European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Committee: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leslie]

Yes. That again gets to this question: are we accidentally bumbling our way through, where nobody has thought about doing an assessment, or, worse, is this work being done but then hidden, covered up and held back from Members of Parliament and from the public at large? I suspect that any serious analysis worth its salt will show that there are some damning consequences of exiting the single market and customs union, and I think that needs to be shared with the wider public.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Brexit Secretary was rather lucky when he appeared before the Select Committee, because having agreed to produce papers, he got out of it by sticking to a narrow definition of “impact assessment”? It was semantics that enabled him to get away with just producing the new documents, which he had hastily produced in the past few weeks, containing bland descriptions of where we are. As the originals are important documents, as these questions have been looked at and as we were told a summary had been sent to the Prime Minister, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the House’s motion meant that whatever documents the Government had that bore on the subject, they should have been produced? The Brexit Secretary should not have been allowed to get away with saying, “Strictly speaking, they’re not impact assessments.”

[Mr Leslie]

I do agree with that. We should not just skim over this question. These are some of the most profound decisions that Parliament will make for a generation and, if we are going to do our jobs correctly as Members of Parliament, having the right facts, getting the evidence, assembling the analysis, making sure we can weigh up the pros and cons of all these matters, and getting readily understandable, plain English explanatory statements of what is actually being proposed are prerequisites. They should be there to make us do our jobs properly.

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[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I want to speak briefly on new clause 21 and amendment 348. I also want to make some points in response to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), because I agree with him on half of what he says and not on the other half. I will keep that stored up for the end to try to persuade him to stay; otherwise, I am sure that cups of tea may beckon for many.

I think that new clause 21, tabled by the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie), is the great confession that we have been waiting for from the pro-Europeans in this House. The new clause has been given the support of some of the most luminous pro-Europeans known to the nation: the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), and that great panjandrum of pro-Europeanism, the distinguished gentleman the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Sir Vince Cable). All have signed this new clause. It says what we Eurosceptics have been saying all along: that the European Union produces its law in a form of gobbledegook—stentorian, sesquipedalian sentences that nobody can ever understand—and that when it is brought into British law, it should therefore be brought in in a plain English translation. The title of the new clause is “Plain English summary”.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s description, actually. Does he agree that a lot of these things are almost as bad as the drafting of the Finance Bills that the Government bring before the House of Commons year after year?

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The Prime Minister said in her Florence speech that she wants market access to continue on the terms existing prior to exit day; that existing structures need to be maintained; that we need to continue with security co-operation; that we need to agree any new processes to implement change and to have enough time to establish a new immigration system; and that we will honour our financial commitments. All those things are quite widely shared desires for the transition period, but we cannot simply rely only on a verbal commitment by Ministers or the Prime Minister. Given how significant this is, it is important that we enshrine in the Bill those objectives for the negotiating process. I commend the Father of the House for that.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when he and I tabled new clause 54, we did so consciously trying to replicate Government policy as stated in the Florence speech? If the Minister would fairly promptly acknowledge and accept that, we should be able to save some time for the other important matters to be discussed in relation to this group.

[Mr Leslie]

That is an excellent suggestion. We could almost add new clause 54 to the copy-and-paste process, given that it is based on the Prime Minister’s own words. Obviously, I personally would like to go further, but the right hon. and learned Gentleman and I tabled the new clause in the spirit of compromise.

New clause 48 serves to highlight the important but often overlooked question of mutual recognition agreements. MRAs are another series of international obligations between countries. The UK has obtained rights for notified bodies to undertake conformity assessments to make sure that standards across the EU are complied with and that UK firms can certify assessments of conformity across that market of 500 million people by virtue of the process that they undertake in the UK. If we lose that MRA process, it could cause immense disruption to many businesses and sectors in the UK.

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[Mr Grieve]

Parliament should certainly be debating these matters. Individual Members will decide whether they want to use the opportunity of this Committee stage for that purpose, but I want to confine myself strictly to the issues in front of us.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

My right hon. and learned Friend has been consistent all the way through our consideration of this Bill in agreeing with me on only the subjects of process, rather than substance, but I quite respect his view and always have the highest respect for his legal and political skills. Does he agree that if amendments actually went beyond the Bill, they would have been ruled to be beyond the scope of the Bill? It is entirely a voluntary decision on his part that he refuses to be drawn into the substance of Government policy, or the stance that the Government are taking on the eve of their starting the first serious negotiations on our future after we withdraw. It is a pity that he has made this self-sacrificing concession.

