European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I agree, and I will develop that argument, because a customs union alone will not solve the conundrum of how to keep to the solemn commitment to having no hard border in Northern Ireland.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

I will not repeat what my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) have said, because I was about to make the same point. It was the most significant thing that happened yesterday, but given the circus that surrounded everything and the timetable that stopped us debating it, nobody so far has taken any notice. However, it does bear on today’s debate, because yesterday’s legally binding commitment extends the needs of the Irish border to the whole United Kingdom. We are talking about Dover—and we settled that yesterday—and we are not having a border down the Irish sea. The United Kingdom has therefore got to negotiate an arrangement with the EU as a whole that has no new frontier barriers. Effectively, we are going to reproduce the customs union and the single market, and the Government will be unable to comply with yesterday’s legal obligation unless it does so.

[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful for that intervention. When the phase 1 agreement was reached in December, I thought that commitment was the most significant thing that had happened since the referendum, with regard to indicating what our future relationship with the EU would be. I think that it is clear to everyone who has considered this and visited Northern Ireland to talk it through that the only answer to having no hard border, in the end, is a customs union and high-level single market alignment, and that is why yesterday was so significant. The fact that that was accepted by the Government and turned into domestic law gives it a status that it did not have until yesterday, because previously it was a political agreement at international level. I am not suggesting for one moment that it was not solemnly entered into by the Government, or indeed that they would resile from it as a matter of international negotiation, but it will now become a matter of domestic law. It is probably the most significant thing that happened yesterday.

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[Stephen Gethins]

My constituency is rich in immigrants who make our community richer, and not just financially—we welcome them. The hostile environment created by the Government is an abomination that should shame us all.

From the very start—from before the 2015 general election—this has been nothing but an exercise in Conservative party management, and not a terribly successful one at that, yet we all pay the price. Farmers do not know whether they should plant their crops for next year—indeed, the National Farmers Union of Scotland has called for the UK to remain in the customs union. Young people do not know whether they will have the same opportunities that we had, with uncertainty about programmes such as Erasmus. Researchers do not know the kind of collaboration they will be able to rely on, but we all benefit from such collaboration.

Just this week I opened a conference at the University of St Andrews, where Professor Stephen Gillespie, Dr Wilber Sabiiti and Dr Derek Sloan are at the forefront of the international fight against tuberculosis—the conference was held using EU funding. We know that Brexit will be economically devastating—the Treasury has told us that. The Scottish Government have shown that every single Brexit scenario makes us worse off. The Fraser of Allander Institute has also reflected that Scotland is set to lose £8 billion over the rest of the decade.

Before we get catcalls from Government Members, I should say that FAI director Professor Graeme Roy says that the rest of the UK could be even harder hit. That is not something that we or others want to see. That means less cash for public services, and the situation is made worse by the Government’s other policies on immigration, with 2,500 doctors refused visas in the first five months of this year. It is a hostile environment. That is why the Lord Dubs amendment—it is being debated today—on the rights of unaccompanied minors and child refugees, the most vulnerable in society, is so important.

Scotland voted to remain, and we know that every Brexit scenario is damaging. That is why the Scottish Government proposed the compromise—the least worst option—of staying in the single market and the customs union. Last night, we had 19 minutes to discuss devolution in the context of legislation that will have the biggest impact on the devolution process since its establishment. That smacks of a lack of respect.

The 2017 general election gave all Members an opportunity. When the Prime Minister asked UK voters for their views on Brexit, they returned a hung Parliament. Only the SNP—and the Democratic Unionist party, to be fair—was returned in a majority of the seats in which we stood. But there should be an opportunity to reach out. Some of the SNP’s best policy achievements came during a period of minority Government between 2007 to 2011, when Scottish Government Ministers were required to work constructively with other parties and needed other parties to work constructively with them. No one got everything they wanted in that particular set of circumstances—I know that the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) was in that Parliament—but that is something that we can all learn from. [Interruption.] I hear chuntering from Government Members saying that we lost. Actually, the SNP gained an unprecedented majority having pursued those particular policies.

There has been a particular impact on Ireland—[Interruption.] Government Members would do well to listen to this. The Good Friday agreement has been undermined by Government Members, and right now, we should be listening to Ireland. The best friends anyone can have are honest and we all rely on critical friends. Frankly, right now the UK has no better friend than Ireland. In fact, the UK has benefited from Ireland being a full member state of the EU, as it would if Scotland were a full member state. I have heard so much about how canny the Commission is and how we cannot trust its negotiating position. No one is trying to pull the wool over Brexiteers’ eyes; it is just that they have come up against the brick wall of hard reality, and that is clear two years on.

