EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Hain Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is now clearer what the deal means. If we diverge from EU rules on labour, environmental and state aid standards, then, subject to arbitration, tariffs may be imposed by the EU. Like Switzerland, the UK will be the junior partner in a complex institutional hierarchy of bodies that will oversee the future relationship for the indefinite future.

Where the Brexiteers promised freedom from the red tape of Brussels, there will instead be bottlenecks from a new partnership council, a trade partnership committee, 10 trade specialised committees, eight specialised committees, four working groups and a parliamentary partnership assembly to oversee the dispute resolution mechanism. The Economist has observed that Britain will become a “supplicant”.

British citizens will no longer feel at home in the EU 27 member states, entitled to make their lives there to live, work or study. Professionals will find it harder to work in Europe, as qualifications will no longer be automatically recognised.

Gaps in the security part of the deal include limits on British access to EU security and police databases, which will have an operational impact, making a nonsense of claims by Priti Patel that the new deal somehow makes Britons safer.

The Brexiteers have contrived a deal where, in future negotiations with the EU, the UK will be a third country, outside the tent, without the privileges of membership and with a diminished scrutiny role for the UK Parliament. So much for “taking back control”.

The EU-UK trade and co-operation agreement is little more than a damage-limitation exercise that slightly softens the impact in some areas of what is not merely a hard Brexit but in practice a very messy half-Brexit.