European Union: Negotiations (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, it will not surprise the House to find that I will not be echoing the sentiments of the noble Baronesses, Lady Hayter and Lady Ludford. I welcome the Government’s plans for a future relationship with the EU, as set out in their White Paper, and I particularly welcome my noble friend Lord True as the Minister in this debate; it is in very capable hands.

I could not be more proud of the approach that the Government are taking to our relationship with the EU. We have left behind us the servile acquiescence that characterised the first three years of negotiations with the EU after the referendum. In its place, we now have a confident Government who really believe in our future outside the EU and have the strong backing of the British people from last year’s general election.

In the Command Paper, the Government have set out their vision of

“friendly co-operation between sovereign equals”.

Those of us who strongly supported the UK’s exit from the EU are much heartened by both the content and the spirit of the Government’s position, and I look forward to my noble friend’s summary of the key elements of our policy when he winds up.

For me, the most important aspect is that we are seeking a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU. We are one of the world’s largest economies, and we expect to be able to negotiate trade agreements with our trading partners on a basis of mutual respect on both sides. The EU is no different from any other trade counterparty in this respect. It is the same basis on which we should approach negotiations with other important trading partners, such as the USA.

Of course, that means that we do not want an association agreement and will not bind ourselves to the rules and mechanisms of the EU, whether for a level playing field or any other purpose. Our country did not vote to leave the EU in order to recreate the past relationship all over again. We especially did not vote to leave the EU to be bound to mirror any part of its regulatory environment in perpetuity. Dynamic alignment is a million miles from any reasonable interpretation of what the British people voted for in 2016.

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-Afl)]

Is the noble Baroness saying that she is advocating no deal?

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[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

We could go on arguing about this indefinitely. However, the noble Earl is rather underestimating the intellectual abilities of his committee if it cannot reach a conclusion on this relatively simple issue without taking evidence. I will move on to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

We may be criticised on our structure. In the next month, noble Lords will have the chance to make comments on the work of committees. I agree that committees are too reliant on “evidence” which is simply regurgitating things that other people have said. This is an excellent report by an excellent committee; the noble Lord may have just contradicted himself.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I do not know whether or not the noble Lord, Lord Lea, was on the committee. I am saying merely, as he did, that committees should be intelligent enough to reach their own conclusions without necessarily having to take evidence.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said that it was not good enough for the Government to inform devolved assemblies what was happening: there should be consultation. However, when we talk about consultation we are actually talking about reaching agreement, so you are, therefore, giving the devolved assemblies a veto over a compromise on the final deal. I have a problem with Parliament getting too involved in all this. At the end of the day, everybody has a different opinion. My noble friend Lady Noakes thinks that we should be preserving all our fishing. I suspect that quite a bit of it will be given away. That will be part of the negotiating ploy and my noble friend will have to ask herself whether or not the compromise which the Government have reached and the overall deal—which I suspect will include some sacrifice of fishing—are acceptable as a whole. That is what Parliament will have to decide.

However, the Government cannot possibly go into these negotiations constantly referring back to Parliament and asking if it is all right to do this or that. By their nature, the negotiations will be a compromise. Concessions are going to be made in some directions and gains made in others. At the end of the day, the Government have to be judged on whether the overall package is satisfactory as a whole. We have to be wary of undermining the Government’s negotiating position but, now that they have a decent majority, I do not think they will be too moved by many of these arguments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, if we were moving towards a love affair with Monsieur Barnier, this would be a funny way for us to go about it. If one was the proverbial man on the moon, one would say that the U-turn we have done since January is undoubtedly much more egregious than anything Monsieur Barnier and the Council of Ministers have done.

I begin with a remark made by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, in this House on the withdrawal Act. He said that

“the Government’s vision for the future relationship with the EU is already set out in detail in the political declaration”.—[Official Report, 20/1/20; col. 1004.]

I do not know why the noble Lord is no longer with us but he was always very much on top of his brief, and he would not have said that if it had not been the policy at that time. Whether it is a U-turn or a 90-degree turn, there has certainly been a considerable change. I do not know whether the noble Lord who just spoke claims that it is cosmetic or fundamental, but it is pretty fundamental.

