Trade Bill

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

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

[Lord Chidgey (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn on their excellent maiden speeches.

In the very limited time available to speak in this debate on the critical Trade Bill, I will concentrate my remarks on trade with Africa, acknowledging my interests as set out in the register. I have acted as a political co-ordinator for the parliamentary offices for budget oversight throughout the SADC region of southern Africa.

The Government stress the importance of trade agreements with Africa, particularly in a post-Brexit era. African economic growth outstrips many parts of the globe and many African countries have a common affinity with the United Kingdom—shared language, laws and accountancy practices. There is, however, an overwhelming desire to break the historic pattern of exporting raw materials and food and importing manufactured goods from the West. Instead, African countries are building trading agreements between them, supported by regional transport links rather than links merely to the nearest port.

This brings me directly to the development of treaties entered into with the European Union. Many African countries have signed economic partnership agreements but a number, notably Kenya, have stopped short of ratifying them in their Parliaments. In discussions with finance Ministers from Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda and other SADC members, with a deputy director-general at the UN and with senior parliamentarians from Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium and Ireland, it became clear that the EPAs, which had been developed from co-operation agreements that gave ACP exports preferential access to European markets, were deeply controversial. There are fears that the EPAs are undermining the sustainability of ACP countries and their regional integration processes. In this context, the status of the UK’s trade and development agreements with African countries at the end of the UK-EU transitional period is a crucial issue.

I would be grateful if the Minister could acknowledge the urgent need to clarify the status of the UK’s new free trade agreements with blocs of eastern and southern African countries. To these must be added others in east and west Africa which have yet to be concluded. In particular, regarding the Southern African Customs Union, which was formed in 1910 and is the oldest customs union in Africa, can the Minister say if the agreement has been ratified by all parties? If not, which parties have ratified it and which have not? Will the new trading agreements be fully operational from 1 January 2021? What aid for trade commitments have the Government made since these agreements have been signed? What new aid for trade commitments for these countries will the UK Government be making in the financial year 2020-21 to accompany these agreements?

Trade Bill

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 8th October 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am glad to see this important clause being proposed as an addition to the Bill. I am also glad to see that Amendment 97 is before us. Sustainable development requires a global response and the commitment of all those who have signed up to the development goals. Either we take the development goals seriously or we do not. It is no good joining the world in saying that we are determined to establish these goals and work towards them and then, by something we do in the sphere of trade, undermining the very principles on which they are based. If the Government are serious in their commitment, as given to the international community at the UN, this clause should be totally acceptable. I really cannot see any reason why it would not be.

Amendment 97 is very important. Having spent much of my life working on the issues of the third world, it can be very sad to see how trade arrangements can undermine years of effort towards development and progress in some of the poorest parts of the world. We know that the world is not a level playing field. I have often heard it said by different Governments that one must ensure that developing countries have a level playing field, but it is not quite as simple as that because many of them are not fit to play on that level playing field. There has to be a situation in which they can be brought to be active players on it.

This is rather like what I was saying on the proposed new clause: either we are serious in our commitment or we are not. We have now had set up by the Government this great new department, which brings so many aspects of our international relations together, including overseas development and what used to be the responsibility of a special ministry. We are constantly assured, and reassured, that things are going to be better on the front of commitment to the third world than before because all these different elements are working together.

This is a test of how serious we are and how far those new arrangements are really working for a better lot for the third world. Again, as I said on the new clause, this amendment should be totally acceptable to the Government if they are serious about their commitment to the goals that they have undertaken. The Government tell us with great passion that, in our efforts to determine our post-EU role, we are going to be positive, constructive and key players in the international community. Well, if we want to be that, we must not just pass airy-fairy resolutions and make airy-fairy statements. We actually have to deliver in the nuts and bolts of the world the policies that are necessary—and nothing is more important in the nuts and bolts than the trade arrangements.

