Debate on the Address

Debate between Matt Western and David Drew

Monday 14th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am delighted to take part on the first day of our consideration of the Queen’s Speech, which was more about a political programme for the forthcoming general election than about how this country is going to be governed. Sadly, the Brexit morass that will envelop us all will carry on, regardless of what happens on Saturday and whatever happens by the end of this month. I wish, however, to start on a conciliatory note and something I am pleased to add my comments on. I refer to the commendation of our late friend Paul Flynn. Paul helped me enormously. He always said I would become an MP and he proved to be right, and he came over to Stroud to help me on numerous occasions. I owe him so much and he is clearly someone we all miss on this side of the House, and I hope the whole House will feel the same.

The Queen’s Speech is significant not so much for what was in it—as I said, there was a lot of politicisation—but, sadly, for what was not in it. It contained no mention of the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign, whose tragedy this whole House has to face up to at some point. It contained no mention of housing, which is the key issue for many of us in terms of how public service has to deliver much better. It did contain a mention of animal welfare, but it was minuscule compared with where we need to be going on animal welfare. A genuine animal welfare Bill is required, yet we are now talking about trophy hunting just as we talked previously about ivory bans, both of which are important in their own right but not what we should be doing, which is looking for a much more comprehensive approach. Many of our constituents vote on the issue of animal welfare and they feel we should be taking things forward much more quickly and radically.

[Matt Western]

My hon. Friend is making some powerful points. I believe he is alluding to the fact that this Queen’s Speech seemed almost tokenistic, in that it was almost like a shopping list of ambitions and touchpoints of things that the Government and Prime Minister felt to be important. How can there have been no mention of something as crucial to what is needed out there as housing, given that we have homelessness and rough sleeping at record levels, with people desperate and dying on the streets?

[Dr Drew]

That is what we should have been prioritising in this Queen’s Speech, along with the abolition of universal credit, which has proved to be a monumental mistake. There was nothing wrong with the concept, but the delivery of UC has caused such hardship, in all our constituencies, and it is beyond reform. We have to get rid of it and start with something different.

The Prime Minister, in defence of the Queen’s Speech, talked a lot about one nation. I know the Conservatives like to talk about themselves as the one nation party. Sadly, the way things could turn out means we could be facing one nation, because the other three parts of the United Kingdom, for various reasons, no longer seem to want to be part of this one nation. I really worry about the level of English nationalism, which is now driving the Conservative party. We have a fundamental problem and I agree with the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) that we need radical constitutional reform, and that includes devolution in this country of England, where we have failed to do anything to deal with the centralisation of power. That is a fundamental reason why people voted for Brexit; they did so because they feel disconnected from the way in which decisions are made. That comes into the need for a fundamental rethink, with votes at 16, electoral reform and unitary authorities, to which she alluded. As someone who spent 28 years on a parish and town council, I am pleased to say that that means taking power to the first level of government—it is not the lowest level. That is important, because people can then see what is happening in the communities.

Brexit has caused huge divisions, but it has also led to this Government wasting the past year. I regret and resent the fact that we will not be having the Agriculture Bill and the Fisheries Bill back—we did not even get as far as the environment Bill. All those are fundamental pieces of legislation that should have been enacted over the past year. We may disagree about what was going into those Bills. We had a critique in Committee, but, sadly for those who served on it—I led on behalf of the Opposition—the Agriculture Bill disappeared last November, never to be seen again. That does nothing other than cause disillusion. Farmers are asking, notwithstanding the uncertainty over Brexit, what policy is going to be in place if we crash out. More particularly, even if we do not crash out, we will need an agricultural policy that is understood and that takes account of the idea of public money for public goods. We need to see that in practice and see how it will work. At the moment, we just have a huge void.

I welcome the fact that the issue of mental health is in the Queen’s Speech, and hopefully a Bill will subsequently come forward, but there is a problem. Like many other Members, I go around my local schools—I have been to 40 schools in the past year—and besides funding and staff stability, the third issue that all schools raise with me is their children’s mental health. It is now at a stage where it is a crisis. We must not underestimate how bad things are. Of course, it is about not only the children but their families. We have a significant problem, even in Gloucestershire, with off-rolling. A lot of it has to do with parents who do not believe that their children can get special needs provision in the normal system, but it is also about the way parents can take their children out of school into so-called home education. There is nothing wrong with home education in theory, but they are not then educating their children, who are being taken out of school more as companions than in the context of a parent-child relationship. That should be addressed by proper investigation and, in due course, the putting in place of a proper legislative context.

