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3.52 pm
Ms Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent, North): It is a sign of how far this place has progressed that I agree with so many of the remarks of the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). He mentioned the mechanisms that are needed to make progress. They constitute perhaps one of our greatest challenges as we move towards the millennium.
There is currently a debate in Westminster Hall about modernising government. I was torn between attending that and attending the debate in the Chamber because, unless we can modernise government and create effective participation at every level of civil society and at every parliamentary level--not only ministerial level--on an issue that affects our planet, we shall not make the necessary progress towards making free trade fair trade, which is underpinned by environmental sustainability. If I convey only one lesson in the short time that I have to speak, that one is the most important.
We cannot simply consider what we need to do about free trade; we must link it to environmental sustainability. Our parliamentary institutions and our mechanisms for achieving that are outdated. I am a member of the Select Committee on Environmental Audit, which, like other
Select Committees, has examined some of the issues that were raised in the millennium round in Seattle. From the evidence that we took in the short time available, it was clear that there is not enough transparency and openness. Nobody has worked out a means of linking free trade with multilateral environment agreements. The question is no longer whether, but how we make progress.
I regret that I was not in Seattle and that many people who would have liked to contribute initially to the debate through parliamentary discussion could not do that. We need to re-examine the opportunities for debate on such issues in the Chamber. We were promised a debate before the meeting in Seattle, and I regret that it did not take place. If Select Committees could have had an input into that debate, our constituents, who feel disfranchised and disengaged from events, could at least believe that our parliamentary scrutiny was making a difference to important, highly technical and complex issues. Those issues include considering the means of underpinning matters with the precautionary principle and re-examining labour standards. They are crucial matters to which we do not pay proper attention.
Let us consider transparency. Ministers negotiate on our behalf, but because of the Ponsonby rules, we do not have an opportunity for real participation in drawing up the bottom line of the negotiations. Whatever the outcome of the agenda for modernising the House, we must consider the way in which the Government, through their role in the EU and the global governance of our planet, can examine the crucial new international architecture more closely.
I know that many other hon. Members wish to speak, but I want to conclude by commenting on environmental sustainability and the way in which all the evidence before the Select Committee highlighted the fraught and flawed nature of the relationship between the WTO and the multilateral environment agreements. There is no common basis for ensuring that the precautionary principle is at the root of everything. Like me, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State believes that it is important for developing countries to participate increasingly in trade. However, there is no point in trade if it means that, in the short term, we destroy biodiversity and the earth's resources and prevent sustained trade. We must work to underpin all trade with environmental sustainability. We do not currently have the means to achieve that, and we need to be radical, innovative and imaginative in the new institutional and architectural framework for the next millennium.
Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham):
The right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) announced that I would speak in the Gladstonian free trade tradition. I shall try to live up to that. First, I must apologise for having to slip out later to move amendments in Committee. I hope that that is not viewed as a discourtesy.
My points of departure from the right hon. Gentleman in many ways echo the Secretary of State's excellent statement. First, I support an open, liberal trading system, not as an abstract, ideological belief but because history shows that it is crucial to raising ordinary people's living standards, and especially those of people who live in poor countries. At the risk of embarrassing the Secretary of State, I want to praise her work. She has taken a lot of flak from some of the development lobbies, which have adopted a fashionable new protectionism. She has argued courageously that open markets benefit developing countries. She may have lost a few friends on the fringes of non-governmental organisations, but she has probably gained others in the developing world and elsewhere.
I want to emphasise the importance of the WTO, not only as free trading organisation--it is only partly that--but as an organisation that creates rules and upholds the rule of law. That is absolutely central and, within the rule of law, it often offers the weak their only protection from the strong.
Some of the key WTO decisions of the 1990s enraged some people in the United States because, for the first time, it found its unilateral actions being overturned by a judicial framework. Examples are Venezuelan gasoline, Mexican shrimps and the slightly comical case of Costa Rican underpants and in each, whatever the rights and wrongs of the deliberations--I have no way of judging them--the United States was talked down by a legal panel of representatives of many countries in the international community. Surely that is progress.
The key point, which leaves us all hanging in respect of the radical statements made by the right hon. Member for Chesterfield, concerns the alternative. The trouble is that nationalism and unilateral action of the worst possible kind are unleashed when such a system breaks down, and there are many historical precedents for that.
Today, we have been talking about the beef ban and the reactions to it. The two countries involved trade a lot and have a framework for settling disputes politically and legally, but the nationalism aroused in both countries by the ban points to the crucial need for an international framework for resolving such disagreements.
