Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill [HL]

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be the first speaker from this side of the House to congratulate my noble friend, as I must call him now, on his excellent maiden speech and to welcome him to these Benches. Time flies: today I am welcoming him to the House but it does not seem so long ago that I was begging him not to resign as Prime Minister. It is a notable day for the House of Lords when we welcome a former Prime Minister who is also the new Foreign Secretary. Whatever the House of Commons may think, it is indisputably good for the House of Lords to have an additional Cabinet Minister in its ranks. He is the first former Prime Minister to return to Cabinet rank since Alec Douglas-Home almost 50 years ago. Before the war, it was quite the norm, with Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and Chamberlain all returning to government. It is a mystery to me why, today, we still have this self-defeating idea that former Prime Ministers should never return to front-line politics. I am glad that my noble friend has broken that rule.

Many people were surprised at the appointment of my noble friend. I was not wholly surprised. I hope I am not breaking any confidence, and my noble friend has probably forgotten, but about a year ago we had a conversation in which I asked him whether he would ever be interested in perhaps a big international job or becoming Foreign Secretary. He was not wholly convincing in his denial that he was not remotely interested. What I do know about the noble Lord is that he strongly believes in public service, and that is the reason why he is sitting where he is today.

The noble Lord and I go back quite some way, to when we both worked in the Treasury. He was always my brilliant spad. He was the master of detail and strategy. I always thought that he would go far and would achieve high office, but what I did not foresee was the rapidity with which he did so, becoming leader of the party in 2005, only four years after entering the Commons, and Prime Minister five years later.

We had some difficult times together. There was one moment when the noble Lord gave me a present; he may have forgotten this. It was a mahogany box about a foot long, and it contained the biggest Cuban cigar you could possibly imagine. There was a yellow notelet attached, which had on it in his handwriting the words, “By the time you smoke this, all your troubles will be over”. Well, my Lords, I never smoked it; I still have it. At times, when watching my noble friend as Prime Minister, I was tempted to send it back to him, but he would never have had need of it, because he has huge resilience.

I need hardly say that my noble friend faces huge challenges as Foreign Secretary. It is a dangerous world. One thing we know is that, when you have an unbelievably large number of difficult problems in politics, there is always another unexpected one coming round the corner. My noble friend, however, has the ability and experience to face these difficulties. This House has great experience in global affairs and there is a degree of common ground between the two sides of the House. The whole House will therefore wish to support him and wish him well. As they say, we look forward to hearing him again.

I welcome the Bill before us today. Before I move on to the detail of the Bill, I want to make one general point about trade that worries me considerably: the whole world, including the UK, is slipping back into protectionism. The retreat from globalisation is in danger of going too far. Yes, we have had the shocks of Covid and of the war in Ukraine. The emphasis has been on terms like “resilience”, “security of supply”, “strategic autonomy” and “self-sufficiency”, but too often these words are just disguised protectionism. Every sector considers itself strategic; we have to be self-sufficient in everything from cheese to steel. That is not the way to go. That is the way to becoming uncompetitive and poorer. Of course we have to pay some regard to the risks to supply that have emerged in recent years, but the answer to uncertainty of supply is to diversify your suppliers, not always to reach towards self-sufficiency. We ought to recognise that a policy of self-sufficiency comes at a price: a price to living standards and to the cost of living.

Let us not forget that the globalisation of recent years raised living standards—sure, there were losers in Europe as well as gainers—and the world as a whole gained a huge amount. Freedom of trade is not just an abstract idea; it is a positive instrument for improving the condition of people worldwide. We should also remember that, in the 1930s, the retreat to protectionism was one of the factors that, combined with others, contributed to the Great Depression. Like my noble friend Lord Hannan, who often uses this quote, I very much believe in John Bright’s idea—I think it was him—that “trade is God’s diplomacy”, improving relations between countries and improving the stability of the world. I make this general point because one thing about the CPTPP that I very much approve of is that it incorporates a commitment to furthering the cause of free trade. I think that is extremely important.

My noble friend emphasised all the statistics— I will not repeat them—about the CPTPP area: the growth of population and the extent to which it is supposed to contribute to the growth of the world economy in the next few years. Indeed, I believe, half the world’s middle- class consumers will soon be around the Pacific Rim. When combined with the UK, the area will account for 15% of world GDP, which is roughly the same as that of the EU; but, by 2050, the CPTPP area will account for 25%, whereas the EU will account for only 10%.

The CPTPP is, I need hardly say, very different from the EU. It is not a customs union or a single market. There is no TPP law, no TPP commission and no move towards a single currency. I note with a degree of scepticism that the Government say our commitment to the CPTPP is also furthering free nations, but among our partners there is one communist single-party state and one Islamic absolute monarchy as well. I am not quite sure how those fit in—I am not in any way criticising—but this is a free trade area above anything else. It fits in, of course, with the Government’s political objective of the tilt to the Indo-Pacific region, which was reinforced by the defence White Paper.

A number of commentators, including the noble Lord, Lord Collins, have tried to dismiss the importance of CPTPP a little because of the statistic that it will contribute, as he put it, only less than 1% to growth. This ignores the political context of the region and of joining this organisation, whether or not the 0.08% statistic that is bandied about is right. Perhaps the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, will comment on this when he comes to wind up, because I noticed in the Sunday Telegraph that the Secretary of State said she did not believe this figure, which has been officially quoted. But whether the contribution to growth of 0.08% is right or not, it ignores the potential. These are, as my noble friend Lord Cameron said, very fast- growing economies and we cannot predict precisely how trade flows will react to those.

Apart from anything else, this is a very deep free trade agreement. I stress that it is a free trade agreement, not a single market or a customs union. But it is a deep agreement and it has these advantages: it covers services, which are important to the UK, because we are the second-largest exporter of services in the world; for goods, there is a single set of rules of origin, which allows all content to be accumulated, provided that it originates in a CPTPP country; there is a good text also on sectors such as digital services, which are of increasing importance; it also gets rid of the need to have a local office before you can sell services into the market of the bloc. These are considerable advantages but, as I said before, one has to look at this very much in its political context and the tilt to the Indo-Pacific region.

The original TPP, the predecessor of the CPTPP, had the United States in it. Had the United States remained in it and President Trump not withdrawn from it, it would be one of the largest trading blocs in the world, amounting to 30% of world GDP. With 30% of world GDP, we would have been in a strong position with our allies there to play a huge part in influencing the rules governing the world economy. Originally, the United States was hoping that by joining the TPP, as it once stated that it was planning to do, it would be able to constrain the role of China in setting the rules of the world economy. We must hope that the United States will think again. I know that President Biden said initially that he might be interested in rejoining and then has lately tried to distance himself from it, but it would be important if America did join because the CPTPP has strong rules—much stronger than the WTO—about state-owned enterprises, which has been one of the main ways in which the Chinese have been criticised for how they compete unfairly with companies in the West.

In response, the United States has also set up the Indo-Pacific economic framework, a bloc that includes Indonesia. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, would comment when he winds up on how he sees the relationship between the two. To many it appears that the latest one, which America set up, is largely just a high-level discussion forum. It will not really be a rival to the CPTPP, but it would be interesting to know what the US Government have told him about this.

I welcome the Bill and our joining the CPTPP. It points the way to a very exciting future, which we should be very eager to grasp and take our full part in it.