Trade Bill

Eddie Hughes Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes (Walsall North) (Con)]

I am going to speak only very briefly because I appreciate that people want us to move on.

Part of the reason for my getting to my feet is that, if you live in Walsall North, you can believe that the country voted for Brexit. In my constituency a substantial proportion of people—over 70%—voted for Brexit. That is the same for Walsall generally and for the west midlands, so we would have to travel some distance from my constituency to get to a place where people did not vote for Brexit.

It is useful for me to have been in the Chamber for the entirety of this debate because I have learned a lot. It was good to hear the candid comments of the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), who said he voted for remain and his intention is to protect the UK from a path of economic destruction—I think that was the phrase; it was something along those lines. He is protecting the country from itself, effectively, because the people of Walsall North did not know what they were doing when they voted for Brexit and they need to be protected from their own decisions. What are they going to be protected from? Let me tell Members what I have learned during the debate. One of the things they are going to be protected from is the fact that when we leave the EU planes might not be able to take off from our airports. People of my age may remember hearing that the millennium bug was going to do the same thing. In fact, I was terrified to either fly or go to hospital because I was completely convinced that, if I was in a plane it would drop out of the sky, and if I was on a resuscitator it would stop functioning immediately. I was terrified, but what happened? I got walloped and went to bed because I thought that, obviously, the world would end the next day. Incredibly, when I got up on 1 January 2000 everything was fine.

I heard the same sort of protestations in the debate on whether we should Brexit or not. It was said that economic Armageddon was coming the day after we voted if we voted to leave. So I woke up the next morning, excited that I had voted to leave, and expecting the world to end, but it has not; it has continued to prosper. Why has the UK continued to prosper? It is because we are an amazing country. We have some of the best—if not the best—universities in the world at one extreme in terms of academia, and we have Scotch whisky, which I learned only yesterday is such an important export to South Korea.

What do we want now for Brexit? We want certainty. Those who export or import at the moment want to know things are going to stay pretty much the same initially while we find our feet and develop new trading arrangements around the world. They also want to know that we are going to maintain access to the £1.3 trillion-worth of opportunities we have through the GPA.

I trust our excellent ministerial team to deliver these services and the process as part of the general Brexit process. I trust them not to use those immense powers for evil. I am trusting them to just put those powers to good use and to continue to ensure that the UK trades globally and in a way that is good for the people of Bloxwich and Willenhall. Why is that? Because if we trade internationally we know we get better access to a wider range of goods and services at the best possible price.

I will therefore be voting for the Bill this evening—the people of Willenhall and Bloxwich would expect no less—and I hope we can have a small amount of positivity for the rest of the debate.