Government Referendum Leaflet

Damian Green Excerpts

Monday 11th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

The hon. Gentleman hits on an important point. Although the single market is successful when it comes to trade in goods, it is insufficiently developed for trade in services. We must do more—indeed, we are leading the debate in Europe on the liberalisation of services and the simplification of product standards and regulations. Particularly for an economy such as ours, in which roughly 80% of GDP derives from the services sector, it would be a major risk to turn ourselves from being the shapers of new rules on services trade to the takers of rules set by other European countries, with us absent from the table.

[Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)]

This House passed legislation that specifically allowed the Government to produce this leaflet as long as it was not in the last 28 days of the referendum campaign, so it is possible that some of the indignation is a touch overdone. Does the Minister agree that it is a strange strategy when, instead of arguing the case, as soon as anyone—whether the Governor the Bank of England, the President of the United States, the CBI or even, ludicrously, the British Government— says anything that the leave campaigners disagree with, they prefer to say that those things should not be said at all? Is that a completely nonsensical strategy?

[Mr Lidington]

My right hon. Friend puts his point well, and I am still waiting to hear from the leave campaigners a consistent and coherent view of the alternative to European Union membership.