[Mr Grieve]

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend. Yes, it is a self-denying ordinance, but it was taken for what I think is a good reason, and partly because I did not wish to inflame the debate into something more general. However, despite my best endeavours and making speeches of what I thought was studied moderation, I seem to have been singularly unsuccessful, but that is merely a reflection of the fevered atmosphere in which this Committee meets.

I have to accept that I did raise the temperature a bit on amendment 381, because when it was first presented to the Committee, I expressed myself in respect of it in very strong terms indeed. I did so not because I was making some statement that I refused to contemplate the day of exit as being 29 March 2019 at 11 pm, but because I considered that to introduce that date into the Bill as a tablet of stone made absolutely no sense at all for the very reason that I sought to highlight in my intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin). In actual fact, that amendment would make it harder to move the date forward if we had wish to do so at the conclusion of the negotiations, because that would require a statute. I know that statutes can be implemented quite quickly in this House, but that process would nevertheless take significantly longer than the alternative. I could not see why we were losing the sensible flexibility provided by the way in which the Bill was originally drafted.

Underlying all this, there appears to be a sort of neurosis abroad that the magical date might somehow not be reached or, if it were to be reached, might be moved back. I am afraid that I cannot fully understand that neurosis of my right hon. and hon. Friends, but it is there nevertheless. It may give them some comfort to have in the Bill this statement of the obvious. However, it is worth bearing in mind that we are leaving on 29 March 2019 as a result of the article 50 process, unless the time is extended under that process, and we are doing so as a matter of international law even if the European Communities Act 1972 were to survive for some mistaken reason, which would cause legal chaos and put us in a very bad place.

In order to try to reassure my right hon. and hon. Friends and to give out the message that this is a process Bill, I am prepared to go along with things now that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) have so sensibly and creatively come up with a solution that appears to provide what my hon. Friends want and, at the same time, removes what I consider, perhaps in my lawyerly way, to be an undesirable incoherence in the legislation.

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[Mr Baker]

The hon. Lady tempts me to dilate on the details of the implementation period, which are to be negotiated, but that is not my purpose today, because it is not the purpose of this Bill. The purpose of this Bill is to deliver a functioning statute book as we leave the European Union.

With that in mind, I turn to new clauses 10 and 54 on the transitional or implementation period. Both new clauses seek to impose conditions on what form the implementation period the Government are seeking will take. I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe for his new clause, which attempts to write the Prime Minister’s vision for an implementation period into statute. That would be a novel constitutional change. Nevertheless, I welcome it in the sense that it is a ringing endorsement of Government policy. New clause 10, however, differs in some key regards from our vision.

The Government cannot accept these new clauses. The Prime Minister has set out a proposal that is now subject to negotiation. We are confident of reaching that agreement, but it would not be sensible for the Government to constrain themselves domestically in any way while those negotiations continue. We are making good progress, and it is in our mutual interests to conclude a good agreement that works for everyone. We do not want to put the legislative cart before the diplomatic horse.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

In referring to the transitional or the implementation period, my hon. Friend has at various times used phrases straight out of the Florence speech, and he has accepted that the new clause in my name is identical to stated Government policy on the subject. In what way does it restrain the Government’s position to put their own policy in the Bill and ask the Prime Minister, as the new clause does, to seek to attain that which she has declared to be her objective? That is not a genuine reason for rejecting it. He is rejecting it because agreeing with the Florence speech still upsets some of our more hard-line Eurosceptics both inside and outside the Government.

[Mr Baker]

I pick up my right hon. and learned Friend on a couple of things. First, he has used the word “identical”—I did not use it because I have not taken the time to go through his new clause absolutely word for word to check his work.

[Mr Baker]

Of course I have read it—it is here in my hand. I have read it but I have not gone back and done his homework for him to check and mark his work.

