Vote Leave Campaign: Electoral Law
Debate between Tom Brake and Kerry McCarthy(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Roger. I want to pay tribute to my long-standing friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), for a sterling introduction to the debate on the petition. I am sure my colleagues will be pleased to know that my contribution will be brief: he said a lot of what I would have said. I also want to thank my 555 constituents in east Bristol who put their names to the petition.
I was one of the 122 MPs, 57 of them Labour, who voted against triggering article 50 in February last year. Every day that goes by vindicates in my mind that I was right to do so. The Government had no plan for Brexit then and have no realistic Brexit plan now. Triggering article 50 began the countdown to the biggest changes our country has faced in peacetime. It was an incredibly serious decision that should not have been taken lightly. Once the Prime Minister’s letter reached President Tusk’s desk in Brussels, it strictly limited the time for negotiations to two years.
The clock is ticking down, and it feels as though it is ticking down ever faster. Even with a coherent Brexit plan in place, it would be a challenging deadline to meet, but the Government were totally and utterly unprepared. They simply had not done their homework, which was painfully obvious when Ministers came before Select Committees such as the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I sit.
We conducted an inquiry into chemicals regulation post-Brexit. When the Minister came in front of us, it became clear that the Government were only just starting to ask the chemicals industry what Brexit would mean for it. This was after article 50 had been triggered. The conversations that needed to be had with industry, with important sectors and with the much derided experts had barely started, so triggering article 50 was reckless in the extreme. The Prime Minister was not doing it because Brussels insisted we move to a trigger, or in an attempt to unite our divided country after the difficult referendum campaign. She was doing it in a futile attempt to keep her warring Cabinet together. We can all see now how well that has been going.
There is little serious doubt that article 50 is revocable, although I know that was not envisaged when it was drafted. The President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, reiterated last year that no Brexit is still an option for the UK Government, and the author of article 50, Lord Kerr, has said that the UK can still opt to stay in the EU. He said:
“At any stage we can change our minds if we want to, and if we did we know that our partners would actually be very pleased indeed.”
Tom Brake
Does the hon. Lady agree that if the Government want to be transparent and open, they should clearly state whether in their view article 50 is or is not revocable? As far as I am aware, the position they have adopted so far is, “The question is not being posed, so we are not going to answer it.” However, they should, and they should put it on the record.
Kerry McCarthy
I absolutely agree. We are discussing all the options available to us at the moment—from no deal to the option that some of us advocate: that we ought to think better and do all we can to try to stay in the EU. Clearly, looking at the legalities around article 50 is in everyone’s interest so that we know which options are still on the table and which are not.
Today’s debate is not really about the rights and wrongs of triggering article 50, although that is something that the petitioners put forward as part of their call. It is about Vote Leave’s illegal activities during the referendum. Although Vote Leave has been held to account, a fine of £60,000 is pitiful and no deterrent at all when we consider that so much was at stake during the referendum campaign and when the people involved are so wealthy and can easily access the funds needed to pay the fine.
I support the Electoral Commission’s call for greater fines to be levied on those who break the law in such a way and the call for a judge-led inquiry into the conduct of the referendum that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) called for. My right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) has led the way in investigating the Russian connections of Arron Banks’s Leave.EU campaign. I was glad to be a signatory to a letter he organised to the Metropolitan police and the National Crime Agency urging them to investigate the links between Vote Leave and Leave.EU.
It has been reported that Arron Banks met Russian officials multiple times—on one occasion it was reported that he had met them 11 times before the Brexit vote. There are reports now of an investigation by the National Crime Agency. We are seeing the destruction of our democracy by foreign funding, by fake news and by very wealthy individuals prepared to play fast and loose with our electoral law and get away with it with impunity.
I do not believe that such law breaking alone is reason to rescind article 50, if the intention in calling for article 50 to be revoked is to rerun the 2016 referendum campaign. Nor are the arguments put forward about a lack of information, or indeed the deluge of misleading information when voters made their choice in 2016, a valid reason to call for a rematch. Democracy is never perfect. We can never really second-guess why people voted the way they did. I would prefer not to turn the clock back and talk about rerunning the 2016 referendum, but I very much support the need to properly scrutinise any deal that the Government put forward, possibly with a people’s vote if the Government do not put forward a deal acceptable to Parliament.
