Government’s EU Exit Analysis

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

Will the Minister give way?

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Walker]

Not now. The public have voted through a referendum to leave the European Union. We must deliver on that result, in the national interest. I agree with the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras that we should work together to ensure that, and that must include scrutiny.

Only yesterday the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe committed to ensuring that Parliament has the appropriate analysis on the terms of our exit from the European Union ahead of the vote on the final deal we agree with the European Union. That is entirely right and we will deliver on it. However, delivering on the referendum result, in the national interest, does mean being able to have a stable and secure policy-making process inside Government. It means Government taking seriously their obligation to preserve the security of our analysis and the work underpinning our negotiations, and receiving that analysis means Parliament sharing in that responsibility and obligation. As all Members of this House come together to deliver for the people the best possible outcome of the referendum result, it is with that sentiment that we will comply with the motion.

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[Peter Grant]

At this point, the answer is no: I neither condone nor condemn because I do not know what the circumstances were.

I walked away from a potentially successful career in NHS financial management. I wrestled for six months with my own conscience, seeing things that I knew had to be brought to public attention but knowing there was no way I could do that, and knowing that the public were being deliberately misled about what was going on in the health board that I worked in. The only way I could bring it to public attention was to resign and walk away from the job. So I will never, ever condemn anyone who believes they are acting in the public interest by doing something that they are not supposed to do.

I would be very surprised if there is a single Member in the Chamber today who is not at this very moment considering an important constituency case that has been brought to them by someone who technically was breaking the rules by raising it with a Member of Parliament. There are times when the public interest has to outweigh all other considerations, and until I have seen the full circumstances of why this information was disclosed, I am not going to condone or condemn, and I do not think anyone else should prejudice the case by commenting on it now.

[Geraint Davies]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a distinction between a leak and whistleblowing? Whistleblowing is in the public interest. The provisional evaluation of the economic impacts, be it incomplete or imperfect, and given that good is not the enemy of perfect, should be in the public arena. This is a whistle blow, not a leak.

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. We have to be careful about language. There is whistleblowing as defined in the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 and it is not clear whether this incident would comply with that.

As a council leader, I sometimes found myself having to respond to information that technically should not have been disclosed. I always took the view that, if the motivation was clearly public interest, we should seek to protect those who did that, even if they had not technically done it in the correct way. The question today should not be about the motivation or principles of whoever disclosed this information into the public domain. The question should be first about what the information tells us, and secondly about what the Government’s determination to hide this information from the people tells us about the Government’s handling of Brexit.

I hope that, when the Under-Secretary of State responds, he will do what the Minister did not do earlier, and tell us when the Government started to prepare this analysis. Is this the homework that the Secretary of State had to confess to a Select Committee he had not done yet when the House asked for it? It looks suspiciously like this is not only the Secretary of State’s late homework but that he copied it off his new pal Big Mike in the high school up the road in Scotland. The similarities between the Scottish Government’s analysis that the Government rubbished two weeks ago and the Government’s own analysis are so striking that it would be a remarkable coincidence if the people who prepared those analyses had not been copying from each other.

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[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant), although obviously I did not agree with much of what he said at the end of his speech.

I am delighted that the Government have had the good sense to agree to the motion. I am concerned about the circumstances in which these documents will now be made available, in some sort of secrecy, despite the fact that they can clearly be read on the internet. Why we are going through that farce, I do not know.

May I gently say to my Government, this madness has to stop. If we were in the middle of the summer, I might say that it was overexposure to a hot sun that seems to have caused a collective outbreak in the Government of a form of madness. Their inability to grasp Brexit and do the right thing, frankly, is now at a point where, as I say, it has got to stop. We have to start to do the right thing; and the right thing is to get this Brexit sorted out, to form a consensus in this place and within the country, and deliver—deliver not just on the referendum result, but on the hopes and aspirations of our people that we will have an economic future out of the European Union that will be safe and secure for generations to come.

[Geraint Davies]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Anna Soubry]

In a moment.

The reality of these documents, of course, is that finally it seems that our Government have decided they are actually going to make some choices; they are actually going to form a view in Cabinet. It has only taken 19 months since the referendum to work out what they want from Brexit.

