Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Kwasi Kwarteng

Thursday 27th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

We are absolutely mindful of the risk that the hon. Gentleman describes. He knows that the Government are fully committed to ensuring that the dark days of the 1970s do not return to Northern Ireland.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I see that yesterday the Minister tried to mitigate fears about a no-deal departure by saying that it

“is not a world war.”

That might be an insight into his thinking, but is “less damaging than a world war” really a benchmark for success? Does he agree with the Security Minister, the right hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace), who said:

“A no-deal situation would have a real impact on our ability to work with our European partners to protect the public”?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s questions, as always, but I would like to point out that he has wrenched my comments completely out of context, and they were made not yesterday but on Monday. I was merely echoing what the former Governor of the Bank of England, the highly respected economist, Mervyn King, has said about our GDP growth since 1800. On an annualised basis, there would be very little impact, even in the case of no deal.

EU Membership: Second Referendum

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Kwasi Kwarteng

Monday 3rd December 2018 Westminster Hall

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I will absolutely make the comparison and I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Economic Community and now the EU had been a top-line issue for 45 years. If it had not been, why was there a referendum in 1975, the year I was born? This issue has gone on for two generations, so I suggest respectfully to the hon. Gentleman that the electorate did have a sense of what they wanted.

We cannot go down the route of simply relitigating referendums when we do not like the result, because that essentially is what this boils down to. That is essentially what is driving the call for a second vote—the so-called people’s vote. Former Prime Minister Mr Blair has said as much. He makes no bones about the fact that he thinks that Brexit is a disaster and the way to reverse Brexit is by means of a second referendum. It is an instrument by which one can reject the will of the people as expressed in June 2016. Let us not be fastidious or naive about this. The people who generally are driving for a people’s vote and a second referendum want to reverse the result. They think—mistakenly, in my view—that the way to reverse the result is to get a second referendum, which will confirm or reconfirm our membership of the EU. I think they are wrong and, as I have said, the Government have made a clear undertaking that we will not have a second referendum.

The question on 23 June 2016 was clear; it was absolutely unequivocal. The question was simply:

“Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”

Many of us in the Chamber took part in the referendum campaign—some with Vote Leave and some with the Stronger In or remain campaign. It was a very hard-fought and widely trailed discussion. Some people have said that the quality of the debate was not good enough or that some pieces of information were withheld, but generally it was an extraordinary exercise in democracy. As has been said many times, it was the single biggest vote that this country had ever seen in a general election or any other kind of election. And as we all know, 17.4 million votes were cast to leave the EU. That was the highest number of votes cast for anything in UK electoral history.

What those calling for a second vote—the so-called people’s vote—are saying is that the people should think again. Essentially, they are saying, metaphorically, to the electorate, “Your homework was not good enough. Please do it again.” As the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton suggested, the electorate—certainly in my constituency—are quite a cussed lot. I do not see the floods of support for remain described by others. I strongly suspect—this is my personal view—that a second referendum would not deliver a different result.

That is irrelevant, however, because the Government are tasked to enact the will of the majority of the people, as expressed in the 2016 referendum. All major political parties were committed to respect the outcome. We fought a general election on the basis that we would leave the EU. As has been said, 499 Members of this House voted to invoke article 50, which we all knew would involve a two-year process, at the end of which we would leave the EU. All of that is in the public record and everyone understood the consequences of it. Furthermore, the Labour party committed in its 2017 manifesto to leave the EU and the customs union. More than 80% of the British people voted either Conservative or Labour in the general election. They voted for parties that were absolutely committed to respect the 2016 referendum result. That is exactly what the British people expect us to do.

I fully understand the emotional impetus behind the call for a second referendum, but I think it is a ruse by which people seek to stay in the EU. We are pledged to leave the EU. The full democratic process of the referendum delivered a clear directive, which this Government hope to deliver. The call for a second referendum opens up a huge question about the levels of trust in our Government and our democracy. We have to respect the will of the people. To do otherwise and say, “We will have a second referendum and try to reverse the result of the first referendum, because you got the wrong answer first time,” is not only an abnegation of democracy, but profoundly disrespectful of the electorate. As a Minister, I would not want to see that.

