Barry Gardiner
MP for Brent West · Labour · United Kingdom
“Sir Desmond, imagine that the top brains in the country’s security and intelligence community produced a report that told you how to save the world. You would want to see it, right? Well, the report we are discussing is not about how to save the world; it is about what happens if we do not.”
“The nuclear threat will rise as clashes between nuclear powers become more frequent. Those are the cold assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Government were right to think that those assessments might scare people—they scare me—but they were wrong to think that they could hide them from the public.”
“The Minister will know that the grant structure on which UKRI is based gives out grants for a maximum of three to five years. Very few are for five years—most are for three years or under—yet the sort of long-term scientific development that my hon.”
“My hon. Friend is making a superb case for the importance of funding for her deep earth facility. I had the privilege of going to the National Oceanography Centre’s deep oceans facility, and the innovative science there on carbon sequestration is superb.”
“The Prime Minister has spoken powerfully about the devolution of power and giving back control. Will he therefore ensure that the proposals for commonhold and leasehold reform, for which 5 million leaseholders in this country are waiting with bated breath, do give that power and control back to those people, through the right to enfranchi…”
“We know how much land there is in the UK, and we know the extent of our inland waters and seas, so we can know how much we have to do to protect them, as we are required to do by target 3 of the global biodiversity framework.”
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“More than 50 other British products that should qualify for protected geographical status are simply not protected. How can the Secretary of State have failed to protect a single one of our products under CETA? No wonder he does not want the matter to be discussed on the Floor of the House of Commons. CETA is also remarkable in its complete disregard for the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises. Even TTIP contained a dedicated chapter outlining the support measures that the EU and the USA would introduce for SMEs. By contrast, in all the 2,255 pages of CETA there is not one single commitment to further the export interests of SMEs. In recent times, we have heard much talk of the Government’s commitment to parliamentary sovereignty.”
“Members will also be surprised to learn that the Government have failed to list in annex 20 to the agreement a single one of the dozens of great British food products that qualify for protected geographical status. The UK is the only major EU member state that failed to secure such protection in CETA for its food businesses. The “Geographical Indications” annex of CETA is page after page of products listed for protection by France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Spain, Romania, Austria, Hungary and the rest, but there is not a single one from the UK. There is no protection for Scotch beef, Scotch lamb, Scottish farmed salmon, Welsh beef, Welsh lamb, Cornish pasties, west country farmhouse cheddar, blue Stilton, or white for that matter.”
“Only one study to date has disaggregated the prospective impacts of CETA on individual EU member states, and it concluded that countries such as France, Germany and Italy would indeed see an increase in their exports as a result of CETA. However, the study is clear that the UK would experience a decrease in both its exports and its balance of trade. At a time when the UK balance of trade is already under so much pressure, the very possibility that we might suffer a loss of exports should give us pause for proper scrutiny. At the very least, a proper impact assessment of how the agreement will specifically affect the UK needs to be conducted. That further underlines the need for the promised debate on the Floor of the House.”
“It will be a surprise to the Committee to learn that the Government have not commissioned any research on what the impact of CETA might be on the UK economy. That should be a matter of concern, because the Government have repeatedly claimed, as the Minister did in his opening remarks, that CETA will bring up to £1.3 billion extra to the UK economy. Let me straightaway say that I would be the first to cheer if that were a credible prospect, but the Government admitted in their explanatory memorandum of July 2016 that it simply took a projection of overall gains to the EU and divided it by the UK’s share of EU GDP to come up with that figure. That is back-of-an-envelope calculation. It has to qualify as one of the crudest and least credible methodologies ever adopted to project the impact of a major trade agreement.”
“He explicitly broke the waiver that the Committee had given to him, when he approved both the provisional application and the conclusion of CETA, and his Department has failed to engage with and consult the devolved Administrations in respect of an agreement that has specific application to them. Those are serious procedural failures that show a disregard for the proper scrutiny of Parliament, and they provide, in themselves, a compelling case for the Committee now to insist that the Government bring that full debate to the Commons. However, there are substantive reasons as well as procedural ones and, in many respects, they are more compelling. I turn, therefore, to the content of CETA.”
