European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill — House of Lords, 2020-01-16
Topic: International Affairs
David Edward Lea (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, the President of the European Commission indicated last week that there was no way that the Government’s open-ended agenda—I stand to be corrected about the detail of the shopping list for the rest of this year—could be dealt with by the end of this year. Indeed, it is seen in Brussels as simple wishful thinking; Boris Johnson will think of another wheeze in time to keep the show on the road Instead of "Get Brexit done", the real question is "Let’s get Brexit real". At the moment, we assume that the starting point was something like the withdrawal agreement and political declaration of October 2019, but we would like to see a credible programme of what the Government will try to negotiate by the summer or autumn in order to meet the commitment made by the Prime Minister. It is in that connection that we could have something like EEA/EFTA as a point of reference—a tick-box, if you like—for many of the questions that will arise. We have just heard an interesting debate about Erasmus, but there are 20 or 30 such subjects, all of which will need decisions, including in many cases on their compatibility with free trade for the rest of the world—all that work has been done over many years since the Stockholm Convention of the late 1950s and Britain’s participation in EFTA and, eventually, the EEC in 1973-74. We have now therefore to set out where we want to be on the whole range of things where we have alignment at the moment The Government often say "We have alignment at the moment", so why not say the next thing? If we are taking some comfort in the fact that we have alignment at the moment, is not the question surely why we want to move away from it? Do Her Majesty’s Government have some ideological reason for moving away from alignment? At the end of January, we will be putting out the flags to say Brexit is all done—it has hardly started, as we know The EFTA and EEA agreements have other consequences as well. I am not suggesting that we would enter into them, given the short title of this Bill, but they include the very important questions of jurisdiction of settlements of disputes, the arbitration panel and so on, all of which are important if we want to continue to attract foreign direct investment into Britain. As the Financial Times charts, this is going down very rapidly, partly because these rather straightforward decisions have yet to be made. If they are not made very soon, there will be an assumption that the Government have not thought through how these Brexit-related issues will be resolved To remind ourselves, the EEA agreement provides for a free trade area covering all the EEA states. It does not extend the customs union to the EEA/EFTA states. The free trade area also abolishes tariffs on trade between the parties, but there are still border procedures. This is a model that I hope the Government will not run away from simply because it was not their idea in the first place. To get Brexit real, these become very serious options for consideration, and I hope that the Minister will agree that we should look at all these questions on their merits and at having a framework for the compatibility of them all. Looking at each question one by one is not necessarily the most helpful way to see how a framework can be agreed. Surely, by the end of this year, the notion is not just that we will have a number of separate agreements on everything under the sun but that we will have some sort of framework, because there are consequences between the different silos in any framework. I hope the Minister appreciates that—I say it in a constructive spirit—because it is, unfortunately, against the background that we will have left the European Union, possibly to rejoin the EEA at a later point. That is another question, but it is not something that the Minister should balk at simply because it sounds like a stalking horse for rejoining the EU. It is a perfectly good shopping list for the Government. I would like to know when the Government’s framework concept for the negotiations in the next few months will be published, or will the Government just keep all their cards up their sleeve and not publish such a thing Take the question of jurisdiction: it is very odd indeed that we should now want to attach more importance to jurisdictions where we have no judge, as we do in the European Court of Justice at present. During the transition and under the future envisaged in the political declaration, does the Minister agree that we will have to accept that it will be for the ECJ, without a UK judge, to present the authoritative view in any imaginable case between the EU and the UK before the new arbitral tribunal We know that there are issues that do not necessarily fit within the framework that I have just described, such as the free movement of persons and mutual recognition of diplomacies. There are limits to how far one wants to go in putting everything in what we might call a framework agreement but, again, a lot of work was done in the EEA negotiations. If we are going to shadow anything to see what works and what does not, that would be an excellent place to start. It would be far more effective than a one-off set of negotiations on a whole range of things one at a time. I hope that, in that spirit, the Minister will agree that there could be value to the Government in looking at such a framework.