King’s Speech

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, to begin, I strongly commend the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who is not in his place, for his coruscating criticism of the Government’s dilatory approach to defence and national security. It was a courageous contribution.

I intend to confine my remarks to the Government’s proposals for dynamic alignment, now rebadged euphemistically as a putative European partnership Bill, the details of which are as yet unclear. Your Lordships’ House may be aware that the European Affairs Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into the policy, and is still the only discrete body in Parliament interrogating this Government’s wider policies in respect to EU-UK relations.

Almost 10 years ago, the British people made a decision to leave the European Union, the single market and the customs union. They chose to return sovereignty to the United Kingdom. That was the democratic will of the British people, and it risks being overturned by politicians who never accepted the validity or the potential benefits of Brexit. The Government are pushing for closer alignment with the EU, but they have gone far beyond any mandate they can claim from their manifesto. They have decided to define themselves by a close relationship with the EU.

In his speech at the beginning of this week, the Prime Minister admitted that he felt it was necessary to go beyond what was stated in 2024 and that, at the next EU summit, he wants to put

“Britain at the heart of Europe”.

However, he refused to admit whether he would ditch the red lines in his manifesto, which ruled out membership of the EU single market or customs union, and instead committed to “take us closer”. This is an attempt to deflect from the failures of the Government—failures demonstrated by their devastating and unprecedented losses in the local elections last week. Rather than take responsibility for their unforced errors and U-turns, they blame the decision which has allowed this country to take back its sovereignty.

The Government are wilfully betraying the people of this country in staking out such an ideological position, and they know it. Reform UK’s gains in the local elections show this. Frankly, leave voters do not trust this Labour Party, and the Government’s announcements in the gracious Speech only validate this argument and the disrespect they have for those opinions. As it happens, YouGov polling for Queen Mary University of London has found that only 9% of Labour voters believe that UK tariff policy should be decided by a non-UK entity.

In our alternative summary to the European Affairs Committee report, Unfinished Business: Resetting the UK-EU Relationship, published last year, we showed how the Government’s EU reset objectives had expanded over time. By the end of the year, this Government intend to publish a Bill including mechanisms which would align the UK to EU law. However, in order to gain the privilege of losing our ability to make our own trade and energy policies, the UK will have to pay and be subject to the fiat of the European Court of Justice.

The EU’s objectives were leaked in a negotiating paper in 2024, in which it made clear the strong desire for the extension of the pre-existing arrangements on reciprocal fisheries access and the support among EU member states for a UK-EU youth experience scheme and a UK return to the Erasmus+ scheme—which, incidentally, comes at significant cost to British taxpayers, with little or no value-for-money analysis. The key EU objectives of the 2024 negotiation document have been agreed to by the UK. The EU has now made it clear that if the Government are determined to push for closer alignment with the single market then we will have to pay in the region of £1 billion a year into the European Union’s budget—something that we have not had to do since we were a member. This completely undermines the UK’s political and financial autonomy.

This would be understandable, were Ministers to have brought forward a comprehensive, robust cost-benefit analysis of how dynamic alignment may benefit British business, but they have not. Our committee has received substantial evidence that the true cost of this policy of dynamic alignment will be a hit of £15 billion to our economy, as it will destroy UK regulatory headroom by importing EU anti-competitive market distortions.

British exceptionalism in areas such as gene-editing, novel foods, AI and, of course, animal welfare standards will be stymied by such a foolhardy policy, and all for a minuscule gain in GDP over the long term, based on contested figures pulled together by lobby groups—according to the Centre for European Reform a gain of just 0.1% of GDP with a sector-specific SPS agreement, or just 0.04% of GDP with youth mobility and a touring artists’ regime in the near to medium term.

We already know that the estimates of the so-called damage to the UK economy of Brexit are based on dodgy figures and have been comprehensively rebutted. For instance, the NBER working paper, used recently by the Chancellor, which claims a hit

“by as much as 8%”

to the UK economy, was derived by comparing growth in UK GDP per capita with the averages of a wide range of other countries with many different characteristics. UK underperformance since 2016 was solely attributed to Brexit and ignored other key factors, such as Covid, the Ukraine war and the energy crisis, which impacted different economies in different ways. We know as a fact that UK growth in GDP per capita has been only a little below that of France and better than Italy, Canada and Germany. Of course, those Brexit-sceptic commentators invariably ignore our hugely successful improvement in services exported to the EU since 2016. That is why the City of London is now wary of linking regulations to a single European jurisdiction.

Dynamic alignment will require at least five years of complex primary legislation and runs the risk of severe retaliation by non-EU countries, as there will develop, for instance, a structural incompatibility with our obligations under the CPTPP. This is bad for our economy. For instance, UK exports of pharmaceuticals to the United States, worth £11 billion, are at risk of a 100% tariff in order for us to, let us face it, protect the EU agricultural sector.

Ministers have completely ignored the fact that mutual recognition and equivalence are tools used by most mature economies trading globally as a means to reduce regulatory friction while protecting parliamentary sovereignty. If the Government continue to yield to the EU’s demands, the UK will be committed to contributing to EU cohesion funding, and we will have to pay financial contributions to help reduce economic, social and territorial disparities within the EU. We will be paying the European Union for the privilege of undermining our global competitiveness. Dynamic alignment offers us nothing that we do not already have.

Finally, these proposals have significant ramifications for parliamentary sovereignty. Ministers intend to use statutory instruments to bypass parliamentary scrutiny every time the EU updates the rules that we are forcibly aligned with. To compound this, we will have no real influence over the EU regulation-making process, merely the opaque illusion of so-called decision-shaping, about which Ministers have not yet opined.

The Government have a choice to make: to change tack and uphold the commitments and democratic will of the British people, producing a Budget that cuts business taxes, reduces regulation and welfare spending, boosts jobs and skills, and secures new global trading opportunities, or to turn their back on the people they claim to serve and shackle our country to a declining, overregulated, dirigiste market that will hobble British enterprise and innovation in a vain attempt to prop up a discredited Administration and a struggling Prime Minister.