Duties of Customs

Debate between Tom Brake and Richard Graham

Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 20th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), a fellow remainer, and I hope that remainers on the Conservative Benches will be a little more outspoken about their concerns.

[Richard Graham]

For clarification, I point out to the right hon. Gentleman that he is following a pragmatist.

[Tom Brake]

If I am indeed following a pragmatist, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will listen to what is being said by many economic sectors, and perhaps read carefully the 58 sectoral reports once they are published, and come to the very pragmatic conclusion that he, as a pragmatist, will want to start to be more outspoken about the Government’s agenda of taking us over the cliff.

Members have suggested that the UK needs to leave the EU to be able to trade, but that is clearly not true. Many European countries are just much more successful than us at trading with other countries, including Germany, France and Italy. They do so within the EU, so there is no reason why we could not do so more effectively than at present. If we are unable to trade while we are part of the EU, I wonder why previous Prime Ministers, particularly David Cameron, spent so much time and effort sending trade delegations to various countries around the world to drum up trade. Was that a completely pointless exercise? Was that just about having 10-course banquets in Beijing, or was it because we can do a lot to boost trade while we are in the European Union? I think it was the latter, rather than a desire to have big dinners courtesy of foreign Governments. Of course the UK is in a position to trade—and, perhaps, to do so more effectively—with other countries while we are members of the EU.

It is nice, as a Liberal Democrat, to be able to make a speech that is longer than three minutes, so I might take full advantage of that in the couple of hours that remain for me to make a contribution, before the Front Benchers make their response. First, I want to focus on the issue of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Frankly, Opposition Members have had enough of listening to Ministers’ platitudes about how they will sort out the problem that is the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. We do not want to hear about “frictionless” any more, or about blue-skies solutions that do not yet exist. What we want to hear from Ministers is the solution to this problem, because if the Irish Prime Minister was asking on Friday for a written guarantee from the UK Government that there would be no border controls, that was because he is worried and because he has heard nothing from our Government to explain how we will be able to leave the customs union, yet have no border and no border controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

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[Tom Brake]

Absolutely, and that is why I believe that the question of Ireland and Northern Ireland is the most challenging of the three. The Government could and should have resolved the question of EU citizens 15 months ago by simply saying to them, “You have the right to remain.” The settlement bill is clearly very difficult politically for the Conservative party, because many of its Members are on record as saying, “We won’t give the EU a single penny; in fact, they owe us loads of money,” so they now have a difficult political position to adopt if they say that they support a payment. We do not know how much that will be, but one figure that has been mentioned is £40 billion, and an interesting article in The Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago, which seemed to be flying a kite, referred to £53 billion. Although that question could be resolved at the cost of some political pain, no one has put forward any solution to the issue of Ireland and Northern Ireland that does not involve some sort of control. That might be ad hoc control, and it might not be directly at the border, but some sort of control will be required.

[Richard Graham]

The right hon. Gentleman has touched briefly on citizens’ rights. Given that both sides have said that that is their absolute top priority, can he explain why the European Union turned down our proposal to treat citizens’ rights first, on their own, so that the matter could have been agreed in perpetuity, regardless of what happened to anything else?

[Tom Brake]

That might be an issue on which we agree. If we are moving towards a no-deal scenario, there is an overwhelming case for parking the issue of EU and UK citizens’ rights and resolving it, because it is a question of humanity and giving safety and security to the 3 million EU citizens here and the 1.2 million UK citizens in the EU.

The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland has 275 crossings. If there is to be some sort of control, will it be at each and every one of those crossings? Presumably not; otherwise, the number of people that HMRC is going to have to recruit would be much greater than the 3,000 to 5,000 it already needs.

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[Tom Brake]

Absolutely; I do have those concerns. It is worth knowing that when the 17-mile tailback occurred two years ago, it was the result of just two French border officers not turning up for their shift. The 20 sq km lorry park—whose construction has now been kicked into the long grass because of the judicial review—would accommodate 3,500 lorries. However, 10,000 lorries go through that port each day, so a lorry park that would accommodate 3,500 lorries will not do very much if there is severe disruption at the port. That is why one of the options the port is considering is to create lorry parks all over the country. In the event of a delay, the port could text drivers in, for example, Leeds or Edinburgh to say, “Sorry, we’ve got a bit of a problem at Dover. Don’t bother coming, because if you do, the town will collapse. Just stay in that lorry park and we’ll tell you when it’s safe to come down.”

[Richard Graham]

We have heard much of what the right hon. Gentleman is saying before. No doubt he will have heard the mayor of Calais and the head of the port there saying that no deal would be a catastrophe for them as well. Does that not encourage him to believe that good sense should prevail, and that we can arrive at an arrangement that suits those on both sides of the channel equally well?