Baroness Hoey
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Customs and Borders
Baroness Hoey Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Yvette Cooper
That is right. Many of these manufacturing towns and areas may well have voted to leave the European Union, but they will also argue strongly for support for manufacturing jobs within their communities. We should be listening to their voices.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way; she has been very generous. If she wants to unite the House on staying in “the” customs union, or “a” customs union, would it not be much better to show the European Union that we are united in wanting a free trade deal, instead of giving the EU the opportunity to play us off against one another?
Yvette Cooper
A customs union should be at the heart of that free trade agreement. Whatever the trading or future partnership agreement should be with Europe ––and we clearly need a close, continuous trading arrangement––my argument is that, for the sake of manufacturing and of Northern Ireland, a customs union should be the central part of it. That is what is in our interests.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
Mr Speaker, I very much think that I will not need to take cognisance of your allowing me longer than Members who will speak later.
I see the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke)—my constituent—regularly and I congratulate him on his speech. He said that he agreed with every single word of the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), who moved the motion, and I can say—very carefully—that he will probably not agree with a single word that I say. I feel a little alone today. We will have an important debate about this issue in a few weeks’ time, when there will be a very different tone in the Chamber, and I hope that saying my few words today will not stop my being called when it comes to our real debate on this issue.
The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe said in the final sentence of his speech that we should stay in the customs union and the single market, but there is no doubt that he was really saying that we should stay in the EU. I am afraid that a lot of Members in the Chamber are using the issue of the customs union as a way of restarting the process of trying to stay in the EU. They will not achieve that, but they are sending a message that the European Union will love. The EU will love seeing such division in this Parliament and that we cannot unite in telling it that we want a proper agreement in which we do not need tariffs and under which we can work with the EU as we would want to work with the rest of the world.
Mr Clarke
The hon. Lady does not normally use a European debate to make the allegation that this is just a subtle way of staying in the EU and defying the referendum. She will recall that during our eight days in Committee on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, no amendment was tabled as an attempt to stay in the European Union. Nobody has cast a vote in this House to stay in the European Union. Although there have been only two speeches so far, there have been many interventions, and nobody has stood up to demand that we stay in the European Union. Of course, the private opinion of many Members—the majority, I think—is that it would be better if we stayed in the European Union, but we are working on the premise that, if we do leave, we must minimise the damage.
Kate Hoey
My point, of course, is that if we were to stay in the customs union, that would be seen as a transition before going back in again. For a start, staying in a customs union is not taking back control of our trade, and I will come back to that in a moment.
Members who want to stay in the single market have lost that argument because the previous Prime Minister was very clear in public, on television and in the House that a vote to leave the European Union would be a vote to leave the single market. The public who voted to leave, and even those who voted to remain, understood that a vote to leave was a vote to give up the treaties of the European Union. Within those treaties, of course, is where we find the customs union.
I have been in this place long enough to remember the great and wonderful MP for Eton and Slough, Joan Lestor. She was a principled and doughty champion of the developing world. I remember, and have since looked up, one of the speeches she made back in 1971 opposing the UK joining the European Economic Community. I cannot remember whether the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe was here in 1971—I know he was here a very long time ago—but he knew Joan Lestor well. Sadly, she is no longer with us. It is worth reading part of that speech:
“The political significance of British entry into Europe will have far-reaching effects upon the third world, the developing world.
Because of the protectionist policies of E.E.C. we shall not close the narrow channels between the rich and poor nations but rather widen them. Much has been said about the ability of E.E.C. to increase assistance to the developing world and to guarantee that the Community will continue to be outward looking in the future.
I cannot understand—and nobody has explained this to me from either side of the House—how an organisation like E.E.C., which everybody agrees is based on a protective tariff wall to which this country must agree as part of the price of entry and which will mean erecting a fresh tariff barrier against helping other parts of the world, can be said to be outward-looking. I do not believe the interests of the E.E.C. are identical with the interests of the smaller, developing and weak nations of the world.”—[Official Report, 21 October 1971; Vol. 823, c. 954.]
I will take Members back a little further to 1962—I genuinely do not think the right hon. and learned Gentleman was here then—and the words of Clement Attlee:
“I think that integration with Europe is a step backward. By all means let us get the greatest possible agreement between the various continents, but I am afraid that if we join the Common Market we shall be joining not an outward-looking organisation, but an inward-looking organisation.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 8 November 1962; Vol. 244, c. 428.]
