European Union (Withdrawal)

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Bowie]

I will not give way; there is far too little time.

For many Members, this will be the first time they have ever voted against this party, after decades of loyal service to it. I know that many have wrestled with their consciences as I have wrestled with mine, and I hear their arguments. This is not an easy decision for anybody, but I will be supporting my Prime Minister this evening. We need to get this deal renegotiated. We need to get this done. We need to leave the EU. Then we can at long last move the country forward.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I rise in opposition to this motion and in support of my Prime Minister, essentially for two reasons. The first is that there is more than a whiff of arrogance in this motion. Too many remain MPs in this place will use any device to try to block Brexit. There are honourable remain Members, but I am afraid that there are too many who are not. The decision was delegated by this place to the people, and they made their decision very clearly. We have been kicking this can down the road for three years and to many outside this Westminster bubble, enough is enough. I remind the House that the majority of Members who are going to support the motion voted in favour of triggering article 50, which said, very simply, that we would be leaving the EU with or without a deal. We have twice extended that time line, and that is why people outside this place are getting very frustrated with many colleagues here tonight.

Apart from the arrogance, this decision is ill-informed. It will make a bad deal more likely. Anyone who has negotiated in business or with any organisations will know that if the other side believes that one is not prepared to walk away, it will make for a worse deal—it is a simple fact of life. Most of us in this place prefer a good trade deal to no deal, but the guaranteed way of getting a bad deal is to take no deal off the table. Business people in this House, and many who have negotiated deals, will understand that.

This decision is also ill-informed from an economic point of view. No deal has been derided without examining a lot of the economic facts. Time does not allow here and now for those points to be made—[Interruption]—and too many people are talking anyway, so they would not hear them. I would merely suggest that people reflect on the fact that half of the EU’s top 10 trading partners trade on WTO no-deal terms with parties outside the EU—it is a simple fact of life.

[Jamie Stone]

I sincerely hope that I am not seen to be an arrogant Member of this House. I always try to represent the interests of the far north of Scotland. Will the hon. Gentleman, and others in the Chamber, at least accept that a no-deal Brexit would ruin the crofters and sheep farmers in my constituency, and that would lead to the second highland clearances?

[Mr Baron]

If there is no deal—most of us in this place want a good trade deal—there would be tens of billions of pounds to help those sectors of the economy and industry to readjust, as we have seen in previous economic cycles. It is a fact of life.

Too many people, not just in this place but outside, ignore the fact that investment and jobs are about comparative advantage. It is about how competitive our tax rates are and how flexible our labour markets are, and what our financial expertise is like—we have London and we have Edinburgh. What about our R&D and top universities? In aggregate, those are more important than WTO tariffs of 3% to 5%.

If proof of the pudding were required, with all the talk in the past few years about no deal being better than a bad deal, industry has been fully aware that no deal has been a distinct possibility and what have we seen economically? We have seen record low unemployment, record manufacturing output and record investment. This country attracted more inward investment last year than France and Germany put together. It comes down to economic reality. I am afraid that some Members of the House, in coming to their decision tonight, have not considered the economic facts.