United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP) [V]]

My Lords, when the Conservative Party came up with its absolutely brilliant slogan about taking back control, many of us, for whom it resonated, felt that it meant that our Parliament would be taking back control. However, over the past year it has become obvious that that is not how the Government see it. In fact, they are using Brexit as an excuse to take more control of the country, which of course is extremely undemocratic. In this Bill, they are trying to seize control from the devolved Governments and Parliaments, and that, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has just said, is extremely unhealthy for the UK. The Bill pretends to replicate what exists in EU law, but it has created a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, which is not at all what any of us were expecting. It is like a legal framework creating a bureaucratic bulldozer that the Government will use to grab more power.

It is obvious that this Government cannot win any seats in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales, so they are using this Bill—this bureaucratic bulldozer—to force the elected Governments of the devolved nations to fall in line with Conservative Party policy. These amendments are important because they would stop that undemocratic move. Without them, devolution will be replaced with a sort of lowest-common-denominator system in which the devolved Governments will have to wait for the UK Parliament to take action on any policy or law that relates to the production, distribution and sale of goods and services in the UK before they can take action. That is clearly not what any of us expected. The devolved Parliaments must continue to have the right to make decisions on improving environmental standards and implementing other legitimate policies that will benefit their nations. Your Lordships’ House must amend this Bill and prevent yet another government power grab, and of course protect the rights of the devolved nations.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, now that we are leaving the scope of the single market, the characteristics of the UK internal market become very important; that is why I put my name down to speak to this group and, in particular, to Amendments 2 and 59.

Superficially, it is easy to assume that the UK internal market should, and will, share the principal attributes of the EU single market but, of course, that is far from certain, not least because of the circumstances surrounding it all. After all, the creation of the EU single market was first agreed by member states in an IGC, which is very different from what we are looking at now in this country. The new arrangements have come into being in somewhat different circumstances and across a single territory in which there has been devolution—and within that, the different components clearly have different perspectives.

There is now much less consensus and no prior agreement. In these circumstances, within a devolved as opposed to a federal system, there are potential procedural problems where the UK Government and the English Government—if I might be allowed to call them that—are coterminous. It is not desirable for the repatriation of European competencies to drive a coach and six through the devolution settlement in these islands. For this reason, I believe strongly that Amendment 2 is important to provide a legal framework around the political procedures repatriating these powers. In my view, it is particularly important—I speak as both a unionist and a supporter of the devolution settlements—that England does not emerge as a bully boy imposing its will on the other countries. To do that would be to take the high road to the break-up of the UK.

I also want to touch on Amendment 59, in the context of my chairmanship of the Cumbria local enterprise partnership. As a border region and part of borderlands, any form of potential discrimination—be it direct or indirect, intended or unintended—poses a very real threat to our economy, much of which is focused on both sides of the Solway Firth. Competition law, environmental law and a number of other more general categories of social law are essential components of market economies in our kinds of societies in the 21st century. As a number of speakers have said, there is a real conundrum at the heart of this between local autonomy, which matters, and British cohesion and homogeneity, which also matter. I very much hope that the Minister will spell out exactly how the Government see these things interacting, because, as always, the devil lies in the detail.