I make two points to my right hon. and learned Friend. First, as I said, it would be a constitutional innovation to begin putting statements of policy for negotiations in legislation. That is a good reason not to accept the new clause. The second point—[Interruption.] He says that it is not a good reason. He is the Father of the House and he has occupied many of the great offices of state. I would be interested to know when, in his long and distinguished career, he accepted that principle in legislation.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

I have never previously seen members of the Government debate a clear exposition of Government policy from the moment it is first announced. That gives rise to serious doubts about exactly what the Government are going to pursue in the transition deal, and these exceptional and unprecedented circumstances are doing harm to Britain’s position. I cannot see what harm would be done by giving the approval of the whole House to the Government’s stated objectives in the Bill. The fact that it has not been done before is not an argument against it; it answers a situation that has not happened before, either.

[Mr Baker]

My right hon. and learned Friend has caught himself in a contradiction. In this exchange, he has rested his argument on knowing exactly what the Government’s policy is, but in his last intervention he said that he did not know what it was.

My second point concerns subsection (2) of my right hon. and learned Friend’s new clause—[Interruption.] I would just like to make this point. The subsection states:

“No Minister of the Crown shall appoint exit day if the implementation and transition period set out in subsection (1) does not feature in the withdrawal arrangements between the UK and the European Union.”

That would cause a problem if the new clause were accepted and we reached the point at which the treaties no longer applied to the United Kingdom. We would have legal chaos—my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) talked about this earlier—if we had not commenced this Bill when the treaties ceased to apply. For both those reasons, we simply could not accept the new clause.

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[Kate Hoey]

No, thank you.

We are disproportionately penalised by the common external tariff, so we are actually suffering from being part of the customs union, although it might have helped at one stage. In the future, we have to look outwards and globally. Of course, we cannot sign free trade agreements until we leave. I personally want us to be able to sign and apply them during the implementation period. Let us not forget that everything that the EU says we must do during the implementation period is up for negotiation. We have to be very clear about this: during those two years, we want to be able to go ahead and do the things that we left the European Union to do. We should not completely align ourselves with every dot and comma of EU legislation.

What has upset me most in this debate—a lot of it has come from my own party, but it has also come from the Conservative party—is the negativity about this whole issue that somehow says that we are such an unimportant, small country that leaving the European Union will destroy us for the rest of our lives and destroy our country’s economic future. That is just so wrong.

I believe that we need more optimism. During its existence, the EU has shown real contempt for national Parliaments and their political activities. It has shown real contempt for electorates. It showed real contempt by forcing the Greek Prime Minister out of his job and through its enforcement of huge, huge cuts on Ireland. The EU does not tolerate the political independence and democratic integrity of the modern European nation, and we should know that in this Parliament. When we talk of parliamentary democracy, let us not forget just how many years we have lived without true parliamentary democracy in this country.

I believe that we should be optimistic. We should not see this as some people—perhaps even some members of the Government—seem to see it: as almost a burden that we have to get through as we say, “Yes, we are leaving, and it is a terrible pity, but we are going to make it work just about.” I want us to be optimistic and to be out there saying, “This can work. This can be great.” We are a great country, so let us get on with it. I am delighted that we have got through this Committee stage.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), who represents the part of London in which I live when I am down here working in the House of Commons. We do not agree on this subject. During the debates on this Bill, she has voted with the Government almost as many times as I have voted against the Government. We are going neck and neck, which has been the position between us for the very many years we have both been in this House. We have diametrically different views.

I am afraid that I do not recognise the hon. Lady’s description of the European Union. In our 45 years of membership, it has helped us to become a more significant political force in the world in looking out for our interests, and it has been one of the fundamental bases of our giving ourselves a modern, successful economy, but this is not the time for a general debate.

I speak to new clause 54, which I tabled in co-operation with the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Mr Leslie). The new clause has been signed by a number of Members from both the major parties in this House. As I said in an earlier intervention, compared with the debates on other things, it should be quite easy to get this amendment passed because we drafted it to be entirely consistent with stated Government policy.

New clause 54 seeks to insert the policies set out in the Prime Minister’s Florence speech into the Bill, thereby including that part of what we have so far achieved by way of clear policy, so we can proceed further with the full approval of this House. I know perfectly well that the Minister who drew the short straw of answering today’s debates would immediately turn to some interesting, original and rather obscure arguments why this new clause should not be accepted, which has been the pattern throughout our eight days in Committee.

