I will not give way for the moment; I would like to make a bit of progress.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, that even if you were to believe that we are under some kind of instruction relating to Brexit it certainly could not
apply to the issue of our remaining in the customs union or the single market. I do not remember that issue being mentioned at all in the referendum, certainly on the customs union. As we all know, there was nothing on the ballot paper about it. The noble Lord, Lord Robathan, intervened to say that he remembered some mention of it by certain people during the campaign. I would be very interested if he could put on record the particular dates, times and places where those comments were made, because I reckon I was pretty alert to what was being said during that campaign, in which I took an active part. I never heard the issue of our remaining in the customs union being dealt with at all, let alone seriously analysed and considered. I do not think that the British people had any chance on that occasion to express a preference one way or the other on that matter. As the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, said, that is a matter of practical fact. Parliament must be sovereign and must take what will be a very important decision.
We all know the potential damage that this country will suffer from Brexit. A lot of it will be from our leaving the single market. Admittedly, some of that damage can be mitigated by our signing a free trade agreement with the EU, but that will not cover financial services, which is such an important part of the country’s economy. There will be great damage from our leaving the EU, even if we are able to sign such a free trade agreement.
On the issue of the customs union, an enormous range of businesses, sectors and companies see this as an existential threat to their continued survival in this country. That goes across all kinds of people, from automotive to aerospace, pharmaceuticals, the nuclear industry and the airline industry. Noble Lords are familiar with the arguments and the very depressing projections made by people from those industries about the costs that they would incur if we leave the customs union.
What is extraordinary is that we have not really heard any of the benefits. It is extraordinary that you can make a proposal for something involving undoubted costs—we can all disagree about the costs and what their extent might be, but we cannot possibly disagree with what sign is on the variable in the equation: it is a negative. The idea that we should incur costs and risks without really knowing what the potential countervailing benefit is seems extraordinarily perverse. No business would manage itself on that basis.
When you press the Government they say, “We need to leave the customs union because that enables us to sign customs agreements or free trade agreements with other countries outside the EU and outside those countries which have themselves free trade agreements with the EU at the present time”. When you actually look at the prospect of doing that you see that it is a mirage; it does not exist at all. Let us take the United States, which spent eight or nine years failing to negotiate the TTIP with the European Union, as the Committee knows very well. Those negotiations broke down partly because of disagreement about the investment guarantees that the Americans were demanding and partly because of the demands being made by the Americans about access for their agricultural products to the single market.
Anybody who knows anything about America knows perfectly well that it is inconceivable that an American Administration, let alone a Republican Administration backed by so many Senators and Congressmen from the prairie states and farm states, would ever ratify a free trade agreement with anybody that did not include agricultural products. If it includes agricultural products, of course it includes hormone-impregnated and antibiotic-impregnated beef and chlorinated chicken. Are the British people any more likely than their continental partners and neighbours to accept such products on the market? Would they accept the very appalling animal welfare standards which the Americans have? They have virtually zero grazing for well over 90%, if not very close to 100%, of their cattle at the present time. The idea that you can go through Texas and see lots of longhorn being herded by cowboys as you could 100 years ago is wrong: you will not see a single Texas Longhorn now out in the open air. Those problems will remain and in practice I believe they will be insuperable for us, just as they have been for the rest of the European Union.
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Let us take China. Of course, it is a very nice idea to have a free trade agreement with China but does the Committee seriously think that the Chinese would accept and sign a free trade agreement which provided for the continuation of quotas on Chinese steel exports? Can the Committee seriously imagine that the Chinese would allow such a precedent to be created? Can the Committee possibly imagine that the Chinese are so far away from their reputation of being concerned with face that they would ever accept an unequal treaty of that kind? Of course not. On the other hand, if we were to sign such an agreement and accept that Chinese steel quotas should be abolished, what is the future then of Port Talbot? What is the future of the British steel industry? We know that and we know that the Government have given an undertaking to the people of Port Talbot that they will not abolish the quotas on Chinese steel exports. There is a fundamental contradiction there. The Government have been completely unclear about it. I could use a less parliamentary term than “unclear”; they have really attempted to obfuscate this issue.
Let us take India. India is another apparent great prize but Mr Modi has said quite seriously that the first priority of India in negotiating a free trade agreement with this country would be a greater quota for Indian immigrants into this country. If we are acting on, or even being influenced by or taking account of, the referendum campaign then we know perfectly well that immigration was one of the most sensitive issues, if not the most sensitive issue, driving the result of that campaign. It would be extraordinarily perverse if the British Government now said that as a result of Brexit we would actually have more immigration from India or from anywhere else. Without more immigration, Mr Modi has said he is not interested in doing a deal.
I think there would be a good chance of our getting a free trade agreement with Australia and New Zealand, but of course it would be totally at the expense of the British livestock industry. We would have, every week, enormous frozen meat containers arriving on big ships from Australia and that would knock the bottom out
of the British beef market and the British lamb market. Anybody who is familiar with those markets, including the NFU, is very well aware of that. The Government have again been very unwilling to be clear and frank about the fact that if they want a free trade agreement with Australia and New Zealand they will have to accept their agricultural products. Actually there is nothing very much that the Australians are interested in selling us otherwise. There are minerals, such as copper, uranium and so forth, but they could sell us that anyway; they do not need an agreement, there are no quotas on that, it is an international commodity, an international raw material.
So if you break it down a bit further than the rhetoric you see that there is no such thing as this vast, wonderful, countervailing benefit to leaving the single market and the customs union, as the Government have been pretending. There is a fundamental falsehood here and we should use the opportunity that this Committee provides to try to expose some of the illusions which the Government have been putting forward, and to throw light in corners which the Government have been trying desperately to keep dark, of which this is undoubtedly one.