My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), who is sadly not currently in the Chamber, talked about air quality as a key issue. I hope that will be addressed, either through the environment Bill or in its own right. I shall just add to what he had to say the significant issue of incineration, which leads to small particulates that have an enormous impact on the health of children in particular. We have never investigated it, and it should be paramount in the way we try to drive up air quality. Yes, of course traffic is seen as the major cause of the huge issue of our deteriorating health standards, but there are other parts to it. The disposal of waste through appropriate means by getting rid of it in a non-polluting manner is crucial, as is not creating it in the first place.

That brings me to the biggest loss in the Queen’s Speech: the failure to address climate change properly. The target of 2050 is far too late. Earlier this evening, I had the opportunity to go along to a meeting of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, at which three experts, including the former chief scientist Sir David King, basically argued that we are not anywhere near meeting the obligations in this country, let alone in the wider world. Warming of 2° will cause climate change catastrophe. We need to understand that, which is why I am proud to stand by my constituents. As many Members know, Extinction Rebellion came from Stroud. Many of my constituents are out there at every moment in time, and I am happy to help them wherever I can. I also pay due regard to Polly Higgins, the creator of the campaign on ecocide who latterly became a Stroud constituent. We need to look at ecocide and the implications—there is an opportunity for Members to come to a briefing this week—of how we can pass a law that means we will not leave a worse situation to our children and particularly our grandchildren. We should feel desperately keen to avoid doing that at any cost. Let us listen to the scientists and the campaigners, and let us do something in this place, rather than talk about it.

In conclusion, I am pleased that the Domestic Abuse Bill has been carried over and will hopefully see the light of day. Let us make sure that the legislation is not watered down and includes action such as banning sham marriages. We must make sure that it is not just linked to immigration and human rights but stands in its own right. The Opposition will debate the Bills as they come forward and seek radically to improve the legislation. We will make sure that there is an alternative. We heard earlier that it was all about the previous Government’s failings in power; I argue that austerity was a political programme. We are now coming to the end of austerity. It was such an unnecessary and punitive way for any Government to try to deal with the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. If we have come out of austerity, now is the time to see the real changes that are desperately needed, so that we have a more humane society that addresses issues such as housing, education and health, as well as trying to deal with the morass of Brexit. More particularly, we need to deal with climate change.

Future Free Trade Agreements

Debate between Matt Western and David Drew

Thursday 21st February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Western]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his chairmanship of the International Trade Committee, which he does so well, and for the important point that he has just made. One senses that we are being kept in the dark, that there is there is far greater transparency on the EU side, and that we will probably end up learning more from the EU and other countries about how our deals are progressing. The Select Committee has actually found that to be the case when we have visited Geneva, Brussels or elsewhere; we are discovering the reality from trade ambassadors in those other countries.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am very much enjoying my hon. Friend’s speech. It is not just that we seem to be in the dark about our relationship with the EU; Ministers also seem to be in the dark from one another. For example, the Chancellor has said that they he does not want any tariffs on food because he wants to keep food prices down, but in today’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions the Farming Minister gave a very long answer about how DEFRA is looking at tariffs, quotas and various other restrictions. It is not very good if Government Departments cannot even talk to one another, is it?

[Matt Western]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, which I was going to come to later in my speech. He is quite right that the Government are kind of fudging the situation along, and no one is absolutely clear how these things will be managed. Our rural and farming communities will be extremely concerned because, having been so dismissive of the common agricultural policy, it is absolutely not clear how we are going to manage our all-important farming and agricultural sector post Brexit.

I was talking about the free trade agreements and the discussions of the Select Committee last week. It has subsequently become clear that the situation is a real mess. The status of the deals has been leaked and we now know that just five have been agreed, nine are off track, 19 are significantly off track, four are not possible to complete by March 2019 and two are not even being negotiated. So much for colour blindness—perhaps it is more of a blind spot.

