Agriculture Bill

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Empey

Consideration of Commons amendments & Ping Pong (Hansard) & Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 20th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I wish this Minister were Secretary of State. If that were the case, I think most people in this House would be content and happy with the way of things. I hope that by saying that, I am not doing him any harm.

The Minister has gone out of his way on a number of occasions to tell us about standards in this country. He has referred both publicly and privately to the FSA and the Scottish equivalent, and I get that. However, I want to tell noble Lords of a little experience that I had a few years ago as a member of the TTIP all-party group, which concentrated on transatlantic trade. This happened in the year of the referendum but before it took place. The group was led by John Spellar from the other place, and the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, and other Members of this House were on the delegation.

We went to Washington DC and had a meeting with all the representatives of the US food producers, ranging from the cattle people to the grain people. There was a whole roomful of them, and they all have very powerful organisations based in Washington. I will spare the House: we came to the chap at the end of the row and he said, “I have 46 Members of Congress in my pocket. There’ll be no deal done unless I say so.” Are we seriously suggesting that we do an international trade deal with the likes of America, although it could be somewhere else, and then say, “You can bring your food in here but we’re going to put a tariff on it if we don’t like the cut of it”, or are we going to ignore it in a specific and limited way?

This is the problem that many of us have. Yes, we have good standards and we want to maintain them, but equally we do not want to see the hands of the Secretary of State for International Trade completely tied behind her back when doing international deals. However, to all intents and purposes some of us, in my part of the United Kingdom in particular, are left in the EU. The Prime Minister came over a year ago and said, “If you get pieces of paper, tear them up and throw them in the bin.” On 1 July this year the Government allocated £25 million to help us fill in those pieces of paper. By 29 August that had risen to £355 million. That is a lot of paper.

The first point I am making is that if we have already have sufficient powers to maintain standards, how can we do trade deals? Why are we not saying specifically that we do not want this in the Bill because it might tie the hands of the Secretary of State for International Trade? You cannot have your cake and eat it. Either we have those standards or we do not. The difficulty that my part of the United Kingdom is left in is that we have no choice and no say, and will have no say, in what regulations we have to maintain. I cannot imagine the US or anywhere else doing a trade deal and then meekly lying down and accepting that we put tariffs on their products. That is the antithesis of having a trade deal. You do your deal, and that is what the deal is.

The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, made the point about equivalence: it does not have to be the same. If it were equivalent then that might be a way around, but if we just say bluntly, “We can bring in cheap food but we’ll put a tariff on it”, there is no point in doing a trade deal because no one is going to agree to it. I can say, from having seen these people in the US, that there are no circumstances in which they are going to be dictated to. Forget about the politics of it; it is the reality of Congress and the people who come from the rural areas. They know which side their bread is buttered, even if we do not. I think we are living in a fool’s paradise.

My second point is that I was quite upset that the House of Commons decided to hide behind a money measure in dismissing the original amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Curry. Yes, we have to be careful of the barriers between the two Houses, but that seemed an unnecessary way around it. They could have stated why they were opposed to it—a point made by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. But to hide behind a money issue, when what we were talking about was trivial in comparison, was unfortunate.

The Minister and his colleagues have been exceptionally patient with, and helpful to, us all. But he must remember that for some of us, this is the difference between having and not having an industry. As far as Northern Ireland is concerned, this is our largest single industry, it has the largest manufacturing, and of all the companies in Northern Ireland, the top five or six are all based around the agricultural sector. That is why these amendments are important, and that is why I hope we can give the House of Commons another chance to look at this.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Empey, I would very much like my noble friend Lord Gardiner to be the Secretary of State, but I have to disagree with him that it would make any difference. I think the die is cast; the Department for International Trade is against these amendments, as is No. 10. They do not get farming in this country, and it would not matter if my noble friend was Secretary of State. I think we are batting our heads against a brick wall. But let us continue to bat our heads against the brick wall, and we might finally get a crack in the brick wall.

