Trade Bill

Lord True Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 11th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure yet again to follow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I like to think it is because we are under T and W but perhaps it is because I am rising from the graveyard to fill the final Back-Bench slot in what has been an excellent debate. I am sorry that my noble friend Lady Meyer is not here but I think we all agree that it was graced by her moving and brilliant maiden speech.

I support the Bill and congratulate my noble friend the Minister on the way in which she introduced it. The Bill is needed to maintain smooth trading arrangements for this country outside the EU, which is where the British people have voted to be. We should get on with it. Yes, of course scrutiny and revision are our job but we should not be using them as a stage for the kind of wrecking tactics that failed in the other place, by tacking on a customs union or a second referendum—although having heard some of the contributions today, I rather fear that we are heading that way.

I would like to highlight one salient truth of the Brexit debate: the decisive, and I would submit shameful, role of the Labour Party in the fight to subvert the referendum verdict. At the last election, Labour promised its electors in the north of England and the Midlands that it would honour the referendum result: that we would come out of the single market, have control of immigration, end EU interference in our laws and leave the customs union. Since then, in vote after vote, Labour has dishonoured the promises it gave the British people. It signalled yet again today from the Front Bench that it wants to use this Bill to keep Britain in the customs union which it promised to take us out of. It has provided the compliant troops in both Houses for the schemes and devices of those who wish to reverse the referendum result. In this, as in so much else, Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party simply cannot be trusted and everyone who voted for Brexit should mark this fact. There would have been no problem in any vote to implement Brexit in either House if Labour had not voted to stop it. A factional thirst for power has consistently been put before the democratic duty not to renege on promises given to the British people.

For all the words of gloom we have heard today—and we have heard many—I submit that on Brexit, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Project Fear proved a total failure. Do your Lordships remember threats to pensions, the warnings of slumps, mass unemployment and the flight of capital from the City? People saw through it; Project Fear was fantasy. Now, in place of Project Fear, outside this House, we have Project Panic: claims that after 29 March planes will stop flying, trade will halt, food supplies will run out and the Army will be on the streets—fantasy, my Lords. In whose interest is it exactly to stop trade, the flow of French food or German car parts into the UK? Mr Macron—sorry, should I call him “Monsieur”, or “Monsieur Le Président”? If French vegetables were rotting in Calais, Monsieur Le Président would soon hear the rumbles of French farmers’ tractors coming down the Champs-Élysées. It will not happen under any model for Brexit unless a malevolent hand wills it to happen.

Last week, sadly, I attended the funeral of my only brother, who was a victim of an unpleasant cancer. Recently some of the authors of Project Panic have talked of cancer victims dying because supplies of medicines and isotopes would be blocked after 29 March. Who precisely would block them? Do those who spin these kinds of things have any conception of the anguish they cause patients and their families? Do they care? Such pedlars of panic, in my most generous estimation, are jackals.

I repeat: we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Outside the EU, Britain can be the country that I demonstrated for as a young man: a trading nation open to the world, confident in its future, competitive, innovative, job-creating, a champion of free trade and a beacon to the world of civility, culture and common sense.

Today we have heard several more attacks on those who argue for Brexit; indeed, we were described as “denizens of another world”—and that was one of the kindest things said. We have heard many pleas that even now, we must stay in the EU. I must respond to that. I declare an interest as a part-time resident of Italy for 40 years—and one, frankly, without an ounce of fear that even under a WTO deal, the carabinieri would come knocking at my door. That is another fantasy of Project Fear.

When in Italy, I contemplate the catastrophic failure of the European project and the euro project that was piled on top of the previously widely accepted EEC. I see 600,000 to 700,000 illegal immigrants, most of them fit young men with iPhones and designer clothes, many begging in the streets from Italians who have lost their entire life’s work in the 2016 earthquake. I see 31% of young people without a job. I see a country that has barely grown since it entered the euro. I see a country that has lost 16% of its industrial production since it entered the euro. I see a country where 158,000 small businesses have closed in the last eight years. That is the monstrous toll of the amoral euro project, not just in Italy but across the Mediterranean.

I see a country that, when it votes in politicians who want to control immigration and change some of these things, first faces a failed coup to impose a Government of pro-EU austerity technocrats and then, when they are seen off, is told by a German EU Commissioner, “The markets will teach Italians how to vote”. That is the behaviour and the language not of partners but of masters.

I see a country where the EU promises to help with illegal immigration but delivers nothing but lectures, where criticism of the Commission is declared inadmissible and Monsieur Le Président turns back 50,000 immigrants at the French border and fraternally declares himself the principal opponent of the elected Government of a neighbouring country. I see a country where politicians who step outside the tent of the overweening EU elite and talk about problems that really confront ordinary people are condemned as extremists or populists. The problem that some cannot stomach in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland or Britain is that these so-called populists are popular and Brussels is not. Tens of millions of people voted for them. Precisely who elected the Brussels elite, or, come to that—I hate to say it—their useful allies in this House? Whatever else we think in this debate, we should dispose of the canard that, inside the EU, all is joy and strength and outside is doom and despair. Things may well be well, as we heard, in Denmark, but there is something rotten in the state of the European Union.

We face a historic choice between a free and fast-moving economy in a fast-changing world, or taking our rulebook from an organisation where what is once agreed can never be changed and anything new takes months or years to agree. It is a choice between free trade and lower prices, and tracking the part of the world which has seen the lowest growth in the last generation. A clear way forward was once offered—a free trade deal on the Canada model. I wish it had been grasped then and I hope it will be pursued now. Whatever route we choose, we need this Bill, which my noble friend has so excellently presented. We should speed it on its way, fast.