Leaving the European Union
Debate between Ronnie Cowan and John Redwood(5 years, 8 months ago)
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John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
The public who are listening to this and similar debates cannot believe that this Parliament so lacks confidence and courage that, two years and eight months on from the great people’s vote, it is still considering forgetting the impact of that vote and ditching Brexit altogether. The public are saying two things to us: “Get on with it!” and, from the majority who voted to leave, “What part of ‘leave’ did you not understand?”
Leave voters deeply resent how too many Members of Parliament and smart commentators look down on them and pretend that they did not understand what they were doing or know what they were voting for, or that they were in some way muddled about their aims. We have heard that again today from the Petitions Committee representative, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner): he says that we did not know what we were doing, that it was all fanciful and that we all had a mixed idea. We knew exactly what we were doing—voting to take back control. We voted to take back control of our laws, our money and our borders, and that is exactly what this Parliament has to get on and do.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
I appreciate what the right hon. Gentleman is saying, but he cannot possibly say that two and a half years ago people knew precisely what they were voting for, when a few hours away from our vote, we do not know what we are voting on.
John Redwood
Well, I know exactly what I am voting on. I am sorry if the hon. Gentleman has not prepared or read anything and does not understand what is going on, but I am voting to leave the European Union. The only way that we can now leave the European Union, because of the way in which the negotiations have been mishandled, is to leave on 29 March without signing the withdrawal agreement and to offer a comprehensive free trade agreement—which, if there were nothing else on the table, the EU would be well advised to accept.
Ronnie Cowan
Okay, what about haulage companies whose drivers need European Conference of Ministers of Transport permits? The UK can give out 984 permits, but there have been 11,300 applications. What does the right hon. Gentleman say to the 90% of hauliers who cannot get permits? Is that just a minor detail?
John Redwood
Well, the Government will make sure that haulage will work, and of course that is something that the Government can and will do. I have every confidence that roughly the same number of lorries will come through Calais and Dover on 30 March as on 28 March. I am sure it will work fine. I know of no reason why the Government would stop lorry drivers moving through Calais and Dover.
Ronnie Cowan
If there is no fear whatever, why are the Government telling people to stockpile? Why are pharmaceutical companies telling me, “There is one key ingredient in the entire process, and if we do not get it, we will run out of that product”?
John Redwood
The hon. Gentleman got the lorries thing wrong, and now he has got the drugs thing wrong. The Government are not asking people to stockpile drugs. People will buy their normal drugs in the normal way, or be offered them free on the NHS in the normal way. There is no need to panic, as I have just explained. The hon. Gentleman has not named a company or a drug that will be deliberately withheld from the British market; unless he can do so, I do not think that he has a case at all.
Ronnie Cowan
The pharmaceutical company Martindale tells me that it needs sugar to manufacture methadone, because it is a syrup. It has stockpiled three months’ worth, but then it will run out. If sugar does not come into this country, it will run out of methadone.
John Redwood
Why would somebody mount an economic blockade of Britain and not sell us their product? That is complete nonsense. This is a competitive world. When the scare stories were first put round that Calais would be blocked by deliberate action, I and others made inquiries and were told that Zeebrugge, Ostend, Antwerp and Rotterdam would love to have the business and were making very competitive offers against Calais, but Calais immediately said, “No, of course we don’t want to lose that business, and by the way we still have the shortest crossing, so it should still be the easiest way.”
Such malicious and unpleasant scare stories are why this Parliament is losing the trust of the public generally. The public expect us to be grown up and manage these things. If there are issues that need managing on our exit, it is our job to manage them, not to scaremonger or try to make them worse.
John Redwood
Not at all, because that was an entirely truthful statement at the time. Clearly, Scotland had no right to independent membership of the European Union, which was the issue. It was already clear in 2014 that my party would campaign for a referendum. I always thought that we would win both the general election and the referendum—I was about the only person who thought that we would win both, and I am very pleased that we did. It was an entirely democratic process. Scottish voters could see that might happen when they made their decision to stay in the Union. As very welcome full members of our Union, they then had every opportunity to make a decisive intervention in the debate we had together on whether we stayed in the European Union.
