European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 (References to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement) Regulations 2021

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Grand Committee

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

My Lords, this takes me back to when I first started to work on the European Community. The EU is a legal construct; clauses, subclauses, chapters and treaties all matter a great deal—usually in French and English, with others to be carefully compared.

I remind the Minister that, when I started to work on this, Margret Thatcher, the then Conservative Prime Minister, was pushing hard to create a single market by removing non-tariff barriers, which she rightly saw as bigger barriers to trade than tariffs. All Conservative Ministers learned and well understood this. I find it very sad that so many Conservatives and current Ministers appear to have forgotten that a mere 25 to 30 years later.

One of the many things that this Government have declared and then had to go back on is that Brexit is done. We are learning that Brexit is far from done; there is a great deal more to be sorted out. That is of course partly because of the chaotic way in which the TCA was negotiated at the last minute against the deadline—in the clear hope from the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, that this would leave very little time for Parliament to scrutinise or find holes in it.

Now we have a technical SI on the negative basis to correct some aspects of it. Can the Minister confirm whether he expects there to be further SIs that will deal with minor—or indeed major—amendments to the TCA and, if so, may I warmly suggest that they should in all cases be affirmative SIs? We are trying to redesign our relationship with the European Union and we all have an interest in that relationship not becoming a hostile and ill-tempered one. If we are to achieve that, however, it requires a good deal more to be sorted out, including foreign and security policy co-operation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said.

In this respect, the very 19th-century view of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, of sovereignty as much more fundamental than international law is clearly a barrier to reasonable negotiation and reasonable arrangements. We all understand that the greatest difficulty with the Northern Ireland protocol is that, for ideological reasons, the British Government have refused to negotiate a phytosanitary agreement—or veterinary agreement, as the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, called it—on the grounds that this would impinge on British sovereignty, not that the British Government have said, so far, that we wish in any way to move away from existing European regulations. That seems to me to be a triumph of ideology over national interest—and, incidentally, it begins to threaten the union and peace in Northern Ireland.

I have some sympathy for the Minister in his position. Honest Conservatives now working for a chaotic Government—I hope not quite as chaotic as Dominic Cummings claims—must find themselves in some difficulty defending the position of a Government who often deny responsibility for what they negotiated less than three years ago. The Government must take responsibility for their future relations, however much they may wish to tilt towards the Pacific. I have to say that I was very amused to discover the other day that the Government are planning to send fishery protection boats to the Pacific in order to enforce fishery protection there, while we are so short of fishery protection vessels in the UK that we could do with another dozen or two here.

There are a number of illogical elements in this Government, which I am sure the Minister quietly regrets as he loyally continues to serve. Can he assure us that further amendments to the TCA, which we unavoidably expect, will be presented, whenever possible, as affirmative SIs and debated on the Floor of the Chamber? We all have strong interests in this relationship becoming a stable and friendly one, and we are some distance from that yet.