EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK

James Naish Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Pete Wishart]

I join the hon. Gentleman overwhelmingly and enthusiastically. He is absolutely right. It is hard to think of a sector that has remained untouched by the fact that we cannot access European talent. It is a problem for hospitality and restaurant businesses in constituencies like mine, and in the City, where many dynamic figures helped build some of the success stories that we see just a few miles from where we are today.

Before Brexit, there was barely a small boat sighted in the channel, and now we are told that that is perhaps the single biggest issue that confronts this country. Various Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries have come up with a variety of different wheezes to try to stop those small boats coming to the UK, but all have been hampered because we left the one international agreement that might have dealt with returning some of those people to the European Union. When we left the European Union, we also left the Dublin III regulation—the one thing that might have achieved some of the ambition that people had about stopping small boats.

Then there is the irony that Brexit did not just make it harder for Europeans to come here; it made it harder for us to move around Europe, too. British citizens are now third country nationals in their own continent. We can still travel across Europe, of course, but there is now a 90-day limit in a rolling 180-day period. For ordinary holidaymakers who have been away enjoying the sun, that might mean nothing more than the huge queues that we have seen in some airports across Europe—a minor inconvenience, perhaps—but for businesses it means more red tape, more restrictions and more unnecessary difficulties.

For those in my former profession—musicians, performers and other creative professionals—it can mean a bewildering collection of different rules about work permits, visas, carnets and documentation. Brexit has been such a destructive and invidious political project that it has even managed to stop the music moving freely. This Labour Government gave a commitment that they would fix that. We are talking about ambitions, so come on, Minister: stop the Brexit imposition on music. Let the music move freely again. Let the current generation of musicians enjoy the opportunities that I had as a musician. Who knows, we might even have the Prime Minister on a European tour if he manages to get it fixed!

[James Naish (Rushcliffe) (Lab)]

Over the summer I was with a constituent who, while celebrating the UK Government’s recent music strategy, recognised the hon. Gentleman’s point about the significant challenge of getting into Europe. Fifty-nine per cent of UK musicians say that touring in Europe has become unviable. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is unacceptable that British musicians and other touring artists face barriers that did not exist pre Brexit? Would he encourage the Minister to look seriously at accelerating improvement in this area?

[Pete Wishart]

Absolutely. We have had this issue for seven or eight years. I remember securing the first urgent question when it was recognised as a problem. We have had a long time to fix it. I see that the Minister is taking notes; one thing he could reassure the House on is that the music will move. Get it moving, because there is no reason why it should be stuck behind the English channel.

We are told that all this is happening—and I am afraid to say that we are going to hear it again today—because it is the wrong type of Brexit. Who knew? Apparently, it was the wrong deal. Variously, it was the wrong Government—the wrong everything—but the hard Brexiteers got everything they wanted. They got everything they asked for and more: no customs union, no freedom of movement, no single market, no European court jurisdiction, no EU institutions and no going back. What we have now is not an accidental form of Brexit that just happened to emerge out of the ashes. It was everything that they fought for decades to achieve. The conclusion is that there is no magic Brexit. There is no Brexit where we get all the benefits of membership without the obligations. There is no Brexit where we have frictionless trade without accepting that the rules are necessary for frictionless trade. There is no cake and eating it.

Lastly, there is the extraordinary position of this Labour Government. They know that Brexit is an absolute and utter disaster. There is no getting away from it. The evidence is right in front of them. I listened to the Prime Minister yesterday, and he was absolutely right to reference Brexit as one of the biggest issues that has damaged this country in the last 10 years. They know that our relationship with our largest trading partner is fundamentally broken, but they have tied themselves up in knots with these unnecessary and useless red lines. Instead of actually fixing the problem, they continue to tinker around the edges. There is a little veterinary agreement here, a little customs improvement there, a bit of mutual recognition, a bit of youth mobility, a bit of this, a bit of that—a bit of a big fat nothing, because that is what it is.

The Government have their reset plans, which I am pretty certain is what the Minister will almost exclusively tell us about, but they are nothing more than the same old tinkering.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I will talk about the impact of the EU referendum on my part of the UK. In ’99, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly was recognised as a region in the EU in its own right and granted objective 1 status, reflecting the fact that we were one of the poorest areas not just in the UK but in western Europe. We received over €1 billion in EU funding between 2014 and 2020. Our economy would not have grown as much as it did over the 20 years of objective 1 status without EU money, but the impact went far beyond economic growth.

To give some examples: on trains, we had a passing loop and points put into our train service, which made it much quicker and better; on buses, we set up park and ride; on cars, we had the dualling of the A30. We had an airport funded, which is now floundering. On renewables, United Downs meant our first geothermal power plant was established, while on culture, we had the Hall for Cornwall. In healthcare we had dental and medical schools; we have a combined university campus in Cornwall for the first time. The impacts were huge, and we lost a great deal because of the referendum. Almost everywhere people go in Cornwall, they can see a distinctive—but far too small—blue sign signifying that a building or something else was funded by the EU. That was transformational for us.

In 2016, the leave campaign promised that Cornwall and the UK as a whole would not be worse off. That promise has fallen short. We did get shared prosperity funding from the Government afterwards and, along with the other Cornish Labour MPs, I helped to secure the Kernow industrial growth fund for economic growth, but there is a gap: because of that funding, other Government support dwindled. We are now looking forward to a devolution deal, as the Prime Minister mentioned yesterday, to make sure that some of that capacity and growth is restored.

The impact on our rural communities has been significant, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) pointed out: particularly on our fishers, who were sold out by the leave campaign, and on our farmers, who had a rocky and uncertain road out of the common agricultural policy and the unhelpful trade deals that we had to deal with. Fortunately, we now have a new land use strategy and the environmental land management deal, and we are working our way out of that. On exports, this Government are looking at a new EU trade and veterinary deal as well.

[James Naish]

I think we need to be really explicit about the impact on farmers. It costs £200 for health certificates on each consignment with physical checks on dairy, fish and red meat. My hon. Friend does a huge amount of work on behalf of her constituents who are farmers, but does she agree that that £200 figure should not be forgotten in debates like this? It is a significant burden on our farmers.

[Jayne Kirkham]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, which I was rushing through due to lack of time. The impact on farmers has been huge in so many ways, particularly with exports and imports. It is really important that the sanitary and phytosanitary agreement takes that into account. We are lucky in that we are hoping for a fast outcome on that agreement, to try to mend some of the terrible damage that has been done to our food sector.

To conclude, perhaps the most pernicious aspect—maybe even more than the financial trauma—was the way that the Brexit vote split us as a society and hardened and coarsened our discourse. Families fell out. We are still polarised, quick to anger and less tolerant. Politicians and the media—all of us, really—had a part to play in that, and that is taking even longer to fix.