The Prime Minister told us, in her Lancaster House speech, what she did not want, but what nobody in the Government—in the Cabinet—has told us is what this Government do want by way of Brexit. And if I am agitated—and I am—I can assure the Front Bench that whilst I think most of the people of this country are just fed up to the back teeth, the people of this country are also agitated, because they are worried and they are nervous. And being blunt, there are millions and millions of people in this country who do not believe that either of the two political parties in this country represent their views, and indeed will forward their views.

I see it in these terms. I think there is a group of people—the hard Brexiteers—and you are not going to change them. In my party, my Government believe that somehow they can “manage” the 35 hard Brexiteers, who for decades have been banging on about Europe in a way that I think is not, at times, particularly good for their mental health—and they think they can “manage” them. They cannot be managed. Even if they were given what they wanted today, they would complain that it had not been done yesterday. For many of them it is a battle to the death, and they will not hesitate to destroy this party or our Prime Minister to get what they want. They can see the prize and they will be damned if anybody is going to get in their way. The Government need to wake up to that reality. So we have that problem to cope with, and that is the way to deal with it: see it off, build a consensus, and jump into the middle ground and put this country’s interests before anything else. As the CBI said, “Goodbye ideology; wake up to the interests of our country.”

Over on the other side is a group of people who still want to fight the battle of the referendum—they are remainers, they are angry and they cannot and will not accept that we are leaving the European Union—but here in the middle is the majority of people. They are like corks, bobbing around in a sea. They feel queasy and uneasy, and they are worried about their own futures and their children and grandchildren’s futures, yet there is nobody for them—no thing, no vehicle coming along upon which they can jump; a big, warm ship that says to them, “Come on board. You’ve got a great captain at the wheel and we can see the land of our destination over there.” It might be Norway; it could be the European Free Trade Association—actually, I would like it to be the single market and the customs union, but hell, I will compromise. I will take EFTA. Why? Because I want to form a consensus to get the best thing for our country.

That is there, but at the moment there is nothing for people to get into that will save them from what, unless this madness stops, will undoubtedly be a catastrophe. Call it what you will—“walking off a plank” is how I think a noble Lord quite properly described it yesterday. Others have described it as “sleepwalking to a Brexit disaster” or “jumping over the cliff”. Whatever metaphor one wants to use, if this Government—and it can only be this Government—do not get a grip on the situation at the top, we will indeed walk into a Brexit nightmare.

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[Anna Soubry]

This is an astonishing idea. The right hon. Gentleman—he is definitely my Friend today—seems to be saying that if there was a report saying that going off the cliff or some other madness would be beneficial to our economy, the Government might publish it, because it would help in their dealings with the hard Brexiteers. Of course, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

What the Government have done, to their credit, is to ask the objective analysts to go away and look at the options, albeit apparently not their preferred option—although we have made that point, so I will move swiftly on—and they have come back, having no doubt done their job, as they always do, thoroughly, openly, honestly and exceptionally well. We now know that these reports were prepared, and apparently some Ministers have already seen them. According to reports, I think in The Times, Cabinet Ministers were to go and see them under lock and key. They were to read them, they were not to take in their phones and most certainly not to make any notes, and they were to inform themselves, so that finally our Cabinet could perhaps come to a conclusion about what we want from Brexit. Yet apparently these very same reports are so useless and flawed—they are based on weird modelling and cannot be trusted—that they have to remain top secret. They were not good enough—or were they?—to inform Cabinet members. It is nonsense.

[Geraint Davies]

The Minister said that these analyses are provisional, incomplete and not fit for purpose, so is the right hon. Lady as amazed as I am that the Prime Minister should conduct phase 1 of the negotiations with no economic analysis? No wonder we are the laughing stock of Europe.

[Anna Soubry]

Well, no, because I thought the conclusion to phase 1 was actually quite good, so I am certainly not going to undermine it, but the hon. Gentleman makes an important point.

Many hon. Members sat through the many hours of debate during the Committee stage of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill and, at the end of it, one thing on which those of us who take a sensible approach to this all agreed was that we had had some terrific debates. The dreadful irony was this: if only we had had those bloomin’ debates before the European Union referendum. What is undoubtedly happening is that people are becoming better informed. They understand now the huge complexity that Brexit is. They realise that there are serious consequences to our decision to leave the European Union, and that is why they are darned worried, not just for themselves but for their children and their grandchildren. People have a right to know. My constituents who work at Boots have a right to know the consequences for them and the pharmaceutical sector, based on the different models and choices that are still available to our country. The people who own and run Freshcut Foods have a right to know about the consequences of, say, duties on imported fruit and vegetables from European countries and what those will mean to them, in the real world, doing the job that they do.

