European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-12-20
Topic: International Affairs
Kenneth Clarke (Conservative, Centre-right): Let me make a little more progress, or I am going to take far too long. I will try to give way later So far, in the complete confusion that has surrounded the consequences of the referendum for the past 18 months—I think we all agree that it has been an extraordinary situation since then—the few actual solid advances on policy have been made on only a few occasions. Indeed, the only times that the Prime Minister has set out policy clearly and been able to sign up to it—in the belief and, I think, hope that all her Government might agree to it—were the Lancaster House speech, the Florence speech and last week when she entered into the agreement on the outline of the withdrawal agreement I do not want to put the Lancaster House speech into the Bill, because that was the beginning of our problems. I do not know why the Prime Minister went there to interpret and declare the referendum result as meaning that we were leaving the single market and the customs union and abandoning the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. I shall come back to this later, but all our economic problems stem from that. Some people may have argued during the referendum campaign that we should leave the single market and the customs union, but I never met one and I did not read about one in the media. The leading lights of the leavers who were reported in the media—I accept that the national media reporting of the referendum debate was pretty dreadful on both sides, with a very low level of accuracy and content—and particularly the Foreign Secretary emphasised that our trading position would not be changed at all. The Prime Minister changed that in her Lancaster House speech The Prime Minister and the Government are free traders. I am a free trader. I keep asserting that we are free traders. The objections to the single market and the customs union that she and the Government give are nothing to do with open trade, which is quite accepted. It is said that we have to leave the single market because it is accompanied by the freedom of movement of workers. Well, as we were running the most generous version of freedom of movement in western Europe before the referendum, if that is the problem—if migration is what we really want to get out of—let us address that and not throw out the baby with the bath water by leaving the single market Similarly, I have never heard anybody get up and say what is wrong with the customs union in so far as it is an arrangement that gives a completely open border between ourselves and 27 other countries in Europe. What is wrong with it? Nothing. Apparently, we have to leave the customs union, so that the Secretary of State for International Trade can go away and pursue what I think is this extraordinary vision that we sometimes get given of reaching trade agreements with all these great countries throughout the world that are about to throw open their doors to us without any corresponding obligations on our part, no doubt, to compensate us for the damage that we will do to our trade with Europe. I am afraid that I do not believe that I wish to move to my final point, because other people are trying to get in. I have the Florence speech with me. It was a really substantial move forward. Let me just quote the bit on the transition period, which is what I am concentrating on. It says: "So during the implementation period access to one another’s markets should continue on current terms and Britain also should continue to take part in existing security measures. And I know businesses, in particular, would welcome the certainty this would provide The framework for this strictly time-limited period, which can be agreed under Article 50, would be the existing structure of EU rules and regulations." Several times since then, the Prime Minister has been courageous enough to make it clear that it means that, during this transition period, we accept the regulatory harmony we have in the single market, we accept the absence of customs barriers in the customs union and we accept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice to resolve disputes I have never understood what on earth is supposed to be wrong with the European Court of Justice except that it has the word "European" in its title. A very distinguished British judge is one of the people who is appointed to it. There is no case of any significance that we have ever lost there. The City of London and our financial services industry enjoy a passport for very important trade in the eurozone, particularly all the clearing operations that they have done. We had to go to the European Court of Justice as plaintiffs against the European Central Bank to get that passport. But, no, it is a foreign court, and it will be replaced by an international arbitration agreement of the kind that exists in every other trade agreement in the world. The ECJ is a superior system, but we will not get a trade agreement with any country anywhere of any significance, or with a developed economy, that does not have a mutually binding legal arbitration or jurisdiction of some kind, which resolves disputes under the treaty.