Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, by way of explanation, I said that the DUP were not represented here. I see that they have now taken their seats, and we look forward to hearing from them.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I hope that the Minister understands that part of the reason for our demand to see the full text is that many of us neither trust the Government nor are convinced that they understand quite where they are going. In answer to my question last week, the Minister insisted, as he just has again, that the Government are aiming for higher standards than common European standards. Yet, since he gave that any answer, I have seen a number of briefings for the press from Ministers and sources in No. 10 which suggest that we want more flexible standards to be able to open up to a range of things, which suggests lower standards. It says here that we are not prepared to be a “rule-taker”. It also says that we want to renegotiate the political declaration so that we can have our own regulations.

When I was following Margaret Thatcher’s proposals for the single market in the early 1980s—the Minister is probably too young to remember that period—the argument which was made by those around Margaret Thatcher was that we were a rule-taker. We by and large took US regulations and taking part in creating European regulations would give us much more of a handle on questions such as how we coped with the internet, and what is now the whole digital economy, and we would therefore be able to take part in making our own regulations.

There seems to be a fantasy in the Government that we are not going to follow American regulations or European regulations but we will be a wonderful island with our own special regulations in this whole area, which will make it much more difficult to trade and produce services in collaboration with others. Is that the direction we are going in, or are we going back, as some Ministers seem to have suggested at the weekend, to following American regulations instead?

[Lord Callanan]

I thank the noble Lord for his question and particularly for his age compliment, although I am not sure I am that much younger than he is; I accept it none the less.

I said last week, and repeated to the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, that we already have higher standards in virtually all those areas than the EU minimum standards. What standards we have in the future is one of the great opportunities of Brexit. What standards we might like to have is a matter for this House. The great thing about Brexit is that we no longer have to have these things dictated for us by the European Union. This is about taking back control. We can decide these matters for ourselves.

I am not clear why the Opposition think that this is such a bad thing. We can decide whether we have much higher standards, different standards, alternative standards. The opportunity to better regulate new and emerging areas of technology is one of the great opportunities of Brexit when we are no longer attached to the lumbering dinosaur of the EU. We can decide these things in a nimble and flexible way.

In terms of the noble Lord’s general comments about standards, obviously it is the case that if we want to export to the US market, the Chinese market, or the Indian market, we have to follow those standards in those particular areas. For the vast bulk of our trade and commerce which goes on within our own internal economy, we can determine those standards for ourselves.