Sir Iain Duncan Smith
MP for Chingford and Woodford Green · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I raise the cases of Ryan Cornelius and Jimmy Lai—both United Kingdom citizens—to the attention of the Foreign Secretary, who I welcome to his position. Ryan Cornelius has been incarcerated for 19 years—trumped-up charges by a corrupt regime that is supporting a war in Sudan at the moment.”
“Has the Secretary of State been made aware of the case of Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong resident who is being prosecuted by the Administration in Hong Kong using the national security law?”
“A particular memory is that during the Maastricht debates, when, I have to confess, I and one or two others here were deeply rebellious, Ann lectured me from the Dispatch Box—she was in government—about how I should support the Maastricht treaty and the European Union, which rather worried me.”
“It was phenomenal, because she was so certain about the way that she was. Ann embodied something else: the passion that is necessary for us in this Chamber to make our arguments without the fear of any other person doing something to us.”
“We need to reiterate, and the Government and the Home Secretary need to specify, to all the social media companies that they must do something to close down the visceral, violent language that some people use in attacking others personally, as they did over Ann’s murder, which shocked me.”
“Friday was a funny day. I heard the news very early in the morning that Ann had died, and I was utterly surprised about that because she had seemed perfectly fit the last time I saw her, so I gave my condolences and spoke about it on the radio.”
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“The question, however, is this: at the end of it all, how will we know that the supply chains have been correctly declared? If they have not been, it will become a matter of avoidance. America checks, tests and sanctions companies that have lied about their supply chains, and that has forced wholesale change to its supply chain process. I ask the Government to learn from America and get companies such as Oritain to use forensic science to test the company supply chains about which they are suspicious.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I just want to remind the House that the Deputy Speaker in the Chair today is also sanctioned by the Chinese Government for her bravery.”
“I remind the Government that their manifesto promised a legal right to consular assistance in cases of human rights violations. The Government have now been in power for close on a year. This is not something that should take a big shove; surely, we should do it straight away. Surely such assistance should be a legal right. People including Ryan Cornelius and Jimmy Lai are still being held. Ryan Cornelius has been held illegally for 17 years, which the UN has criticised as a human rights violation. For ages we did not send anybody to see him; surely now we must act and call out these regimes. The first place to start is by giving those people the absolute right to consular assistance.”
“One thing puzzles me slightly about the position taken by the Government, which is a bit like that on the Chagos islands: we already owned them, but we entered a negotiation to give them away and rent them back. In this instance, Europe threatens us that we cannot talk about other matters until we sign up to this defence deal, but we already have a defence deal and we already co-operate: we have built weapons with France, Sweden and various other countries. Rather than what they would lose, what is it that we gain?”
“I just wanted to check on something. We can debate whether a trade deal can be improved—I am sure that all trade deals can be improved, whether it is the American one or what is an extensive one with Europe, and probably the greatest one negotiated in the past—but one area, as the Government go back into this discussion, needs to be very clear. I was looking at a paper produced by the Centre for European Reform, which makes one point very clear, as the Government go into the negotiation. It states: “Labour’s red lines do not extend to ruling out dynamic alignment or a role for the ECJ in dispute settlement.” Is that correct? Is that the position of the present Labour Government?”
“Of course, that argument was used in reverse on those of us who had had concerns about Europe for 40 years as we were told—exactly to my hon. Friend’s point—that a referendum was superior to continuous elections. We made a decision after the last referendum; that was a generational move. We have hardly had a generation in the few years since the referendum.”
“I am pleased that my hon. Friend raises that point, which I want to elaborate further. The real point is that J. D. Vance, the vice president, came over to Munich and ripped a hole through the Europeans, including ourselves, for not having spent enough, although we were one of the top spenders. Since then, the Americans have gone on and on about that, but each time we get the sense that they are keener to decouple. Does what we are about to do not give strength to the argument that we do not need them any longer and therefore they need to look somewhere else? That is the danger, because NATO was not just about defence of the west; it was about making sure that the US never goes into isolationism again.”
