Oral Answers to Questions

Chuka Umunna Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Conor Burns]

As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State alluded to some moments ago, I visited Brazil recently. In addition to conversations about trade, we discussed with the Brazilian Government how the United Kingdom can assist them in their move to a low-carbon, greener energy production model. We have spent over £150 million of climate finance in forest programmes across Brazil, and I was delighted, in the light of my recent visit, that the Prime Minister announced a further £10 million to help the Brazilian authorities in forestation and deforestation.

[Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (LD)]

The National Audit Office said yesterday that if the UK leaves the EU without a deal, cross-border shipments could be reduced by more than 50% and would take 12 months to return to normal. Can we stop this charade? Is it not the case that no responsible Government would do that to our businesses, and that if there is no agreement with the EU by Saturday, the Prime Minister will send the letter requesting an extension, not least because if he fails to do so he will be in contempt of court, given the proceedings in the Court of Session?

[Graham Stuart]

As well as birthday congratulations to the hon. Gentleman, I have other good news: we are taking steps to support businesses in all scenarios and to ensure that, with or without a deal, we minimise any negative disruption. But as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State just said—this is an appeal to Members right across this House—we will have the opportunity to vote for a Saturday sitting, and we will have the opportunity, I hope, to see a deal put through that will mean that we can move forward. I hope that the hon. Gentleman, finally, will support and respect the decision of the British people in 2016.

No-deal Brexit: Schedule of Tariffs

Chuka Umunna Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Conor Burns]

I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that assurance. We are determined that the trade remedies body will be one of the most innovative and strong bodies in protecting not just free trade but fair trade.

[Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (LD)]

The Prime Minister talks about getting Brexit done by 31 October and indeed, the Minister has just referred to that, too, but is it not the reality that, if Brexit were to happen on that day, with or without a withdrawal agreement, no trade agreement, including a permanent tariff regime with our biggest customer, the EU, will be in place at the point of departure? Is it not the case that, to put in place a permanent trade agreement will take at least three years? If I am wrong about that, can he name one EU leader who is suggesting that we could get a permanent trade agreement in place quicker than that timeframe? Nothing is going to be done, really, by 31 October.

[Conor Burns]

If there is a deal by 31 October, as the Government wish, it is highly likely that the deal will come with an implementation period. That would give us the opportunity to come to a comprehensive free trade agreement with our European Union friends and neighbours before the end of that implementation period. I give the hon. Gentleman full marks for consistency on this, as he has never seen any opportunities in the idea of Brexit, and he believes—it is a perfectly logical and consistent position—that our current membership of the EU under the current terms is the best thing possible. Many of us believe that there are significant opportunities for the United Kingdom not only to trade with our largest and nearest trading partner, but to have new bilateral trade agreements with countries around the world—that is the opportunity that Brexit provides.

Arms Export Licences (Saudi Arabia)

Chuka Umunna Excerpts

Thursday 26th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend is right that we play a significant role in terms of aid to Yemen—we have provided £770 million-worth—and it is important that we work through the UN, to which the Foreign Secretary is committed, to seek as quickly as possible an end to conflict in Yemen.

[Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (LD)]

When Court orders are contravened a couple of times, it can perhaps be dismissed as a failure to follow procedures, but when it happens on multiple occasions, it suggests that there is a systemic problem; the system is not working. Will the Secretary of State look at implementing a policy of the presumption of denial in respect of all export licences to countries listed as human rights priorities on the annual Foreign Office human rights report, so that those exports to those countries would be banned in the first instance?

[Elizabeth Truss]

To be clear for the hon. Gentleman, it was on 12 September that the errors were identified within the Department and notified to me. We then notified the Court and immediately conducted an internal review of all the licences already issued. All these issues relate to decisions that were made before 12 September, and that is why we have put in place the new interim procedure.

European Affairs

Chuka Umunna Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

The Government are undertaking analyses of so many different factors involved in this particular arrangement and question. We have always made clear our commitment to ensuring that the House is properly apprised of all the relevant facts when it comes to examine the actual withdrawal agreement in due course.

As we prepare the ground at the Department for International Trade, its Ministers have made more than 100 overseas visits in the past year and a half. We have set up 14 trade working groups, covering 21 countries with a substantial market size. None of that would have been possible without the excellent work of our Department for International Trade staff, both at home and in post in 108 countries around the world. I put on the record my thanks for their hard work, professionalism and invaluable expertise.

[Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)]

The Minister is right to pay tribute to his Department’s staff. First, has he noted the comments of the Department’s recent former permanent secretary to the effect that, if we are to leave the European Union, non-EU trade will not make up for the loss of trade that we currently enjoy with the EU? Secondly, the Secretary of State was part of a campaign that promised that we would start negotiating new trade agreements with other non-EU countries as soon as we voted to leave. How many of those new trade agreements are being negotiated right now?

[Greg Hands]

The hon. Gentleman knows full well that this is not an either/or situation: it is not a choice between having trade with the European Union or with the rest of the world. The Government’s objectives are clear, namely, to secure a deep and comprehensive partnership with the European Union while still being able—crucially, outside the customs union—to pursue an independent trade policy and to secure those agreements with the rest of the world.

On what was said during the campaign, the Department for International Trade has the capability in place and we have built up the Department. I have mentioned the 14 trade working groups. We are clearly not able to carry out a trade negotiation while we are still members of the European Union, but the hon. Gentleman seems to be demanding that we have those negotiations while at the same time saying that we should stay in the EU, which would prevent us from having the negotiations in the first place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)]

I welcome this debate, but I do not welcome the fact that the Government continually duck having votes in this House on these matters, or that they continue to do everything they can to withhold appropriate information so that we can come to an informed view on behalf of our constituents. My view is that when we are asked to vote on the withdrawal agreement that the Prime Minister is supposed to return to this House with in the autumn, we should be granted a free vote given the magnitude of the agreement and what we are dealing with and its importance for future generations in this country.

As we can see every single day, it is clear that the Brexit process has been a total and utter mess. Article 50 should never have been invoked at the time that it was invoked; we should have had the debate we are having now before it was invoked. It is extraordinary that we have only been given serious detail by the Prime Minister this month, more than a year and a half after she took office and when we are halfway through these Brexit negotiations. Only now do we seem to have more clarity from the Government on the direction in which they wish to take this country in these Brexit negotiations.

I give the Prime Minister this: her speech was significant because for the first time it officially acknowledged what we know to be true, which is that the Government are voluntarily choosing to pursue a policy that they have admitted is going to make this country poorer. She made it clear in her speech that we were going to get less access and that we would not have a frictionless border. She talked about achieving as frictionless a border as possible—[Interruption.] It is no use Ministers shaking their heads. We know from the impact assessments that they commissioned from their own civil servants that the options they are choosing to pursue will make this country poorer. Let us be clear about this. We hear all this talk about our EU friends seeking to bully our country and to punish us, but they are not doing that. At the outset, they put a range of options on the table, including remaining a member of the single market and the customs union, and it was this Prime Minister who took those options off the table.

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is right. Our European partners have said clearly that the red lines that this Government have set themselves mean that the goals they wish to achieve are impossible. We cannot blame our EU partners for that, because they are the Government’s own red lines.

[Chuka Umunna]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is the Prime Minister who is dictating the kind of agreement that we will reach with the European Union.

Let us be clear about what has happened since 2016. In March 2016, the Office for Budget Responsibility was forecasting that our economy would grow by 2.1% this year, next year and the year after. However, because of the judgments and decisions that this Government have made, the OBR is now forecasting that our economy will grow by a paltry 1.5% this year, 1.3% next year and 1.3% the year after. The Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) is chuntering in his place, but I say to him that I cannot remember a time since the war when a GDP forecast was coming in at under 2% for every year. This forecast is a result of the policy decisions that he is making.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

The Government’s strategy on these negotiations is a shambles, as my hon. Friend has indicated. More importantly, however, they are banking on the Trump Administration bailing them out. They think they are going to get great deals from the Trump Administration, but if we look at agriculture, for example, we can see that they are not going to get any great deals at all.

[Chuka Umunna]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and I will say more about that shortly.

One of the most extraordinary things about the Prime Minister’s speech was that she did not explain how the future relationship that she set out was going to help the NHS, particularly given that so many of her Cabinet Ministers went around telling us that voting to leave the European Union would lead to a bounty for the NHS. The number of EU nurse applications is down 96%, and we lost 10,000 health workers from our NHS in the year after the referendum vote. We now have 100,000 vacancies in the NHS that need to be filled. There was no mention at all of this in her speech. I think it was the director of the Vote Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, who said that if people such as the Foreign Secretary, the Environment Secretary and the Trade Secretary had not gone round saying what they said about the NHS, we would not be in this situation today.

