Government’s EU Exit Analysis

Baroness Laing of Elderslie Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. This has been such a heated debate that we must now reduce the time limit to five minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

This has been an interesting debate, and I appreciate the intent behind it, but we have to be a bit more basic in our expectations. Everybody with any sense of how the world works, or even the tiniest ability to listen to experts, knows that leaving the EU is a disaster in slow motion. It is an omnishambles.

Like a train in a spaghetti western running on to a half-collapsed bridge, we know that the plunge is coming, but the people driving the train are shovelling more coal into the boiler—they have never looked over the side and they are fairly sure the train can make the jump to safety on the other side. Frankly, the blank refusal to look at what is actually happening makes blind faith look like scepticism.

The assertion that we will trade jam with China and scones with Brazil to make up for loss of access to the world’s biggest barrier-free marketplace, and the claim that 27 countries will be crippled without our expertise, is madness, as the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), who is no longer in the Chamber, said.

I do not know what is in the tea in Whitehall, but it is pretty strong. If the analysis is anything like as rubbish as the policy position, its value, as has already been said, will be questionable, but I agree with Labour that it should be published. I am happy to hear that we will get to see the analysis, but it should go further. The people who put us here, and who pay for everything that gets done here and in our names elsewhere, are entitled to know just how much ignorance is at the heart of Government strategy and what the Government’s best forecast is of just how much disaster we are facing.

We all know there is a cliff edge, but none of us knows how high the cliff is. We have seen some analysis, most pertinently from the Scottish Government, and no one is predicting benefits. The best that anyone says is that there might be some way to ameliorate the worst effects, some way to make the pain a little less.

Leaving the EU is bad; walking away from the customs union and the single market is worse. Voters had many reasons for voting to leave. I have heard people offer different reasons, but none of them reckoned that we would end up with better trading relations. The people who will have to suffer the blunt trauma of this exit deserve the scant respect of having these forecasts opened up to scrutiny.

Labour’s motion calls for Members to be allowed to see the forecasts, and I acknowledge the Government’s movement, but I regard that movement as only a good first step on the way to everyone having sight of the forecasts. Frankly, I do not understand why the Labour motion is so narrowly drawn. In fact, I cannot for the life of me understand why there is so little opposition to exiting the EU, the single market and the customs union among Labour Members.

I appreciate there was a substantial leave vote in many of the seats that Labour worries about, and that there was a bit of a UKIP vote against a fair number of Labour MPs, but I cannot understand why an entire party would abdicate the responsibility of leading. Contrary to the Tony Blair doctrine, politics is not always about finding out where people are already heading in order to try to lead them there; sometimes we have to stand and say, “It is this way.” Sometimes we have to say that we believe something is the right thing to do, and the right thing to do now is surely to seek to protect, to the greatest extent possible, our membership of the single market and the customs union.

As we are where we are—heading down a track that comes to an abrupt and uncompromising end—the Government should at least have the courtesy of letting us see what they think are the best-case and worst-case scenarios. On courteous behaviour, I ask the Government to confirm that the analysis will be sent to the devolved Administrations at the same time as it goes to the Chair of the Exiting the European Union Committee.

The public should also be offered the courtesy of a glance at the research. We are told by the Brexit Department that everything is going swimmingly and will be all right if we just have enough faith and patience, so I cannot see why there would be any reluctance to publish the intellectual musings of the Brexit Secretary and the underpinning, in-depth research that I am sure went into those musings.

All might be for the best in the best of all possible Brexits, but we have no way of knowing what kind of Brexit is heading our way, what the great vision of the Government is or what kind of economic disaster zone is heading our way. I have seen nothing plausible to counter those who say that the economic outlook is almost apocalyptic—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I call Geraint Davies.