I don't intend to go over a lot of the statistics and the ground that we continually debate in this Chamber. So, there are two areas I wanted to focus on. One is what I call the 'conspiracy of incompetence', which I believe has taken over the Government, and the other is a more serious point in respect of the undermining of parliamentary democracy. In July 2016, David Davis said that, within two years, the UK could negotiate a free-trade area massively larger than the EU. And he was followed by Liam Fox in July 2017, who said—the International Trade Secretary said that negotiating a new British trade deal with the EU would be one of the easiest in history. 

We get to a stage now where the only things we seem to have agreed is that there's a £39 billion divorce bill, Northern Ireland is going to be in chaos, and the biggest danger that we face is absolutely no deal, and you wonder how we can get to a situation where a Government is bringing us so close to a dangerous no-deal situation. You can almost put it down to a conspiracy of incompetence, where you can almost see the hardline Brexiteers saying, 'The more incompetent we can be, the more likely we're going to get what we actually want to achieve.' That might sound as though that's really a bit of speculation, but then you have to actually listen to the actual words that came from Boris Johnson, one of the senior players in this, the Foreign Secretary. These are the actual words from Boris Johnson. Here we go:

'You've got to face the fact there may now be a meltdown. Okay? I don't want anybody to panic during the meltdown. No panic. Pro bono publico, no bloody panic. It's going to be all right in the end.'

And then he followed it on by saying,

'I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump. I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness. Imagine Trump doing Brexit'.

This is from our Foreign Secretary. Well, the reality is that we don't need Donald Trump, because we've got our own Trump trio of Theresa May, David Davis and Boris Johnson. When I was reading this, I saw a tweet that came through that said that even Baldrick had a plan. [Laughter.]

Coming on to the point of undermining parliamentary democracy, the whole article 50 case was actually about the UK Government wanting to bypass Parliament, diminishing the actual role of Parliament. Even the EU (Withdrawal) Bill in the format it came in to us was about Government bypassing Parliament through the creation of Henry VIII powers and centralising Government. Of course, the Grieve amendment, which is coming up tomorrow, is again an extremely important matter, because this is about the fundamentals of giving Parliament a voice, and one would have suspected that the whole purpose of the Brexit referendum, as we were told, was about actually restoring parliamentary democracy.

Lord Hailsham in the House of Lords said the Government's offer 

'not only fails to deliver the promised meaningful vote...but is far worse...as the Government are seeking to make the promised meaningful vote impossible...It deliberately removes the possibility'.

And we see the response to this in the papers is that people who speak in such ways of talking about supporting parliamentary democracy are called 'traitors'. They're called 'enemies of the people'. We risk, I believe, a collapse of parliamentary democracy if the Grieve amendment or some subsequent amendment is not approved that gives Parliament a voice. And it is a total irony, isn't it, that we could end up with a situation where, as a result of the loss of parliamentary sovereignty, we risk having fewer powers in Parliament than if we'd remained in the European Union? There is, in my view, a significant threat to the rule of law. There is an undermining of parliamentary democracy. I believe the only way out of this is that we actually need a general election. We need a Government that actually has a new mandate, because at the moment all we actually have is a Government whose sole motivation, whose sole rationale for existence, is self-preservation, and that is not putting the interests of the nation first.