Australia and New Zealand Trade Deals

John Spellar Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for trade deals and I look forward to him voting for one of them one day. In terms of the impact on Welsh farmers, I must point out some of the market access that we have recently gained—for example, Welsh lamb is now able to enter the US market for the first time in many decades due to the United States removing the small ruminants rule, and I was in Taiwan only last week are trying to negotiate access for Welsh lamb to the Taiwan market. When it comes to accumulation, he ought to think about the fact that there is tariff-free, quota-free access for the European Union for the UK at the moment. That has been the case from day one of the trade and co-operation agreement.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Surely one of the points we ought to be considering is the fact that about a third of the beef consumed in the UK is already imported. Some of it is imported from Brazil, where there are concerns about deforestation, and a big amount is imported from the EU, primarily from Ireland. We might not see fresh competition from Australian beef, but import substitution might be part of the equation.

[Greg Hands]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a strong point. We are all in favour of competition, and of consumers being able to make their choice, but I would add that meat exports from Australia and New Zealand are much more likely to go to the far eastern markets. A big percentage of the exports from Australia and New Zealand currently go to those far eastern markets that, frankly, we would like to access by joining the CPTPP trade agreement. We want to have a piece of that action. He is right that it is more likely that exports from Australia and New Zealand will displace those from the EU, giving choice to consumers.

These are more than just deals with like-minded and long-standing partners; they are part of the UK’s new strategic approach.

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[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

The hon. Gentleman raises a useful point. Our farmers are seeking a level playing field. We believe in our farmers and we want them to be able to compete on the same basis.

We also see in the Australian deal a lack of success on tackling climate change. The former COP26 President, the right hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), told the House last December that the Australia deal would reaffirm

“both parties’ commitments to upholding our obligations under the Paris agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5°.”—[Official Report, 1 December 2021; Vol. 704, c. 903.]

However, the explicit commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5° was not in the deal, despite the fact that the Minister had said that only a matter of days before it was signed. What went wrong in those final days? Was it perhaps that Ministers simply gave way for the sake of getting a completed deal?

The current Secretary of State for International Trade, the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Kemi Badenoch), was sadly not here to open the debate. When she was standing to be Conservative party leader, she branded the net zero climate target “unilateral economic disarmament”. I think it is fair to say that there are worries about her commitment to delivering the progress needed on climate change, given that she has expressed that view publicly. Not only does that view misjudge the economic imperative of action to tackle climate change, but it fails to recognise the huge opportunities that the transition to net zero could provide. The question must also be asked: how broken can a party be when dabbling with climate change denial is a way to drum up support from its members?

On labour standards and workers’ rights, the Government did not push as hard as they might have done, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) said in an earlier intervention. On the Australia deal, the TUC said that the

“agreement does not contain commitments to ILO core conventions and an obligation for both parties to ratify and respect those agreements”

and that it provides

“a much weaker commitment to just the ILO declaration.”

That is a mistake. We should not set a precedent for new trade agreements across the globe to sell short our workers here or elsewhere.

[John Spellar]

I accept my right hon. Friend’s point when it comes to dealing with some countries, but in the case of the deal with Australia, where there is a strong Labour Government committed to workers’ rights and trade union rights, and a strong trade union movement, are we not slightly making a mountain out of a molehill here?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend about the Australian Government. Having met a number of representatives of the Australian Government, I know that their commitment to workers’ rights is second to none. It is a shame that we did not see a similar commitment from this Conservative party, frankly. Of course, the issue with the Australia deal is the precedent that it sets: other countries with lower workers’ standards than Australia will look at the standards in the deal and think that they should be the starting point in negotiations. A further issue is around geographical indicators, on the cross-party International Trade Committee said:

“The Government has failed to secure any substantive concessions on the protection of UK Geographical Indications in Australia”.

We have to ensure backing for our fantastic national producers and not let them be undermined.

