EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement
Debate between Barry Gardiner and William Cash(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner
Clearly, while we remain a member of the EU, we have a seat at the negotiating table of any deals. If we are outside the EU, we will not have that, but, equally, we will not have the benefit of being part of a 500 million-strong consumer market that would enable us to negotiate better deals. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman appreciates that being in a new customs union with the EU, as the leader of my party set out in a speech he gave in Coventry a little while ago, would mean that we would be co-decision makers with the EU in that relationship—a customs union not such as the one we currently have with the EU, but one much more like Mercosur, where each of the countries has equal sway.
Barry Gardiner
I will make a little progress and then, of course, I will very happily give way to the hon. Gentleman, because his Committee has raised a number of questions on the EU-Japan deal that we need to explore further. The Committee insisted, in fact, that the Government bring the deal to a debate on the Floor of the House before the EU Council. Interestingly, in the light of the absurdly tight timeframe that the Government imposed on themselves, the Committee also instructed them to publish their impact assessment on the EU-Japan EPA no later than 4 June.
The first question that the Minister must answer then is why the Government failed to meet that deadline. The impact assessment was published a week late, on 11 June, on the same day that this debate was announced. It is an extraordinary document. Its own authors openly acknowledge that the assessment cannot be taken as an accurate guide to the future impacts of the agreement. It failed to calculate the specific effects on individual EU member states. The assessment admits that it cannot know what proportion of any aggregate gains from the EU-Japan EPA might come to the UK or to any other EU member state. There has been no proper independent assessment of the impacts on the UK, and the authors—these are the authors of the assessment—say that they have just had to assume proportionate outcomes in line with the UK’s projected share of EU trade with Japan.
Sir William Cash
I thought I might try to lift this enormous pile of documents to show the House what we are actually considering today; it is really quite formidable. I want to make one point regarding the single market. Does the hon. Gentleman deny that, in relation to our trade with the other 27 member states, we run a deficit of £82 billion a year—these are figures from the Office for National Statistics—whereas our external growth, our external surplus, is growing exponentially and, of course, 90% of all future trading will be outside the EU?
Barry Gardiner
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman on two counts—first for showing us precisely what we are talking about. I know that he will have read the full EPA assessment, as I have done. I am equally grateful to him for raising the issue of the balance of trade surplus and deficit that we currently run. I am just about to come to that point, so I hope that he can hold off with his remarks.
It is perhaps most damning to quote from the impact assessment document itself, which states:
“Figures presented here reflect the long run impacts per annum and should be treated as a magnitude of change and not a forecast…It is important to note the results below are not based on the final EU-Japan EPA text and are therefore subject to a degree of uncertainty…Estimates are produced against a baseline of 2008 and reflect a world in which the Doha trade round and EU-Korea FTA are un-concluded.”
So there we have it. The baseline is 10 years out of date and fails to take account not only of the EU-South Korea FTA, which has been applied ever since July 2011 —seven years ago—but of the terms of the final agreement text that it is supposed to be assessing.
The European Scrutiny Committee was absolutely right to demand in its report
“a clear breakdown of how different UK sectors and stakeholders are expected to win or lose from the agreement.”
All the independent projections made of the EU-Japan deal calculated that the gains accruing to Japanese firms would be far higher than those seen by European businesses. All the forecasts spoke of major increases in Japanese exports, and the potential loss of jobs and businesses in Europe as a result. The Government assessment has at least picked up on these forecasts, recognising that the UK’s balance of trade with Japan will take a serious hit when this agreement comes into force. Voting to approve this motion will allow the Government to rush ahead and sign a deal that the Government’s own figures show will result in a decline in our trade balance with Japan of between £2.2 billion and £2.9 billion, so the hon. Member for Stone, who chairs the European Scrutiny Committee and asked for the impact assessment to be published, will now see that the effect of this deal is, in fact, to increase our problems in terms of our balance of payments with Japan.
Parliamentary Scrutiny of Leaving the EU
Debate between Barry Gardiner and William Cash(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
For the avoidance of doubt, we intend to accept the Government’s amendment. Today’s debate has been one of the finest I can remember in this House. The contributions from right hon. and hon. Members read like a Baedeker guide to the United Kingdom. We heard from the right hon. and learned Members for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), my right hon. Friends the Members for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) and for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), my hon. Friends the Members for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) and for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), and my hon. Friends the Members for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). They all made absolutely superb speeches. I must also pay respect to speeches made on the other side of the debate, from the hon. Members for Stone (Sir William Cash), for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) and for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), which I thought were particularly worthy of note.
It is right that this debate has taken place, and it was good that the Government acceded to the will of Parliament by accepting the right of this House, and indeed its duty, properly to scrutinise their proposals for leaving the EU before article 50 is invoked. After the Prime Minister herself had insisted that the referendum was about the country taking back sovereign control over its own affairs, it would have been difficult for her Government to maintain that this sovereign Parliament had no such right to scrutinise and express its will in relation to the biggest constitutional challenge our country has faced in a generation. I therefore genuinely welcome the Government’s concession on the matter.
What today’s debate has made clear is that whatever way Members voted in the referendum, leave or remain, the vast majority do not wish to overturn the referendum vote. We are democrats: however small the margin of victory, a 52% to 48% vote for leave is a majority. It represents a mandate and it must be respected.
