UK’s Withdrawal from the European Union

Debate between Lord Clarke of Nottingham and Angela Eagle

Wednesday 13th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I am being drawn outside this debate. The best deals with other countries are achieved through the EU—that is the basis on which British Government have proceeded for years—and it is a disaster that we are in danger in 16 days of falling out of some of the most favourable trade deals, which the British Government have played a part in negotiating. I think that if we insist on that proviso, and if we insist on tackling the problem of our no longer being directly part of a regulation-making power, we are powerful enough to be allowed more consultation than countries that are outside the EU and are part of, say, the European Free Trade Association or European economic area arrangements. We have to tackle the problems that arise from the fact that we are giving in to the idea of leaving the European Union politically, and leaving its institutions.

I think that these problems are grossly exaggerated. I have never heard anyone argue against the EU trade deals that we have with other countries. The Japanese deal was a tremendous stride forward. It is the biggest free trade agreement in the world, and we are about to fall out of it after only a month or so. We talk about losing our powers, and about the threat posed to our sovereignty by the fact that we are not allowed to pass our own different laws on product quality, consumer protection, health and safety, animal welfare and the licensing of products, but I have yet to hear a Brexiteer advocate the reversal of any European regulation that we have passed so far. Members of the public tend to demand higher regulatory standards, and I am lobbied for new regulation more than I ever am for sweeping away what we have.

If the virtue of no deal is meant to be leaving to have a trade agreement with, say, the United States, I can tell the House that I have been involved in trade negotiations with the United States under President Obama, and it is protectionist. The Americans are not dying to open up any of their market to us; they will want us to open up our food market to them. We will not be making regulations here. The Americans will not let the House of Commons decide on animal welfare or food standards. Those are nothing to do with us. We made an agreement. The House of Representatives and the Senate, along with the powerful American food lobby, will decide what the welfare standards for animals and the standards for food should be. We will not get a trade deal with the United States unless we agree to that.

I am being drawn into the merits of the basic argument, but I think it should be underlined that we must look at realistic alternatives to no deal. No deal was not being advocated by anyone at the time of the referendum. I do not think that it was being advocated by more than a handful of people until a month or two ago. Most Brexiteers were not in favour of it. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is nodding. Even those who campaigned for us to leave were not campaigning for us to leave with no trade arrangement with our greatest partner. This is just an accident that has loomed because the House of Commons is not able, and the Government are not able, to solve problems in a way that we can agree with the other 27. We are drifting into it, which will be a catastrophe.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

[Mr Clarke]

I am going to be very brief—as brief as I can be. I have already taken longer than I intended.

The argument is that these matters were settled by the referendum, but one of the problems is that the debate at the time of the referendum does not resemble the debates that we keep having, with ever more frequency, in the House. That is not because we are out of touch with the real world. It is because the referendum was conducted in the most bizarre, broad-brush terms, with the leading figures on both sides using ridiculous or dishonest arguments in order to make their case, which had nothing whatever to do with the merits or otherwise of being in the European Union.

Remainers, I am afraid—the key remainers, David Cameron and George Osborne—decided to raise all those fears of immediate catastrophe, which did not actually materialise. That has led people now to say that every future warning from every major business lobby in the country, from the Treasury, from the Government and from everyone else is to be ignored. That is a classic case of crying wolf: one day the wolf actually arrives, and we cannot conduct the government of this country on the basis that we ignore every expert piece of opinion we have, which most of us in fact agree with because we think their warnings are correct.

The referendum gets invoked in all our other debates, too. When I ask my constituents who are leavers—most of them, I am glad to say, voted remain—it is clear that the idea that they were expressing a view on the Irish border and the problems of the Good Friday agreement when they voted to leave, or that most of them were expressing any opinion on the single market or the customs union, is absolute nonsense. Indeed when I talk to members of the public now—who are all expressing anger about the state of affairs we are in—they are still not lobbying me about the Irish border and the single market and all the rest of it. We are having to be engaged in this because our duty is governance; our duty is the medium and longer term better governance of this country, and we have to address the real world of a globalised economy and today’s systems of regulation and the international order in which we have to earn our living against a background of bewildering technological change.

All the arguments about the damage to business and the threat to Ireland, including its constitutional position, and so on have already been addressed by others and I have agreed with every word that has been said. However, I want briefly to give my reaction to that handful—I think it is no more—of Members who seem to think now that no deal is positively desirable and that it is an objective we should have sought from the first. They make it sound very respectable by describing it as “WTO rules”, but I strongly suspect that many who argue that point had scarcely heard of the WTO at the time of the referendum, and I do not think most of them understand what WTO rules actually comprise. I will not go into too much detail, not least because I have not refreshed my own memory too greatly, but there is no developed country in the world that seeks to trade in today’s globalised economy only on WTO rules. They are a fall-back that cover all that international trade that is not governed by recognised free trade agreements. They are designed to ensure that there is no discrimination among countries with which we do not have an agreement. That is why they require a schedule of tariffs, to be accepted by the WTO, and then those tariffs to be imposed on all those countries with which there is no agreement. That means the EU is obliged by WTO rules, now much loved by Brexiteers, to impose the same tariffs on us that it imposes on other third party countries, and we are obliged to impose the same schedule of tariffs on the EU and all other countries with which we do not have a deal.

There are WTO rules that do not allow countries to abdicate a thing like the Irish border. We cannot say we are not going to put any border posts in, so we are going to have organised smuggling become the major industry of the island because we have no idea how we are going to enforce it all. Not only would the Republic be under great pressure from the rest of the EU, but WTO rules would require us to co-operate with policing our border, collecting tariffs, regulatory checks, customs checks and all the rest.

My main worry, however, is not entirely about these short-term consequences, catastrophic though they would be for some sections of our economy including agriculture and the motor industry. My main worry is that, whatever happens in the global economy, the effect of leaving with no deal in the medium and long term and on the comparative economic strength of this country will be that we and the next generation will be made poorer than we would otherwise be. That will be the result if we cannot move away from this no deal nonsense, and I hope a big majority settles that tonight.

Finally, I just want to be totally clear what the Government’s intentions and motives now are. I hope I have been reassured that, if we pass this motion tonight, the Government will in all circumstances take whatever steps it is eventually necessary to take in 16 days’ time to avoid our leaving with no deal. I do not want them to come back in a fortnight’s time saying to the House, “It’s your fault, because you will not vote for the Prime Minister’s withdrawal agreement, so sadly we are going to have to leave with no deal.” We are ruling this out. That really means having indicative votes to give us some idea of what the British are going to negotiate over the next two or three years. Failing that, it means revoking article 50. Speaking as someone who is a diehard European—