In the case of the five deals that have been rolled over, their lack of priority and importance is perhaps self-evident. The Faroe Islands, which were mentioned earlier, are the UK’s 114th largest trading partner—critical, then—and account for 0.1% of total UK trade. Clearly we buy a lot of fish from them. Then there is Chile, our 65th largest trading partner, which also accounts for 0.1% of total UK trade. The eastern and southern African region accounts for £1.5 billion and another 0.1%. Switzerland and Israel are the only countries that are bringing deals of the scale that we would have expected earlier in the process. Perhaps most concerning are the agreements with South Korea and Japan, which are way off track, and the lack of diplomacy is only hampering them.

It is clear that the Secretary of State and his Department favour securing deals with Anglosphere countries—the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada being prime among them. The US is a major market, but so is the EU. Perhaps it is the appeal of another strong and stable leader that is driving the Prime Minister and her Secretary of State to prioritise a deal with the US. Elsewhere, of course it would be good to have better deals with Australia and New Zealand, but is it not more sensible to prioritise the customers on our doorstep? When I did a paper round, I always thought that it was better to do the paper round on my own street, rather than on the other side of the village; maybe I am wrong.

The public should not be fooled into thinking that this will be over by 2020 or 2021. As we have heard, these deals will take six to 10 years to negotiate. This will not be easy. The EU-CETA deal took six years. That is typical, and we have heard from trade negotiators, trade lawyers and those involved in other countries just how difficult this will be. The public need to know, as do those in our industrial and business sectors. The US is a great country, but it is an even better trade negotiator. In trade deals, as in any business deal, size matters, and since the election of President Trump we have seen a new approach that favours the bilateral agreements that he prefers. That puts the US at an immediate advantage. Hence, NAFTA was redone. The Select Committee happened to be over there back in the spring of 2018, and the anxiety was palpable among the Canadian negotiators about what that would mean—but not just among them. It was palpable among US exporters and the car industry, as we heard earlier.

Perhaps naively, or perhaps because it is the outcome that the Secretary of State favours, we will face the mother of negotiations when our people sit down in Washington, and we should be under no illusion as to what the US will want to trade on. It will be services and cars, traded for agriculture and healthcare. We should remember the issues from the negotiations on the now-abandoned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, otherwise known as TTIP. Foremost among the public’s concern was the threat posed to our precious health service from a possible corporate takeover in any form. That deal, lest we forget, was being negotiated between the EU and the US, virtually equal-sized economies.

I have nothing against the US. In fact, I love the US, but I love the NHS more, and I am suspicious of the strategy of the Government and the Secretary of State. I have nothing against him personally, but let us be honest, he was the founder of the Atlantic Bridge, and his motivations and intentions have always been clear.

Like so many of my constituents, I fear not just for our health service but for our excellent, world-leading car manufacturers, local farmers and all those involved in our agri-food industry. None of those working in that sector should be under any illusion that they will be safe in a trade deal that the Secretary of State will seek urgently and desperately to secure in order to preserve the Government’s position. Without doubt, financial services will be his priority.

Our farmers should also be concerned by what concessions are likely to be made in the trade deals elsewhere, especially in the trade of livestock. Likewise our fisheries. Just last week, there was disagreement between the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and that was echoed this morning, as we have just heard, in the comments about who would subsidise our farmers in those circumstances should we leave the EU. While both Australia and New Zealand have much to offer, their markets are still a small fraction of that of the EU, and the Secretary of State should be clear about that. By my estimation, trade with the EU is 30 times the combined trade that we do with New Zealand and Australia.

By contrast, the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership has considerable scale. Naturally, its members comprise the nations around the perimeter of the Pacific, which will benefit from free trade in that sphere. I struggle to see how it will benefit or be appropriate to the UK. Call me old-fashioned, but doing business locally was always easiest and remained the priority. That seems no longer to be the case. Of the countries involved, our trading negotiations with Japan and South Korea are the most critical—far more so than those with Australia or New Zealand. In conversations with Japanese and Korean investors, it is clear how concerned they are by Brexit.

At an event in October last year held by the Japanese Chamber of Trade here in Parliament, its chief executive made it clear to those present, including the Secretaries of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and for Transport, that Brexit would seriously affect its businesses and investments in the UK. Spring forward three months, and Nissan has cancelled its investment in Sunderland, Honda has announced the closure of its plant in Swindon with the direct loss of 3,500 jobs, and Hitachi has cancelled its investment plans for a nuclear station in Anglesey. A clear pattern is emerging.

