Leaving the EU: Customs

Anna Turley Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

I agree, and I would draw another historical analogy: it is 60 years ago this year that Nye Bevan issued his famous warning to the Labour party not to send a British Foreign Secretary into the negotiating chamber naked, and that is precisely what this motion would do. It runs directly contrary to our national interest, and the whole country will see how profoundly misguided it is. There is no way of overstating this: every Member who votes for this motion—every one—will be damaging the principles of Cabinet government in the hope of inflicting partisan advantage. It is unforgivable. Coming a week after north-east Labour MPs called for a second referendum—or, as they now euphemistically call it, a people’s vote, as if a referendum were not exactly that—this shows the Opposition in the worst possible light.

[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

Given that documents the Government have produced show a devastating impact of at least 11% on the north-east economy, why does the hon. Gentleman continue to lash himself to the mast of this devastating Tory Brexit, which will harm his constituents and mine?

[Mr Clarke]

This is the same “Project Fear” prognosis that we heard in 2016, which has been comprehensively rubbished and which nearly 70% of the hon. Lady’s own constituents rejected—and she continues to lecture me about listening to my constituents and acting in their interests.

The Labour party is unreconciled to Brexit, unwilling to deliver it and unfit to run our country, but the Leader of the Opposition should be thanked for giving us another opportunity to point out the many reasons why Labour’s policy on the customs union and Brexit is so absurd. First, depending on who we ask and on which day, Labour has committed to staying in “a” or “the” customs union, but at the same time says it wants the UK to have a say over future trade deals and arrangements. The whole point is that if we are in the customs union but out of the EU, the UK will have no formal role or veto in trade negotiations, and the EU will have no incentive, let alone legal obligation, to negotiate deals that are in the UK’s interests.

Secondly, Labour’s U-turn towards stay in “a” or “the” customs union clearly breaks a manifesto commitment on which its Members all stood. That manifesto said:

“Labour will set out our priorities in an International Trade White Paper…on the future of Britain’s trade policy”.

We now discover that that White Paper would simply read: “Priority No. 1: give trade policy back to Brussels”.

Thirdly, the EU’s customs tariffs hit the poorest in this country the hardest. The highest EU tariffs are concentrated on food, clothing and footwear, which account for 37% of total tariff revenue, so the poorest British consumers are paying to prop up European industries.

Fourthly, the customs union not only hurts the poorest in our own country; it also supresses the economic growth of the developing world, because EU trade policy encourages cheap imports of raw materials from developing countries, such as coffee, but heavily taxes imports of processed versions of the same good. This means that poorer countries are stuck in a relationship of dependency, whereby there is no incentive to invest in processing technologies, which could lift them from their status as agrarian economies.

Finally, the House should be reminded that during negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, about which Opposition Members made so much fuss in 2015 and 2016, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) gave an impassioned speech to the House in which he concluded that, in negotiating TTIP, we were

“engaging in a race to the bottom”.—[Official Report, 15 January 2015; Vol. 590, c. 1108.]

As Leader of the Opposition, he is now proposing a policy that would completely abrogate the UK’s ability to veto such arrangements in the future, let alone influence their negotiation.