European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

I am sorry that the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) and the Attorney General are not in their places, because I would like to say to them and all Members of this House that I need no lectures on how to love my country. None of us do. We all care deeply for Britain, but the fact is that, as the members of the Treasury Committee found in our report published for this debate before it was aborted in December, there is no dividend for our country in Brexit. Economically, there is only loss.

There is no Brexit bonus. There is only the madness of doing something we know to be a bad idea because we allowed another bad idea—a referendum for which we were ill prepared—to take hold. I will not repeat the cliché that people did not vote to become poorer in the referendum, because it does not matter now. What matters is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) made. The choice is ours: should we vote to make our constituents poorer?

I ask those who think that their constituents will be angry if they do not back the deal what they will say when they become accountable for a permanent downgrade of our economy. Can they do that without consequences either? I do not think so. Often in this House we talk about the real issue of how wages have fallen over the past 10 years. To properly understand the money in people’s pockets, however, we have to understand that it matters what they are able to pay for, and what has happened to our currency since the Brexit vote has made us all poorer. There is only more to come, and there is no escaping it.

The reason that happened was the deep dishonesty at the heart of the leave campaign. It said we could have global Britain, a Britain open to the world and more globalisation, but also less immigration, more command and control over our economy, and less globalisation. That contradiction at the heart of what people were offered is at the root of the impasse we find ourselves in.

The truth is, because of that contradiction, we now do not really know what the public want. We have had a general election with an inconclusive result, because people were offered something that was never really on the table and they voted for it. Another referendum would be far from perfect, but I have come to the reluctant conclusion that offering people a choice—Brexit as we now know it to be versus the deal that they have now—is probably the only way forward.

Finally, I will mention the thing that has kept me going through this turgid Brexit discussion: the reason why we are in this place. We are here for our ageing population; to produce Treasury Committee reports about wages and nursing homes, not about Brexit; for our young people; and to talk about how to fund libraries and teaching assistants, not about Brexit. I ask myself a simple question: judged by those objectives, does Brexit help, or is it a hindrance? Will it help our country to have the money it needs, or will it hold us back? The answer is glaringly obvious: Brexit is bad for our country, and it is time that in this House we took the steps that we need to take to rectify it.