Trade Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly welcome the Minister to the House and I entirely endorse the three principles of good public policy that he set out in his speech: good government, clear thinking and decisiveness. Alas, they entirely refute the trade policy that the Government are following, which does not observe any of these three principles. This is because by far the best trade policy for this country is membership of the European Union, the second best is membership of the single market and customs union and the third best is membership of the customs union with the best deal we can get in terms of access to the single market and services.

The first policy—membership of the European Union—was the policy of every Prime Minister of every party and Government from Harold Macmillan in 1962 through to David Cameron in 2016. The third of those policies—membership of the customs union—was effectively the policy of Theresa May, and we have come to this pass because of the collapse of successive waves of good government, clear thinking and decisiveness.

However, we have to make the best that we can of the dire situation. I will make two comments on the situation in which we currently find ourselves. The first is to do with the wider trade negotiating strategy of the Government with the European Union because, with all due respect to the noble Lord, Lord Astor, it accounts for half of our trade and dwarfs all the other potential trading partners.

If it is true, as reported this week, that the Government are proposing to unilaterally withdraw from the withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol that was agreed last year, not only would that be a major issue for the Government in terms of their breach of international law—we have seen that the Government’s chief legal adviser has resigned today because he is not prepared to implement that policy—it would also be a very big issue for this House. When the legislation comes to us, we will be invited to agree to a course of action that is, frankly, unconstitutional. It is also a clear breach of the Salisbury convention, which states that, in respect of major, controversial policies, Governments should abide by their election manifestos, and the Conservative Party’s manifesto pledged to implement the withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol.

Therefore, it is my view, on reading about our present constitutional arrangements, that we should reject outright a Bill that involves Her Majesty’s Government abrogating the withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol agreed by Boris Johnson last year.

In respect of the wider trade negotiations taking place at the moment, the two key sticking points appear to be fishing and state aid. Obviously, we want the Government to get the best deal they can in terms of fishing quotas. On state aid, the Minister said that he was the private secretary of Nigel Lawson, who would be absolutely aghast at the Government’s proposal to cast all current state aid restrictions to the winds so that they can follow a new interventionist industrial policy.

As it happens, I am to the left of the Minister and I actually support a more active industrial policy, but everyone who deals with trade and industry knows that, before you can get to a decent industrial policy, you have to have a stable economic policy, an open trading system, a stable exchange rate and clear, effective and understandable rules for takeovers and acquisitions. All of these are at stake in the Government’s Brexit policy and their trade policy in particular. I greatly regret that the Minister’s speech did not in any way reconcile the high aims and ambitions he set out at the beginning with the actual policy of Her Majesty’s Government.

Trade Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments & Ping Pong (Hansard) & Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 2nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Polak; I did not realise we had so much in common. I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Collins and Lord Alton, on their moving speeches. I support them and very much hope that there will be a vast majority in favour.

I have been an elected, and now appointed, politician for more than 20 years and in all those years, I have seen critiquing the Government, whichever side they were, as good sport; it is what small parties are for and what opposition is. In the last year, though, there have been two well-publicised, well-known events that have brought home to me just how morally bankrupt this Government are. The first was the decision to restart arms sales to Saudi Arabia, calling the possible war crimes against the Yemenis “isolated incidents”, and the second was their inability to see that feeding hungry schoolchildren is actually a moral imperative. They had to be shamed into it by a footballer who had principles. Well done, Marcus Rashford; thank God for people like him. So, this Government actually need these amendments to do the right thing.

During consideration of the last set of amendments, the Minister took a dig that was slightly below the belt, saying that I was implying that officials were not competent and got us bad trade deals. My point is not that the officials were at fault; rather, they are operating in a political climate of inept and, worse, incompetent government. We have to do the right thing here today. We have to vote for these amendments because that is the only way of making sure that our Government do the right thing.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, we have heard many powerful speeches today. If I may say so, the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is one of the most powerful I have ever heard in the House. He made an utterly compelling case for sending this issue back to the House of Commons. Purely as a matter of parliamentary protocol, we should do so, and not only because, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, rightly said, the opportunity for the Government to honour their own commitment to seek a compromise can arise only if this matter goes back to the Commons, but because the current amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has addressed the points made in the Commons speech last week by Greg Hands, the Minister for International Trade, about why we should not agree to the earlier Alton amendment.

Greg Hands said in the House of Commons last Tuesday:

“Nobody denies the importance and seriousness of the situation in Xinjiang … or that human rights cannot and should not be traded away in a trade agreement or anything like it.”


