Brexit: UK-EU Movement of People (EUC Report)

Lord Spicer Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

My Lords, this is now the gap, so I have four minutes through my own incompetence in not putting my name down on Friday. My only worry is I will not be able to get across quite how much I disagree with, I think, every single speech—it is a very arrogant position to be in but I am afraid it is the truth. I will take up 30 seconds of my speech to say to the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, that I quite agree that the construction industry is important, but why do we need to be a member of the single market to build houses in Britain? I did not quite follow his logic.

We are talking about economics, basically. One of the basic arguments used about this country is that the economic benefits of being a member of the single market, the customs union and so on outweigh the political cost of loss of sovereignty. That is the reverse, for instance, of Germany. Germany has economic costs that it suffers by not having the Bundestag, the deutschmark and so on, and it thinks it makes it up on political matters. This swap of politics and economics goes on.

I want to look at whether Britain gains enormous economic benefit by being in the single market. Let us think about what the economists are saying. The brightest economist I know is in this Chamber at the moment: the noble Lord, Lord Burns, whom I have known for many years and from well before he was a famous civil servant. Economists are saying two things at the moment: one is that we will have modest growth with full employment and the other is that we will have abysmal productivity figures. Why in those circumstances do we give priority to belonging to a club that restricts growth and builds walls to protect itself? Why do we need to be protectionist, when what we really want is the urge of competition to give us the spur to deal with the fundamental problem of our abysmal productivity figures? We never seem to argue against such protectionism. We keep on thinking about extra markets and so on, but we never think of the fact that, with respect to Europe, we do not have policies that spur us to sell our goods around the world through competition and not through protectionism. We do not want a customs union or, in trade, protectionist walls around our economic activities; we need the spur of competition. Selling our goods around Europe will be key to what we do. That is what we keep missing when we think about staying in the single market.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, talked about the price that we will have to pay in freedom of movement of people and so on. I do not think the price is very high at all; it is very low. The WTO will do, frankly. It is not second-best; it will do, although that is the reverse, I realise, of what many people in this Chamber think.