European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Boswell of Aynho. I followed him for a number of years as a member of the EU Select Committee, his chairing of which was remarkably valuable. I am delighted to do it again today. Since my contribution to this Second Reading debate on the withdrawal agreement Bill is on the critical side, I wish, to avoid any possible misunderstanding, to emphasise that I respect the convention that this House does not attempt to frustrate a measure which has figured in the manifesto of a Government who have obtained an overall majority at a general election. We should not, therefore, seek to amend the Bill in any way that would prevent the withdrawal agreement being ratified by the UK in time for Brexit to take place on 31 January.

Nor do I intend to take up much of the time of the House speculating about the credibility of the Government’s objective of concluding an agreement on the new relationship with the EU by the end of this year, to which it has now shackled itself. It may—I suspect it will—turn out to be more of a gambit to win votes than a realistic possibility. Time will tell us soon enough which it is, but I hope that we are not going to be treated in the latter part of the year to a re-run of the “no deal is better than a bad deal” mantra, which is no more likely to squeeze concessions out of our EU negotiating partners than it did in 2017, 2018 and 2019; it is every bit as likely to inflict disproportionate damage on this country as it was then. I note, moreover, that, while the Government are tying their hands in domestic law to not seeking an extension of the transitional period beyond the end of 2020, they are busy ratifying in Brussels an agreement which contains precisely that option. A rum way to proceed, one might think.

I doubt whether anyone would now contest that the May Government made a fundamental error by accepting the EU 27’s sequencing of the negotiations as soon as they began in the summer of 2017, relegating the future relationship to a non-binding declaration after the divorce settlement was agreed. Many noble Lords spoke out against that in this House and privately to the Government, including the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, whose speech I followed with the greatest interest. So let us not repeat the error now by accepting that this year’s negotiations should be focused on trade in goods alone. Of course it is important to achieve duty-free and quota-free trade in goods, but that is now no more than 20% of our economy. Going over a cliff edge into no deal on other matters at the end of 2020 would be hugely damaging for trade in services, which is 80% of our economy; for data processing; for the mutual recognition of professional qualifications; for co-operation on science and research; for maintaining regulatory equivalence; and for the instruments which underpin our internal security and the fight against international crime. I hope the Minister will be able to assure the House that, when negotiations open this spring, they will cover the whole range of issues and not just exclusively or principally trade in goods.

Three words which we will inevitably hear a lot of in the context of these negotiations on a new UK-EU relationship are “level playing field”. They are embedded in the documents that we are being asked to help ratify, even if attempts have been made to reduce their prominence. There will be no ducking them once the negotiations get under way. The concept is an integral part of any free trading relationship between large developed economies in close geographic proximity to one another. If noble Lords doubt that, look only at the agreements the EU has with Norway or Switzerland or, for that matter, at the newly revamped US-Canada-Mexico agreement or even the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That concept was also at the heart of the campaign, led by Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Cockfield, to move on from a tariff-free and quota-free European Community, still festooned with non-tariff barriers and border checks, to the frictionless trade we have today. How we give practical effect to that concept, those three little words will determine the nature and the benefit to us of the new trading relationship. The Government’s views on that remain a mystery, but there will be hard choices to be made this year.

There are plenty of other lacunae in the Bill which could do with being filled in, many of them highlighted in the excellent report by the EU Select Committee. We are promised separate legislative provisions, ensuring that we do not slip below EU standards on the environment, labour and social rights. How secure will they be and when will they be tabled? One of the biggest gaps is the role of Parliament in mandating and overseeing the new relationship negotiations, to which many Members have already alluded in this debate. Are we to find ourselves, yet again, negotiating with an EU whose mandate is endorsed by the European Parliament and whose every step is overseen by that body while this Parliament is left groping around in the dark? Can we really not manage to guarantee access for unaccompanied minors seeking asylum when they have family members here already?

It is reported that the Prime Minister would like to see the back of the term “Brexit”. I am not sure he is likely to succeed in that, nor indeed that it is desirable that he should do so. We are all, on both sides of this argument, going to have to come to terms with the realities of Brexit. We are going to be spending the whole of this year speaking about it. I hope there will still be some sensible consideration of that matter. There are important policy choices to be made in this legislative programme and in these negotiations.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I hate to interrupt, but the noble Lord has spoken for six minutes 48 seconds and the advisory speaking time is five minutes. I would thank him for concluding.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

The noble Baroness got me in the middle of my last sentence. I am happy to conclude by saying that we should not treat Brexit as something we would rather not talk about or pretend does not exist, because it will have important consequences.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I join in the congratulations to my noble friend Lord Barwell, who spoke succinctly and excellently illuminated where we go next in this whole great saga. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mann, on both his generous tribute to Mrs May, which she deserves, and his fight against sickening anti-Semitism.

