European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Report: 6th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

In terms of the Government’s intention in the negotiations, it is required. But to counter, to a degree, the otherwise helpful contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the EU have to agree it. If we do not have this as a positive point in our negotiations, and if we do not co-ordinate the role of British industry, sectors and professions with those of their European counterparts, there will be an end to that co-operation. I have had cause to remind the Minister that the EU’s current guidelines in negotiations say that we will no longer participate in these agencies from March next year. If so, that is seriously disruptive. It is therefore important that this House gives an indication to the other place and to the Government that we must continue to participate. I hope the Minister does not repeat his and his colleagues’ previous disdain in dismissing the need to make this clear. I hope the Prime Minister’s intention is wider than the few specific agencies to which she referred in her Mansion House speech.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment, partly to give our support to the Prime Minister against those within her divided Government who do not believe that it is important to stay closely associated with these agencies.

Perhaps I may give a little of their history. I was on the staff of Chatham House in the early 1980s when the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, first proposed the single market and made it clear that what was in Britain’s interests—as well as, she argued, in enlightened European interest—was to replace a tangle of different national regulations with single regulations in a single market. She did not assume that we would get rid of all these regulations but that we would agree on common regulations. Many of the agencies then grew up to make sure that these regulations were observed and enforced, and altered and developed as technology, pharmaceutical research and other things changed. That was why they were clearly in Britain’s interests. There were always some in the Conservative Party who did not believe in that—they believed in deregulation—and thus were dubious about the single market because it was replacing national regulations with common European regulations.

One of the most interesting pieces of research carried out for Chatham House in that period was by an American trade lawyer who wrote about the extraterritorial jurisdiction of US regulations over the United Kingdom until the single market was formed. Very often business, engineering, the chemical industry and the pharmaceutical industry in Britain simply followed American regulation. The idea that we had sovereign regulation on our own did not exist. As the single market developed, so European regulations, over which we had considerable influence, replaced the British adoption of regulations designed for American purposes, which we felt we had no choice but to accept.

That is these agencies’ historical origins and they clearly still serve British national interests. It is therefore important that if and when we leave the European Union we remain associated with them. Technology and research have continued to develop and these agencies therefore serve an increasingly important role. I therefore hope that the Minister in replying will reinforce what the Prime Minister said in her Mansion House speech and make it clear that a major objective of the Government is to remain as closely associated with these agencies as possible, even if Boris Johnson may then denounce it in the Daily Mail.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I share in full measure the hopes and concerns articulated today by so many of your Lordships. That said, if the amendment is put to the vote, I shall not feel able to support it. My approach to this amendment, as to earlier amendments to the Bill, has been essentially that it is fine to tell the Government what they must do once they have achieved what they regard as the best available deal, but it is not fine to seek to impose on the Government requirements as to precisely what that deal must be or how to achieve it. In other words, we can tell the Government what rights Parliament or, as I promoted, the public should have on a further referendum as to what we can do and should do, by way of approving or rejecting the proposed final deal—or, indeed, a decision to exit with no deal—but we should not seek to bind or inhibit the Government in reaching a deal and so risk weakening their negotiating position.

The Bill is not for that purpose but to keep our statute book intact. I urge your Lordships, rather than indulge all our hopes and wishes in this area, to think about whether we ought to put these explicit requirements into this legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, before the noble Lords, Lord Howarth and Lord Forsyth, tell us that we are frustrating the will of the people, it may be appropriate to remind them of the arguments that the leave campaign made before the referendum for leaving the customs union and the single market. We had to leave the customs union because, if we stayed in, we could not negotiate those different free trade agreements that we would make independently with India, China, the United States and many others, which would give us better conditions than we had had, constrained as we were by being a member of the European Union. They said that we had to leave the single market because we had to get rid of so many of these constricting regulations that bound the British economy and which we could be free of when we left. I wish to suggest that neither of those arguments now holds.

The Government have so far spent well over half a billion pounds on the Department for International Trade, and the Treasury, as the newspapers reported this morning, has decided that that is getting to be too expensive for the value that is being produced, which, after all, is very low. Liam Fox has travelled the world several times—someone told me the other day that he has travelled half the distance between here and the moon so far—and has achieved remarkably little. A number of countries have made it quite clear that they are not prepared to offer us anything better than we would get as a member of the European Union. Our hopes that we have a wonderful free trade partner in the United States do not appear to be assisted by President Trump’s present approach to foreign economic relations. Those who still support a hard leave, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, are reduced to attacking business as being part of Project Fear when business says that its interests are about to be damaged so badly.

On deregulation, we have heard increasingly from members and supporters of the Government, including those on the Front Bench at present, that we do not want to deregulate—that we want to maintain the high standards of regulation. I have not even heard anyone suggest recently that we should get rid of the working time directive. If that is the case, the reason why we want to leave the single market has also evaporated. The Minister earlier this afternoon suggested that, as an independent country, we could mirror EU regulations by passing, on our own, the same regulations the European Union has just passed. That is wonderful parliamentary sovereignty, isn’t it—jumping in behind, taking the rules and saying, “Gosh, look, we’re doing it on our own”? Geoffrey Howe, a far greater Foreign Secretary than the present incumbent, used to talk about the gains to Britain of the single market: that we would be sharing sovereignty and taking part in decisions about common regulations. Outside the single market we will be taking the rules others have given us and pretending that we are a sovereign country.

The Minister suggested earlier this afternoon that the amendments in question would introduce confusion and uncertainty. I suggest to the Minister that most of us think that that describes the Government’s current position. Indeed, I took part in a radio discussion on Sunday morning with someone whom I imagine is quite a good friend of his—Nigel Farage—who agreed with me that the Government’s current negotiations with the European Union are a total mess. That is the relatively widespread set of opinions from a range of different views around the world. Then, we are faced with the Daily Mail this morning, in which the Foreign Secretary is rubbishing the Prime Minister’s views. If that had ever happened during the coalition Government —if a Liberal Democrat Cabinet member had rubbished the Prime Minister—there would have been a government crisis. But we apparently have such a weak and unstable Government that they totter along from one thing to another, unable to decide what they are doing.

My question to the Minister and to noble Lords who are about to speak is: given that the arguments the leave campaign made in that hard-fought and narrowly won referendum have now evaporated, what are the arguments for staying out of the customs union and single market?