European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Lord Warner and Viscount Trenchard

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard continued) & Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 15th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Trenchard]

That is my pleasure. Proportional representation has its place but it may not be applicable everywhere.

I am very surprised that the noble Lord has sought to require the Government to adopt his amendment seeking a level playing field with the EU on workers’ rights and environmental and consumer standards. Is he not aware that it was a manifesto commitment of the Conservative Party, to which all Conservative candidates signed up, that the Government would get a proper Brexit done and that we would leave the customs union and the single market? It is essential that we do that to have the flexibility we need to develop and maintain our own independent trade policy, and to negotiate free trade agreements with third countries.

The noble Lord’s amendment requires close alignment with the EU single market, underpinned by shared institutions and obligations. “Shared institutions” sounds to me as though we could still be regulated by EU regulators even after we had left. The EU will seek to export its regulatory framework and standards to us in return for providing market access. Dynamic alignment on workers’ and consumers’ rights would completely subjugate us to the EU, ruling us out as a potential trade partner for others and denying us the benefits and upside of Brexit. We know that the noble Lord does not want to leave the EU but surely he understands that, given that Brexit is going to happen anyway, we should make sure that we can play on a level playing field at the global level. That means freeing ourselves from EU strictures, such as the noble Lord’s amendment would make worse.

[Lord Warner]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Viscount’s flow but I cannot resist asking him, even at this time of night, whether the Prime Minister’s new best friends in constituencies in the north of England and the Midlands will welcome his robust approach to workers’ rights at the next election.

[Viscount Trenchard]

I believe that the policy which my right honourable friend the Prime Minister used to persuade his new supporters in the north of England and elsewhere to support is one that will produce more prosperity for the United Kingdom and a brighter future for all, and that those who voted for him in the north of England will see that it is in their interests to continue to vote for him and his successors, because his policy will have so clearly worked. Furthermore, since we will be free of the cash drain and the regulatory strictures of the EU, which have progressively stunted the United Kingdom’s voice in global fora—I speak as someone who has spent a large proportion of his working life outside the UK, looking in—the new supporters of the Conservative Party in the north will, I hope and trust, wish to continue to support it.

The noble Lord, Lord Fox, talked a lot about regression and standards. He is always trying to bind the Government not to resile or retreat from the high standards set by the EU. But standards are not about high and low; they are about what is proportionate, what properly balances the interests of the innovator with those of the consumer, and what sufficiently but properly protects the consumer against risk. EU regulation in many fields relies so much on the precautionary principle that it has a very negative effect on innovation. That places at risk the UK’s position as the best country in the world in which to conduct medical and scientific innovation, so for all those reasons I would resist the noble Lord’s amendment.