We have to look at the nature of the referendum itself. It was a long, four-month campaign, but we cannot just think of the referendum as those four months in 2016, because this debate had been going on for decades, not only in my party but in the Labour party. I am old enough—just—to remember the 1983 general election, in which the Labour party was pledged to leave the EEC. That created great divisions and caused great debate within the Labour party. My own party has been a scene of great discussion and lively debate on this issue. It is not right to say that those four months of the referendum campaign in 2016 encapsulated the whole debate, because it has been ongoing for 45 years and more.

I sense that I am in a room of clairvoyants, because everyone has told me that the Government will lose the vote on Tuesday. I have been in the House long enough—let us see what happens. People have asked, “What about plan B?” If I knew plan B, I would not divulge it in this Chamber—I assure hon. Members of that—so the question is redundant. I remind hon. Members that the choice is between a deal and no deal, because, as others have suggested, the hourglass is running quickly. We are running out of time. Article 50 was invoked on 29 March 2017. It does not take a mathematician to work out that 29 March 2019 will be the end of our formal membership of the EU. Nor does one have to be mathematically gifted to work out that there are fewer than four months between today and exit day. In that timeframe, the notion that the Government will throw off their policy of the last two and half years and then bring in some parliamentary device for a second referendum to take place before the exit day is, frankly, ridiculous. We do not have the time to do it and people would feel that it would be extremely irresponsible to do so.

I could spend the next hour and three quarters trying to convince hon. Members of the merits of the deal. I do not want to do that, because they probably want to do other things. However, I will say that the deal does precisely what the electorate voted for. On immigration, we have heard about restrictions to freedom of movement.

[Paul Blomfield]

Given that the Minister has raised the question of immigration, does he agree that it is incumbent on the Government to do as they previously promised and publish the immigration White Paper before we vote on the deal?

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The shadow Minister is trying to tempt me down paths I do not want to go down. We will have a plan. At the moment, the Government are focused on winning the vote on Tuesday and getting on with Brexit, as so many of our constituents want them to do. My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam said that someone was bored of Brexit. I have used that phrase myself—not of me: I love Brexit and am fascinated by it, but a lot of my constituents want to get the ball rolling. They want to get on with wider political debate and to get on with their lives. They see that the deal is a way of getting to the finishing post of 29 March. Anything we do to jeopardise that would not only frustrate Brexit, but be a great abnegation of democracy.

The debate about our relationship with Europe will not end with our formal exit from the EU. There will be all sorts of ongoing discussions and debates about bits of the EU that we might want to pay into and others that we might not. That is the nature of democracy: we can debate it. It will not be set in stone, but we will have an evolving and, I hope, co-operative and fruitful relationship with the EU. However, we seek to close the question of membership of the EU and we will formally end it on 29 March.

People have talked about the money—the £39 billion. The figure of £35 billion to £39 billion has been quoted as a divorce payment. That is actually a small fraction of the £100 billion that we saw in the newspapers and the other huge amounts that were trailed across the media. Looking at our 46-year commitment to the EU, we see that £39 billion works out as four years of net payments to the EU—what I call the annual subscription.

The annual subscription in the 2014 to 2020 budget period was about £10 billion a year net, depending on how it is calculated. After the payment and the implementation period, we will not have to pay a penny piece. The golf club subscription, as one of my constituents once referred to it, will be over. We will not be paying into the common kitty to the tune of £10 billion a year. We will secure—we hope and confidently expect—a free trade deal. We will be able to co-operate with the EU, but our formal membership and the annual tribute or payment that we used to make will be over.

My last point is about sovereignty, which was raised by the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton. People wanted to have a sense that they were electing to this Parliament Members who would exercise the sovereign will of the British people and make our own laws. That is a fundamental point that cannot be captured in trade deals, money or economics; it is about fundamental independence and sovereignty. That was a big driver of the vote and this deal delivers it. I am pleased to speak on behalf of the Government in this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam on introducing it and I look forward to his concluding remarks.