(Nottingham East)
(Lab/Co-op): I may give way, because we have been
talking about the USA, and some people have speculated about a
trade deal with India.
(Broxtowe) (Con): Yes,
on that point.
Mr Leslie: I give way to the right hon. Lady.
: Given the hon.
Gentleman’s experience, has he, like me, talked to people about
the detail of the EU-Canada comprehensive economic and trade
agreement, as well as about what the Australians and the
Indians—and many other countries that are apparently queuing up
to do these great trade deals with us—want? At the core of any
free trade agreement with such countries will be an absolute
requirement for their people to be able to come to our country
quite freely, as they can with the accelerated migration policy
under CETA. Under that free trade deal, the Canadian people have
the ability to come into parts of the European Union. It is a
myth to think that this is about trade, because a huge part of it
is about immigration.
Mr Leslie: Absolutely. The right hon. Lady has
taken the words out of my mouth. I would love to see the
Government’s draft free trade agreement with India. I hope that
there are fantastic manufactured goods or widgets that the
British want to sell and could sell to India, but I suspect that
the Indian economy is quite adept at producing widgets of its own
and probably at quite a low cost. If the Indians are going to buy
anything from us, they will buy services—services are about
people; they are people-to-people businesses—and the Indians will
naturally say, “Well, we’ll do you a deal, but it has to involve
the movement of people.” All hon. Members will need to think
about the downstream consequences of that and about how our
constituents might respond. Such an agreement would be perfectly
reasonable, but this is a much bigger question.
(Newcastle-under-Lyme)
(Lab): I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work in
drafting and moving all these new clauses. Does he remember that
when the Prime Minister visited India, the No. 1 topic on the
Indians’ agenda was relaxing our immigration rules? How does that
square with the Prime Minister’s immigration targets and her
ambitions on Brexit?
Mr Leslie: We are due imminently to see the
immigration Bill—the Minister will tell us exactly when it will
be introduced to Parliament—and the draft agreement that the
Secretary of State for International Trade has drawn up with the
Indian Government, and we will be able to make a judgment on that
at that point.
(Edinburgh South)
(Lab): Before my hon. Friend moves away from India, may
I draw his attention to the Scotch whisky industry? I am sure we
will all partake of some of that industry’s goods during the next
few weeks of the festive period. The Scotch whisky industry has
flourished on the basis of free trade deals done through the EU,
such as the one with Korea, but this Government are planning to
walk away from those 57 EU bilateral trade agreements and try to
reach free trade agreements with countries such as India, which
will want to maintain its 150% tariff on Scotch whisky.
...I say that because nothing could be as good as the
situation that we have at the moment. We have free and unfettered
access for goods and services, free and unfettered access to the
customs union, and free and unfettered access to the single
market. The aspiration of this Government is to ensure that when
we come out of this process, we have exactly the same, if not
better, terms than we have at the moment. That is completely and
utterly impossible, because the European Union will never agree
to the same benefits of the customs union and the single market
if we are dealing with it on a separately negotiated basis. That
means—this goes to the arguments made by the right hon. and
learned Member for Rushcliffe—that when doing individual
bilateral trade deals with the US,
Australia, India or wherever else, the
Government will have to throw some sectors under the bus.
has said in the past 48
hours that the red lines that the Government have drawn and the
aspirations they wish to achieve for the financial services
sector are contradictory and therefore cannot happen. If the
Government refuse to accept any of the amendments, do we draw the
conclusion that financial services is a sector that they are
willing to throw under the bus?
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