“That brings me back to my previous point. Before I return to that issue, I want to raise another point. The trouble is that the argument I heard made—that a phytosanitary agreement involving dynamic alignment would address the price of food—is patently absurd. If SPS checks concerned the price of food, we could unilaterally relax them. They do not have to be where they are: that is our decision to take. It would not change or lower the price of food. If anything, it would be more likely to block us from doing a number of things, such as gene editing in food and work that we want to do that the European Union does not want to do. All these things put at risk where we may be in future trade arrangements and the direction in which we may want to develop farming here.”
“I have always found the phytosanitary objection peculiar, because it could be sorted out very quickly. Our standards are higher than the EU’s, and our vets are quite capable of checking different producers to see whether they fit European standards. That is all it is: are they up to European standards, and are European standards up to ours when the EU exports to us? It is very simple. That can be done in every trade deal, and the EU already does it with other countries that are not, and have never been, part of that Union. There is an idea that to get this issue sorted, we would have to go into dynamic alignment and accept the EU’s rules over our products, but it would make it more difficult to make future trade arrangements if we were rule-takers from the European Union and could not negotiate these areas ourselves.”
“I sat down with Monsieur Barnier and a group of people to have a long discussion when the negotiations broke down as a result of what was going on here in Parliament, and I very much remember that we talked about trusting each other’s regulations and working with that trust to get an arrangement that made it as easy as possible to get goods across the border. He accepted that then, saying that, provided we could trust each other’s veterinary authorities, we would not need to have the phytosanitary rules as proposed at the moment. It was only later, when my party in government came back and did a terrible shimmy with him, that he thought he had it all, so he took it. The reality is that the EU knew all along, from the word go, that it was easier to put in place these arrangements than it made out.”
“The European Union knows that. The reality is that somehow it decided that there had to be all these phytosanitary checks and changes, and it is desperately keen to get dynamic alignment now, because that means that there will be a rules-based order coming from the EU. That is what it has always wanted to do. The truth is that the European Union does not have that arrangement with other countries around the world. For example, it is quite happy to have New Zealand vets check their products before departure. Those products go in through Rotterdam without any checks, other than checks that they came from the area specified. The EU knows which vets it authorises, so it does that. It could have done that here in the UK.”
“It risked some of the process of peace in Northern Ireland by making it a critical negotiating tool that could be used as leverage later in the rest of the negotiations, and as a result we have been left with a problem in Northern Ireland. I encourage the Government to have a very good look at that. I did not vote for the Windsor agreement because I thought it did not solve the problem by a long chalk, and it has left Northern Ireland in the same position as before, with a couple of small modifications. This debate is really about getting into the issue. I say to the Minister that the European Union did not play straight about phytosanitary from day one in the negotiations, and it still does not play straight. The fact is that our standards in animal welfare and product health are, and always have been, above those of the European Union.”
“The Conservative Government did 73 after Brexit, although some of them were mopping up the ones that we had before. I stand ready to congratulate the Labour Government if they use the freedom Brexit gives them to get more trade arrangements, because that is what we are here for. I might want to press them further and say they could get a lot more out of the US, but that is another debate all together. I do not disagree with the idea that the deal we did with the European Union is capable of being improved. Of course it is, because the EU put up many barriers in the course of that negotiation; it weaponised Northern Ireland distinctly, and that was a grave error on its part.”
“By the way, they would not have got a trade deal if the Democrats had got back into office because they rejected it for four years. In fact, President Biden said that there would be no trade deal with the UK. Let us not just observe that because the Democrats are not Trump, somehow they were going to give us a trade deal. I have my problems with the current President, but President Biden absolutely did not want trade with us; it was as simple as that. That was a mistake on his part. He had a real opportunity, because the trade deal was pretty much all done—and then it was binned. There is also the question of the reason we are able to do these trade deals with the rest of the world, to which we export more than the European Union. We should do more of those trade deals.”
“It is good to follow the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) and to be reminded of how old he was when I first came here; I hope he stays here as long as well, or maybe I do not hope for that as it might mean we Conservative Members will be on the Opposition Benches forever. Today’s debate is on an important topic and there have been some very good contributions already, but I want to get to the bottom of what the Government really want out of this negotiation, because they have been a little bit tepid in coming forward on the key issues. I welcome the Government’s negotiations in India—finishing off a trade arrangement deal or whatever it is with the Indian Government. I welcome too that they have been able to begin to negotiate with the United States, although they have not secured a full trade deal.”
