Brexit: Deal or No Deal (European Union Committee Report) — House of Lords, 2018-01-16
Topic: International Affairs
William John Lawrence Wallace (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I merely remark that I was given this during the referendum campaign when it was being extensively used by speakers from Business for Britain, so it was very much part of the briefing for the referendum campaign itself. I rest my case on that I feel that the extent to which Britain’s achievement in 40 years of membership, and the whole corpus of regulation that has grown up in that period, has been achieved by engagement with our neighbours, including what was after all Mrs Thatcher’s greatest European achievement, the European single market. There is little new in the evidence presented to the committee for this report on the implications of a hard Brexit. Most of it has been reported in successive exercises and inquiries over the last few years, most comprehensively in the 32 balance of competences papers, which were the outcome of an extensive consultation conducted by the coalition Government at the insistence of Conservative Eurosceptics As the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, has just demonstrated, Brexiteers and remainers still seem to be living in parallel universes in how they see Britain’s relationship with our European neighbours. One of the noble Lord’s colleagues on the Conservative Benches told me the other day that the British had been misled when we were taken into the European Community and not told that this was a political project to build a united states of Europe—what I see the Daily Mail now calls a "European empire". Britain, he added, must regain its independence; the details of our future co-operation scarcely matter. However, as the report makes clear, the details matter a great deal The easy promises and illusions of the leave campaign that we could go back to the relationship that we had before 1973 ignore the transformation in the global economy since the 1970s: the impact of new technology, the communications revolution and the accompanying transformation of international security and global threats. Data protection and exchange, air traffic regulation and pharmaceutical and financial regulation have all become far more complex. Britain has helped to shape the European framework for these regulations. If we leave the EU completely, we will have to choose between whether we go back to following American regulation, which is what we did before we joined and before the European single market, or follow European regulations in order to have continuing open access to its markets. I note that the London Chamber of Commerce evidence told the committee: "For the aviation sector, there is no World Trade Organisation ‘fail safe’" There is no fail-safe either for phytosanitary regulations, which are vital for our food and agricultural industries, or for managing tensions between free data flows, data protection and efforts to combat cross-border crime and terrorism. The leave campaign seems to be still back in the 18th century world of David Ricardo, where tariffs were the only things that mattered and regulations and standards hardly existed. However, it is the focus on timing that is the most important part of this report. The report notes the closeness of the intermediate deadlines that we face, well before the Government’s self-imposed deadline of March 2019. The Government have stated that they wish to reach agreement on a transition or implementation arrangement no later than March 2018, now a matter of weeks away. In order to leave the EU in March 2019, they also state, the UK and other European Governments need to reach agreement by October 2018 to allow sufficient time for domestic approval and ratification in the UK and other states. The Government have boxed themselves in by insisting, to placate the hardliners in their party, that the UK will formally leave the EU in March 2019 and that any period of implementation after that will be as a third-country non-member. So time is extremely short The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, suggests that we should ask the Germans to provide an answer, to define the future relationship for us, but if the Government cannot define what they want, negotiation is impossible. The Prime Minister herself is still unable to define what she means by a "deep and special partnership" with the EU, without which it is difficult to negotiate any such relationship. The Cabinet, we are told, held its first discussion on the definition of the future partnership with the EU that we should seek to negotiate on 19 December, a few weeks ago, and it was reported in the Times that the discussion did not enter into much detail. The Cabinet clearly disagrees on the nature of the transition or implementation agreement we are asking for The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, suggests that we should immediately stop paying for the European budget, which is clearly a source of great grievance to the Brexiteers. He will no doubt recall that enlargement of the European Union to eastern Europe was, again, one of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest priorities in the 1980s and 1990s and that a substantial part of our net contribution to the EU budget goes to fund the economic development of eastern Europe and the eastern neighbourhood and is thus a contribution to European security. I hope that the Government want to continue to contribute to European security in various ways. The foreign policy implications of leaving the European Union have not been fully addressed, except in the excellent position paper we received last September The Cabinet clearly still disagrees. Perhaps if the Government had placed their best Ministers in charge of negotiations, we might have made more progress. Perhaps if the division of responsibilities between the Cabinet Office and DExEU had been clearer and the turnover of staff within DExEU had been lower, the Government might also have made more progress. Perhaps if the Prime Minister had paid more attention to Britain’s long-term national interest than to holding her bitterly divided party together, we might by now be in a different place. As it is, we have lost a year, including an unnecessary general election, and we are in danger of running out of time to negotiate an acceptable agreement with the rest of the EU rather than collapsing into a chaotic no-deal outcome, which would be a tragedy and a disaster for this country.