I will not be following the same line of argument as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I remind noble Lords that the majority of the amendments in this group apply only to regulations made under Clause 2, which applies to continuity agreements only. All noble Lords who have the bogeyman of a trade deal with the United States in their minds when they make their speeches are barking up the wrong tree. These amendments would have nothing whatever to do with any trade treaty outside the continuity agreements.
This feels like Groundhog Day. Having just come through the Agriculture Bill, I see the same people making the same arguments. I have this nightmare that in every Bill going forward, for ever, the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and a number of other noble Lords will be popping up with amendments in virtually the same form, whatever the basic content of the Bill, if they have half a chance of squeezing them into the long title.
These amendments go beyond food standards and all those things that so many impassioned words have been said about already into how food is produced. Noble Lords will be aware that, under WTO rules—they are our future in trading terms, if not our past—it is not allowed to mention food production methods without a scientific basis. That is one reason why the EU, and therefore the UK, has been in contravention of WTO rules. We need to come to terms with the fact that we are now living in the post-EU world where the
WTO will be extremely important to us. I hope that my noble friend Lord Trenchard, who knows much more about the WTO than I do, will amplify that when he speaks later.
The noble Lords who have spoken know perfectly well what the UK Government’s stated policy is in relation to the standards that they are keen to see adopted in the way that the Government pursue business. UK law is aligned with EU law by virtue of retained law, so whatever trade agreements are entered into, it is not possible to import, for example, hormone-treated beef into the UK—even though there is actually no scientific basis for that, certainly on food safety grounds. Treaties do not and cannot change UK law. As I have said before, we do not customarily write every government policy into legislation. That would create a very cumbersome way of building up legislation.
Noble Lords have remarked in various ways how they think these policies need to be written into the Bill because they do not trust the Government or think that the Government are not sufficiently persuasive. They have often accompanied those remarks with a number of insults about either the Prime Minister or the Government in general. I have to say, it is not the approach of any Government involved in legislating to write into legislation things that appear to upset noble Lords on the Opposition Benches, or even on the Cross Benches. Noble Lords will be aware that, even if we wrote it into the Bill, it could easily be changed if the Government sought to change it in later legislation and Parliament agreed to that. As has already been mentioned, the straightforward electoral arithmetic now means that, with a majority of 80 in the other place, the Government’s policy can change. If we try to put anything into this Bill, it does not necessarily determine government policy for ever and a day, which is what noble Lords are trying to do.
The amendments in this group are not necessary and are, I believe, a waste of legislative time. I would fully expect the other place to reject them if they were pursued and passed on Report. I will speak in specific terms about one amendment only: Amendment 23. A number of noble Lords have referred to it as representing some kind of glorious compromise around the time of the previous Trade Bill. I will speak to it because my noble friend Lord Grimstone, the Minister, was not here at that time. He will have not been aware of the circumstances in which that amendment was put into the Bill.
We have to remember that, at that time, Parliament was barely functioning. It was more focused on resisting any form of Brexit in any way possible. Getting the Trade Bill through the House of Lords was an extremely difficult thing for my noble friend Lady Fairhead to try to achieve. Not to put it too mildly, the amendment that came forward was just an act of attempted appeasement to those noble Lords who were bent on obstructing anything related to Brexit. I say this to noble Lords: the world has changed. That amendment belonged in that era, and that era is behind us.