European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab) [V]]

I am glad that the Government and the EU have agreed a deal. As the transition ends tomorrow night, our country should start the process of building new relationships and a future outside the EU, based on an agreement and a plan, not on the acrimony or chaos that no deal would have heralded. This is not the deal that the Prime Minister promised everyone—on services, which are left out; on red tape, which will increase; and on security co-operation, which will go down. He should level with people about those problems, not make impossible promises.

There are further urgent things we need the Government to do now to support jobs and security, but we need an agreement as a starting point. We left the EU in January; the transition ends tomorrow. Everyone needs to get on with things and no one deserves the chaos of no deal. Britain’s counter-terror chief told us that that would make us less safe, and employers in my constituency such as Tereos, Burberry, Haribo and Teva would be badly hit under no deal by tariffs and delays.

So it is in the national interest and in our local interest for this Brexit agreement to pass through Parliament now, and I shall vote for it today, but we need urgent action to improve the deal for this country. I am glad that it includes continued security co-operation on criminal records—DNA, Europol and extradition—although arrangements will be more bureaucratic, but there is a huge gap for us. Tomorrow night the police and Border Force will have to remove access to the details of 38,000 wanted suspects and criminals from the EU on the SIS II criminal database, which they check hundreds of millions of times a year. The replacement Interpol information system database is much slower and weaker. That makes our security response weaker too. There is not a proper trade deal on services, and there will be a massive increase in red tape for businesses—11 million customs forms that have to be filled in. Those costs will hit jobs and investment.

So we need to look forward to the things that the Government need to do now, once the Brexit agreement is in place, to support security and jobs—resources for the police to operate the new arrangements; look again at SIS II and work to improve Interpol; a new trade plan for services to reduce customs red tape; a proper industrial policy to support communities; and higher, not lower, environmental and labour standards.

We also need urgent action to heal the divides. The ultimate test of the Prime Minister’s deal and future plan is what he uses it for—whether to strengthen the United Kingdom or to divide and destroy it; whether he pushes Scotland away and deepens the divide between north and south. So far in the north this year we have not seen any of the levelling up that the Government promised. We have seen power and control centralised. Our communities still want a fair deal. That is what we should unite around now.