My Lords, unlike my noble friend Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, I am afraid that I was not present for the Second Reading debate—I was with the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, who spoke earlier on, as the other half of the reception committee that welcomed the President of the Republic of Korea. I hope that we played our small part in deepening the friendship and relationship between this country and the wonderful, vibrant democracy of the Republic of Korea, with which I hope we will deepen our trade relations as the years go by.
I also have an amendment for consideration later, which will probably be reached on our second day in Committee. It also has within it a reporting mechanism. I agree with my noble friend that 12 months may not be the right time, but the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, and my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, are right to have both articulated the need for Parliament to have reports laid before it. That is the principle, but how one does that, the mechanisms that we use and the timeframes we place on it are surely open to discussion. The Government should not quail at the idea of there being time for Parliament to look back at what has happened to something such as the CPTPP. I must say that I also welcome the CPTPP; I strongly believe that the Government have done the right thing in promoting this opportunity for the United Kingdom. I have no issues whatever with
that; my issues would come later about some of the partners we might have in the future. We will discuss that later on.
This idea that Parliament should discuss the nature of trade is not new. With the help of the House of Lords Library, I was looking at the debates that took place in 1857 when the great champion of free trade, Richard Cobden, denounced the opium trade in a three-day debate in which two relatively young MPs—William Ewart Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli—joined forces across the political divide to support him, just as Cobden had stood with William Wilberforce in denouncing the trade in human beings. He was against the slave trade. There were red lines not to be crossed.
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It is not just about free trade at any cost. We need to know what partnerships we are involved in and what their implications may be for us. I give just one example of this. The noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, talked about the importance of supply chains and looking at them in granular detail. We know where these products are coming from and who was involved in their production. Only a week ago, I raised on the Floor of the House the issue of cobalt and the use of child labour in the mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I think all of us have seen the horrific reports of young children standing up to their knees—barefoot and with no leggings—and having to work in toxic conditions. This has been detailed in an amazing book called Cobalt Red.
This is about lithium and the production of all the renewables that we want to see, which often use child and slave labour not just in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo but ultimately in the finished products in places such as the People’s Republic of China. I see that the Campaign for Uyghurs—I declare a non-financial interest as vice-chair of the All-party Group on Uyghurs—has today produced new evidence of Volkswagen being involved in the use of slave labour in its products.
These are things that will be in our supply chains and which we have a duty to look at, discuss and reflect on in due course. That is why these amendments are important. The principle behind them is that Parliament should be involved in this and have the chance to have its say. I support these amendments. I recognise, as my noble friend has done, that maybe they should be tweaked into a form that the Government find more usable and convenient. They could even be remitted to the relevant Select Committees in the first instance for them to analyse in some detail.