European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Hain Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, this Bill offers possibly the last guaranteed parliamentary opportunity to change the Government’s Brexit strategy, prevent a hard Irish land border and protect all the precious gains of the Good Friday agreement. To achieve that, since the DUP has quite understandably insisted that Northern Ireland must not have a separate constitutional status from the rest of the UK, surely not just Northern Ireland but the whole of the UK must stay in the single market and the customs union.

As the CBI, supported by the TUC, has made crystal clear, our businesses do not want to be cut off from their largest markets, or from the EU’s regulatory bodies that guarantee our access to them, in return for promises of jam tomorrow in far-flung emerging markets. UK services exports to Europe are around 60% higher than those to the US, and twice those exported to Asia. The 11 countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, favoured as an alternative by Brexiteers, account for only 7% of our trade, while Germany alone accounts for 11%.

As for the claims that, once freed from the EU, the UK can negotiate preferential trade deals with third countries, the truth is that we already have 60 such deals through the EU that unless renegotiated in time, which is highly unlikely, will actually cease to apply after Brexit—that is, by March 2019. Furthermore, with a market of over 500 million people, the EU often negotiates trade deals that are far more comprehensive in scope than those achieved by individual countries outside the EU, so the likelihood of the UK getting even better terms with third countries than we already have through the EU is minimal. Remember that many non-EU countries, such as Japan, invest here because of the level of access that they currently have from the UK into that larger EU market; access that their UK-based companies will lose once we are no longer in the single market and the customs union.

Trade deals take years to negotiate. They are usually designed to secure the convergence of standards and regulatory regimes, not divergence, which is what Brexiteers want in relation to the EU. Moreover, because of the EU’s internal budget timetable, Brussels is now suggesting that the transition period should finish at the end of 2020, after just 21 months. There could then be a dramatic cliff edge, with queues of lorries stretching for miles in Kent and gridlock on the roads of Northern Ireland. This is the true prospect for Brexit Britain, not the fantasies of the Government and the Brexiteers.

Another government fantasy is more ominous. No one who really understands the complexities and dangers of politics on the island of Ireland seriously believes that keeping the border open can be achieved without Northern Ireland staying in the same single market and customs union as the Irish Republic. The 8 December agreement requires the UK to retain “full regulatory alignment” with the EU to prevent a hard border with customs posts and security checks. Meanwhile British Ministers, divided over what was actually agreed, waffle about a high-tech frictionless border. They remain in denial about the reality that, for the European Union, protection of the integrity of the single market—which is a legal construct, not a political arrangement—means that you cannot be half in, half out.

It is important to recall that the 1998 Belfast Good Friday agreement, and the peace process which followed, was explicitly designed to depoliticise the Irish border by making it completely open. Any restriction whatever would completely undermine the agreement, which, by the way, formed an international treaty with the Irish Republic, recognised by the European Union. Border posts, customs personnel and surveillance technology could provide sitting targets for dissident republican paramilitaries to rerun the IRA’s border campaign of 60 years ago, also provoking the reactivation of their loyalist paramilitary counterparts to defend Ulster.

Worryingly, Dublin’s and London’s interpretations of the December first-phase deal are very different. The EU sees it as binding Northern Ireland and the whole of the UK to the EU’s regulatory domain; the UK sees it as merely an outline containing work in progress, with the Cabinet divided and unable to resolve the implications. The contradiction is that EU rules do not permit frictionless trade while Northern Ireland—and by extension the UK—is outside the customs union and the single market. Remember too that the Good Friday Belfast agreement is not only of constitutional and institutional importance; it requires a shared regulatory structure for cross-border movement, trade and co-operation.

Surely our duty in your Lordships’ House is therefore to act over this Bill for the whole of the UK and not just for part of the Conservative Party. Surely we have to persuade the Government to stay in the single market and the customs union to protect our economy and, above all, to protect the Good Friday agreement and avoid the catastrophe of a hard Irish border. Everyone says that they do not want such a border, but we are accelerating remorselessly towards it, as long as the Government remain so dogmatically rigid about the terms of Brexit.

House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Hain Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to make just two broad arguments: about the imperative for reform now, and the legitimacy of the committee whose recommendations we are invited to endorse by taking note of its report today.

I will deal first with the legitimacy of the committee and its report. With the commendably active support of the Lord Speaker, your Lordships’ House established a fully representative Committee to look at reforms to deal with our increasingly embarrassing, ballooning size. Collectively, each major party and Cross-Benchers determined who should sit on it and who chaired it; it is our committee. Some colleagues have questioned details or specifics in the report and, yes, there are arguments for special pleading on this or that detail. Of course Members will find reason—I trust not excuse—in each bit to criticise the whole, but surely we all have to accept that the whole package hangs together or falls together. It is most ingeniously interconnected. Surely the point is that reducing the size has always been fiendishly complex, and that the committee has done an amazing job in solving the hitherto seemingly insoluble.

Secondly, I will talk about the imperative to act now. Weight watchers have shown that the best way to tackle a problem of excess is to combine personal responsibility with collective resolve and mutual support. The alternative—drastic surgery—involves unnecessary risk, no guarantee of success and an unpredictable outcome. A Commons Select Committee, having already begun considering the matter, stands ready to report but awaits the conclusion of your Lordships’ House. The media are also waiting to pounce. Newspapers, MPs and Ministers have already made threats over Brexit, which will doubtless increase to a crescendo when the withdrawal Bill reaches us early next year.

Yet we all know that things cannot continue as they are. We number over 800 and rising. Commercial properties are commandeered in the vicinity at great expense to provide us with additional offices. Through no fault of our own, we have become not so much an embarrassment but, many say, a scandal. At a time of austerity, when everything else is cut, our numbers rise inexorably through no fault of our own—until now.

Until we set up this committee to recommend reform some among your Lordships could argue we were more sinned against than sinners. We did not fill this House to bursting; Prime Ministers did. We did not put ourselves here, others did—although we all agreed with their immense wisdom in choosing each one of us. But all that changed when we, absolutely correctly, decided to establish the committee to solve the problem. That decision—our decision—means the buck stops right here with us in this Chamber today. Find excuses and we will be rightly pilloried. I therefore urge that the recommendations of this report are endorsed and implemented as soon as practicable early in the new year. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Burns, in replying will confirm this and I hope the Lord Speaker, with the party leaders, will also make sure that this happens.

When the committee was first established, I asked one venerable sage on our Benches for a view on the likely outcome. “It will be shelved as reform always has been shelved,” he said with a weary, knowing smile. I trust your Lordships’ House will prove him wrong. Things have reached a point where change is unavoidable. The question is therefore not whether there is change, but who makes it. Either this House takes responsibility or it will pass to the Commons and the Government. Either we reform ourselves or others will reform us.

European Council

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The discussions in relation to us leaving the EU were very constructive. We have now agreed to move on to phase 2 and to start to talk about our future relationship, which is extremely welcome.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, given that the Northern Ireland question was responsible for rescuing the Prime Minister in the first stage of negotiations when she agreed a regulatory alignment on standards and the adjudication of those standards, not just physical controls on the Irish border, within the whole of the UK—that is, the customs union and the single market have to be aligned in order to keep the border open—and now that has been accepted for the transitional talks, what is the point of leaving the single market and the customs union? Does she think that the EU is magically going to give us a better deal by being exactly aligned with the customs union and the single market outside it?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

We have always said that the details of how we maintain an open border will be settled in phase 2 of the negotiations, when we agree our future relationship, and that is what we will do. We have also been very clear that alignment is about pursuing the same objectives, but achieving this could be done through different means. It does not require regulatory harmonisation.