European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Lord Maude of Horsham Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to congratulate the two maiden speakers in this debate. I worked closely with my noble friend Lord Barwell when I was chairman of the Conservative Party some years ago. Both he and the noble Lord, Lord Mann, made powerful maiden speeches here today, and I am sure the House looks forward to hearing much more from them in the months ahead.

I draw attention to my interests in the register. In some of them I attempt from time to time to give advice about issues around Brexit and occasionally to try to predict what might happen. This has proved challenging, but I hope some certainty is beginning to emerge.

I was neutral in the referendum campaign three and a half years ago. I thought that the upside of leaving claimed by the leavers and the downside claimed by remainers were wildly exaggerated. I do not believe that the most important factor in Britain’s future economic success or influence in the world lies in whether Britain is a member of the European Union.

In my brief period as Minister for Trade, I found myself attending the WTO’s biennial meeting. We hear much about the top table that apparently we will not be at after we leave. I got to the meeting and found that I was not at the table at all. I was representing the Government of the fifth-largest economy in the world and I did not have a seat at the table.

What matters is what we ourselves do, how we configure our own domestic economic arrangements and how we play our role in the wider world, strengthening and using our unique combination of national assets.

There was a clear decision in the referendum. It had to be implemented and implemented briskly. The inability of the Government and the House of Commons over the last three and a half years to make that happen has inflicted short-term damage on the perception of this country around the world, at a time when it matters more than ever that our reputation for effective diplomacy and political stability is not just maintained but enhanced. So it is essential that the Bill is passed without delay.

I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, said. It is certain that any amendments passed by this House will be reversed by the House of Commons. As my noble friend Lord Cormack said powerfully, if this House is unwise enough to lock horns with the House of Commons, it will do itself possibly irreparable harm.

So far as the next stage after 31 January is concerned, much has been made of the constrained timescale for negotiation. Of course it looks challenging, but the outlines of a deal are already there, and it is notable that since the Brexit vote in 2016 the EU has started to show that it is, after all, capable of conducting trade negotiations rather more rapidly than at its previous glacial pace, piqued by the criticism made of it during the referendum campaign.

Of course, this negotiation does not have to be—indeed, it should not be—the last word that sets the relationship in stone for all of time. As my noble friend Lord Howell powerfully argued earlier, this is a dynamic world in which change happens increasingly swiftly and unpredictably. It would be a mistake for us to spend years seeking perfection in a protracted negotiation that is likely to be obsolete before the ink is dry on it.

I have one final point. This is not just a trade negotiation. It needs to cover the whole range of ways in which Britain collaborates and will collaborate in future with the EU. Of course, this must include the security, defence and intelligence relationships, on all of which Britain can continue to be an essential partner for our nearest neighbours. I hope that this time the Government will not be pressured into giving way on this at the outset. In the early stages of the Article 50 negotiations, the EU—having fulminated about how there could be no cherry picking—ruthlessly picked the cherry labelled “security and intelligence collaboration”, and the then Prime Minister permitted this. I hope this mistake will not be repeated.

Brexit: Negotiations and No-deal Contingency Planning

Lord Maude of Horsham Excerpts

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)]

My Lords, is it not now clear that, despite the best efforts of my noble friend and his Secretary of State, whom I admire greatly, the Chequers proposal could be agreed only at the expense of further, very substantial concessions extracted under duress, which would lock the UK indefinitely into a highly disadvantageous one-sided arrangement? Is it not now clear that there is a growing and powerful case for the UK to exercise its right to join the European Economic Area, very much as a holding arrangement, so that businesses could have a line of sight for the next few years on how they can trade and invest? That would create a period in which, when emotions have settled, a substantive free-trade agreement could be negotiated with the EU. Would he accept that this argument is most powerful not for those who want to reverse the result of the referendum and prevent Brexit happening but for those who, like myself, believe that it must happen?