Let me return to the question of priorities—let us call them business priorities. Surely our priority must be to secure our existing trade in inward investment. I do not understand why the Government seem so relaxed about walking away from their biggest customer and in the process damaging existing relations and undermining both domestic and foreign direct investment.

[Matt Western]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, whose constituency name I always get wrong—the Outer Hebrides—for his important point. It is not until we actually talk to investors and their representatives, and to major corporations that have given so much prosperity to these islands over the last 30 or 40 years, and consider how they feel—he used the word “slighted”—that we realise that respect is such a critical part of the culture in Asia. It is absolutely clear that they feel disrespected in this process and that we have not approached them and engaged with them sufficiently well. The Government may well have done that to an extent, but the fact that we are now seeing this haemorrhaging of investment from the UK underlines how seriously that is felt. At that reception held by the Japanese embassy in October last year, attended by the Secretaries of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and for Transport, the words of the chamber’s chief executive were chilling. He said, in summary, about Brexit, “We will be watching you.” Never have so few words concerned me so much.

I cannot help but conclude that this country is being seduced by a prospect of some sort of brave new world—empire 2.0, perhaps—when, in reality, the existing world in which we trade is both stable and prosperous, no matter the present headwinds. Actually, I agree with the Secretary of State for International Trade that we could be performing better in Asia Pacific markets, but I disagree with him on his solution. How can it be that, as I have said previously in this place, German exports to China are 10 times those of the UK? Germany is part of the EU, is it not?

Sometimes, we—the UK public—have bought the lie that being a member of the EU has held us back in international trade. It has absolutely not. To be fair to someone I did not necessarily agree with, Margaret Thatcher recognised that and recognised the importance of the EU. As was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), who is no longer in his seat, it is perhaps the greatest irony that she would have sought to protect our membership of the EU single market, of which she was the architect, recognising its importance to businesses based here, and particularly the Japanese companies she persuaded to invest here, such as Honda and Nissan. She will be turning in her grave.

I remain convinced about and committed to protecting our market and our businesses, and our jobs that they provide. Likewise, I am concerned for our farmers and those in the south of my constituency around the villages of Barford, Bishop’s Tachbrook, Hampton Magna and Norton Lindsey, who I believe will be seriously damaged by the industrial-scale farming they will be forced to compete against in future.

I also remain convinced about and committed to the EU market. Surely it provides greater certainty than the prospect of being caught up in the crossfire of the US-China trade wars. The truth is that, whether it be the uncertainty of negotiating with the current President of the United States or the significantly smaller markets presented by Australia and New Zealand, the priorities claimed by the Secretary of State are far removed from the certainty of the EU market. We should be wary of where we are going.

[Dr Drew]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again. Does he accept that one sector that is particularly vulnerable is the pig sector? American exports to China have all but come to an end and the Americans are desperate to find another market that they can populate with their pigs. The obvious one is the UK. Would not that be a real threat?

[Matt Western]

I thank my hon. Friend for his well-informed intervention—he clearly knows a huge amount more about the pig farming sector than I do. The subject did come up in conversations in the United States and subsequently of the opportunities not just for pig farmers but for soya bean agriculture, and how keen the US is to export those products. We have to be cognisant of what that will mean. As has been said many times this afternoon, this is about concession, trading terms and what we are most prepared to give way on, but I am particularly fearful of the impact on our rural communities and on the farming sector, whether it be the pig farmers or others.

In considering future deals, it is essential in any event that there should be scrutiny from Parliament. That has come through loud and clear in the evidence that our Select Committee has taken: we should involve not only Parliament, but the devolved Administrations, civil society groups, representative business bodies and the unions. We need economic impact assessments, undertaken and shared with the relevant bodies—in particular, Parliament and the Administrations. That approach would ensure transparency and is best exemplified by that followed in the EU’s process, but also by the US itself. We also need to ensure the protection and maintenance of workers’ rights and environmental protections—certainly in our farming and rural sector—and to oppose the use of investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms in future agreements.

Finally, in leaving one of the most sophisticated, most advanced markets that is the EU, we must not allow this or any Government to reduce standards or protections. First and foremost, we must be determined to ensure that our manufacturing industries and farmers receive the appropriate protections they deserve, not the 0% tariffs on imports that the Secretary of State is advocating.