Global Britain

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD) [V]]

Three minutes is not a great deal of time to talk about a subject as big as Britain’s place in the world as global Britain, so this evening I want to challenge the House to think a little about the signals we are sending.

I mean it as absolutely no disrespect to the Secretary of State for International Trade, but I rather wish somebody else had opened the debate. I wish the Secretary of State for international development had come to the Dispatch Box to boast that Britain was one of the handful of countries that had a commitment to spend 0.7% of its GNI on overseas aid. Of course, we could not have had that, because the Government have abolished the Department for International Development and now seek to walk away from the commitment to spend 0.7% of our GNI on aid. As others have said in this debate, that commitment put us at the top of the world’s nations, rather than in the rather backward and downward-looking position we are now left in.

If the Government want the focus of today’s debate to be on trade, let us take them at their word. As the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) said, let us focus on the tariffs currently being imposed on Scotch whisky, which have cost us something in the region of £450 million in lost exports already. It is a pretty open secret that we were close to having a bilateral deal with the US last week but we did not get it over the line. That is because it was just too difficult for Government Departments within Whitehall to agree on a common position that would have delivered that deal. Rather than having Ministers come and crow at the Dispatch Box about the great achievements of cut-and-paste trade deals, they would do better to focus on the real challenges that face us as we now try to create these trade deals across the world, because that one issue of tariffs in one sector shows just how challenging this is going to be.

The challenge to the House tonight is what the narrative is going to be as we create this global Britain. Is it going to be one that is merely transactional—all about trade? Are we going to create a global Britain that is actually rooted in values—rooted in support for human rights, wherever they are found, and the rule of law—or are we going to be looking at this just as a question of pounds, shillings and pence?