UK and EU Relations

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cavendish of Furness (Con)]

My Lords, how hugely refreshing to follow a speech which is so constructive and given with such authority, hoping to make these negotiations work. I congratulate the Government on their use of the long recess to provide us with a large folder of position papers, and I thank my noble friend the Minister for giving the House the opportunity to debate them. I also thank her for introducing the debate with her customary clarity.

I have tried to read all the position papers as they appeared and, as a result, I feel that I have gained a clearer view of what the Government have in mind in the different areas under discussion. That surely is what they are intended for. They are not dogmatic and frequently offer alternative approaches to problems. They have formed the basis of intelligent debate in various quarters, not least among a number of your Lordships. I have also read them in conjunction with the European Council’s document on guidelines for Brexit which, aside from the usual self-promoting claims that one might want to challenge, held no real surprises. But what I have found striking is how sparse the EU negotiator’s response is. I can understand that the EU will indeed miss our financial contribution, but I would have thought that there were aspects of Brexit, other than money, and especially those set out in the position papers, which merited a greater reaction than has so far been forthcoming.

Much of the criticism that I have seen in the press and which has been articulated this afternoon has been, in my view, largely synthetic. We have heard that there has been both too much detail and too little detail. More broadly, I rather miss the days when convention held that, in international affairs, criticism of one’s own country and Government was measured. Sometimes I hear and read things that suggest there are elements in Britain which appear not to have their country’s interests at heart. Their disappointment at the outcome of the referendum is manifested in an apparent wish for the negotiations to stall or fail.

The message of the position papers suggests to me that Ministers recognise that Brexit has implications for all our EU partners as well as ourselves, and that we stand ready to make the process as painless as possible.

On many occasions since the referendum result, I have paused to reflect on how common ground might be found between we leavers and the almost, but not quite, equal number of my fellow citizens who took the opposite view. Although I continue to rejoice at the decision that was reached and to feel a free man at last, I do not understand the rationale of those who wish to retain membership of the EU. It still eludes me, but I know that I need to keep in mind that 48% of voters represents a very substantial minority. It is for those of us who won by a not-great margin to go on listening to those we disagree with and respect their feelings.

Conversely, the 48% should not seek to derail the decision reached by the British people. As for those who seek to abort the whole process, I invite them to reflect on what might be the reaction. They might also give some thought to the kind of terms Britain would be offered if we crawled back in supplicant mode. Like my noble friend Lord Ridley, I await patiently and with interest for the Labour Party to find a settled position on Brexit. There is little to say until it does. The Liberal Democrats were the only party at the last general election that campaigned to reverse the referendum decision. Voters hardly flocked to support that policy, and unless they are listening only to themselves, one might think that some restraint would be appropriate when the repeal Bill arrives in this House.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord for permitting me to intervene. For his benefit, I will just clarify that we did not seek to reverse the referendum. What we are saying is that the referendum last year was rather like buying a house subject to a survey and that once the details are known, there should be a referendum on the concrete details of Brexit. That is not a reversal or a second referendum.

[Lord Cavendish of Furness]

I will read very carefully what the noble Baroness has said and I hope I will be clearer.

I will now briefly look to the future, because I believe there is a vision for this country behind which we could reunite and thrive—the vision of global free trade. There are people I know devoting energy and talent beyond the minutiae of current negotiations who see in the ancient notion of free trade a means to worldwide prosperity and peace. When we leave the European Union, we will also leave behind a protectionist organisation, whose policies harm the poorest of the world. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Newby, no, trade is not good for all. The European Union is an organisation where the producer is placed above the consumer, where the powerful prosper at the expense of the weak, where huge youth unemployment is deemed acceptable and where government comes before the governed.

On leaving the European Union there is a real opportunity to work towards global free trade. Although no one pretends this will be easy, it has this extraordinary feature: it can be done unilaterally. If a country dismantles tariff and non-tariff barriers while others do not, that still brings benefits that others come, in time, to emulate. That is the lesson of history. It is a vision that offers peace, fairness and prosperity to a country and to a world that has become full of self-doubt. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister has spoken of a post-Brexit Britain becoming the “global leader” in free trade. Can I ask the Minister what the current thinking is on that? I can think of no greater ambition, and it must be ever present in our minds in the months and years ahead.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Ludford]

My Lords, to start, while I fully share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Framlingham, about the spread of diseases, the sealing of our borders is not the answer. If instead of co-operating we start blaming each other—Britain needs to remember its own track record on exporting animal diseases—we are doomed to hang separately. I thought Brexit was supposed to mean global Britain, not closet Britain.

The Government’s attitude to parliamentary scrutiny of its conduct of Brexit negotiations is rather perfectly illustrated by the publication of the foreign, security and defence paper today: the Minister appears on the “Today” programme, the media have the paper under embargo, and parliamentarians and the public get it many hours later at lunchtime, when it finally appears on the website.

Last week’s Statement on the progress of negotiations said that the negotiating rounds were about reaching detailed understanding of each side’s position and beginning to drill down into technical detail. However, the Brexit Secretary just days before referred to the partnership paper on future customs arrangements as blue-sky thinking, so detailed it was not. That paper will not help retain the jobs of the Airbus workers in Wales to which my noble friend Lady Humphreys referred.

