EU Exit Negotiations

William Cash Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

Let us start with the right hon. Gentleman’s original presumption that we cannot achieve a negotiated deal in the period. As he should know, given his role as past and current Chairman of the Brexit Committee, the previous Trade Commissioner, Karel De Gucht, who is no friend of Brexit and does not approve of what we are doing, has said in terms that it is not technically difficult to achieve a trade outcome—all it requires is political will. What it requires is the political will on the European side to do it. What will give that political will is the fact that it sells roughly €300 billion of product to us every year and will want to continue doing so.

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that not only have the official Opposition been totally contradictory on the single market, customs union and the European Court, but they are now even defying their own manifesto and their vote on the article 50 Act, let alone the democratic outcome of the referendum itself? In other words, they have now moved from being remainers to reversers.

[Mr Davis]

On the day the shadow Brexit Secretary was on “The Andrew Marr Show” saying, if I remember his words correctly, that he was glad to have a unified party behind his current policy—policy No. 10, by the way—on that very same programme the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) was saying exactly that: that the right hon. Gentleman was betraying Labour’s own voters. That is what the Labour party has to come to terms with. Its voters, more than anybody else, want us to leave. They voted for it and they want us to leave, and Labour had better deliver on it.