He went on to say that the Government are clear

“that doing more trade does not have to come at the expense of human rights. In fact, as I am sure my hon. and right hon. Friends will agree, there is a strong positive correlation between countries that trade freely and human rights”.

However, he said that the House of Commons should not agree to the then amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, because it

“would, in effect, take out of the hands of Government their prerogative powers to conduct international relations with regard to trade”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/1/21; cols. 796-97.]

The current Alton amendment meets that point entirely. It does not take prerogative powers out of the hands of the Government; rather, it enables Parliament and government to be better informed. They could not be better informed than by the advice and judgment of the High Court, and other courts in the land, on the specific issue of whether genocide is being committed. It does not even matter whether the Government intend to come back with further proposals. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, has already met the test which Greg Hands set last week.

On the wider question, where I have some sympathy with the Minister, there are wider issues involved here —of course there are. When I was a Minister, I visited China and had substantial dealings with them. Those who of us who have been engaged in these events for many years are aware that we have a growing China problem, which is not just about the Uighurs and potential genocide. It is also about Taiwan, Hong Kong and China’s belt and road initiative. What we have in Xi Jinping is essentially a leader who is not so new now—his leadership is 10 or 11 years old—but who is increasingly Stalinist. It was reasonable to think in the decades after Deng—although, of course, Tiananmen Square was a wake-up call—that China might be on a more liberal path and that we should move accordingly. It turns out that that was a mistake. We all make mistakes, and there has been a significant change in circumstance. The Xi Jinping decision to essentially abolish what passes for the Chinese constitution at the end of his original 10-year term was clearly a massive wake-up call. Many of the worst atrocities being reported now, which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred to, have flowed from the radicalisation of his regime, and we have to respond accordingly.

We have been here before. I said that the regime was increasingly Stalinist. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in a powerful speech, did not exhibit himself to be a great fan of the Foreign Office. He used certain epithets about it, which might indicate its weakness or pusillanimity, and so on. I have spent a large part of the last two years researching and writing about Ernest Bevin who, I can assure the noble Lord, was in no way weak as Foreign Secretary. He stood up to Stalin with determination, well before that was fashionable either in this country or, crucially, the United States, where the early years of the Truman Administration sought to appease Stalin. Bevin stood up with a relentlessness for which we should all be grateful; maybe our freedom depends upon it. Great departures such as NATO certainly depended upon his actions.

However—and this goes straight to the point of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton—although two situations are never alike and there are differences between the situation with China today and with the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s, one hugely important commonality is that there was then a distinct absence of knowledge about, and much controversy about, what was actually going on in Russia. Many people, predominantly but not exclusively on the left in politics, I am ashamed to say, thought that Soviet Russia was “a new civilisation”—to use the phrase in the famous book by the Webbs. They thought that it had found a new pathway to success and prosperity which we should honour. What goes straight to the point of this amendment is that they constantly poured cold water on reports coming out of Russia that there were massive abuses of human rights which verged on genocide, and which we now know were genocide.

Trade Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend has just made an enormously powerful speech, and two points in particular will impress themselves on the House. The first is that the Government’s position in saying that it should be for the courts to decide whether a genocide is taking place but not giving them any powers even to offer an opinion on that fact is a recipe for inaction. It is a recipe for inaction in one of the worst causes imaginable because we are talking about genocide. It is a striking fact that, historically, the British Government have never declared a genocide to be in progress before it has been completed. We have to wrestle with the legacy of history. We did not do it in respect of Stalin; we did not do it in respect of Hitler. We have afterwards taught our children in schools about the horrors of genocide against the Jews and against many other races which those dictators and others carried through, so we should learn the lessons and seek to stop genocides in future.

The second powerful point made by my noble friend is that part of the reason why we should go down the route which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has so convincingly laid out for us is not simply to reveal a genocide that is currently in progress—or may be; that is to be determined, but there is very good circumstantial evidence which should be tested and courts are good at doing so—but to limit the further extension of that atrocity while it is happening. We should do that rather than doing what may well happen, which is that in 20 or 30 years’ time, when people may talk about Xi Jinping in the same way as they talk about Stalin and Hitler, we ask: what are the lessons and why did we not learn them at the time?

