EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement

Debate between Peter Grant and Geraint Davies

Monday 6th February 2017 General Committees

[Peter Grant]

I think that means I have as long as the hon. Member for Brent North had after starting to come to his conclusions, so I will try and keep by comments brief.

The Minister asked what the Opposition’s view of CETA was. Well, there is not just one Opposition—even on this small Committee there are at least two Oppositions, and possibly more, but we will see later. The Scottish National party’s position on trade is that we want it. We form the Government of a country whose exports are worth almost £30 billion a year, excluding oil and gas—that counts as Scottish produce when it is bad news but not when it is good news. That is equivalent to about £100 a week exported for every man, woman and child in the country.

We can do that because we have confidence in our producers to compete on a level playing field with anybody anywhere in the world on quality, whether in food and drink, which have been mentioned, our tourism provision or invisible exports such as higher education. Scotland has nothing to fear from fair trade, which is why we are staying in the single market even after some Members here have chosen to leave, but we have to ensure that removing barriers to fair trade does not create opportunities for the destruction or hijacking of important public services. I welcome the assurances that the Minister has given us today, but I still want to hear them given to the entire House of Commons, not simply because I think that is what should happen, but because a Minister of the Crown promised that it would happen.

The Minister and some of his colleagues on the Government Benches keep talking about debating the process as if that did not matter. We should remember that the European Parliament, the Court of Justice and the European Commission are processes. If we are not interested in processes, why are we going through the chaos of Brexit to change the process by which our laws are made and interpreted? The process matters. Strange though this may seem coming from somebody who, as hon. Members will have gathered, is not a great fan of this place, I think that the principle of Ministers’ accountability to Parliament is so important that I would be prepared to see a delay in a trade deal that I was 100% in favour of if that would ensure proper parliamentary scrutiny. When I am here, I am not just speaking for myself. When the whole House is assembled, we are all speaking for others, and those others have raised significant concerns, whether they are well founded, based on misinformation or based on good information. Those concerns can be addressed without scuppering the whole treaty.

This issue is too important to be discussed late on a Monday evening in an upstairs Committee room in the House of Commons. I had a look at the BBC website a few minutes ago. There are 11 different headlines on the politics page, but this debate does not feature—that is how successfully it has been hidden away. I cannot see into the minds of the managers of the Government’s business. It might just be a coincidence that we got notified of the date, time and place of this meeting on exactly the same day as the programme motion for Committee stage of the Withdrawal from the European Union (Article 50) Bill appeared on the Order Paper. It might just be a coincidence that after five months of waiting for an urgent debate, it suddenly gets programmed for a day on which nobody but nobody is going to be paying the slightest bit of attention to it.

If the Minister is concerned that delaying the signing of CETA will somehow damage Britain’s reputation in trade circles around the world, what does it do to the Government’s reputation when a Minister goes before a Select Committee and says that he agrees that there needs to be an urgent debate before the full House of Commons, yet months later it still has not happened, and then another Minister comes along and says, “Well, yes, the Secretary of State gave that commitment, but it really doesn’t matter because we’re far too busy getting out of the European Union to worry about parliamentary democracy”? I do not think anything can make us too busy for that.

I simply do not believe that it is purely due to a lack of time that after five months we have not had an urgent debate on a major issue that has caused a lot of concern to well-meaning, sincere and genuine citizens the length and breadth of these islands. I simply do not believe that, if the Government wanted to schedule a debate on the Floor of the House at some point since 7 September, they could not have found a way of doing so. If that is not the case, and if five months genuinely was not long enough to schedule a three-hour debate on the Floor of the House, we should remember that the same Government tell us that they can negotiate an entirely new relationship with 27 different countries in just under 18 months. If that does not send a chill down the spine, I do not know what will.

Incidentally, I do not care what amendments the hon. Member for Swansea West doodled down, submitted and decided not to follow through with. Perhaps Government Members should think more about articles that were written about the case for staying in the European Union, which were somehow never published, by someone who had a kind of road-to-Damascus conversion and is now one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Brexit. We should remember that he has also changed his opinion about Donald Trump since he got elected to the presidency.

We are not debating amendments that were drafted and never submitted or amendments that were submitted and then withdrawn; we are debating the amendment before us. I ask this of Conservative Members. I know that the Government and the Whips have told them what they want to do, but if they seriously believe that a major reason for exiting the European Union was to restore parliamentary democracy—I will not refer to parliamentary sovereignty, because that does not exist equally in all four parts of these islands—and if they want to restore parliamentary supremacy over Europe, surely we should also be maintaining parliamentary supremacy over Ministers of the Crown.

This is not an isolated case. I have sat beside the hon. Member for Swansea West many times in the European Scrutiny Committee, and I have lost count of the number of times that that Committee, which has a built-in Government majority, has savaged Ministers one after the other for their complete failure to show any respect whatever for the due processes of the House. If the Government do not like the processes, they are perfectly entitled to bring forward changes and to ask the House to agree to them.

[Geraint Davies]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if our Chairman, the hon. Member for Stone, were here, he would demand a full debate and full scrutiny, as we do today?

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. I rather suspect that the hon. Member for Stone is more than capable of speaking for himself. We disagree significantly on a number of issues, but on this issue he and I agree entirely. Given that he has never opposed any of his Committee’s reports, and that we have had report after report severely criticising the Government for failure to bring important matters of public policy forward for debate, either in Committee or in the House, it is reasonable to take it that not only the Chair, but members of that Committee across the parties, agree that the Government, for far too long, have not been interested in being held to account by the House of Commons.

I make a final plea to those on the Government Benches. I am not asking them to support the amendment because I want to give the Government a going over, because, quite frankly, they are doing that well enough themselves just now. I am not doing it because I want to block the treaty, because my view is that, with a few changes, the treaty could be a good thing for the vast majority of people on these islands. I am asking them to do it because it is what they believe in.

Tory Members are taking us out of the EU. Some of them did not support that at the referendum, but last week only one Member on the Tory Benches voted against the Bill, so they are now accepting that the UK is leaving the EU, and a major purpose in doing that is to restore what they term parliamentary sovereignty. If they are not prepared to stand up for parliamentary sovereignty when it relates to Ministers in the UK Government, we have no chance of restoring parliamentary democracy anywhere else. I make a final plea: please do what you know is the right thing to do. We are not talking about holding things up. We are simply talking about giving the House of Commons its proper place in oversight over Government decisions that will continue to affect all our lives, and the lives of future generations for many decades to come.