Amendments 16B and 18B seek to increase the resilience and sustainability of UK food and farming, and that is to be welcomed. On the sustainability of UK farming, I would like to go on a quick tangent, because, as my noble friend the Minister knows, I am concerned about the sustainability of farming, and I think a lot of English farms, as a result of this legislation, will be turned into theme parks. My fear of that was heightened when I listened to “Farming Today” last week. I do not know whether my noble friend listens to “Farming Today”, but it was an interview about what was going to happen as a result of ELMS coming in. It took place with a Defra representative in Cumbria, and she said a farmer could take his sheep to a show, and he would be able to get a grant for that because that is engagement; it is under the heading of “heritage, beauty and engagement”. This is not farming; this is taking it to the extreme. So I ask my noble friend: if a farmer is going to be able to get an ELM grant for taking his sheep to the show—and good luck to my noble friend Lord Inglewood—would the farmer be able to claim the same engagement by taking his produce to the harvest festival service? There, in the church, everybody would be able to see his grain, his potatoes, his leeks; that is engagement of the highest kind, so surely the theme park managers will be able to benefit from that.

Let me return to the amendment. Again, in the committee I sat on, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, it was quite clear that the hospitality industry is keen to buy the cheapest food at the cheapest price and sell it at the cheapest price, regardless of where it comes from and what the quality is, let alone the animal welfare standards. The noble Lord, Lord Grantchester—and I am happy to support him once again on his amendment—told us how much of the food we consume in this country comes from the hospitality side. That is a major concern. I have already described how difficult it was to get evidence from some of these people, but what evidence we did get did not fill me with any confidence for the future of farming and animal welfare standards in this country.

My noble friend the Minister, when opening, said that these amendments were disproportionate. If they are disproportionate, it means that the current system is adequate, and the current system is clearly not adequate, because we have heard of the bolt-ons that are going to be necessary and which are taking place. Surely, much the cleanest and best thing to do is to persuade the Department for International Trade and No. 10 that Amendments 16B and 18B should be included in the Bill.

It is absolutely right that there should be independent oversight of these trade deals, and that that body should report to Parliament through the Secretary of State. I have been in the Minister’s position and, after a cross-party defeat—and, so far, the Minister has no supporters, and the noble Lords, Lord Grantchester and Lord Curry, have six each—I went to see Viscount Whitelaw, who was Leader of the House, and apologised for getting heavily defeated by a cross-party amendment. He looked at me and said, “Malcolm, perhaps they were right.” I wonder whether my noble friend could take that back to his Secretary of State.

Scotland Act 1998 (Modification of Schedule 5) Order 2013

Debate between Earl of Caithness and Lord Empey

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey]

My Lords, the noble Earl is concerned that people only met at a later stage in separate rooms. People in negotiations that I have been involved in have been in separate nations, separate continents and different places before we actually got together, so we are well versed in “proximity talks”, which I think was the phraseology that was invented to cover those circumstances.

We seem in this country, of late, to have developed referendumitis, because we are looking at a whole series of them now. Indeed, later this week, we may be offered a menu for further referenda. Not wishing to be outdone by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, the sole English contributor to this debate, I felt it appropriate for my part of the world to make a few comments, because, as noble Lords have said throughout the debate, all of us would be affected one way or the other. However, the most important thing is that we are a union with component parts, and there is no doubt in my mind that the people of Scotland have a right to choose. The job of this Parliament is to ensure that the choice is fair and that the options are put to them clearly, as has been said many times before.

I will just deal with the order, because noble Lords will all have great sympathy with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, has said today. However, I think that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, who is not in his place at the moment, put his finger on it. Whether we like it or not and whether this Parliament has had enough time to debate it or not—and I think it has not—the fact is that the Prime Minister and the First Minister have shaken hands. Quite frankly, any departure from that at this stage would have cataclysmic results on the implications and how that would be spun in the circumstances. It is done, and whether we like it or not, we have to work with it.

I will also deal with the point of breakdown. When we had our referendum—nearly 15 years ago, believe it or not—I had the task of being co-ordinator for the Ulster Unionist Party’s “yes” campaign. Not only were communities divided but so were families—husbands, wives, sons and daughters—and some of those scars have not yet healed. Let us be under no illusions but that the tone in which the debate is conducted is going to very important for the long-term relationships. People keep telling us today of the implications of the miners’ strike and the differences that arose there, and I know that both communities and individuals remained very divided.

