Progress on EU Negotiations

Dan Carden Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I absolutely agree with what my hon. Friend has just said. If this House were to stop Brexit, the British people would feel that it was a gross betrayal of the trust that we had shown in them and they had shown in us. I believe that it is a matter of our integrity as politicians that we deliver on the vote that we gave to the British people, when they told us, in no uncertain terms, to leave the European Union.

[Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

The withdrawal agreement worsens the situation for the UK in terms of EU state aid, leaving the UK legally bound by European Commission decisions. Currently, the European Commission waves through state aid cases case by case, but that will not be so for the UK, with our economy and major industries permanently disadvantaged. At the same time, workers’ rights and environmental protections seem not to have any of the same types of protection. Was this negotiated by the Prime Minister, or was it at the behest of the EU?

[The Prime Minister]

We have made this clear on a number of occasions, and the proposals that we have put forward are very clear about non-regression in relation to workers’ rights. We already, in some areas, have higher standards on workers’ rights than other countries in the European Union, and we have, as a Government, been working to enhance workers’ rights in a number of ways, not least in our response to the Matthew Taylor report. It was this Government who banned exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts—a matter that the Labour party spoke about for many years but failed to do anything about.