“In the same vein, there has been a marked failure to present CETA for consultation before the devolved Administrations, despite the fact that their Departments are all listed in the annex of entities covered by the public procurement rules of CETA and are thus exposed to CETA’s strictures on central and sub-central Government entities alike. I call on the Government to remedy that failure as a matter of urgency, before initiating the process for ratification of CETA in the House. I hope that the Minister feels that he can give an undertaking on at least that level. With regard to process, the Government failed to meet their own successive promises to bring CETA forward for a full debate on the Floor of the House. The Secretary of State was, at best, disingenuous in the statements made to the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee.”
“It is important that we hear from him whether the UK made any objection or moved any procedural motion during the Council of Ministers to unbundle it, so that the Secretary of State could observe the protocols that he had undertaken to the Committee. I can only concur with the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, who said that it was a “serious” breach when the Secretary of State failed to honour the waiver he had been given. That stands in stark contrast to the many statements made by the Government in recent days to assure us of their commitment to respecting parliamentary scrutiny and accountability.”
“I wholeheartedly agree. We must now move forward. The Government said that it was of the utmost importance to have the debate on the Floor of the House, yet we find ourselves 68 days later with a debate up in Committee Room 10. The European Scrutiny Committee issued the Government with a waiver, to allow them to sign CETA at the Council of Ministers. The Committee made it clear that the waiver did not extend to the provisional application or conclusion of CETA. The Secretary of State chose to disregard the Committee. We have heard from the Minister today the reason why: because it was bundled.”
“Certainly the process of ratification must not be initiated in this country before Parliament has had the opportunity to decide on this issue, so I support the amendment.”
“The Canadian Government, for their part, said that they see CETA as the baseline for any future UK-Canada trade deals. Moreover, Ministers in this country have suggested that CETA could even provide the blueprint for a future UK-EU trade deal. All those considerations underline the critical importance of getting it right on CETA. They underline the critical danger of not submitting the agreement to the full level of scrutiny that it deserves. There is still time for the CETA debate to be scheduled on the Floor of the House, as we were promised, and for parallel consultations to be held with the devolved Administrations before the provisional application of CETA comes into effect. That was the original chronology stipulated by the European Scrutiny Committee.”
“The fact that the recommendation was not taken up in the negotiations or the legal scrubbing that delivered the final CETA text is yet another reason why we must avoid rushing into an agreement that could see us bound to a deal that may well be in the best interests of our fellow European countries, but not our own. Indeed, hon. Members might consider that it would be better to conclude a separate deal with Canada when we have the legal capacity to do so on our own, outside the EU. Those are some of the most pressing concerns we have on CETA, but I will make one final observation. The Secretary of State for International Trade stated last week that he intends to adopt all the EU’s free trade agreements into stand-alone UK treaties with the trading partners in question.”
“Going into the full intricacies of this complex issue would take us beyond the time that we have available this afternoon, but the lack of clarity plaguing the situation is yet another argument for the fuller debate on CETA on the Floor of the House that we were promised. I simply mention that the official impact assessment carried out for the European Commission at the start of negotiations included a specific warning that health and education services should be exempted from any investor-state dispute disciplines adopted in CETA.”
“There is no disagreement that health, education, post, rail and waste water services are all covered by CETA. Individual EU member states were permitted to register their national reservations in the two service annexes to CETA. To compensate for the lack of certainty surrounding the status of public services, the German Government took out a comprehensive reservation to ensure that all their health and social services would be fully protected from the threat of market liberalisation under CETA. The UK Government entered reservations for certain aspects of privately funded health and social services only, including privately funded ambulances, but they failed to protect the core functions of the NHS.”
“The standstill clause states that Governments forfeit the sovereign right to introduce any reforms that could reverse the level of market liberalisation registered in CETA. The “ratchet” clause goes even further, in that future Governments will lose the right to reverse liberalisation measures that might be introduced in years to come. There has been much concern about whether our public services are vulnerable to attack from the far-reaching provisions of CETA. Trade lawyers from within and without the European Commission have cast serious doubts on the validity of the repeated assurances that public services such as the NHS are safe. Suffice it to say that on the European side, the only sectors definitively carved out of CETA are audio-visual services—in deference to the French exception culturelle—and certain air services.”
