Oral Answers to Questions

Matthew Pennycook Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend raises a point that we have already raised with Michel and the remainder of the team. At the moment, the Union’s negotiating team are taking the approach of stressing what they term legal responsibilities, and we are challenging them. When we get to the end of that, we will make some decisions about political and moral responsibilities, and also negotiating outcomes, and that is where the decision will, I suppose, be made.

[Matthew Pennycook (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)]

The Government took flexibility to new heights over the summer, taking just under three weeks to jettison one of only two proposals set out in their customs arrangement paper on the basis that they represented “blue sky thinking”. Can the Secretary of State tell us how many of the other proposals set out in the various future partnership papers are effectively just creative ideas that are unlikely to survive contact with reality?

[Mr Davis]

I do not think the hon. Gentleman was paying attention the day before yesterday: I said to him then that blue sky thinking, talking to an American audience, is a description of an imaginative approach.