UK’s Exit from the European Union

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), who chaired the Brexit Select Committee so effectively when I was a member. As we have heard, 178,000 people signed the petition. I thank each and every one of them, and I thank the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) for presenting the debate.

It appears the UK Government do not believe that Brexit is an appropriate subject for debate. People watching at home will have realised that we are holding the debate in Westminster Hall, not in the main Chamber. We are not holding it in Government time. It seems the Government do not believe that Brexit is a subject for a public inquiry. I appreciate that many Government supporters will want to leave the division of the Brexit years behind. They say, “Brexit is done and dusted, so let us put the tensions of the past few years behind us and get on with reaping the benefits of Brexit.”

I opposed Brexit, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Ben Lake), as well as my party and my constituents. I concede that not everyone in Wales did—we lost by a short head—but a recent poll by Focaldata shows that people who regret their decision to leave outnumber remaining Brexit supporters in every constituency in Wales. Apparently, every constituency in Wales is now of that opinion.

As to Brexit’s benefits, I would dearly love to see some benefits. They would suit the people of Wales just fine, but as yet the benefits are singularly elusive. The Government face at least two ways on this. They say that Brexit is an event that is over and done with, setting us upon the sunlit uplands, so let us get on with it. Or they say it is an ongoing process, and at some undefined point in future the benefits will appear. Well, they cannot have it both ways. They cannot have a process and an event. It is one or the other and, quite obviously, Brexit is a process that, at the very best, is bogged down and not delivering or, at worst, a process that will deliver nothing but further chaos, decline and poverty.

With trust in the Government at such a low, the Conservatives and their friends continue peddling the patent myth that the UK’s economic malaise is the result of the war in Ukraine or the aftershocks of the pandemic, and so on. The facts of international comparisons on inflation, growth and a host of other measures are against them. As we heard from the hon. Member for Gravesham (Adam Holloway), who is now inexplicably absent from his seat, finance is being favoured ahead of other sectors—certainly ahead of manufacturing. A practical example is the decline of the Welsh steel industry, which is being accelerated by a trade policy that deliberately strains supply chains.

At the other end of the scale, in my own constituency the Menai mussel industry, which was thriving—thriving on the basis of exports, mainly to Belgium—has seen its business model wrecked by post-Brexit rules and it has more or less disappeared, in the short term at least. Welsh businesses are struggling to cope with mountains of Brexit red tape just to trade with our nearest neighbours. Many have simply given up.

One example that will interest the House is that of Seiont Nurseries, which I referred to in the Chamber last week. Seiont Nurseries, which is in my constituency, exports live plants to Ireland. In my constituency, and in that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, we can actually see Ireland in the uplands—it is just over there. We can see the lovely green hills of Wicklow, which is where the plants go. However, Neil, who runs Seiont Nurseries, has found that the only practical way of exporting his plants is not directly through Ireland, which is just over there, but rather through England, Belgium and France, down to Normandy or Brittany and over the long sea crossing to Ireland.

I raised that with the Secretary of State for Business and Trade last week, and her eventual response was that Neil could always use the green lanes. Either she does not understand that the green lanes go only to Northern Ireland—perhaps she does not understand the difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland—or possibly she had no answer and, in desperation, reached for the first thing that came to mind, which was green lanes. That is completely useless for my friend at Seiont Nurseries. That is just one small, practical example of a small business that is struggling with the effects of Brexit.

[Peter Dowd in the Chair]

The first step towards understanding the Brexit debacle and what needs to be done would be an independent public inquiry into the Brexit campaigns: what was said, what was promised, what was delivered, what will never be delivered, who has benefited and who has lost out—not least, as was referred to earlier, in Wales losing out on EU funding in the universities sector, which is very close to my heart. We have seen only this weekend the problems around rejoining Horizon. The Government are apparently demanding a rebate for the two years when we were unable to join it. Why were we unable to do so? I will allow hon. Members to guess, but apparently we need a rebate for those two years when we were not members of Horizon.

We can reckon up only when we have some answers to those questions. If this Government and their campaigning friends are as confident of the propriety, wisdom and value of Brexit as they seem to be, they have nothing to fear.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Dowd. I congratulate Peter Packham on starting the petition and the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) on introducing it with such customary eloquence.

My Brighton, Pavilion constituency has the second highest number of signatures to this petition, with 655 of my constituents signing it. I know very well that many more than that support it, so I am pleased to be able to represent them here today. One of that number wrote in an email about the debate:

“I firmly believe that the public were misled systematically by campaigners for Brexit before the referendum. Although it is unlikely that the decision will be reversed, I believe that the record should show the truth, not a fantasy.”

That short, simple message encapsulates many of the important reasons why I think we need an inquiry and why I back the call in the petition. I believe that if a sufficient number of people over time choose it, there is a way back into the European Union. That is the virtue and beauty of democracy.

