Lord Spicer: One of the reasons why the Opposition are is using the strange technique that my noble friend has exposed is in search of the word “compromise”. Surely that is something that we are going to have to look at later in the proceedings. That is because in a binary situation, you cannot have a compromise: you are either in the European Union or you are out of it. You particularly cannot reach...
Lord Spicer: My Lords, if and when we sign a trade agreement with the United States, is it not likely that food prices will fall and environmental concerns relating to standards will rise?
Lord Spicer: My Lords, this may be the last time I address this House on a point of substance—unless my health changes. My physiotherapist says that I will be playing tennis again by Christmas, which would be nice because I used to captain the parliamentary tennis team. But at the moment I do not think I could crawl here from the Bishops’ Bar in a straight line without what that nice lady has given me...
Lord Spicer: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that I have mixed feelings about this decision? Having been the House bore on the subject for many years, of course I am pleased that we have moved with greater certainty towards a final decision on this matter, but it has come very late. When I was Minister for Aviation in the 1980s, Heathrow was by far and away the busiest international airport in the...
Lord Spicer: Where does the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, get his forecasts of doom and gloom from? I hope it is not the Bank of England.
Lord Spicer: My Lords, where does the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, get all his forecasts of doom and gloom from? I hope it is not the Bank of England.
Lord Spicer: My Lords, again, these amendments are important, particularly when the industry is new, when it can be not just inconvenient but disastrous to turn up at a point which was on the map but which does not exist. As the industry gets older and more points are automatically there, a sunset clause could be built into this amendment. However, at a time when there are hardly any points around at all,...
Lord Spicer: My Lords, whatever the difficulties, it must be right to alter the title to include the total market. After all, running a car on water is not a mean objective. That is a very important technology that has been left out of the Bill. I think those who have argued in favour of changing the title are right.
Lord Spicer: My Lords, why could the proposal to switch from the American F35 to the much cheaper Eurofighter not be made earlier? That would have created savings, for instance to give the noble Lord, Lord West, half a dozen destroyers, if not a battleship to boot.
Lord Spicer: My Lords, we have been pouring money into the north-east ever since Lord Hailsham went up there in his cloth cap and I fought Emanuel Shinwell in the 1960s in Easington, and yet nothing much seems to change. Surely that can only get better after Brexit.
Lord Spicer: I rise having just torn up the speech that I was going to make, as a result of the very eloquent speech that we have just heard, made by the former Hong Kong governor and present chancellor of Oxford University, and a person with whom I entered the Conservative Party on the same day. We entered the research department together on exactly the same day in the 1960s. It was a very eloquent...
Lord Spicer: My Lords, if this amendment is passed, this day, 30 April, should be called hypocrisy day because the overt objective is the opposite of the covert objective. The overt objective is apparently to give greater powers and a greater say to Parliament. The covert objective, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said, will be to do the opposite. If one wanted examples or specific reasons why one says...
Lord Spicer: My Lords, I enter one word of caution. The choice might not be between Parliament and Ministers, but between Ministers and civil servants. To change it to “necessary”, one has to use judgment about that word just as much as the previous one.
Lord Spicer: My Lords, I shall give a brief layman’s perspective. Being brief, I shall follow the advice of the late Cecil Parkinson, who said to after-dinner speakers, “Get up, say you’re very proud to stand before them and sit down”. I shall be a little longer than that, but not very long. I think that we can all agree on one thing: that pretty well all of us had a fixed view on Brexit before...
Lord Spicer: To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have prepared an analysis of the benefit to the United Kingdom of participation in worldwide free trade; and if so, whether they will publish that analysis.
Lord Spicer: My Lords, whatever happened to the European Union? In these troubled times, it has almost completely disappeared. Could it be that, when there is a real crisis, the nation state—when it supports democracy, individual rights and, indeed, free trade—counts for everything?
Lord Spicer: I would like to question that intervention. I think that common standards can be a bad thing for free trade. They can be the most effective of all anti-trade policies and, when it comes to the European Union, in many cases they are. They are used, particularly by Germany, to restrict trade in a far more effective way than tariffs might do. Therefore, it is precisely the kind of vague, if I...
Lord Spicer: The noble Baroness is making a very interesting speech, but how will we get in and out of the country—we are an island—as the population becomes larger and we do not expand our airports?
Lord Spicer: My Lords, the noble Lord has been a great champion of Luton Airport—and good luck to him. He has admitted that Luton is pretty well full up itself now, so there is a bit of a problem there. I agreed with him when he said that the whole of airport policy was a perfect example of how not to run a government policy. The only qualification I would make is that all three parties have had their...
