Showing every spoken contribution, including 5,779 under 12 words. Hide short remarks
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. We will need to move to Front-Bench speeches at just before 10.30 am, so if colleagues can keep their speeches to around three minutes, we might get everybody in.
Before the hon. Gentleman gets on to any more churches, I gently pointed out to him that he is well over his three minutes. It is not a formal time limit, but I am trying to get everybody in.
We have five more speakers and about 10 minutes left, which means, I am afraid, about two minutes each.
We will find out in a few minutes.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his brevity, as I am sure is Brian Mathew.
I thank all hon. Members for their co-operation and self-discipline. I now call the Front-Bench speakers, beginning with the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.
I thank the Minister for building on the work of the Mansion House reforms that I introduced two years ago. Westminster works best when Governments do not automatically tear up the work of their predecessors. Who knows, with this constructive attitude, we may see some tax cuts in the autumn Budget. Does the Minister agree that there is a circularity in the argument that the reason pension funds do not invest in the UK is because returns are lower here? In Australia and America, the stock markets can depend on more than 40% of pension fund assets investing domestically to create bigger returns, compared with just 4% in the UK. Does he agree that if we are really to make these reforms fly, we will need to involve the 28,000 defined benefit schemes as well as the 4,000 defined contribution schemes?
The sustainable success of Ukraine and its self-defence hinges very much on the appetite of the President of the United States of America. What steps are the Foreign Secretary, his Ministers and his officials taking to ensure that the President remains committed to defending the territorial integrity of not just his own nation but all nations, and will the Foreign Secretary ensure that the White House understands that allowing an aggressor to prosper in this case will encourage other aggressors to invade their neighbours in the future?
18. What discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on introducing a statutory right to consular assistance.
I remind the Government that their manifesto promised a legal right to consular assistance in cases of human rights violations. The Government have now been in power for close on a year. This is not something that should take a big shove; surely, we should do it straight away. Surely such assistance should be a legal right. People including Ryan Cornelius and Jimmy Lai are still being held. Ryan Cornelius has been held illegally for 17 years, which the UN has criticised as a human rights violation. For ages we did not send anybody to see him; surely now we must act and call out these regimes. The first place to start is by giving those people the absolute right to consular assistance.
One thing puzzles me slightly about the position taken by the Government, which is a bit like that on the Chagos islands: we already owned them, but we entered a negotiation to give them away and rent them back. In this instance, Europe threatens us that we cannot talk about other matters until we sign up to this defence deal, but we already have a defence deal and we already co-operate: we have built weapons with France, Sweden and various other countries. Rather than what they would lose, what is it that we gain?
rose—
I just wanted to check on something. We can debate whether a trade deal can be improved—I am sure that all trade deals can be improved, whether it is the American one or what is an extensive one with Europe, and probably the greatest one negotiated in the past—but one area, as the Government go back into this discussion, needs to be very clear. I was looking at a paper produced by the Centre for European Reform, which makes one point very clear, as the Government go into the negotiation. It states: “Labour’s red lines do not extend to ruling out dynamic alignment or a role for the ECJ in dispute settlement.” Is that correct? Is that the position of the present Labour Government?
Of course, that argument was used in reverse on those of us who had had concerns about Europe for 40 years as we were told—exactly to my hon. Friend’s point—that a referendum was superior to continuous elections. We made a decision after the last referendum; that was a generational move. We have hardly had a generation in the few years since the referendum.
Will my hon. Friend give way?
I am pleased that my hon. Friend raises that point, which I want to elaborate further. The real point is that J. D. Vance, the vice president, came over to Munich and ripped a hole through the Europeans, including ourselves, for not having spent enough, although we were one of the top spenders. Since then, the Americans have gone on and on about that, but each time we get the sense that they are keener to decouple. Does what we are about to do not give strength to the argument that we do not need them any longer and therefore they need to look somewhere else? That is the danger, because NATO was not just about defence of the west; it was about making sure that the US never goes into isolationism again.
