My Lords, unlike for the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, this is my first as well as last contribution to the Committee stage, but it is on a very big question indeed. While I support the amendment effectively introduced by my noble friend Lord Monks, I have become rather sceptical about the value of most of the debates about the withdrawal Bill, because they are not put in any sort of picture about the architecture of the treaty that we are moving towards.
To use the current vernacular, cherry-picking is all very well, but frankly it will not get us very far. The amendment would give the Parliament whose sovereignty we hear so much about the opportunity to consider how we can get towards a satisfactory outcome from this affair for the nation as a whole. We do not at this moment need to split hairs about whether we would be amending a draft presented by the Government or whether Parliament would consider some sort of resolution on a mandate. Today is the day to consider the principle, which is the broader canvas on which this will be played out.
Only yesterday, the President of the European Commission, Mr Juncker, shortly to be succeeded, we are told on the Brussels grapevine, by Monsieur Barnier, stated:
“As the clock counts down, with one year to go, it is now time to translate speeches into treaties; to turn … broad suggestions”,
into “workable solutions”. We have to raise our game and address the bigger picture to see how the Bill can be amended to facilitate that.
The field that I know best, workers’ rights, provides a good illustration, particularly those derived from collective agreements made in Brussels under the Maastricht treaty, a baker’s dozen ranging from pro rata rights for part-time workers to rights to information and consultation. The blunt fact is that the only way they can be guaranteed if we leave the EU is to move from pillar 1 of the EEA, the EU, to pillar 2 of the EEA, which is EFTA and, by doing so, stay in the single market with all its provisions. That has yet to be broached with our friends in Norway, for example, and the clock is ticking on this too: how that could be worked out on the EFTA-EEA side. It would be very discourteous not to start that process in an exploratory fashion with them, especially given the context that it is now at least 50% likely that that is where we will wind up.
The nearest we have to a document that would show the architecture that the treaty would cover is the draft of the withdrawal agreement, which has been in the Printed Paper Office for two weeks. It is the first outline of what will become a treaty, like the treaty of Maastricht, for example, which caused Sir John Major so much difficulty with his “bastards” the best part of 30 years ago. It gives us an indication of the territory that must be filled in, a framework to add in what this country wants to insert separately as and when such can be agreed.
For reasons that we all understand and to which my noble friend has referred, it is counterproductive to the national interest to fail to take the opportunity to spell out the mandate that Parliament wishes to give our negotiators. Some people have not yet realised why this is so important.
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I used to work at the TUC and I take a trade union negotiation as an analogy. In a trade union negotiation with an employer, one does not put into a remit, on the one extreme, “Let’s all have a 20-hour week. Let’s double our pay. Let’s have eight weeks’ holiday”, or whatever. Even if the members thought that that might sound like a good idea, the trade union executive would say, “No, that is ridiculously ambitious. You will not get it and, moreover, in failing to get it, the members will be disillusioned”. To go to the other extreme, you do not normally say, “Let’s negotiate and see what happens. Just wait and judge the outcome of the negotiations”. There is an interesting reason why that is not a good idea. Apart from anything else, the union executive would have no established criteria against which to explain how it has eventually come to recommend acceptance of an agreement. Not setting out a mandate is putting off the evil day when there would have to be that sort of difficulty or indeed guarantees that sort of crisis.
As regards the architecture and what is in the mandate as opposed to the detail—it is difficult to know how one would spatchcock in all the things that have been mentioned in the last two hours—I need to distinguish the major planks that do not stand on their own but have to be part of a treaty. They have to be part of a comprehensive solution. They cannot just be hanging there. The mandate has to have some major planks on the single market and the customs union, all within a framework of the family of trade relationships and rule-making relationships of which we want to be a part.
The examples given this morning can be added to. There are literally thousands of things that we cannot begin again to negotiate from scratch. We have to have categories that have some read-across. If you take a broad sweep, in industry and commerce about half the people would say that their number one worry is regulations in the single market and what happens to them. Will we have to have new standards and so on? The other one, if you take the broad sweep, is tariffs and customs. Many companies, ranging from manufacturing to financial services—it depends on the field—would say that it is about 50:50. They have worries about both and there are some overlapping concerns.
The referendum question did not say, “How many of these regulations do you want to get rid of?” Where I think we can distinguish the different levels of architecture in a mandate is to talk about, for example, the case for quasi-membership—if I can call it that—via EFTA of the single market and the customs union. It is not, in my opinion, “a customs union” but “the customs union”. It is there and it actually works.
I stress that these vehicles have been going strong for 20 or more years. They have all the problems removed from them by now. They run reasonably well. To bigheadedly deny ourselves the possibility of being in either pillar 1, the EU, or pillar 2, EFTA, would be to shoot ourselves in the foot. Membership of EFTA would mean that we were still in something that works and has relationships around the world and we would not have to start from scratch. EFTA is a vehicle that has been road-tested since about 1958. We would have
half-price membership and not be at the table of the EU. Some people say, “That’s a downside. We voted to come out of the EU and now our objection is that we are not at the table”. I have never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. However, as a big player, we could help to beef up what is already written, in broad terms, in the articles of the European Economic Area on pre-legislative arrangements on consultation on rule-making within the EU.
We would not just be shooting ourselves in the foot if we did not recognise all those points; we would be shooting ourselves in the head. This is a tangible step that we can take right now. It is a broad framework for the other amendments to be taken today. In my opinion, it is the most important one because it is the architectural provision within which all the others have to be considered. This is the way in which Parliament, at this critical juncture in our country’s history, could exercise the sovereignty that we hear so much about.