Thursday 10 September

LCCI Chief Executive, Richard Burge, has written to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and the Secretary of State for International Trade - raising concerns about the implications of the Internal Market Bill.

Outlining those concerns, Richard says:

“The LCCI office sits in the City of London, the origin of the basic principle that underpins all business, trade, and commerce throughout the world; my word is my bond. This mirrors the principle cornerstone of peace and the pursuit of prosperity across the world; that we obey international law, and we fulfil the obligations of treaties into which we have freely entered. It is on this basis that we defend these values and seek to alleviate poverty and fear. Ultimately we are prepared to send our daughters and sons to war in defence of these principles.

"Parliament is sovereign but it is not unconstrained. Independent nations remain free because they agree to be bound by the rules of the world.

"I am in no doubt about the difficulty of these discussions. I am not deluded by the EU negotiating approach. It is driven by a singular desire to achieve an unilateral ideological goal that it holds with such singular focus that it's prepared to sacrifice compromise and reasonable agreement in order to stick to it. That is not statecraft, nor is it the action of a mature democracy. But neither does it even begin to approach the conditions when the UK, the most mature democracy of them all, might even consider disregarding its own core principles.

"Every day, the continued presence of these provisions in the Internal Market Bill undermine our ability to pursue wider agreement in the world, to promote London as the core global location for the fair, impartial and constant application of the law, and for businesses to strike reliable contracts. This must stop now.”

ENDS.

London Chamber of Commerce and Industry is the capital’s largest independent business network. As the largest issuer of export documents in the UK, LCCI has been helping British businesses grow through international trade since 1881.