Trade Bill

Nusrat Ghani Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 19th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

I can reassure my right hon. Friend that the Government are very ready to have these discussions. I am sure that the amendment in the name of Lord Alton is not an appropriate amendment to put into this Bill. As my right hon. Friend will have seen from the Foreign Secretary’s statement last week, we do take the situation in Xinjiang, and other allegations of serious human rights abuses, extremely seriously. However, we also have to think about what we are dealing with—the appropriate role for the High Court in international treaties, and particularly the right in the Alton amendment for an automatic revocation of an international treaty.

[Ms Nusrat Ghani (Wealden) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for presenting what the Foreign Office is doing on human rights. We have tabled a compromise amendment that takes into account all the concerns that the Government have expressed about the Lord Alton amendment, and that makes very clear the separation of powers—fundamentally, that Parliaments advise, and Ministers decide. What is his objection to the compromise amendment tabled by me and my colleagues?

[Greg Hands]

I will have to look at my hon. Friend’s amendment. My role is to speak about the amendment from the other place in the name of Lord Alton.

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[Greg Hands]

I emphasise to the right hon. Gentleman, who I know is passionate about these issues, the importance attached by the Government to the underlying issue of allegations of genocide and human rights abuses. However, it is right that the Government give significant attention to how that process would work. The Lord Alton amendment, which allows automatic revocation by the High Court of an international trade agreement that was negotiated between Governments and approved by Parliament, would not be the right way forward.

Lords amendments 2 and 3 pose significant legal and other problems and so cannot be accepted by the Government. Lords amendment 3, tabled by Lord Alton, seeks to revoke trade agreements where the High Court of England and Wales makes a preliminary determination regarding genocide. This would, in effect, take out of the hands of Government their prerogative powers to conduct international relations with regard to trade. That goes to the heart of the separation of powers in Britain’s constitutional system. If we accepted the amendment, the High Court could frustrate or even revoke trade agreements entered into by the Government and approved after Parliamentary scrutiny. That would be an unprecedented and unacceptable erosion of the royal prerogative, and not something that the Government could support.

[Ms Ghani]

Will the Minister give way?

[Greg Hands]

I will make a little more progress, if I may.

It is for the Government, answerable to Parliament, to make trade policy, not the courts. In any event, the Government already have the power to terminate trade agreements. Modern trade agreements include termination provisions as standard, allowing either party to terminate the agreement if they so decide, usually following a specified notice period. The option of terminating agreements would remain available to the Government to use at their discretion, with or without the amendment.

It is crucial to understand that we do not have a bilateral trade agreement with China. There is no trade deal with China to revoke. Not a single person in Xinjiang—the people we are trying to help—would benefit from the amendment.

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[Dr Fox]

I will not—my hon. Friend will forgive me—given the constrictions on time.

It would have been possible to create a system that allowed us to do that. The House would have been happy that Parliament would have been able to set those parameters, and not anyone else.

[Ms Ghani]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Fox]

Okay, I will give way to my hon. Friend. She has charmed me into it.

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[Ms Ghani]

My right hon. Friend will know that we have offered such a compromise, which very easily separated the role of powers, whether of the courts, the Executive or parliamentarians, but it has been rejected outright. If there is no apparent objection to that, really, what is the Government’s position on dealing with genocide within trade?

[Dr Fox]

My hon. Friend should ask the Government; I am not the Government. My view is that we want to ensure that the powers are exercised exclusively by Parliament. I do not want any outside body, including the courts, to have a say on what we should or should not do. But I agree that we could have had a mechanism that allowed the House to do that in a way that satisfied all the reservations that have been put forward.

My second reason for objecting to the amendment is that I think it is the thin end of the wedge. If we set a precedent that says that the courts can make a judgment on genocide, where does it stop? In future trade Bills, we may get amendments on the use of torture or on other human rights violations. Valid though those points may be, once we have set a precedent that the court can make a judgment and tell Parliament what it can and cannot do, I wonder how we can reverse that trend.

Thirdly, I think the amendment is not good for our judges. It is difficult to know what the evidential base would be upon which judges would make such a decision, and therefore we bring judges into the territory that many of us saw and were uncomfortable with in the last Parliament, where judges are dragged into making political decisions; that is an uncomfortable place for them and us.

Finally, I do not think this amendment would make any difference whatever to the behaviour of the Chinese Government in relation to the Uyghurs or anyone else. It would not affect our trade with China in any way, shape or form. It would not even deal, for example, with dual-use materials when it comes to the Chinese state security apparatus. For that reason, it is an impotent tool when it comes to dealing with the Chinese Government.

