Covid-19: Future UK-EU Relationship

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

I want to start by talking about the catalogue of demonstrated Brexit costs, which grows almost unceasingly. I continue to be told by constituents of how it will cause massive damage to their businesses, and I am going to highlight just one of the most recent examples.

Leith and Edinburgh have a long association with the European wine trade—back as far as the 13th century—and it continues today. Raeburn Fine Wines, with premises in Leith, Edinburgh and London, has been telling me about the effects of the Brexit proposal on the wine trade. Perhaps surprisingly, the UK accounts for a large share of the world trade in fine wines, but that is under threat. Import certificates for EU wines will add business costs and near impossible bureaucracy to the uphill challenge of surviving the covid recession.

Wine is not the only high-quality sector facing an uncertain future. The recent announcement of the membership of the Trade and Agriculture Commission showed that the Government intend to break their promise to farmers to protect food standards post Brexit. The financial services sector also features heavily in my constituency, and it faces being locked out of EU markets or migrating to EU nations to protect its access. Universities face losing research cash. The health service faces losing access to essential supplies, including any new vaccine for the virus causing the current pandemic. Our fishing industry is about to be sold out by this Government, who will be handing out quotas with abandon. The list goes on and on.

Brexit was already a damaging prospect. Add the global pandemic, the trade negotiations going worse than anyone predicted and the OBR forecast of one in eight soon being out of work, and it is not clear to me and many others why anyone other than the blindest zealot would plough on unthinkingly. Now those zealots want to tie an unwilling Scotland to the handcart on the road to hell, with an internal market that once again renders the wellbeing of the people of Scotland secondary to the financial considerations of the south-east of England. No room for nuance or subtlety in the brave, new Brexit; no room for devolution in the sunny uplands of broken Britain.

The Government are so frightened of debate that the Minister for the Cabinet Office is in hiding and they have sent expendable cannon fodder instead. That points to the fact that Government Ministers do not seem to understand the four nations. Some of them famously think that there is no border. They think that wisdom rests in Whitehall and all must comply. They have lost even the limited vision that once embraced England’s northern powerhouse—that, too, will be ground down in the new Tory version of Mao’s long march. No dissent will be tolerated, no differentiation accepted. At a time when the best economic solutions for Scotland, Wales and for huge parts of England diverge hugely from the solutions offered in Parliament, uniformity will be enforced. Four legs shall be good and two legs shall be bad.

The proposed UK internal market is an infernal insult to nations that need different frameworks and support; to the people who will suffer the aftermath of the pandemic; and to those who aspire to something better than the fag end of British imperialism and exceptionalism. What has become breathtakingly clear during the coronavirus pandemic is that the UK Government are dysfunctional and incompetent. I shall give a few examples. Ministers and Spads who went roaming around England in flagrant abuse of the rules remain in post; confusing and inconsistent messages are sent out; financial help for those affected was provided at first, then withdrawn; figures on testing capacity have been massaged until they are meaningless.

It is a shambolic mess, much like the Government’s Brexit negotiations and trade talks. Failure mounts upon failure’s shoulders until the combined weight is too much to bear. The bluster and bravado is no substitute for clear thinking and proper action. The confusion and dither, the stumbling up cul-de-sacs and falling over kerbstones are not statesmanship—they are just bluster and bombast. It is a sad and embarrassing caricature of a Government who talk populism and serve elitism.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I think we have to move on—sorry. I call Lee Anderson.

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[Jacob Young (Redcar) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn). He speaks passionately for Aberdeen, and I commend him for that. I am grateful to the Scottish National party for tabling this motion to extend the transition period, as it allows me to remind my constituents why they voted for me last year. On 31 January, the UK left the EU nearly three years after article 50 was triggered, and the people of Redcar and Cleveland celebrated with a great party at the Citz Club in Redcar. They celebrated this passage into the new Europe with a deep sense of relief because, time and again during those three years, their choice had been questioned, their will ignored and their views belittled. They were told that they did not know what they were voting for, that the people should not have had a say, or that a decision that big should not have been left to the public. So they were asked again, and in December last year, the public backed the Conservatives and gave them their biggest majority since 1987 on a promise that we would deliver on the mandate from the 2016 referendum.

Until now, Redcar has never had a Tory MP, and neither have West Bromwich West, Heywood and Middleton, Dudley North and Rother Valley. I and many of my colleagues on the Government Benches are here because people trusted us to make their voice heard. They put their faith in the Prime Minister and a Conservative Government for the first time ever in our constituencies, because they felt let down by a Labour party that had ignored them for so long. I draw the attention of the House to the empty Labour Benches. Tonight, the Labour party looks set to ignore them once again. Here we are, nearly six months since we left, debating yet another motion aimed at extending the transition period, put forward again by those who refuse to accept the result simply because they did not want it.

It is no surprise to anyone on the Government Benches, or to the public at large, that those who still reject the result of the EU referendum are the very same ones who still refuse to acknowledge that the people of Scotland rejected independence in the 2014 referendum. It seems that the Scottish separatists simply cannot accept the result of any referendum. Well, we on the Conservative Benches trust the people of the United Kingdom, wherever they may be, to make the right choices for them. They put their trust in us to deliver on those choices.