The course proposed today seems not only deeply moral but relevant in terms of our own capacity to avoid greater horrors and problems that we ourselves will have to face. The noble Lord referred to a red line that he has; we should be much more worried about the red wall which we face in respect of Xi Jinping. That will have to be addressed over time, and it is much better that we get the measure of it earlier rather than later. Surely the lesson from such dictators in the past is that there was a moment when it was possible to stand up to them and find a way through that did not involve extreme action. We could all look at it in due course. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, and I had a good-natured exchange last time about what he sees as the great weakness of the Foreign Office. It has not always been weak. My great hero is Ernie Bevin because he stood up to Stalin after 1945 and we did not have to repeat the horrors of another full-scale war. There is plenty of combustible material in respect of China that could lead to war in future. We have only to look at what is going on in Hong Kong and Taiwan, let alone what is going on inside China itself. These matters are weighty. My noble friend said that some votes matter more than others. One reason for that is the consequences of action and inaction, and there is no bigger set of issues than those that we are addressing today.

The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said that the Minister, for whom we have a high regard, had been handed a poisoned chalice. We are very glad to see that he is still well on the Government Front Bench and will be in a condition to reply to this debate at the end. However—if I may use a Chinese analogy—in trying to persuade us not to agree to this amendment, what the Minister has done is offer us a very Chinese artefact: a paper tiger. He has made all kinds of imprecations as to what might happen if we agree to the amendment. Apparently, the constitution is going to be ripped up forthwith, which we are doing by the back door—what a large back door; an extraordinary number of people appear to be walking through it in remarkable unison. We were told that the amendment would somehow go against the wishes of the elected House. On the previous amendment, where the Minister told us not to be seduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, he said that there was a resounding majority in the other place, which was why we should not insist on it. Not only was the majority when the Commons voted on the first of these amendments only 15 but, as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, rightly said, there was not a vote on the amendment in the name of noble Lord, Lord Alton; there was a resounding silence on it from the House of Commons. We should therefore resoundingly ask the House of Commons resoundingly to resolve its silence; that is our duty in respect of the amendment before us.

On the second element of the paper tiger the Minister put forward, he said, in establishing his red line, that the Government would not agree to expand the jurisdiction of the courts to assess the existence of genocide. But we are a parliamentary democracy. It is not for the Government to say whether the courts should assess whether genocide has taken place. It is for Parliament to legislate on whether the courts should have that power.

The Minister gave us a constitutional lecture on the separation of powers. It is not for the Government to tell the courts what they will and will not consider. That is for Parliament, making the law, to determine. It does not matter what the Government’s red line is; the issue is what Parliament’s red line is, and we do not know that yet, because the House of Commons has not had the opportunity to give its opinion. This House has given its opinion twice, which is unusual, since, normally, in ping-pong, we start to become faint-hearted and susceptible to the arguments about the role of this House and all that. Unusually, this House has had larger majorities as we have considered this matter again. I suspect there will be a very decisive majority at the end of this debate, too. I strongly urge all noble Lords who sympathise with the arguments, but are in doubt about what they should do, to vote for the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, because that will ensure this has the best possible consideration by the House of Commons.

I will make one final point about the red line and the red wall. The issues we face are extremely grave. If you read about the conversation between President Biden and President Xi Jinping, although there is a determination to have decent bilateral relationships, there is no clear meeting of minds between those two great powers. As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, rightly said, it would be disingenuous of Her Majesty’s Government to pretend that there in respect of the United Kingdom, too.

Many noble Lords may read a thing called China Daily, which we have circulated free to us—the propaganda sheets of the Chinese Government. China Daily’s account of that conversation should leave one in no doubt about what Xi Jinping said. According to its interpretation, he said:

“China hopes the US respects China’s core interests and cautiously deals with matters related to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, which are China’s domestic issues concerning the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”


On the opposite page, in a remarkable story headlined “Reporting the truth about China”, there is a whole series of assertions and lies about what is going on Xinjiang, including the claim that there are no events that are out of order taking place there, that the re-education camps are to improve the employment prospects of the Uighurs and nothing more, and that in the BBC facts have been “twisted” and the situation

“has been angled to give a certain, preconceived message.”

Of course, since we last debated this issue, the BBC has been banned from China and Hong Kong.

That brings us back to the need to have a clear assessment of what is going on, attracting and weighing evidence. That is the fundamental purpose of this amendment. When this matter was last considered by the House of Commons—in the strange procedure that did not actually allow a vote to take place on the key issue—Greg Hands said:

“Fundamentally, it is right and proper that Parliament takes a position on credible reports of genocide relating to proposed free trade agreements rather than, in effect, subcontracting responsibility to the courts to tell us what to think.”—[Official Report, Commons, 9/2/21; col. 219.]


