debates. I would like those debates to concentrate on giving them a lesson in what a sovereign constitution actually means.
The way this has gone at the moment, I think the House of Commons is committing an act of treason by even recognising the ability to negotiate a treaty in which its own God-given right by the Bill of Rights is being breached. The one great power our Parliament has is that it is omniscient in all things. The only thing it cannot do is limit its own powers. That is what this Bill would do, because it would continue to endorse what came in with the treaty of Madrid and would carry that on as though it were permanent for ever. That, in my view, is treason. I would not wish to go to Her Majesty and put that to her. Under the oath we have all taken on coming into this House, anybody who took that line forward from here would be committing treason. I will not do it. I will go to the barriers—with anybody who will come with me—before I do that.
Beyond that, we have to recognise that we have got to try to change the emphasis in how they think of us. It is strange that in all of this there have been three references to the fact that we are an island. We know we are an island. It is almost as though they have just discovered it for themselves. General de Gaulle said: “No, no, no. We do not want Britain in; they are an island”. Mr Macron recently said: “Of course they would say that; they are an island”. One of the other people did as well. Yes, we are an island and a trading island. We survive, as all islands do, by trade. We should have every assistance in continuing to do that.
We are also the island that three times in the last 200 years has provided the means of putting together an alliance which has rescued Europe from itself. As Sir Lewis Namier, professor of history at Manchester 25 to 30 years ago, said, the fact that we are an island is the unique feature that means we have saved Europe. They have to put us back in the position to continue to be the positive benefit for them that they do not see us as today.
They need a history lesson. That should be the first part of resuming our dialogue with them. In 1815, we rescued them from Napoleon. I wonder how many of your Lordships recognise that Nelson’s Column stands today on exactly the position that the post-revolutionary Government had marked to mount the guillotine where they were going to march the entire occupants of the House of Commons and House of Lords for one last embrace. We did not win the Second World War or the First World War, but we were the island that put together the alliances that did. They need to remember that. I hope they never need another alliance, but they can send us an email if they ever want us to try again. We will be around.
We would like to be a prosperous, trading island. We need some sense on that and some respect for what we are. We are not a defeated nation, and Europe should cease trying to look upon us and treat us as such. We are a nation that is proud of its achievements, survival, people and monarchy. Hands off: we do not want any interference with it. We keep what we have, and it is good for you in Europe, too, so get used to it.
It has been a long debate. I have gathered a very strong impression that there is a willingness in this House to support what is on the table at present, but we should not take it until we have hammered away at getting it improved. I am sure that it can be improved, but we have got to take the initiative more strongly than we have.
]]>I do not know what the solution is, but we should not be ignorant of this big market. It is likely to continue and will be very persistent. The only alternative for a casino is to use a Teflon ball, which is fine but it bounces too much. It is too easy to use a Teflon ball which has a steel interior which can then be mixed up with a magnetisation of the roulette wheel’s rim and give easy distortion for fraud. This is why casinos do not want Teflon balls and they do want ivory balls. We should be on guard against this because it is going to be a big, dark market.
]]>The first case emanates from the northern shores of Africa and the other one relates to our old friends the IRA. They are very different, and I shall take the Libyan incident first, which is astonishing in its own way. President Gaddafi had decided that he had to get rid of this terrible capitalist symbol known as Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola had to be driven from the shores of Libya, but he did not have another drink to replace it, and Libya is a very hot country and you have to have a drink.
He approached a company in Yorkshire which specialises in turnkey operations and said, “Please invent me a cola company”. Unfortunately, and unbeknown to them at that time, I was about to be made chairman of this company because the bankers were frightened about how much its borrowings were rising. I arrived on the day when the cola had apparently been created to replace Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola had been sent from the shores of Tripoli with the blasts of cannons echoing in their ears—he got planes to shoot at the ship as it went out to sea, carrying all the residual Coca-Cola of Libya—and the new cola was born.
Unfortunately, the headline in the national press the next morning, on the launch of this new cola—I am awfully sorry but I am going to use a very non-parliamentary word; apologies to Hansard and to the Chair—was, “Kitty Kola is Kitty Cat Piss”. I thought, “This is terrible—if this is what Mr Gaddafi thinks, he will never pay the invoice”. So I said, “How are we going to get paid for it? How much do they owe us?”. They said, “£27 million, sir”. I had only been there since Monday and this was the Tuesday. I said, “We’re not going to get paid, are we?”. They said, “Yes, we will—you wait and see”.