“I want to make a couple of points on this issue before I give way. We know, and everybody else around the world outside the EU knows, that the EU puts up very hidden tariff barriers. America is right about that; it complained that Europe finds all sorts of little regulations and problems, so that it cannot break in with its products and goods. That has happened for a long time, and it has happened with us—we know that it was even happening when we were in the EU. We are by nature a free-trading country, and there is no way on earth that we think the EU as a construct is as free trading in that sense. It wants to protect its markets more than anything else, rather than open up to the rest of the world.”
“That document is very close to how the European Union’s heads of department all think, and it says: “Labour’s red lines do not extend to ruling out dynamic alignment or a role for the ECJ in dispute settlement.” As such, I ask the Minister this simple question: is the Centre for European Reform correct? Do the Government’s red lines rule out dynamic alignment, or do they not? I will give way to the Minister right now, because I am generous like that, and he probably wants to answer that question. I tempt him to come to the Dispatch Box and say whether the Government’s red lines rule out dynamic alignment. Could they, and will they, agree to dynamic alignment and ECJ rules? I will give way to him now, because I see that he is beginning to move.”
“Returning to phytosanitary issues, I have had debates and discussions with the Minister, the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), in the past, and we have agreed with each other many times. I laud him for his stance on Russia and everything else—there is no question about that—but I want to quote from a little document that I came across from the Centre for European Reform. By the way, it is very complimentary to say that I read things that I do not agree with. I tend to do that quite a lot, strangely—it is a bad habit of mine, I know.”
“If damage has been done to exporting to the European Union, as I said earlier, that is about the attitude of the European Union to protectionism in the EU. Its trade with us has not fallen away on that basis, because we did not set up those barriers in the first place, so my argument to the hon. Gentleman is very simple: the European Union wants it all. That is the reality of what we are dealing with. It wants it all, and it negotiated in bad faith from the word go. We have an agreement, which is a pretty good agreement as trade agreements go. It is one of the largest trade agreements that we have. It can always be improved—I do not disagree with that—but the reality is that we need to deal with an organisation that is as relaxed about being fair to us as we are about being fair to it. That has been our biggest problem from the word go.”
“The problem here is that if we take out the countries that joined since the Ukraine war, Europe across the board spends half of what the United States does on defence in dollar terms. We have more people and more industry in Europe, yet we spend half of what America does on weaponry and defence. That is a shocking position for a member of NATO to be in. We have not stood up. We have done better—still not good enough—but what the rest of Europe has done has been shocking. By the way, the country that just told us that we will not get any discussions unless fishing is on the agenda has been one of the worst spenders on defence in the European Union, let alone in global terms.”
“The Prime Minister is showing some leadership over Ukraine, trying to galvanise the other nations, which is his role. His role is to haul America and keep it with us, and he has been doing that. I do not have any criticism of that, but when the Prime Minister got involved, saying that Europe should form a coalition of the willing and that he wanted to drive that further forward and get some kind of agreement on it, what did France immediately say? “Not before you give us access to fishing.” That was it. In no world does fishing have anything to do with defence, yet France weaponised fishing to block off the UK, which had taken the—I think—generous position of saying that it wanted to galvanise Europe to do more.”
“With respect to the hon. Gentleman, he has a little while to go before he stands at the Dispatch Box. I am after the Minister, not him, but we will get to that in due course. The reality is that the Government could agree to dynamic alignment—there was no denial of that. Essentially, the Government are going into this negotiation knowing full well that they are so desperate on phytosanitary matters that they will give way on dynamic alignment. That is exactly what the EU wants. My real worry in all of this, however, is that we know what is going on—I will just move on to another topic, and then I will sit down and give other Members a chance to speak. Most of all, I am worried about bad faith. When we talked about improvements—which, to be fair to the Government, they did with the European Union—what did France do almost immediately?”
