United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 19th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, some of the language of the Bill brings back distant memories from over 35 years ago. Proponents of free trade and open markets, including Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, argued then that the absence of a common framework for regulation across the European Community disadvantaged UK exports to our neighbours. It also meant that British standards usually copied US standards; American regulators exercised what lawyers termed “extraterritorial jurisdiction” over foreign markets such as the UK. For Mrs Thatcher, a European single market would mean that British Ministers could take an active part in negotiating international standards rather than swallowing American ones.

A generation later, in a far more integrated global economy, it has become clear that standards and regulations will emerge from one of three major global players: the United States, China or the European Union. However, our Government are pursuing an antique and absolutist version of Westminster sovereignty, breaking free of the EU. In practice, that means we will end up following either American or European standards on food safety, financial regulation and the internet without much influence on either—losing control, not taking back control.

The doctrine of sovereignty that underlies the Bill was set out by Albert Venn Dicey in his 1885 Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. Dicey insisted that Westminster sovereignty was supreme and indivisible, internally and externally. Sir William Cash frequently quotes him and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, cited Dicey in this House when challenged about the subject. However, Dicey was writing at the high point of British imperialism when English politicians could assume that Britain shaped international law and other countries had to follow. The Empire has gone, but the mixture of imperial nostalgia and English nationalism that motivates hard-right Conservatives resists negotiating international law with other states. That is disastrous for Britain’s reputation, for London as a global centre for litigation and legal expertise and for our ability to negotiate future trade deals with others, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and others have noted.

Dicey’s approach to domestic sovereignty was shaped by his bitter opposition to Irish home rule. He refused to accept that powers could be shared with a parliament in Dublin. Conservative unionists follow Dicey, insisting that all authority in the UK rests in Westminster. That absolutist view, through opposition to successive proposals for home rule, led to Ireland breaking away from the United Kingdom.

This is a constitutional Bill. It goes to the heart of the rule of law within the UK as well as in relation to other states, and it threatens the further disintegration of our state, with Scotland leaving and Ulster moving towards reunification to leave England diminished and internally divided.

We are now watching right-wing Republicans bend America’s written constitution until it is close to breaking. We have even seen the embittered partisanship of American politics spilling over into this debate in the attack by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, on the Bishops who are addressing the moral dimensions of the Bill. We should not allow our increasingly authoritarian Government to bend the conventions of our own unwritten constitution any further.