United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and William Cash

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 16th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

I was very taken by the reference the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) made to improvement. Having looked at the Bill and followed it over the last few weeks, I find it difficult to call it an improvement.

However, I want to pay tribute to the Public Bill Office. Given the amendments, and the contortions the Public Bill Office has had to absorb in looking at the Reasons Committee’s consideration of these issues and at the question of what insistence on disagreement or agreement is at a particular point in time before it comes from one House to the other and goes back again, this has been an incredible exercise in complexity—so much so that it would be asking an awful lot to expect anybody, including the Minister, to be able to claim that they really understand what it is that has ultimately arrived. I was going to ask him if he would like to explain exactly what all this means. We will only find out in due course.

I was looking at the reasons for disagreeing only yesterday, and they were very clear. One said that the Government disagreed with the Lords over the question of legal certainty and disruption to business. Suddenly, almost at the wave of a magic wand, all of that has completely evaporated into thin air, and we have ended up with this extremely contorted, extremely confusing and ambiguous series of statements. However, at the heart of it, there is one point that I want to put to the Minister. Does he recall the famous Schleswig-Holstein question? Only three people comprehended what was going on, or they had originally, but unfortunately one had forgotten, one had died and the other had gone mad. [Interruption.] I am not going to attribute any one of those to the Minister. However, right at the heart of this, a lot of very complicated drafting has been put in to try to salvage some face. As I read it, the Secretary of State can make these regulations but—this goes to the heart of it—that process would be subject to the affirmative resolution under clause 10(2), which is mirrored in clause 17. It strikes me that there is one fundamental question: can the Minister effectively veto matters that have been discussed and consulted on with the devolved Administration? If the regulations are subject to the affirmative resolution, it seems that may well turn out to be the case. Who knows? I do not know at the moment, and only when the process reaches its conclusion will we know whether the reserved powers in the Scotland Act 1998 will bite. I cannot be sure of that. I have a feeling that this may end up in the courts, and perhaps the situation will be made clearer. We are at the end of the line for this Bill, and I regard the whole thing as being difficult to plot in terms of a clear path to any conclusion.

[Jonathan Edwards]

In the 10 years that I have been in this place, I think this is the first time that I have agreed with the hon. Gentleman on a substantial point. The concession last night in the Lords opens up a number of new questions, and there needs to be a well thought out process regarding how the common frameworks will work, where power will reside within the frameworks, and who has the power to create them. I would like a far more consensual approach than we have seen today.

[Sir William Cash]

I am glad to hear that. I am not sure—we cannot be sure—whether these provisions might eventually be declared void for uncertainty, and I am not clear about what they will do in practice. At least, however, we have got to the end of the Bill. I am in favour of the Bill in principle, and that is about all I need to say for the moment. As far as I am concerned, the future lies ahead with uncertainty built into these provisions.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Jonathan Edwards and William Cash

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Edwards]

rose—

[Sir William Cash]

Just a moment. This refers back to what I said earlier when the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey wanted to intervene on me to suggest that somehow or other I was exaggerating the issue, as I am certainly not. The reality is that the EU takes all these decisions behind closed doors; nobody really knows how the authorisations are made; and—surprise, surprise—we could not stop any of those ports regulations, as indeed we could not stop any of the state aids authorisations. That is the essence of it, and he will not be able to explain to the people of Scotland why they will not benefit if the day comes when he gets his way, which I do not think he will, by our ending up removing the state aids from the EU. The people of Scotland would benefit so much by having a system in place that they can deal with on the Floor of the House.

The hon. Gentleman puts forward capable arguments. I notice how he weaves his way round these subjects. That is a compliment, in a way, but it does not alter the fact that the people in Scotland will suffer grievously if they continue to have EU regulatory arrangements inflicted on them. The Bill ensures that they will not. I dare say that the Minister is noting what I am saying—I hope that he is—because it is important to understand the damage that has been done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir William Cash]

That is interesting, because the counterpoint to that—the hon. Gentleman would expect me to come back with this—is to ask why on earth the people of Scotland would want to subjugate themselves to the European Union system, which we are escaping from, when it has such deleterious and tragic consequences for so many people and jobs in Scotland, as well as in Wales and England. He argues that Scotland can do this better, but I tell him that the consequences of staying in the European Union would be extremely damaging.