Parliament is not subcontracting responsibility to the courts. On the contrary, it is asking eminent judicial figures and the courts to report on and expose the facts, so we know what is happening. Once those facts have been exposed, it is for Parliament and the Government to decide what action should follow. But we will not get that action unless we have the facts. This is a circular process: we need the facts; we need proper inquiry; we need measured judgments made on them just so that Ministers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, can make balanced judgments in due course.

We do not want, in 20 or 30 years’ time, to have to spend time in our schools teaching our young people about the genocide in China in the 2020s that we did nothing to resist, involving what could be terrible consequences in terms of the relationships between the great powers, because we were not even prepared to consider whether a genocide was taking place.

Trade Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments & Lords Hansard
Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Adonis]

At end insert, “, and do propose Amendment 3G as an amendment to Commons Amendment 3C—

3G: In subsection (6), at end insert “within reasonable time.””

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I move this amendment only for the purposes of precipitating a debate. The Minister rightly said that the other place has considered this matter three times, and three times produced a majority for the position that comes before us again this afternoon. We obviously should not impose our will again. I pay tribute to the Minister, who has been extremely conscientious in his handling of this matter all the way through. I add that the only reason I am moving an amendment myself is that I could not persuade the noble Lord, Lord Alton, to move one.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, is the hero of this whole process. He is held in very high esteem in the House. The Minister described him as a force of nature; I would add that he is also a force for humanity in the House. When, as I hope, we ultimately we get to grips with the situation in respect of China and the Uighurs without the rollout of a full genocide—which could be in progress at the moment—the noble Lord will be among those who deserve credit, as will all those who have fought so hard over so many years for the rights of these people to be heard. They are people who would not be heard if politicians like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, did not take up their cause.

On the merits of the case before us, we have converged. There will be a process involving a formal review of what is going on in Xinjiang in respect of the Uighurs. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, would have preferred that it had a more formal judicial component, a view which I supported. We began with it going to a court and then to a judicial committee; we now have a parliamentary committee. While a parliamentary committee has limitations, I note that the Minister flags up in his own amendment that the committee could bring in senior judicial figures to help in its considerations. We could therefore get quite close to what was being proposed before—and I respect the Minister’s final remarks about these matters being considered in a timely fashion.

It is also very important that nobody thinks that there are easy answers here. Of course our relations with a great trading nation such as China—one of our greatest trading partners and a rising, not declining, power—are always going to be problematic. When the Government say in their strategy paper Global Britain in a Competitive Age, published last week, in respect of China:

“We will continue to pursue a positive trade and investment relationship with China, while ensuring our national security and values are protected”,


that is a perfectly fair statement of policy, which I think any Government would sign up to. I was a member of a Government who sought to maintain precisely this balancing act, and one of the very few Ministers since the war to have visited Taiwan. I went to look at its outstanding education system but I remember being told by very senior members of the Foreign Office what I was and was not allowed to say when I was there. I was urged particularly to avoid having any photographs taken with members of its Government, lest this be taken as somehow giving recognition to Taiwan as an independent state.

We have all been there, in a sense, and I do not criticise the Government for having to maintain a difficult balancing act. This is the nature of modern life, where we live in interdependent economies. I still fondly hope that it will be possible to foster better relations with China, including being able to boost trade on the basis of an improved recognition of human rights in China itself.

As the Bill finally reaches the statute book, however, it is worth us considering the problem we may be entering into. It is not because this issue is not difficult—we all recognise that it is—but because it seems, and I say this with all due respect to the Minister and his colleagues, that the Government are in danger of dialling up both their concern for human rights and, at the same time, their desire for improved trading relations with China, without recognising that there is an inevitable tension between those things. They seem to be moving on from a recognition of the facts of life into, dare I say it, wanting to have their cake and eating it. You just need to read the relevant documents and statements by members of the Government to understand that.

In what I thought was in many ways an admirable Statement by the Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons yesterday, he said of the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang:

“This is one of the worst human rights crises of our time and I believe the evidence is clear … It includes satellite imagery; survivor testimony; official documentation and, indeed, leaks from the Chinese Government themselves; credible open-source reporting, including from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International; and visits by British diplomats … In sum, the evidence points to a highly disturbing programme of repression. Expressions of religion have been criminalised, and Uyghur language and culture discriminated against on a systematic scale. There is widespread use of forced labour; women forcibly sterilised; children separated from their parents; an entire population subject to surveillance, including collection of DNA and use of facial recognition software and so-called predictive policing algorithms.”—[Official Report, Commons, 22/3/21; col. 621.]


