Lord Horam
Main Page: Lord Horam (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Horam (Con)
My Lords, I am glad to hear of the semi-conversion of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, to something like what I regard as common sense.
There always seemed to me to be three elements in the negotiations between the UK and the European Union. First, there is the dosh—the money. It has been obvious for months that Germany would be very unhappy about there being a big hole in the European budget, which it would largely have to finance. It was expecting us to come up with a better deal than we have already. Frankly, £20 billion is ridiculous: we could easily double that with no real problems. Our deficit at the moment is £1.7 trillion; another £20 billion is frankly ridiculous. It is about 100 times the amount for Harry Kane’s transfer to the Tottenham Hotspur football team. As one of my investment banker friends said, £40 billion or £50 billion upfront by the UK would be an absolute steal for us.
Secondly, there is the issue of the transition. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, rightly pointed out, imagine the scene at Dover if this were to end in March 2019 with no deal whatsoever and acrimony as well. The queues would be back to the M25, just at Bexley: in that case, there would be a certain amount of chortling in heaven. The fact is that the reputation of the Government for competence is already sliding and the effect of this would be a hammer-blow. Black Wednesday would be as nothing compared to what would happen if we marched off the end of the cliff.
As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, rightly pointed out, for all the platitudes and good will of the Prime Minister, we do not have a mechanism. What is the end-point of all of this? We have no clear understanding, after all this time, of what is to be expected. I personally think we should stay in the customs union, but I recognise that that would cause a few problems for Liam Fox. The alternative, frankly, is that we have an association agreement, which the European Union has with many of its surrounding countries, such as Ukraine, Morocco, Turkey, Algeria, Serbia and so forth. All of these have association agreements with the European Union which contain free trade agreements. That is a familiar template for the European Union and a flexible one. You can put into it what you want and that would make total sense for us given that, even outside the European Union, most of our trade would still be with the European Union.
It is a delusion to imagine that somehow or other there is a large area out there with which we could do trade but are not doing so at the moment. That is not to understand at all the nature of trade, which is that trade halves as distance doubles. That is the fact of the matter, and will always be the case. Therefore, we should follow the advice that was set out in the House of Lords European Union Committee report, Brexit: the Options for Trade, way back in December, on transition deals and the possible role of an association agreement. It shows how lugubriously slow the Government have been to follow it up. We still, even now, have no clearer idea where we are going.
The time has come for the Prime Minister to crack the whip and get a move on. Otherwise, we will be in real trouble. If she does crack the whip, believe you me, she will have Parliament and the people behind her.