Brexit: Agriculture and Farm Animal Welfare (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, on his maiden speech. I think I am right in saying that it is many centuries since his ancestors first appeared in this Chamber but his speech tonight shows that he has a very good contribution to make to the modern House of Lords, and so we welcome him. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on a quite brilliant extempore exposition of his committee’s report, which showed tremendous clarity of thought about the complex issues involved.

I am no agriculture expert but I approach this as someone who has looked at European Union affairs in the round for the last quarter-century. I should declare my only interest in this debate: I am a member of Cumbria County Council and although I am not a landowner or a farmer, I am well aware of the views of many hill farmers who find themselves on the margins, many beef farmers who are pretty prosperous and many middling dairy farmers who somehow or other manage to survive. That is the knowledge which I bring.

For me, the real problem in the question of agriculture and Brexit is the clash of goals, which the Government have failed to resolve. This is the clash between, on the one hand, what Defra says in its response to the Select Committee’s report about securing,

“a more productive and environmentally sustainable future for UK farming”,

and, on the other, what we saw in the White Paper on trade that the Government published last week. That was an ideological commitment to Britain having an independent trade policy in which I fear British agriculture is literally going to become the sacrificial lamb. Dr Fox’s commitment to an independent trade policy is evangelical. The paper is full of statements about the benefits of free trade and about how Britain is going to take advantage of the boundless scope for new agreements with the Commonwealth, old and new, and the new economic powerhouses of the world. I do not think the picture of a free-trade nirvana for Britain is realistic.

I worked in the European Commission for three years; I went there to work in Peter Mandelson’s cabinet when he was Trade Commissioner. I went as a committed but rather naive free trader, and I quickly learned that there is no such thing as a free lunch in trade relations. Only hard bargains can be struck. Our trade partners are not going to lay wreaths on the statues of Cobden, Bright and Robert Peel. They see trade relations as fundamentally about economic power, and you will get no deal unless you put bargaining chips on the table. What are our British bargaining chips? I am afraid to say that the bargaining chips we have are the same as the bargaining chips the EU has in its trade relations, which are the tariff and quota regimes in agriculture. This is what the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Americans, the Brazilians and the Argentinians will be trying to get at in return for our greater access to their markets. As we have heard from other speakers, there will be very serious consequences as a result of this policy. As many speakers have said, it will make it impossible to have a free trade agreement with Europe that covers agriculture, and our exporters will face huge tariffs which will be a big problem for them. But it will also mean that our domestic producers are undermined by low-cost producers from other parts of the world.

Some people will say that that is what free trade means. We saw it in textiles. In textiles, poor people are benefiting from cheap clothes and cheap shoes as a result of free trade. I do not think the same argument quite applies to agriculture. It is an approach that shows the price of everything and the value of nothing. From my Cumbrian experience, I know that agriculture and farming are embedded in the county’s way of life. Hill farmers do not just live off their sheepmeat sales; they sustain the landscape and a culture that has rightly just been awarded world heritage status. There are things of great value that we have to fight to preserve.

I also believe that getting this wrong could have a profound impact—I would like the Minister to comment on this—on the unity of the United Kingdom. I believe the reckless pursuit of an independent trade policy could easily give the Scottish Government the excuse they want to raise again the question of Scottish independence and the Scots’ control of their agriculture. Similar pressures might well come in Wales. This would be a very high price for Britain to pay for an independent trade policy. I hope the Government realise that they are facing a clash of goals which they have to resolve very quickly.