The Brexit Secretary also said last week that the rationale for the partnership papers is that they are,

“designed to make points to our European partners so that they could see what the future might look like under our vision”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/9/17; col. 48.]

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham said, we need a strategy—and, I would add, practicalities. Vision butters no parsnips. The Minister said in her introduction that the Government do not aim to dictate the future arrangements. Leaving aside the obvious fact that they cannot dictate as it is a negotiation, this fig leaf does not cover the lack of hard proposals with realistic content.

It is hard to blame Michel Barnier for his exasperated reaction to the UK’s demand to start negotiations on future relations. He said:

“We must start negotiating seriously. We need UK papers that are clear in order to have constructive negotiations. The sooner we remove the ambiguity, the sooner we will be in a position to discuss the future relationship and the transitional period”.


As my noble friend Lord Newby said, the Government’s ambiguity is not constructive.

It is largely the behaviour of the UK Government that is preventing an important linkage between the withdrawal negotiations and the future relationship negotiations, and a speedy move to the latter—not least their refusal to deal honourably, as well as toughly, on the divorce bill, which echoes what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, and their ungenerous positions on the rights of EU citizens. I contend that this Government are not generating the necessary trust to move the negotiations on. This is not a case of bad, rigid, punishment-mode Brussels; it is a case of a Government who, 15 months after the referendum, are unable to act in a grown-up, competent, organised manner and who indulge in occasional, extremely unproductive hissy fits. The Government need to be honest and willing to compromise, as the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, urged. My noble friend Lady Kramer, with good reason, thanked the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for revealing the Brexiteer war mentality, which helps explain the lack of progress. The Government would do well not to listen too much to that mentality.

My noble friend Lady Kramer also raised the prospect of how the Government seem to be pursuing international regulatory co-operation, rather than focusing on a relationship with the EU regulatory regime. I suspect that the UK is trying to subvert the importance of EU regulation by diluting it, and I really do not think that is going to be helpful.

Other noble Lords have produced their own lists of rules and themes. I have detected eight common features of the position and partnership papers. First, there is always an assertion of common goals, that continued co-operation is in both sides’ interests, and a declaration of undying devotion to all things European, including as my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire noticed in the paper today, a paean of praise for the European co-operation, foreign and defence policy that we have never heard from any government before probably. There is even sometimes an assertion that we will co-operate even more once we are out of the EU. Often this is accompanied by a strong hint of “they need us more than we need them”.

Secondly, there is an assumption that the degree of benefit and convenience for us Brits will stay pretty much the same as we enjoy now through membership of the European Union, even when we leave its arrangements. So nobody needs to worry.

Thirdly, there is a declaration that the deep and special partnership we seek goes way beyond any existing run-of-the-mill third country, because we are special. Our relationship would be unprecedented, which I have come to realise is an excuse for not pointing to any concrete examples of existing co-operation for a non-EU member state, or practical guidance on how ours would work. The term unprecedented is a convenient peg not to explain.

Fourthly, there is a tone ranging from optimism to fantasy that runs through all of the papers. Indeed, the fifth feature is insufficient detail of how the Government see the actual arrangements working in the context of a future relationship. Several noble Lords have mentioned that in the context of the science field. There is also a lack of realism on the costs involved. The Institute for Government yesterday published a report which says that the costs of the customs arrangements could be up to £9 billion. We need to confront those kinds of figures.

The sixth feature is to cite other third countries—variously Norway and Switzerland, sometimes Canada. But we then reject EEA membership, so quite how these are good examples I am not sure. Then it is said that the UK’s relationship will be unique, or uniquely ambitious, because of our starting point of close integration.

The seventh feature is that we want to maximise certainty about what the arrangements will be while supplying no basis for what that certainty looks like. The last feature is that we are to have autonomy of UK laws, with the prospect of therefore diverging from European laws and a regulatory gap—but that we want the maximum depth and specialness in the relationship, including lots of mutual recognition and reciprocity. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, dealt with this very well.

[Noble Lords]

Where is he?

[Baroness Ludford]

That is not for me to answer. As Michel Barnier has described it, this last position—the freedom for the UK to adopt its own standards and regulations but to have them automatically recognised by the EU—is “simply impossible”. He said,

“You cannot be outside the single market and shape its legal order”.


His position is surely correct.

I am afraid that the topic of citizens’ rights illustrates how the Government have squandered time, trust and goodwill. I do not have time to go into the detail, but the way in which the Government have let EU citizens down is a great shame, given that the original problem was a simple guarantee of rights.

We have rightly taken the Government to task in this debate for their lack of clarity and precision. However, may I also press the Opposition? I understood that the Labour Party was now committed to single market and customs union membership during the transitional period. However, the Motion cites “participation”, which is not so precise, while their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has reverted to the manifesto language of mere “access”. I thought that was history.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

Come on.

[Baroness Ludford]

Perhaps the noble Baroness might be able to explain rather than heckle me. That would be helpful. I look forward to the responses from the noble Baroness and the Minister.