Trade Bill

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th January 2021 Commons Chamber

We recently voted to take back control of our laws, our borders and our money. This is about taking back control of our laws and, indeed, our conscience. It is about reminding ourselves that when a people is under oppression so that their very existence is threatened, we have a duty and a responsibility to stand up. So I will be standing with the Muslim community around the world—Ummah Islamiyyah—and the Jewish community around the world, as well as with many, many people across the United Kingdom and across the world who are seeing the abuses that we are seeing, sadly, in western China and reminding ourselves that that crime does not just fall on the heads of the victims, but threatens us all. It is therefore genuinely a crime against humanity that cries out for justice in any court, but particularly, in a British court.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP) [V]]

Feasgar math, Mr Deputy Speaker, and thank you very much for calling me at this stage of the Bill. I am speaking from the island of Barra in Scotland, which has just been included in tier 4 with the mainland. That is one of the reasons why I have not been travelling and why this is the first time I will speak in any stage of the Trade Bill. I am grateful that we are back to a virtual Parliament, which should have been happening long ago.

I would like to mention a couple of things before I get to the meat of this. A lot of constituents, and people who are not constituents, have been getting in touch about the NHS. I did hear the Minister say that the NHS would not be on the table and I hope that that includes the back door and every other side angle into the NHS. Food standards concern an awful lot of people. Over a quarter of a million emails were sent to MPs in the last year on food standards, so we should be very aware of that, as indeed we should be of standards in agriculture and general trade. The role of Parliament in scrutinising deals comes up a lot in correspondence, so I will raise that, too. ActionAid has pointed out, very valuably, that the fallout from covid-19 has shone a new light on the disproportionate impact of trade policies on women and girls, who comprise the majority of unpaid carers. It has had a particular impact on women and girls in the global south and has affected the work of women in trade. When trade is considered, we should think of all of humanity, and particularly the half of us who are of a different gender.

Scrutiny is indeed a very good thing. Let us think about this. With a lack of scrutiny, which Brexiteer thought that they were making the EU bureaucrat king over the UK’s export trade? But that is what has happened, as the shellfish guys and girls, and other exporters, will tell us. Much to the frustration of many in the shellfish sector, we have the EU bureaucrat with the clipboard, demanding five or six more bits of paper before things can move, where once they moved freely. And it is not just them, but exporters in general. From July, they will met by not just the EU bureaucrat, but another set of bureaucrats coming in as quasi-monarchs—the bureaucrats of the UK—and importers will be hit as well. The lack of scrutiny was probably one of the reasons that it came as a late dawn for many that the UK trade bloc is now smaller than the UK—quite an achievement for Brexit.

We move towards scrutiny in a bit more depth in amendment 5. My Committee had difficulty with the Japan agreement because of the time we had at the end for scrutiny and the experts we could share it with. I would have raised this concern earlier in Parliament had I been able to, but of course then there was no virtual Parliament. The access we had to negotiators was very interesting. We usually got the debonair, bland kind of guys at the top when we wanted the guys at the coalface who were negotiating during the trade deal—but that did not happen. Information we got during the briefings did not bear much relation to the matters that came up at the end, such as UK negotiators setting the principle of playing second fiddle to the EU when it came to tariff rate quotas in relation to Japan.

The UK boasts that it is doing 63 more trade deals. What it is doing is rolling over trade deals, and it is not actually getting any GDP increase from that. It is worth considering the numbers, because in the flowery language that is often thrown around on this, the numbers talk most. The cost of Brexit at the moment is 4.9% of UK GDP; it is costly. No trade deal that the UK has made or signed so far is recovering this 4.9% damage. The Japan trade deal was touted as being a 0.07% gain. To put this in context so that people understand, let us call that £4.90. The Japan trade deal was reported as giving us back 7p of that damage, but in fact it was not, because the UK was already trading under the trade deal that the EU had with Japan, so the net gain was, in effect, zero. The UK Government had not done the numbers comparison between the two, which was disappointing. Again, the need for scrutiny is large.

When it comes to the best trade deal we can get—the American trade deal—that is only going to give the UK about a 20p increase on the £4.90, comparatively, that is lost. We need 24-and-a-half times such trade agreements to make up the damage. As America has a quarter of the world’s GDP, that effectively means finding seven or eight planets we can drive lorries to, or ship containers on boats to, to counteract the GDP damage that Brexit has done, so clearly it ain’t going to happen. The trade deals that we are doing need to be looked at responsibly and carefully. Incidentally, on the American side, the GDP gain for them is only 0.02%, or 2p. I am sure that the new Biden Administration will have bits of paper showing other priorities for greater economic growth, before a trade deal with the United Kingdom. Again, that scrutiny could have stopped us misleading ourselves.

On Amendment 3, I think everybody considers that to be the right thing. It is just that if the FTAs are suspended, do we then go back to trading on WTO rules, and when does that happen? Surely something stronger needs to be in place on that.

The best of all trade deals available is the one we have just walked away from. If the UK wants to increase GDP by 4.9%, there is the single market and the customs union, and that will help our shellfish guys as well. Tapadh leibh, Mr Deputy Speaker.