[Lord Chidgey (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Judd, in debate, because he brings to every debate a lifetime’s experience in parliaments and in international aid and development after a very successful career as an MP in a neighbouring constituency to my own—although it was some years earlier, I have to say. I must also comment on my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed’s tour de force. His research is so assiduous and he brings it to debates in such a manner that I cannot but sympathise with Ministers who must quail before him, knowing that his facts and figures are probably going to match anything provided by the special assistants that Ministers have available to them.

My noble friend Lord Purvis established his reputation very early in his career in the House of Lords, and it follows very closely the path of the noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale. It is a great shame that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, could not be with us this evening, because he has been a major force in developing the assessment, scrutiny and implementation of the SDGs, following on from his sterling work on the MDGs. He has been great in organising us in all-party groups to go to the UN and discuss the issues which, of course, will be major issues for us in the years ahead.

The MDGs and SDGs are linked very closely with international high-level agreements on achieving aid effectiveness and developing indicators to monitor that. I have had the good fortune over several years to be able to represent UK parliamentarians at a number of these high-level forums hosted by the UN in the developed and the developing world. I want to speak in support of Amendments 39 and 97 and I shall certainly support them with my colleagues.

Amendment 39 ensures that trade agreements cannot be implemented, signed or ratified unless they are consistent with the provisions of the SDGs. Amendment 97 requires a Minister of the Crown to report annually on the impact of trade agreements to which the UK is party on the world’s least developed countries. The 2030 agenda for the SDGs, adopted by all UN member states—we should remember that—in 2015, provided a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart, as many of us will know, are the 17 SDGs which are an urgent call for action for all countries—developed and developing—in a global partnership. As some noble Lords brought to our attention today, somehow the rate of achievement has not been up to the levels that we would have hoped, and it is very distressing to hear that the UK has yet to achieve one of those 17 goals.

Trade Bill

Lord Chidgey Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 15th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Chidgey (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on his presentation. He has second-guessed that I would want to speak about the implications of the amendment for countries in Africa. I agree with him that the amendment is important. It provides for the Secretary of State, on being satisfied that a developing or least developed country has committed human rights abuses, to remove it from the trade preference scheme. Specifically, with regard to preferential trade agreements for developing countries, at Second Reading of the Bill in the other place, the Secretary of State for International Trade, Liz Truss MP, said:

“Fundamentally, free trade is humanitarian and we will maintain preferential margins for developing countries, helping businesses lift millions out of poverty. As a Government, we have committed to going further than the EU has in terms of trade for development”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/5/20; col. 613.]


It is perhaps inevitably the case that the most extreme examples of state-sponsored human rights abuse tend to occur in least developed countries—not all but an awful lot—particularly where state institutions and governance are weak or non-existent. The African continent as a whole received close to £2.5 billion in ODA from the UK in 2018-19, thereby helping to address a wide range of poverty, development and human rights issues, and to tackle them head on. I shall give three examples of horrendous difficulties faced as a result of human rights abuse.

The countries of the Great Lakes region of Africa and their neighbours have suffered military incursions and civil wars for decades. Massive investments in peace-making and peacekeeping intervention by UN and AU forces, together with national armies, have barely kept the violence in check. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by the self-styled prophet Joseph Kony, roamed across northern Uganda, kidnapping, mutilating and butchering tens of thousands, and creating 2 million internally displaced persons. More than 20,000 children were killed, and many more used as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.

I had the opportunity to lead an all-party delegation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I travelled to Goma, in the north-eastern region of Kivu. It was accessible only by plane. My plane was piloted by expatriate Bulgarians—no disrespect to the pilots, who were excellent, but it just shows the diverse nature of the exercise. They were on contract to the UN. In a local church, we were met by a small group of women and children, with some village elders. The women were determined to tell us how they had been attacked by armed men in uniform. They wanted their story to been seen by the rest of the world. One woman described how she was raped after her baby was torn from her arms and brutally killed. Her nine year-old daughter was then raped in turn by the soldiers. We were witnessing the results of sexual violence used as a weapon of war.

