My Lords, I received the email from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, trying to persuade me to support the amendment, and I must say that I am very reluctant to do so. The fact is that all trade agreements are a compromise. That is one reason why there is no veto in Parliament over a trade agreement—you would start to unpick the whole thing if Parliament objected to some aspect of a trade agreement —and there is no reason why we should want to change that now.
The other point is that the real prize for the CPTPP would be not the membership of China but the membership of the United States. It is clear that neither country wants to join at the moment, for particular reasons, but the agreement is going to last a very long time, and there may well come a moment when things change in China and the threat of China joining might well force the United States to join in order to keep China out. So we do not want to tie any Government’s hands on this in any way. We have to bear in mind that if the United States was to join the CPTPP, it really would become a massive trading bloc, and that prize would be well worth achieving.