I return to what went wrong in Seattle. There has already been some analysis of that, but a finger has to be pointed at the United States. I am not talking simply about the procedural points and the lack of preparation; the demagogic statements of President Clinton and the idea of telling the developing countries that they will face sanctions for being poor were so damaging. I am sure that he made those statements for totally opportunistic reasons, but they were thoughtless and damaging. There are people in this country--they sit on the Benches alongside me--who argue that we should detach ourselves from the European Union to be closer to the United States, even to the extent of joining the North American Free Trade Agreement, but people often fail to understand that the United States, far from being the paragon of free-trading virtue, contains extreme isolationist and protectionist tendencies, on the left and the right. That is the kind of structure within which we would be moving.
The case for a new round of liberalisation was not properly made and, although we may find scapegoats for what went wrong, we are all to blame in a sense, as are all Governments. There was hardly any discussion of the round in the House, although its opponents were
mobilising through the internet and their organisations, and hardly anybody made any attempt to explain its importance.
Last week, I asked in a parliamentary question whether the Government had made any estimate of the benefit to the average British family of the new round of trade liberalisation. I received the helpful answer that studies had been done and it was estimated that the benefit for the ordinary family could be roughly £4 to £5 a week, mainly from the liberalisation of agriculture. That is far more than such a family is likely to get back from the Chancellor in tax cuts; it would receive a tangible benefit if trade liberalisation could be made to work, but, although I am not pointing fingers, none of us has argued that case effectively.
Another comment has to be made about the Seattle round. Many of the NGOs that I have dealt with over the past few months--some of which have been forceful and articulate in putting their case--played a constructiverole, raising valid questions about transparency, the environment and the exclusion of developing countries. Some, however, are deeply hostile to the globalisation concept and they went to Seattle to wreck the round. The people who were dancing in the streets at its end will, I am afraid, harvest a bitter fruit and we can already see some of the consequences of the breakdown of the negotiations. One is that the isolationist tendencies in the United States--which are led by people from evil forces on the far right such as Pat Buchanan, who was in Seattle egging on the demonstrators--will get a lease of life and a new form of legitimacy.
Another result of the protest and the breakdown of the talks is the new respectability that has been given to people who argue about the dangers of cheap labour and the link between trade and labour standards. The Secretary of State dealt with that well and I do not need to go over the arguments again, but we underestimate at our peril the extent of the prejudices associated with that issue--they run deep.
The right hon. Member for Chesterfield is not here, but he knows his political history. At the end of the 17th century, there were riots on the streets of London and workers smashed windows in Whitehall because they feared what was then regarded as coolie labour and early Indian textile products such as calico. Such prejudice has long been present. At the end of the 19th century, the Conservatives had one of their bouts of nationalism and Joseph Chamberlain almost came to power on a platform of protectionism and keeping out cheap labour products. Oswald Mosley adopted such policies in the 1930s. Protectionism is a powerful current in the United States and in France, where it has been taken up by the National Front.
A danger of the breakdown is that a new lease of life has been given to people who believe that importing products from poor countries with lower wages is fundamentally damaging and morally and ethically wrong. A final danger has not been touched on, although we need to watch it carefully. People from the establishment in Europe and the United States will resurrect the concept of the transatlantic partnership and say, "Let's have more trade liberalisation, but we don't want all these troublesome developing countries to be involved. They are getting in the way and creating problems. Let's get
together with the Americans and hammer out a deal on electronic commerce, agriculture and a few tariffs and that will be it." We must be aware of that danger.
How can we turn things round and what positive issues can be taken forward? I welcome what the Secretary of State said about process and I emphasise a point that was touched on by the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer): transparency is partly to do with introducing democratic control. A Parliament for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation already exists and he mentioned a Parliament for the WTO, which is an important idea. We should not simply introduce non-elected NGOs to the structure; elected people should be scrutinising it. The other process change has to be the recognition of developing countries as a legitimate force in the WTO--they have been shockingly marginalised and excluded--although in some of the proposals we are in danger of re-inventing the wheel.
I have been involved in the preparatory process of the past two rounds of negotiations and it was said on each occasion, "Let's pay much more attention to developing countries." The United Nations conference on trade and development and the Commonwealth Secretariat in particular did a great deal in that regard, but the issue is not simply being polite to lots of ambassadors and encouraging them to sit in meetings. Real political courage is involved in doing what those countries want--cutting tariffs and quotas, often on sensitive items.
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