EU Exit Negotiations — House of Commons, 2017-09-05
Topic: Mixed Topics
Keir Starmer (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the Secretary of State for giving me notice of his statement. I also thank him for what I hope will be his agreement to update the House in this fashion after every round of the talks. I think that he has agreed to do that, and I am grateful. We accept that the negotiations are complex and difficult, and I understand the Secretary of State’s frustration at points with the process and sympathise with the view that some phase 1 issues cannot fully be resolved until we get to phase 2. Northern Ireland is a classic example of that. Although he will not say it, I am sure he is equally frustrated by the deeply unhelpful "go whistle" and "blackmail" comments from some of his own colleagues. I am sure that colleagues and officials in his Department are working hard in these difficult negotiations and I pay tribute to what they are doing behind the scenes. However, the current state of affairs and the slow progress are a real cause for concern. The parties appear to be getting further apart, rather than closer together. Round 3 of the five in phase 1 is gone, and we would now expect agreement to be emerging on the key issues. The last round is in October, and that should involve formal agreement. There is now huge pressure on the negotiating round in September. If phase 2 is pushed back, there will be very serious consequences for Britain, and the concept of no deal, which I hoped had died a death since the election, could yet rise from the ashes—[Interruption.] Great? The second cause for concern is that it is becoming increasingly clear that the Prime Minister’s flawed red lines on issues such as the role of the European Court of Justice or any similar body are at the heart of the problem, as is the matter of progress on EU citizens here and abroad. The Secretary of State, the Prime Minister and the Government need to be much more flexible on that issue. I fear that these examples will crop up not only in phase 1, and that these flawed red lines will bedevil the rest of the negotiations. It is a fantasy to think that we can have a deep and comprehensive trade deal without shared institutions, and the sooner we face up to that, the better That brings me to my third concern. We are obviously reaching the stage of the negotiations where fantasy meets brutal reality. The truth is that too many promises have been made about Brexit that cannot be kept. The Secretary of State has just said that no one pretended this would be easy, but the Government were pretending it would be easy. The International Trade Secretary promised that a deal with the EU would be "one of the easiest in human history" to negotiate. A year ago, in the heady early days of his job, the Secretary of State himself wrote that "within two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete…we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU." He went on to say that "the new trade agreements will come into force at the point of exit from the EU, but they will be fully negotiated and therefore understood in detail well before then." Even this summer, the Government published position papers riddled with further fantasies. The "track and trace" customs idea was put forward on 15 August as an apparently serious proposition, only to be effectively removed on 1 September by the Secretary of State himself, with the admission that it was merely "blue sky thinking" The time for floating fantastical ideas is over. There must be no more promises that cannot be met. This is the brutal reality. We need to know how the Secretary of State intends to ensure that real progress is made in the September round. Is he intending to intensify the talks? Does he accept that it is now time to drop some of the Prime Minister’s deeply flawed red lines, in order to create the flexibility that he says is necessary? When will we see position papers that actually set out the Government’s considered position on the key issues?