Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to see the Minister in his place. He has always represented the best of the Scottish Labour tradition, that of building people up rather than trying to tear things down. I am strongly in favour of what the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said about Xinjiang. It is worth looking not only at the horror of what happens there, but the exportability of it. An algorithm monitors you for antisocial behaviour. What is antisocial behaviour? Growing a beard, covering your hair, observing the fast, talking to foreigners, accessing the wrong websites. The algorithm can then sentence you to re-education. I hope it is common to all of us in this House that that is abominable behaviour. Equally, I hope it is common to everyone on every side that forced labour is an atrocity. It offends all our deepest moral sensibilities. I wish we would spend more time eliminating the remaining pockets of slavery in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Mauritania, and so on, rather than fretting over who owned a share in the Royal African Company in the 18th century. The problem that arises from this report is that we should not judge policies only by their intentions. We need to look at their consequences, and there are reasons why we have generally, in trade policy, restricted ourselves to the finished product, rather than trying to police the production of any given good or service, whether it is to do with net zero, animal welfare, or whatever it is. It is an incredibly difficult and intrusive thing to try and police, and it is usually very ineffective. To the extent that there is an impact, it is very often negative. With a trade sanction of any kind—refusing to buy certain products and then having to go through a bureaucracy to see which products they are is, if you like, the loosest form of trade sanction—who does that hurt? It hurts ordinary people in the other country and, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester reminded us, in our own country, and it generally drives support to the regime of which you disapprove. It strengthens its control of the economy and makes it easier for it to put its cronies in positions of power. So there is a real danger that we elide from saying, “I disapprove of this practice”, or “I disapprove of this regime”, whether it is Iran, China or wherever else, into saying, “Therefore, let’s have some kind of trade sanction”. Actually, I think we need stronger sanctions: not commercial sanctions but political and legal sanctions aimed at the individuals responsible. We should not use trade as a kind of dustbin into which we put all our desiderata. It is rather like the last debate, when people were talking this way about the school curriculum: “I want my particular thing in the school curriculum—I want there to be more financial literacy, more climate change”. If you put in everything that everyone wants in the school curriculum, there would be no English, maths or science. Similarly, if trade deals become about women’s rights and workers’ rights, net zero and indigenous rights and all the rest of it, there will not be room in them for what they really for, which is the removal of obstacles to increase mutual prosperity. I have to say that, historically, the thing that really did for slavery was rising prosperity, which made it obsolete, and if you look at the list of countries where it still persists, they are poor countries. The best thing we can do is to allow them to trade their way to wealth.