My Lords, I offer the Green group’s agreement with the legal aims of all noble Lords who have spoken so far. Amendments 1 to 5 seek to keep environmental and public health protections, and in particular workers’ rights protections. I note that there has been very strong support for Amendment 5. I offer support, too, for Amendments 100 to 102, because of the need for democratic control of this House—something that we seem to spend a lot of time talking about these days. I also agree very much with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, about how they would keep basic minimum standards here, so it is very hard to see why the Government would disagree with any of them.
However, I can perhaps offer different sentiments to some of the ones expressed in the debate thus far. The noble Lord, Lord Lennie, said that we had seen a
century of rising standards. That is broadly true if you start from the beginning and go to the end, but in recent decades there have been real falls in standards, and when we look at the state of the world, whether we consider the natural environment or the climate emergency, we see that there has been a massive degradation.
The noble Lord, Lord Fox, said that there is no point having trade that reduces our standards. I very much agree with that, but we have a real problem in that so much trade has done just that. On Friday, I was at the launch of a report by the Green House Think Tank and the Green European Foundation on trade and investment requirements for zero carbon, which set out how much damage trade has done historically. However, what we are debating are the amendments, and however much we might want to shape towards a trade world that has less trade in it but far better trade that does not build in environmental destruction and exploitation of workers, we do not want to go backwards. These modest amendments, as other noble Lords have said, seek modestly to ensure that we do not go backwards. I therefore commend them to the Committee.