On a separate mission, in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, we witnessed the plight of thousands of refugees, displaced from the north by the Bashir regime. They arrived on huge barges on the River Nile with just the possessions they could carry. The fortunate few were being met by relatives and taken to safety and shelter. The least fortunate—the orphaned children—found their way to Juba central market, where they could shelter under the stalls. The girls were destined to be pimped into prostitution. The boys faced enslavement. As of 3 October, the Juba peace agreement has brought together the warring parties marginalised during the Bashir era. It could change the face of the transitional Government and see the establishment of a single, professional army and the return of two million Darfuris to their villages. It could build on the £350 million of UK ODA provided between 2016 and 2019 and at least £75 million more allocated to consolidate the peace agreement in conjunction with the World Bank. The introduction of trade preference eligibility could well be an incentive for the new settled state to curb the almost endemic state-sponsored human rights abuses.

My third and final example is that, in another development, on 11 October, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, announced that Uganda, the DRC and South Sudan have agreed jointly to develop road infra- structure to boost trade between those countries and the region. Uganda has received more than £600 million in UK ODA since 1986 and currently has a rolling 10-year ODA programme of more than £50 million a year. Uganda, understandably, is considered a strategic priority by the UK. President Museveni emphasised that building roads that will connect Uganda to eastern DRC and South Sudan would tremendously increase connectivity within the region and unlock its growth potential. We must remember that access to the eastern part of the DRC is possible only by air because there are hardly any roads and it is traversed by river after river. President Museveni makes the point that a good road network connecting Uganda with eastern DRC would go a long way to help solve the question of insecurity and that movement of personnel and equipment to pockets of insecurity would be eased, as it is the territory where the remnants of Joseph Kony’s LRA still lurk, kidnaping and killing with impunity. Yet while these trade opportunities are emerging, Bobi Wine, the prominent opposition leader of the National Unity Platform party, claims his presidential candidature is threatened by human rights abuse and impunity in Uganda. Could this be a test case for this new legislation?

The former Foreign Office Minister, Rory Stewart, reflected recently that while on mission in the DRC, where he intended to discuss human rights and the illegal postponing of an election with President Joseph Kabila, the summit passed largely with Kabila—and I quote—

“laughing at me about Brexit”.

I support this amendment and suggest to Liz Truss that while, fundamentally, free trade is humanitarian, there is still some way to go before human rights abuse eradication is part of the trade preference package, particularly in Africa.

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, and I have known each other for almost a lifetime, since his very young days as a student in Portsmouth when I was the MP. We did not agree politically, and we do not agree politically now, but we have been good friends and I have always valued his insight, experience and total commitment on a range of issues concerning our part in the world, developing countries, particularly in Africa, and our responsibilities towards them.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for this amendment. It seems appropriate that as we come to the end of our considerations in Committee on the Trade Bill we come back to human rights. I have always felt that trade and human rights have a complex and close relationship. The other evening, we were debating with real feeling, emotion and commitment the proposals on China from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and our deep concerns about the actions we felt would become necessary. I said in that debate and will repeat now that the problem is that there is genocide, which is very clearly defined and well established in international law and on which the issues are stark, but there is a whole range of issues on the edge of genocide or comparable with the situation under genocide but it is not a race or a people who are at stake but elements of a society. It is long overdue that we should have sensitive arrangements in our trade policy that would mean that we could respond to such a situation by taking appropriate action to bring home to those with authority in the country concerned what is at stake and the corrective actions. This amendment raises that point, and for that reason I was very glad to see it on the Marshalled List.

Of course, we have to remember our own responsibilities in this context. It is not just us as judge of the rest of the world. We must look at ourselves. It is simply not true that there is something called trade or business which is self-contained and separate from our concerns about humanity and the responsibilities of civilised values towards the cause of humanity. This amendment gives us the opportunity to do something about it in a graduated way and from that standpoint I think it deserves very full consideration.