There have been hardly any concessions of principle. When issues of great moment have been debated, it has been unusual for a Minister to be allowed to engage with that principle. What happens is that a very long brief is delivered, some of it quite essential—this is not a criticism of either the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker), or other Ministers, and I do not envy the role in which they find themselves of holding the line on this Bill—in which a Minister goes into tremendous legalistic, administrative and even constitutional niceties without actually debating the subject.

We have already talked about amendment 7, which was passed against the Government. The amendment was all about whether this House should have a meaningful vote on the agreement before the Government bind themselves to it. The Minister on that occasion, the Minister of State, Ministry of Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), never joined the debate about a meaningful vote. Indeed, today’s Minister would not when he was drawn into going back into where we are on amendment 7. All kinds of bizarre arguments were produced on why it was not suitable to put this in the Bill, and the House had to assert that it is not going to allow this Government to commit themselves to things that will be of huge importance to future generations, probably affecting our political and trading position in the world for many decades to come, without their first getting approval from this House of Commons for whatever it is they want to sign up to. New clause 54 is an attempt to minimise the risk of that happening again.

[Ian Paisley]

I recall the Minister asking the right hon. and learned Gentleman to list, after all his 47 years’ experience in this House, one occasion when he, a former Minister, would have put into the Bill what he is suggesting the Government should have put into the Bill. He could not claw anything back from his memory banks to that effect. Surely, what this Minister has said in the arguments he has put to the right hon. and learned Gentleman has completely dismantled new clause 54.

[Mr Clarke]

Parliament will have an opportunity to give its assent to the Government’s approach to the transition deal, which they are on the point of trying to negotiate over the next few weeks. I have never known a Government go into an international agreement and start negotiating something towards a conclusion without giving the House the opportunity to express its views and without subjecting themselves to the judgment of the House on the objectives they are declaring.

This transition deal—I think that this is agreed on all sides—is probably going to be agreed in the next month. We are about to go away for Christmas. Everybody is hoping we will have a clearer idea of the transition or implementation deal by the end of January. As things stand, I do not think this House has ever discussed this—it has never had a debate on the subject. No motion has been put before this House to approve what the Government are seeking to do. If the Government have their way, we are simply going to discover, when they come back from the next step in the negotiations, what exactly they have signed up to.

The reason it is important that we should put down this marker is that I want to stick with what was set out in Florence, which was a Government policy position. At this moment—over the course of this week—the Cabinet is having a discussion. There is an attempt to keep this secret, but, unfortunately, leaks are coming out in all directions, and I sympathise with the Prime Minister on that. The Cabinet is debating whether everyone is prepared to be bound by the Florence speech or whether some of its members want to reopen it and start modifying it. That is why this new clause is a chance to say that if that be the case, the overwhelming majority of Members confirm and approve what was set out in the Florence speech.

I hope that we will not see the extraordinary spectacle of the fear of right-wing Eurosceptics meaning that such lengths are gone to that the Government put a three-line whip on their Ministers and all their Back Benchers to cast a vote against the Florence speech, so that some room is left for them to be able to negotiate further with the Environment Secretary, the Foreign Secretary or whoever it is wanting to reopen it again. The Foreign Secretary made a speech before the Florence speech in which he tried to undermine the Prime Minister’s position going there. When she had made the Florence speech, he wrote an article a few days later—I think that I have this the right way round—putting out a starkly different interpretation of what she had said. This House of Commons has not so far had the opportunity to express an opinion, which is what new clause 54 is about.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

For the most part, this is a fairly benign new clause, but I am not certain, even from listening to him now, what my right hon. and learned Friend’s concern is in subsection (2) of his new clause where it refers to subsection (1). It seems he is concerned that somehow there will not be an implementation period. Alternatively, is it just that that implementation period has never been discussed by Parliament? Is there a fear the Government will try to do the dirty on us? I do not understand why he feels he has to have this provision.

[Mr Clarke]

It is an attempt to rule out both. Before anybody starts resorting to talking about drafting points, which is what has happened on every point of principle we have had in the past seven days of debate, they can all be sorted out on Report. If something in the wording of the new clause raises some serious technical difficulty, the Government should table an amendment on Report to sort it out. I am sure that would face no resistance at all.

