UK and EU Relations

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, I usually enjoy a few improbable detective novels as summer reading. However, this year the Government supplied their own—some might say, improbable—reading matter over the Summer Recess. Some of the position papers I read were wildly optimistic: “hope” and “belief” appeared several times. Some of the papers were thin to the point of emaciation. The Confidentiality and Access to Documents paper ran to a full one and a half pages, as did that on Privileges and Immunities, while the Nuclear Materials and Safeguards Issues position paper did little better. It came in at a full four pages.

On the vastly important issue of the border with Northern Ireland, which will become the EU’s new external border, we were treated to more detail on the Good Friday agreement, the free movement of goods, the common travel area and energy supply on the island of Ireland. However, the paper still does not meet the EU’s concerns that there is a distinct possibility of a return to a hard border and of damage to the existing frameworks of funding for the peace process, such as the EU-funded PEACE programme. The EU believes that the issues relating to the Irish border, created by Brexit, are the UK’s responsibility to resolve and it is right. Both Northern Ireland and the island of Ireland have been well and truly dropped in it by our decision to leave the European Union. The complex and difficult issues created by Brexit, as it relates to Ireland, would be far better tackled if the UK stayed in the single market and the customs union.

The position paper on safeguarding EU citizens living in the UK and UK nationals living in the EU raises so many new questions that it is hardly a comfort to those left in limbo as to their future status. The paper states that we—the UK—are,

“ready to make commitments in the Withdrawal Agreement which will have the status of international law”.

What does that mean if we are not going to recognise the Court of Justice of the European Union? Is it the case that those EU citizens who have already obtained a certificate of their permanent residence must still reapply? How much better for everyone, and how much more humane, would it have been for the Government to have said, the day after the referendum result, that those EU citizens legally residing in the UK were more than welcome to remain—full stop?

The science and innovation position paper ran to an impressive 16 pages but it managed to do so only by having page 1 marked as page 3, oddly. We are reminded in the paper of the Government’s achievements and how, in the years of our collaboration within Europe, the UK has brought about so much in the field of research and innovation. We have been there in the development of new therapies and in the medical technologies that have benefited all EU patients. We have, in so much, been participatory leaders in science and innovation in the EU. There is an attempt in the paper to say, “It’s not going to be so bad. We can continue to do all this innovation and science after Brexit, but as a non-EU country”. Yet, it does not take much probing to see that, as a non-EU country, we cannot lead projects as we have done in the past—projects in CERN, the European centre for nuclear research, for example.

In another part of the paper is the suggestion that we, the UK, could have special access to these research programmes that other non-EU countries have never had. This, I suggest, is wishful thinking, and so we will go from leading in research, as we do now, to having no influence, no vote and bringing our own credit card to the table every time, as a non-EU country. We would have indeed voluntarily put ourselves out of the Premier League and settled for the Vauxhall Conference, or whatever its equivalent is today.

April 2019 looms, as many noble Lords have said, and these position papers, with their wishful thinking and special pleading, do not yet make for the detailed road map that this country so desperately needs.