“In what world does anyone do that? What are we doing it for? The answer, it seems to me, is that we are too desperate to curry favour with an organisation that, when push comes to shove and when it comes to defence, needs us more than we need it. It needs the UK to be locked into this because we are the key to so much of what it needs to do with defence. I say to the Government, “You have much stronger tools in your hand than you may think.” We have key persuasive powers on defence, and we should not sell them on the basis that they should become European and we should destroy NATO, or damage NATO, simply because we want to make some kind of adjustment or improvement which includes dynamic alignment and the loss of the possibility of future trade negotiation.”
“However, where we are now heading, towards somehow encouraging those countries peculiarly to form some kind of European Union defence organisation, is exactly what will give the American Administration permission to say, “Well, you can do this yourself.” We are already halfway there, by the way, because we are forming a coalition of the willing but America is not willing, and we are at odds with it over its relationship with Ukraine. We agreed about the ceasefire, but America has now changed its position and will now be holding negotiations before a ceasefire. I think that that is wrong, by the way. Although I am personally a big supporter of America, I think it is mistaken on that particular point and the Government are right. My point is that we are putting the whole of NATO at risk for a phytosanitary and fishing deal.”
“Way less than us, and less than most of the others—it is at the bottom of the scale. I simply say to the Government that the Prime Minister is right to press on defence, to get the European nations to step up, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) said earlier, we have a mechanism for that. The Prime Minister is right to do it through NATO, and we must not allow Europe to slide away from NATO as its means of defence. I watched, as did many of its leaders, when Vice-President Vance lectured the European Union in Munich. What he said shocked the European leaders, as it was meant to—he laid into Europe quite vindictively—but fair enough.”
“Reform Members are not here, so I will answer that point. They are not on the same page as us because their amendment, which was not a proper one, did not fit on the same page of the Order Paper!”
“I am grateful to my neighbour for giving way. If she wants to deliberately not go down that rabbit hole, she should be talking to the Government Front Benchers.”
“I just want to draw something out. Dynamic alignment is not a small thing; it is huge, because it is rule taking. Can my right hon. Friend imagine our engaging in any other trade arrangement—with the United States or Australia, for instance, or the trans-Pacific partnership—and being in a position where we had to say, “We will accept your rules and your adjudication”?”
“I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and as I have said, we have worked together in the past quite a lot. I will just ask a very simple question. The Government have constantly said they will not breach their red lines. They have apparently said that publicly in Europe, and they have said it here. My simple question is: is dynamic alignment one of the red lines?”
“Gentleman on tabling the amendment, because it goes to the heart of what it means to be a democracy that values the rule of law, privacy and the dignity of the individual. It rightly states that no third country can be considered adequate if it lacks credible means for judicial protection, administrative redress or statutory legal remedy. It aligns closely with the high threshold set by the Schrems II judgment, and it ensures that the standards do not fall below those we uphold, and are upheld among our friends in the European Union.”
“We see what is already going on in Xinjiang, where a troublesome ethnic group is being deliberately targeted through genocide to get rid of it, but it is also looking at areas and weaknesses in Europe that may well in turn be usable. We have allowed it under this contract to have that data presuming that it would be protected. It is not protected at all; it has simply been transferred and is now being used for military purposes. Those are just two examples, but it is interesting that Ireland has already taken action. Let us not forgot the Shanghai police database leak in 2022 in which the personal data of over 1 billion Chinese citizens, including criminal records and biometric details, was left openly accessible online for over a year without any enforcement action or Government accountability. I congratulate the hon.”
“The commission determined that Chinese law offers no essential equivalent to protection on GDPR due to state surveillance laws and the lack of judicial oversight. That is not a lone example. I have written on a number of occasions about the stupidity of the contract law covering things such as pregnancy tests and covid tests, which were dominated by a Chinese company called BGI. It is the biggest genomics company in the world and it was allowed to hold about 15% of the data gathered for tests for use back in China. We now know that China is using that data, working with AI companies, to develop tests and to reference weaknesses in certain ethnic groups.”
“That is not speculation; it is the well-known and established law in China. This is not only about China, but I use that country as a good example because it is a regular abuser of data. We have been unbelievably stupid across the board, in companies and so on, in assuming straightaway that the rules would apply to Chinese companies and they would enforce them. They cannot, because under the national intelligence law, they are told, “You will provide data as and when we require it from whatever source you have access to.” The situation right now in Ireland is interesting. The Irish Data Protection Commission recently fined TikTok the not inconsiderable sum of €530 million and found that the company had illegally transferred data from users in the European economic area to China.”
