Leaving the EU: Negotiations

Debate between Christine Jardine and Stewart Malcolm McDonald

Tuesday 10th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran).

I have listened with incredulity today to the claims from those on the Conservative Benches that they are delivering on Brexit. Every time I think this Brexit chaos cannot get any worse, I discover I am wrong—it can, and it does. The past few days have simply added chaos to uncertainty, built on complete mismanagement. Yesterday was perhaps the most unedifying spectacle yet. For me, it was a particularly surreal experience, and at the same time absolutely appropriate, because I was enjoying my daughter’s graduation ceremony at the University of Edinburgh when my phone buzzed with a message saying that the Foreign Secretary had resigned. That was followed by a flurry of other texts and newsflashes, which I mostly ignored.

While the Cabinet’s agreed stance on Brexit and the Cabinet itself were crumbling and what is left of our future relationship with Europe was being thrown under yet another Brexit bus, I was witnessing a particularly European experience. At the same time as I was getting all these texts, the founding father of the Erasmus scholarship programme stood up to accept his honorary doctorate and address the assembled graduates of Edinburgh University. He talked about the idea, inspiration and vision that has seen millions of EU students from this country and the others benefiting either directly or indirectly from meeting and sharing their experiences with Erasmus scholars from elsewhere. He also told us proudly about the 1 million Erasmus babies that there now are in Europe.

For Edinburgh University, like many other universities up and down the country, that scheme has been crucial. Edinburgh attracts the biggest share of Erasmus students of any Scottish university. Erasmus has also encouraged talented young people from across Europe to come and live and work in the UK. Two constituents visited me last week who are Spanish and have been here for a number of years, paying income tax at 40% and national insurance. They are now being asked to pay the fee to stay here that the hon. Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) mentioned, but these are people who came here to contribute, encouraged by European co-operation.

When the founder of the Erasmus scholarship programme sat down, I looked around the hall and I saw in front of me a wonderfully diverse group of students from all ethnic and social backgrounds. I glanced at the list of those who were about to graduate, and it revealed names from across the continent. Here was Erasmus in operation and European co-operation in operation, and here was our future—the students’ and our country’s future. Meanwhile, the Government were indulging in self-inflicted chaos and mismanagement, and any semblance of a strategy for a future with Europe was crumbling.

Make no mistake: the students knew about this too, because their phones were buzzing with texts; I saw them glancing down at them every so often. The principal of the Edinburgh University then stood up and assured his students and the parents that the university would never turn its back on Europe, regardless of “the many obstacles that politicians might place in their way”. This is one politician who listened yesterday and who is determined to fight to remove such obstacles from the futures of those young people and other young people in this country who see their horizons narrowed and their opportunities limited by what is happening in this place on an almost daily basis. I heard what the students had to say and their positive reaction, because that statement by the principal of Edinburgh University received the loudest reaction of the day. I and my colleagues will not give up on defending that future.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)]

In her speech about Erasmus, will the hon. Lady note that one of the people who helped to found it was Winnie Ewing, and today is her 89th birthday?

[Christine Jardine]

As the hon. Gentleman says—his colleague the hon. Member for North East Fife mentioned it earlier—today is indeed Winnie Ewing’s 89th birthday. I have met the hon. Lady on more than one occasion, and I think she would be extremely upset to see what is happening to the programme that has done so much for students in this country and elsewhere.

I am in the Chamber today to demand that we listen to those young people, their parents, the academics and others in this country. We should listen to their demand that the Government stop this narrow infighting and internal self-interest, and think about how to achieve some sort of national unity in the way ahead. People need to have faith that what is on the table will work for them, but what I hear daily—from those in business who say, “But what will happen after Brexit?”, and from constituents who say, “What will happen to me, because I am a European citizen from elsewhere in the EU?”—is that they want something different. What the Government are offering does not cut it for them, and those of them who can vote want the opportunity to say so in a decision on the final deal.