[John Spellar]

Is it not also the case that this trade deal does not, for example, have an investor-state dispute settlement clause, because with comparable legal systems and comparable levels of development it is not necessary? Surely we do not need one template for all sorts of trade deals with all sorts of countries in very different circumstances.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend that we do not need a single template, but we could do with a core trade policy and a core set of objectives from the Government.

I turn to the issue of scrutiny, because for those in this House who follow trade matters closely, it will not have gone without being noticed that this debate brings a distinct change of focus from Ministers at the Department for International Trade. Ministers—I would say they are new Ministers, but I think the Minister for Trade Policy, the right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands), is competing with Frank Sinatra in the comeback stakes—will I am sure be aware of stinging rebukes from the cross-party International Trade Committee, which has regularly and strongly raised the need for better scrutiny structures around trade deals. It called in its recent report for

“the Government to accept specific recommendations to enable better scrutiny of any FTAs”.

That is very much a cross-party matter—the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) has regularly made the case to me as the shadow Secretary of State as well as to the various Secretaries of State and I hope that those criticisms and recommendations are having an impact. I hope that those recommendations, which come from right across the House, are being heard. Perhaps that is why we have at least ended up with today’s debate, although the irony is not lost on us that parliamentary time has now been allocated to agreements that were long ago signed and agreed.

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[Drew Hendry]

It will come as no surprise that I do not agree with the Government Member. These are damaging deals. They are one-sided and other people will want access.

Talks are ongoing with India, Brazil, Mexico, the Gulf states, the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership countries and Canada. Will they now accept less than has been offered here? This might just be the damaging start of the process. No wonder the National Audit Office report says that the UK Department for International Trade is “taking risks” in its haste to sign new deals.

This is bad for consumers. Research by Which? found that 72% of people across the nations of the UK do not want food that does not meet current standards coming in through trade deals. And boy, do standards differ! In Australia, animal welfare standards are well below what is expected of our producers, particularly on pigs, eggs, sheep and beef, with cramped sow stalls, battery cages, the painful mulesing of sheep, huge herds of cattle in zero-grazing feedlots, and permissible live animal transport times that are twice the length of ours. Australian poultry farmers use 16 times—I repeat, 16 times—more antibiotics per animal than our farmers. The UK Government’s own advisers have voiced concern about the impact on UK farmers of the overuse of pesticides in Australia, including 144 highly hazardous pesticides.

[John Spellar]

But do we not also import chicken from countries with very questionable standards, such as Brazil, from which we also import beef, and Thailand? Are there not, even within the EU framework, considerable variations in animal welfare standards?

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[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Trade is one of the issues that, from time to time, erupt in British politics. Indeed, in some areas it has dominated political discussion, and it has twice split—torn apart—the Conservative party. After all, that is why we had free trade halls in many of the great cities of the industrial north and midlands.

There is a strong case to be made for open trade, and I sometimes wish the Government would make it more strongly, both in general and in detail, and particularly in relation to the opportunities it presents. We have heard a great deal about some of the possible problems, and I shall come on to those shortly, but there are also opportunities for our industries and services, which were mentioned a moment ago by the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford).

We have to recognise, and we should be making the argument, that trade has been a major engine of human progress for millennia, and has driven prosperity, innovation and a flow of ideas. It has enabled the development of civilisation. When people advance arguments against trade, one almost wonders whether they consider that the industrial revolution was desirable and right and a great advance in human progress, but although there were considerable and well-documented costs to that development, fundamentally humanity benefited and moved forward. We need to be advancing those arguments, not the arguments of people who want to return to some idyllic pastoral age, which was actually never much of an idyll at all, because we have certainly made great progress as a result; and if we are going to do that, we have to say, “Who better to do such deals with than Australia and New Zealand?”

