Government’s EU Exit Analysis

Debate between Hilary Benn and Seema Malhotra

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), and I echo what she said to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, on behalf of all of us in the Chamber about seeing you back in your place. We feel for you enormously.

Such is the interest in our debate today that we have been joined by a robin—[Interruption.] Not that Robin—I was thinking of the other one, which has been hopping around the Gallery.

Well, well, well, this is all rather familiar. However, as well as the despair expressed by the right hon. Lady, I feel a growing sense of puzzlement. Let me give Members just a little history. We were led to believe in the first instance that the Government had been carrying out assessments of the impact of Brexit on different sectors of the economy. Then we were assured by the Secretary of State that they had not. Now we discover that, in fact, they have, although clearly those are not the same assessments we had mistakenly been asking for before. If I understand it correctly, they are now the assessments that will be shown to Cabinet Ministers in the locked room over the next week or so.

I want to say something about what the Minister’s hon. Friend—the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker)—said yesterday. We on the remain side need to be honest and acknowledge that forecasts have been made that have proved to be spectacularly wrong. The right hon. Member for Broxtowe just referred to a forecast by the International Trade Secretary, whose precise words were that a post-Brexit free trade deal with the EU should be the “easiest in human history”. In 2016, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union forecast that by September this year, the UK

“can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU.”

Well, that forecast was wrong too, and then there has been the repeated assertion by many Ministers, including the Prime Minister, that no deal is better than a bad deal. All of us know that is nonsense, because no deal is the worst possible deal of all, which merely proves that when it comes to talking about inaccurate forecasts, some Ministers live in very, very vulnerable greenhouses.

If Ministers in the Department do not trust any of the forecasts, it prompts the question: why did they bother to commission them in the first place? I see that the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Wycombe, has tried today to soothe the no doubt ruffled feathers of his civil servants with a tweet—I do not habitually follow his tweets, but they were drawn to my attention—saying that

“I still love them and my critique is of economic method, not individuals”.

I am sure that will be of great reassurance to hard-working and professional civil servants.

Then there is the very perplexing question that it would be good to hear an answer to. What confidence should we have when the Minister said yesterday from the Dispatch Box that we do not need to worry about the gloomy forecasts, because the very same analysis shows that under every one of them, the British economy would continue to grow? How do we know that that forecast is true if it is being produced by the same people whom the Minister said from the Dispatch Box always get their forecasts wrong? It is a farce—it is a Whitehall farce.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My right hon. Friend just pointed to the extraordinary circumstance whereby we see Ministers against civil servants, and I have never seen that situation in my lifetime. Does he not agree that at the heart of this is honesty and transparency for Parliament and the public in the most important debate that we will have for generations?

[Hilary Benn]

I agree absolutely. Indeed, I made the point yesterday about the importance of transparency and about a lack of transparency not being in the national interest. I gently say to Ministers that trying to have a go at people who are asking questions about what analysis has been done and what it shows, and attempting to suggest that all of them are trying to undo the referendum result, is an unwise approach. I think it reveals a great defensiveness and a lack of confidence on the part of Ministers about the position that they have put the Government in.