All these years later, some things have changed, but the European Union is still an inward-looking organisation. Do we really want our future arrangements to be tied to that?
The EU customs union is not a progressive policy, and it is certainly not one that anyone who vaguely calls themselves of the left should desire to retain. That is probably why there are so few customs unions in the world. The protectionist external tariff around the entire European Union prevents poor developing countries from accessing our markets on equal terms, as many of us saw when we met members of the Commonwealth who were here last week. They are desperate for the changes that would come about if we were no longer in the customs union. For months if not years, we have heard the people behind the motion proclaiming that the EU market is singularly valuable, yet this policy denies the poorest people in the world the ability to freely trade with us or with the rest of the EU market. To make matters worse, the tax paid is largely siphoned off to Brussels, with UK consumers seeing little or no return.
In 2018, surely we want the development and growth of the poorest nations so that they are successful through trade, not reliant on aid. The customs union is a deliberate and persistent barrier to realising that. Outside the customs union, the UK could immediately reduce or remove these tariffs, becoming a great friend to the world’s poor.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
I am listening carefully to the hon. Lady but, with respect, she is rehearsing familiar arguments. What is her answer to the point on Northern Ireland that has been expressed?
Kevin Hollinrake
We spend a lot of time in this Chamber developing new regulations and rules that put costs on business. They might be environmental regulations, workplace regulations or animal welfare regulations. If the hon. Lady is talking about doing a free trade deal with nations that do not have such high standards, would she not be putting UK businesses at a significant disadvantage?
Kate Hoey
There is an issue there, but it is something that we can solve through negotiation and discussion. We do not solve it by putting up an immediate barrier to countries that desperately want to benefit from trading with us but are currently prevented from doing so.
The public’s expectation when they voted to leave, or even when they voted to remain, was that if we chose to leave, we would regain our trade policy. I do not think that we can do that other than outside the regressive customs union.
I will move on to Northern Ireland in a moment, but let me respond to a number of points that have been made in various ways. Why should we not want to trade with the rest of the world? Why are we being weak? Why can we not get our own trade deals? The EU takes so long to get a trade deal. We have seen how long it has taken, and we can do so much better.
Ruth George
Businesses in my constituency have expressed huge concern that, when we leave the EU, we will cease to receive the preferential tariffs that we currently enjoy with 188 countries outside the EU. Those businesses will cease to have the same competitive level playing field with EU countries that they have now, and by the time we have these free trade agreements, they will have lost their trade.
Kate Hoey
The problem with our staying inside a customs union is that we would then be subject to the decisions of a European Union of which we are not a member. Let us not forget that many businesses in this country do not trade with the EU at all, but are bound by all the rules, regulations and paraphernalia that go with EU membership. In any kind of customs union, I cannot see that the EU would allow the kind of things for which some of my colleagues are pushing.
While the EU accounts for 40% of our trade, that is because the arrangements imposed on us by our EU membership concentrate trade within this protectionist block. Although the proportion of our trade with the rest of the world is rising, I believe that the customs union holds us back and we could be doing so much better. We do not seem to have much confidence in our own country and our own businesses. Despite what the EU has insisted on, those businesses have still managed to export, trade and do very well. We could do so much better if we were outside the customs union.
Mr Clarke
I will not intervene again, I promise. It is very courteous of the hon. Lady to give way.
Let us look at China as an important market. Germany exports four or five times as much—I am probably understating it—to China as the United Kingdom does. It is not held back in some curious way by being in the EU, and nor is the growth of all our trade with the wider world held back in the slightest by the customs union or the single market.
Kate Hoey
The right hon. and learned Member and other Members have said that, and we have to make a lot of changes in this country to ensure that we can do much better than has been the case inside the European Union, but being outside the EU and the customs union will be almost a catalyst by ensuring that our businesses have that opportunity and freedom to do better than they are doing at the moment.
Those people who pushed for the Norway option during the referendum campaign and even since seem to forget that Norway is outside the customs union and is doing well. In fact, when I went to a conference in Norway recently, the feeling among people there was that they wanted to get out of the European economic area as well. They are looking to us to make a successful transition from the EU and they will probably follow us.
Kate Hoey
No, I will not give way to my hon. Friend.
