Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill

Debate between Baroness Morgan of Cotes and Anna Soubry

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 16th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

In a moment.

The reality, which is faced in the White Paper, is that if we do not deliver frictionless trade in the way in which companies such as Toyota need and demand, they will simply not be able to operate. Some 81% of Toyota cars produced at Burnaston are exported into the European Union. And before anybody says, “Well, there will be new markets”—those unicorns that our Government will be chasing in new deals—please understand how the modern manufacturing industry works. Companies such as Toyota already make cars in other parts of the world to satisfy and supply the local market.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Anna Soubry]

I will give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough and then I will come down the row.

[Nicky Morgan]

Does not the intervention on my right hon. Friend made by our hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) show what is the matter with this Brexit debate? Rather than talking about the detail and the risk to thousands of jobs across the country in our manufacturing sector—the Conservative party has championed that sector since 2010—he prefers to trade insults and trade on personalities.

[Anna Soubry]

Here is a surprise: I completely agree with my right hon. Friend.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Baroness Morgan of Cotes and Anna Soubry

Thursday 7th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I congratulate the new hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) on an excellent and confident maiden speech. I was sorry to hear about the online abuse that she has already experienced but pleased to hear about the support she has received. She talked about unity and togetherness, and she might have found the House at a challenging time for such things, but we will hopefully find a way through these debates. Her predecessor was a doughty champion of the armed forces, about which he spoke often in this House.

So it starts—the real process for getting us out of the European Union. The Bill is needed. It is needed legally to disentangle us and to make many people really believe that we are actually going to leave the European Union, something that I have not had difficulty believing. Like many colleagues who share my views, I have been clear since 24 June 2016 that it was going to happen because, as the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, we believe in democracy in this House of Commons. However, the Bill contains two major ironies. First, as was said earlier, it is not a repeal Bill but a reintroduction Bill, and those who wanted to get away from EU law now seek to bring it all over here. Secondly, those who wanted to take back control showed no concerns about the amount of Executive power that will be wielded as a result of the Bill until a number of the rest of us started to highlight such issues, and they now claim to be happy with the amendments that might be discussed in Committee.

In the limited time available, I want to draw attention to two parts of the Bill that have already been discussed. It is worth putting them on the record again so that Ministers are in no doubt about the parts of the Bill that they are going to have to discuss with colleagues throughout the House and agree amendments to if they want the Bill to pass. The first is the Henry VIII powers in clause 9, which could theoretically bite on the Bill itself and allow Ministers to amend the very legislation that the House is now debating and being asked to assent to. We might ask why we are going through the troublesome and time-consuming business of getting the Bill into shape when Ministers can use clause 9 to reverse the changes they dislike with speed, efficiency and a minimum of parliamentary oversight. The Secretary of State’s response to the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the Chairman of the Exiting the European Union Committee, about the fact that the withdrawal agreement should not be implemented until this House has had its say, is incredibly important.

[Anna Soubry]

Will my right hon. Friend advise ardent leavers, possibly those on the Government Benches, that there is a real danger that the amount of money that might be paid to the European Union by way of what we call this divorce bill could be decided by the Government without report or redress in this place by virtue of clause 9?

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right. As a former EU budget Minister, I can say that money will be paid to the European Union, and I disagree fundamentally with the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood). As one of our MEPs, Dan Hannan, said, this country pays what it owes. We have made financial commitments to the European Union until 2020, and we should pay what we owe. As the Secretary of State has said previously, we may well even decide to pay more towards some elements in order to have access to them, in particular Horizon 2020 and so on.

The second issue is the power for the Ministers to specify the date of the exit day, which will be subject to no parliamentary scrutiny procedure whatsoever. Interestingly, the Secretary of State started his remarks by saying that the Bill does not take us out of the European Union. I did think about intervening, but it was very early in his remarks and I thought that he might clarify things. The difficulty with what he says is that clause 1 baldly states:

“The European Communities Act 1972 is repealed on exit day.”

If the 1972 Act is repealed, the UK leaves the European Union, so if this Bill is passed and its provisions are enacted, we will leave the European Union. Article 50 is a process for giving notice to start the discussions. I am afraid that the Secretary of State was not correct about that.

Why does scrutiny of statutory instruments matter so much? I suspect that Members have been having discussions with businesses and others who rely on EU law to go about what they do, and they are telling us very clearly that what will make their life easier and a transition possible is regulatory convergence, which means sticking to the regulations and rules we have been following for years, whether we are talking about pharmaceutical companies, financial services companies, food exporters, farmers, universities or many other different sectors.

To those who seek to say that we have been rule takers, not rule makers, I say that successive Ministers, including me, have sat at the European Council table and had those debates. The point is that if we want to have regulatory convergence after March 2019, which is what we are hearing, we will have to take the rules without having had any influence on them.

Finally, I am a proud parliamentarian, and the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Canterbury has just reminded me of how special it is to be elected to this place. Parliamentary scrutiny is not an affront to democracy; it is its very essence. The true saboteurs of Brexit are those who would sanction the exclusion of Parliament from this process. The debate on this Bill has only just started.