It is impossible not to feel some emotion on this occasion, having spent well over half a century of my life discussing the future of Europe and the UK’s role in it, ever since the editor of the Daily Telegraph sent me to Brussels in 1962 to find out about, as he put it, “this Common Market thing”. Now at last comes this gateway—and it is only a gateway; I see many challenges ahead—confirming the replacement of the European Communities Act 1972, although of course by virtue of this Bill, rather than as an EU member state, we will still be under ECA provisions for another 11 months.

However, I find it a little sad and extraordinary that the debate publicly, and to some extent in the other place in the last few days, continues in an extraordinarily one-sided way. It is all couched in terms of what Britain can and cannot do in face of the supposed EU juggernaut, about solidarity and how difficult it is going to be to fit it all into our 11-month schedule. One would never guess from all this debate that things are changing just as fast on the other side of the channel—if not in Brussels, then deep in the heart of the EU member states—as they are here. People constantly talk about our being in a Westminster bubble and being out of touch. There is a Brussels bubble as well, which is in many ways just as out of touch with what is really happening, and we seem to hear sadly little of that.

The President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, spoke at the London School of Economics the other day. Her words were full of good will and friendship, but she spoke of the fear of Britain undercutting regulatory standards and the need for alignment and a level playing field. What neither she nor others seem to grasp is that global technological forces far bigger than Brexit are already undercutting—one should say overcutting and making utterly redundant—many of the EU’s standards and controls, which belong to a past age, whether we are talking about workers’ rights, conditions and benefits, consumer protection, the environment, financial services, taxation methods and state aids or other forms of protection.

To take one specific example, there has been a worry all along—raised in this House last week—about our energy situation. Will that be constrained by the withdrawal agreement and the Bill we are now discussing, given that we get 6.6% of our electricity supply every day through interconnectors in continental Europe? Actually, the withdrawal agreement which this Bill will enact fully protects our continental energy supplies and the excellent diversity of sources they provide; and under the protocol agreement for Northern Ireland, Ulster remains part of the all-Ireland system within the so-called internal energy market anyway. The point I am trying to make is that this is typical of a mass of regulations. We are right to question whether it is sustainable and whether it anything like matches our much higher standards. Frankly, the chief results of energy and climate policy throughout the EU so far has been more Russian gas reliance, extensive and very dirty coal burning, increasing unreliability of supply at a cruelly high energy cost and a miserable overall emissions performance.

These are the very last so-called standards and regulations with which we want to be aligned, dynamically or otherwise. Good Europeans, in my view, should be fighting for superior standards now in all these areas, ones that are truly relevant to the new world economy. If I may say so to my Liberal Democrat friends, if they had stuck to this line of EU reform, instead of trying to revoke and drag us back into the thickets of outdated EU controls, they might have done a lot better in the election. I hope they are not going to become like the Jacobites after the Hanoverian succession and spend the next 60 years fighting vainly for their cause, because that would be very tiresome—not that I shall be around.

The truth is that markets and trade flows around the world in the digital age are going through deep and radical transformation—as are patterns of business everywhere, financial services, data handling, agriculture and many other sectors—in ways with which the EU and the Brexit debate, and many commentators and self-styled experts, have simply not caught up. I am glad a new employment Bill is coming along. I hope it will be really radical. Worker and employee ownership of new wealth is still disgracefully low in this country; we can set the pace for the whole of Europe.

Finally, when it comes to foreign policy, while of course we must always co-operate on security, we certainly need to be well clear of cumbersome EU decision-making—or non-decision-making. As my noble friend Lord Lothian said in the Queen’s Speech debate last week—incidentally, I regard my noble friend as the best Foreign Secretary we never had—this is indeed the opportunity for a new British foreign policy, and defence and security policy as well, which take full account of the transformed and fluidised pattern of world power and international relations that has now emerged. Once out of the EU we can play our own game, agilely and with really skilful diplomacy.

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, it is now over six minutes. I remind all noble Lords—I am trying to play an equal wicket here—to keep within the advisory speaking time. There has been a little latitude, which we are monitoring, to be fair to all noble Lords.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

That is the real gateway that the Bill opens. We should now swiftly pass through it to better times.