Trade Bill — House of Commons, 2021-01-19
Topic: Foreign Trade
Emily Thornberry (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to open this debate for the Opposition. I want to thank Members from the other place for all the work they have done on these amendments, which follows the considerable amount of work on the Bill’s previous iteration, all of which is welcome It is a great tribute to how deeply Members on all sides and in both Houses have engaged in our debates about trade over the last few years that we have such a wide range of important amendments before us today. They reflect the values, priorities and safeguards that we believe the UK should apply when negotiating new trade agreements. We have one amendment that reflects our desire that young boys and girls growing up in this country should be able to learn, play and interact with their friends online without the fear that those experiences will be tainted by bullying, grooming or exposure to harmful content. We have another amendment that reflects our equally strong desire that young boys and girls growing up 4,000 miles away should be able to live in freedom, practise any religion they choose and one day have children of their own without the fear that those rights will be taken away by the criminal actions of the Chinese state. I want to focus most of my remarks today on the amendments relating to human rights and to parliamentary scrutiny, but let me first talk briefly about the other key amendments we have before us We welcome Lords amendment 4, which seeks to exclude NHS patient data from the scope of future trade deals. This amendment cuts to the chase of the debate over whether the NHS is on the table when it comes to trade negotiations. To some people, that concept would mean private healthcare companies from overseas being able to compete against the NHS to provide taxpayer-funded healthcare, but in fact it is much more realistic and pernicious. What it means is those same companies winning a greater right to provide services to the NHS through open procurement contracts and thereby gaining access to the vast resource of NHS patient data, which, quite frankly, they have been actively pursuing for years. This amendment seeks to prevent that, and I cannot see why any Member of the House would disagree with it We welcome Lords amendments 6 on standards affected by international trade agreements, which rests on the very simple notion that the international trade agreements we negotiate should not undermine the domestic standards we apply on everything from environmental protection to employment rights—again, something we would have thought everyone would support I have spoken already about Lords amendment 7 on the protection of children online, which seeks to protect the very welcome progress we are making in the UK to keep our children safe when using the internet, and to force major service providers to help prevent children from exposure to illegal content or harmful activity. We know for a fact that the major US internet companies have sought to use trade deals with Mexico, Canada, Japan and Korea to exempt themselves from liability over the harms caused by their services and to guarantee unrestricted access to user data, including that of children. The Minister might well assure us that the same thing will not happen here, but I would simply urge him to allow the passage of this amendment to ensure that the same thing cannot happen here We also welcome Lords amendment 8, the Northern Ireland amendment, on non-discrimination in goods and services, for which we thank my good friend the former right hon. Member for Neath—a much missed presence in this House, but still a good friend to the people of Northern Ireland. When we look at the delays, disruption and economic damage that has been caused by the loss of unfettered access for goods travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland surely we would all agree how important it is that we protect the unfettered access for goods travelling the other way and for the exchange of services in both directions. Indeed, if the Government are promising to maintain that unfettered access, I cannot see why they would urge Members of this House to vote against the opportunity to put that promise into law Finally, let me turn to the other amendments. We welcome amendments 9 and 10, which would expand the remit of the Trade and Agriculture Commission to cover the impact of food on public health. If the Government are to leave it to the commission to protect our food and farming standards against low-cost, low-quality imports, rather than putting those protections into law, then the least they can do is ensure that the commission’s remit covers all the standards that we wish to protect, including those related to public health. I understand that the Government are trying to lift the public health aspects of this amendment, but, before the Minister does that, I urge him to speak to his colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about Government undertakings that may have been given before we had clause 42 of the Agriculture Bill. There is a common thread running through all the amendments that I have mentioned and through those that I will come on to relating to human rights. The common thread is this: if we do not have the right procedures in place to allow proper parliamentary engagement in the Government’s trade negotiations and proper parliamentary debate and approval of the Government’s new trade deals, then, inevitably, Members will seek instead to ring-fence what the Government can give away and protect in law the standards that we want to preserve I just do not understand why the Government are so stubbornly holding on to the Ponsonby rule and CRaG and laws that come from a previous century and a previous age. Why we cannot step into the 21st century as a confident democracy is beyond me. In other words, if we do not have proper scrutiny of the Government’s trade deals, we must have proper safeguards on what the deals can do. Personally, I argue that we should want the best of both worlds—proper safeguards coupled with proper scrutiny—but surely every Member of this House can agree that the worst and most illogical of all worlds is to have neither. I urge Conservative Members, when they are instructed by the Government later to vote down not just the amendments relating to NHS data, online harms, standards, public health and unfettered access, but Lords amendments 1 and 5 relating to parliamentary scrutiny, please to say to the Government that one set of amendments or the other may be opposed, but logically they cannot oppose them both.