EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, we are where we are, and it is perhaps time to take an overview of things. The Minister who introduced this debate, rather a long time ago, said that it was going to be a new chapter for “global Britain”, yet the trade deals that we have had so far are mainly no more than copy-and-paste jobs from existing EU agreements. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, tried to give a better overview; he said it was a choice between paddling our own canoe and continuing in the EU’s wake, and we must answer that question now. It seems to me that neither of those options is terribly attractive.

This is surely an opportunity to start to reset our economy and our trade. The first general point that I want to make is that we ought to have less trade. That is perhaps controversial, but the idea that our future rests with more and more trade with the other side of the world, whether with China, Singapore, east Asia or Japan, is undesirable. Flying food around the world to the extent that we do is environmentally undesirable. While I am about this, it is time that we stopped exporting waste from this country to the far side of Asia—south Asia and elsewhere—which is just a disgrace.

Secondly, I suggest that it is time to radically restructure our economy and move towards what people call a circular economy rather than one that uses vast amounts of resources and throws a lot of them away. It is time to take economics as a practical discipline away from sterile economic algorithms and put it at the service of people and the environment—what the economist Kate Raworth calls doughnut economics. It is time that we changed what we did and how we do it. This is an opportunity.