It is good to follow the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) and to be reminded of how old he was when I first came here; I hope he stays here as long as well, or maybe I do not hope for that as it might mean we Conservative Members will be on the Opposition Benches forever. Today’s debate is on an important topic and there have been some very good contributions already, but I want to get to the bottom of what the Government really want out of this negotiation, because they have been a little bit tepid in coming forward on the key issues. I welcome the Government’s negotiations in India—finishing off a trade arrangement deal or whatever it is with the Indian Government. I welcome too that they have been able to begin to negotiate with the United States, although they have not secured a full trade deal. By the way, they would not have got a trade deal if the Democrats had got back into office because they rejected it for four years. In fact, President Biden said that there would be no trade deal with the UK. Let us not just observe that because the Democrats are not Trump, somehow they were going to give us a trade deal. I have my problems with the current President, but President Biden absolutely did not want trade with us; it was as simple as that. That was a mistake on his part. He had a real opportunity, because the trade deal was pretty much all done—and then it was binned. There is also the question of the reason we are able to do these trade deals with the rest of the world, to which we export more than the European Union. We should do more of those trade deals. The Conservative Government did 73 after Brexit, although some of them were mopping up the ones that we had before. I stand ready to congratulate the Labour Government if they use the freedom Brexit gives them to get more trade arrangements, because that is what we are here for. I might want to press them further and say they could get a lot more out of the US, but that is another debate all together. I do not disagree with the idea that the deal we did with the European Union is capable of being improved. Of course it is, because the EU put up many barriers in the course of that negotiation; it weaponised Northern Ireland distinctly, and that was a grave error on its part. It risked some of the process of peace in Northern Ireland by making it a critical negotiating tool that could be used as leverage later in the rest of the negotiations, and as a result we have been left with a problem in Northern Ireland. I encourage the Government to have a very good look at that. I did not vote for the Windsor agreement because I thought it did not solve the problem by a long chalk, and it has left Northern Ireland in the same position as before, with a couple of small modifications. This debate is really about getting into the issue. I say to the Minister that the European Union did not play straight about phytosanitary from day one in the negotiations, and it still does not play straight. The fact is that our standards in animal welfare and product health are, and always have been, above those of the European Union. The European Union knows that. The reality is that somehow it decided that there had to be all these phytosanitary checks and changes, and it is desperately keen to get dynamic alignment now, because that means that there will be a rules-based order coming from the EU. That is what it has always wanted to do. The truth is that the European Union does not have that arrangement with other countries around the world. For example, it is quite happy to have New Zealand vets check their products before departure. Those products go in through Rotterdam without any checks, other than checks that they came from the area specified. The EU knows which vets it authorises, so it does that. It could have done that here in the UK. I sat down with Monsieur Barnier and a group of people to have a long discussion when the negotiations broke down as a result of what was going on here in Parliament, and I very much remember that we talked about trusting each other’s regulations and working with that trust to get an arrangement that made it as easy as possible to get goods across the border. He accepted that then, saying that, provided we could trust each other’s veterinary authorities, we would not need to have the phytosanitary rules as proposed at the moment. It was only later, when my party in government came back and did a terrible shimmy with him, that he thought he had it all, so he took it. The reality is that the EU knew all along, from the word go, that it was easier to put in place these arrangements than it made out. I have always found the phytosanitary objection peculiar, because it could be sorted out very quickly. Our standards are higher than the EU’s, and our vets are quite capable of checking different producers to see whether they fit European standards. That is all it is: are they up to European standards, and are European standards up to ours when the EU exports to us? It is very simple. That can be done in every trade deal, and the EU already does it with other countries that are not, and have never been, part of that Union. There is an idea that to get this issue sorted, we would have to go into dynamic alignment and accept the EU’s rules over our products, but it would make it more difficult to make future trade arrangements if we were rule-takers from the European Union and could not negotiate these areas ourselves. That brings me back to my previous point. Before I return to that issue, I want to raise another point. The trouble is that the argument I heard made—that a phytosanitary agreement involving dynamic alignment would address the price of food—is patently absurd. If SPS checks concerned the price of food, we could unilaterally relax them. They do not have to be where they are: that is our decision to take. It would not change or lower the price of food. If anything, it would be more likely to block us from doing a number of things, such as gene editing in food and work that we want to do that the European Union does not want to do. All these things put at risk where we may be in future trade arrangements and the direction in which we may want to develop farming here.