All this comes at a time when politics in this place, as has been demonstrated today, could not be poorer. Notwithstanding some fine individuals whom I respect on both sides of the House, we have the most ineffective and incompetent Government in living memory, and they are let off the hook only because they are shadowed by the most ineffective Opposition most of us have ever known, and hopefully will ever know. We want Labour Members to be doing better and we rely on them to be doing better, but at just the time when we need an effective Opposition and Government, we have neither. Given the devastating impact that leaving the EU is having on jobs, the economy and those who have made the UK their home, the UK is on the cusp of becoming a failed state that does not represent its constituent parts and, for the first time ever, leaves the following generation worse off than the ones that came before it. One way or another, there is a better way to do this.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

Mr Speaker, an English Member may restore some of the calm that has not accompanied the Scottish exchanges—thank you very much for calling me. I will try to be as brief as possible. We have a ridiculous situation thanks to the programme motion—we have about three hours left to cover amendments on a whole variety of different subjects that have all been lumped together. In the interests of time, I will confine myself to discussing the future trading arrangements of this country with Europe and the rest of the world, and the Government amendment seeking to get rid of the reference to “a customs union”. Obviously I will not follow all the Front-Bench spokesmen in being extremely generous in giving way. I apologise in advance, because I do not think I will give way much, if at all, because otherwise a large number of other Members will wind up speaking, as they did yesterday, with three-minute time limits and other absurdities that this House has inflicted on itself by accepting the programme motion.

I come to the issue that we are currently addressing most vigorously, although there are many, many more to come: our future trading and economic arrangements with the rest of Europe and the world. My views are well known, and I set them out in Committee. I wish to see absolutely no new barriers to trade and investment erected between ourselves and the rest of continental Europe. I do not think such barriers are necessary to fulfil Brexit. I certainly do not go along with some of the more extreme advocates, who seem to be positively relishing the idea that we should erect new barriers of all kinds between ourselves and 27 nation states on the continent, while having the most open and exotic free trade approach to the rest of the world, reducing barriers of every kind to other trading nations. In today’s globalised world and rule-based order, free trade is particularly essential to the British, and we have to minimise the damage that might otherwise be caused when we implement Brexit.

Let me deal briefly with the argument that is bound to be raised by some—“the moment you mention this, you are defying the referendum.” Again, I shall not repeat what I said yesterday, but I do not think the referendum remotely addressed the important subjects we are debating today; it was a yes/no question on a very broad-brush issue. I took part in a lot of debates up and down the country, doing one or two against Dan Hannan MEP, whom I know well. He is a difficult man to debate against. In my opinion, he is one of the most articulate and informed of the Brexiteer campaigners. I disagreed with him, but I got the clear impression that Dan Hannan was not against the single market and the customs union—that was not his view at all. None of that came through in the debate.

Unfortunately, the national media reporting of the referendum debate was pretty pathetic; it was all about Turks and how much money was going to go to the health service and so on. All this argument about trading arrangements was brought to a head only after the referendum, when the Prime Minister was induced by her then special adviser, Mr Timothy, to give the unfortunate speech at Lancaster House. Suddenly, new red lines were introduced: we were leaving the single market, leaving the customs union and rejecting the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. I will not go further on that, as I made the same point yesterday.

I do not remember any ordinary member of the public asking me anything during the campaign about the customs union and the single market. To this day, when I go to my constituency nobody is quizzing me about the customs union and the single market. Nobody is following these debates, except when there is reference to the fact that if we get this wrong, we could do immense damage to the livelihood and wellbeing of very many people. If we do get it wrong and unintentionally create borders to trade, we will make the prospects for future generations even more difficult. In this debate we have heard great vehemence about the customs union and “the single market” and how appalling they are, but the arguments used against them are very narrow.

The Prime Minister has been absolutely consistent for months. She does not say, “Oh, we’re against the single market”—and not surprisingly, because it was the Thatcher Government who created the whole institution in the first place. Although the Prime Minister is not a Thatcherite entirely, on economic policy she and I both believe in open, free markets. There is nothing undesirable about the single market arrangement, except that it allows the freedom of movement of labour. That is the only objection to it that most Conservative Brexiteers ever raised, unless they are of the hard-line head-banging variety, who go much further than that. That is the only objection that they have.