We have made it clear that the laws would continue under the protocol, as we discussed yesterday. I know that from the advice and analysis that we are doing in the European Scrutiny Committee, and the Cabinet Office Minister is coming to see the Committee very soon to discuss all these questions. Given the manner in which the European Union functions—as I have said, behind closed doors and without even a transcript—and with the wholly unelected European Commission making the authorisations, the system is very bad news for Scotland. It will be no substitute for having these things handled in an objective and down-to-earth way by the Minister; I have no doubt that he will ensure that the people of Scotland are looked after properly.

This is a bread-and-butter issue for those who work in our economy. It is about putting food on the table, into the indefinite future, for all voters, whether they are Conservative, Labour, DUP, SNP or others. It is similarly important for those voters’ representatives in this House. If Members vote against the Bill, they will have to explain to every one of their constituents, including those in Labour constituencies—I am not looking at anybody in particular or making a point about that, because we represent the whole country through different political parties—why our economy and voters’ jobs and businesses have continued to be undermined by unfair and discriminatory EU state aid and other uncompetitive lawmaking.

The Bill will ensure, among other things, that the UK escapes unfair discrimination under the EU state aid regime, which I mentioned yesterday in relation to the steel industry. The voters in the red wall know this, as do their parents, including those in coalfield communities. I became vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on coalfield communities—this is going back five or 10 years—because I understood, as did many Labour Members from Mansfield and all over the country, how important those communities are. I even got up the other day and spoke in the House about pension arrangements for coalminers. We need to take account of the fact that the state aid rules cause total misery and tragedy, and ultimately the destruction of our coal and steel industries.

[Jonathan Edwards]

As someone who represents two coalmining valleys, I think the hon. Gentleman might be guilty of some historical revisionism. The French, the Germans and the Spanish also went through a similar transition in coalfield communities, but they did it over a number of decades. It was a decision of the British Government to bring a guillotine over the coal industry and decimate it in one go, and that was a Conservative Government.

[Sir William Cash]

I voted against my own Government and nearly defeated them on the question of the closure of pits around Stoke-on-Trent. I actually challenged Arthur Scargill on a platform in Hanley and grabbed the microphone from him. It was recorded by BBC and apparently won an award. The issues to which the hon. Gentleman refers are very important, but I do not agree that this is revisionism at all. It is what happened and I objected to it.

Let us consider state aid. I will give the figures: Germany received as much as £4 billion a year in grants and subsidies, while our coal and coalfields in the United Kingdom were languishing. I know that coal is not popular now in quite the way it was, but none the less the principle is there: the state aid policy discriminated in favour of Germany and France. It is part of the deal: the European Coal and Steel Community, and supranationality—that is what it is all about. Our people in those communities were not compensated by grants and regional aid under various EU schemes and handouts, and they have never forgotten it.

Furthermore, the Court of Auditors reports that we debate in this House, although not on the Floor of the House, which we should, have genuinely never been signed off. Almost never has a Court of Auditors report ever been signed off. The money never got to those who really needed it. That was compounded by a wave of scandals—for example, over milk quotas, backhanders and fraud—all of which has been well documented over the years. The list is endless. In any case, our taxpayers—from the whole United Kingdom—paid for those inadequate grants through our own massive contributions to the EU of up to £18 billion a year and rising. If we do not fully disengage, this is what we—the people of Scotland, too—will be suffering from.

The Bill is therefore about the economic future of our future generations. It is about a new competition law administered on our own terms in our own country by our own courts. It will prevent our professional working voters from being trapped indefinitely in an EU economic satellite run by the unelected European Commission and Council of Ministers. We will have no veto. It will be imposed on us and it is an outrage that that should be the case. That is why the notwithstanding clauses, which I played some part in developing, are a matter of vital national interest and sovereignty. Otherwise, we will continue to be subjected to EU laws on terms and conditions imposed on us by them. The bottom line is that, for the vital national interest of this country, that situation cannot be allowed to continue.

I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) perhaps understands that a little better as we move forward. Yesterday, I got the impression that although he was very concerned about breaking international law, the reality is that there are circumstances—my exchanges with him yesterday are informative on this point—about which he is now very aware, as are other Members who signed that amendment, which as yet I do not think has been completely disposed of. This is about our sovereignty and our ability to maintain political and economic sovereignty and to save jobs, develop them and create enterprise.

This is not a small matter; this is monumental. It is all very well for the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey to talk about this in terms of independence, but people will not thank him, and they will not thank the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) or anyone from any other part of the United Kingdom when the truth comes home to roost, which is that the EU will not allow us to compete favourably or at all. Its cardinal principle is to make sure that we cannot compete with it, and that is a reason in itself why we have to stand firm on the whole question of the notwithstanding clauses.