Exiting the EU: New Partnership
Debate between David Davis and Andrew Murrison(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Davis
We are not going to have hard borders. I will take the question on two different levels. First, the common travel area has existed since 1923 and, in that respect nothing will change. On goods, there will be the softest, most invisible and most frictionless border we can find. There is a lot of technology these days, ranging from automatic number plate recognition through to the tagging of containers, with trusted trader arrangements across the border, and such things operate between Norway and Sweden, the US and Canada, and so on—countries with very amicable relations and very open borders—and we will do the same with Ireland.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
The White Paper is an impressive document, for which I thank the Secretary of State—the Venn diagram on page 48 is particularly insightful. He will know that the European Union has concluded a pathetically small number of free trade agreements with other countries, but there are some. Will he confirm that there will either be a continuity arrangement with those countries on Brexit or that the agreements will be the basis for an accelerated relationship with those very few countries?
Exiting the European Union
Debate between David Davis and Andrew Murrison(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend to his post. He is absolutely the right man to do this important work. He will appreciate the complete economic illiteracy of the European Union. On the one hand, it writes very big cheques to middle-income and developing countries to bail out their flailing economies, and on the other, it gives unequal access to European Union markets. That clearly hampers the ability of those countries to be equal partners rather than supplicants. How can Britain do better?
Wilson Doctrine
Debate between David Davis and Andrew Murrison(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Davis
I take my right hon. Friend’s point, but that is why I urged Members to read the transcript. What I said is very apparent from the transcript. He is, of course, right that there has been a huge transformation. Metadata, which I will come back to later, simply did not exist in their current form in Wilson’s day. Many of the things that are now available, including email, did not exist in his day. A whole series of things that we all assumed had been swept up in the Wilson doctrine have not been swept up in the Wilson doctrine. That is why the Home Secretary’s case that it is the same as what was enunciated by Harold Wilson all those years ago is simply not tenable. I will come back to that point, too.
Members will notice that the Press Gallery is nearly empty. Over the past week or so, the newspapers have been very derogatory about this case and the argument that we are putting. They say, “Why should MPs be treated any differently from anybody else?” Those, by the way, are the very same newspapers that were in an uproar of anger about the fact that somebody had checked out the metadata of one of their journalist’s telephones. Perhaps they were right in that, but it is an odd dichotomy.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
What does my right hon. Friend think the deputy leader of the Labour party will think about the stance that has been taken by the shadow Leader of the House, given that the deputy leader of the Labour party is making a career out of exposing the alleged wrongdoings of Members of this House and the other place? Presumably that would be made much more difficult were we exempted from the investigatory instruments that are available to the agencies.