Comprehensive Economic Partnership (EUC Report)

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, coming this far down a long and distinguished speakers’ list, including the welcome expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Darroch of Kew, whom we already know has a very sharp eye for political realities and the ability to communicate them clearly, I seek to meet my regular aim of adding to the debate, rather than repeating points already made. However, I note how many speakers have highlighted how this continuity-plus agreement has been radically oversold by the Government as ground-breaking.

That the Government have a problem with trust is a statement of the obvious. They seem to fail to understand that assertion is not fact. The disrespect for reality-based politics dates back to at least the second Bush Administration in the US and seems to have spread its tentacles across the Atlantic with great success. Our Government would do well to recover a respect for reality when commenting on future trade agreements, not just for their own future, but for the level of trust and engagement in politics. The noble Lord, Lord Woolley, has just powerfully commented on that in the Chamber. It is something that the UK has a particular problem with.

As a former resident of Bangkok, where I counted as friends a number of members of the large Japanese community, I found the extended focus on blue cheese exports particularly grating—not to coin a pun. Of course, we can understand the attraction of strange and exotic foods, but 100,000 tonnes a year in sales is not, I venture to say, something we are likely to see growing significantly in this particular market.

There are many things missing here. A crucial area, highlighted by the consumer organisation Which?, is the digital. This potentially undermines the general data protection regulation, and threatens the data adequacy agreement with the EU, as many noble lords have already addressed. There are also grave concerns in the area of animal welfare. As the RSPCA has noted, there is no new language, only poor existing language that does not even recognise animals as sentient beings, something that my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb has often addressed in the House. There is no provision to implement the Government’s commitment not to lower animal standards in free trade agreements. We come back to trust again. This part of the agreement says:

“The Parties will cooperate for their mutual benefit on matters of animal welfare with a focus on farmed animals with a view to improving the mutual understanding of their respective laws and regulations.”


I can only concur with Compassion in World Farming in saying that this wording is meaningless.

I want to focus an issue that I have been engaging with this week through the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Antibiotics. In 2017, the UK used 281 tonnes of antibiotics in animal agriculture and Japan 809 tonnes. Those figures come from the excellent Antibiotic Footprint website. It struck me in preparing for today that perhaps we could bring our technological leadership a step further, compared to the other place, by bringing slides into our speeches, for the image of the size of each nation’s footprint is a compelling and telling one—although, of course, the United States looms enormously, as it would in a similar graphic for greenhouse gas emissions and so many other environmental destructions, something to keep in mind when a trade deal there is potentially on the table.

Japan is working on reducing antibiotic use, but is clearly well behind us, something to think about at the end of World Antimicrobial Awareness Week. That is closely related to the issue of animal welfare, which is a crucial issue in its own right but also crucial for human health, as the issue of mink and Covid-19 has recently illustrated only too clearly. The risks of factory farming anywhere in the world are obvious, and trade should be one of the mechanisms we are using to tackle that.

To pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, about the truly world-leading work by Costa Rica, Fiji, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland with New Zealand on the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability, and to quote their agreement,

“trade policies, practices and rules have an important and substantive role to play”

in tackling the climate emergency, and indeed broader issues of sustainability.

Your Lordships have heard me ask before a question too often ignored. What is the economy for, and what is trade for, as a subset of that question? Growing GDP is the assessment most commonly used, yet we know that GDP is a terrible measure of national progress. Chasing it has given us a trashed planet, an insecure society and a dreadful state of public health. This agreement does not live up to the Government’s promises of improvement and does not meet the crises facing us, so it can only be called a failure, and a failure to live up to the promise. New Zealand and its allies are leading; we are again trailing far behind.