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[Mr Baron]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way?

[Mr Clarke]

No, because I have almost taken longer than I intended already.

Let us address freedom of movement. Personally, I do not have any hang-ups about freedom of movement—people coming to work here, contribute to the economy, provide skills that we do not have or do unskilled work that British people will not do—but it could be tightened up. People should not come here for benefits and so on, or hang around if they have lost their job. I am sure that we could start to negotiate on the basis of tightening that up.

[Mr Baron]

Will my right hon. and learned Friend give way on that point?

[Mr Clarke]

If I start giving way, we will go back to where we were before.

Similarly, on trade deals with the rest of the world, if anybody can devise a method of trading with other countries on our own that is consistent with a sensible customs arrangement and better than the deals that we have now used very successfully for a long time—with our being the leading nation pushing for EU deals with the rest of the world—that is fine, but let us not accidentally drift into a position in which we are making absurd demands of the EU that mean our leaving not only the customs union and single market, but losing all the advantages that particularly the best and most competitive sectors of our economy have by way of their existing access to the European market.

Some people seem to think that we can have an altogether different and better type of trade deal with other parts of the world. Quite irrelevant statistics are misused to make the case, such as that growth is faster in the rest of the world than it is in Europe. It is an underlying truth that growth in emerging and developing markets, which was very poor until we got going with the rules-based order in the 1990s, is faster than that of developed countries such as our own, and it is always going to be faster. There is also the argument that there is more of the outside world than there is of Europe. That is indeed the case, but for the past 20 years in particular, the United Kingdom has been the most influential player in the European Union in insisting on the steady attempt to negotiate trade deals with the world in general, and the numbers keep growing.

On the British Government’s behalf, I was involved on the fringes of the constant efforts to get an EU deal with the US—the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. It did not fail because there was something wicked about the EU; the fact is that, unfortunately, protectionist influences in America are very strong, and were even under the Obama Administration. One cannot get any response. I have been involved in all these things—I have talked about trading openings with India and Brazil, which are of course where the population is. It is absolutely absurd to think that there are no protectionist pressures in India and Brazil and that it is simply a question of our present Foreign Secretary walking in, with his bonhomie, and saying, “You will of course now throw your markets open to us”.

It is also absurd to argue that somehow this approach will produce deals with less damage to our sovereignty and fewer constraints. I do not understand those arguments. What is the nature of a treaty embodying a trade deal—or any other treaty, come to that? Both sides agree mutually binding obligations. They agree on tariffs, and remove them where they can. But what is far more important in trade with developed countries, such as the US—I personally think that the few tariffs left there could be abolished both ways with no disadvantage—is talking about regulatory alignment.

In the EU, we have achieved regulatory harmonisation. What one wants is mutual recognition. We agree to say, “We will abide by arrangements on regulatory standards, on which we both agree, and we, the British, will not change them in our House of Commons. We will not go back on them, and you won’t go back on them.” If we listen, again, to the more zealous Eurosceptics, they seem to think that the world will throw open its doors when we arrive saying, “We want a trade deal with you—open trade.” “Fine”, say the Australians. So we say, “The rules are that you agree to this, this and this, and you take this, and we take that.” But then we say, “Of course, we may change the rules—we may change the scope occasionally. We do not, of course, undertake to fetter ourselves by any lasting obligation to what we have agreed with you.”

There are no such deals. It is fanciful, as the Secretary of State for International Trade discovered when he went to America. He no doubt believed, as they all did just after the referendum, that the doors were about to be thrown open and that we would get a deal with the Trump Administration by Christmas. He found, as indeed I did in my dealings with America, that things are different. The current President is hopeless. He wants to reduce the amount that we and others export to America, and he wants to use force in what he says are easy-to-win trade wars to get us to open up more of our markets to exports from the United States in sensitive areas. That is what he is about.

What is a constant in America—it is also true in Australia, New Zealand and Brazil, thinking of some of the bigger and easier markets—is that they are always anxious to have access to our market for their farmers. They produce food on an industrial scale to lower standards of animal welfare and food regulation than we have. President Trump will say, “We are going to sell you our beef and our chicken and some of our cereals on a bigger scale.” What will those countries want us to get rid of? They will want us to abandon the European regulations on animal welfare and food standards and take up theirs. It would cost us the European market if we did that, and we would have to have border guards everywhere because nobody would let us export to the rest of Europe or to Ireland, or be a route for, chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated beef. Australia has hormone-treated beef; it is not just the Americans. I will not go on, because I think I have made my point.

