Free Trade Agreement Negotiations: Australia

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, I am happy to confirm to my noble friend that there will be absolutely no diminution of the controls that we apply to imported agricultural produce. As he will know, our phytosanitary regime is very strong. I sometimes hear scare stories from noble Lords that, for example, hormone beef will be allowed into this country as a result of this agreement. I can put people’s minds completely at rest on this: we will be maintaining our strict animal health standards and our own animal welfare standards.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, how extraordinary that there should be this opposition to a trade deal with Australia—a country with which we enjoyed the closest commercial relations before the artificial diversion of our trade by the phased imposition of European tariffs and non-tariff barriers in the 1970s. It is a country to which we could hardly be closer in language, law, accountancy systems and interoperable regulations. Does my noble friend the Minister find it odd that in this debate Australian trade is attacked on the contradictory grounds that the deal will wipe out our agriculture while making little difference? Does he detect behind those questions the real problem, which is nostalgia for EU membership? We heard it in almost every intervention from the Benches opposite—a few desultory remarks about Australia and then a prolonged complaint about Brexit. Does he share my surprise that people who spent the referendum brandishing their internationalist credentials have, on this issue, now descended into mercantilism, protectionism, nostalgia and fear?

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My noble friend makes an important point. If someone came to listen to these proceedings for the first time, they would think we were debating an agreement with a hostile country—a country with which we had perhaps had a long period of enmity. This agreement, and the agreements that we are hoping to strike with New Zealand, Canada, India and elsewhere, are with our Commonwealth friends. I detect that nostalgia for the EU on the other Benches. I just wish I could also detect a nostalgia for the Commonwealth and dealing with those countries that have stood by us for many years.

Agricultural Exports from Australia: Tariffs

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, I am not familiar with the letter the noble Lord refers to, but I will make sure to study it after this Question. As I said earlier, we do not believe that this deal will mean a flood of cheap imports. We will use a range of tools to defend British farming. I want to emphasise the opportunities that this deal will give to British farmers in terms of their exports, whether they are large or small and whichever part of the United Kingdom they come from.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, we do not reduce tariffs on imported food as a favour to Australia, we do so as a favour to ourselves—which may incidentally happen to benefit some Australian exporters. Will my noble friend the Minister confirm that reducing the cost of food makes everybody better off, especially people on low incomes for whom the food bill is the highest proportion of the monthly budget? In doing so, this gives us more money to spend on other things and thereby stimulates the whole economy.

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, as ever my noble friend encapsulates precisely the advantages of free trade agreements and I thank him for that.

Turkey: Free Trade Agreement

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, on bringing this important Motion before us. His argument that Turkey was the demandeur because we run a trade deficit with it strikes me as one that was answered by his countryman Adam Smith 245 years ago in that little phrase,

“Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production”.


What is the benefit of having a trade surplus? It is not as though you can keep silos filled with extra stuff. Cheaper imports are a terrific way of raising living standards for all of us, especially for people on low incomes. Exports are the stuff you want to get rid of to pay for those cheaper imports. Understanding that point, now 245 years old, seems to me the way to get to a world where we are lifting restrictions and allowing people to prosper.

Equally, trade is a remarkably poor instrument of foreign policy. Let us all accept that there are at least questions to answer when it comes to human rights in Turkey. Any kind of generalised sanctions—and I would call refusing to have an FTA the weakest form of trade sanction—are almost always counterproductive. They create a siege mentality. They hurt the wrong people—ordinary folk in the other country and in your own—while driving support to the regime of which you disapprove. There are sanctions that you can take, but generalised trade sanctions almost always fail for the same reason that they kept Castro in power in Cuba: they create a sense of people needing to rally to the authorities.

Let me make a final point on Turkey’s relationship with the customs union, which, as noble Lords have said, came to an end with this FTA. It is important to understand quite how disadvantageous Turkey’s position within the customs union was. Turkey was obliged to follow all EU concessions in talks with third countries. When the EU did a trade deal with Japan or South Korea, Turkey was required to match all the concessions, but there was no reciprocal obligation on Japan or South Korea or whoever to make the concessions vis-à-vis Turkey that they were making vis- à-vis the EU.

That position was negotiated transitionally. It was supposed to be a step to full membership. It was acceptable—indeed, it made very good sense—in those terms. However, it makes very little sense as a permanent situation for Turkey. We have huge opportunities to do what both Trade Ministers—our own and her Turkish counterpart—said when this deal was negotiated at the beginning of this year remains our ambition: to have a much deeper, more ambitious and more comprehensive commercial relationship with Turkey.

It seems pretty clear that Turkey’s EU ambitions are over; that is clear whether you talk to people in Brussels or in Ankara. I suspect that Turkey will therefore look to change the terms of its trade relationships with the European Union because, once they cease to be transitional, they become deeply unattractive. Britain should have no qualms about seeking the closest trading relationship possible with a country that for a long time guarded NATO’s flank against the horror of Bolshevism and to which we may one day look to guard our flank against religious extremism.

Renewables Obligation (Amendment) Order 2021

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, looking around I see lots of former Members of the European Parliament. I think there are half a dozen speaking in this debate, including my noble friend the Minister, and until a moment ago another was on the Woolsack or perched on the steps of the Throne as I started. It is a tribute to the popularity of our new colleague, my noble friend Lord Kamall, that there should be this support from different Benches. We former MEPs know what it is to deliberate unreported and unremarked; we have what the police might call “previous” in this department. However, I hope that in the circumstances your Lordships will indulge me if I add my voice to previous speakers in welcoming my noble friend Lord Kamall. He is a man of immense breadth of character, a handy cricketer, a brilliant footballer and a very talented bass guitarist, but also a man of extraordinary modesty.

Over the past month, there has been a lot of press coverage of the change of leadership in the Scottish Labour Party. People have been saying that the new Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, is the first Muslim leader of a British political party and the first ethnic minority leader. I wish Mr Sarwar every success: you do not have to be a Labour supporter to want the best for the Labour Party in Scotland. It is a party with a terrific tradition—the party of Keir Hardie, John Smith and, indeed, of that flinty patriot, the noble Lord, Lord Reid, who is sitting opposite now. Of course, anyone who first becomes a dentist and then a Labour MP in Scotland is plainly elevating the public weal above his personal popularity, so I wish Mr Sarwar the best. Yet it is not really the case that he is either the first non-white or first Muslim British party leader, because my noble friend Lord Kamall had led not only a British political party but a coalition of European political parties with extraordinary diplomacy and talent, remaining popular until the end. That is quite some achievement, as his predecessor in that role, my noble friend the Minister, can confirm.

The Motion on the renewables order is a tribute to two aspects of our current energy policy that deserve a little more acknowledgement. The first is the value of an intelligent use of market mechanisms to deliver environmental goals. Aristotle said that that which no one owns, no one cares for; the use of sensitive and carefully laid incentives so as to encourage the private sector to deliver goals which deal with externalities has been one of the great elements of the UK’s success in getting to a diversity of supply. Secondly, it illustrates that, very often, the things which make the biggest difference in environmental policy are quite technical issues of this kind, rather than sweeping and sometimes histrionic global statements of intent.

As my noble friend the Minister said, the measure effectively restores the mutualisation proportions to what they were when the Bill was brought forward and the change was first made in the previous decade. I share my noble friend Lord Kamall’s ambition that we should get to the point where renewables become competitive, and where technology delivers what state subsidies have, until now, been required to help with as the booster rocket. I support these temperate, judicious and targeted measures.