[Lord Callanan]

I thank my noble friend for his comments; he brings a lot of informed commentary on the subject. I am afraid that I do not think the option he set out is particularly practical. Were we able to carry on with membership of the European Economic Area, of course freedom of movement would continue, which I think would disappoint a lot of people who voted for Brexit, while the legal options are not straightforward. It would require the agreement of existing EEA countries and the ongoing agreement and co-operation of the EU, which would not necessarily be forthcoming. I know that the option has been put forward in good faith by a number of people, but I am afraid that the legal and practical difficulties would be considerable. That is why we default to our proposals, which we continue to negotiate on in good faith in Brussels and in other member state capitals.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Maude of Horsham Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maude of Horsham (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests. I recognise that at this stage in the debate one struggles to find anything original to say, so I will content myself with a few short points.

On the Bill, it never occurred to me that after the vote happened last year there could be any question but that Parliament should have a voice before the triggering of Article 50. I recollect, possibly rather tragically, as a teenager sitting in the Public Gallery of the House of Commons during the six-day debate it had before the decision was made for Britain to join what was then the Common Market. My noble friend Lord Lamont permitted me to be a signatory to the Maastricht treaty as his deputy—my opportunity, he said, to put my footprints on the sands of history. I recall that, both before and after the agreement of that treaty, there were two-day debates on it in the House of Commons, which undoubtedly informed the way in which the negotiation took place. It is important that on something of this magnitude and gravity Parliament must have a role, a voice and a say.

Having said that, of course a decision has been made, not an expression of preference or view, by the public in the referendum. They were invited to make a decision and they did so. Therefore, it is completely appropriate that there should be a full debate, as is happening in this House, but it is totally inappropriate for the Bill to be significantly amended, and I hope that this House will think again. To me it would be a double affront to democracy to seek to overset both the verdict of the public and of the elected Chamber on this issue.

I remained undeclared during the referendum campaign and took no part in it. I thought the arguments were finely balanced, and that if there was a vote to leave there would be some short-term downside and some medium to long-term upside opportunity. For those who cheerfully say, “Well, we are in the short term and there has been no downside”, I simply say that the short term is not over yet. We are only eight months into this period, and the short term certainly includes the two years we are going into when the negotiations will take place, when businesses looking to invest will have concerns before they do so. With regard to the longer-term upside opportunity, I stress that it is opportunity and not certainty. Whether those opportunities are realised depends very much, obviously, on what happens in the meantime. Of course, as many of your Lordships have said in the course of this debate, the eventual arrangements are not in our sole gift; these are to be negotiated. We hope that collective economic self-interest among us and our 27 current partners will prevail and that there will be sensible arrangements which benefit all, but we know that rationality does not always obtain in politics.

There must of course be control over immigration, although I suspect that the actual number of immigrants is unlikely to fall by much, although its composition may well change. It is also extremely important that this country remains not only open to talent from around the world but that it actively seeks it, because that has been our history and much of our strength.

Will economic self-interest prevail and outweigh the desire that there clearly is in some parts of the EU to hurt the UK and to make sure, as my noble friend Lord Tugendhat said, that the UK cannot be seen to be better off afterwards than it was before? It was clear to me, as Trade Minister, that many of our partners in the EU see this as a zero-sum game. They see a benefit to one country as being a loss to others. We know that they are wrong. I hope that there is a consensus in this House that that is wrong. Economics is not a zero-sum game.

In the context of the excellent EU Financial Services Sub-Committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, looking at the clearing of euro-denominated instruments in London, of course it is open to the European Central Bank to ordain that that must happen within the EU. We know that that activity is not just about the euro; it is co-mingled with the clearing of other currencies. There are huge efficiency gains to the whole of the European Union from that continuing to be the case, and there would be a significant efficiency penalty, as well as potentially some systemic risk, if that were to be undermined. There are only two financial centres where this can take place—London and New York—and there is no place in any kind of medium term where that can take place within the rest of the European Union. Certainly, the European Central Bank can ordain that, but it is not what the doctor would order for the eurozone’s fragile financial system.

My last point is this: what is within our unilateral gift is to set the environment for business to take place in this country. It needs to be unequivocally welcoming, and we need to make this, as it has been for much of my lifetime, the go-to destination for people who want to put to work their expertise, their energy, their money and their ideas. That means a proportionate regulatory environment, a simple and low-rate tax regime, and continuing support for the world-leading science and research base. If we do those systematically, the arrangements to be reached with the European Union will matter—they are certainly not marginal—but we can do a huge amount ourselves unilaterally to make sure that the upside opportunities in the medium and long term that I see from Brexit can actually be realised.