EU Membership: Economic Benefits

Helen Whately Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend spoke about how companies that export to Europe would be badly affected by leaving the European Union. If we have a Brexit recession, not only will businesses that export to the EU be hit, but almost all businesses will be affected by the loss of investment in the UK and the loss of consumer income. Will not all businesses be affected?

[Mr Hammond]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am afraid that I can predict, on the basis of experience, what will happen. If we get a Brexit vote, markets will go into freefall, business confidence will collapse, business investment will freeze, and consumers will panic and stop spending, and that will have a massive effect across the width and breadth of our economy.

The United Kingdom is, and should remain, an outward-looking trading nation. If we want to remain prosperous, we must move up the value curve, not down it. Britain’s future has to be about higher skills, higher wages and higher investment, not the opposite.

The EU has many failings, and no one is pretending that the reforms negotiated by the Prime Minister should be the last word. If we remain on the inside, we can and should continue to influence the speed and direction of reform. If we step outside, we will continue to be affected by EU rules, but we will have no way of influencing them and no way of reforming the institutions.

The consequences of the decision the British people make on 23 June will reverberate down the generations. This is not a decision to be taken lightly; all our futures depend on it. Now is not the time for reckless risk-taking; it is time for cool, calculated consideration of the facts, the evidence and the expert opinion, and all point to the same conclusion: we are stronger, safer and better off inside a reformed European Union.

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[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), who rightly made the positive case for staying in the European Union and, most importantly, asked who will pay the price if we leave.

I want my constituency and my country to be prosperous, peaceful and proud of being British. That is why I will vote to remain on 23 June. I could make the security case, or a case about the sort of country that I want us to be, but today’s debate is about the economic benefits of European Union membership, so I will focus on that. Being in the European Union brings investment and jobs to the UK. It is not perfect—no relationship is—but being in the EU is good for our economy, which is good for our country.

My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister recently joined me in my constituency on a visit to the UK’s oldest brewery, Shepherd Neame. It has been expanding successfully since the recession, thanks to our strong and stable economy in the European Union, but that is not something that it, or we, should take for granted. Like many businesses, Shepherd Neame is worried about the risk that we will leave the EU, and I am worried because it is the largest employer in my constituency. If it struggles, jobs will be lost.

There is no doubt—almost everybody agrees about this, including those who are campaigning for us to leave the EU—that there will be a recession if we vote to leave. That will result in the loss of thousands of jobs. I have heard some on the leave side of the argument suggest that the loss of those jobs perhaps does not matter, and that they see it as a sacrifice that might be worth making. But jobs really do matter; they mean livelihoods and the income needed to pay the mortgage, rent and bills and to buy children’s shoes. I could go on. It may sound obvious, but I really am shocked at how dismissive some of those arguing to leave are being.

I think about what the economic squeeze that we will experience—whether it lasts five years, 10 years or longer—will mean for today’s school leavers. A generation of school leavers was hit hard by the last recession, and we cannot have another lost generation as a result of a decision to leave the European Union.

Some Members have argued that a vote to leave could boost trade with non-European countries, but that is highly uncertain and, I would say, unlikely. Our largest export market outside the EU is the US. We exported £84 billion of goods to the US in 2014, but that is dwarfed by the more than £150 billion of goods and services that we exported to EU countries. Some Members have argued that if we leave, exports to India, Australia or Canada should increase, but the value of our exports to each of those countries is less than £10 billion per annum, and that would not change overnight.

Some time ago, before I became an MP, my day job was negotiating deals for AOL Time Warner, which at the time was the largest internet provider in the world. One thing I learned as a deal negotiator was that size matters for bargaining power. To those who say that the UK would somehow get better deals if we left the EU, I make the point that the EU is a much larger market and so has greater bargaining power in negotiations with other countries. I do not think we can be remotely confident, however great we are as a country or however good we are at negotiating, that we would be able to negotiate better trade deals with other countries than we can as part of the EU.

I am conscious of time, so I will move on quickly. The NHS is the reason why I became a Member of Parliament. Since my time doing the deals that I mentioned, I have worked mainly with hospitals and the NHS. I know just how difficult things are for the NHS at the moment. If we are to be able to afford the costs of care for our society as we live longer and demand more from the NHS, we need a strong economy. A vote to leave would damage not only our economy and prosperity but our international reputation. We are respected abroad for our values, our integrity and our collective conscience, and many countries seek to emulate our democratic system. Leaving the EU sends the wrong message. It suggests that when things get tricky, we walk away. That is not the sort of nation that I want us to be. We must be an optimistic country playing an influential role in the world, and that means being in the EU and leading from the front.