United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 19th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, like many Members I was horrified when I saw this Bill. I was, for many years, on an EU committee on benchmarking, and in those days people had to get used to the idea that if we get best practice in Europe, it is for the good of us all. The slogan we in the trade unions worked out in those days—Jacques Delors and all that—was something like “Europe is the league we are in”. Britain will go nowhere but backwards if we get out, and although we have accepted that there has been a referendum result, we are now going to make the situation far more adverse for our employment and investment prospects. Multinationals said, in a meeting I went to a couple of years ago, that their investment forecasts for Britain were going down even then, and now it is going down very much more than 50% for many industries.

It is so unrealistic to have the idea that we can complain about the 26 countries together wanting to stick with their standards, rather than them saying “Britain wants to change, in a negotiation between equals, so we will change all our standards”. I hear colleagues in this House suggest there is some rational motivation for this Bill, when I can only imagine it was from some late-night conversation in No. 10 Downing Street. That Conservative Party element wants to return to the heyday of Boris Johnson by doing something a bit more dashing, such as tearing up this aspect of the Good Friday agreement because some people have never liked it. Where the Irish question is concerned, the Good Friday agreement has of course been a great contributor to peace. It implies a certain degree of condominium between aspects of life in Northern Ireland and—with dotted lines to them—London and Dublin. If that is the issue lurking behind this it is, historically, such a ludicrous way for the tail to wag the dog.

If we go down this track now, there is a big question about whether we could have third-nation status within the WTO because part of the United Kingdom—Northern Ireland—would need to have one foot in the joint arrangements with Dublin, under the Good Friday agreement, and another foot in the United Kingdom. Therefore, it is hard to think that we would be a normal third nation. Before the lorries queue up at Dover on 31 December, we should start to think how we are going to get away from this ridiculous apotheosis of Boris Johnson’s idea of the world and see what we can do. We need a framework agreement not just for the British Isles but one such as Switzerland has with the European Union, at the least. That is not my ideal, but we cannot simply commit hari-kari in the way we are going.