I want to make a couple of points on this issue before I give way. We know, and everybody else around the world outside the EU knows, that the EU puts up very hidden tariff barriers. America is right about that; it complained that Europe finds all sorts of little regulations and problems, so that it cannot break in with its products and goods. That has happened for a long time, and it has happened with us—we know that it was even happening when we were in the EU. We are by nature a free-trading country, and there is no way on earth that we think the EU as a construct is as free trading in that sense. It wants to protect its markets more than anything else, rather than open up to the rest of the world.
If damage has been done to exporting to the European Union, as I said earlier, that is about the attitude of the European Union to protectionism in the EU. Its trade with us has not fallen away on that basis, because we did not set up those barriers in the first place, so my argument to the hon. Gentleman is very simple: the European Union wants it all. That is the reality of what we are dealing with. It wants it all, and it negotiated in bad faith from the word go. We have an agreement, which is a pretty good agreement as trade agreements go. It is one of the largest trade agreements that we have. It can always be improved—I do not disagree with that—but the reality is that we need to deal with an organisation that is as relaxed about being fair to us as we are about being fair to it. That has been our biggest problem from the word go. Returning to phytosanitary issues, I have had debates and discussions with the Minister, the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), in the past, and we have agreed with each other many times. I laud him for his stance on Russia and everything else—there is no question about that—but I want to quote from a little document that I came across from the Centre for European Reform. By the way, it is very complimentary to say that I read things that I do not agree with. I tend to do that quite a lot, strangely—it is a bad habit of mine, I know. That document is very close to how the European Union’s heads of department all think, and it says: “Labour’s red lines do not extend to ruling out dynamic alignment or a role for the ECJ in dispute settlement.” As such, I ask the Minister this simple question: is the Centre for European Reform correct? Do the Government’s red lines rule out dynamic alignment, or do they not? I will give way to the Minister right now, because I am generous like that, and he probably wants to answer that question. I tempt him to come to the Dispatch Box and say whether the Government’s red lines rule out dynamic alignment. Could they, and will they, agree to dynamic alignment and ECJ rules? I will give way to him now, because I see that he is beginning to move.
He is not—what a pity.
With respect to the hon. Gentleman, he has a little while to go before he stands at the Dispatch Box. I am after the Minister, not him, but we will get to that in due course. The reality is that the Government could agree to dynamic alignment—there was no denial of that. Essentially, the Government are going into this negotiation knowing full well that they are so desperate on phytosanitary matters that they will give way on dynamic alignment. That is exactly what the EU wants. My real worry in all of this, however, is that we know what is going on—I will just move on to another topic, and then I will sit down and give other Members a chance to speak. Most of all, I am worried about bad faith. When we talked about improvements—which, to be fair to the Government, they did with the European Union—what did France do almost immediately? The Prime Minister is showing some leadership over Ukraine, trying to galvanise the other nations, which is his role. His role is to haul America and keep it with us, and he has been doing that. I do not have any criticism of that, but when the Prime Minister got involved, saying that Europe should form a coalition of the willing and that he wanted to drive that further forward and get some kind of agreement on it, what did France immediately say? “Not before you give us access to fishing.” That was it. In no world does fishing have anything to do with defence, yet France weaponised fishing to block off the UK, which had taken the—I think—generous position of saying that it wanted to galvanise Europe to do more. The problem here is that if we take out the countries that joined since the Ukraine war, Europe across the board spends half of what the United States does on defence in dollar terms. We have more people and more industry in Europe, yet we spend half of what America does on weaponry and defence. That is a shocking position for a member of NATO to be in. We have not stood up. We have done better—still not good enough—but what the rest of Europe has done has been shocking. By the way, the country that just told us that we will not get any discussions unless fishing is on the agenda has been one of the worst spenders on defence in the European Union, let alone in global terms.
