European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me so early in the debate. [Laughter.] My predecessor as MP for Newark, William Gladstone, was called by the Speaker to give his maiden speech so late that nobody could remember it. The next time he gave a speech, the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, wrote him a congratulatory note on his maiden speech. I hope that despite the hour, I will be listened to and remembered this evening.

After the storms of the referendum and its immediate aftermath, the country was understandably divided into leave and remain. It seems to me, having listened to 10 hours of this debate, that two new groups have emerged and become the real divide in Parliament. The first, and by far the larger, group consists of those who accept the mandate of the referendum and who want to implement it in full. As many have said tonight, that includes leaving the single market, the customs union and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. However they voted in the referendum, they are primarily focused on how we can make a success of the life to come.

The second group consists of those who are not yet able to accept the mandate of the referendum, or who do so in word only and seek to diminish it in reality. They look back in anger, remorse and regret, and they are unable psychologically or intellectually to reorientate themselves to the new world and to ask the real question that is before us today: what comes next? In a free society, there is no obligation on anyone to change their views to conform with the majority but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) said so eloquently, there is an obligation on all of us to act in the national interest. The path of the second group is not in the national interest.

I do not believe that the people of Newark sent me to Westminster at a time of such historic importance to point fingers—to say, “What about the £350 million for the NHS?” or, “What about the recession that you threatened, which never happened?” They want us to come together. They want us to recognise our moral obligation to make our exit from the European Union succeed. The task of every Member of this House must be to build up the positives of leaving the European Union and to mitigate the negatives. That is the test we must all apply in our lives. Voting against the Bill, or amending it to bind the hands of the Prime Minister in our negotiations, fails that test.

Change can be hard, and even more so if it is a course that we did not want to embark on. But we in this place have a special responsibility to give people the confidence and the courage to live with that change and make a success of it. We do that by accepting the mandate and setting out to find a vision of the future that works for everyone. We have to see this as what an economist—I know that some hon. Members do not like economists—would call a non-zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is one in which one side wins at the expense of the other: leave won, and remain lost. A non-zero-sum game is one in which we try to find a way for everyone to win.

[Alex Chalk]

My hon. Friend is making a characteristically powerful speech. Does he agree that if we are to make this a non-zero-sum game, we have to send the message out as early as possible that EU nationals in our country have got to be part of our shared future in the United Kingdom?

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who, as ever, is thoughtful and makes the right choices about moving forward as a country. We begin the task of moving forward by accepting the mandate in full and rowing together in the national interest. Finally, in doing so, let us be clear, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset was earlier, that we are taking an irreversible decision. In fact, it was taken for us on 23 June. Like William the Conqueror burning his ships on the beach at Pevensey, we have no choice: we have to make a success of this. All the genius of Parliament and of this country should not be focused on recriminations or petty politics, but on the life of the nation to come.

I have always believed—I was brought up to believe it, and I am teaching my children to believe it—that pessimism and cynicism are cop-outs and self-fulfilling prophecies. Parliament should be in the future business. As a country, we spent the best of my parents’ lives managing decline, until Margaret Thatcher’s Government put a stop to that. I do not intend to spend the best days of my life looking backwards, feeling remorse, talking down the prospects of this country. Unlike what the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) implied, but as the noble Lord Hague would say, some of us will be here in 20 or 30 years’ time, and we intend to make a success of Brexit. As Shakespeare would say,

“some have greatness thrust upon them”.

Greatness has been thrust upon each of us in this House and across the country as a result of the referendum, and the only question is how we meet it. As Shakespeare would have finished:

“be not afraid of greatness…Thy Fates open their hands. Let thy blood and spirit embrace them.”