If we believe in this Parliament that the behaviour of the Chinese Government warrants sanctions, we have sanctions available to us. The British Government, if enough pressure is applied by Parliament, can use those sanctions—whether the Magnitsky sanctions that come from our more recent legislation, or wider sanctions. We do not have to wait for an international agreement to be able apply sanctions that we are bringing forward on the grounds of the high bar of genocide. So it is up to Parliament to make such decisions.

We talk about taking back control, but Parliament has got to stop giving its decision-making powers away. If we want to be respected in this Parliament, we have to be the ultimate arbiters of the decisions and direction of travel of our country. We can have those powers. I say to the Minister for Trade Policy that we have had these discussions. I hope that the Government will bring forward mechanisms that allow the House to have much greater scrutiny at the outset of a trade negotiation to set those ethical parameters.

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[Mick Whitley (Birkenhead) (Lab) [V]]

I understand that we are pressed for time as many Members wish to speak on this important matter, so I will endeavour to be brief.

In the coming months and years, the Government will seek a range of free trade agreements which will profoundly change our country and the lives of our constituents. That is obviously a matter of great interest to my constituents, and I have been inundated in recent weeks with messages urging me to speak in this debate. The view of the people of Birkenhead is clear: they do not want these trade deals to be agreed behind closed doors and signed in secret. They understand that the only way to safeguard our health service, maintain our world-leading food standards and protect our environment is to ensure robust parliamentary scrutiny of trade deals by elected representatives. This is one of the opportunities that this House has to discuss the 10 continuity agreements that the Government have signed since the new year.

The experience of the past few weeks has shown that we simply cannot depend on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 to guarantee parliamentary scrutiny of trade deals. I am therefore glad that this Bill has returned from the other place amended by Lords Purvis and Stevenson. Their amendments are badly needed and would go a long way to addressing the democratic deficit at the heart of the UK’s trade policy, so I hope that when this debate concludes, Members from across the House will join me in voting for the amendment to guarantee Parliament’s right to debate and approve trade deals.

[Ms Ghani]

I rise to speak in support of Lords amendment 3—the genocide amendment. It is the only vote on genocide on the table today. I regret that the compromise amendment that we tabled has been rejected.

Let us remember that we are talking about genocide: the systematic destruction of an entire people. It is a threshold that is so hard to reach because it is the most heinous of all crimes—the forced sterilisation of women, forced labour and re-education camps for hundreds of thousands of children. The Board of Deputies of British Jews stated that it is reminded of the holocaust when it thinks of the plight of the Uyghurs; it cannot get any worse than that.

Members across the House have a very simple choice to make today. We can, by voting in favour of Lord Alton’s amendment 3, empower the UK to fulfil its UN obligations under the genocide convention and ensure that we do not offer advantageous trade deals to genocidal states. It really is that simple. The UN continues to fail to recognise that genocides are happening until it is too late. The UN and the Security Council are in a state of frozen paralysis, held hostage by Russia and China and incapable of holding genocidal states to account.

Against the amendment, the Minister and some of my hon. Friends argue that we should not outsource trade policy to the UK courts, and that the proper place to make decisions about genocide is in international courts. In practice, that means that we have to accept that foreign states will always hold a veto over our determination of genocide. I do not accept that that is taking back control. I do not accept that our courts are not skilled enough to determine breaches of international law. I do not accept that the Bill as drafted gives Parliament sufficient say over whether states that we wish to strike trade deals with are committing genocide.

I understand the concerns about Executive power, and the role of Parliament versus the courts, which is why I tabled an amendment with colleagues in lieu of Lords amendment 3 to address those concerns. Courts will judge, Parliament will opine and Ministers will decide. Yet that amendment was rejected. If the Government believe that this is still an unacceptable derogation of power, what is the alternative and what are the Government’s objections? If we do not pass the amendment today, we will be outsourcing all future decisions on genocide to Russia and China. We now have an independent trade policy after leaving the EU, and Brexit was a vote of hope and optimism and for Britain to play its part in leading the world, so why would we want to use our new-found freedom to trade with states that commit and profit from genocide? Britain is surely better than that.

Tomorrow, Joe Biden becomes the President of the United States, our closest allies. Today is Britain’s moment to blaze a trail and showcase global leadership on trade and international law. We can all talk about our noblest values, but we cannot do so while allowing the vilest of crimes to continue. We have an amendment. We can make a stand against genocide. We can uphold our United Nations obligations and ensure that we do not trade with genocidal states, or we can do nothing, and to do nothing is a counsel of despair.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind) [V]]

It is a pleasure to speak briefly in this debate in support of the amendments made in the other place. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) who made a very passionate and convincing case for supporting Lords amendment 3, to which I will refer later.