[Paul Farrelly]

I have been trawling back through my more recent memory banks. If I am not mistaken, before the Minister was taken to task and dismissed the new clause as a constitutional novelty, which is no argument, he was rather sympathetic to its content, so I was assuming that he might agree with it because it is, after all, in agreement with what the Prime Minister said.

[Mr Clarke]

I shall not go back to waxing too much about the nature of the debates we have been having. We can be clear that it is the fault not of the Ministers but of the brief they have been given to keep things going until the timetable motion comes in, at which point if all is intact, they have made it—that is their job done. Those of us who have been Ministers have probably been in that situation ourselves on various occasions. Just as in the debate about the meaningful vote when the Minister at no stage engaged in the question what sort of meaningful vote the House of Commons should have, on this occasion the Minister has not engaged in any feature of the Florence speech with which he had any reservations. The substance was not challenged by a word that he said, hence my speculating why we might see the extraordinary spectacle of the Government instructing all their Ministers to vote against a prime ministerial declaration of Government policy from which, as far as I can see, the Prime Minister has at no stage personally withdrawn.

[Stephen Doughty]

rose—

[Mr Clarke]

Let me make a little more progress, or I am going to take far too long. I will try to give way later.

So far, in the complete confusion that has surrounded the consequences of the referendum for the past 18 months—I think we all agree that it has been an extraordinary situation since then—the few actual solid advances on policy have been made on only a few occasions. Indeed, the only times that the Prime Minister has set out policy clearly and been able to sign up to it—in the belief and, I think, hope that all her Government might agree to it—were the Lancaster House speech, the Florence speech and last week when she entered into the agreement on the outline of the withdrawal agreement.

I do not want to put the Lancaster House speech into the Bill, because that was the beginning of our problems. I do not know why the Prime Minister went there to interpret and declare the referendum result as meaning that we were leaving the single market and the customs union and abandoning the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. I shall come back to this later, but all our economic problems stem from that. Some people may have argued during the referendum campaign that we should leave the single market and the customs union, but I never met one and I did not read about one in the media. The leading lights of the leavers who were reported in the media—I accept that the national media reporting of the referendum debate was pretty dreadful on both sides, with a very low level of accuracy and content—and particularly the Foreign Secretary emphasised that our trading position would not be changed at all. The Prime Minister changed that in her Lancaster House speech.

The Prime Minister and the Government are free traders. I am a free trader. I keep asserting that we are free traders. The objections to the single market and the customs union that she and the Government give are nothing to do with open trade, which is quite accepted. It is said that we have to leave the single market because it is accompanied by the freedom of movement of workers. Well, as we were running the most generous version of freedom of movement in western Europe before the referendum, if that is the problem—if migration is what we really want to get out of—let us address that and not throw out the baby with the bath water by leaving the single market.

Similarly, I have never heard anybody get up and say what is wrong with the customs union in so far as it is an arrangement that gives a completely open border between ourselves and 27 other countries in Europe. What is wrong with it? Nothing. Apparently, we have to leave the customs union, so that the Secretary of State for International Trade can go away and pursue what I think is this extraordinary vision that we sometimes get given of reaching trade agreements with all these great countries throughout the world that are about to throw open their doors to us without any corresponding obligations on our part, no doubt, to compensate us for the damage that we will do to our trade with Europe. I am afraid that I do not believe that.

I wish to move to my final point, because other people are trying to get in. I have the Florence speech with me. It was a really substantial move forward. Let me just quote the bit on the transition period, which is what I am concentrating on. It says:

“So during the implementation period access to one another’s markets should continue on current terms and Britain also should continue to take part in existing security measures. And I know businesses, in particular, would welcome the certainty this would provide.

The framework for this strictly time-limited period, which can be agreed under Article 50, would be the existing structure of EU rules and regulations.”

Several times since then, the Prime Minister has been courageous enough to make it clear that it means that, during this transition period, we accept the regulatory harmony we have in the single market, we accept the absence of customs barriers in the customs union and we accept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice to resolve disputes.

