Extracts from Parliamentary proceedings - July 18

Wednesday, 19 July 2017 07:39

Extracts from Lords debate on Brexit: Trade in Goods (EUC Report) Lord Livingston of Parkhead (Con):...As regards some of the talk about doing trade agreements with the US, India and China, such agreements would be commendable. However, in the case of the US, I think there is a failure to recognise the problems of dealing with difficult areas such as the Jones Act, the buy American policy and, indeed, the current President of the US. None of these will make it easy to do a...Request free trial

Extracts from Lords debate on Brexit: Trade in Goods (EUC Report)

Lord Livingston of Parkhead (Con):...As regards some of the talk about doing trade agreements with the US, India and China, such agreements would be commendable. However, in the case of the US, I think there is a failure to recognise the problems of dealing with difficult areas such as the Jones Act, the buy American policy and, indeed, the current President of the US. None of these will make it easy to do a trade deal. India and China do not start from a globalisation position. They are big markets but they will not start from the same place regarding free movement of goods and, indeed, services. To achieve all this we may have to make some of our red lines a little dotted. We have challenges and we may have to compromise...

The Earl of Sandwich (CB):..Much of the Brexit talk these days is of the Commonwealth as an alternative free trade route. We will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Howell, in a moment. Of course, such a route will favour the stronger members such as Canada, Australia and possibly India but these days it seems unlikely that the Commonwealth can offer anything better than the EU to African countries. If we lose all access to the EU, we will have to set up our own new arrangements with the ACP countries through the WTO, building on various versions of the generalised scheme of preferences. All these countries need reassurance and the Minister will not be able today to predict the outcome of negotiations. The Government will need to think of something to tell other countries. As this report makes clear, the UK will not be able to sign new free-trade agreements with third countries until we have left the EU and we will not, it seems, have access to existing EU free-trade agreements with third countries. Furthermore, negotiating all these individual bilateral agreements during what is now called the implementation phase and assessing whether the terms will be preferential or not will take many months if not years, as the noble Lord, Lord Livingston, clearly demonstrated...

Lord Bilimoria (CB):..I am a lone voice in this country but I will keep saying this: why do the Government not bring back exit checks at our borders? I challenge the Minister on that. We should have visible, physical exit checks and then we would have control over our borders. In every other country that I fly in and out of on a regular basis, whether it is Europe or South Africa or India or the United States, my passport is scanned on the way in and again on the way out. You then have control over immigration. From the security point of view it is negligent not to do it—and we need to give people more faith where immigration is concerned...

...The noble Lord, Lord Marland, referred to our world-class universities, the best in the world along with those of the United States of America. UUK illustrates this with an example: we are less than 1% of the world’s population, yet the UK produces 16% of the world’s most highly cited articles. The UK also ranks first in the world by field-weighted citation impact. What is the danger of leaving the EU? It is not just losing the funding that our universities rely on—the Government can say, “We’ll give you that funding”—but, more important and more worrying, it is losing the collaborations that exist. I saw this when I went to India with Jo Johnson, the Universities Minister, as chancellor of the University of Birmingham and wearing my hat as chair of the advisory board of the Cambridge Judge Business School. In India, we demonstrated the collaboration between the University of the Punjab and the University of Birmingham. Our field-weighted impact result is about 1.8; that of the University of the Punjab is 1.3; combined, it is 5.3. When we research with Harvard, which has a field-weighted average of 2.3, the combined result is 5.4. That is the power of collaborative research; that is what we would possibly be losing.

The noble Lord, Lord Howell, spoke about services being 80% of our economy. We are already a great trading nation; we always have been. Trade makes up 65% of our GDP. Then the Government will have to make a trade-off between their desire to determine UK laws and regulations and the extent to which an FTA with the EU can operate to two separate regulatory standards. As the report points out, that is another problem. The report then states that leaving the customs union would result in costly administrative requirements and customs procedures—burdens for companies—and further states:

“Administering UK-EU tariffs and non-tariff barriers—in the absence of a common regulatory system—would also significantly increase the work of HMRC”.

What about HMRC? How will it cope with this?

We are going to lose out on a huge amount. The 60 countries with which the EU already has free trade agreements account for about 17% of our exports. If we add the 50% of our trade accounted for within the EU and the 17% with those other countries, we see that two-thirds of our trade globally is tied up with being in the EU. Wake up—this is really serious. Leaving will be a huge problem.

And then our great International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox, goes to India and says, “I’m going to open up a free trade deal with India”. I have shared a platform with the Indian high commissioner, a seasoned diplomat, who says that we are welcome to do a free trade deal with India—“Please, do come along, but also remember that a free trade deal with India also means looking at movement of people”. It is not just goods and tariffs; it is services, it is movement of people and it is students. By the way, how many bilateral free trade deals does India, the largest democracy in the world with 1.25 billion people, have in the whole world? Nine—and not one is with a western country. How many free trade deals does the biggest economy in the world, the United States, have? It has 20...

Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con):...This brings me to my final point. As we push for a more liberal trade agenda, not least in our new-found membership of the WTO as an individual country, we can do so with the fastest-growing nations on earth—of which the EU, I am afraid, contains very few. I could not agree more with the report’s stress on the need to make sure that our embassies, consulates and high commissions are properly staffed with economic and trade experts to take advantage of our new-found freedom, outside the customs union, to have free trade with India, China, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, Israel and, in particular, the USA. These are rapidly growing nations and, for our own prosperity, it is vital that we seize the opportunities that free trade presents for us to share in it. In advocating a transitional period, it is also vital that this is for a finite time and crucial that during it, we are allowed to negotiate these free trade agreements in earnest and ensure adoption of the Authorised Economic Operator—AEO—scheme. It seems bizarre that we are currently not allowed even to enter negotiations. I hope this will change during the transitional period. Free trade is ultimately what will make us successful. It is a long-term strategy, of course, but one we should not lose sight of among the weeds of the Brexit negotiations...

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Extract from Westminster Hall debate on Catfishing and Social Media

Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab):...Facebook has launched an initiative in India to counter personal photos being stolen. It has introduced profile picture filters to mark the photograph, because research has shown that a photo marked with a filter is 75% less likely to be stolen. There are now a number of websites for searching someone’s information to confirm their social media profiles and suggest whether they are catfish. A number of dating websites have dedicated fake accounts teams; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat have measures in place so that an account that impersonates somebody can be taken down. Using artificial intelligence to detect fake accounts helps to deal with the enormous challenge that the sheer volume of them poses to identifying and removing them; Facebook announced an initiative in that area earlier this year. Nobody wants to stop people setting up anonymous accounts—they may want to do so to express an identity that they cannot reveal in real life, because of prejudice or discrimination—but there is a difference between that and stealing somebody else’s identity in order to exploit another person...

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