My Lords, I cannot match the dazzling intellectual exposition of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, but I completely endorse his remarks on the Good Friday agreement. The need to stay in the single market and the customs union in order to preserve the integrated economy and the peace and political enjoyment of the Good Friday agreement is one of the best arguments for doing so. I shall speak to Amendment 203 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and my noble friend Lady Smith of Newnham, who sadly feels that there is not time for her to speak. I shall also speak more generally on this group and second the remarks of noble friends who have spoken on it.
Amendment 203 requires a specific parliamentary vote on whether to leave the EEA. This would perhaps both remove any legal doubt about whether the Article 50 notification made that decision—I will slightly sidestep that issue—and be an explicit political decision in itself. Therefore I advocate the merits of Amendment 203.
We are in the dark about the future. The Cabinet is meeting again tomorrow at Chequers and we are all very hopeful that some white smoke will emerge from that meeting. As many noble Lords have said this afternoon, the implications of leaving the single market and the customs union are serious. Indeed, it has been described by my former noble friend Lord Carlile of Berriew as a “suicide note”—hence the need to have a specific vote on whether to leave the EEA, which would be a safeguard, at least against sudden death.
We learn from the Financial Times, in advance of having anything explained to us in the open by the Government, that the buzzword for the trade relationship that the Government will be aiming for is “managed divergence”. Apparently:
“Under this approach, economic activity between the UK and the EU would be divided into three baskets: complete alignment, where the UK would follow EU rules”—
presumably to at least encompass the famous paragraph 49 of the phase 1 agreement—
“‘managed mutual recognition’, where both would agree to common objectives but each would choose its own rules; and a third basket where the UK can abandon EU regulations and do whatever it wants”.
That sounds incredibly complicated for citizens and business, as against the simplicity of full membership of the single market and the customs union. This commentator says:
“The beauty of this approach is that it unites the cabinet”.
This is possibly because it has three variations. However, it does not have one single theme.
Of course, we have heard all variants, not least this past week. We had the speech from the Foreign Secretary and the letter from the European Research Group—I am not sure that it does a lot of research but it writes a lot of letters. It wants “full regulatory autonomy”. I hope that I will not embarrass the Minister if I quote him when he was in the European Parliament. He said in 2012:
“Surely one of the best ways for the EU to speed up growth is to scrap the employment and social affairs directorate in the Commission, repatriate its responsibilities to national governments, then we could scrap the working time directive, the agency workers’ directive, the pregnant workers’ directive, and all of the other barriers to actually employing people if we really want to create jobs in Europe”.
We will discuss on other days the maintenance of employment and other rights, but it is illustrative of the problem that we have that there is such an array of opinion within the Government. The advantage of having a parliamentary vote in the context of the implementation of the withdrawal agreement would be that it would allow Parliament to have the backstop of saying, “Actually, we want to stay in the EEA”.
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All the cherry picking and cakeism which these three variants represent—you could call it having your cherry cake and eating it—mean that it is pretty unlikely to be acceptable to the EU, as well, as I have just said, as being very complicated for citizens and businesses to work out which of the three phases they are in. The other thing, of course, is that we have no idea what dispute resolution mechanisms are envisaged for any of this. Are we going to get three types of dispute resolution? We already know that the Prime Minister is proposing to respect the remit of the European Court of Justice—indeed, for the long term—in the security field. What will happen in other fields?
We are in this state of huge uncertainty now 20 months after the referendum, as opposed to the great certainty and security of staying in the single market and the customs union. Other noble Lords have talked about the difficulties of being outside the customs union; the magical thinking of technological solutions; the problems of rules of origin, which the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said were not important but which, as my noble friend Lady Kramer said, the car and aerospace manufacturers regard as absolutely crucial to their operations; and if we left the single market we would have to have checks for compliance with standards in, for example, food and agriculture across the Irish and other borders.
My noble friend Lord Newby talked about the Brexit study, which absolutely must be published. It is an insult to the citizens of this country that they are patronised to the extent that they are denied the knowledge that the Government have about the likely impact of their plans. Why is that? Because they might actually want to say to the Government, “No, we do not want to go in this direction”. I say to the noble Lord, Lord True, that my right honourable friend Vince Cable did not and does not call for a rerun of the June 2016 referendum. What he and the Liberal Democrats, who are solidly united behind his leadership, are calling for is a final say on the deal itself. That is a completely different animal and it would be quite nice if some noble Lords opposite could actually grasp that point.