Sir Ashley Fox

I welcome the Government’s stated aim of negotiating a closer trading relationship with the European Union—I wish the Minister well—but given this Government’s record of negotiating international agreements, I worry about what the Prime Minister will agree on our behalf. We have seen his weakness in the negotiations on the Chagos islands. The Government intend to give away the sovereignty of a territory that we already own and then pay billions of pounds to lease it back. I can assure the Minister that when he comes to negotiate the details with the European Commission, he will find it a great deal tougher to deal with than the Government of Mauritius. The Government say that the agreement will improve growth in our economy, and that is commendable, but we on the Conservative Benches would take that assurance far more seriously if the Government had not spent the last 10 months making life more difficult for British business. The Employment Rights Bill will increase costs to businesses by £5 billion a year, borne mostly by small and medium-sized enterprises, and the £25 billion national insurance jobs tax will make it more expensive to employ people—unless, of course, it is an Indian business importing workers from India, because then it will benefit from the new trade deal negotiated by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade. A closer trading relationship with the EU would be very welcome. Trade frictions could be diminished easily. An agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary measures could be reached were the EU and the UK to recognise each other’s standards. Our standards are already the same as, or higher than, the EU’s, and the EU knows this. But the EU has no intention of doing that. It intends to wait until the UK has a Government who will agree to its rules, agree to the dynamic alignment of those rules and then agree that the Court of Justice of the European Union is the final arbiter of those rules. It seems that the EU’s patience has been rewarded, because when I asked the Minister earlier to clarify what approach he intended to take, answer came there none. It is clear that this Government intend to sign us up to EU rules, over which this House will have no say. When those rules are changed by the EU, Britain will simply have to follow. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) that this is the beginning of a process to bring the United Kingdom within the regulatory control of the EU, and thereafter, perhaps an attempt by the Labour party to make us join the EU.