Matt Warman
Main Page: Matt Warman (Conservative - Boston and Skegness)Department Debates - View all Matt Warman's debates with the HM Treasury
Customs and Borders
Matt Warman Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
I am delighted that this debate has been extended to 5 o’clock, but I am afraid that my duties as Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Northern Ireland Office mean that I will not be here for the wind-ups. I apologise to the House for that.
My constituency, as I have said many times in this place, voted more strongly than anywhere else in the country to leave the European Union, and I, as an individual, voted to remain. I suppose that I am therefore one of those whom the Father of the House teasingly described as someone who has undergone a damascene conversion. One of my constituents suggested that I had undergone a damascene conversion from kamikaze to life support when I voted to trigger article 50.
My starting point is the same as the point that I made when we were fighting the referendum campaign—we have to respect the result. That means that we have to define what we discussed during that campaign. In my constituency, as in many others up and down the country, the two defining points that we discussed were ending freedom of movement and being able to strike our own trade deals around the world. Those two things—although we may not have expressed it in these terms at the time—require us to leave the single market and to leave the customs union.
If we are to respect the way that people voted, it is impossible to get away from those positions, for two very simple reasons. First, freedom of movement is absolutely bound up with our membership of the single market. That point is probably more accepted by those who have called this debate than the second point. On the customs union, no one on any sensible side of the debate—certainly no one in my constituency—is arguing for a compromise in which we are unable to control our own trade policy but have to take the rules that the European Union makes. No one is suggesting that there is a compromise that both upholds the result of the referendum in allowing us to go and strike our own trade deals around the world and allows us to remain in the customs union. I simply do not see how today’s proposal would allow us to respect that.
Antoinette Sandbach
Many of my constituents say to me that they voted to join a common market. If there were a compromise that delivered a common market but took them out of the political institutions of the EU, they would accept that as an acceptable compromise, and it would bring together remainers and leavers.
Matt Warman
I would like to agree with my hon. Friend, in the sense that if the European Union were to offer an option that said, “Remain in the customs union and remain in the single market, but you don’t have to have freedom of movement and you do have the ability to go and strike your own trade deals”, then a lot of us would think that that was a very attractive move. However, that would make it a better deal to be outside the EU than to be in it.
I simply do not see how it is a sustainable, coherent position to think that the European Union would offer us that sort of compromise, so we have to live, as Opposition Members have so often said, in the real world. That requires us to say that people did not vote for the European Court of Justice to continue to have its rulings being valid in this country when we play no part in that organisation, and people did not vote for us to have no remedies on our trade policy. What people voted for, whether some in this place like it or not, is a clean break, because that is what allows us to have the control that they wanted. Many Conservative Members accuse the Opposition of trying by subterfuge to force us to remain in the European Union. However, the more we pursue the line that we can remain in the customs union but also do our own trade deals, the more we not only undermine faith in the referendum result overall but undermine faith in democracy as a whole, and we have to preserve that above all else.
Matt Warman
My right hon. Friend proclaims, “Rubbish!”, from a sedentary position. I think he knows me well enough to know that I am not an ideological hard Brexiteer, by any means. However, surely we all have to accept that we should be ideological about preserving the primacy of democracy. If we in this place are not all democrats, then we have a real problem.
Mr Speaker
Order. Before the right hon. Lady intervenes, can I make this point? People are perfectly entitled to intervene, but if they keep doing so, particularly those who have already spoken, they do so knowing that they are stopping other colleagues speaking. Let us be clear about that. Does the right hon. Lady still wish to intervene?
Matt Warman
I was about to say that my right hon. Friend is talked of frequently in my constituency. I say that because I know that she does not seek to undermine democracy. I know that she, of all people, is a democrat. However, the impression that is too often given outside this place is that people here do not trust the result and that they do not trust people out there in this country to have made a decision.
Matt Warman
No, because I will upset Mr Speaker, who has already been very kind.
If we are to respect the result of the referendum and are not to become a silent partner in EU trade deals, we have to ensure that we do not become simply a rule-taker. We have to ensure that all the debates that were gone through in the referendum campaign are upheld and defended. I say gently to my own colleagues that democracy must come first.