“Under that approach, all sectors that are not explicitly exempted are automatically committed to binding liberalisation, including future services that have not even been invented yet. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West gave certain examples. One might consider the potential ban on microbeads in cosmetics as another thing done for the public good that could open the Government up to a suit. The adoption of the negative list method in CETA marks a significant departure from the EU’s previous use of the positive list approach, whereby only sectors actively listed for inclusion are subject to the rules and disciplines of the agreement. CETA introduces the standstill and ratchet mechanisms, which prevent countries from reversing liberalisation commitments already made in their service sectors, whether now or in the future.”
“On the other side of the Atlantic, a group of Canadian lawyers with direct experience of investor-state disputes have published a letter outlining the threats that the investment court system poses— “the undermining of democratic regulation, the special privileging of foreign investors, the lack of judicial independence and procedural fairness in the adjudicative process, and the lack of respect for domestic courts and domestic institutions. Those are serious charges that deserve to be debated in full on the Floor of the House of Commons, as was promised. CETA departs from all previous EU trade agreements in being the first in which the EU has accepted the high-risk negative list approach to scheduling our service sectors.”
“That study made it clear that providing north American investors with privileged rights would bring no benefits whatsoever to the UK economy, but would incur “considerable” monetary costs to the UK taxpayer, as well as significant political costs. The investment court system has been rejected by the European Association of Judges, which represents 44 national associations, and by the German Magistrates Association. More than 100 legal scholars from European universities have issued a strongly worded statement warning that the inclusion of such powers in CETA would undermine not only the rule of law but the very principles upon which our democracies are founded.”
“Around 80% of the 13,000 US companies that operate in the UK have active subsidiaries operating in Canada, through which they will be able to bring ISDS claims, using the new CETA investment court system. That means that, overnight, 10,000 US firms will gain the right to sue the UK over any new social, environmental or public health regulations that might adversely affect their profits in future. In that way, CETA will open the floodgates to precisely the wave of suits that the UK Government were warned about in the cost-benefit analysis that they commissioned from the London School of Economics back in 2013.”
“Indeed. Canadian companies have been among the most litigious in using the ISDS powers that exist in other treaties, yet we have learned from parliamentary questions that the Government have failed to conduct any risk assessment of the potential threats of investor-state challenges to health or the environment. That is another reason for the Committee to insist upon a full parliamentary debate on the issue. Such risk assessments are absolutely standard in other countries preparing to adopt ISDS provisions in their trade or investment agreements, and the Minister really must explain why no such impact assessment was conducted. It is not just Canadian firms that will be able to use CETA to challenge social and environmental protections.”
“I refer to the explanatory memorandum of July last year, which explicitly states the way in which the figure was calculated. I can find the exact reference.”
“It is the Department for International Trade’s “Explanatory Memorandum on European Union Document: Proposal for a Council Decision on the provisional application of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada of the one part, and the European Union and its Member States, of the other part”, from July 2016.”
“One of the steps that the Government are taking to expand UK trade is through arms sales, particularly to the middle east. In July, the Committees on Arms Export Controls heard evidence that there was an imbalance in arms sales, with promotion coming at the expense of regulation “such that in UK practice those things are at odds.” Does the Secretary of State recognise that imbalance? If he does, what does he propose to do about it? If he does not, has he chastised the White House for the remarks this week that “systemic, endemic” problems in Saudi Arabia’s targeting of civilians in Yemen drove the US decision to halt a future weapons sale, which has the Secretary of State and British policy in this area looking callous and threadbare?”
“If he does, repeatedly denying the UK Parliament the right to properly scrutinise such an important trade agreement is a very odd way to go about it. Will he now commit to bring a debate and a vote to the Floor of the House before the European Parliament finally votes on CETA on 2 February?”
“By insulting my wife’s taste in ties, the Secretary of State must await her reprimand, but she must wait in line because there are others who wish to reprimand him. The European Scrutiny Committee told off the Secretary of State for going to Brussels and agreeing the comprehensive economic trade agreement between the EU and Canada without first bringing it to the UK Parliament for scrutiny. He undertook to the Committee that he would bring CETA for debate in this House by the end of November, a deadline that he missed. The Committee then set a more generous deadline, but that deadline expired two days ago, on 13 December. Will he tell us whether he actually believes in taking back sovereignty from Brussels—does he or does he not?”