Some of us spent the campaign warning that the Brexit process was much more complicated than some would have it. We have gone from being told that Brexit would be
“the easiest deal in human history”,
to the Prime Minister saying,
“it wouldn’t be the end of the world”
if we left with no deal. The promises have evaporated. As I said, I would rather not turn the clock back and look to scrap article 50, but we certainly need to hold to account the people responsible for illegal actions during the referendum campaign. They should not be allowed to get away with it with impunity, but the important thing now is to look at the deal—if it is possible to scrutinise it, given what an absolute mess it is at the moment. It is important to focus on the here and now and make sure that we either get the absolute best deal—a soft Brexit for this country—or we think again, extend or rescind article 50 and go back to the drawing board.
Seasonal Migrant Workers
Debate between Tom Brake and Kerry McCarthy(6 years, 8 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to see you in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to this important debate and the hon. Member for Angus (Kirstene Hair) for leading it with an excellent speech. This debate could not have come at a more critical time for British farmers. Despite the weather outside, summer and the harvest season will be upon us before we know it. I am glad to have been able to co-sponsor the application as another vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for fruit and vegetable farmers.
We have already heard how important migrant labour is to our farming sector. That is true all year round, not just for seasonal work. It is true right across the supply chain—not just in picking, but in packaging and processing, right through to the retail and hospitality sectors. Migrant labour is important not just in low-skilled work, but in highly skilled jobs such as food scientists and vets, which I will mention again later.
Migrant workers have made a huge contribution to the British economy. The whole rhetoric during the Brexit campaign about their being a drain on local resources was not matched by the figures. They have a lower than average use of the NHS, use local shops and put money into the local economy. As we are hearing today, they will be much missed when they are no longer welcome on these shores. The debate today is about seasonal migrant labour, which is where the most pressing problem lies. This is not just a far-off problem that we need to deal with in the distant, post-Brexit, post-transition period future. The shortage in seasonal workers is happening now.
There are already alarming reports that food is rotting in British farms as there is simply no one available to harvest it. In total last year, something like 4,300 jobs were left unfilled. One farm in Scotland had to leave up to 100 tonnes of blueberries at a cost of £500,000. Another farm in Kent could not find workers to pick 2,000 tonnes of raspberries, costing it £700,000. Although demand for British fruit and veg has risen drastically—demand for strawberries alone rose by 180% from 1997 to 2015—the ability to source migrant workers has fallen. In September 2017, a huge 29% shortage was identified, and there are reports that the 2018 harvest has already been written off by many farmers. At a recent meeting of the APPG, which the farming Minister attended, we heard from a farmer in Kent—I think it was the same farmer who had lost £700,000—that he was already incurring significant losses due to a shortage of labour. He was talking about moving a substantial part of his business to Spain, which is clearly not what we want to happen.
Besides the obvious problem with food waste and inefficiencies, these rotting harvests jeopardise the already thin profit margins of British farmers, putting their entire businesses at risk. There is also the risk of cutting off the ongoing supply of quality British food getting to our supermarkets, as well as the tarnishing of the British brand abroad if we are unable even to get our own food out of the ground. As we have heard, the truth is that it is becoming far more difficult to attract workers.
In recent years, agriculture has become so heavily reliant on workers from eastern Europe, particularly the recent EU accession countries. Statistics show that migrants make up about 20% of regular full-time staff in the agriculture sector, with the majority coming from Romania and Bulgaria. According to estimates from the Association of Labour Providers, 90% to 95% of seasonal agricultural workers are from other EU countries. But as people from these countries now have the right to work and settle in the EU, they are looking not for seasonal work, but for permanent, better paid jobs often in towns and cities, rather than in rural areas. They want to be in places where they can bring their families with them, with better schools and local opportunities for family members to get jobs—places where they can make a life. We saw this first with Polish workers. We have heard from farmers that, going back a few years, perhaps 90% of their labour force were from Poland. That has very much disappeared, as those workers have been replaced by people from the newer accession countries—the Romanians and Bulgarians. However, these new workers are now following the Polish workers into permanent jobs in the towns and cities.
Pay and conditions for agricultural work are not attractive, certainly not enough to attract British workers and increasingly not enough to attract migrant workers either. Accommodation in rural areas is expensive and, if provided by employers, it is often very basic at best. In some cases, it is far worse than that. Unite the union has done some excellent work highlighting some of those concerns in its excellent report, “From Plough to Plate”. We also hear stories about the role of gangmasters and even human trafficking in the food and agriculture sector.