That is at the heart of all that is happening now. People want to know, because they are finding out about the promises they were made. The £350 million for the NHS is all gone; they were lied to—they were conned—on that. They were told this was going to be the quickest trade deal—I think I am right in saying they were told it would take a day and a half to do a trade deal.

We are nowhere near doing that trade deal, and we will be nowhere near doing it, because the other Brexit reality is this: we are not going to have a meaningful vote in this place—we are not—because there will not be anything meaningful to vote on. What is going to happen, unless the Government get into the right place, is that, yes, we will have an agreement on the divorce—that will be there in the withdrawal agreement—but in terms of the actual relationship we will have with the European Union once we have left, we will have a few woolly heads of agreement. That will mean pretty much nothing—not even to those of us who have spent what feels like a lifetime now looking at these options. We will have a series of heads of agreement. That is not meaningful; that does not give us the ability to decide whether this is in the interests of our constituents and our country. It will have no meaning whatever. Again, people—my Government and everybody else—have to wake up to the reality of what we are going to get in October.

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[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Being Welsh, I enjoy a leak, but when does a leaker become a whistleblower? Although we have to take precautions, I would contend that the information is in the public interest and should be in the public arena. The Government say this information is unreliable because they have not finished their economic analysis, so I wonder why we have ended up in a situation in which the Prime Minister appears to be going into a negotiation with no idea of the economic impact of different scenarios even in phase 1, particularly in relation to the Irish border.

It appears that the Government are intent on keeping secret any information that is put together, which reminds us all of what Keynes said: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” The Government want to conceal the facts so that people do not see the awful truth of Brexit and of what it will mean to the economy.

Of course, people can see with their own eyes the damage that has already been done. Every family will have to pay £1,000 for the divorce bill. The London School of Economics has said that inflation is 2.7% instead of 1.7%, because of devaluation, which is costing every worker a week’s pay each year. We are now at the bottom of the G7 for growth, having once been at the top, and we have growth only because there is global growth. What is more, people and businesses know there will be a two-year transition period. People and businesses around the country want to know what the sectoral analysis is. In Wales, where 70% of exports are to the EU and where there are 25,000 jobs in Swansea bay, there is great concern. If we face a cliff edge and no deal, the steel in south Wales will be decimated by the Chinese, and the agricultural industry will be decimated by any trade deal with New Zealand. We therefore need to know the facts and to have a vote in this place in October. People should have the final say on the deal on the table, and the sooner we get this information, the better.

There are benefits and opportunities outlined in this paper, contrary to what people have said. Those opportunities have been identified as the opportunities to deregulate environmental, worker and other standards. People in my constituency and elsewhere are worried about the fact that workers’ rights will be reduced to reduce business costs; that the Government have been taken to court on numerous occasions by the EU for poor air quality; and that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is saying we will have only recycled or reusable plastics in 2042, whereas the date for the EU is 2030.

We are worried that all our standards will fall below EU standards, and that we will give away public health safeguards and food standards in our dealings with the United States. This is not what people voted for. People want to have on the table in front of them precisely what this will mean for their families, regions and countries. The Government are intent on denying us that information. They expect us all to go into closed rooms and not to disclose outside them what they have already said is not reliable data. It is time for them to come clean, and for us to have clarity of where we are going and the data on which we are basing our decisions.

The reality is that the Government do not know where they are going. We are told that in conversations between the Prime Minister and Mrs Merkel the latter asks, “What do you want?” and our Prime Minister says, “What can you offer me?” There is a circular dialogue, with nobody knowing what they want. We know that the EU27 will defend their interests, and defend the integrity of the single market and the customs union. We have a choice before us. It is my considered opinion that as the facts emerge we should think again. This is not what people voted for when they voted to leave; they have a right now to have a look at the deal on the table and they should have the opportunity to have the option of staying in the EU if they do not like what they see. If someone orders a steak in a restaurant and gets a bit of chewed up bacon, which is the best we can hope for from this Government, they should have the right to send it back. People should have the final say and the Government should come clean.