UK and EU Relations

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, the most striking Brexit fact that I have learned is that trucks going to and from the European Union through Dover take two minutes to process, while trucks from outside the EU take 20. How long do the Government hope it will take for trucks to and from the present EU states to be processed from April 2019?

The difference between two and 20 minutes at Dover graphically illustrates the challenge we face with Brexit, as does the debate we had on Ireland last week, when the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, was reduced to telling us about pubs he had visited in Enniskillen because he was unable to address the two fundamental concerns of the debate. The first was how the Northern Irish border is going to become the external border of the EU and yet customs checks are going, in 18 months’ time, to be magically frictionless and electronic—presumably as frictionless and electronic as they currently are at Dover. The second was how the common travel area would continue once the UK and Ireland have different visa and immigration rules. Even diverting down the highways and byways of Enniskillen, Lord Bourne could not keep going for 20 minutes in explaining how the Government’s magical thinking will ensure that everything will be fine on 1 April 2019.

The other papers we are discussing today fit into two categories. There are those that claim that everything will be fine because nothing will change; and those that claim that everything will be fine because everything will change. The common thread in both is magical thinking. In the paper on future customs arrangements, we are encouraged to think that everything will be fine because of an entity which at present is a figment of the ministerial imagination, namely, “highly streamlined customs arrangements”. The Government say they will seek to maintain a series of facilitations that are part of the existing customs union: the waiver for the requirement to submit entry and exit summary declarations, continued membership of the common transit convention, and mutual recognition of authorised economic operators. Let us hope that this is possible. However, the revealing part of the position paper is what is not being kept: countless other measures which facilitate frictionless trade and form the existing customs union. We keep coming back to this: if we mean to protect the status quo in trade, why do we not simply maintain the status quo and remain in the customs union and the single market?

This theme recurs in the paper on the exchange and protection of personal data, where our domestic data protection rules, at the time of our exit, will be aligned with the EU data protection framework. The Government’s paper states:

“The UK’s data protection law fully implements the EU framework”,


for once the Data Protection Bill has passed, both the general data protection regulation and the data protection directive will be part of UK law. To maintain the free flow of personal data, the Government suggest that our relationship should be built upon the adequacy model. However, this requires routine validation by the European Court of Justice, so how is this going to work when we are outside that court? And how is this compatible with the Government’s aim of playing a leading global role in the development of data protection standards?

In the paper dealing with cross-border civil judicial co-operation, the Government similarly state that the,

“optimum outcome for both sides will be an agreement reflecting our close existing relationship”.

To do so, the Government are, once again, proposing to incorporate EU law wholesale into domestic law: Rome I and II. EU law is clear: if an international agreement contains provisions which are, in substance, identical to EU law, the European Court of Justice can be the only body which has jurisdiction to give definite interpretations of those provisions. Yet the one thing the Government seem determined to change at all costs is the role—any role—for that court once we have left the European Union.

All the alternatives to the European Court of Justice set out in the paper come with disadvantages highlighted by the Government themselves. A reporting or monitoring clause, or a joint committee, do not possess sufficient legal authority for they are not binding, and the arbitration model has not been tested in non-economic areas of agreement. It is important to note that the reason the Canadian deal and the EU-Singapore free trade agreement are not subject to the European Court of Justice is precisely because they do not wish to co-operate as closely as we would wish to in the construction of a common trading area.

Sharing data as closely as possible, frictionless and free trade, subscribing to the European Court of Justice in certain cases—the Government are investing huge political capital trying to construct a policy infrastructure which, even if it were successful, would never be as good as the status quo. But the price of failure is immense.