Later that day, they came to me and said, “We’ve been paid”. I said, “Let me see”, and they showed me a credit transfer for £29 million. I said, “That’s £2 million too much”. They said, “Yes”. I said, “Send it back immediately and just keep the £27 million”. “Don’t be a fool”, they said, “You’re a new chairman and you don’t know what’s going on”. I said, “I certainly don’t. What’s the £2 million for?”. They said, “You’ll be told later today”. I said, “I can hardly wait.”
Shortly after that, I got a communication from Libya saying, “Please take the £2 million and open a bank account for us in Rome, and provide us with all the bank details—and by the way, we’ve sent you a picture of the passport of the individual whose name we need to have on the account”. I said, “We’re not doing this, are we?”. They said, “If you don’t do it, we’ll never get another deal in Libya”. I said, “Have you done this before?”. They said, “Yes”. I said, “How many times?”. They said, “Seven times”. I said, “You’ve opened seven bank accounts? For how much?”. “Well, it’s usually about £2 million each time”. “And what’s that money being used for?”. They said, “We don’t know—it’s none of our business”. I said, “It jolly well is. We’re going to have to talk to the security staff about this, straight away”. They said, “You can’t—they’ll blow us away”.
So I got on to the security people and said, “Are you interested in this?”. They said, “Yes. Come and have breakfast and bring all the stuff with you”. So the next morning—they always do it nicely—I got breakfast at the Dorchester, which is never to be complained about, and I took all the files on this thing. They said, “This is wonderful! This is like gold dust.” I said, “I think it’s terrible”. “No, no, no—don’t stop doing it; just give us all the details and then we’ll have the whole thing completely under supervision”. I said, “This is going to be used for buying armaments to murder the Pope and everything else”. “We’ll look after that; you just do what they’re telling you, give us the details and we’ll all be happy”.
The present Bill makes everything that I have just told noble Lords very illegal. But I ask the Minister: how are we going to catch it, because I cannot see that there is any regulatory process or overview that will stop it happening again? And do we think it is not happening today? The company that I was chairman of for that brief period is not there today—but somebody is and they will be doing the same. How are you going to make this Bill work to stop that happening again? I bet it is happening today, and will happen tomorrow and the next day. I would not like to know how many private bank accounts are opened up which provide easy access for Islamic terrorist intervention across the shores of the southern Mediterranean.
I have a conundrum for your Lordships. I will mention five different types of company and I want noble Lords to tell me if they can see instantly why it was attractive to the IRA to acquire a controlling interest in five small listed companies trading individually on the London Stock Exchange. They were as follows: one, the world’s biggest library of photographs available for press utilisation; two, a spoil reclamation company, taking salvage spoil from mining tips; three, the building of a residential village on the shores of Portugal; four, a technical film services company; and five, an extremely upmarket and very posh limousine service working round the airports of Europe. What was the possible interest in having those five companies? I have asked around and only one Member of the Lords got the answer: my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond—it took him about seven seconds. I think that he should be put in charge of intellectual investigations of all suspicious work immediately.
The answer, quite clearly, is that every one of them performs a service abroad for which an invoice for payment can be provided from Ireland. It is an easy way of transferring money wherever you want it, in small or big sums, and having the money—criminally acquired funds by the IRA in Ireland—filtered away into little bits and pieces. The village in Portugal is funny, I think, because it was intended to be the holiday venue and retirement homes for retired successful IRA operatives. I did not know that it had such care for the welfare of its people. It makes one feel proud to know that the IRA was so responsible.
The film technical services company was the one that caused the greatest problem. There was in those days—this is the terribly important difference from what we have now—a hugely active corporate governance department in the Bank of England. It was run by a man called Jonathan Charkham who, among his many other great distinctions, was the father of my noble friend Lady Shackleton of Belgravia. Jonathan Charkham was the witchfinder general for the IRA’s activities in the 1980s and he was brilliant at it. He sadly died some years ago. The department in the Bank of England had ferreted away and had found a very strange set of circumstances. An American company that it could not identify had worked through Savory Milne, the broking arm of the Swiss Bank Corporation, to acquire the controlling interest of a company called Eagle Trust and had then used Eagle Trust to float a rights issue to acquire a tiny little film services company called the Samuelson Group for £55 million. The Bank of England decided that something was really wrong because the £55 million, which had been used for the rights issue, was stolen completely. The IRA took that as its up-front money.