Let me return to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) has just made about new trade deals. I agree with the Minister for Trade Policy that there is not an either/or choice about whether we pursue trade with the EU or with the rest of the world, even though that argument is often made from the Government Dispatch Box. Let us get real about this. This is not a question about whether this country is going to be able to do trade deals after we have left the European Union. We will be able to do trade deals after we have left the EU—if we leave the EU—but the question is: on what terms? When we negotiate with China with its 1.2 billion people, we are not going to get the same terms we now enjoy as we negotiate alongside 500 million people on our side of the table. We, a country of 65 million people, are not going to get the same terms, because we are a much smaller economy relative to the big economies that we want to trade with. That is the reality. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South is absolutely right to refer to President Trump. He is not going to ride to our rescue. We need only look at what he is doing to our steel industry with his 25% tariffs.

My final observation about the Prime Minister’s speech is that I have not spoken to any diplomat, EU ambassador or EU Foreign Minister who thinks that this Government’s technological solution to the hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland will resolve the issue. Nobody I have spoken to believes that that will happen.

What does that lead me to conclude? The form of Brexit that was sold to the British people is simply not deliverable. I will give this to the Government: it is not necessarily simply a matter of competence; it is the reality that so many of the promises that were made to people, whether they voted leave or remain, simply cannot be delivered. That is one reason why I think that—the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) made this point—if we are to leave the European Union, we should at the very least seek to keep this country’s full participation in the customs union and, to my mind, in the single market. As far as I am concerned, if someone wants to end austerity and to promote social justice, they have to support that position. Being part of the framework of the single market and the customs union would be no impediment to the implementation of the Labour manifesto, to our pursuing the nationalisations that we want or to other matters.

One of the things that I am most struck by as I go around my constituency at the moment is that many members of the public are just fed up with the Brexit process. They just want it to be gone. They want us to get on with it. But there is a recognition that the process is far more complex than anybody had thought and that it is throwing up all kinds of issues that nobody thought would be connected to Brexit. Who on earth would have thought that Brexit would be connected to the transport of isotopes used for medical research and cancer treatment?

However, the group of people in my constituency who have the most visceral and strong views about what is going on are the young people. They believe that what is going on is robbing them of the opportunities that older generations have taken for granted. They cannot understand why we would want to be doing this to them. That is why I think this House should have a free vote on the matter. The issue transcends party politics and politics more broadly. It is an issue of national interest, and I do not believe that the younger generation will ever forgive us, the generation of politicians sitting in this House of Commons, if we do not do the right thing by them and secure their futures, ensuring that they have the same opportunities that all of us enjoy now in the European Union.

Trade Bill

Chuka Umunna Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

This Bill is not about trade agreements; I can only explain it to the hon. Gentleman—I cannot understand it for him. This Bill is about continuity of existing agreements. In any case, the 2010 Act effectively gives the Commons the power to block ratification, notwithstanding the fact that we have already scrutinised these agreements in the past. He ought to know that, as the 2010 Act was passed by the Labour Government and he voted for it.

There is no attempt here to bypass parliamentary scrutiny or to obtain sweeping new authority for the Government over this country’s trading structures. Rather, the Government seek powers in clause 2 that we think necessary for us fully to implement in UK law non-tariff obligations of the transitioned existing EU-third country trade agreements that we adopt. Any tariff-related obligations in such transitioned agreements will be implemented using powers conferred by the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill, which had its Second Reading in this House yesterday.

[Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State answer three questions? First, on the existing agreements the EU has with third countries, which he says will be transposed, will he guarantee that those 65 agreements will be transposed by the exit day? Secondly, this Bill does touch on new agreements, to the extent that the Trade Remedies Authority will have a locus and oversight on those agreements. He was part of the campaign that promised that we would have all these new agreements, with Canada, the US and Japan, and would immediately start negotiating with all these countries. It is right, is it not, that none of those negotiations has actually started?

[Dr Fox]

I look forward to the hon. Gentleman’s extension of that intervention in his speech. Let me deal with the last of those issues. He is well aware that, under our duty of sincere co-operation, while we remain a member of the EU we are not able to negotiate new trade agreements. We will want, first, to get continuity of the existing agreements, which number about 40. We will want to have as many of them as possible—all of them, if possible—transitioned before we leave the EU. I absolutely confirm that. We already have 14 working groups with 21 countries in preparation for future negotiations in the trade agreements that we want to take advantage of when we leave the EU.