European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Lord Rooker Excerpts

3rd reading & 2nd reading & Committee negatived & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate my friend the noble Lord, Lord Austin of Dudley, on a brilliant maiden speech. When normality returns, I look forward to working with him.

The proceedings today are a farce. Parliament has failed again to stop more powers going to the Executive without scrutiny. And it is not the end of Brexit; it is just the start. Food, our largest manufacturing sector, is badly served. Rules of origin are more important than tariffs. Several products are now impossible to export to the European Union. Trade rules in food for the European Union are now more onerous for the UK than they are for New Zealand.

Confidence in food safety must be maintained at all costs. The Bill means that the UK is now outside many of the notification systems, and those have mainly been invented during our membership, so there is no previous system to fall back on. For animal diseases and pests in plant products, there is RASFF, the rapid alert system for food and feed. Of RASFF notifications, the top seven EU members account for more than 50%, with 11 notifications a day around the EU. The UK is the second-highest notifier, Germany being the highest, followed closely by France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Austria. The United Kingdom is kicked out of RASFF while Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland are still members.

Real-time information is crucial for food safety. In my view, it is urgent that the Food Standards Agency, for which I have massive respect and of which I declare an interest as a former chair, and which has been working on this issue for a long time, asserts its operational independence and publishes, before 11 pm tomorrow, the policy to protect UK consumers, manufacturers and others. It is a two-way process: we need to be able to alert others as well as looking after ourselves. Confidence will not be maintained as matters arise without an open and transparent system. I was very pleased to learn in the last hour from the director of FSA Northern Ireland that Northern Ireland is remaining in the RASFF.

That is a bit of detail out of the way. One of my biggest problems is that I do not trust the Prime Minister. EU members have no reason to trust him. His word is not his bond. I am reminded of Churchill, when he wrote:

“Great nations are no longer led by their ablest men, or by those who know most about their immediate affairs, or even by those who have a coherent doctrine.”


That completely sums up our untrustworthy Prime Minister and his Government. We need a firm commitment, not to make the treaty work or to build on it but to renegotiate it to avoid being smaller and alone and to be bigger together and greater than the parts. I have not heard that from any quarter. This Bill will not have my name on it.