For the first time in 46 years, the UK is developing its own approach to international trade. As a member of the International Trade Select Committee, I know from first-hand experience that scrutinising this approach can be a frustrating task. Just over a week ago, newly-appointed Secretary of State Liz Truss refused to appear before the committee prior to the prorogation of parliament. Angus MacNeil, chair of the committee, was quick to point out that since her appointment as Secretary of State, “Truss has found the time to cross the Atlantic to meet with Trump administration officials, but has been unable to cross Whitehall and appear before the select committee responsible for monitoring the work of her department”.
Days later, a number of my parliamentary questions to Truss’s department were also met with silence and dismissal: “It has not proved possible to respond to the hon. Member in the time available before Prorogation”. This is the blunt reality of prorogation: at a time when far-reaching and unprecedented political changes are taking place in our country, there is no place for proper scrutiny of the government’s position. Now that the trade bill has been “dropped” due to the sudden prorogation of this parliamentary session, MPs could end up without a meaningful vote on any of Britain’s post-Brexit trade deals.
Nowhere is the need for parliamentary scrutiny more urgent than in the Department for International Trade (DIT), where the government’s apparent commitment to combat a global climate emergency seems to have barely registered in policymaking terms. In 2017, under Liam Fox’s stewardship, DIT civil service documents photographed on a train revealed the Government’s plan to “scale down” some “economic security-related work like climate change”. There is no evidence to suggest that Truss, whose personal aversion to environmentally friendly policies is well documented, will deviate from this path. A former Shell employee, she has spoken derisively of UK climate protesters as “a bunch of anti-capitalists that glue themselves to public transport”. Now she opts to consort with climate change deniers in the White House while literally writing the rulebook on UK trade policy without being held to account.