He went on in this vein. Let us be clear what is happening: this is prima facie evidence of a genocide, and the Foreign Secretary as good as said that in the House of Commons yesterday.

The Minister’s letter to us, which he kindly made available just before the debate, says that

“the UK is sending a clear message that we believe those responsible for serious human rights violations or breaches of international humanitarian law in China should face consequences.”

But the head of the Government, the Prime Minister, said in a meeting of Chinese businesspeople in Downing Street on 12 February—I know that Harold Wilson told us a week is a long time in politics, but 12 February is only a few weeks ago—that he was “fervently Sinophile” and determined to boost trade

“whatever the occasional political difficulties”.

Are we talking about prima facie evidence of genocide or “occasional political difficulties”? There is a bit of a gulf between those two statements. Ministers such as the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, whom we hold in high regard, are having to walk the tightrope between those policies, and I say gently to him: I think they will fall off.

It is not possible to square what is going on in China at the moment with a policy of expanding trade as if there were only “occasional political difficulties” when another part of the Government, and a large and increasing part of the international community, rightly say that there is prima facie evidence of a genocide and there must be consequences. The reason is not just because it is the right and humanitarian thing to do, although it obviously is, but because it is not a sustainable policy for this country to pretend on the one hand that we can boost trade and have business as usual with China while, on the other, there is ever greater evidence, which will become ever more prominent in the media, of an extreme situation in the western part of China that increasingly resembles a genocide.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, in my closing remarks there are just a few points I would like to focus on. First, I am sure we would all agree that the tone of debate in this House has been excellent throughout the passage of this legislation. It is a testament to this House that we have been able to have these debates, and noble Lords should be proud of the improvements they have made to the Bill. I would like very much to join with the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, in thanking all the noble Lords and officials who have helped us to reach the point that we have done today.

In some areas, the Bill is not recognisable from the one that we started with. In particular, I believe that we have demonstrated through our words and actions during the passage of the Bill that trade does not have to come at the expense of human rights. Indeed, I think if one wanted a fitting short title for the Bill, given the point that we have reached, that would be a perfectly admirable one: “Trade does not have to come at the expense of human rights”. Speaking personally, I find it impossible to envisage the circumstances in which Parliament would agree to any trade deal to be done with a country that is found to have committed the evil of genocide.

The noble Lord, Lord Collins, raised the issue of the content of the FCDO’s Human Rights and Democracy report. Of course, the Foreign Office publishes that report annually, and it touches on many relevant issues, including matters concerning human rights in the context of business and the private sector. I understand completely why the noble Lord has raised these points, and I will look to see whether this can be enhanced in further reports.

The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, asked about the timing juxtaposition of reports produced under the Agriculture Act and any reports produced under today’s amendment. I am afraid to say to the noble Baroness that, as no process has yet been put in place in relation to reports being produced under today’s amendment, her question is unanswerable.

In reply to the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, I can confirm that the Office for Investment is not in the process of negotiating any investment agreements with China. Again, I can also confirm that we have no preferential trade agreements in place with China.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, himself stated in one of our earlier debates, with a memorable reference to Banquo’s ghost, that the reason he was tabling an amendment was so that the other place could take up the baton and adapt and improve his amendment. Similar statements were made by my noble friends Lord Blencathra and Lord Lansley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham. This place has discharged its duties by asking those in the other place to reconsider; they have reconsidered and sent back an amendment.

I believe that the amendment passed for the second time by the other place is a reasonable and proportionate compromise that will ensure that the voice of Parliament is heard loudly and clearly on this vitally important issue going forward. The decisions to be made on future trade agreements are, of course, political decisions to be taken by the Government, but with appropriate oversight from Parliament. This is what the amendment before us now guarantees, and noble Lords can and should take pride in the knowledge that the Bill might very well not have contained such guarantees—indeed, I will go further and say that there are no circumstances in which the Bill would have contained those guarantees were it not for the sustained and passionate representations that Members on all sides of this Chamber have made over recent months. Again, I believe that the House can take pride in that, and I offer my sincere gratitude to all Members who have contributed to the debates we have had on this issue.

I hope that noble Lords can now come together to support the Government’s approach, pass this amendment and progress this Trade Bill on its way, at long last, to becoming a Trade Act, content in the knowledge that we have fulfilled our constitutional obligations and—if I may say—have done so in the most searching, diligent and passionate manner. I say to noble Lords that they have undoubtedly made this a better Bill.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Motion A1 withdrawn.