Way less than us, and less than most of the others—it is at the bottom of the scale. I simply say to the Government that the Prime Minister is right to press on defence, to get the European nations to step up, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) said earlier, we have a mechanism for that. The Prime Minister is right to do it through NATO, and we must not allow Europe to slide away from NATO as its means of defence. I watched, as did many of its leaders, when Vice-President Vance lectured the European Union in Munich. What he said shocked the European leaders, as it was meant to—he laid into Europe quite vindictively—but fair enough. However, where we are now heading, towards somehow encouraging those countries peculiarly to form some kind of European Union defence organisation, is exactly what will give the American Administration permission to say, “Well, you can do this yourself.” We are already halfway there, by the way, because we are forming a coalition of the willing but America is not willing, and we are at odds with it over its relationship with Ukraine. We agreed about the ceasefire, but America has now changed its position and will now be holding negotiations before a ceasefire. I think that that is wrong, by the way. Although I am personally a big supporter of America, I think it is mistaken on that particular point and the Government are right. My point is that we are putting the whole of NATO at risk for a phytosanitary and fishing deal. In what world does anyone do that? What are we doing it for? The answer, it seems to me, is that we are too desperate to curry favour with an organisation that, when push comes to shove and when it comes to defence, needs us more than we need it. It needs the UK to be locked into this because we are the key to so much of what it needs to do with defence. I say to the Government, “You have much stronger tools in your hand than you may think.” We have key persuasive powers on defence, and we should not sell them on the basis that they should become European and we should destroy NATO, or damage NATO, simply because we want to make some kind of adjustment or improvement which includes dynamic alignment and the loss of the possibility of future trade negotiation.
On national insurance!
Reform Members are not here, so I will answer that point. They are not on the same page as us because their amendment, which was not a proper one, did not fit on the same page of the Order Paper!
Apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker—that was a lapse on my part.
Will the hon. Lady give way?
I am grateful to my neighbour for giving way. If she wants to deliberately not go down that rabbit hole, she should be talking to the Government Front Benchers.
I just want to draw something out. Dynamic alignment is not a small thing; it is huge, because it is rule taking. Can my right hon. Friend imagine our engaging in any other trade arrangement—with the United States or Australia, for instance, or the trans-Pacific partnership—and being in a position where we had to say, “We will accept your rules and your adjudication”?
rose—
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and as I have said, we have worked together in the past quite a lot. I will just ask a very simple question. The Government have constantly said they will not breach their red lines. They have apparently said that publicly in Europe, and they have said it here. My simple question is: is dynamic alignment one of the red lines?
I thank the hon. Lady for the work she does on behalf of the Church. She occupies a very important role and commands considerable respect for what she has been doing. I wish to add to the point that the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) just made about the closure of churches, particularly in rural parishes, which is becoming an increasing problem. In my constituency, we have experienced difficulty getting the Church to recognise that it too has an obligation to stand by the side of local communities when those wonderful and precious buildings are to be closed as places of worship, and that it must help find a community purpose for them. Does the hon. Lady agree that the Church cannot ignore its responsibility?
