Duties of Customs

Debate between Angela Smith and Peter Grant

Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 20th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am pleased to speak in favour of amendments (c) and (e) in the name of the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray). I sincerely hope that he will press them to a vote later this evening.

No one here would disagree with the need to have new customs legislation in place. Given that much of the customs legislation that we currently have is derived from EU legislation, nobody would argue with the fact that when the UK leaves the European Union that legislation will have to be replaced. However, as is so often the case in the debate about the European Union, we have moved very quickly from, “We need to have something in place” to being told that, “You will agree to put this in place whether you like it or not.” It is quite clear that there is a fundamental disagreement between—I suspect—a substantial majority of Members of this House and the Government on whether we should also be preparing to leave the customs union and the single market.

As well as paving the way for new customs tariffs, which is what this resolution is about, the resolution also implicitly paves the way for all the additional bureaucracy, all the additional infrastructure and all the additional border delays that leaving the customs union will inevitably create for every single journey of every single person and every single lorry and every single suitcase that travels to and from the European Union in future. It has been estimated that there will be an additional 548,000 customs declarations needed every day—that is six and one third declarations per second.

[Angela Smith]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that this particular problem will apply pretty severely to perishable goods such as food, agricultural produce and fresh fish.

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. There are significant implications for perishable goods and, as was mentioned earlier, for the manufacturing supply chain where the goods can cross borders several times. There are also implications for medical supplies such as radioisotopes, which are useless if they are held up for a few hours at customs. That, of course, is before we even think about the massive inconvenience to travellers—either for business or leisure. Even if they have nothing to declare, they have no guarantee that they will not be on a plane when, for whatever reason, UK or French customs decide that they are going to search every single passenger coming off that plane.

We are told that in return for that, we will have this brave new world of trade deals with everybody and anybody. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Ross Thomson), who is no longer in his seat, harked back to the glory days of Glasgow’s place as the second city of the empire, blithely forgetting that, to our eternal shame, that empire was built on slavery. We cannot go back to the days when Glasgow was a huge trading port for tobacco, sugar and cotton because—thank God—we no longer have the slave plantations that were such an important part of that economic model.

We are not going back to the days of empire and too many virtual reality Government Members—well, there are not currently many Members on the Government Benches—need to understand, once and for all, that empire has gone. It is now partnership. Partnership means that when we are in a weakened position and the big players such as the Chinese, the Singaporeans and the Malaysians are in a strong position, we are not going to get a favourable deal from them if we negotiate on our own.

I do not want this motion to apply to goods going to and from the European Union or the customs union, because I want us still to be in the customs union. It has been made clear that that offers by far the simplest and least disruptive way of giving effect to the referendum result in June last year. The referendum, as far as the voters of England and Wales were concerned, certainly gave a mandate to leave the European Union, and we have to respect that. But there has never been a referendum mandate to leave the customs union or the single market. There was what looked to be an almost spontaneous, hasty and precipitate decision by the Prime Minister; a red line was drawn that has now painted the Government into a corner.

It is becoming clear that many of the Government’s highly plausible-sounding objectives simply cannot happen if we leave the single market. Those highly plausible-sounding objectives include the “deep and special partnership” that we are going to have with the European Union, the “continued close association” with the customs union, and the

“freest and most frictionless trade possible”

with the single market. Except it will not be as deep and special a partnership as it would if we were in the EU, it will not be as close an association with the customs union as being in the customs union, and it certainly will not be anything like as free or frictionless a trade deal as we can get by staying right where we are now in the single market.

As an indication of how much substance there is to these sound bites that the Government Whips are so fond of encouraging their Back Benchers to use, it is worth remembering that they were doing the same thing just over two years ago. But the sound bites that got cheers on the Tory Benches then, on the days when there was anybody there to cheer, were “long-term economic plan” and “Majority Conservative Government”. “Hear, hear”, they would shout. The Government’s current platitudes about easy trade deals are likely to be consigned to history just as quickly as the things that they thought would be around for a long time back in 2015.

We are now more than halfway through the journey from referendum to leaving day, and there is not one single major policy area where the Government have put forward a clear, concrete proposal for discussion. That means that on every major policy decision, the Government have taken longer to come up with an idea than 27 Parliaments—and 27 Governments will have to agree it. Putting pressure on those Governments and telling them that it is not fair to delay it will not work; they will act and speak in the interests of their people. It is ridiculous to condemn the Irish Prime Minister for speaking in favour of the interests of the people of the Republic of Ireland. That is what Prime Ministers are supposed to do. I wish that some Prime Minister would maybe listen to that.

As it stands, we are in serious danger of crashing out of the EU without a deal, but there is a simple way that the Government can avoid that. There is a simple way that they can move very quickly to clear the logjam—to avoid having interminable discussions about Northern Ireland that do not have a solution and to avoid having interminable discussions about the rights of 4.5 million citizens. Both those major problems can be substantially resolved simply by the Government having the humility to say, “We got it wrong. We have to change tack and stay in the single market.”

There is an urgent need for the Government to follow their own advice, listen to their own rhetoric and listen to the advice that the Brexit Secretary gave to the Germans last week: stop putting politics before prosperity, because it is never a smart thing to do. The Government should take the decision that they know as well as I do will prevent the worst economic and social damage of Brexit. The Government should confirm today that they want to remain in the single market and the customs union, and they should signal that intention by accepting the amendments of the hon. Member for Edinburgh South without forcing the House to a Division.