EU: Withdrawal and Future Relationship (Motions)
Debate between Baroness Hoey and Kevin Hollinrake(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey). She made some important points about the manifesto promises and about living up to them. There are some other promises that we need to live up to. Time and again, I have heard colleagues criticise the Prime Minister, in the House or on the media, for setting out her red lines and not budging from them. For me, those red lines simply represent the promises that were made before the referendum. It was certainly not just a binary question about the options of staying and leaving. The question about what leaving meant is critical to this debate, because the promises that Vote Leave set out—I believe the hon. Member for Vauxhall was a member of the Vote Leave campaign—
Kevin Hollinrake
The hon. Lady shakes her head. I apologise.
Vote Leave, which was the primary advocate for leaving, clearly set out promises to control our borders, control our laws and control our money, while having a free trade agreement. I have read the Vote Leave manifesto several times, and the words were, “There is a free trade area that stretches from Iceland to the borders of Russia, and we will be part of it.” Those were the promises that were made.
I believe the Prime Minister has come back to this House with a deal that meets the promises made; that is what her deal does. There is not a single motion on this Order Paper that lives up to those promises, however; all of them incorporate compromises that move outside those red lines. She has come back with a Goldilocks deal—not too hard, not too soft—but still people will not accept this deal.
If we do not approve the Prime Minister’s deal in the days and weeks to come—hopefully days—I think certain Members in this House might well look back and think, “That was our opportunity and it has now gone.” We should support the Prime Minister’s deal, because I do not think, having a small business background, that it is right that we should think of taking an uncalculated risk with the lives and livelihoods of small businesspeople, who we know could be affected by a no-deal exit. So we definitely need to leave with a deal.
How do we leave with a deal if we do not support the Prime Minister’s deal? It means we have to remove at least one of the red lines. From my perspective, despite the fact that it would breach the manifesto promises, I would remove the red line on the single market. There will be challenges, certainly particularly between Northern Ireland and Ireland, but most of them are solved by membership of the single market. Some 80% of the border challenges are about the single market. Barnier said it himself: customs checks need not happen at the border.
We can do without the customs union, but we need the single market for regulatory standards, particularly on foods. A humble cottage pie sat on a supermarket shelf in Northern Ireland has passed over that border typically seven times. If there were regulatory checks, they would have to happen every single time according to EU rules; and it makes the rules, and we have been part of that system for 46 years, so we cannot simply say now “We don’t agree with your rules despite the fact that we’ve been happy”—or relatively happy—“to sit within them for 46 years.”
I will support two motions this evening. One is motion (D) brought forward by a number of colleagues, including my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) and the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). Many colleagues have been big advocates of common market 2.0; it is a free trade agreement. I have concerns about it: I have concerns about the customs union, and the longevity of the customs union and our ability to exit it. Paragraph (1)(c) says we will need to agree with the EU our exit from the customs union, and I cannot see what incentive it would have to let us leave.
If we approved this motion, we would also have to agree lots of things with the Opposition. I do not have an issue about working cross-party on this at all, but I do fear that if we approve this, as we take the legislation forward over the next months and years, Labour Front Benchers will ask an ever higher price, because there is a political divide between the Opposition Front Bench and the Government Front Bench.
The other proposal I will happily accept is motion (H). It represents an excellent way forward; it is bold and decisive, and I will support it this evening.
Customs and Borders
Debate between Baroness Hoey and Kevin Hollinrake(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Kevin Hollinrake
We spend a lot of time in this Chamber developing new regulations and rules that put costs on business. They might be environmental regulations, workplace regulations or animal welfare regulations. If the hon. Lady is talking about doing a free trade deal with nations that do not have such high standards, would she not be putting UK businesses at a significant disadvantage?
Kate Hoey
There is an issue there, but it is something that we can solve through negotiation and discussion. We do not solve it by putting up an immediate barrier to countries that desperately want to benefit from trading with us but are currently prevented from doing so.
The public’s expectation when they voted to leave, or even when they voted to remain, was that if we chose to leave, we would regain our trade policy. I do not think that we can do that other than outside the regressive customs union.
I will move on to Northern Ireland in a moment, but let me respond to a number of points that have been made in various ways. Why should we not want to trade with the rest of the world? Why are we being weak? Why can we not get our own trade deals? The EU takes so long to get a trade deal. We have seen how long it has taken, and we can do so much better.