Continuity Trade Agreements: Parliamentary Scrutiny

Marco Longhi Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

The Vienna convention has been around for a long time, and I mentioned that many agreements were provisionally applied by the European Union. I specifically mentioned the CARIFORUM agreement with the Caribbean Community countries and the Dominican Republic, which is also of course a Caribbean country. The reason I mention it is that it has been provisionally applied for the past 12 years. It was signed by the last Labour Government. If the right hon. Lady was happy with something signed by the previous Labour Government that is still provisionally applied today, she is making a bit of a mountain out of the remaining days that we are adding to the process, given the fact that that has been provisionally applied for 12 years. Kenya is a new deal; it is not the continuity of the pre-existing deal.

What steps are we taking? We are stepping up our efforts and working extremely hard. When will UK businesses be told? We are telling businesses all the time about the deals that we have done and landed.

The right hon. Lady mentioned Ghana. There is a deal on the table; it replicates the EU agreement and is consistent with the EU-Ghana stepping stone deal applied in 2016. We are not asking Ghana to do anything that it is not already doing.

The right hon. Lady said in her letter to the Secretary of State on 10 November, which she referred to, that representatives of countries from Cameroon to Montenegro have been communicating with the shadow International Trade team. I do not know whether it is quite right for the shadow Secretary of State to be correspondingly directly with our negotiating partners during negotiations that we have been carrying out on behalf of the whole country. I would urge her in the interests of transparency to release all that correspondence with our negotiation opposite numbers, which she referred to in that letter.

It is ironic that the right hon. Lady invokes Ghana, given the amendments to the Trade Bill that she supported on other countries’ domestic production standards. The very exports that she is so worried about would have been prevented under those Labour amendments from entering the country in the first place.

The irony in Labour Members complaining that we have not yet rolled over all these EU agreements is this: they did not support these agreements in the first place. They voted against EU-Singapore, they abstained on EU-Japan, and they split three ways on EU-Canada, so they are complaining about agreements not being rolled over that they never supported in the first place.

As we know, Labour has moved on from the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) to the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer). The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury is caught between them both, first geographically and now on policy. She cannot escape from this: when it comes to trade and trade agreements, successive Labour leaders cannot decide whether they want these agreements or not. In short, they are in complete chaos, and their approach deserves to be dismissed.

[Marco Longhi (Dudley North) (Con) [V]]

I thank the Minister for his detailed and full responses. With more trade equating to more jobs in Dudley North and across the country, will my right hon. Friend update the House on the upcoming trade deal with Mercosur countries in the light of the recent Joint Economic and Trade Committee with Brazil?

[Greg Hands]

I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent question. I am aware of his background—I think he worked for five years in Brazil and knows the market extremely well. Mercosur is, of course, a very important partner for the United Kingdom, and there are significant opportunities for British business to do more trade, including with Brazil. Just last week, the Secretary of State and the Under-Secretary of State for International Trade, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire, were pleased to host their first Joint Economic and Trade Committee with Minister Fendt from Brazil. They spoke about success to date in financial services and food and drink sectors. As there is not an EU-Mercosur deal in effect, any future UK-Mercosur deal is not within the scope of this programme.