“Does the Secretary of State see any irony or contradiction in his development of these new free trade and investment agreements, which involve the harmonisation of rules and standards with other countries—even obedience to supranational commercial courts—and the referendum instruction from the British people that we should leave membership of the largest free-trade agreement in the world so that we can set our own rules and take back our sovereignty?”
“The Government Front-Bench team has tried to suggest that the High Court decision that Parliament should have a vote before triggering article 50 is in some way antidemocratic or thwarts the referendum result. Will the Secretary of State acknowledge that the vast majority of Members in this House are now committed to honouring the decision to leave the EU, but that democracy demands that the terms of our leaving must be subject to the proper advance scrutiny and consent of this democratically elected House, and not negotiated in secret and smuggled through without the support of this sovereign Parliament?”
“The Chancellor’s guarantee of funding while we remain a member state, and for projects agreed before this year’s autumn statement, does not go far enough in giving answers to families, businesses and investors in the north-east. Can the Government commit to continued investment in trade promotion measures for the region post-2020?”
“It reads: “We’ve helped…create 346.5 new jobs through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) project” and “secure a further 1,014 jobs with our trade support activities for the ERDF project”. That fund was actually proposed by the United Kingdom in 1972, but it is available only to European member states. We need to know what access we will have to those funds in future, because they are vital for industries in the north-east. The Government might want to update their website, but it might also help if they provided their new strategy. The Government’s strategy has relied on EU funds to boost exports to BRICs markets and create jobs in the north-east. They must now provide answers about how they will ensure jobs and exports are maintained in the future through support for new projects once we have left the EU.”
“Bearing in mind the strong dependence on the single market of north-east exports and the regional trade surplus, what special measures will the Government consider to diversify export options for the region and avoid negative employment impacts that might arise? The Government must clarify what will happen to the UK’s European Investment Bank status. Will we continue to be a shareholder and have unrestricted access to funding, or will we be considered a third country and thus only be eligible for the 10% of the fund made available for third countries? The Government’s webpage entitled “UKTI North East: helping companies export and grow overseas” was last updated in May this year.”
“A fast-growing marketing and PR agency based in Newcastle told my colleague, the MEP for the region, Jude Kirton-Darling, “Creative and digital service industries like ours don’t export in the traditional way that goods companies do—but we benefit just as much from...membership and could be impacted badly by exit” from the single market. Service industries are asking the same questions of Government. What analysis has the Department conducted of the impact on the trading balance in the north-east of different post-Brexit trading arrangements with the EU? Have the Government quantified the impact of losing access to the single market on the north-east economy? Will they do so before making a firm decision on their negotiating priorities? If we default to WTO tariffs post-Brexit, what impact will that have on exporters in the north-east?”
“Ministers continue to drop heavy hints about their preferred—often contradictory—directions of travel. That is causing these businesses absolute turmoil with their investment profiles. The priorities of manufacturing bodies are clear. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, EEF, the Chemical Industries Association, the British Ceramic Confederation and the UK Petroleum Industry Association—all representing phenomenal industries based in the north-east—are demanding guaranteed access to the single market to continue exporting without the extra costs that will make it harder to keep doing business there. Almost two thirds of the north-east’s exports to the EU are reliant on road vehicles, medical and pharmaceutical products and organic chemicals. It is not just the goods exporters calling for this.”
“Have the Government conducted a survey to find out what the skills base is in the north-east and to determine how they will continue to ensure that skills supply in the future? While the weakened pound has given a short-term boost to certain exports, the steel industry is not benefiting from a low pound. The deal to buy the Tata pipe mill in Hartlepool is clouded with uncertainty, and the suggestion is that it would have been completed by now if it were not for the referendum result. That puts hundreds of jobs at risk. We have heard from my hon. Friends about the household brands that are facing difficulties, but we must not forget the small and medium-sized enterprises and the family businesses that are finding it impossible to invest in their own future in the region until the Government provide a clear plan.”