I have never understood what on earth is supposed to be wrong with the European Court of Justice except that it has the word “European” in its title. A very distinguished British judge is one of the people who is appointed to it. There is no case of any significance that we have ever lost there. The City of London and our financial services industry enjoy a passport for very important trade in the eurozone, particularly all the clearing operations that they have done. We had to go to the European Court of Justice as plaintiffs against the European Central Bank to get that passport. But, no, it is a foreign court, and it will be replaced by an international arbitration agreement of the kind that exists in every other trade agreement in the world. The ECJ is a superior system, but we will not get a trade agreement with any country anywhere of any significance, or with a developed economy, that does not have a mutually binding legal arbitration or jurisdiction of some kind, which resolves disputes under the treaty.

[Geraint Davies]

rose—

[Mr Clarke]

I will conclude if I may. I have already taken longer than I said, so please forgive me.

Let me just touch on this question: how we can get this whole debate into the grown up world and accept the reality that exists in a globalised economy. What do we mean by international trade agreements? What is beneficial to a country such as ours to give us the best base for future prosperity in the modern world? Frankly, at times, some of the debate has taken on an unreal quality.

I will not follow the hon. Member for Nottingham East, my collaborator in this new clause, because he gave a very carefully researched and very clear description of what actually is involved in trading arrangements. The first simple political point I will make is that, at the moment, we have absolutely unfettered access, by way of regulatory barriers, customs and so on, to the biggest and most open free-trade system in the world. Nowhere else has rivalled it. Mercosur failed because it did not have the institutions such as the Court or the Commission; the North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA—is collapsing; and the Americans have pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Everybody wants these deals, but only 28 European nation states have succeeded in getting such an open one. Of course the hon. Member for Vauxhall and others have argued strongly that we voted to leave that. Anything new that we put in by way of tariff barriers, customs barriers or regulatory barriers is bound to damage our position compared with where we are now. That is why we should minimise all those things as far as we can.

It is no good developing some fantasy that we are going to reach an agreement that puts up new barriers to trade—that we are going to get protectionist towards the rest of Europe, while being ultimate free traders towards the rest of the world—without damaging ourselves. Both sides exaggerate, which is pretty typical of most political arguments that take place in any democracy. Once people start putting mad figures on everything, they can get carried away.

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[Mr Duncan Smith]

Excellent. It is always good to take a sedentary intervention from my hon. Friend.

I said I would be brief, so I will bring my remarks to a conclusion. I support the amendments and I congratulate those who drafted them. I want the Government to get through this as best they can. They should listen carefully where there are changes to be made but, if we have to return to this matter on Report, they will certainly have my support in making whatever changes are necessary to accommodate concerns so that we get a Bill that is reasonable, feasible and puts the power back into the House.

I would make one small point, however, to those who opened up this massive debate about what happened during the referendum and the idea that we can guess what was in people’s minds. It was said again and again, as I recall, by the then Prime Minister, by the then Chancellor, by Lord Mandelson and also by many in the vote leave campaign, that voting to leave meant leaving the customs union and the single market. Now, I understand and accept that people might not want to do that—they advance all sorts of reasons for not doing it—but it was said again and again. On the idea that the British people were too stupid to understand what they were voting for, I say that they were right in their decision and made a decision that was a lot more intelligent than people give them credit for.

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

When that was said—it probably was said by one or two campaigners on the remain side during the referendum campaign—it was used as an argument against voting to leave. The reaction of leave campaigners was to dismiss it, saying it was the politics of fear, that people were being alarmist in talking about leaving the single market and that in fact our trading arrangements would remain absolutely unchanged, because the Germans had to sell us their Mercedes. That was the role it played in the referendum campaign.

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I always like to take an intervention from my right hon. and learned Friend. We agree on many things, but not on this, it has to be said. He will remember that, when he was Lord Chancellor, I supported him in getting through his very good and far-reaching reforms—I wish they had all been put through, but they were not, as he knows. To that extent, I have long supported him, but on this I do not fully agree with him. I think it was clear. It is no good saying that “some” people on the remain side said it. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor were the leaders of the remain campaign, certainly on the Government Benches, but also from the stand point of the country, and they were very clear on this. I do not recall anyone—I certainly did not—saying, “No, no, we’ll stay in the single market and customs union.” I have always made the point that leaving means leaving the Court of Justice, the customs union and the single market. Voters were, I believe, clear about that, but we can all debate and rerun the arguments.