These are countries with which we share huge affinities, connected with families and relatives, and with which we have shared service and security and intelligence relationships over several centuries. They are countries with similar legal systems and similar values that work together in the wider world. There may be some difficulties, and I am pleased about—well, not pleased; in fact I am slightly dismayed, but I suppose I could also take some partisan pleasure in them—the revelations of the utter inadequacies of at least one of the Ministers involved in the trade deals, who made the fundamental error in negotiations—any negotiations—of believing that getting a deal is more important than the contents of the deal. That is a recipe for failure in business, and it is a recipe for failure in government as well. I therefore hope that Ministers may now learn the lessons from that period. It was not even the deal, but the photo opportunity it presented, that seems to have been most important, and we definitely need to move beyond that.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman think that this may also reflect the fact that for many years the UK has not needed negotiating teams to go into the negotiating rooms on behalf of the UK to make trade deals, and that that naivety may in part—along with Ministers’ overenthusiasm—have resulted in poor terms in this trade deal?

[John Spellar]

I take the hon. Lady’s point about the shortfall in technical skills. The hon. Member for Mole Valley identified certain failings in at least one individual. I am not qualified to comment on that, but I am perfectly prepared to believe it. There was certainly a technical deficit—because trade deals have been undertaken by the European Commission on behalf of all member states—but that was exaggerated, and indeed made far worse, by the obsessive and indeed utterly irresponsible attitude of the Trade Secretary at the time. Unfortunately, the Conservative party then saw fit to put that same individual in as Prime Minister, where those same negative qualities completely imploded the Government and demonstrated why the description of her as a “human hand grenade” was so apt.

There was a discussion earlier about several of the common factors between our countries, and they include labour standards. The developments in Australia are enormously encouraging, because some of the reductions in labour standards that were brought in by the previous conservative Government there are now being rolled back and trade unionism is being encouraged. I am sorry that the Minister for Trade Policy has just left the Chamber. When he was describing the talks with the United States, I thought he missed an opportunity to say that the UK and US trade union movements were involved in those talks in Baltimore and Scotland. I know that was at the insistence of President Biden and the American trade team, but I hope that this Government will have learned the positive advantages of having representatives of the trade union movement involved in those discussions and that they will include them in future discussions with countries that have comparable effective and free trade unions, because that has enormous value in getting the right sort of deal.

The fact that we need trade deals, that we need to have trade, and that Australia and New Zealand will be excellent partners does not exonerate the Government from their inadequate performance, which has been described in several previous debates and again here today. Also, it is not just about getting the deals; it is also about enforcing them. Another area where this Government and others have failed considerably is in allowing China into the World Trade Organisation, with the various qualifications that that required, and then allowing it time and again to breach the conditions under which it joined up, until it became much more difficult to take action because it had grown its economy, quite often by violating those deals as well as by using industrial espionage to steal intellectual property.

I want to touch on scrutiny. I fail to understand the Government’s reluctance to face scrutiny on this. They have a big majority, and the farming influence is not so dominant on their Back Benches, but in some of these deals they have a case to make. Given that we are not exactly overburdened with parliamentary business from the Government, because they do not seem to have got their act together, I do not understand why they are having these debates now and not at an earlier stage in order to defend their position—for example, to talk about some of the other benefits of the deals.

Visas for professionally qualified people have been mentioned. I have said in a previous debate that, where there is enough commonality in training, we ought to be asking the professional bodies what additional training an individual might need. They would not need to fully requalify; they would need only to undertake the necessary training to deal with any differences. This would encourage the movement backwards and forwards of professionally qualified people and encourage training in all our countries.

I fully accept that Ministers have a difficult task in remedying some of the deficiencies from the Truss era, but I hope that they will learn the lessons from these agreements and take them forward in future discussions, to ensure that they improve both the process and the substance as they focus on the deals.

Notwithstanding that, I hope both sides of the House—the new shadow International Trade team, as I said back in September, is a great improvement on some of our previous shadow International Trade teams, in having a generally favourable view of trade but a critical view of the detail—can then go forward and, bluntly, not follow those in the Chamber whose only answer is to go back to the EU, which has many of the problems associated with these trade deals. Trade deals are not easy, whoever we do them with. Can we just dump the ideology a bit and focus on the practicalities, for the benefit of our people not just in rural areas, very important though they are, but in our great towns and cities across the country?