Brexit Internal Markets Bill 'Bad for Britain', Michael Howard Says

In a career that has seen him become Conservative Party leader, sack current Prime Minister Boris Johnson from the Shadow Cabinet and now enter the House of Lords, few are as well-positioned as Lord Michael Howard to comment on the state of Conservative Party politics.

In an exclusive interview with Newsweek International, Lord Howard talks about what he thinks about the government's handling of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, austerity, trust in politics and what the Conservative Party under Johnson does next.

"I never thought I'd hear a British minister get up in the House of Commons and say 'we are deliberately going to break international law'," Lord Howard tells Newsweek.

Johnson's government recently brought to Parliament the Internal Markets Bill, which would allow it to override parts of its Brexit agreement with the European Union, despite Johnson signing the agreement himself. The government has previously admitted that such a move would break international law. Having been passed in the House of Commons, the bill is now being debated in the House of Lords.

"It's bad for Britain, it's bad for our relationship with other countries, it's bad for the rule of law," he says of the bill. Howard doesn't think the bill will get through the House of Lords either, saying last month that he would be surprised if it does and believes many of his fellow Conservative peers will oppose it.

After becoming the leader of the Conservative Party in 2003, Lord Howard gave Johnson two new jobs: party vice-chairman and shadow arts minister. In November 2004, he was sacked from both positions after assuring Lord Howard that tabloid reports of his affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt were false and an "inverted pyramid of piffle". After the story was found to be true, Johnson refused to resign.

The British government's handling of the pandemic has been seen by its residents as worse than the U.S. and every other advanced economy, according to the Pew Research Center.* It has been accused by critics of being "complacent" about the dangers of COVID-19, carried out numerous U-turns over issues such as how exam results were calculated by an algorithm and confusion about its "test and trace system" to slow the spread of the virus, which still does not reach all people that could be affected. Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll of any country in Europe and the most severely affected economy in the G7 but Howard thinks the government should be viewed in context.

"I think they have done a pretty good job in very very difficult circumstances," he says. "It is a challenge the like of which no peacetime government has ever really faced before and it's much much more difficult than any challenge faced by me or my colleagues when we were in government. Though I've no doubt it will be possible in due course with the benefit of hindsight to say they didn't get this right or they didn't get that right, faced with this completely novel virus and faced with these extraordinary difficult decisions of balancing the need to save lives with the need to try and keep the economy going, they've done as good a job as reasonably could have been expected in the circumstances.

"I don't agree with the suggestion of U-turns, the virus changes, the threat changes, the challenge the government faces changes, and when there has been change, you have to change your policy response and that's not a U-turn that's a change, I think [notable early 20th-century economist John Maynard] Keynes once said that "when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do?"

The challenges for Johnson have perhaps been larger than most in his first year of office. In his first few months as prime minister, Johnson decided to remove the whip from 21 of his own MPs when they rebelled on a Brexit vote, including two former chancellors, Philip Hammond and Ken Clarke. While some were reconciled within the party, others, like Hammond, quit the Conservatives altogether.

"That was absolutely necessary, regrettable but necessary," Howard says. "In order to win the election Boris Johnson had to convince the country that if he was elected, Brexit would be done and if they returned a whole load of Conservative members of Parliament who are determined in effect to thwart Brexit which is what we saw in the previous Parliament, he wouldn't have been able to say that."

Following that decision, Johnson's party won the biggest majority of recent times. But does that mean it has taken a more populist tone that risks fracturing the party?

"There have always been different people placing a different emphasis on various strands in the Conservative tradition - those on the one hand who place more faith in free markets and a limited state and others who have been in favor of more government intervention," Howard says. "The reason why the Conservative Party is often described as the most successful political party in the Western world is because it has, over time, been able to adapt and bring together those different strands of the conservative tradition in a pragmatic response to the challenges which the country faces."

These challenges include a national debt above 100 percent of GDP for the first time since the 1960s. Will that mean a return to austerity from Chancellor Rishi Sunak?

"He's got to be pragmatic in his response," Howard says. "Given the amount of money we are borrowing, the key thing is to maintain the confidence of the markets and to continue to be able to service that debt at very low rates of interest and he has to judge the necessary policy response in the context of keeping the markets on-side and I've every confidence that that's what he'll do. He may well not need to resort to austerity if the markets are prepared to continue to have confidence in the British economy."

A lot of the economic prosperity relies on how Britain fares through the winter with the COVID-19 response and case rises. Local lockdowns are in place to at least some degree in around half of England as the opposition, Labour leader Keir Starmer, is calling for a full national "circuit breaker" lockdown to get the virus under control.

"People have been begging the government to react to the virus in a localized way, to impose differing restrictions on different parts of the country, depending on the extent to which they are being affected by the virus," Howard says. "It's not a recipe for confusion, it's doing what people have asked the government to do, which is to tailor their response to local circumstances."

The Conservative Party has been dogged by allegations of Islamophobia, with councilors suspended and accusations that anti-Muslim prejudice in the party is systemic. *

"I don't agree with that, I think we crack down on Islamophobia wherever we find it, including in our own party," Howard says. "I was responsible for encouraging Sayeeda Warsi [a Conservative peer and the first Muslim woman to serve in government] to come into politics and to play an active part and I was delighted when she was made chairman of the party. We have Muslim colleagues in high positions in the party they are very welcome and we absolutely respect our fellow citizens of the Muslim faith."