“Friend spoke of—that feed into supply chains in Europe for products that are then sold into third countries. They will not be admitted into the supply chain in the first place. The Minister knows that those supply chains are 18 months’ long, which means that decisions will be taken in Europe within the next six months on whether to source items for the supply chain from the UK. This is of vital and urgent importance, and it is critical that the Minister provides some answers on it for business. What assessment have the Government made of the contribution that skilled workers coming into the UK make to the north-east export industries? Skilled workers in these industries are vital.”
“James Ramsbotham, chief executive of the North East England chamber of commerce, said: “With the automotive sector being such a major part of the business community in the North East the future of the car-making is of crucial importance to our economy and employment prospects.” What assurances will the Minister provide to car manufacturers about continued access to import parts from the EU to their supply chains, and to export cars, tariff-free, into mainland Europe? My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central raised that issue, but there is also a need for the Minister to answer the question about non-tariff barriers. Country of origin rules may well mean that, in the future, if we are outside the EU we cannot provide goods from this country—indeed, from many of the smaller companies in the north-east that my hon.”
“We know the Government will not provide a running commentary, and we do not ask for that, but perhaps they will provide some much-needed clarity to business about their futures. That is what I think all Members here are really asking of the Minister. What guarantees will the Government provide to businesses in the north-east about access to those markets in the future, and how similar will those terms be to the current ones?”
“That is 50% of the region’s total exports, making the region one of the most highly exposed to the uncertainty arising from the Government’s refusal to set out a clear plan and approach to the negotiations with the EU Parliament, or indeed to make that clear to the public. The value of north-east exports to the EU grew 30% from 2005 to 2015, yet in July, after the vote to leave, companies across the north-east suffered the sharpest rate of decline in business activity in four years, leading to scaled-down activity and jobs being laid off. Lloyds bank attributed that downturn to “post-referendum vote market uncertainty”, which caused the number of new incoming orders to the region to fall at the fastest pace in almost seven and a half years.”
“Let us be clear: 58% of voters in the region voted to leave, and all of us who have spoken from the Labour benches have said that we respect that—and we do. We must now all rise to the challenge of delivering that departure from the EU, but that departure must not undercut our industry, our labour rights or our prosperity. That is our clear message to the Government today. We have heard from several hon. Members about the destabilising effect on industry in the north-east of a divided Cabinet and a Secretary of State for International Trade who is pushing his own ideological agenda that will disrupt investment and threaten jobs in the north-east. Of the £12 billion-worth of goods exported last year from the north-east, £7 billion were exported to the EU.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) on securing this vital debate. Had he not, I know that my formidable colleagues, my hon. Friends the Members for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) and for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson), who both spoke with such clarity, would certainly have initiated the debate otherwise. It is good to see a strong contingent from the north-east here in defence of their region. The north-east is the major goods-exporting region of this country, with more than £12 billion of goods exported last year. It is therefore a powerful indicator to the rest of the country about the impact that the Government’s approach to Brexit will have.”
“I would not wish to leave the Minister too little time to answer all the questions that my hon. Friends and I have asked this afternoon. I will simply conclude by saying this. The danger is that the favoured trade model will not give control back to voters who told us that that was what they wanted. If the Government wanted to make the UK a great trading nation, they would not be putting forward options that would decisively cut ties with the world’s largest free trade area. The Government are not pursuing a free trade agenda. It would appear that they are using the vote to leave to embark on a ruthless deregulatory agenda, which will threaten jobs, public services, labour standards and environmental protections in the north-east and the rest of this country. The Minister must provide answers and clarity for business and the public.”
“Our respect for our constituents must surely insist that they have a right to know what our future relationship with the EU might look like—after all, their jobs, welfare and livelihoods, and the future of their children and grandchildren, are at stake. We are asking for clarity on the terms of the UK’s leaving the EU.”
“Let us be equally clear, however, that the need to respect the 17 million votes cast for leave does not mean that the rights and concerns of the 16 million who voted to remain can be trampled on. Although we of course accept that no Government should give a running commentary on the details of their negotiation, any responsible Government must give a coherent and reasoned picture of what sort of future they aim to achieve for their citizens. Business leaders are demanding not certainty, but clarity. Everyone accepts that negotiations will be tough and protracted, and that means an inevitable period of uncertainty, but that should not stop the Government being clear in their purpose and objectives.”
