High Peak Liberal Democrats

Boris “a real embarrassment” says William Wallace

Our Lib Dem Peer and regular LDV contributor William Wallace is an Emeritus Professor in International Relations. He is more qualified than most people to comment on foreign policy. In the Lords debate on the EU Withdrawal on Monday, he was incredibly critical about the Foreign Secretary - and that was before Boris's bizarre comparison of the congestion charge boundary to the Irish border after Brexit.

Here's the whole of that speech:

It is clear that we will have to return to this at the next stage if the Government do not provide any more detail.

First, on the role of the Lords in considering Bills such as this, the noble Baroness said-as the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said on a couple of occasions-that this is a largely mechanical Bill.

Well, it is a mechanical Bill that gives very wide discretion to the Government to design our future relationship with our most important security, political and economic partners. So a House that concerns itself not with whether the principle of the Bill is correct but with the detail is entirely in accord with its role to ask for detail on what that discretion will be used for.

It would be easier to accept that this is a mechanical Bill and not to raise these difficult questions one after another if we had some confidence that the Government actually know what they want in these areas. Part of our problem is that many of us have no such confidence.

I do not think that the Foreign Secretary has a clue about what he wants by way of a future relationship with Europe: I doubt whether he has really thought about it for more than three or four minutes. He is too busy thinking about the next anecdote he is going to tell or the next joke he is going to make.

His speech last week was a disgrace for a Foreign Secretary: the Prime Minister's was of an entirely different quality. For a Conservative Party that has always prided itself on its commitment to a strong foreign policy, it must be a real embarrassment that we still have someone in place who is incapable of giving a serious speech on foreign policy. So this House is fulfilling its proper role in asking for detail on the implications of the Bill.

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