European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Lord Falconer of Thoroton Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the staff of the House of Lords for making this important debate possible. I thank the noble Lord, Lord True, for his engagement since the agreement was announced. Since the Bill was published, he has been truly helpful to all noble Lords in trying to understand it and making this debate meaningful.

I offer my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Austin of Dudley. He is a friend and a courageous politician who stood out against anti-Semitism when many others did not. He made a very moving maiden speech today. This House will discover what I know about him, which is that he improves and shakes every organisation of which he is a member. I very much hope that I will be able to call him my noble friend fairly soon.

I also say a sad farewell to the noble Lord, Lord Cavendish of Furness. Everyone who know him knows that he is an absolutely lovely human being, whose care, decency and straightforwardness have served this House very well for many years. He will be much missed.

We should not lose sight of the pandemic, which has claimed over 900 lives today, with 50,000 new infections. I associate myself specifically with the remarks of my noble friends Lady Royall of Blaisdon and Lord Judd. We live in an interdependent world; if we want to fight the pandemic effectively, it has to be done by co-operating right across the world.

There have been many insightful and worthwhile interventions in this debate. It has been a good debate, but it has been an absolute travesty of parliamentary scrutiny. It did not have to be like this. The deal that was done by the Prime Minister and the European Union involved provisional ratification. Both sides agreed, in Article 10 of the final provisions of the agreement, that ratification did not have to take place until February 2021. In the meantime, a process of provisional enablement would take place. We have chosen not to do that.

Instead, the Prime Minister has produced the 1,250-page agreement and an 80-page Bill which he has put to this House in one day. That 80-page Bill will not only be the framework of our relationship with the European Union but will deal with, for example, extradition, criminal records and social security. It is all being done without any parliamentary scrutiny at all, as is recognised by the fact that both Houses have, in effect, agreed that there will be no Committee stage for the Bill in either House. Why has it been done like that? Could the noble and co-operative Lord, Lord True, explain why the Government chose to have only an executive process in relation to this, instead of a parliamentary one?

I echo the words of my noble friend Lady Taylor, who chaired the committee that produced an excellent report highlighting that it was provisional ratification only that the parties envisaged, when she said this represents a new level of executive abuse. This is a new low in the Prime Minister’s sidelining of Parliament. He did not need to put Parliament in this position.

The ideological ERG, without a trace of irony, convened what they called a “star chamber” not to decide what whether the agreement was good for this country but whether it satisfied their self-important lawyer’s view of sovereignty. Many noble Lords will remember that Parliament abolished the Star Chamber in 1641 because Charles I used it as a means of gaining support for his policies without having to go to Parliament. The Star Chamber allowed Charles I to get away with a series of disastrous policies. As you probably know, it ended rather badly, both for King Charles and for the Star Chamber. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said Parliament is going to regain control over the process. That remains to be seen. There has been a bad start with this Bill and this agreement.

The debates about whether to Brexit at all, and whether we should leave the single market or the customs union, are over. The country—remainers and leavers—has little stomach for them anymore. As long as they continue, we cannot move on as a country, and we must move on. I agree with all those who said we should put past divisions behind us. I agree that this deal is, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, the best of a bad job. I agree with noble Lords who say, like my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, they will vote for it with a heavy heart.

I understand why the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, cannot bring themselves to support this, but I believe we should support this Bill and this deal. We have been urging the Government to get a deal. The chaos we would face if we broke from the EU without a deal is acknowledged on all sides. We accept the deal because it is better than no deal and avoids massive friction with the European Union for years.

For our country, it is the future that matters. The country needs transforming investment and new economic policies to address the grinding inequalities and lack of opportunity and hope that so drove Brexit. The Prime Minister’s incantation of the phrase “levelling up” has to be exposed for its total emptiness. We need to make the economy work for the many; that is our task now.

This is not a good deal. The Government understand that. It is a Christmas sack of broken promises from the Prime Minister, who deals with the problem by misleading the country about the deal he has done. The Prime Minister, on Christmas Eve, said

“there will be no non-tariff barriers to trade.”

Rules of origin, customs, VAT, plant and animal health: the list is endless. As so many noble Lords said, an ocean of new paperwork is on the way.

The Prime Minister said, on Christmas Eve,

“we will be an independent coastal state with full control of our waters”,

and in the Commons, this morning, he said:

“in five and a half years’ time, we will be able to fish every single fish in our waters.”

No, the agreement will reduce the rights of EU fishermen to fish in our waters, but the deal is a haggle about percentages, not a fundamental change in our relationship on fishing. It goes on, in perpetuity, after those five and a half years. The Prime Minister is wrong to pretend otherwise.

The Prime Minister, on Christmas Eve, also said:

“We will be able to decide how and where we are going to stimulate new jobs”.


Again, this is wrong. The agreement provides that if the European Union thinks a UK state aid subsidy causes, or risks causing, a significant negative effect on trade or investment with the EU, the EU can unilaterally impose tariffs. There is no need, in that case, to await any arbitration. That is only related to labour, climate and environment regulations. So do not mislead us on what this agreement says.

The Prime Minister also said on Christmas Eve that

“it means certainty for business from financial services to our world-leading manufacturers, our car industry, certainty for those working in high skilled jobs in firms and factories across the whole country.”

Wrong again. This agreement is, explicitly, the beginning of long years of negotiation. On access for financial services, as this House knows, the deal offers nothing, and the Government’s own summary of the financial services deal is as follows:

“The Parties will discuss how we move forward on specific equivalence determinations. The Parties will codify the framework for regulatory cooperation in a Memorandum of Understanding.”


That is not certainty. Listen to my noble friend Lady Donaghy, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr: it is a bad deal on financial services.

There is a whole annexe to the agreement that sets up a structure to try to promote agreement on regulations for the car industry. This agreement does not provide certainty; it provides only the certainty of an endless haggle, with constant end-of-negotiation-cycle cliff edges like what we have just gone through.

I will quote one last misleading comment on this agreement made by the Prime Minister on Christmas Eve:

“It means certainty for the police and the border forces and the security services and all those that we rely on across Europe to keep us safe.”


He has done well on DNA, fingerprint and car registration databases, but we now know that he has done incredibly badly on the SIS database. When a wanted person is travelling around Europe, it will not be providing the information—as it does now—about where that wanted person is going. The list of misstatements is endless, and we have heard so much about them: Gibraltar, Erasmus, museums and, what is more, musicians, who, for example, cannot now tour Europe without first getting a range of visas.

What happens to our relationship with the EU in the future is the key. This depends on how our country implements this agreement. If the UK Government want to plunge to the regulatory bottom, determined to make the UK the cheapest place to do business through deteriorating labour, climate and environment protection relative to the EU, this agreement allows that—and diverge they want to. Within an hour and a half of this deal being announced, the Prime Minister was keen to stress to Mr Harry Yorke of the Sunday Telegraph that the UK will now be free to diverge from EU standards. Mr Johnson told Mr Yorke that he has achieved what his critics said was impossible:

“That you could do free trade with the EU without being drawn into their regulatory or legislative orbit.”


He failed to draw attention to the terms of the agreement, which do precisely that.

The question for the UK is whether we should recognise and embrace the need for alignment, using it to ensure that our standards are at least as high as the EU’s and then to promote our trade with the EU and the rest of the world. I have no doubt that we should. Or should we constantly lower our standards to levels at or beyond the point where the EU can retaliate under the many provisions that allow that under this agreement, or so that we are constantly in dispute with the EU on just how low we can go? We would make a different choice from this Government, choosing high standards, not low-regulation profiteering. We accept Brexit and must now deliver the economic reform that the public expect.