Let us be equally clear, however, that the need to respect the 17 million votes cast for leave does not mean that the rights and concerns of the 16 million who voted to remain can be trampled on. Although we of course accept that no Government should give a running commentary on the details of their negotiation, any responsible Government must give a coherent and reasoned picture of what sort of future they aim to achieve for their citizens.
Business leaders are demanding not certainty, but clarity. Everyone accepts that negotiations will be tough and protracted, and that means an inevitable period of uncertainty, but that should not stop the Government being clear in their purpose and objectives. Our respect for our constituents must surely insist that they have a right to know what our future relationship with the EU might look like—after all, their jobs, welfare and livelihoods, and the future of their children and grandchildren, are at stake. We are asking for clarity on the terms of the UK’s leaving the EU.
Barry Gardiner
No, I will not.
Parliament has a duty to ensure that the various final options are considered accordingly and not simply forced through; Parliament has an obligation to ensure that each of them is properly debated and clearly presented to the British people. Every Member appreciates that each of the different possible outcomes of our leaving the EU has both advantages and downsides, and it would be morally repugnant for anyone to pretend that there is only one sort of Brexit. That would be a lie: it would be to perpetrate a deception on the British people. The debate of June has moved on. We can no longer debate whether we leave the EU, but we absolutely must debate how we do that.
The Government are clearly experiencing certain strains between their Treasury wing and their Brexit triumvirate, but my purpose is not to make political hay with that dispute. In fact, I believe that it is right that the Government are having a serious debate and considering the various options. Our point is simply that this is not a discussion that the Government can keep to themselves. Parliament must be part of that discussion, and the British public have a right to their say.
Our role as politicians and leaders of our different communities is to present all the different possible options for how to leave the EU to our constituents and to let them inform the final decision that this sovereign Parliament must make. Our sovereignty rests on the sovereignty of the people.
It is important, too, that we also understand the limits of that sovereignty. It is said that politicians propose and markets dispose. Sovereignty does not give us control over the confidence that others have in the strength of our currency. It was not for no reason that the Bank of England put £70 billion of extra liquidity into the UK economy immediately after the referendum result and lowered interest rates by a quarter point. Some commentators who are fond of reminding us that after the Brexit vote the sky did not fall in should perhaps consider that Mark Carney and the Monetary Policy Committee were pumping liquidity into the system precisely to prop it up. Sovereignty certainly does not give us control over the markets; over the past week, we have seen all too clearly the markets’ violent reaction when they thought that the Government were proposing to leave both the single market and the customs union. Today the pound stands at a 168-year low.
The Government can insist. They can exercise the royal prerogative and decide to withdraw from the preferential terms of access to the world’s largest consumer market that the UK currently enjoys, but they are very mistaken if they confuse that exercise of sovereignty with any real control over the investment decisions that companies will then take about the future of our constituents’ jobs and wages. If the market is right to have devalued the UK’s stocks so significantly, and if it is right in thinking that investors will no longer invest and that the UK’s economic prospects have declined, we need to understand that our current account deficit—which currently runs at £28.7 billion, and which the fiscal rule was supposed to abolish, before it was abolished itself—is only likely to widen. The Government have a responsibility to set out precisely how they propose to deal with that economic fact, because, again, this is about the jobs, wages and wellbeing of our constituents.
As the Chancellor himself said,
“the British people did not vote…to become poorer or less secure”,
but we must be open with the electorate that the prize of regaining full sovereignty is that we will no longer have any control over the regulation and standards in a market with which we currently have 44% of our exports and 53% of our imports. We must be open with the electorate that the control over the movement of people from the EU that the Prime Minister spoke of at Prime Minister’s questions earlier today will also affect the capacity of companies to hire those with the skills they need to grow and prosper, and to employ more people here in the UK.
I am not in the habit of quoting the Daily Mail—I often like neither what it says, nor the way in which it says it—but none of us should ignore what it says today. In an otherwise misleading and confused editorial, it says:
“what the public voted for was simple: to regain control of our borders in order to end mass immigration; reclaim control of our laws; and stop sending billions of pounds to Brussels.
None of this is possible inside the single market—which requires the free movement of workers”.
If the Government believe that—and I believe they do—the question must be asked why they will not admit that they have ruled out maintaining the access we currently enjoy to the single market.
Immigration is the political heart of the Brexit debate, and we in the Labour party state unequivocally that those EU workers currently in the UK contributing to our economy must be allowed to stay, just as the 1.2 million UK citizens living and working in the rest of the EU must be. We in the Labour party also put it on record that the principle of the free movement of workers must be changed, and our new relationship with the EU must put in place clear and fair immigration controls that work to the benefit of the British people.
However, there will be a cost in terms of market access, investment, jobs and our constituents’ livelihoods. Why are the Government afraid to say so? The answer is that they do not want to admit the financial consequences that must inevitably follow from such an admission. The free traders are actually fighting against the financial consequences of leaving the largest free trade market in the world.
The Government have 170 days. The Secretary of State can continue to duck and dive as he did today—42 minutes in which he said nothing—but democracy demands that the Government should publish the terms of Brexit and submit them to the scrutiny of this sovereign Parliament, and the people of Britain will not trust this Government until they do.