As we count down the days towards the end of the transition period, all the motion would do is add yet more delay and betray that unprecedented trust. What we still do not know, however, is how Sir Keir will vote tonight. We know that he was the architect of Labour’s failed Brexit policy, a rigged second referendum between staying in the EU or staying in the EU without calling it that, but what is his position now? Will he jump on this delaying Brexit bandwagon, or will he respect the result of the referendum? Will he return to blocking, delaying, preventing and doing all he can to stop Brexit, or will he show true leadership and listen to the voice of the people who used to vote for his party?

There is no doubt that the Scottish independence party, the illiberal un-democrats and whatever is left of the Labour party are still hoping for Brexit to be reversed. They are still hoping that it will never properly happen. They do not trust the people of this country, just like the SNP still refuse to trust the people in Scotland in the 2014 referendum. The Opposition parties tonight are revealing their true colours and we must do everything in our power to stand strong while they turn their backs.

I am under no illusion that the principal reason I was elected in December was to get Brexit done for the people of Redcar and Cleveland, which is why I was so proud, as one of my first votes in Parliament, to vote Brexit through. It is why I will proudly walk through the Lobby tonight against any extension to the transition period. We want to reach an agreement with the EU by the end of December, based on a Canada-style free trade agreement. We can achieve that in the time ahead. We are not asking for anything that the EU has not already given to other countries, but if they do not want to extend that to us, we must do what is best for Britain and leave without.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Just a gentle reminder—I did not want to interrupt the full flow—but please do not refer to current sitting Members by their names. Thank you very much.

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[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith). Let me be clear that it is because of our United Kingdom that, by the end of June, nearly 900,000 jobs across Scotland had been protected by the UK Government’s unprecedented support, and the Scottish Government have been allocated an extra £4.6 billion for coronavirus funding.

However, today’s debate is really about revisiting two questions that have been answered: Scotland leaving the UK, which was rejected in 2014, to join, if allowed, the European Union, which the UK collectively voted to leave in 2016. Both referendums were once-in-a-generation votes, and it is our duty to respect the people’s voices. The nationalist obsession with separating themselves from our United Kingdom risks at least half a million jobs, throwing Scottish business into chaos with dither and delay while they wait to see whether they are allowed into the protectionist racket, and the opportunity to export the best of Scotland around the world could be lost. The SNP is desperate to rejoin the European Union and would do so at the cost of its own workers and industries, and fishermen and women are a prime example. Remaining in the common fisheries policy would be detrimental to the health and success of the Scottish fishing industry, and we know that the European Union’s oppressive one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work.

The SNP could have talked about topics that are more pressing to the people of Scotland. In January this year, Scotland had the joint biggest fall in the social and economic wellbeing index. Why the decline? Education is one major part of the fall. Since 2006, PISA—the programme for international student assessment—shows that Scotland has dropped from 11th to 23rd in reading, 11th to 24th in maths, and 10th to 19th in science. Teacher numbers are lower today than when the SNP took power.

However, it is not just PISA that points out the failure of the nationalists in Holyrood. A survey on literacy and numeracy, which the SNP set up, came out with damning figures about what is happening, so what was the First Minister’s response? It was to close it down, dismiss it, and tell the professional statisticians they were wrong. Instead of a data-driven approach, they asked teachers what they thought about every pupil relative to a test that may have been taken at any point in the year. That does not allow proper moderation and applies unfair pressure on teachers, causing impartiality to be thrown into doubt. The SNP choose to play party politics over helping to improve the educational outcomes and destinations of the youth in Scotland.

However, before the SNP tells me that positive destinations have increased, let me point out that it happened because the Scottish Government chose to include zero-hour contracts in their figures—a system that SNP Members regularly lambast. The Scottish Government will also praise their flagship curriculum for excellence, but it is to be investigated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—failure after failure after failure. Let us talk about these issues instead, rather than revisiting the same old arguments that the public of the United Kingdom wish to move on from.

On top of educational failure, let us not forget the new children’s hospital in Edinburgh that was meant to be delivered in 2012 and is now mothballed for the remainder of 2020, costing the taxpayer £1.4 million a month. Let us not forget the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, which tragically saw two children die due to water contamination in 2017, and which saw NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde placed into special measures. Scotland is also now the worst place in Europe for drug deaths, after the highest ever rise in fatalities following an 80% reduction in rehabilitation beds since the SNP came to power.

Let me offer something that Members from the Scottish National party and we on the Government Benches can agree on: where is the Labour party? Rather than showing that it has learned the lessons of December 2019, its Members are hiding. Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge—they try to avoid discussing Brexit, because in private they want to stop it. It is one of the many reasons that people of Stoke-on-Trent North, of Kidsgrove and of Talke rejected them at the ballot box. My constituents overwhelmingly asked to leave the EU in 2016, but they were ignored time and again by the Labour party.

Let us not forget that the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), the architect of Labour’s disastrous Brexit policy, said to Labour members in Dudley in March that he wants to campaign to go back in. Then he told the media in May that he wants to stay out of the EU, yet he cannot walk through the Division Lobbies with us this evening to reject an extension. Time and again, Labour is failing the people of Stoke-on-Trent and the United Kingdom. [Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

No clapping, please.