I want to finish on the economic issues, of which much has been made. It is a strange debate, because most leave voters voted on the issues of democracy, independence, sovereignty, making our own decisions and spending our own money. I am someone who thinks that we will be better off—not worse off—by leaving the European Union. I have consistently argued this before and after the referendum. The case is very easy to make. I would like us to have a Brexit bonus Budget as soon as we leave the European Union at the end of this month. Such a Budget should boost our economy by between 1% and 2% of GDP.
Let me take the more modest version—a 1% boost from a £20 billion stimulus, which would provide a mixture of increased money for much-loved public services. It would also include tax cuts. The kind of thing I have in mind is more money for our schools budgets and teachers. We need more money for our armed forces and security, and for our police and the work on gangs, knife crime and so forth. We need more money for our social care, where the shoe has been pinching. The Government have already found prospectively large sums for the health service, and the challenge is to ensure that—where we vote those sums through—we get good value for money and are buying something that really does provide a higher quality service, which is what the public expect.
There should also be a series of tax cuts, firstly on VAT—the tax that we are not allowed to cut or reduce in so many ways, because it is an EU tax. I would take all VAT off green products, because it is wrong that people have to pay rather large taxes on better boiler controls, insulation and various other green measures they can take in their homes to cut their fuel bills. I would like to get rid of VAT altogether on domestic fuel. The budgets of people on the lowest incomes have the highest proportion of expenditure on fuel—there is fuel poverty. Why do the Government contribute to it by adopting an EU tax on domestic fuel? It would be good to get rid of that.
I would like stamp duties to be put back to the same levels as before the big hikes. I would not put back stamp duties that have been cut, but those that have been increased—it has clearly done a lot of damage to the property market by stopping transactions and stopping mobility—so that people can afford to live in the right-size property that is appropriate for their stage in life.
I would also like quite a big reduction in business rates. There is definite unfairness for high street retailing by comparison with online retailing, and now would be a good opportunity to reduce business rates. It is eminently affordable. The Government have provided their estimate of £39 billion, which is largely to be spent in a couple of years over the period of further negotiation. I think it will be much more than that in the long term—there are no numbers in the withdrawal agreement. Quite a lot of that money falls in the first couple of years, and I would like us to spend it in the next couple of years in the way I have described, with a £20 billion increase in the first year to get things going. There is a running saving of £12 billion a year or more from the saving of the net contribution, leaving aside any special payments under the withdrawal agreement.
The Chancellor has already let it be known that there has been a big overshoot of his fiscal tightening: we are borrowing far less than he was expecting, so he has a bit of leeway. We might learn more about that later this week. Putting it all together, the package I suggest is very modest, but it would give a very welcome improvement to our public services and give quite a good economic boost through targeted tax cuts. Our GDP would go up in the first year after we left the European Union, rather than go down on what it would have been otherwise.
Ronnie Cowan
I am just curious how a national debt of £1.7 trillion can be serviced with all these tax cuts.
John Redwood
As I just explained, my measures would not increase the build-up of public debt, but would be financed out of the amounts that are already in the Budget to go to the European Union.
The public find it extremely odd that many Members of Parliament want to give any amount to the European Union without challenging or probing what bill it is sending to us and why, and yet begrudge us spending that money on our priorities at home. One of the winning themes of the vote leave campaign was that we want to control and spend our own money. There is absolutely no legal obligation to pay that money to the European Union after 29 March, when we have left. Indeed, the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 repeals the European Communities Act 1972, so I do not think the Government will have any powers to send money to the European Union after 29 March, given the admirable legislation now on the statute book that means that we will leave.
Many people who are interested in these affairs want us to get on with it and leave the European Union. Many share my optimism that we will be better out, trading and developing free trade agreements with the rest of the world and cutting tariffs where that makes sense and does not damage our home industry. Above all, we will spend the money that we will spare because we are no longer making a huge tribute to the European Union through these very large sums of money. What’s not to like? How do MPs who got elected to implement Brexit think they will get away with telling the British people that they were wrong, and that they will delay or stop Brexit?