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. Roy was political to his core. He loved this place more than anyone could possibly imagine. He regularly got quite frustrated with Governments and Prime Ministers. I will always remember arriving at the office on my first day as Chief Whip, and seeing his look of frustration and irritation, which said, “Who on earth have they sent me now? He’s never been in the Whips Office.” I remember Roy sitting me down and explaining that he worked for me 51% of the time and for the Opposition the other 49%. I wanted him to shift the dial a little more in my favour, but he was never going to do that. I asked him, rather naively, what I should read, and whether it was worth picking up “Erskine May”. He looked at me and said, “Chief, only strange people and Clerks read ‘Erskine May’.” Yet there was a not a page in “Erskine May” that he did not know. Roy started as an apprentice in the Ministry of Defence, worked his way through to No. 10 Downing Street and got briefings ready for Prime Ministers, and then went into the Whips Office. All that equipped him to understand raw politics. As anyone who has been Chief Whip will know, it is deputies, not Chief Whips, who whip their party; Chief Whips have to manage the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. They are there to save the Government from doing incredibly stupid things to themselves every single day—or that was the case in my day. I have a feeling that might not have changed that much. I would sometimes come into the office and Roy’s eyes would roll; he had heard the news about the latest decision emanating from No. 10. Yet he would always sit down, talk through the problem and give solutions—a potential way out of the awful mess that you found yourself in. I particularly recall the day after the 2017 general election. For those who were not here, it had not gone quite as well as we had hoped. I arrived at the beautiful Chief Whips Office in Downing Street and Roy, who was as good with his Anglo-Saxon words as any man—I will not say the word he used, but it rhymed with “clucking”—said, “Well, you clucking screwed that one up, didn’t you? What are you going to do?” At the time, the Prime Minister was in shock and not really doing an awful lot, and it fell to the Whips Office to work out how we took things forward. Sitting down with Roy to work things out was essential to our putting together a deal with the Democratic Unionist party—a deal that made sure that the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) did not have the opportunity to form a Government in 2017, or since. Roy lived and breathed politics, but also cared about nothing more than his family. I would hear him talk with such pride about his daughter at university, and about his son, whom he took to countless events related to swimming, and then to the RAF. Altogether, Roy was a good friend. Just a few weeks ago, I was sitting down with him, having a cup of coffee and talking about his family. We talked about the difficult times, but also the amazing times. He will be so missed.
It is important to remember the history here. There was no common fisheries policy until the prospect of Britain’s joining the common market arose, and then those countries created one simply so that they could rip us off.
Would the hon. Lady’s second question for the Minister include All Saints Mudeford, which burned down two years ago? The rebuilding process cannot be started because of the extra burden of VAT, so the church is raising money for that.
Would my hon. Friend care to disabuse Labour Members who seem to be under the impression that whatever amount we put in, somehow our defence contractors in the UK will get more out of the fund than we are contributing? The history of defence procurement in Europe is that France and Germany invariably make sure that they get more out of it than they put in, and we are always the losers. I do not think we will suddenly become winners when we are not a member of the EU.
May I point out that the Conservative motion says that the Conservatives stand by the result of the 2016 referendum, but the Labour amendment does not say the same of the Labour party? Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that a one-term mandate in one election trumps a referendum result, or does he respect the referendum result of 2016?
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point about shellfish. The environmental and hygiene standards we apply to our shellfish remained exactly the same the day we left the EU as when we were in the EU—it was the EU that supplied all that bureaucracy and requirement for wet stamps. Under World Trade Organisation rules, if a territory has equivalent standards, it is obliged to allow goods to enter its jurisdiction unchecked. Why does the EU breach this international law so wantonly, and why have the Government become a supplicant to the EU, trying to gain its favour to remove these illegal barriers?
rose—
The hon. Gentleman told us that he has a constituent who finds it easier to trade with South Korea than with the EU. What does that tell us about the EU? Is that not one reason why people voted to leave? It is because of its excessive bureaucracy and its protectionism. Why is it easier to trade with South Korea than with the EU if it is not for EU bureaucracy?
I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) and his flowery optimism for the future of this country, with it somehow being a terribly good thing that we are realigning ourselves with the European Union without actually rejoining it. It makes me wonder about all the debates I have attended over 33 years in the House about our relationship with what used to be called the common market, then the European Communities and now the European Union. This debate has a ring of familiarity about it, because there are two sides in the House that tend to completely misunderstand each other—only, I think that Conservative Members now understand the truth, because that came out in the referendum. The referendum demonstrated that the House of Commons was completely out of alignment with the population on the question of our membership of the European Union. The whole Brexit story was about a battle within the House as to whether the pro-EU majority would assert itself and somehow negate the referendum, or whether the referendum would be respected. That is why my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and her shadow Cabinet colleagues are right to put at the front of the motion the importance of honouring the referendum result. The fact is that a referendum result represents a superior mandate to a single term of election for an elected Government, because that referendum takes place on a single issue. I do not think anyone would pretend that the European Union was the main issue at the last general election, so anyone in the Government or indeed in the Liberal Democrats trying to use the general election result as a mandate to circumvent the result of the 2016 referendum is playing a dangerous political game.