Again, I was put in to sort this one out. Jonathan Charkham went in one day and called the board. He had the right—as the backbone of the Bank of England—to call a board meeting which he could attend, sitting beside the chairman of any public company. He sat with this lot, went through the whole thing and then fired the whole board on one day. He then put me in as chairman and I had the night to get together a new board for the next day. We looked at this and it was just a nightmare. Eventually, we found that money had indeed been stolen and, later on that same day, there arrived some very strange Americans from a company in New York who announced that they were the new owners of Eagle Trust. The IRA had been in collusion with Cosa Nostra—I do not how this Bill would cope with that if we get it again. The IRA was using foreign money to buy up a company that it wanted to steal some money from. I am not sure that this Bill gets anywhere near providing a regulatory network to get into that. The difference as I see it between then and now—I know I am talking about 25 or 30 years—is that, whereas then we had the regulatory people and professionals who could act on and work with this sort of thing, nowadays we rely upon the FCA and conventional police forces; the security arm will only act if there is a specific security leak recognised with it. We do not have anything like the old Bank of England corporate governance arm which did so much wonderful work to watch what was happening and move on it. Without that, I cannot see how the Bill will have teeth.
A funny thing about the acquisition of the Samuelson Group was that when we went through the accounts, we found that the IRA had ticked off items and had written down, “Four funerals, £500,000”. We wondered what the IRA wanted with four funerals for £500,000. It turned out that this was code for the film “Four Weddings and A Funeral”, which it had spent all the money producing. The IRA had worked for a year for no fees, which had caused it to go bust, in return for 65% of the revenue from the film, which was an enormous amount of money—so we turn from a £4 million a year loss to £14 million a year profit. The flotation raised nearly half a billion pounds and all the banks were paid back with all the money from that. The IRA lost the lot—which I have to say is one of the most satisfactory things I could ever record.
As I say, I cannot see that the Bill will have teeth. There are no foot soldiers to back it up, and we need them. If the Bill is to work, we need to get the Bank of England to decide whether it will reactivate corporate governance as one of its arms. Are we going to make the FCA do its proper job for once and get on with supervising these things, or will it be the security services more generally? At the moment, it is not there and it will not happen—and unless we get it, this well-meaning Bill will not work. It did work before—we cleared the decks and we do not want them to get cluttered with these dreadful people again. We need to make something to back this Bill.
]]>I was infuriated 12 or so days ago, just before we came back for this September session, watching the last day of the England v West Indies test which England lost. There were two amazing innovations that afternoon which I had never seen before. First, the Sky television channel—which of course can have no possible financial interest in this matter—had started to introduce the bookmakers’ odds on the changing position of the teams to win the match, given in conjunction with the support of their expert commentators and their thoughts on whether England could still win or not. The odds on the screen that afternoon were still quoting England at 8:1 to win at 3 pm, when we were clearly dead in the water already, so any money was a gift to a bookmaker in those terms. What right does a major television channel with a national event like a test match have to be encouraging betting and putting out odds which it is manipulating on screen? This is simply dreadful.
What was also terrible that afternoon was that it all moved so slowly that there were a whole range of new advertising slots. One ad came up seven times in two hours, including on two occasions twice in the same three-minute spell. I have to admit this ad was hilariously funny: a footballer trying to take the last, definitive spot kick to win a major championship—probably the European Cup or the World Cup. His shot hits the crossbar and shoots up in the air, whereupon the goalkeeper turns and rises to celebrate with his colleagues the triumph of winning the cup. As his back is turned, the ball comes back down to earth, does a leg-break which Shane Warne would be jealous of and goes into the net—the winners and losers have reversed their positions. It is a hilariously funny ad and I have watched it many times, but it has a very dangerous subliminal message. It is effectively saying, if you a gambler you can rely on the Archangel Gabriel sitting on a cloud up there to look after you: he will catch the ball and turn your defeat into a victory, so gambling is safe because miracles happen to protect you. That is what a child is going to think if he sees that ad as many times as I did; seven times in an afternoon.
We have a very serious problem here, much more than this brief debate can possibly address, and we have to stop this nonsense. It is awful; it is undermining of a mentality and attitude of responsibility. How can you influence children when they are seeing this stuff? I can watch that ad many times, because it is hilarious, and so will they, but the message is the same, all the time: trust in a miracle and you will be a successful gambler.
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