European Affairs — House of Commons, 2018-03-14
Topic: Foreign Trade
Chuka Harrison Umunna (Labour, Centre-left): I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and I will say more about that shortly One of the most extraordinary things about the Prime Minister’s speech was that she did not explain how the future relationship that she set out was going to help the NHS, particularly given that so many of her Cabinet Ministers went around telling us that voting to leave the European Union would lead to a bounty for the NHS. The number of EU nurse applications is down 96%, and we lost 10,000 health workers from our NHS in the year after the referendum vote. We now have 100,000 vacancies in the NHS that need to be filled. There was no mention at all of this in her speech. I think it was the director of the Vote Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, who said that if people such as the Foreign Secretary, the Environment Secretary and the Trade Secretary had not gone round saying what they said about the NHS, we would not be in this situation today Let me return to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) has just made about new trade deals. I agree with the Minister for Trade Policy that there is not an either/or choice about whether we pursue trade with the EU or with the rest of the world, even though that argument is often made from the Government Dispatch Box. Let us get real about this. This is not a question about whether this country is going to be able to do trade deals after we have left the European Union. We will be able to do trade deals after we have left the EU—if we leave the EU—but the question is: on what terms? When we negotiate with China with its 1.2 billion people, we are not going to get the same terms we now enjoy as we negotiate alongside 500 million people on our side of the table. We, a country of 65 million people, are not going to get the same terms, because we are a much smaller economy relative to the big economies that we want to trade with. That is the reality. My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South is absolutely right to refer to President Trump. He is not going to ride to our rescue. We need only look at what he is doing to our steel industry with his 25% tariffs My final observation about the Prime Minister’s speech is that I have not spoken to any diplomat, EU ambassador or EU Foreign Minister who thinks that this Government’s technological solution to the hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland will resolve the issue. Nobody I have spoken to believes that that will happen What does that lead me to conclude? The form of Brexit that was sold to the British people is simply not deliverable. I will give this to the Government: it is not necessarily simply a matter of competence; it is the reality that so many of the promises that were made to people, whether they voted leave or remain, simply cannot be delivered. That is one reason why I think that—the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) made this point—if we are to leave the European Union, we should at the very least seek to keep this country’s full participation in the customs union and, to my mind, in the single market. As far as I am concerned, if someone wants to end austerity and to promote social justice, they have to support that position. Being part of the framework of the single market and the customs union would be no impediment to the implementation of the Labour manifesto, to our pursuing the nationalisations that we want or to other matters One of the things that I am most struck by as I go around my constituency at the moment is that many members of the public are just fed up with the Brexit process. They just want it to be gone. They want us to get on with it. But there is a recognition that the process is far more complex than anybody had thought and that it is throwing up all kinds of issues that nobody thought would be connected to Brexit. Who on earth would have thought that Brexit would be connected to the transport of isotopes used for medical research and cancer treatment However, the group of people in my constituency who have the most visceral and strong views about what is going on are the young people. They believe that what is going on is robbing them of the opportunities that older generations have taken for granted. They cannot understand why we would want to be doing this to them. That is why I think this House should have a free vote on the matter. The issue transcends party politics and politics more broadly. It is an issue of national interest, and I do not believe that the younger generation will ever forgive us, the generation of politicians sitting in this House of Commons, if we do not do the right thing by them and secure their futures, ensuring that they have the same opportunities that all of us enjoy now in the European Union.