“Those contracts create the illusion of protection, but in reality the data transfer is unsafe, either because the prospect of state interference is real or because the conditions for protection of data transfer simply are not present. We rely too much on the idea that, somehow, contract law in the UK will protect the data being transferred across to other countries, but this is about countries where such rules do not apply. Transferring data to regimes such as China, for example, is not just a threat to UK citizens’ privacy but a national security risk. British citizens’ personal information, health records, financial details, biometrics, genomics or location data could be accessed under China’s national intelligence law, which compels organisations to co-operate with state intelligence work in secret.”
“I rise to speak in support of amendment 10 tabled by the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel), in my name and that of others. I congratulate him on the amendment, as it is worth talking about. The amendment is quite simple, in a way, as its key point is that it prevents the transfer of UK user data to jurisdictions where data rights cannot be enforced and there is no credible right of redress. The core principle of data protection law is accountability, yet current UK law allows UK companies to transfer user data to their international partners in jurisdictions where there is no credible appeals process and no predictable rule of law. That basically puts power in the hands of those who have signed contracts containing standard data protection clauses.”
“If we are to maintain the UK’s standing as a nation that upholds privacy, the rule of law, democracy and accountability, we must not allow data to be transferred to regimes that fundamentally do not share those values. It is high time that we did this, and I am glad to see the Minister nodding. I hope therefore that he might look again at the amendment. Out of old involvement in an organisation that he knows I am still part of, he might think to himself that maybe this is worth doing or finding some way through.”
“Genomics is a huge and vital area right now, because it will dominate everything in our lives, and it populates AI with an ability to describe and recreate the whole essence of individuals, so this is not a casual or small matter. We talk about AI being used in the creative industries—I have a vested interest, because my son is in the creative industries and would support what has been said by many others about protecting them—but this area goes a whole quantum leap in advance of that. We may not even know in the future, from the nature of who they are, who we are talking to and what their vital statistics are. This amendment is not about one country; it is about providing a yardstick against which all third countries should be measured.”
“I agree with my right hon. Friend: that is the peculiarity. The Minister knows only too well about the nature of what goes on in countries such as China. Chinese companies are frankly scared stiff of cutting across what their Government tell them they have to do, because what happens is quite brutal. We have to figure out how we protect data from ill use by bad regimes. I use China as an example because it is simply the most powerful of those bad regimes, but many others do not observe data protection in the way that we would assume under contract law. For example, BGI’s harnessing of the data it has gleaned from covid tests, and its dominance in the pregnancy test market, is staggering. It has been officially allowed to take 15% of the data, but it has taken considerably more, and that is just one area.”
“I am grateful to the Minister, and I hope that that might find its way on to the face of the Bill with a little more description, but I understand that and I acknowledge that he does as well.”
“I fully understand the nature of what the right hon. Gentleman is bringing forward. I also understand some of the requirements for speed in this case, and we can argue about whether this should have been done before. Having quickly looked through the Bill, I do not see a sunset clause. I ask about that not because I want the Government to set a particular date, but because such a clause would bring them back here to debate whether the process should be extended. It would therefore put a reasonable limit on Government activity without debate. Can he explain why there is no sunset clause in the Bill?”
“I want to make sure that my right hon. Friend puts the record straight: some of us on the Opposition Benches warned the then Government that it was wrong.”
“The previous Conservative Government should never have awarded it the contract, and I warned them about that. It is time for us to make sure that we deal with China at face value and do not accept the pretence that this company is private or in any way detached from its Government. That is a critical point. There is much to be dealt with, and I urge the Government to listen to the House and to check all of this. Cheap Chinese steel is a desperate problem for us, and we need to work with other countries in dealing with it. We also need to get our costs down. On net zero, I hope that the Secretary of State will tell the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero that we cannot go on like this.”
