Brexit and Foreign Affairs

Matt Warman Excerpts

Monday 26th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard). We have a shared interest in the voyage of the Mayflower, on which I look forward to working together. I like to think of Boston as where it started. Some people would say that Plymouth was merely a stop on the way across the Atlantic, but we can have that debate later.

Brexit defines not only the election we have just endured but the state of my constituency over the past 10 to 15 years. It is right that Brexit is, in large part, the focus of this Gracious Speech. Thinking back over what has happened to my constituency over that period, we have seen huge changes. In some ways, the agricultural industry has been supercharged by the huge number of new migrant workers and by changes in industrial practice, but we have also seen huge changes to the town of Boston, in particular, and to Lincolnshire as a whole.

Those changes did not come with the democratic consent of my constituents, and the changes placed huge pressure on the public services in my constituency. It is a testament to all previous Members of this House that we did not even have an argument about the benefits of being in the European Union, never mind win it. Now, the fact is that if we were to seek to vote down this Gracious Speech, or indeed to undermine much of its content, we would be undermining democracy itself. I do not say that in a bid to ask people not to oppose it, but, overall, the fact that we are leaving the European Union was not only in the manifestos of both major parties but is very much on the minds of my constituents. Seventy-six per cent. of those constituents turned out to vote in the referendum, with 76% of them voting to leave. We must respect that result as we look to the future.

With that in mind, I pose two questions. First, what will the future of our country outside the European Union mean for the farming industry? That is closely linked to my second question, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, on what many of my constituents tell me was the No. 1 issue when they voted to leave the European Union: immigration.

I plead that we acknowledge that the process we are going through will, in part, supercharge an ongoing process of mechanisation. I believe that the changing availability of labour will see more and more farmers in my constituency invest in more and more machines that enable them to be infinitely more productive and require less labour, but the fact is that they will require significant amounts of labour in the future. Before being a member of an expanded European Union, we had a successful seasonal agricultural workers scheme, and I hope that that work permit scheme can, in some form, be quickly reconstituted to provide stability for the agricultural industry, just as today we heard the Prime Minister seek to provide stability for the many of my constituents who came from eastern Europe to make their home in Boston and Skegness. I hope that today they find themselves in a better position than they were in earlier this week.