People are of course dismissed any time they try to point out the consequences of our ignoring reality in the modern world and what might happen to our economy—to Scotland and the rest of the UK—if we accidentally put all kinds of new barriers in the way of our trade. Unfortunately, the public have been persuaded by the Eurosceptics to ignore the Bank of England, the Treasury, the CBI, chambers of commerce, and people from key sectors of the economy such as the car industry and pharmaceuticals. It is all scaremongering, apparently —so we are told.

Actually, I do not see how anybody can argue that erecting new barriers between ourselves and the biggest, richest international free trade market in the world can do anything other than make us poorer than we were. That is why I do not understand why the Government are resisting the not very strong or compelling Lords amendment 1, on customs union, at all. They are only being asked to report on what efforts they are making to get there, and I think they are going to have to make efforts to get there.

The amendments in lieu are an attempt to devoid substantial amendments of any meaning. I would not vote with the Government on the meaningful vote yesterday, because I could not see that any commitment had been given; nor could I see any argument against what was on the amendment paper. I was very worried, because I thought that some of my close hon. Friends and colleagues were going to be very angry when they discovered that they had been fobbed off with an agreement just to discuss the possibility of changing the provision. They may yet have the last laugh on me—I am getting to be a cynic in my old age—as this morning they appeared to be getting somewhere in getting a more substantial system put in place, but we have yet to see the Brexiteers mount their full counter-attack. I will wait and see.

I will come back to the subject of this particular debate, as you will want me to do, Mr Speaker. What is being offered as an amendment in lieu, to use the jargon, is pathetic and utterly meaningless. We could save a bit of public money by saving the paper involved in putting it in the amendment paper and printing it. That probably explains why the amendments in lieu have been tabled by an extraordinarily wide range of Conservative MPs. As well as the Secretary of State, the list includes my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) and so on. I know all these people and I do not believe that they agree on anything that has anything to do with the European Union, so what has induced them all to do this? I quite accept that there is a sense of deep loyalty to our party, which I assure the House I actually feel in every other way myself. I think that this is an excellent Government if it were not for their policy on leaving the European Union, but there we are.

What are we being asked to sign up to? The amendment says that it is “a customs arrangement”. Well, that covers anything. It is a phrase that the Prime Minister, for reasons that I have always understood, has slipped into several times because she cannot get the members of her Cabinet to agree on her using any other form of words. So for the time being she has been obliged to slip into talking about “a customs arrangement”. But that includes absolutely everything, from the kind of arrangements that would suit my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset to those that would suit my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough, but everything in between as well. It is a bit of a waste of a statement, coming back to say what efforts they have made to reach that extremely amorphous destination. Of course, that takes us back to the root of the whole problem, which is trying to arrive at a border policy.

To end on a more optimistic note, I think that most of us have noticed that a most important stride was made yesterday, as I have said, with an amendment tabled by the Government that was described as the Irish amendment. It is part of dealing with the argument about the Belfast agreement, and actually embodies the Belfast agreement in law. It goes further by reinforcing what the Prime Minister has actually been saying for some time, if we have been listening to her—that we are going to have a customs union, in effect, in Ireland, because there is going to be nothing new and no checks on the border. We are, in effect, going to be in the single market as far as Ireland is concerned, because we are having regulatory alignment. We agreed that. I think that the Cabinet agreed it—although some of them do not seem to have noticed—not too long ago, back at the time of the draft withdrawal agreement, which the Government are now trying to finalise. I actually think that that is where we should go.

The Government are still talking about frictionless trade. Unfortunately, thanks to the rows there have been, the slogan is now “as frictionless as possible” trade, which no doubt cheers up the Foreign Secretary. The truth is that we will have to have genuinely frictionless trade through arrangements on customs and regulatory alignment that preserve the benefits of all this for Ireland. Actually, the one thing that I think every Member of the House agrees on is that we do not want new barriers down the Irish sea. Northern Ireland is part of the Union—I am as Unionist as anybody here—and we are not putting up new barriers between the mainland and Northern Ireland when we leave.