Questions of this nature are extremely divisive, and constitutional questions, certainly where I come from, are exceptionally divisive. What we are witnessing at home at the moment is terribly sad. Sadly, Mr Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, in his new year message, as reinforced in an article yesterday, is now trying to promote a referendum in Northern Ireland. Under the Belfast agreement, the only question, effectively, is, “Do you wish to be part of a united Ireland?”. Putting that particular, most divisive, issue front and centre as your main campaign for the next few years running up to 2016—the 100th anniversary of the rebellion in Dublin—is irresponsible to say the least in the present circumstances. When we should be talking about our economy and trying to get young people into work, I would have thought that talking about a referendum is the last place anybody wants to be. I deeply regret that.

With regard to complacency, I strongly endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, has just said. If you have a 50% turnout, 33% can be 66%. You will get differential turnouts; I have seen it happen. If one side of the argument feels, “Ach, well it will be all right on the night”, but the diehards on whatever side of the argument come out, the percentages in an opinion poll are almost an irrelevance. It is who turns out on the day that matters.

I share the concerns about intelligibility and all these sorts of things. These arguments go over people’s heads. We have had three terms used in this debate already: “country”, “state” and “nation”. If you go and ask somebody for a definition, we all slip in and out of that language in our own parlance. As an Ulsterman looking across the channel at Scotland, to me, Scotland is a country. It has to be a country; if it were not, it would be part of the amorphous landmass of Great Britain. If it is not a country, why does it have its own law, traditions and different languages? Why does it have a history of attitudes, religion and a pioneering spirit and all that goes with that? Of course it is a country. I also think it is an independent country, because it has all those things, which define a country. However, if we get into an argument with somebody in the street about whether a country and a state are two different things, and if we have to go to the door arguing and trying to explain the difference between those things, I fear we are in some difficulty.

All I can say, with the experience that we have had, is that this will be divisive. We have to try to keep the best humour possible, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said, but not underestimating the downsides and implications—and try to keep the argument as simple as possible. I sincerely hope that the people of Scotland will choose to remain within the union, because it would have huge implications for us if they did not. It is their decision, and I respect that, but the playing field has to be level, with nobody manipulating it, and the question asked has to be a genuine question that makes it clear that they are seceding from the United Kingdom. Anything less than that will leave an argument. There are still people in Northern Ireland today who do not accept the referendum result that we had, even though it was won with 71.5%. Because of our cross-community issues, people say, “Oh, well not enough of this group voted or of that group”. I can think of nothing worse or more corrosive than an argument over the process. I sincerely wish the people of Scotland well, but sincerely hope that the Government do not allow anybody to wipe their eye in the months ahead.

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, has said, words are important, and I come back to this word “independent”, or “independence”. I agree with my noble friend Lord Forsyth—on the hypothetical question that the Scottish Government would like to pose, I would very much like to vote yes because Scotland is, to me, an independent country now within part of the UK. I have been banging on about the use of the words “separate” and “separatism” rather than “independence”, and must ask my noble friend why the Government have used “independence” in the order. Proposed new Section 5A, under Article 3 of the order, refers to,

“the independence of Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom”.

That only encourages the Scottish Government to continue using “independence” rather than “separation”. Why are the Government using that wording rather than saying, “Separate from the rest of the United Kingdom”? That would make what we are all talking about and what the Scottish Government actually mean much clearer.

I also echo what the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, said. I have been longing to ask the question, “Why have we got this order now?”. My noble friend Lord Forsyth said that the Electoral Commission has told him it needs 12 weeks to study the question and formulate its reply. That is in only three weeks’ time, but so much of this debate has been about what the Electoral Commission might have said or might not say. Why have we brought it forward this time? It has been a huge disservice to Parliament, and we have not had the sort of debate that we could have had. It leads one to ask the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Browne. If the Electoral Commission says, “No, that is a leading question”, what are the legal remedies if the Scottish Government persist with their proposed question?