EU Membership: Economic Benefits

Debate between Nick Clegg and Lindsay Hoyle

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[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.

Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Nick Clegg and Lindsay Hoyle

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

As the Member of Parliament for Wyre and Preston North, I represent huge tracts of Duchy of Lancaster land. Henry IV set up the Lancastrian inheritance separately from the Crown and its entities to follow through the male heirs, except where the monarch was a female. Under that separate arrangement for passing on the private possessions of the Duke of Lancaster, inheritance currently remains with the male heir where a male is a child of a monarch. Therefore, if the Queen were to have both a boy and a girl, would we not be in danger of splitting an inheritance so that the changes ensured that the female inherited the position of monarch but the title of Duke of Lancaster went to the son?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Before the Deputy Prime Minister answers, may I say that we need shorter interventions? I hope that that can be taken on board.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

As my hon. Friend knows, this Bill deals only with the succession to the throne and not with issues relating to the succession of hereditary titles. We can have a perfectly valid separate argument about that, but it is not within the very narrow scope of this Bill, all the reasons for which have been explained by the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith).