Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2019

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

On the EU side of things, can the Minister tell us what the attitude of the French Government is towards these questions? France is our closest security partner and it would be very relevant to know its views.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I am sure the noble Lord will understand that I cannot talk about intelligence discussions with other states at the Dispatch Box. Of course, we have very close security ties with France. We have assisted it when it has had terrorist attacks, and I have no doubt that discussions with France will be ongoing.

Trade Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 4th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, both the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson and Lord Purvis, have stressed how important the services sector is to the economy of this country and to the exports that we sell. However, anybody involved in the financial services industry would say that they have not been much helped by the single-market provisions of the EU, which have put up many non-tariff barriers, to which the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, referred. It is probably quite ambitious, if we hope to have a free trade deal with the EU, to think that we are actually going to lower the non-tariff barriers that have been erected during our membership of EU, when the single market was supposed to provide a market for services as well as goods but effectively has not actually done so. I will be very interested to hear what the Minister has to say about this very important sector of the economy. We have not been much blessed by reciprocal agreements with the EU over financial services and very many other services in the past because of the non-tariff barriers that have been erected against them.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support this amendment, which is of profound importance. I apologise for an intervention that I made in Committee last week, where I was ticked off by the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, for intervening on an amendment when I had not been present for the start of the debate. I apologise again; I should know the rules better.

I was privileged to serve on the EU Internal Market Sub-Committee of your Lordships’ House. We conducted an inquiry into non-financial services, and I was very struck, not having known much about this before, by the importance of non-financial services. The sector makes up something like two-thirds of the total of the services trade. This is important, particularly for people who think that services just mean finance and the City. It is far broader than that and a lot of members of my own party might better understand that point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

The noble Lord will remember from day three of Committee last week that one of the questions asked was whether we could provide the Committee with some running status on where we are with all those free trade agreements. That is a perfectly reasonable approach and it is something that my noble friend Lady Fairhead agreed to take back to look at and come back on ahead of Report. Rather than using this opportunity to rehearse that, I will say that it is something that we are looking at. Specifically on the EU and Japan, I was going to come to that topic and say that there is a working group with Japan to seek to replicate its effect as part of the continuity arrangements.

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, on the point about freedom of movement, I have two specific questions for the Minister. I accept what he has said, but I would like to quote a personal example and declare an interest. For a period, my wife was chief executive of the English National Ballet. It was a requirement for the success of the English National Ballet that ballet dancers from all over the world were able to join, but the ENB had great difficulty with ballet dancers from outside the EU because they do not earn anything like the money that is put down in the Immigration Rules to justify easy entry. Are the Government prepared to be flexible on the earnings requirement to enable cultural organisations, which are very important to the British economy, to easily access talent from the EU, where people’s salaries will not initially be that high?

Secondly, if you are a small business in services and trying to expand by getting jobs, projects and contracts on the continent, one of the obvious business strategies you would pursue is recruiting young people from the countries in which you hope to do business. You take them into your consultancy, or whatever, and that gives you language and personal links into the markets you are trying to target. Again, there is no guarantee that, under the immigration policy outlined by the Home Secretary, young people coming from European countries would be able to get jobs in that kind of situation. We asked for a clear statement of the Government’s trade policy. The Government have to be clear on these issues before we can proceed on the Bill.

[Lord Bates]

I am happy to do that, and perhaps get some notes—I know we have a group coming up on the mobility framework, to which those points will perhaps be pertinent. I will, if I can, address them there. I also draw the noble Lord’s attention to section 9 of the political declaration, paragraphs 50 to 59 inclusive, which sets out the Government’s position on that.

The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and my noble friend Lord Hamilton pointed to or asked a very important question on bilateral services-only trade agreements. There is no precedent for a bilateral services-only trade agreement. Where service agreements exist, they are notified to the WTO alongside a wider agreement that also covers goods. We are leaving the customs union so that we can set our own tariffs and have an independent trade policy tailored to the strengths and requirements of our economy, which therefore includes—by implication and explicitly—the importance of services to our economy. The political declaration sets out a plan for a UK-EU free trade area for goods, including no tariffs, with ambitious customs agreements. This will be the first such agreement between an advanced economy and the EU.

The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, referred to the situation in relation to Northern Ireland. Without wanting to revisit that whole area in this group, the situation is that in Northern Ireland, under the common travel area, the rights to work, study and access social security and public services will be preserved on a reciprocal basis for UK and Irish nationals in the other state.

I turn to the questions raised by my noble friend Lady McIntosh and, in particular, the two questions raised by my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. My noble friend referred to the Chancellor’s speech on liberalising services and looking for a more ambitious way forward. I am sure that is at the core of government policy, otherwise the Chancellor would not have said it. I do not have the text in front of me, so I cannot comment on its full meaning, but I will write to my noble friend on that point. My noble friend Lady McIntosh also asked a three-pronged question. For a company setting up in the UK, what would its situation be in the event of no deal on day one; in the event of the implementation period; and at the conclusion of a future economic framework? Some of those outcomes will depend on the extent of the negotiation, which we have set out in the heads of agreement in the political declaration. Between Committee and Report, I will write on my noble friend’s specific point relating to that. Again, I thank the noble Lord for giving us an opportunity to raise this very important issue.

Brexit: The Future of Financial Regulation and Supervision (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, this is another excellent report from one of our EU sub-committees. It owes a lot to the quality of the clerks, and the quality of the chair and other members of the committee. However, I want to make one central point about the report which greatly worries me. I think it takes for granted the Government’s present commitment to withdraw from the single market and not to seek membership of the European Economic Area. For the City, that will have pretty awful consequences. I do not really agree with the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, on that.

Let me make three broad points. First, services are our economic future. This is where we have a trade surplus and are very strong. The City has benefited enormously from being the financial centre of the European single market. I am very worried about the way that the debate is going on Brexit. As evidenced by the piece by the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, in the Financial Times on Monday, the argument is, “Let’s have regulatory alignment in goods but let’s go our own way in services”. This could do grave damage to the service sector in Britain, which I regard as a key part of our economic future. When we had the report on non-financial services, virtually all the people from all the different parts of the service sector—from broadcasting, the law, accounting and architecture—said that the three fundamentals of the single market were fundamental to their business model. They are: the freedom of establishment, which we lose when we leave; the mutual recognition of qualifications, which we may just about manage to hold on to; and, most important of all, free movement of labour, which is absolutely fundamental to service businesses including the City.

My second main point is about the hope that we can negotiate a mutual recognition arrangement through a free trade agreement, which is basically what we will be doing if we are not in the single market. The idea that this is possible is very misplaced. I can tell your Lordships about it in EU terms. I worked in the Commission for three years and the EU will see us as a third country. You cannot have mutual recognition with a third country but that is the position we are putting ourselves in. That is not the EU being dogmatic and difficult but a question of where we have chosen to put ourselves. Think about mutual recognition and the contribution it made to the start of the deepening of the single market—for example, in the Cassis de Dijon decision. That was because people were in a common regulatory area governed by a single court, the European Court of Justice. How can you have a system of mutual recognition when you have a separate system of adjudication, apart from the European system? That is the fundamental logical flaw in this position.

My third point is that I have grave doubts about the position that the Bank of England is taking: that there are no circumstances in which, in financial services, Britain could be a rule taker. This could be very damaging to our national interest in the long run because it implies that if we are not to be part of the EEA, we will go our own way and there will be gradual divergence between the City and the EU. The very fragmentation of the financial services market that we are trying to avoid will actually start to take place. That is based on a misjudgment about how much influence Britain could have as a member of the EEA in various areas. True, we would not have a vote but I believe that we would have influence. We would certainly have influence on questions of free movement and I think that we would also have influence over the future of the City which, if we remained in the EEA, would be seen by our continental partners as a vital asset to them. Once we leave, that mutuality of interest disappears. I have very serious concerns about the way that this whole debate is going.

Brexit and the Labour Market (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. I am not sure that I have that much to add to it, to be honest, but I regard it as a clarion call for improving the statistics in this area, so that we can have evidence-based policy-making when decisions are taken on immigration policy in the future. Given the way that the Government have been reluctant to disclose the evidence base for their policy-making in the rest of the area of Brexit, I should like assurance from the Minister, if possible, that the work that the Home Secretary has commissioned from the Migration Advisory Committee will be fully and publicly available as a basis for thinking about future migration policy.

Last night, I and some other noble Lords attended an interesting meeting that the Lord Speaker held with businesspeople on their concerns about Brexit. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, was there as well. The message that comes across all the time is, “You politicians are putting us in a position of impossible uncertainty—we need to know where we are going”. There has been a lot of controversy in the last weeks about the uncertainty over the degree of regulatory alignment we will have with the EU after Brexit. But there is a far bigger uncertainty for a lot of businesses, which is far more important to them, about what the Government’s immigration policy will be. Before too long, the Government really must face up to the clash between politics and the economic reality and needs of business, and give greater clarity about their long-term aims. Surely, we cannot remain committed in the long term to the idea of a target in the tens of thousands; it just makes no sense.

Like my noble friend Lord Livermore and my former noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, I am a strong supporter of free movement. It is the right policy within the European Union and has been of great benefit to Britain. It is not just economic benefit; there is merit in diversity. I speak as chair of Lancaster University, and free movement enables many of our lecturers and researchers to come easily from the European Union. This is a tremendous plus in advancing knowledge and research. Free movement is a great benefit.

I also think that migration is one reason why our London schools have been so successful in improving their performance in the last decade and a half. We should therefore be willing to accept these things. I have three points on migration. I accept that there are serious problems of integration in certain parts of the country, as the noble Lord, Lord Horam, talked about, but in the main it is not a problem of EU migration but of non-EU migration. It is a serious problem for the country which has to be addressed. Secondly, the relationship between immigration and the leave vote in the referendum is complex. The fact is, most of the areas of the country that have seen the most immigration—I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Green, is aware of this—are areas such as London and parts of the south-east that voted to remain in the EU. I admit that there are some other parts of the country that have seen sudden increases in immigration, such as Lincolnshire, where there was a strong leave vote but, in my part of the world in Cumbria, where there was also a strong leave vote, there has been very little EU migration. I suggest that, although people gave immigration as a reason for voting leave, what was in fact in their minds were deeper frustrations about life today, particularly the way our labour market has functioned in the last two or three decades. Migration is a consequence of weaknesses in our labour market structures; it is not the cause.

If I have a criticism of the report that the committee prepared, it is that I do not think it looked sufficiently at these structural questions in the labour market. I have, from the 1980s onwards, always supported the flexible labour market. I spent my youth working on questions of incomes policy and industrial democracy and trying to make us into a Nordic-model economy but, after 1979, it appeared that the only way that we could run ourselves was with a more flexible labour market. The Labour Government are owed credit for what they did to strengthen protections in the labour market through the Social Chapter and national minimum wage.

We have benefited from a flexible labour market, but we now ought to be thinking about what further changes we need to make in labour market structures. Certainly, the problem with skills results from deep problems in the British education system. You have to look at the whole system, not just ask, “How do we tackle the problem of the lack of construction skills?” We need to look seriously at maths teaching in secondary schools and at early years opportunities in areas of high deprivation. As I have said in this Chamber before, we need to consider seriously the gross regional imbalances in our economy, which result in the paradox that people cannot move to well-paid jobs, or to jobs in general, and the only labour that is available in London and the south-east is immigrant labour. We also need to look at whether we need to strengthen the balance of power in the labour market, and whether that should shift. That issue is of pressing concern but that is for another day. All those issues are important. If they were addressed and reforms were introduced, people’s worries about immigration would lessen.

I welcome this debate and hope that it is a clarion call to the Government to establish a clearer policy based on clearer evidence. I hope we will think much more about the structural issues in the labour market that need addressing, rather than attacking free movement as the source of all the problems.

Global Green Growth Institute (Legal Capacities) Order 2013

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson]

I shall just rise to congratulate the Minister on her excellent exposition of the connection between green growth and economic growth, for the good not just of the planet but of this nation. I hope that she will spread this message well and truly throughout the land, particularly towards 11 Downing Street, and reinforce that message as much as possible. I congratulate her and I fully support the Government in their support for this very important institute and its future work. We will see how well it does over the years.

[Lord Liddle]

On behalf of the Opposition, I also rise to support this measure. In government we fully backed international action against climate change, of which this is a useful part. I would like to hear from the Minister what the plans are for the future of the institute. Like the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I would also like reassurance that the Government are not falling into the hands of climate change deniers.

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Teverson for his strong support and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for his support. I assure both noble Lords that I will do my very best to promote green growth, which is strongly supported, as they know, by DfID and this Government. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, of that.

As to the future of the institute, we are very optimistic about its future programme, but that will be its responsibility. This order enables the institute to operate in the way that I have said in the United Kingdom, and we look forward to its further work in the future. On that basis, if the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is content, I beg to move.

Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, in speaking for the Opposition in response to the debate, it is a pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint, to the Dispatch Box for one of his relatively rare appearances here. I do not say that in any spirit of criticism; all sides of the House appreciate the huge amount of work that the noble Lord does on behalf of UK trade promotion around the world. He brings to mind a conversation I had with Chris Patten, as he was then, when he was in Brussels. I asked him what life was like as a European Commissioner and he said, “I spend all my life expensively circulating the globe”. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Green, does a lot of circulating but I hope that, in the age of austerity, he does not do it too expensively, although I am confident that he does it productively. It is good to welcome him to the debate.

I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for introducing the debate. I will not join in the obituaries because there is plenty of life left in the noble Lord yet. However, I regret that he is no longer on the Front Bench. As a new boy to this place, I found him one of the most reflective of our Ministers, who always tried to deal very conscientiously and carefully with points made to him. In that sense, he is a loss.

I agreed with the vast majority of what the noble Lord said in his introduction. He told us about the great transformation in the world, which the noble Lord, Lord Bates, illustrated very well in his speech when he spoke about China and its huge pace of transformation, which is something that we all neglect. I agree with the noble Lord that we should make the most of our networks. I am rather more with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, than I am with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay; I think that networks matter in this world, and the UK is fortunate and well positioned in that. I only wish that the Government paid more attention to the higher education network, about which the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, spoke, because it is key to our future. I also agree with him about the chambers of commerce, as recommended in the excellent Heseltine review. I agree that the Lords should do more in international affairs; I would love the Lords to have a proper foreign affairs or international committee.

The points that he made about the Middle East and energy are very valid. I also agree about the strengthening of Commonwealth ties. I support what my noble friends Lord Judd and Lord Anderson, and the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, have said. I think that the soft-power ties of the Commonwealth are very important but that it will not act as one as a political and diplomatic force—at least, I do not see that happening very much—still less as a single economic unit. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, was not talking about going back to a world of imperial preference but I see very little prospect of a kind of free trade arrangement within the Commonwealth. The interesting thing about the Commonwealth is the way in which its economic interests have moved away from those of the United Kingdom. One of the most striking things about the emerging world is the growth of south/south trade, as opposed to south/north, between Commonwealth countries.

The fundamentals of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said, were right. Trade with the emerging world is crucial to our success in what the Prime Minister and Chancellor rather irritatingly refer to as the “global race”. However, the danger in such talk is that we convince ourselves that there is some great choice to be made between the rest of the world and Europe. As my noble friend Lord Anderson said, it is not a case of either/or—and as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, it is not a case of a blue-water strategy or a continental one. There was a lot of hullabaloo recently about the fact that for the first time we were trading more with the rest of the world than with the European single market. That is a perfectly natural development, given the pace of growth in the rest of the world. It should not become a political point.

Membership of the single market remains crucial to our ability to compete with the rest of the world because of its size, its proximity and its relative stability. It is highly integrated. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, and I were at a dinner last night where a Foreign Office official made the very good point on the subject of exports to China that France includes Airbus exports in its figures but 17% of each Airbus is made in the UK. We benefit from our partners’ success as well as our own.

Size matters. Being part of the EU single market gives us clout. On trade with China we worry about intellectual property challenges or the dumping of solar panels, but we try to secure fair competition and open up markets. Having that clout behind us is much better than being the United Kingdom on our own because—I think that I am right in saying this—the UK is smaller than the smallest Chinese province.

Europe matters a lot—and it matters in another sense. When the rest of the world thinks about us, it thinks about us not as Britain but as part of Europe. It thinks of Europe as an entity in the world. Britain has great strengths of its own—many noble Lords talked about them—such as the BBC, the World Service and the British Council. However, Europe, too, has strengths in this emerging world. It is regarded highly for its culture, civilisation, science and engineering. The European model is greatly respected as one in which we have achieved democracy and the rule of law, and a model of capitalism that combines innovation and dynamism with social justice. The European model is a strength for us, and in this multipolar world it will matter even more.

[Lord Spicer]

How long can we go on trading at a loss with Europe?

[Lord Liddle]

The question about our competitiveness applies not just to Europe but to the whole world. The House will debate later the excellent report of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, which addresses these issues. The problem is not with Europe but with UK competitiveness.

In the new world, Europe matters more, not less. Trade policy matters. There is a very ambitious EU trade agenda, as well as a transatlantic agenda and an agenda for trade with the Mercosur countries, with India and now with Japan. I would like to hear from the Minister about these possibilities. There seems to be a tremendous route to opening up more growth potential.

If we want to be an effective force, we have to put more emphasis on our European commitment. We should look at how the Chinese are buying up Africa; at how Europe has been ineffective in dealing with Russia on energy questions; at how as a continent we do not seem to be taking advantage of the opportunities of the Arab spring. Together, the European Union could do so much in these areas that it is not doing.

The biggest risk that this country faces is that we give in to the pressures for a pared-down Europe—the kind of pressures that Boris Johnson talked about this week—and end up sleepwalking towards our exit from the European Union when it is our membership of the EU that will be our strength in this emerging world.

West Bank

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, on behalf of the opposition Front Bench, I would like to say how much we welcome the fact that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, has got us this debate. It is a vital but not very well publicised issue, and she is certainly right that questions of water supply are about human rights. She has pursued this with her typical determination, which I admire, as well as her personal diplomacy through her twinning efforts between Watford and the Palestinian territories. I therefore have the greatest respect for what she is trying to do in highlighting these issues.

All noble Lords who have spoken in this debate accept that there are serious issues at stake here. The noble Lords, Lord Warner, Lord Alderdice and Lord Wright of Richmond, also spoke passionately about the problems. I agree with my noble friends Lord Winston and Lord Turnberg that certainly we have no wish to vilify the Israelis, and I am sure that many ordinary Israelis are horrified by these facts as much as anyone in this House. I also fully accept that the politics of the Palestinian Authority and of Hamas are not always the most constructive.

However, when you research the reports written by a number of international organisations and reputable NGOs on these issues, as I did briefly for this debate, one can only come to the conclusion that the Israelis have a serious case to answer. The most recent report I looked at was produced by the World Health Organisation last month. In that report the WHO says that the average supply of water to the Palestinians is only 50% of what it regards as a reasonable daily requirement, and that it is much worse in some parts of the territories—in Gaza and the so-called Area C—than in the rest. It also says, as did the noble Lord, Lord Wright, that Israel dominates the take of water from the aquifer on the West Bank—over 80% of it is taken by the Israelis—and similarly of the underwater aquifer in Gaza. Settlement building has made the problem worse: they are building deep wells, the building of which affects the water table and makes life more difficult for the Palestinians. The greatest injustice of the lot, in a way, is that the Israelis then sell a lot of the water back to the Palestinians, at quite a hefty profit. One estimate is that 50% of water in those parts of the territories has to be bought from Israel.

What is the Government’s view of this? This is something on which the British Government ought to have its own independent assessment of how serious these problems are. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that at the conclusion of this debate. We ought also to know what representations and what action the Government are taking to pursue this issue. I picked up in my researches an interesting report on these issues produced by Amnesty International in 2009. One of its suggestions, which seems perfectly sensible, is that there should be much closer co-ordination between the international donors who are trying to help to resolve these problems; a system of transparent reporting of difficulties and obstacles that they encounter, whether they are on the Israeli side or the Palestinian side; and a proper mechanism for reporting what is going on. That transparency and reporting mechanism seems to me to be an important part of trying to resolve the difficulties. What are we doing through our own aid efforts and the EU to try to ensure that that is done?

I have been passionately pro-Israeli all my political life but when one hears about some of the problems that the Palestinians encounter, it makes one wonder about the seriousness of the present Israeli Government’s commitment to a two-state solution. There are steps that the Israelis could take. As the noble Lord, Lord Wright, eloquently said, if they do not want to have blood on their hands, they should not have water on their consciences.

Socioeconomic Equality Duty

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, I will repeat it yet again. We supported much of the Equality Act. If local authorities are worth their weight in gold, they are already doing all the things that the noble Baroness is hoping for. While 90 per cent of the Act has been in force since 1 October, further announcements will be made in due course. The noble Baroness will just have to wait and see.

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I understand what the Conservatives said before the election about not liking these clauses, but does the noble Baroness accept that we are now in circumstances of drastic economies in public finances and that tough choices must be made by the public sector? Is not this environment precisely the time when we need a socioeconomic duty to ensure that the poorest in our society are protected?

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, the relevant clauses have not commenced. The Conservative Party made it clear that it opposed them, so we do not have to act further. As I have said repeatedly, we supported a large part of the Equality Bill. We worked incredibly hard with the then Government to ensure that it had a safe passage through this House.