Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill [HL]

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, we have a very nice tradition in this House of always warmly welcoming maiden speeches. We usually do it because we are a nice, polite House. In this case, we do it because we genuinely warmly welcome the Foreign Secretary to join us and we greatly admire the maiden speech he has just made. We genuinely do.

There is something wonderfully Alice in Wonderland and ironic about the fact that the noble Lord’s maiden speech is made in a debate on an implementing Bill that will implement a treaty that we have not yet seen; it has not been presented to us. We are going to debate the detail of a Bill that will put on the statute book the necessary changes, because it is assumed that we will agree that we should accede to the CPTPP. Of course, it is not an unrealistic assumption, because we in this House can do absolutely nothing to stop our acceding to the CPTPP—which is again nicely Alice in Wonderland.

Actually, I would not want to stop it—I think it is a very good thing that we are acceding to the CPTPP—but I do hope that the Foreign Secretary will find time to consider the paradox that we are stuck here on pre-Brexit arrangements for scrutinising and approving trade agreements even though, post Brexit, we no longer have as our trade negotiators the Christopher Soameses, the Leon Brittans, the Cathy Ashtons or the Peter Mandelsons. We no longer have the right, in the Council of Ministers, to give them a mandate; we no longer have a European Parliament scrutinising everything they do in a trade negotiation; and we no longer therefore have Select Committees in this House and the other place scrutinising very closely what our Ministers say in the Council of Ministers, with all of this done in public.

Since Brexit, trade policy has been a black box. Westminster is in the dark and Whitehall has taken back absolute control. It does not feel quite right to me. I do not suppose the Foreign Secretary will have the time, or possibly the inclination, to consider amending the CRaG Act 2010, but I hope that successor Foreign Secretaries will. The Alice in Wonderland arrangements are all very funny, but it is not right.

I also hope that the Foreign Secretary might consider why the International Agreements Committee of this House has so regularly called for the publication of a government trade strategy. Most grown-up Governments publish their trade strategies. I am a member of that committee, and we have repeatedly called for one. Not knowing what the Government are trying to achieve makes it quite tricky to work out, looking at each negotiation and its outcome, how far they have achieved their aim. I am not naive; I suspect that I have just described what some Trade Secretaries would regard as the best feature of our arrangement. Since it is not possible to say against any overall guideline whether they have done well, they can tell us that they have done jolly well.

As previous speakers have indicated, some Trade Secretaries have tended to do that a bit. As the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, said, most of the agreements that Ms Truss presented, for example, were simple rollovers of the existing pre-Brexit arrangements, but all her geese were swans. Most of them were perfectly respectable geese, but they had to be presented as swans. I hope the Foreign Secretary will seek to persuade his Trade colleague, who I think is more open to the idea, to listen to the recommendation from this place that the Government should publish an overall trade strategy. But let me reassure him that the task of seeing this Bill through the House will not be onerous and that accession to the CPTPP is a swan—or at least a cygnet that might, over time, grow into a perfectly respectable swan.

I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said about what it is worth economically in the short term. The Government’s own impact assessment says that in the short term there will not be much economic benefit. Their economic impact assessment says it has taken full account of the likely dynamic—on which I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lamont—and how the region is likely to grow. The impact assessment says that

“UK gross domestic product (GDP) could increase by the equivalent of £2.0 billion in the long run”

as a result of the CPTPP. It defines “in the long run” as by 2040. I agree with the impact assessment and those who say that all such long-range predictions have extremely wide margins of error, but it is important to remember that the Government thought that the central estimate of the likely financial benefit was £2 billion in the long term—in other words, about a third of 1% of GDP. That is not a lot. The reason is that we have existing free trade agreements with all CPTPP partners except Brunei and Malaysia.

But I believe that, over time, this agreement will deepen, widen and become genuinely significant, so I am glad that the Government have decided to get us on board. I hope that, during the course of our study of this Bill, the Government will set out for us how they see the future of the organisation. Do they believe, as I do—although I think the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, would disagree with me—that, to be effective, it will need to acquire some sort of permanent secretariat, possibly even a site? Do the Government believe that it will need to consider enforcement mechanisms? I do.

What is the government view of CPTPP accession and of the six outstanding applications? These include the Chinese application that, if accepted, which in my view is very unlikely, would be transformative—in my view very undesirably. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, was right to call for transparency on this. We need to know what the Government think is the future of the organisation we are getting into. Of course, it would be a perfect subject to be covered in a trade strategy document, which could also perhaps explore the wider issue of the future of the multilateral rules-based system, and whether it has a future or whether the future is bilateral and plurilateral arrangements like CPTPP.

I am with the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, on this. I am a free trader and I believe that the best for free trade is the widest-possible global rules: simple rules, but as wide as possible. But there are two obvious problems that he and I have to face: first, American protectionism. I warmly agree with what he said. It was free trading Republicans under Robert Dole who got the United States into the WTO, but that breed seems to be extinct, and their successors have destroyed the WTO court. The second problem is China, now the world’s number one trading power. Together with the rest of the global South, it does not mind global rules, but it does not see why they should remain the rules we set 75 years ago, in the very different era of Bretton Woods.

It has a point; we have been very slow to update the structures we built. Why have seven of the 10 heads of the WTO been Europeans, like all 12 heads of the IMF, with all 14 heads of the World Bank coming from America? There is room for new thinking on effective internationalism and on the institutions that should underpin a rules-based trading system. There is a perfect task for an experienced new Foreign Secretary to consider. Meanwhile, let us work on accession to the CPTPP and welcome his arrival in this House.