Trade Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, there is a tradition in the House of Lords that maiden speeches are received only with approval. Today I must break that tradition. While congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone of Boscobel, on his maiden speech, it was made by him as a Minister, for the Government, and expressed a philosophy that is urgently in need of explicit challenge.

In his introductory remarks, the Minister said that globalisation, trade and investment are the best routes to prosperity and peace. These sentiments attracted wide support during the debate, reflecting the 19th-century and earlier origins of the political philosophies that dominate in your Lordships’ House. For the Liberal Democrats, the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, said that free, open and fair trade is “the bedrock of our political movement”. These are the antiquated ideas that gave us the world we have today, one wracked by poverty and inequality, facing a climate emergency and a nature crisis, a model that Covid-19 has helped expose as profoundly insecure and unstable.

Pursuing our current economic model, based on economic growth, multinational-dominated trade and the exploitation of vulnerable workers and nations, has given us a world in which one in nine people regularly goes to bed hungry. The planet is treated as a mine and a dumping ground—including the forest destruction to which the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred. That destruction has been to the benefit of a few and not to the majority of the people on the planet.

In today’s other maiden speech, which I commend, the right reverend Prelate said that he would work to ensure that the House heeded the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable communities, noting how many of those are in northern England. This region enjoyed a period of relative prosperity built on trade and on the backs of child labourers and exploited women workers, but that was at the cost of the impoverishment of what became Britain’s colonial possessions, as the noble Earl, Lord Devon, noted earlier in his excellent speech. There is a chilling reminder of this period in the astonishing appointment of the former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott. He is now an adviser to the Board of Trade—or, to get into the full formalities, the Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council appointed for the consideration of all matters relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations. It seems we are not so much heading into the 21st century as the 18th.

However, there are positive possibilities. The Green Party believes that we need strong local economies in all parts of the world, built on a foundation of local independent businesses and co-operatives with money circulating around those economies, doing its work of meeting people’s needs rather than the place of money in our trade-focused world, which is all too often concentrated uselessly in tax havens, with the financialisaton of more and more areas of life. It is a threat to the security of us all, as the increasingly regular arrival of financial crises has demonstrated.