EU-UK Summit
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Rachel Blake(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Sir Bernard Jenkin
The House of Lords still has a European Affairs Committee, which held an inquiry in the run-up to the reset. There has been no inquiry into the reset by any Select Committee of the House of Commons, apart from the Business and Trade Committee.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (James McMurdock) are absolutely right that we need to reinstate the European Scrutiny Committee, because there will be a flow of new regulations coming out of the European Union that should be scrutinised in the proper way, as they were when we were a member of the European Union. Without that, there is no proper scrutiny in this House at all.
I will now move on briefly to the question of how bad Brexit really was as an economic event. We were told that the British economy would fall off a cliff, that the housing market would collapse, that interest rates would rocket—actually, none of those things occurred. When we left the European Union at the beginning of 2021, the dial hardly moved. Our economy was growing at roughly the same rate as other economies in the European Union.
Rachel Blake
I am interested in the hon. Member’s economic analysis. Does he really think that the economic consequences of Brexit could only have started in 2021, at the moment when we actually left the European Union, and not when the decision was made?
Sir Bernard Jenkin
We were told by the Office for Budget Responsibility that there might be a 4% reduction in what our GDP would otherwise have been. That has not occurred—the OBR was wrong. Our economy has continued to grow at roughly the same rate as the other EU economies. Of course, there have been adjustments because the economy has a different trading relationship with the EU. We now have a very deep and comprehensive trading relationship with the EU, as opposed to being in the single market, but there are swings and roundabouts. There have been gains in other areas. The other big advantage is that our contribution to the European Union, which used to be very substantial, pushing up to £20 billion a year, is now right down, which is a huge advantage.
Given all the exaggeration about how bad Brexit was going to be and how bad Brexit is, how seriously should we take what the Government are now saying about the huge benefits of this so-called reset?