European Union (Referendum) Bill

Catherine McKinnell Excerpts

Friday 17th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I voted in that 1975 referendum. I would like to say that I lied about my age in order to vote, but I did not. I had just started out as a young lawyer, and had just been elected a young councillor in Havering. I was at the beginning of my working life. Virtually the whole of some people’s working lives—virtually a whole generation—has gone by without anyone’s having had a say. The nature of the EU has indeed changed from that economic community—that

“purely economic and trading negotiation and not a political and foreign policy negotiation”,

as the late Lord Stockton described it—into an entirely different animal, altogether more complex and demanding in its relations with both this country and the rest of the world. That is why it is right for us to have the chance to engage in a sensible renegotiation and put the new offer that is available to the British people, so that they can decide.

[Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)]

I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman does not accept the point made earlier by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), but does he not accept that the last thing business needs at this time is a prolonged period of uncertainty? Will he explain how his proposal will help to support and create jobs in the areas such as the north-east, and, indeed, throughout the United Kingdom?

[Robert Neill]

The greatest threat to British business would be the return to government of the hon. Lady’s party. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] My constituency contains many business people and many people who work in the City. I would not always take the voices of the big battalions as being representative of the people who are running the firms out there in the country and the people who are on the trading floors of the City of London—the people who are bringing the wealth into this country. That is what really matters.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Alexander]

I know that this debate is proving uncomfortable for Conservative Members.

[Catherine McKinnell]

Conservative Members do not seem to want to listen to my right hon. Friend’s arguments, but he is making a powerful speech. Perhaps they will listen to their own Lord Heseltine, who has said:

“To commit to a referendum about a negotiation that hasn’t begun, on a timescale you cannot predict, on an outcome that’s unknown, where Britain’s appeal as an inward investment market would be the centre of the debate, seems to me like an unnecessary gamble”.

[Mr Alexander]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, which points to two truths. The first is the importance of economic stability and certainty in relation to investment and the opportunities that British business needs not just to invest and employ, but to export in the future. The second is that it shows just how far the Conservative party has travelled.