European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I follow the themes picked up by my noble friends Lord Hain, Lord Whitty and Lady Crawley. They have all drawn attention to the fallacy whereby the Prime Minister seems to believe—we have to assume she believes it—that there is no alternative to where she is heading and, in particular, that this includes leaving the internal market.

Many political leaders over the years have used the phrase, “There is no alternative”, but in this case it is a tautology. Of course there is no alternative for Mrs May to the package that she brings back to Westminster. There is something tautological about the way this whole argument is going.

I ask the Minister, who is expert in all these matters and in pulling rabbits out of a hat: have the Government really not done a cost-benefit analysis in turn on each of the models of trade—tariffs and so on? That has been done by the EU Sub-Committee chaired by my noble friend Lord Whitty, in its report on trade options. As my noble friend pointed out, it concluded that the option for Britain that is least disruptive to trade and most favoured by industrialists was the EEA option. It so happens that I have tabled an amendment on that, for a week today in Committee, which would entail staying in the single market on particular terms until adjustment of freedom of movement meant that we could rejoin EFTA—but that is for next week.

The Government have got themselves into considerable confusion because they believe a lot of the wilder, more extreme rhetoric of their Brexit supporters: that Britain, somehow uniquely, wants to be involved in world trade and that there is a contradiction between that and being involved in European trade. I do not know whether it has occurred to people who press this point that Germany is the most successful exporter in world and the German share of world trade—or the world market share, as the Germans call it, which we are also interested in—is handled very effectively by the Germans both in Europe and in the rest of the world. There is no contradiction between the two.

On the internal market, there is the idea that it is all useless, obstructive regulation. The point has been made: how do you expect trains to run on all the different European railway systems unless there is one system of signalling? That example can be used, along with many others.

Then, there is the question of the future of workers in this country. Why do people think that, to achieve this so-called frictionless market—which we actually have at the moment—we need to spend some $60 billion? Why do we not stay in this market? Is that not exactly what Vauxhall, Nissan and the aerospace industry are telling the Government, let alone those in the labour movement, in financial services and so on? There are a lot of myths about the “working class”—a term that people have been telling me for many years is out of date and no longer exists. Now I am told it does exist, and that people who voted to leave have an angst about the modern world. The slogan which fits the experience is: “Stop the world, I want to get off”. I do not know whether you can stop the world but it is jolly difficult to get off.

We have a problem with involving people. I was a member of the Bullock committee on industrial democracy, and in the last 30 years we have lost the idea that the average worker should be heavily involved in strategic issues such as world market share and that the main goal of the organised worker should be to see that their company and industry can increase its world market share.

In conclusion, we would have a better explanation of how the so-called great repeal Bill relates to the negotiations if we had a cost-benefit analysis of all the different trade options, rather than being told that there is no alternative.