Customs and Borders

Debate between Norman Lamb and Lord Clarke of Nottingham

Thursday 26th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

With great respect to my close ally and friend, I must make a little progress and finish making this point. I might already have had my 10 minutes.

The theory is propounded to the British people that we somehow have nothing to do with these EU trading arrangements and that somehow, when trade deals are done, grey men in the European Commission secretly impose upon us all sorts of restrictive terms. Indeed, the right-wing press give the impression to all their readers that that is what we are facing now. They suggest that Jean-Claude Juncker and Michel Barnier are somehow plotting against us, that the whole thing is being done by unaccountable Eurocrats who are trying to take revenge on us, and that the trouble with our EU trade deals is that we have no say in them and they happen mechanically. That is complete rubbish, and it is rubbish that has been propounded for the last 30 or 40 years.

The Commission does have some roles that our civil service does not have, but basically it can negotiate only if it has the approval of each and every member state’s Government. It negotiates only within a mandate that the states have agreed. In my own ministerial experience of EU trade and economic affairs, the bigger countries —particularly Britain—have a huge influence on what is being negotiated. In my last job in the Cameron Government, when I was in the Cabinet Office without portfolio, I was asked by David Cameron to lead for us on the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal. I spent time in Brussels and Washington doing that. I cannot say that I played a key role, but the whole point was that the British were keen advocates of that, along with the Germans, the Italians and the French. We were all close to what was going on, and seeking to find out where things were going and whether we could push it. No deal has ever been done by the EU with any other country that anbody has ever objected to in the United Kingdom. For example, no British Government ever protested about the EU deal with South Korea, which is one of the better ones that we have achieved recently. No one ever told me they were against it.

[Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)]

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

[Mr Clarke]

I really should not, because the Speaker will get extremely annoyed. I must come to a quick conclusion and I wanted to touch on Ireland. I apologise to the right hon. Gentleman, but other people must get in.

It is an utterly ludicrous idea that it would somehow be better if we do things on our own. The countries always cited are the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and they will do deals with us because they all want to sell us foodstuffs. There is not a great deal of trade that we can add between us and New Zealand and Australia, and the Americans are desperately keen to sell us their beef and their chicken. As someone has already said, all trade deals are not done by a sovereign country saying, “Of course we are not binding ourselves to do anything.” They involve the agreeing of market regulations and of the trading rules that will apply. We would not say, “It’s all going to be decided by the British courts.” There would be an international arbitration agreement to which businesses and countries could look if one side started breaking its treaty obligations. The Americans will say, “Give up these European food safety and environmental regulations, and we will trade with you on ours.” If we let in chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated beef and genetically modified crops— personally I am not convinced that they are the health hazards that most people in the country seem to believe they are—that means new barriers with Europe, which will not let those products go straight through, and we will probably lose a large part of our biggest market, for food and agricultural products, which is in Europe.

I have one final point to make on international trade and about where the debate is unrealistic. WTO rules have suddenly been elevated to some mystic world order that means that our new trade agreements will somehow be much better. I wish that were true. This country does abide by WTO rules, but they are nothing like as comprehensive as they ought to be because the Doha round failed. The Americans take no notice of the WTO. The Americans and the Chinese are about to start a trade war, and everything that they are doing is in total breach of WTO rules. We will not get a deal with Donald Trump subject to WTO rules. He will not even appoint judges to the WTO court, because otherwise it might do what is usually its major duty, which is settling disputes between states.

Going back to what the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford said, we want trade with Europe that has no barriers between ourselves and Europe. It will require some ingenuity to find some basis on which we might still be able to do trade deals with other people, but the idea that some marvellous new global future with fantastic new trade deals is about to open up is hopeless. If someone can get the Americans to open up their public procurement to international competition and give up the “Buy America” policy or to open the regulatory barriers that they have put in the way of professional and financial services, they will be a miraculous negotiator, because we could get nowhere when Obama was in power. I do not think that the present Administration are offering us anything; they just want their beef to come here.

Finally, on Ireland—I will be much shorter on this because it is a big question that has been touched on already—it is absolutely critical that we do not break the Good Friday agreement. It is quite obvious that most people on this side of the Irish sea had never thought about Ireland when we were debating during the referendum and when they were propounding their policies. The problem of the Good Friday agreement has been addressed by most Brexiteers by them saying, “Surely that’s all over now? Isn’t it a nuisance? What an irrelevance. Let us break it now, because it no longer matters. It is far more important that we get the kind of hard Brexit that we want.” That is very dangerous.

The Good Friday agreement is one of the major achievements of the British Governments of my time. It was negotiated with the Americans, with the Government of the Republic of Ireland and with every section of opinion in Northern Ireland. It brought an end—almost; it is the end, I hope—to 200 years of the troubles in Ireland after they erupted into violence. When the troubles were under way in the ’70s and ’80s we lost more policemen and soldiers in Ulster than we did in Iraq and Afghanistan put together. The agreement was a splendid achievement for John Major and Tony Blair, so to say, “What an inconvenience. It is getting in the way of our leaving the customs union,” is very dangerous.

I thought that the Government had accepted that. Indeed, I think they have done so formally on two occasions. First, we had the Prime Minister’s Florence speech, which addressed the matter. Talking about the discussions she had had with Europe about Northern Ireland, she said that

“we have both stated explicitly that we will not accept any physical infrastructure at the border.”

That was solemnly agreed. It was the agreed Cabinet policy. The Foreign Secretary made a strange speech before the Florence speech and a statement shortly afterwards that gave the impression that he was trying to undermine the speech, but I am sure he was not. That statement is already agreed Government policy.

Secondly, we finally managed to make progress by finishing the withdrawal agreement, and we published the texts of what had been agreed. As people have said, there are all these other possible solutions involving using congestion charge cameras and things to avoid issues at the border, but I do not think that they will get very far. We have already committed ourselves to the following:

“In the absence of agreed solutions, the United Kingdom will maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union which, now or in the future, support North-South cooperation”,

which I think means pretty well full regulatory convergence. As someone has already said, the chief constable of Ulster has said that we cannot have infrastructure at a new hard border. It would outrage nationalist and republican opinion across the whole island and take us right back to all the problems we had. Symbolism is huge in the politics of Ireland and always has been, and it would be grossly irresponsible to put a hard border in the middle of the island of Ireland again. We have never been on such good terms with the Government of the Republic of Ireland since the Republic was founded.

If we have those arrangements at the Irish border, the same arrangements will of course apply to Holyhead and to Dover. That is what I want to see. We want no new barriers and no customs processes. We want the necessary level of regulatory convergence. Obviously, the easy way to do that is to stay in the customs union and stay in the single market. If not, we will need what I think the Prime Minister described as a “customs procedure”, which will be something that looks remarkably like the single market and the customs union.

The customs union is what today’s business is about, and it would do terrible damage to this country if, for strange ideological reasons in the confused aftermath of a misguided referendum, we were to take such a foolish step as not to replicate the customs union in any future arrangements.