David Hannay is a member of the House of Lords and former UK ambassador to the EU and UN.
Would you believe it? Faced with a unanimous resolution of the Commons, ruled on by the Speaker to be binding, requiring it to hand over to the Brexit Committee the analyses it had made of the Brexit implications for 58 industrial sectors, the government has redacted them. It also seems to have applied shrinking fluid to them, reducing the 58 studies to 39.
Whether or not the government’s actions transgress parliamentary rules and conventions is a matter for the Commons and its Brexit Committee to judge (and for the EU Select Committee in the Lords which has also been promised the documents). But the least that can be said is that the government is acting with a singular lack of transparency in its dealings with the institution which it is expected to treat as sovereign. How on earth are these committees to do their scrutiny work if they are only provided with bowdlerised versions of the information in the government’s possession?
The government’s excuses of commercial confidentiality and of the need to avoid compromising the UK’s negotiating position if and when negotiations on end-state trade arrangements get under way are not entirely convincing. We do not know what undertakings the government may, or may not, have given to companies which helped them compile the analyses. Was the information provided on condition that it was not disclosed to parliament?
As to the risk to our future negotiating position, this is a bit far-fetched. No one has suggested that these analyses are negotiating mandates or even guidelines. Much of the material is no doubt available in any case to our EU 27 partners since some of the companies will be headquartered in other EU member states. And given that trade negotiations will, under WTO rules, need to be about overall freedom of trade, not about sectoral arrangements, it is not clear how relevant they would be to the other side’s negotiators.
In any case is it right that the government should be both judge and jury in deciding what is not in the public interest to disclose? A judgement on this could be made by a committee of privy counsellors and then there would be no grounds for dispute.
In any case the government’s action in redacting the analyses is likely to be pretty counter-productive. In all probability, it will merely feed the suspicion that the government has something to hide; that the implications of Brexit, and in particular of its “no deal” variant, will be worse for the UK than they have been prepared so far to admit. If that is the reaction in parliament and the country, the government will only have compounded the serious problems it is already having in convincing others that its Brexit negotiating strategy is well founded and sound.
Better, surely, on reflection, to hand over the analyses unredacted. And it would also be nice to know a bit about the cost of compiling the analyses in the first place and then of redacting them.
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Edited by Hugo Dixon
It is nothing short of outrageous that these Brexit Impact studies have not been published. Parliament have an entirely legitimate right to scrutinise the impact of Brexit. The Government are guilty of manipulating the democratic process. Even a child can see that. No doubt they will be published after all the incriminating evidence has been redacted, but even more cynically, after the Brexit Bill has passed through the Commons.
It proves the hard-line Brexit lobby have given up trying to make a rational case for Brexit. They want it whatever the costs, whatever the harm caused. They know that if those consequences and costs were open to public scrutiny, the case for Brexit would ebb away rapidly.