The labour shortage is real. It is an immediate threat. I am not being alarmist and neither are other Members who are raising these concerns. The Government urgently need to address the issue. This was recognised by the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, on which I sit. Last year, we conducted an inquiry into labour constraints and published our report in April, just before the election disrupted everything. We took evidence from a Home Office Minister and a DEFRA Minister, and we felt that there was a huge degree of complacency from the Ministers that the issue was something that we could muddle through, that it would all be fine and that we did not need an urgent response. Our report concluded that:
“We do not share the confidence of the Government that the sector does not have a problem: on the contrary, evidence submitted to this inquiry suggests the current problem is in danger of becoming a crisis if urgent measures are not taken”.
We also had real concerns about the lack of empirical evidence on which the Government based their decisions; they were using flawed statistics. In another of the Committee’s recommendations, we stated:
“We are concerned that the industry has such different experiences to those reported by the Government”.
In other words, the Government were not listening to experiences directly from people working in and running businesses in the sector. We continued:
“It is apparent that the statistics used by the Government are unable to provide a proper indication of agriculture’s labour needs. These statistics and their utility for measuring supply of, and demand for, seasonal labour must be reviewed by the end of 2017 to give the sector confidence in the adequacy of the official data on which employment and immigration policies will be based for the period after the UK leaves the EU.”
It is an understatement to say that the Government’s response, which came out in October last year, was weak. It showed shocking complacency. The Government chose to reject the hard facts and data that had been presented to the Committee by the sector, and failed to acknowledge that their own statistics were not fit for the purpose of measuring seasonal labour in specific sectors.
The strong feeling that I had during these discussions in the Select Committee and the APPG was that an ideological fervour for Brexit among certain Ministers—and, with that, unbending support for stringent curbs on freedom of movement—had completely overridden any common-sense approach to this problem. The response was very much, “We voted for Brexit. We voted to stop freedom of movement. That is our approach, no matter what evidence we have that this is going to harm the British economy.” I have heard that the then tourism Minister—the current Economic Secretary to the Treasury, the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen)—took a very different approach. When he was in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, he went in to bat with the Home Office for the tourism sector, saying that hospitality absolutely needs some flexibility to bring in migrant workers. That approach was not replicated by the farming Minister, which is one of the reasons why we are where we are now.
It was very welcome that the Environment Secretary made positive noises about reintroducing the seasonal agricultural workers scheme in his recent speech to the NFU. That scheme was scrapped in 2013 on evidence that we did not need it because we had workers from accession countries—the Romanians and Bulgarians. However, that is now no longer the case. It is worrying that we are only now starting to talk about the possibility of reintroducing SAWS; it would be far too late to get such a scheme in place for this year’s harvest.
However, I am not convinced that reintroducing SAWS would, in itself, solve the problem. As I have said, many people who would previously have done such work simply do not want to do it, and do not need to do it, any more. The exchange rate, the uncertainty following the Brexit referendum, the feeling that they are not welcome here, and even the British weather all mean that working elsewhere in the EU is a more attractive prospect. As we have heard, the economic situation in their own countries has improved to the extent that perhaps they do not need to come over here. Certainly, the poor exchange rate means that the financial benefits of doing so are much less, and taking home money with which they can afford to pay for things in their own countries is not such a pull. Even countries such as Poland cannot get workers; it is looking to Ukraine, for example, for people to do its agricultural work.
I do not see how far we can carry on with this chasing after cheaper labour, looking ever further afield. A year or two ago, I was on a flight from Stansted to Moldova that was full of Romanian workers who had clearly been hopping on budget flights, coming over here to work, and going back to their families at the weekend. If we are looking further afield, budget flights on easyJet are not going to bring in workers from Vietnam or Cambodia for £30 a time.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Tom Brake and Kerry McCarthy(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Tom Brake
As part of the good law initiative, the Government are taking a number of steps to promote law that is clear, necessary, coherent, effective and accessible. For instance, we are considering how we can improve the drafting and presentation of Bills and supporting documents such as explanatory notes, as well as access to and navigation of existing legislation online.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
6. What steps he is taking to improve opportunities for the scrutiny of draft statutory instruments.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Tom Brake and Kerry McCarthy(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
4. What recent assessment he has made of Departments' performance in answering written parliamentary questions.
The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Tom Brake)
My office collates departmental performance information for ordinary and named day parliamentary questions for each Session, which are submitted to the Procedure Committee. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House of Commons provided data relating to the last Session to that Committee in July 2013. Those data are available on the parliamentary website.
Kerry McCarthy
I have received particularly poor responses to recent written questions to the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister on whether they would raise human rights issues during business trips abroad. For example, the Prime Minister took more than two weeks to reply to named day questions, with no holding answer. Does the Deputy Leader of the House think that it is wrong of the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, in particular, to show such contempt for Members who are simply seeking to find out what they do when they go abroad at public expense?