“After the Prime Minister herself had insisted that the referendum was about the country taking back sovereign control over its own affairs, it would have been difficult for her Government to maintain that this sovereign Parliament had no such right to scrutinise and express its will in relation to the biggest constitutional challenge our country has faced in a generation. I therefore genuinely welcome the Government’s concession on the matter. What today’s debate has made clear is that whatever way Members voted in the referendum, leave or remain, the vast majority do not wish to overturn the referendum vote. We are democrats: however small the margin of victory, a 52% to 48% vote for leave is a majority. It represents a mandate and it must be respected.”
“Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden), the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), and my hon. Friends the Members for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). They all made absolutely superb speeches. I must also pay respect to speeches made on the other side of the debate, from the hon. Members for Stone (Sir William Cash), for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) and for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), which I thought were particularly worthy of note. It is right that this debate has taken place, and it was good that the Government acceded to the will of Parliament by accepting the right of this House, and indeed its duty, properly to scrutinise their proposals for leaving the EU before article 50 is invoked.”
“For the avoidance of doubt, we intend to accept the Government’s amendment. Today’s debate has been one of the finest I can remember in this House. The contributions from right hon. and hon. Members read like a Baedeker guide to the United Kingdom. We heard from the right hon. and learned Members for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) and for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), my right hon. Friends the Members for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) and for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), my hon. Friends the Members for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) and for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), my right hon.”
“The Secretary of State can continue to duck and dive as he did today—42 minutes in which he said nothing—but democracy demands that the Government should publish the terms of Brexit and submit them to the scrutiny of this sovereign Parliament, and the people of Britain will not trust this Government until they do.”
“We in the Labour party also put it on record that the principle of the free movement of workers must be changed, and our new relationship with the EU must put in place clear and fair immigration controls that work to the benefit of the British people. However, there will be a cost in terms of market access, investment, jobs and our constituents’ livelihoods. Why are the Government afraid to say so? The answer is that they do not want to admit the financial consequences that must inevitably follow from such an admission. The free traders are actually fighting against the financial consequences of leaving the largest free trade market in the world. The Government have 170 days.”
“In an otherwise misleading and confused editorial, it says: “what the public voted for was simple: to regain control of our borders in order to end mass immigration; reclaim control of our laws; and stop sending billions of pounds to Brussels. None of this is possible inside the single market—which requires the free movement of workers”. If the Government believe that—and I believe they do—the question must be asked why they will not admit that they have ruled out maintaining the access we currently enjoy to the single market. Immigration is the political heart of the Brexit debate, and we in the Labour party state unequivocally that those EU workers currently in the UK contributing to our economy must be allowed to stay, just as the 1.2 million UK citizens living and working in the rest of the EU must be.”
“As the Chancellor himself said, “the British people did not vote…to become poorer or less secure”, but we must be open with the electorate that the prize of regaining full sovereignty is that we will no longer have any control over the regulation and standards in a market with which we currently have 44% of our exports and 53% of our imports. We must be open with the electorate that the control over the movement of people from the EU that the Prime Minister spoke of at Prime Minister’s questions earlier today will also affect the capacity of companies to hire those with the skills they need to grow and prosper, and to employ more people here in the UK. I am not in the habit of quoting the Daily Mail —I often like neither what it says, nor the way in which it says it—but none of us should ignore what it says today.”
“If the market is right to have devalued the UK’s stocks so significantly, and if it is right in thinking that investors will no longer invest and that the UK’s economic prospects have declined, we need to understand that our current account deficit—which currently runs at £28.7 billion, and which the fiscal rule was supposed to abolish, before it was abolished itself—is only likely to widen. The Government have a responsibility to set out precisely how they propose to deal with that economic fact, because, again, this is about the jobs, wages and wellbeing of our constituents.”
“Sovereignty certainly does not give us control over the markets; over the past week, we have seen all too clearly the markets’ violent reaction when they thought that the Government were proposing to leave both the single market and the customs union. Today the pound stands at a 168-year low. The Government can insist. They can exercise the royal prerogative and decide to withdraw from the preferential terms of access to the world’s largest consumer market that the UK currently enjoys, but they are very mistaken if they confuse that exercise of sovereignty with any real control over the investment decisions that companies will then take about the future of our constituents’ jobs and wages.”