European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Lord Hain 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 Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, what a tragedy. Dogmatism which confuses sovereignty with power and influence has triumphed. This thin deal is better than no deal, which is why I will not vote against it today, but no pumped-up, jingoistic celebrations can disguise an act of gratuitous, enormous national self-harm.

Our weight and influence on the global stage as a senior member of the world’s biggest trading and diplomatic bloc is now reduced to that of a bit player in an increasingly dangerous multipolar world. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, explained, we will be a rule-taker, excluded from the very European trade, defence, foreign and external security policy-making that still impacts directly upon us as a close neighbour and trading partner.

Leaving the EU single market, which constitutes around half our trade, will, the Government estimate, reduce national income per head by around 5% and have two to three times the medium to long-term economic impact of Covid-19. Non-tariff barriers, estimated by HMRC to cost £7 billion a year, will damage UK goods, where we have a trade deficit with the EU. Yet on services, where the UK has an £83 billion surplus with the EU, the deal provides absolutely nothing, future access humiliatingly dependent on EU permission.

As for taking back control of immigration, since the 2016 referendum net immigration from the EU has collapsed but from the rest of the world it has exploded. As EU nationals have been driven away, our NHS has been left with over 40,000 nurse vacancies and our care sector with over 120,000 vacancies—not much increase in sovereignty for our sick and elderly citizens.

UK nationals are losing sovereignty over our rights to live, work or study in the EU and will need visas to stay there for more than three months. We are losing sovereignty over rights to free healthcare, mobile roaming charges, frictionless border entry and much else. In the name of reclaiming sovereignty, we are torpedoing the sovereignty of the UK, as Scotland threatens to go its own way, maybe to be followed by Northern Ireland. Even my homeland, Wales—long a bastion for UK unionism—has recently seen an unprecedented boost to the independence cause.

Project Fear? More like “Project Reality”, for which I cannot and will not take personal historic responsibility by voting for this sovereignty-reducing, control-surrendering, rights-destroying, job-cutting, poverty-increasing, nationalism-inciting, miserably demeaning Brexit deal.