I understand why this amendment was put forward and presented so well by the noble Lord, Lord Leong, but I do not support it. I do not think it necessary or desirable.
There are three politically controversial applications to join the CPTPP. The Chinese application is, of course, much the most controversial. If I were asked to predict what will happen, I would predict that nothing will happen, and that the Chinese application and, sadly, the Taiwanese application will remain in the “too difficult” tray for a very long time. Unanimity among existing members is required both to open a negotiation and to end a negotiation by agreeing to accession, and that is not foreseeable under present circumstances. The amendment is unnecessary because the condition that it sets—the peg for the report it calls for, which is a decision on Chinese accession—is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.
It is also undesirable because, in general, there is quite a lot to be said for not requiring Governments to come clean on hypothetical questions. I admit that I used to work in government and, to put it in a pejorative way, it might be desirable to hide behind “There is no consensus”, rather than revealing which side one was actually on. That is conceivable and I do not think it is desirable.
3.45 pm
So far, I hope I am being extraordinarily helpful to the Government. Let me now be extremely unhelpful to them: I think it is necessary to be much more open with Parliament on what our trade strategy is. What actually do we think is the future of the multilateral system? Do we think that plurilateral is the way it is going, or that there is any need to have a policeman—an authority? Does it matter that the WTO court is moribund and perhaps dead? Is there any way of reviving the WTO and what is the British philosophy on the future of trading systems?
We say that we believe in the global system of rule of law. It is collapsing before our eyes. The world is dividing into huge blocs. The policeman of the WTO is on its knees, if not on its back. I do not know what instructions we give our people in Geneva or what they are supposed to say about the future of the WTO. We look at trade relations through a narrow focus on particular bilateral relations and this very welcome accession to the CPTPP, which I am strongly in favour of, but we need a sort of philosophy.
In the United States, the USTR’s report is an annual event. I do not want to call what the United States has at the moment a trade philosophy—it is hard to dignify current US trade policy with the word “philosophy”—but the practice of the United States is set out in the USTR’s report. In many ways, the New Zealanders are an example that we should really try to follow. They encourage a public debate, which informs their Parliament. They discuss in public their record—what they have achieved in the past year and what they hope to achieve in the year ahead—against a coherent philosophy. They are strong free traders, as I hope we will continue to be, and as I wish the United States was.
The International Agreements Committee has, again and again, suggested to government that it might be quite a good idea to publish a trade strategy document—
and renew it, year by year. That is the answer rather than amendments such as Amendment 17, which is not required and is mildly undesirable.