CPTPP

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) on securing the debate.

There may well be positives for Britain from joining the CPTPP; there may also be negatives. The problem is that we just do not know, because the Government still have not published any of their negotiating objectives, or even an impact assessment of the deal. Last week, the International Trade Secretary said that Parliament would have full scrutiny of CPTPP through the Trade and Agriculture Commission—but the Trade and Agriculture Commission is not a parliamentary body, and its work can only supplement parliamentary scrutiny, not replace it. In the absence of any impact assessments, it falls to us to decide for ourselves, and I am sorry to say that it is not looking good for the Government.

British sovereignty, promoting British exports and jobs, protecting the NHS, agriculture, environmental standards, human rights, workers’ rights—those are just some of the challenges of the CPTPP. Let us address agriculture, environmental standards and human rights.

Farming has a proud part to play as part of Britain’s heritage. Over hundreds of years, we have developed high-quality produce with strict environmental and animal welfare standards. To continue that proud record, which is admired around the world, our farmers cannot afford for this Conservative Government to compromise on standards in trade agreements. The CPTPP could have some minor benefits to the UK’s agriculture sector but, as the National Farmers Union states,

“CPTPP includes major agricultural exporting countries”—

Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The question for the Government is whether they will have to make concessions that will damage British farming as a price of joining the CPTPP. We do not know what increased market access CPTPP membership will provide for countries such as Australia and New Zealand, but we know that it will have potentially dire consequences for food and animal welfare standards. Will the Government be able to opt out of the parts of the agriculture chapter of the CPTPP agreement that would allow our agriculture sector to be undercut by lower standards of production? Major questions also remain over whether the UK will be able to retain current bans on the import of hormone-treated beef or chlorine-washed chicken.

Next we come to environmental standards. Palm oil is used in food products, detergents, shampoo, cosmetics, biofuel and even ice cream, but palm oil production is wreaking untold destruction on jungle habitats. Palm oil plantations cover more than 27 million hectares of the earth’s surface. The industry is pushing endangered species ever closer to extinction, and with their carbon dioxide and methane emissions, palm oil-based biofuels are estimated to have three times the climate impact of fossil fuels. Although the UK has a ban on palm oil imported through biofuels, Malaysia—a CPTPP member country—is one of the largest producers of palm oil, and Malaysian officials want the Government to scrap the protections that we already have against the import of palm oil. Palm oil is just one example, and it is emblematic of the potential dangers of signing up to a deal such as CPTPP. Will we be rule takers on imports of palm oil, or will we be able to insist on maintaining our high environmental standards? Parliamentary scrutiny would tell us.

Then we have human rights. Over the past few months, this Conservative Government have voted down amendments that sought to block trade deals with countries that commit genocide. The Foreign Secretary says that he would rather the UK ignored human rights concerns than lose out on trade agreements. Recently, the Government struck a deal with Cameroon, a country whose Government are carrying out a brutal subjugation of its English-speaking minority population. The Minister knows that even President Trump declined to sign a deal with Cameroon.

Now the Conservatives tell us that we should join the CPTPP, whose members include Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore and Vietnam, all of which permit child labour, forced labour, workplace discrimination, unsafe working conditions and the absence of trade union rights. Are the Government planning to negotiate tougher alternatives to the current clauses in CPTPP, which permit lower standards of production using exploited workers, or not? Although the Secretary of State for International Trade has said previously that the UK has no plans for a bilateral trade deal with China, does the Minister share my concern that a deal with China could take place by the back door via the CPTPP, or can he tell us whether the UK would be able to veto China’s application to join?

On human and workers’ rights, full parliamentary scrutiny and consultation with trade unions and human rights groups is essential if the Government want to build confidence that we should join CPTPP. Agriculture, environmental standards and human rights are just three of a number of CPTPP elements that urgently need to be addressed.

Businesses, workers, freelancers, consumers and the people of Northern Ireland are learning the hard way what a failure to negotiate effectively looks like under this Conservative Government. The trade and continuity agreement with the EU has left gaping holes in trading arrangements that the agreement was meant to deliver after the end of the Brexit transition. We cannot afford a repeat of the failures in the TCA with the application to join CPTPP, so will the Government reopen the 2019 CPTPP public consultation? At the time, it elicited only 55 bespoke responses from business, and the Government’s own surveys showed that only 21% of the British public knew what the CPTPP was. There is also the increasingly serious prospect that China may apply to join the CPTPP, which was not a consideration at the time of the survey in 2019.

Scrutiny of negotiating objectives, a full impact assessment and the reopening of the public consultation on CPTPP are all must-haves, as well as a guarantee that we will have at least as much time to examine the final terms of accession before a final vote in the House of Commons, just as the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand Parliaments had before their respective votes.

In the absence of scrutiny, the shadow Secretary of State for International Trade wrote to the Secretary of State, setting out 238 questions that must be answered if the Government are to have any hope of convincing Parliament that this is a good deal. Those questions included the following. Will the Government be able to negotiate exemptions from the CPTPP to address the concerns that I have raised today? What are the implications of joining the CPTPP for the retention of the UK’s current prohibitions on the import of hormone-treated beef and chlorine-washed chicken?

Will the UK have the right to impose import restrictions on products containing unsustainably sourced palm oil, and apply those restrictions to Malaysia and other CPTPP countries? How will the Government use their accession to the CPTPP to hold all member countries, including Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore and Vietnam, to the commitments made under article 19.3 of the agreement and demand their compliance with the UK’s high standards of human and workers’ rights? Are the Government prepared either to veto any application by China to accede to the CPTPP, or to withdraw from the CPTPP, if we do not have that right, so we do not end up in a trade bloc with China by the back door?

Finally, will the Government guarantee at least the same amount of time to scrutinise the terms of the UK’s accession before they are put to a vote, as was given to the Parliaments of Australia, Canada and New Zealand?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Steve Baker]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend the Minister. Like him, I have hugely enjoyed this debate. He enjoys my unqualified support, so I will turn my remarks to some other aspects of the debate.

I thought that the best part of the contributions from the Front-Bench spokesmen for the SNP and the Labour party was their vivid illustration of the shortcomings of virtual proceedings, because we were not able to intervene on them to explode the fallacies in their speeches. I regret that they are not able to intervene on me now, and I look forward to them supporting the full resumption of proceedings in the main Chamber and in Westminster Hall, so that we can resume our normal to and fro.

I thought the Labour party were progressive, and yet this progressive agreement is one that they do not wish to support. Of course there are problems with labour standards among the Pacific rim countries, and I would very much like to see those problems addressed and standards driven up. Of course we want to get children out of child labour, and that is why I support a progressive agreement that improves labour standards in the region. If we were to listen to the Labour party, they would have us do a deal with no one who had not already met the standards of the western world, the United Kingdom and the European Union. We can see why they want to be in the EU.

The SNP, of course, is speaking entirely from its own hymn sheet. It wishes to leave the UK and rejoin the EU—that is perfectly plain from what it has said. I refer the SNP, in its pinched and miserable assessment of our economic prospects, to an article by the well-known pro-EU commentator Wolfgang Münchau—he often, of course, writes for the Financial Times—in his own Eurointelligence:

“So much for the Brexit scare stories”—

he writes—

“Apart from a short-lived disruption of trade flows Brexit has been a macroeconomic non-event…If you look at the latest IMF data and projections in the graphic above, you don't find a discernible macroeconomic effect of Brexit in the first ten years after the referendum.”

[Bill Esterson]

Tell that to the people who are losing their livelihoods—

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order. Members participating virtually are not allowed to intervene on any speakers in the room. If you persist, I am afraid we will cut you off.