At present, we face a severe economic prospect. We have to step up to the plate as a country in the next few months in two or three obviously very difficult areas, and come together, as was said. However, we need to do so with a close understanding and good will with our neighbours in the European Union. Coronavirus has been mentioned, and it is fortuitous—of course it is. We did not invent it as some sort of political stunt to make it more likely that we would stay in the European Union. However, there has been an enormous change since 31 January. At that point, two things happened. There is an EU room with two doors in it. One is signed “Exit” and we walked out of it, while through the other one, signed “Enter”, walked a big elephant. Its name is coronavirus. In the next few months, the political climate in this country will conflate these two questions, especially as the already forecast decline in GDP will become significant for people’s living standards, whether or not they are affected by the virus per se. We can already see transport, restaurants and so on shutting down. We have not had this sort of mixture—rationing et cetera—in our lifetime, apart from those of us who were just about alive during the war. This will change the political psychology in Widnes, Wakefield, Wolverhampton and Walsall.

In December we had a change of Government. We are only beginning to recognise that this was a huge change. We are, at the same time, both becoming more nationalistic and starting to tear up the Union Jack. We will lose the cross of St Andrew and be left with a strange combination of Parliaments in the different parts of the British Isles—if we still call them that. People have to be careful about the sort of nationalism that they now say trumps every ace because they have a majority of 60, 70 or 80.

As a former TUC official, I want to explain something that has been happening in the European Union for many years. The Social Chapter has been there since 1990. Robin Cook signed it as Foreign Secretary when the Labour Government came in in 1997. I will read out a list of things that have been achieved, with the agreement of employers, through collective bargaining: equal pay; protection from discrimination; protection when a business changes hands; equal rights for part-time workers; maternity and paternity rights; equal rights for fixed-term workers; four weeks’ paid holiday; eight hours in the working day; having a voice at work through information and consultation; European works councils; the posting of workers in Europe; and health and safety at work. No employers in this country are asking for the repeal of that lot. They know that it helps a modern labour market and we have to do more to deal with zero-hours contracts. This is the new agenda with which we are locking antlers in Brussels. The TUC will be part of the social negotiations because they are conducted with the European TUC and European employers. There is a notion that something is being imposed on us through qualified majority voting, but there was always a consensus on these things. There has been no voting on anything. It has been a huge step forward but we need to go further on the new labour market trends emerging, on new technology and so on, but I do not hear that speech from the Government at the moment.

As Philip Stephens pointed out in a very interesting article in the Financial Times last week, if one said, “Of course, there will be a Brexit trade deal, stupid”, everyone would accept it. But he is not so sure, now that the conservatives have taken over the Conservative Party. For 200 or 300 years, they were hard-headed pragmatists; now they have become the champions of English nationalism. It is a totally different party, according to the article. Whether that will stand the test, with everything that is happening in the next six months, is another question. I think it probably will not. We will need as close co-operation with our EU neighbours as we can get in the next six months, in every possible way, not just because the elephant has entered the room, but because it has come in at a time when we are putting at risk a lot of the factors that determined our rate of economic growth.

I remember, again from the Financial Times, that four or five years ago a French person was wandering around London and he or she happened to be interviewed and said, “Of course everyone knows that London is the capital of Europe.” This was in South Kensington. It is not said now—of course not, because we have just thrown it all away. I think there is something in the fact that we have a nationalistic media. The only part retaining its sanity, for the most part, is the BBC, on which we had a very interesting debate the other day.

We have to move to a position where we can find some construct to meet together as the European economic area—I say that without the capitals, necessarily. I cannot believe that we can do all the things that now need to be done in every sphere without being part of a forum, having left the European Union. No one in this Chamber is saying other than that we have left the European Union, but there is no reason why we cannot do some geometry with something like the European economic area, apart from what we might call the trade geometry. Instead of trying to negotiate 10,000 different agreements de novum, we have the option of buying a bundle that more or less suits.

I do not understand at all what to make of the Government’s new negotiating strategy, apart from the fact that it began with a proto-Churchillian speech—“We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the hills; we will never surrender.” That sounded pretty good for a bit, but it will not sound as though it has a shelf life for more than two or three weeks from now. I very much hope that we can ask the Minister to bear in mind the opportunity for the Government to take up some of the ideas mentioned by my noble friend Lady Hayter at the beginning, instead of trying to override the very interesting remarks made over the last couple of hours with some ideological override. If the Labour Party were doing this, the very people on the other side who are doing it would say, “Marxist dogma.” This is the equivalent of the Marxist dogma, and it is not like the Conservative Party we used to know. I can give some free advice to the Conservative Party: get real.