EU Withdrawal

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Wednesday 13th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I am speaking in the gap, so I will be brief. The Government’s five words that have worried me most right from the beginning of these debates are, “the brightest and the best”, and there they were again in the very first paragraph of Sajid Javid’s opening speech in the Immigration Bill’s Second Reading debate last month in the Commons. To take the example of the creative industries, it is unlikely that artists and creatives, including other Europeans who have become established abroad already, will want to spend a great deal of time in a country where free movement is denied to its own citizens. This will be a fact if Brexit happens.

We have not had a debate about free movement in this country. Immigration is not the same thing, although the Prime Minister conflates them within her proposed immigration policy, with no thought at all about how this policy will affect the British themselves. As the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said last week in Committee on the Trade Bill, trade is about people. It is about movement both ways, not just of goods but of people. The loss of free movement will be catastrophic for our service industries, whose importance, and whose future importance, is hugely underestimated, since the free movement of British people, including movement between other countries, is essential to their operation. This plain fact is being ignored by both the major parties. Those who think that protecting manufacturing is the only way to protect jobs, even if that is possible, should think again. Bartenders, chefs, workers at ski resorts, beauticians in holiday resorts, plumbers, IT workers, performers and musicians are just a few of the new mobile working class whose widely varied livelihoods must also be protected. Many of them are self-employed, and all of them are part of a sector that now represents 80% of the economy.

More essentially still, particularly among young people, free movement across Europe is an established democratic right. From the point of view of the left, free movement ought to be understood as a socialist objective. I take my cue here from the social philosopher André Gorz, who believed in an emancipatory socialism which maximises freedoms for all people, not one which hems people in, which is what Brexit in any form will do, except for the privileged few. For these reasons I hope that the Immigration Bill—a Bill that is unnecessary and destructive—is stopped when it reaches the Lords.