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Leaving the EU: Data Protection

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) and will pick up on one or two of his points.

David Cameron has a great deal to answer for. To win support from his party’s right wing for his leadership bid in 2005, he promised during the leadership campaign to withdraw Conservative MEPs from the European People’s party, the main centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, and he delivered on that commitment after the European elections in 2009. By pushing his MEPs to the fringes in the European Parliament, he significantly reduced British influence there and more widely in the EU’s structures, which meant that Britain did not get its way in Europe on an increasing number of issues, by contrast with previous Governments, both Labour and Conservative. The referendum result—the decision to leave the EU—was the inevitable outcome of that spiral of loss of influence, kicked off by his commitment in 2005.

One way to look at the referendum is as a choice between sovereignty and prosperity. In the referendum, the country chose sovereignty, and of course that was a wholly honourable choice to make, but we need to be honest now about the resulting loss of prosperity. Leaving the EU, if it is seen through in the way envisaged now, will make us poorer. Ministers need to stop pretending otherwise, for their own sakes, as well as for the sake of the country, because once the reality becomes clear, the punishment inflicted on the Conservative party will be all the greater if people have not been told what is ahead.

An official in Germany put it to me like this a few months ago: “If you want the benefits of the single market, you have to obey the rules of the single market.” Ministers continue to tell us that we can have the benefits but no longer obey the rules, but that will not be the outcome of these negotiations. It could not possibly be because, if it was by some fluke the outcome, Germany and lots of other Parliaments in the EU would surely vote it down when asked to decide on the deal.

This week, we have at least had some recognition of that reality from the Prime Minister. She has announced that in the transition period from April 2019 we will continue to obey the rules. The writ of the European Court of Justice and the free movement of people will continue into the transition period. As far as I could understand it, the announcement in her statement on Monday seemed to be that we would stay in the single market and the customs union, other than in name. I presume that this is a face-saving device to avoid the embarrassment of a clear U-turn. It would be much better to be honest and commit to staying in the single market and the customs union during the transition period at least, as argued by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), the shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister’s announcement does at least hold out the prospect of delaying the damage to our prosperity for a couple of years, but we need to recognise that that will not avoid the damage to our prosperity altogether.

The challenge is perfectly illustrated by the subject that we are debating this afternoon, and I welcome the fact that the Government have given us the opportunity to have this debate. Mr Speaker characterised my interest in a different area of policy earlier this week with the phrase, “some would say anorakish”. How much more that applies to the area of policy that we are debating this afternoon. The Minister was absolutely right in his opening remarks to underline just how important this policy area is for our prosperity. It underpins the wellbeing of the economy. Indeed, there is growing evidence that one of the reasons why we have failed on productivity growth in the UK in the past few years by contrast with other countries is that the internal management of companies in the UK has been digitised to a lesser extent than elsewhere. If we are to make progress on that—it is vital for our prosperity that we do—then data communications will be even more important in the future than they have been in the past.

I very much enjoyed and appreciated the contribution of the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), who chairs the Select Committee on Justice. He underlined, quite apart from the economic considerations, how vital it is for our security and safety that we can continue to communicate personal data with other European Union countries.

The Minister was right to make the point at the outset that our data protection laws in the UK originated with an EU directive in which the UK was very influential. The Conservative Government who negotiated that directive had a powerful voice at that time. Sadly, as I explained earlier, more recent Conservative-led Governments have had a much less powerful voice.