Lords amendment 1 would introduce vital democratic safeguards into international trade policy by ensuring that the Executive cannot operate unilaterally. It would strengthen the hand of Parliament without undermining the ability of the UK Government to conduct negotiations as they see fit. In reality, the negotiations with the European Union have clearly shown that trade agreements can have far-reaching consequences for people’s everyday lives, from food standards to workers’ rights, from environmental legislation to the impact on our public services. It is to be welcomed then that Lords amendment 1 would require the UK Government to outline their negotiating objectives to Parliament prior to the commencement of any trade negotiations and to secure the agreement of both Houses before a deal is ratified, giving Members of Parliament a meaningful role in setting trade policy.

There was much debate during earlier proceedings of the Bill about how domestic democratic empowerment would strengthen the hand of the UK Government when it comes to trade negotiations. That was certainly my experience during a brief visit to the United States many years ago to scrutinise the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the EU and the US, where we were reminded that there were certain matters, such as access to food markets, which were non-negotiable for Congress.

Although I support Lords amendment 1, I would have liked to see it go even further in respect of strengthening the role of the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish Governments and respective Parliaments. That would not be without precedence. In the EU, every single member state has a veto over its international trade deals as well as sub-national Governments such as Wallonia in Belgium. Although I accept that the UK Government have a direct responsibility for trade policy, I believe that a world of constitutional trouble awaits us unless there are statutory safeguards for the respective countries of the British state. I therefore urge the British Government not only to retain Lords amendment 1, but to go a step further by giving the devolved Parliaments a veto on trade agreements.

I wish briefly to pledge my support for Lords amendment 3—the so-called genocide amendment—which several right hon. and hon. Members have supported this afternoon. Effectively, it couples international trade policy with the promotion of human rights.

Lords amendment 4 would place protections for the NHS on a legislative basis. I also support Lords amendment 6, which sets out to protect a range of regulatory standards such as for food, animal welfare and workers’ rights. Given the increasing noises coming from the Government Benches about a bonfire of standards, acceptance of this amendment would go a long way to allaying fears that our trade policy would be used as a regressive Trojan horse.

I am disappointed to see that the Government are seeking to remove provisions from Lords amendment 9 that strengthen the Trade and Agriculture Commission. Again, I ask Ministers to include representatives from the devolved Governments on the commission and introduce scrutiny protocols for the commission with the Welsh Senedd, the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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[Greg Hands]

I am not going to take any interventions. I have a lot of points to respond to. I apologise to my right hon. Friend, but I have responded to his speech.

As I was saying, that would mean immediately having to sign up to the EU’s brand new investment deal with China from day one. The hon. Member for Glasgow North says, “Oh, we wouldn’t do that,” but he has just said that he would re-join the EU.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) made a very strong point that trade policy must be conducted by the elected Government. We have taken control from unelected judges in Brussels and it should be for elected parliamentarians to scrutinise. He said that amendments put forward today for the very best reasons will result in the very worst practice.

My hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) and Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee made a powerful speech, in particular about his own family’s experience of genocide. He is absolutely right. Genocide is the worst crime there is; it removes an entire people, but we still need to make sure we are making good law. If a country is committing genocide, it is extremely unlikely that any UK Government of any colour would be negotiating a trade agreement with it. I do not believe it would need a court to tell us that, a point also made by my hon. Friends, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie).

The Chair of the International Trade Committee had a few points to raise in terms of the Committee’s scrutiny of the Japan deal. I remember that his Committee actually praised it, but we can work with him further to improve scrutiny.

We had some very good speeches. My hon. Friend the Member for South Ribble (Katherine Fletcher) spoke against the involvement of courts. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) made strong points on the UK’s international position, but I do not believe that if he had really dug into Lords amendment 3 he would be supporting it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall), who has studied the amendments, made an excellent speech. He pointed out that, from the scrutiny from the International Trade Committee, Ministers have proven ready to listen. My hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) knows trade policy well and was also against the amendments.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) called for more parliamentary scrutiny. Well, there is a very significant increase in parliamentary scrutiny from the CRaG position that we inherited. We compare favourably with other Westminster-style democracies, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani) was passionate on the issue, but she said that the UK Government are in a do-nothing position. That is not correct. The statement made by the Foreign Secretary last week was very clear about the trade actions that the UK Government are putting in place on supply chains and information and on making sure that no companies benefit from any of the appalling practices happening in Xinjiang.

[Ms Ghani]

Will the Minister give way?