Government’s EU Exit Analysis

Pat McFadden Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I have huge respect for the right hon. Lady on this issue. Does she agree that we would not be hearing any of this stuff about the reports being negotiation-sensitive if the Government could lay their hands on a single report that said there would be economic benefits to Brexit, rather than economic costs?

[Anna Soubry]

This is an astonishing idea. The right hon. Gentleman—he is definitely my Friend today—seems to be saying that if there was a report saying that going off the cliff or some other madness would be beneficial to our economy, the Government might publish it, because it would help in their dealings with the hard Brexiteers. Of course, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right.

What the Government have done, to their credit, is to ask the objective analysts to go away and look at the options, albeit apparently not their preferred option—although we have made that point, so I will move swiftly on—and they have come back, having no doubt done their job, as they always do, thoroughly, openly, honestly and exceptionally well. We now know that these reports were prepared, and apparently some Ministers have already seen them. According to reports, I think in The Times, Cabinet Ministers were to go and see them under lock and key. They were to read them, they were not to take in their phones and most certainly not to make any notes, and they were to inform themselves, so that finally our Cabinet could perhaps come to a conclusion about what we want from Brexit. Yet apparently these very same reports are so useless and flawed—they are based on weird modelling and cannot be trusted—that they have to remain top secret. They were not good enough—or were they?—to inform Cabinet members. It is nonsense.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I want to make a few points about the politics of all this and what that says about our politics. I do not need to go over the pantomime of the Government saying that there were economic assessments in excruciating detail, then that there were none at all, and then that there were two lever arch files. That has all been well documented. We then saw this week’s report, and what has the response been? Yesterday, the Minister turned up at the Dispatch Box to rubbish the Government’s own document and to attack the civil service and the Bank of England in tones more hostile than I have ever heard a Minister use. He capped it all by telling us that discussing such things was really not in the national interest and that it would undermine our negotiating position. The first thing that we can learn from this saga is that winging it has become a point of principle for those in charge. I do not know whether we reached this point through carelessness, a tendency to busk or something worse, but the way that things have been handled has been extremely corrosive of trust in the Government and has left people asking not only about what is known, but what is being hidden.

The documents say that in every scenario modelled, the country will be poorer than it would otherwise be, with the effect being felt most keenly in sectors such as chemicals, clothing, manufacturing, food and drink, cars and retail, and felt most deeply in the west midlands, the north-east and Northern Ireland. Those sectors and those parts of the country collectively employ millions of people and generate billions in tax receipts for our public services. If the lower growth depicted in the documents transpired, we would have lower incomes and a lower standard of living than would otherwise be the case.

How should we react to this? My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) is correct. If the Government had a forecast showing economic benefits from Brexit, we would not hear these arguments about negotiation sensitivity. It has been said far too much that those who ask questions are somehow undermining the national interest. Ministers are trying to create a world in which they are the sole owners of information, and in which the public and Parliament are allowed to see that information only when Ministers decide.

This is not just a conventional political argument; it is an attempt to downgrade the role of representative democracy. The irony is not hard to see, because the real danger to the national interest comes not from asking questions about the economics of Brexit but from pursuing a policy that we know will make the country poorer than it otherwise would have been, in order to satisfy the nationalist ideology driving the project. It comes from putting the appeasement of a faction within a political party above the leadership task of securing the greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people. The Government are governed not by the analysis but by those political imperatives, which is the real point.

Those of us who want to see the information do not want to see it because we are necessarily saying that the forecasts are correct to every decimal point. That is not really why Ministers do not want to publish the forecasts or do not want us to see them. The exam question for them is not the economic consequences of Brexit but how to keep the right wing of the Conservative party happy.

The right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), who is no longer in her place, told us the other day that there are 35 “hard Brexiteers”. The reason why the Government rubbish the economics is that, for them, it is not about the economics. My plea is for honesty and for Ministers to say, and to admit, that they actually do not care, first and foremost, about the economics of Brexit. This is about putting politics above the economics. It is about keeping the Tory party together and, in particular, it is about appeasing the right wing of the Tory party. I cannot think of anything that downgrades the national interest more than that.