Trade Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th October 2020 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

My Lords, I offer a gentle reminder that all mics in the Grand Committee are live at all times. If everyone’s mobile devices could be on silent and their notifications muted, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, in the light of the way we have spent much of the past hour, I begin by recording my thanks to the members of your Lordships’ House’s staff who have been extraordinary in their patience and calm with the technical difficulties that we have all suffered. They have held everyone’s hand and been wonderful under fire.

It is my absolute privilege to follow the speeches we have just heard, particularly those of my noble friends Lord Hendy, Lord Hain and Lady Blower. I have lent my name to Amendment 17, drafted by my noble friend Lord Hendy. But before I speak to it, I will make a preliminary point of law that is relevant not just to Amendment 17 but to many of the amendments that your Lordships have discussed during these many hours of debate in Grand Committee, which I have had the delight of listening to very closely.

In the community and in the country at large, it is understood that it is dangerous to pontificate about the law and give legal advice without a certain level of qualification. That is so well understood that the profession is regulated and there are tight legal limits. That cannot be the case in the business of legislation, of course, because there is politics and policy on the one hand and the law on the other, with the journey—the process of legislation—in between. So, although I think that dinner-table lawyers are almost as dangerous as armchair medics or epidemiologists, I do understand that making claims about the law during legislative debates is sometimes an occupational hazard.

Your Lordships’ House is criticised in many quarters, but one thing that can often be said of it is that it contains a great many experts who contribute expertise from different areas of life and practice to the business of scrutinising legislation. My noble friend Lady Blower mentioned the noble Lord, Lord Patel. I do not think that she is alone in having benefited from his contributions, from a medical and public perspective, to your Lordships’ Grand Committee.

Of course, my noble friend Lord Hendy, who drafted Amendment 17, has been a practising barrister for 48 years—he will forgive me for pointing this out—working in particular as a labour lawyer but also on legislation and legal disputes, and he has spent 33 of those years in silk as one of Her Majesty’s Queen’s Counsel. So noble Lords can imagine that he would not have drafted an amendment to the Bill if it were outside the scope of the Bill; or, if he had, or if other noble Lords had drafted amendments that were beyond the scope of the Bill, the amendments would not be entertained in this way. They would not appear on the Order Paper and your Lordships would not have been asked to waste so many hours debating them.

That brings me to my preliminary point of law. In the many hours of Grand Committee that I have listened to in recent days, I have heard claims made, at times by the Minister and at times by some of his noble friends, notably the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and others, suggesting that various amendments trying to restrict the vires of the regulation-making powers in this Bill are somehow beyond the Bill’s scope, or are irrelevant, or would clutter up the statute book—that was one comment I heard—or are otherwise inappropriate because they seek erroneously and improperly to clip the Executive’s wings when they are out trying to make trade agreements. That is one argument to the House that has emerged in your Lordships’ Grand Committee. Another argument that has been made is that the amendments completely miss the point of this draft legislation, because this legislation is purely about so-called continuity or rollover trade agreements; therefore, there is no need to place any additional hindrances or fetters on the regulation-making powers in the Bill to implement these rollover or continuity—other similar phrases have been used—trade agreements.

Well, the politics and the policy can come later, but let us be straight about the law here. That is just not correct. As a matter of law, that is not what is provided in the Bill, which allows for trade agreements, albeit with parties that have already been in an agreement with the European Union. They are trade agreements and there are regulations to be made under those trade agreements to implement them. That is the law. That is not spin. That is not politics. That is the law and the effect of this legislation.

Therefore, it is important to pre-empt the comments that will no doubt come from the Minister in due course and point out that it is completely appropriate for your Lordships and this Grand Committee to use amendments that have clearly been ruled as within the scope of the debate to restrain the vires, or the power, to make these regulations: that is, to say that it is perfectly appropriate that the regulation-making powers to implement these trade agreements—whether you call them continuity agreements or rollover agreements or even Charlie—can be constrained. Many amendments attempt to do that.

Your Lordships are perfectly free to say that some of the constraints should not be there as a matter of politics or policy: indeed, to say that we should not protect the NHS, workers’ rights, environmental standards, et cetera. That is fair for political and legislative debate, but in my view it is not okay—it is not straight talking with Members of your Lordships’ House—to suggest that these amendments are somehow beyond scope or inappropriate for debate in this way. I am afraid that, whatever else we are, some of us are lawyers first and last, just like some of your Lordships are distinguished medics, career politicians and so on. That is quite important.

This brings me to Amendment 17, and ISDS in particular. Obviously, this is dealt with with some care and precision in my noble friend Lord Hendy’s amendment, to which I have added my name, but I noted that, during the many hours of debate, other Members of the Committee have spoken to the evils of this system of secret justice, if such a thing is even possible. It seems to me that, whatever our differences in this Grand Committee and in your Lordships’ House, all Members ought to be concerned about ISDS and should seek to rule it out from being implemented by way of regulation-making powers in this Bill. In other words, if there is to be ISDS in future, it should require a new, separate Act of Parliament that can be consulted on and aired publicly, and debated line by line in both Houses of Parliament. All Members of your Lordships’ House, whether they are socialists, Greens, Liberals or Conservatives, ought to be scandalised by ISDS.

What is more, all people in our nations should be alarmed by the practice of ISDS, whether they voted to leave the European Union or to remain. Why? In a nutshell, because this practice prioritises unelected, unaccountable corporations over democratically elected Governments and the people they serve. That is the first reason. The second reason is that, as other noble Lords pointed out, it prioritises foreign corporations over domestic businesses. That cannot be right either.