The Government's Plan for Brexit

Debate between Andy Burnham and Callum McCaig

Wednesday 7th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I will make some progress. Today needs to mark the beginning of a new phase in the Brexit debate. It is time to move beyond the re-running of the referendum arguments and accept what people voted for. The 700,000 people in Greater Manchester who voted to leave, many of them lifelong Labour voters, voted for change on immigration. I am clear about that, and it has to be our starting point in this debate. The status quo—full free movement—was defeated at the ballot box, so it is not an option. What is to be debated is the precise nature of the changes that replace it, so that we get the balance right between responding properly to the public’s legitimate concerns and minimising the impact on our economy.

[Callum McCaig]

The right hon. Gentleman’s party is suggesting that leaving the customs union was not on the ballot paper, so how come free movement of people was on the ballot paper? It simply was not. The ballot paper asked whether we should leave the EU or not.

[Andy Burnham]

I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that he speaks to the public and listens to what they had to say during the referendum campaign. If he is saying that they were not voting for change on free movement and immigration, I am afraid that he simply was not listening to them.

I have long argued for a change in the system of free movement to reflect people’s concerns. As it stands, it is not working for the more deprived parts of our country, particularly those where traditional industry has been replaced by lower-skill, lower-wage employment. My preference was to work within the EU to fix those problems, but the country, understandably, lost patience with that approach.

Free movement does not affect all places in the same way; it affects cities differently from former industrial areas. It has also made life more difficult in places where it is already hardest. These are areas that got no real hope from the Government when traditional industry left and that saw house prices collapse and whole streets bought up by absent private landlords. They are places that, alongside taking new arrivals from the EU, continue to take in the vast majority of this country’s asylum seekers and refugees. Largely they do so without any real strife or difficulty, so I do not want to hear anyone claim that people in places such as Leigh who voted to leave are in any way xenophobic or racist. They are welcoming, generous people, but they also want fairness, and they do not think that it is fair that the country’s least well-off communities should expect pressure on wages, housing, public services, primary schools and GP services without any help to manage it.

EU Nationals in the UK

Debate between Andy Burnham and Callum McCaig

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

It was entirely wrong. As I said, what happened to no taxation without representation? I cannot defend a situation in which British nationals had the vote in the referendum even if they were living abroad but people living and paying taxes here did not. There was a basic unfairness in that, which needs to be corrected.

We have got this the wrong way around, and I sincerely hope that the Government will act soon to confirm the legal right of EU nationals to be here. Rather than dragging it out grudgingly, should we not take this opportunity to do the opposite and show them how much we value them by giving them that right to have their say at elections? We could go further, as the Institute for Public Policy Research has suggested and the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) said a moment ago, and offer British citizenship for free to any EU national working in our national health service or other public services.

[Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

I agree very much with what the shadow Home Secretary is saying. The fact that British expats—or immigrants to other countries, as they should perhaps be known—had the right to vote in the referendum, whereas EU nationals living here did not, really underlines the crass nature of using EU nationals living here as a bargaining chip in negotiations. That is despicable and should end.

[Andy Burnham]

I could not agree more. As I have been outlining, the thrust of Government policy is already to treat them as second-class citizens, because they do not have the same voting rights as other citizens. If they are now to be left in the lurch for two or three years, how will they feel at the end of that process? What will they think of our country? What will the countries that they come from think of us? I do not think any of us—certainly on the Opposition Benches—want that to happen.

Those are big questions and are perhaps for another day. Today, we have a very simple decision to make. We have an opportunity to do the right thing, take away our constituents’ worries and improve the climate on the streets of our communities. It is no secret that I have a high regard for the Home Secretary, even going so far as to give her a backhanded endorsement via Twitter at the weekend. I have seen her show leadership on difficult issues in the past, and I urge her to do so again tonight. Real leadership would be giving her MPs the chance to vote to take the uncertainty away and return a degree of stability to an uncertain and worried country. By passing the simple motion before us, we can send a simple message to those who have chosen to make their life here: we value you, and you are welcome here.