United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Hilary Benn and Bernard Jenkin

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Monday 7th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

Who would have thought that we would be here on 7 December—there are 24 days to go—with the Government wanting to put these international law-breaking clauses back into the Bill and the Brexit negotiations still going? I have always thought that there will be an agreement, but I must confess that in the last few days I have felt a bit gloomy. I do not know whether the announcement in the last 20 minutes that the Prime Minister and Ursula von der Leyen are going to meet later this week to pore over the areas of disagreement should raise our hopes or not. What do they say? It’s the hope that kills you.

Anyway, the truth about this Bill is out. The offending clauses are nothing more and nothing less than a piece of negotiating leverage, which we now know will be dropped the moment a satisfactory resolution is found to the questions that the Joint Committee is properly considering. That was confirmed in the Prime Minister’s statement this afternoon.

The Prime Minister’s dilemma with this Bill and, indeed, with the talks is best explained in this way. Four and a bit years ago, he famously decided to publish the second of two articles that he had written about Brexit. One of them was for leaving the EU, and the other was against. When he made that decision, he climbed on the back of what I would describe as the Brexit tiger. It has taken him on quite a journey—it has taken him through the door of 10 Downing Street, which I am sure was his hope, but there is just one problem: it is not entirely clear he knows how to get off the tiger in order to secure a deal. He is the prisoner of the fateful decision that he made.

It is not that he was not aware of the consequences, because thanks to Tim Shipman, we now know what he wrote in the other article, which was not published. He said:

“Almost everyone expects there to be some sort of economic shock as a result of a Brexit. How big would it be?”

Well, we know the answer, because the Government have done their own economic assessment, and we saw what the Office for Budget Responsibility reported a couple of weeks ago: the economy is hit either way, but it is much worse if no agreement is reached.

The question now for the House and for the negotiators is, how do we get out of this? It is clearly not by the clauses that the Government are seeking to put back in the Bill. One of the reasons why the Government are having so much trouble with the level playing field negotiations is the existence of those clauses. Let us think about this for a moment. Why do Ministers think that the EU negotiators are so keen to tie down commitments that both sides will be asked to give in the negotiations? It is for the very simple reason, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) made clear in another brilliant speech, that we have shown that we are not to be trusted to keep our word. If a country is in the process of negotiating a new international treaty, it does not do wonders for its credibility if it is busy preparing to tear up part of the previous treaty that it negotiated with the same partners and signed just over a year ago.

The other issue is sovereignty, about which we have heard an enormous amount today. If sovereignty is absolute, and if we were to take it to its logical and absurd conclusion, for example, why should we be negotiating on fish at all? Would not giving any of “our fish”, as some people describe it, be a betrayal? If sovereignty is absolute, what are we doing in the World Trade Organisation? As the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) knows only too well, the WTO has a dispute resolution body that gives other countries, if they win a case against the UK, the ability to impose countervailing measures upon us, including tariffs. How could that be acceptable to a sovereign country that claims complete sovereign control? The truth, of course, is that sovereignty is not absolute. It is what we choose to do with it that matters, and we cannot avoid that choice. We cannot avoid that choice in these negotiations, because the only way out of this mess, in the interests of the country, is for both sets of negotiators to grasp the heavy responsibility that they have at this moment to make the choices that will secure the deal that the country desperately needs.

In conclusion, since German car makers, as was once rather fancifully suggested, are not going to turn up late in the day to rescue the negotiations, a bit like Blücher at Waterloo, we have to save ourselves. That is what we have to do at this point. Whatever the bluster, I simply say to those on the Front Bench that the country will not forgive this Government if they impose no deal upon us.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

It is always an enormous pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). For decades, the EU was a train that we had to stay on, and now Brexit is a tiger that we have to get off. There is not time to re-engage in the old arguments about sovereignty, but it was very telling that he thought the importance of sovereignty was what a country chooses to do with it, not what it is imposed with. There is no international organisation of which we are a member in the world that is like the EU, which imposes its will on us through our own laws and courts; every other international body—such as the WTO, to which the right hon. Gentleman referred—is a voluntary association governed by international law, which is a completely different matter.