I speak in support of the amendments to clause 7 in the names of my right hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) and other hon. Members. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) has already mentioned, they are amendments 264, 222, 73, 233, 234, 239, 240, 266, 269, 272 and 161. They are important because they go to the heart of the debate on democracy—whether so much power in so many important areas should be exercised by Ministers without substantial oversight by Parliament. I have not been reassured by the Minister’s lengthy response.
Particular importance has to attach to protecting the rights of consumers and of workers, and I was disappointed at the Minister’s rejection of the amendments we suggested.
We have heard some rumblings from Government Back Benchers and fellow travellers that leaving the EU is an opportunity to strip away protections from workers, consumers and the environment, and to cut supposed “red tape” from manufacturers and producers. The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) reminded us of the previous views of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on this. The Foreign Secretary has also been one of these siren voices in the past, and the Brexit Secretary wrote an article during the EU referendum in which he said:
“The continental response to competition is, rather than trying to compete, to make sure that regulation tilts the playing field in their favour.”
He also said:
“while the single market may seem like a good idea, in reality it has distorted market incentives, reduced competition and burdened European economies with unnecessary regulations.”
So there are people at the very heart of the UK Government who seriously believe that regulations designed to keep us safe and to prevent us from being ripped off, and regulations to ensure that the environment gets a break and that workers get paid and protected properly, are bad things. There are Cabinet Secretaries of the opinion that these things were invented by European bureaucrats as a weapon against UK productivity—that truly is health and safety gone mad.
I mention the current Government members to make it clear that there is a clear and identifiable danger to our continued safety, to the standards we expect in goods and the services we buy, and to the rights that workers enjoy—and it occupies Whitehall today.
As has been said by other Members, the extent of the power aggregation is such that it would leave Ministers, in effect, changing primary legislation by fiat. This is a coup, a very Tory coup, that is seizing power from this place—the power to create and amend legislation—and centralising it in the hands of a few who would have nothing to do with these protections and who would claim that we did well enough without them before.