Customs and Borders

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Anna Soubry

Thursday 26th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry]

The hon. Gentleman speaks with authority because he knows the reality. He will also know that pharmaceutical batches must be checked to ensure that the quality and ingredients are right. That work has to be done in a European Union country in order for those products to be sold within the European Union, so this pharmaceutical company it is going to replicate exactly the same brilliant labs that it has in Broxtowe and in Nottingham over in Amsterdam. This is the stuff of madness. The company is looking at flying qualified, high-skilled technicians out to Amsterdam on a weekly, if not daily basis, to do the work there. Replication adds to costs, and I have no doubt that it will not be long before the senior managers simply say, “Why on earth are we doing it in the UK, facing the end of the customs union and the single markets, when we could simply go into another country in the European Union and replicate our manufacturing process there?”

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Is my right hon. Friend therefore proposing that we stay members not just of the customs union, but also of the single market?

[Anna Soubry]

I absolutely am. I made it very clear to my constituents when I stood for re-election in Broxtowe last June that I would continue to make the case for the single market and the customs union—oh, and by the way, for the positive benefits of immigration—and they were good enough to give me and our party their vote. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough said, each and every one of us must look deep into our hearts when deciding the future relationship that we will have with the European Union. It is imperative that we put our country and the best interests of our constituents first and foremost—and, in particular, over and above any ideological drive that too many people have—in this most critical of debates.

The final thing I want to say is this: I get rather agitated at the notion that we are about to be global Britain. Why? Because we are already global Britain. I had the great pleasure of going to the far east with David Cameron, and I went to China with George Osborne. Why did we go to these countries? To do trade. In fact, to do more trade; we already trade all around the world. That ability to trade should not be diminished in any way, and it will not be by our membership of the customs union. We have struck up well over 40 deals, and at the heart of those deals we made the case for free trade in a way in which no other European Union member state has done. We are recognised for our strong belief in free trade and we have achieved that by virtue of our membership of the customs union.

I am old enough to remember when we were described as the sick man of Europe, and we were. The reasons that we became such a hugely successful economy was because of our membership of the single market and the customs union. Other Members—especially my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who was undoubtedly around at the time— have referred to Margaret Thatcher’s great speech, when she not only described the single market, but was the finest exponent of it. She believed in the single market. As many of us now know, she promised the Prime Minister of Japan that our country would never leave the single market, and that is why the Japanese invested in our country on the scale that they did.

I hope that the House does not have to divide tonight; nobody wants that. But we all want the best deal for our country, and that is in the customs union—and, by the way, the single market.