EU Membership: Economic Benefits

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We have 50 speakers who want to get in. I want to get them all in, but I cannot do that with very long interventions; they have to be short and sweet and get to the point.

[Stephen Gethins]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point about the health aspects that we all benefit from in a large range of ways.

My hon. Friend also mentioned that the European Union makes us greener. I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will join me in congratulating the Scottish Government, who have met their world-leading climate change targets four years ahead of schedule, with very little help from this place but plenty from co-operation with our European partners. We have worked together on the environment. She mentioned air quality. A number of years ago, complaints about acid rain affecting Germany’s forests led to air quality directives that are benefiting each and every one of us.

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[Stephen Gethins]

I will happily take an intervention from a Conservative Member—they are all helpfully badged.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Can I help a little? I say to people who are going to speak very shortly and want to remain on the list: if you intervene, I am going to drop you down the list. Make your minds up—you cannot have it both ways at the expense of everybody else.

[Mrs Murray]

I will not intervene, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Okay, thank you.

[Stephen Gethins]

Working with our partners has made us greener, and wealthier in terms of the industries in the sector.

Collaboration with our partners has made us smarter through our universities, not least the University of St Andrews, where I see the benefits daily. Since 2014, Scotland has received over £200 million from the EU science fund, and is set to gain £1.2 billion by 2020. The opportunities for collaboration and from the students that come here benefit us all and enrich our campuses.

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[Ian Blackford]

The right hon. Gentleman is making some very powerful points. May I remind the House that we are still living with the consequences of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008? We have the answer to the question he is asking: the stock market has fallen by £80 billion in the past few days as investors recognise the risk to this country if we have a Brexit vote next week. That is the start of the tsunami that he is talking about. Why would we risk the prosperity of the United Kingdom and, indeed, of Europe by taking such a rash action?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Interventions must be short to give everybody a chance to speak.

[Mr Clegg]

I played a role, somewhat thanklessly as it turned out, for five years in the coalition Government—as did my party, although it is not abundantly represented today on the Bench next to me—to try and provide the political stability that the country needed to recover from the cardiac arrest that occurred in 2008. I think it was the right thing to do. A country cannot recover from that kind of trauma if there is constant constitutional and political instability, yet that is what the Brexit camp want wilfully to inflict on this place and on this country. It is astonishing that they want to drag us back into the furnace of that economic disaster from which we are still escaping right now.

My third and final point is that, unlike, I think, every other Member of the House, I actually worked in a relatively lowly manner—in a previous incarnation, before I went into politics—as an international trade negotiator. I was part of the EU trade negotiation team that sought to settle the terms of China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation. I spent months haggling with hard-nosed Russian trade negotiators about the overflight rights paid by British Airways and European airlines for flying over Siberia. I have spent a lot of time with a lot of international trade negotiators, and I know that they are very unsentimental folk. It is almost laughable simply to state it, but the idea is that we could pull out of the world’s largest economic bloc and then say to these unsentimental folk, who have driven such a hard bargain with that bloc of 500 million people, that we want not just the same but better deals and a better set of conditions on behalf of an economy of only 60 million people. Who do the Brexit camp think these negotiators are? They are not stupid or naive: they will just snigger.

I have looked in vain—I scoured the internet this morning—for the apparently many freedom-loving nations that will cut such favourable deals with us as we depart into this world of milk and honey in which, effortlessly, people will give us concessions that they did not give to a bloc of 500 million people. Can we find anyone? Have the Indians said, “Yes, sure, we’ll give you what you want”? Have the Americans, Canadians or Australians said that? Has anyone said it? Not a single country anywhere in the world has said that it will give better terms of trade to the United Kingdom on its own than to the European Union.

So please, if we do one thing between now and next Thursday, by all means let us thrash it out between those who want us to remain in the European Union, flawed though it is and reformed though it must be, and those who want us to go out, but let us not do so on the basis of these falsehoods, this misleading nonsense, this naivety and fantasy, which would do this great country of ours such a terrible disservice.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. After the next speech there will be a five-minute limit.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I now have to announce the result of the deferred Division on the Question relating to local government. The Ayes were 278 and the Noes were 4. Of Members representing constituencies in England, the Ayes were 260 and the Noes were 3, so the Question was agreed to.

[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]

I now introduce a five-minute time limit on speeches.

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[Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, not least because we might have the opportunity to get answers to some important questions. He will be aware that when the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) was asked about the impact on the economy in GDP of Brexit, his answer was, “We don’t know.” He will also be aware that when Diane James, a UKIP MEP, was asked whether visas would be required, the answer was, “We don’t know.” Given that the answer to every question posed to the leave campaign is, “We don’t know”, perhaps the hon. Gentleman could answer these questions now.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We need to have short interventions, not speeches. That was longer than five minutes!

[Sir William Cash]

I can say that I do know. I know because I look at the facts as they are now. The facts I have just given demonstrate that inside the single market we run a monumental trade deficit, while we have an enormous and growing trade surplus with the rest of the world. That surplus is the future. That is the vision. That is the means by which we will get jobs and ensure the future of our children and our grandchildren.

To conclude, it is very simple: this is about who governs us. If we get this wrong, we will not be able to organise and establish a democracy in this country, which is what people fought and died for in not just one world war but two.