European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

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

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, the Prime Minister has promised former Labour voters in the north and the Midlands who voted Conservative for the first time that he will look after their needs and that he will increase their prosperity. To keep to his promise, he must negotiate a deal with the EU that retains as much as possible of the UK’s trade with EU countries on the best possible terms and which commits us to EU standards on the rights of workers and on the environment. He must also ensure that our economy produces sufficient revenue to improve the public services on which these voters depend and indeed hope desperately will meet their needs.

This Bill falls short in many respects of what is required to achieve all that, including proper scrutiny by Parliament. In a parliamentary democracy, taking back control, which many of these voters saw as an outcome of Brexit, means, as many speakers have emphasised, that Parliament, which represents the people, must be able to scrutinise the process of implementing Brexit and to hold the Government to account. Brexit will not be done, as Mr Johnson would have us believe, when this Bill becomes law on or around 31 January. There will be many months of complex negotiations before it is implemented and therefore done.

Like other speakers, I ask why on earth we are setting an unrealistic target of 31 December of this year to complete the negotiations when both Michel Barnier and Ursula von der Leyen in Europe have made it clear that it will not possible, as have many experts on trade negotiations in this country. The work entailed requires patience, pragmatism and attention to detail, not silly and unrealistic deadlines. Allowing only 11 months to negotiate a deal on both trade and security makes no sense and once again we risk crashing out because that artificial deadline, written into legislation, will not be achieved. By all means have a target date, but do not legislate for one.

Will the Minister tell us a little more about the content of the negotiations? Does he accept that they must cover not just tariffs, quotas and rules of origin, but our enormously important service sector on which so much of our economy depends? That includes access to databases, in particular those relating to terrorism, international crime and other security issues, as well as aviation, the safety of drugs vital for the NHS, co-operation on consumer rights and climate change, to name but a few.

I turn now to climate change. I hope that the Minister will agree that there should be no lowering of environmental standards or protection. We must protect both current and future standards so that future generations will benefit not from any kind of weakening but, indeed, strengthening. In that way we will meet the aspirations of young people. To prevent any regression through, for example, second legislation at a later date, there needs to be a non-regression statement set out in primary legislation.

There are two other areas where this Bill is far less acceptable than the original. The first is the dropping of strong protections for workers’ rights which were in the internationally legally binding part of the deal agreed by Mrs May. Can the Minister say why these have been dropped? We would be naive to accept an assurance that they will be restored in a future trade Bill because they should be in this Bill. The second area is the weakening of protection for child refugees, for whom my noble friend Lord Dubs has fought so hard. If the Minister claims that the Government are still committed to them, why not leave those provisions in the Bill?

I ask the Government to come up with a meaningful role for Parliament along the lines of the amendments passed in this House on the previous trade Bill. There needs to be a framework for post-Brexit trade negotiations. This should apply not only to UK/EU agreements, but to other post-Brexit deals, notably any reached between the UK and the US, about which there is considerable public concern. If the Government reject proper scrutiny through such a framework, it will mean nothing less than contempt for the parliamentary sovereignty that most of us hold so dear.