EU: Future Relationship — House of Lords, 2020-02-27
Topic: International Affairs
William John Lawrence Wallace (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I, too, welcome the Minister to his new position and look forward to a series of robust exchanges in the months to come. As I was coming down to the House, I was interested to learn that there is now a revised version of the Statement. Perhaps it might be of interest to the House to point out what has been revised. The original text stated that "as a sovereign, self-governing independent nation we will have the freedom to … lower all our taxes" The Minister correctly read out the revised version, which is "to set all our taxes." That seems a wise revision by a Government who are about to produce a Budget which intends to increase spending very considerably. If they were to promise in a wonderfully populist way to lower all our taxes at the same time, it would be a little more Trumpian than even Johnsonian I would like to tackle the language and assumptions of the Government’s current approach. This is a very harsh, autonomous independence. As has been pointed out, sovereignty—independent sovereign equality—runs all the way through it, as does the notion of the people’s Government, the "servants" of the people. Saying that "we follow the people’s priorities" is the not the language of Churchill or Thatcher. It is the language of Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, or even President Erdoğan of Turkey. This is not constitutional parliamentary language. This is not Edmund Burke. The Conservative Party has to recognise that it is slipping into different territory In his speech last week, David Frost started and finished by quoting Edmund Burke, but he also rubbished the idea of shared sovereignty. I recall listening to Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher talking about shared sovereignty and how we benefit in constructing a multilateral international order by sharing our sovereignty through international treaties and agreements, international organisations and international law. Britain has done a great deal in that regard. The language of the Statement suggests that we reject most of that and that we think we are now dealing with a power—the sovereign European Union—which is threatening our sovereignty and independence I have not yet heard any Minister say that in dealing with the United States we will expect the United States to treat us as a sovereign equal. I hope the Minister can assure us that we expect the same from the United States because it would not be desirable to establish our independence from the European Union hostile force—as it clearly in many ways is—by reinforcing our dependence in security, intelligence and a range of other ways on the United States. We see it in current extradition procedures and in the presence of American intelligence operatives in this country, who are not fully covered by treaty arrangements and not fully reported to Parliament. That is a degree of dependence which is certainly an evasion of British sovereignty, if we are going to talk about our sovereign independence How are we going to establish our political and economic independence by January next year? If we are going to be economically independent, are we going to ensure, for example, that all our key telecommunications equipment is made inside this country? Are we going to ensure that we have an independently owned steel industry, or at least a steel industry of some sort, or is that not part of economic independence? Do we think that supporting offshore financial centres under British sovereignty is part of independence, given that integration into the offshore world which is the ultimate denial of sovereignty in taxation and other terms? If we are not, that is misleading, populist language. It is wonderful to suggest that we stand for the people, but actually, we do not Free trade limits sovereignty. Protectionism is what protects sovereignty. North Korea is in many ways one of the most sovereign countries in this world. Once you open yourself to foreign investment and trade, you limit your sovereignty, and that is what we have done. We are one of the most open countries to foreign takeovers and, as a result, we have limited sovereignty and we have to share it with others. If we are talking the language of sovereign equality, we should remember what that great realist Thucydides said: strong states do what they like, small states—and we are smaller than China or the United States—do what they must There is no understanding of Britain’s position in the world now we have left the European Union. We have no foreign policy at present. That is not part of this current populist dimension. How do we approach climate change and how do we deal with pandemics? We have to share sovereignty. I hope, when it comes to the climate change conference, the Government will sign up to new international obligations, which will also limit Britain’s sovereignty. Perhaps it is only signing up to shared obligations with the European Union that we object to and we do not, apparently, object quite so much to signing up with China or India Can the Minister also assure us that what I understood the Statement to mean on regulatory divergence is that we demand the principle of regulatory divergence but, in practice, we shall be fairly closely aligned? We are standing up for the ideological dimension that we choose but, when it comes to it, we will probably go along with them. Of course, the alternative, if we do not align with European regulations, will be to align more closely with American regulations, rather than, I suspect, to choose our own I hope the Minister recognises that the change of tone from the political declaration we signed last October is very worrying for anyone who cares about our position in the world. He will have read the Times editorial the day before yesterday, which said that if we now suggest that we are not bound by agreements that we signed up to last year on Northern Ireland and on the political direction, no one will be prepared to trust us and we will not be able to get a future agreement. When a not particularly left-wing newspaper, such as the Times, says that about the Government’s approach to their negotiations, we should all be very worried indeed.