Brexit: Negotiations — House of Lords, 2018-10-09
Topic: International Affairs
William John Lawrence Wallace (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I start by remarking that I went to the Printed Paper Office to ask for a copy of the Written Ministerial Statement and technical notices that have been published today, but they were not available. I find that very regrettable, as we need to be informed about these things, and I hope that the Minister will ensure that on the next occasion the Written Statement is available I find this a profoundly worrying and in some ways surreal Statement. It talks about preparing the UK for Brexit, irrespective of the outcome of the negotiations—in other words, if necessary at the end of March to break all our relations with the European Union. Can the Minister assure us that the British Government are really prepared for that? As the noble Baroness has just said, Rotterdam is well in advance of the port of Dover in its preparations. We are beginning to train the extra customs officials that we would like and to reverse the cut in the number of Border Force officers that the Government have pushed through in the last three years, but there is no way that we can do that between now and March I find the confusion within the Government deeply worrying. For example, the Home Secretary has said that we will have the same visa regime for European exchanges as we have now for the rest of the world. In the last two weeks, I have been collecting a certain amount of evidence on how far universities are suffering from the refusal of the visa authorities to allow academic and scientific researchers from outside the EEA to attend conferences in Britain. If we start doing that to the EEA next April, we shall blow up half the networks for scientific research that we have in this country. I speak with particular passion because my son is involved in many of them There are elements here which one can really only be humorous about. I congratulate the Government on the element of irony in the Statement with the reference to their pragmatism and the suggestion that it is the European Union that is being rigid while the Conservative Party, which is so well represented on those Benches, is being entirely pragmatic On the Northern Ireland issue, I recognise that this is the Conservative and Unionist Party, which by its rigidity in dealing with the Irish problem over 100 years ago contributed to the division of Ireland. It seems to me that now its rigidity may well risk losing not only Northern Ireland but also potentially Scotland. I wonder whether the Government have considered taking more seriously Boris Johnson’s proposal to build a bridge across the Irish Sea. It would have a number of advantages. We could maintain the temporary customs arrangement until the bridge was completed and opened, which would certainly take us 20 or 30 years, and if one were to construct the bridge in such a way that there was room for customs arrangements to be conducted on the bridge, it could become a garden bridge in the event that those arrangements were not needed To move on, my wife has just been to a conference in Geneva to discuss as a model EU-Swiss relations, on which she has been an expert for some years, and the question of whether the Liechtenstein model should be taken more seriously. As some people will know, it has a customs union with both Switzerland and the European Union. That seems almost as attractive as the Jersey model, which has been talked about by various sources. The Government refer to their "ambition", but ambition that would perhaps take us as far as being like Liechtenstein or Jersey is really beyond a joke On the question of how we get from here to April, I ask the Minister how far the Government will take the other parties into their confidence over the management of the business that is required. We do not know what has happened to the Trade Bill. When are we going to continue with its Committee stage? What other major pieces of legislation do we need to take through between now and March? The Institute for Government has just produced a report on the very large number of statutory instruments that we will need to consider between now and March. Can the Minister assure us that both Houses will be given time to consider these legislative instruments properly and that they will not be bulldozed through in a panic at the last minute I should like to move on to the subject of the future relationship. There was no reference to it in this Statement or to any sort of declaration about our future foreign policy and defence relationships. Again, the Government seem to be in great confusion on this. We have a new Foreign Secretary, who compares the European Union to the Soviet Union. Clearly, we would not wish to maintain foreign policy and defence relationships with an area that was naturally so hostile, yet for the last 40 years much of Britain’s foreign policy and security relationships externally have been conducted multilaterally in partnership with the European Union. When will the Government tell us a little more about what they consider to be important and what sort of pattern they intend the future relationship to have Perhaps most worrying is the reference in the Statement to a potential gap, in the case of a delay, between the end of the implementation period and the entry into force of the treaty on our future relationship. Do the Government consider that there may well be a hole whereby we have come to the end of the implementation period but have not yet negotiated a treaty on the future relationship and there is somehow a void, with no firm treaty foundation for the relationship between, say, 2021 and 2024 or 2025? If so, that is deeply worrying. I presume that that is the point at which we would go back to WTO terms, or perhaps that is another piece of loose wording in the Statement.