“What we have in China is something that will really hit us hard and make the Secretary of State’s job even worse: very simply, China is now suffering from the over-production of steel. Its housing industry has gone static, and that was one of the biggest users of the steel it produced. Where will that steel go? By the way, it is no surprise that a Chinese company, Jingye, is involved. In pushing to shut down the blast furnaces in the UK, it knows that we will have to buy slab steel from China. That is not a coincidence; it is all part of the plan. That company is linked directly to the Chinese Communist party, and it is high time that we called that out. In his negotiations, the Secretary of State needs to remind Jingye that the reality is that it is not a private company.”
“The costs in the UK are now the highest in the world, at $400 per megawatt-hour. Germany, which has the highest costs in the rest of Europe, is at $250 per megawatt-hour, while France and the others all have lower costs for producing energy. That energy is critical for the steel industry, and that is one of the big issues that the Secretary of State has to deal with. China, with its subsidies and broken free market rules, is at $60 per megawatt-hour. We should not attempt to compete with it; we must say that it is not competitive at all. [ Interruption. ] Exactly right, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Goole and Pocklington (David Davis) says. Others are complaining about China right now. Countries in the far east, such as Vietnam and South Korea, are accusing it of dumping.”
“I have argued for some time that this is not a free market. Far too many countries such as China have abused the rules of the free market, subsidised their industries ridiculously and used slave labour to produce their products. When that happens, the free market is dead. We must recognise that we will have to deal with those whom we trust and who do not break the rules. That means a whole rethink of the Government’s China policy and of whether we need to rush to China for investment. We need to ensure that we deal with our industry at home and that we produce things again. One problem is the energy costs our industry faces, which are really quite stark. Our industry is not just in competition with China; even the costs in Europe are far less now. I will give a short list.”
“As a result, weapons and arms are needed on an unprecedented scale, there is a plan to build up the armed forces, and they need the very high-quality virgin steel that is produced in this plant. Without it, we would have to import it. Frankly, China does not produce that quality of steel. The other reason is the tariff war now taking place, which has introduced 25% tariffs on the car industry, which is one of the biggest purchasers of steel. All those things make the Bill very much necessary. We have another problem, which I hope the Government will deal with in the context of the Bill when they talk to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Things have changed. The Prime Minister himself has said that the world has changed. We have been operating in what we considered to be a global free market.”
“I therefore urge him to have another look at the sunset clause, which I raised earlier. It is not saying, “We don’t trust you”; it is saying that sometimes Governments are taken down sidetracks, and before we know what has happened, the powers are beginning to be used for the wrong purpose. I urge him to introduce the sunset clause, or even to do so in the other place, to give the House real powers to come back. For everyone’s sake—even those on the Government Benches—I think that would be worth doing, because it would allow us to have a strong debate on how the powers are being used and would perhaps even enable us to influence what is taking place. The reason for this debate is clearly the massively changed needs of this country, particularly after the event that we never thought would happen: Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.”
“I will try to be brief and stay focused on the Bill. Let me start by saying that we should all focus on the requirement to save the jobs of those 3,500 people who have this threat hanging over them. In fact, I understand from my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers) that 2,500 people have already received a redundancy notice, and they will be very worried at the moment. Our thoughts should be with them today. Coming in on a Saturday is right if it saves their jobs. I am certainly prepared to vote for that. The Bill does give vast powers to the right hon. Gentleman the Business Secretary and the Government. As others have said, I trust him personally—this is not an attack on him—but we in this House should never trust Government more than we have to. I have said this on both sides of the Chamber, by the way.”
“The company has brought in cheap Chinese workers and pays them nothing like what it pays the British workers. Many of those workers have ended up burned and in great difficulty. I simply say that this is not a company we should be doing business with right now.”
“I am grateful for that, because it allows me to say something that I had not been planning to say: we sit on an island of gas, so why, for goodness’ sake, are we not drilling for it? We need it, and we will need it strategically. There is a need for strategic industry, and I agree with the Secretary of State on that. However, the issue does not stop there; it stops elsewhere, in the production of energy. I simply leave that point for him, and he can argue it with his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. I want to say one final thing. In the course of this Chinese company’s operations, I have talked to a number of people involved in the business, and its record on health and safety and on the abuse of the workers in the blast furnace area has been shocking. We should look into that much more carefully.”