I should like to move on to the issue of the border and Northern Ireland. Under the Tony Blair Government, I was one of those who went over and campaigned for a yes vote. I was very keen to see what happened happen, and I pay tribute to all those who made that happen. There is no doubt that there is an issue relating to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but the European Union is seizing on divisions to pursue certain demands that are just not necessary. It is certainly using the Irish border as an issue with regard to the customs union. EU officials recently said that they had systematically and forensically annihilated the Prime Minister’s proposals for a loose customs arrangement, but in fact they did not do that—they simply refused to discuss any creative compromise. They talk down every British proposal, and they are being helped by some in this Parliament who talk down everything positive that is said about what might be done. Proposals are talked down and talked down.
People need to remember that there is already a legal border in Northern Ireland for excise, alcohol, tobacco, fuel duty, VAT, immigration, visas, vehicles, dangerous goods and security. Indeed, the primary function of the hard border of the past was to be a security border, not a customs border. People forget that because they want to forget what happened during those long years of troubles. Today all those border functions are enforced without any physical infrastructure, so adding customs declarations and marginally divergent product standards to the long list of functions that the border already implements invisibly does not require a huge, drastic change to the nature of the border.
Even in the most complicated area—agriculture —the director of animal health and welfare at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has already given evidence to Parliament that sanitary and phytosanitary-related risks would not be altered by Brexit from what the authorities are already managing across the border pre-Brexit, and that additional infra- structure at the border would not be needed. There are already cameras—not at the border itself, but further away—and checks are going on all the time. There is intelligence all the time. There is no reason why businesses on both sides of the border that need to move back and forth every day will have any problem.
Lady Hermon
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for allowing me to intervene. I can assure her that I do not forget the appalling years before the signing of the Good Friday agreement.
Will the hon. Lady please address the worrying issue that, if there is in any shape or form a harder border than what we have at the moment, Sinn Féin will exploit that and agitate for a border poll, which would jeopardise Northern Ireland’s constitutional status as part of the United Kingdom? I, as a Unionist, will not tolerate that, and we need to be careful that we address that issue.
Kate Hoey
Of course Sinn Féin would love a border poll, but as the hon. Lady knows, there are regulations about when a border poll can be held, and there has to be a certain ratio of contentment before that can happen. It is almost as if we are being blackmailed by Sinn Féin and those who have been responsible for violence in the past. It is as if we have to shape our whole economic policy and future according to whether some dissidents will start to do dreadful things again. That is not how we should tackle it. We should take those people on and put them in jail, and we should make sure that decent, ordinary people can go about their lives without being attacked and threatened by the idea that if we do not do Brexit in a particular way, terrorism will start again.
Hywel Williams
At the recent meeting of the Brexit Committee in Northern Ireland, the Deputy Chief Constable said that he was absolutely against a physical border post. Was he blackmailing us?
Kate Hoey
No, he was not at all. The problem is that people think of a hard border as big cameras, lights, structures and so on. I remember those, as does my hon. Friend the Member for North Down (Lady Hermon); we all remember what that looked like. No one is talking about having that again, but some people are using it as a way to change the fact that the people of this country voted to leave the EU, the single market and the customs union.
Kate Hoey
No.
I believe that the EU is using the border to try to change our policy. It is obviously unhappy that we are leaving and is doing everything possible. It is being helped by the Irish Government, but the Irish Government should be terribly worried that we will end up with no deal, which is not what anyone wants, because that would really hammer the Republic of Ireland. Varadkar and the Irish Government should get in there and use their position to get the European Union to see some common sense. Such a small proportion of total European Union trade relates to the Republic of Ireland, yet the Irish Government have got into a position where it is their country that the European Union is listening to.
There is a whole dishonesty about the debate in this Parliament, and I hope we do not see that. I mean that not in the sense of people being dishonourable, but in the sense that we are not really saying what we want to say. I hope that I am saying what I want to say: we should leave the customs union and the single market—that was what people voted for. The country will recognise the way in which the debate is now being pushed by those who fought so hard to remain, and people will see though that. We have to go ahead with getting out of the EU, getting our trade deals, getting our laws, and not being subject to the European Court of Justice, which we would have to be if we stayed in the customs union. I hope that today will be the preparation for what will be a very big and serious debate in a few weeks’ time.
Several hon. Members rose—