If you haven't read the speech given by Lord Heseltine yesterday at Liverpool University, I thoroughly recommend it. Read it in full HERE. The second half is mostly about how he transformed Liverpool after the Toxteth riots but the first half is a welcome and full-throated call for the UK to begin the long process of rejoining the EU. One of the more bizarre points he picks up on is how a former cabinet minister (George Eustice), who as DEFRA secretary actually helped negotiate the Australia trade deal, now tells MPs it's not good for the UK. Amazing. The commons held a debate on the Australian and New Zealand trade deals on Monday afternoon with Greg Hands, the minister for trade policy, opening for the government with this statement:
"The Australia and New Zealand free trade agreements are deals that will deliver for people, businesses and our economy. These are our first “from scratch” free trade agreements since we left the European Union, and they are deals of which this country can be proud. They demonstrate our ambition as an independent trading nation. They secure commitments that, in places, go above and beyond international best practice, and put us at the forefront of international trade policy."
At around 5:00pm, George Eustice the former DEFRA secretary addressed a near-empty chamber and told members who had bothered to attend: "the Australia trade deal is not actually a very good deal for the UK." See it HERE at column 424.
This is not a surprise to many people but it goes against everything the government - the one he was part of until a few weeks ago - has been telling us since the deal was agreed upon. Indeed, Eustice himself, speaking from the despatch box on 17 June 2021 when he was a minister claimed "Australia is an important ally and this is a good agreement between us."
What a thoroughly dishonest gang of half-wits they are. Eustice absolves himself and puts the blame on Truss who was trade secretary at the time and took a decision to set an arbitrary target to conclude heads of terms by the time of the G7 summit in June 2021. This, he said, put negotiators on the back foot and they had to accept more or less whatever the Aussies demanded. He didn't mention that this is also what Johnson did with the EU in 2019 with a similar effect.
Precisely like Brexit, the government never agreed among themselves on a mandate and went into the negotiations totally unprepared. There were, Eustice now admits, "deep arguments and differences about how we should approach it." Well, fancy that!
What Truss and the whole government were attempting to do was demonstrate a benefit, any benefit of Brexit and at any cost. They were (and still are) desperate to have something positive to show, to get a good headline for a day or two in The Mail or The Telegraph. Farmers will be paying the price for decades.
Eustice now says the best thing about the deal is that it can be ditched by either side with six months' notice.
In June he told Tim Farron that: "this House will have the ability to decline to ratify any treaty, including this particular one." In truth, when it came up for debate on Monday, MPs had no such ability. In the end, the House simply resolved that (col 452) "this House has considered the Australia and New Zealand Trade deals" - and that was it. There were hardly any MPs in the chamber anyway.
Eustice also lambasted Crawford Falconer, currently the interim permanent secretary at the Department for Trade. Falconer, a New Zealander, was brought in as some sort of trade wonk in 2017 because he had been Special Trade Commissioner for the Legatum Institute, the shadowy think tank that also used to employ Shanker 'snake oil' Singham. Eustice is not impressed and said Falconer was...
"..not fit for that position [interim permanent secretary], in my experience. His approach was always to internalise Australian demands, often when they were against UK interests, and his advice was invariably to retreat and make fresh concessions. All the while, he resented people who had a greater understanding of technical issues than he did. It was perhaps something of a surprise when he arrived from New Zealand to find that there were probably several hundred civil servants in the UK civil service who understood trade better than he did, and he has not been good, over the years, at listening to them. He has now done that job for several years, and it would be a good opportunity for him to move on and for us to get a different type of negotiator in place—somebody who understands British interests better than he has been able to."
Ooof! Brexiteers have always complained that the EU was too protectionist so we have now employed someone at great expense to give away "far too much for far too little in return." I could have done that.
On 29 June this year, parliament's International Trade committee called for the government to delay ratifying the deal. Under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, MPs are supposed to get 21 sitting days to scrutinise any deals but by then the government had already triggered the process, despite previously committing there would be “sufficient time for relevant Select Committees to produce reports” beforehand.
In the event, it was then
automatically ratified when the 21 sitting days expired on 20 July without any vote ever being taken.
The IT committee published a report which mainly complained that they were not given sufficient time but they also included written evidence from a lot of stakeholders. You can access it all
HERE.
Evidence from the NFU can be seen
HERE. It begins with this:
"There is little in this deal to benefit British farmers. When it comes to agriculture, it appears that the Australians have achieved all they have asked for and British farmers are left wondering what meaningful benefits have been secured for them. This will just heap further pressure on British farm businesses already facing serious challenges such as a squeeze on labour, the phasing out of support payments and rocketing input costs."
If we can’t get a beneficial deal with Australia what is going to happen when we come up against the take-no-prisoners approach favoured by the USA or India?
David Gauke has a
good article about it in The New Statesman, pointing out that May’s deal was rejected by the Spartans because the UK would have been unable to negotiate its own FTAs. With Johnson’s terrible withdrawal agreement, the trade deals we have been able to negotiate have simply turned out to be exercises in self-promotion for Truss and Johnson, nothing to do with the national interests or those of the farming community.
Gauke says:
"Truss (and Johnson, who sided with her), argued in the context of the EU that we could live without an [EU withdrawal] deal even if the economic consequences were calamitous. In the context of almost meaningless trade deals with Australia and New Zealand they rolled over."
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And what Eustice is now asking us to believe is that nobody else in the cabinet at the time knew the Australia trade deal was a bad one. They knew, but they didn't want to rock the Brexit boat - as he didn't - and reveal it for what it is. That's the real problem.
