Trade Bill — House of Lords, 2018-09-11
Topic: Foreign Trade
Roger John Liddle (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, speaking as one of what the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, so kindly described as the unreconciled, I do not like this Bill. It is an unnecessary Bill in pursuit of a foolhardy objective of having an independent trade policy, which is not actually required by EU withdrawal. Far from being technical and pragmatic, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fairhead, said in her introduction, it is actually a matter of ideological choice. It is a very bad choice to pursue this independent trade policy because the most obvious way of cutting the Gordian knot of frictionless borders and the Northern Ireland problem is for us to stay members of the customs union. I hope that, in Committee, the House will return to the question of the customs union and the European Economic Area. I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Cooper, said about public opinion and the public’s expectations of what Brexit would mean. The pursuit of an independent trade policy comes very low in the public’s priorities. Safeguarding our trade through membership of the customs union and single market is much higher This is a very misguided Bill, and I do not believe that the Government have presented any kind of evidence for the benefits of the UK having an independent trade policy. Could the Minister tell the House what research work the Department for International Trade has done on this question? If it has done research papers, why have they not been published? What are the gains that we believe we would achieve as a result of being able to conduct our own trade agreements as opposed to retaining the benefits of the single market which we are clearly on the point of losing The case for this independent trade policy is weak, and I have heard two arguments that for me completely destroyed the case. The first was a lecture by Sir Martin Donnelly, who was Liam Fox’s Permanent Secretary, in which he demolished the Government’s arguments for the policy, point by point. He ended up with the wonderful line that it was like forgoing a three-course dinner for a packet of crisps. That is what I believe it to be. The second was in this House when, on 18 April this year, we heard the most wonderful speech from the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes. He took the Government apart on this question. I recommend that every Member of this House should read it. On all these Brexit questions, the Government have always completely failed to provide any rebuttal of serious intellectual arguments made against these ideological policies The Government have an aspiration for an independent trade policy but, beyond that, it is very confused. There is tremendous tension on the question of what we are trying to do. Are we prepared to sacrifice standards in order to get trade agreements with countries such as the United States? Michael Gove says we are not. So what sort of trade agreement are we going to be able to negotiate with the United States? In the Brussels negotiations on the withdrawal agreement, the Government are hanging out against the protection of geographical indications—the Scotch whisky-type thing—precisely because they know that that kind of protection is the sort of thing that the US trade negotiators would be going for straightaway, as soon as we tried to negotiate an agreement with them. I have a local worry about this. Cumberland sausage is about to suffer; it is going to be sacrificed on the ideology of this Government’s commitment to an independent trade policy. What a disgrace Another serious point is the one about rules of origin, which I raised with the noble Baroness, Lady Fairhead, in her clear introductory speech. I have not heard any satisfactory answer from a Minister on how this problem is going to be dealt with in the rollover of existing EU trade agreements. The very serious problem that gets in the way is this business of trying to pretend we are still in the EU when we are not, yet being able to negotiate our own deals because we are not in it. Yet, in order to have the rules of origin provision, we have to pretend that we still are. This is the total confusion of the Government’s approach to these negotiations The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, made a good attempt to justify the independent trade policy, but I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Horam, that the key question is competitiveness rather than trade deals. You have to ask yourself the question: if the EU is such an obstacle in its trade agreements to British success in export markets, why are the French and Germans beating us around the world hands down? It is not because of the EU but because we have fundamental problems of competitiveness that we have to address. On the argument about Switzerland, as I understand it, the Swiss have been unable to get any services provisions in their negotiations with China, and the argument that small countries are able to negotiate big deals is simply wrong about the modern world. When President Juncker of the Commission went to see Donald Trump, he managed to get him to back off from imposing industrial tariffs on the European Union. Why? Because the European Union is a very big market, and Trump thought that it was much better politics to have a go at China What we have here is basically an ideological obsession, which I am afraid is delusional, and I wish that the Government would abandon it so that we could have a soft Brexit around which a national consensus could be established.