Chris Bryant

I am keen not to give way again, because there is not much time and I have to answer all the questions that I have already been asked. Turning to legal services, of course we would have much preferred to have been able to secure legal services as part of this deal. We have a very strong legal services sector in the UK—it is excellent. I was with the head of the Law Society in Riyadh last week, celebrating some of the changes and opportunities that are happening in Saudi Arabia, for instance. The difficulty is that, as the Indians made very clear throughout the whole of the negotiating process, law is a noble profession. It is very specifically understood as such within the Indian constitution, so that would have required significant changes to primary legislation in India, and that was not something we were able to achieve. Similarly, we would have preferred to have been able to secure a bilateral investment treaty, but we stand ready to start that process whenever India would like to do so. I am glad that we have a digital trade chapter, because so much of the trade we do internationally is now digital, and lots of other arrangements do not end up with that provision. On services, the way we transacted this deal means it is supported by the Federation of Small Businesses, HSBC, Standard Chartered, EY, TheCityUK and Revolut, and I do not think they think of the deal as “soggy poppadoms” at all; I think they think of it as a fine tandoori. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) and several other Members referred to Kashmir, and the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) gave us some shocking stories about the situation there. I was once the curate in High Wycombe, which has a large Kashmiri population. They have felt many of the issues relating to Kashmir ever since the 1940s. It has been a long-standing British position that India and Pakistan need to come to a settlement of their agreement. For the purposes of the CETA, the core text chapters define India’s territory as set out in India’s constitution, but emphasise that that is without prejudice to territorial sovereignty or compatibility with international law. An important point that nobody has referred to is that Pakistan enjoys preferential tariff rates when trading with the UK under the developing countries trading scheme, which offers significant preferential access. Approximately 94% of Pakistani goods are eligible for 0% tariffs, and that runs out for India three years after the FTA enters into force. The deal is not silent, as it were, on the relationship between the two. Some Members have said that there is nothing in the FTA about human rights. First, that is not true; there are provisions. It is also not true to say that none of it is legally binding. The whole agreement is legally binding, and review processes are built into it in a way that makes it possible for us to monitor human rights. I have to say, the EU deal does not enter into human rights issues either—traditionally, it does not. We want every element of how we engage with another country to reflect the values we want to protect, including opposition to the death penalty, to forced labour and to so many other things.