The referendum campaign and the subsequent narrative about Brexit have been a litany of misinformation and disinformation. The infamous words on the side of the bus are just the tip of the iceberg, but let us start there, with whether £350 million a week has been diverted from the EU to the NHS. As we have heard several times this afternoon, the simple answer is no. The NHS budget in England alone has risen by more than £350 million a week since 2016, but that money has come from taxes, borrowing and squeezing other Departments. It most certainly has not come from savings arising from Brexit, for the simple reason that those savings did not materialise because the overall economic impact has been so severe. If the public hoped for a transformative sum for the NHS post Brexit, they most certainly have not received it.

Turning to the economy, during the Chancellor’s recent autumn statement, he spoke for almost an hour without once acknowledging the economic catastrophe of Brexit. There was no reference to the OBR’s warning that Brexit will slash productivity by 4% and lead to a 15% drop in trade intensity and an 11% drop in investment, or that it will increase food prices and deliver lower wages, workforce shortages and the highest inflation in the G7.

I, too, am a member of the UK Trade and Business Commission, which is expertly chaired by the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). Since July 2021, we have been taking evidence about the impacts of Brexit, and, as the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk has pointed out, we have not heard of the positive impacts that were promised. To the contrary, we have heard time and again all the evidence of pain, particularly for small businesses. We have also been examining why Brexit is seen as the primary reason why we are the only G7 country that is still not reaching post-pandemic levels of growth.

While the Government keep their head firmly in the sand and continue to deny the existence of anything other than positive outcomes, they cannot begin to adapt to and resolve some of the many problems that we are hearing are caused by Brexit. Misleading the public includes wishful thinking. Who can forget the endless conjuring of sunlit uplands, the ignoring of reality, the telling of only half the story, the cherry picking and, frankly, the plain lying? It all happened during the Brexit campaign, and it has been happening since. Independent scrutiny and inquiry would help set the record straight.

The vilification of free movement by the leaders of the Leave campaign was one of the most pernicious examples of disinformation. They wilfully perpetuated a hostile narrative about immigration, deliberately conflating asylum seekers, economic migrants and refugees, and whipping up hatred and racism in the process. This was disinformation at its most destructive. No wonder they are now so afraid of light being shone on those impacts.

That brings me to democracy. In the wake of the referendum, I set up an initiative called Dear Leavers. We went around the country visiting the places that had registered some of the highest numbers of leave votes and listened to people who voted leave. The overwhelming message was that people voted for Brexit because they felt powerless. They felt unheard by a political establishment that had not listened for decades. The tragedy is that the political establishment is still not listening, and people still feel powerless.

Democracy, scrutiny, accountability and responsiveness have all been victims of Brexit. Evidence and experts were derided, Parliament was illegally prorogued and international law was trashed. We had unsettled constitutional questions and opposition to a ratification referendum. There has been an impact on the incredibly precious Good Friday Agreement, and we now have the dangerous Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill. Opposing a public inquiry into these matters only adds insult to injury.

To return to my constituent’s view that the Brexit decision will probably not be reversed, it is with great sadness that I see that the Labour leadership has capitulated to the tyranny where even to talk about rejoining is somehow judged to be anti-democratic. I want to talk about it. The Green party wants to talk about it. I think the public deserve for us to talk about it. If rejoining the EU is the right thing—for our economy, our environment, workers’ rights, young people, our public services, trade and more—we should take that step when the time and conditions are right. We should be preparing for that possibility by taking a step-by-step approach, with steps such as negotiating membership of the customs union now; full engagement with Horizon; regular adjustments to the trade and co-operation agreement to ensure that our interests are best supported; a general approach of maintaining alignment with EU regulation—that means seeing the back of the deeply dangerous Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill—and the ongoing rebuilding of diplomacy and, I hope, of our reputation as a trustworthy partner, which has frankly been trashed.

I want to talk also about the status quo in this country, because the leave vote was a howl of rage about legitimate concerns, which have still not been addressed. The social contract remains broken, and the power game remains rigged. We did not leave the EU because of anything that had happened in Brussels or Strasbourg; we left primarily because of what had happened in England, because outside the capital, every single region of England voted to leave the EU. It is meant as no disrespect to Wales—which voted by a majority of only about 80,000 to leave—to say that it was an English vote that drove Brexit.

[Hywel Williams]

It is significant that the highest vote in favour of leaving the European Union was recorded in Blaenau Gwent. Blaenau Gwent is the constituency that received the highest level of European funding, but it is also the poorest constituency in Wales. That reinforces the point that the hon. Member is making: it was a howl of rage against poverty, marginalisation and all the rest of it.

[Caroline Lucas]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman very much. I believe that one reason why there was such a howl of rage in England was that, while devolution has given powers to Scotland and Wales—not enough, but some powers—there are no political institutions that represent England. There is nothing to give political expression to our complex, rich reality, and nothing to bring power to the regions of England. It is no wonder that people voted to take back control, but they want control from Westminster, so that they have the right to make decisions about their own lives here. Rethinking our constitutional settlement more fundamentally is also key to mending some of the divisions in the UK. Brexit was the result of a divided UK, and it threatens to divide us still further unless we build a democratic consensus about changing that, together, for good.