Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill — House of Commons, 2018-07-16
Topic: Mixed Topics
Anna Mary Soubry (Conservative, Centre-right): I rise to speak in support of new clause 1 and new clause 12, and I shall also seek to speak briefly against new clause 36 and amendment 73. I hope that there will be Divisions, in the event of which I will vote against new clause 36 and amendment 73. It is my firm view that it is deeply regrettable that the Government have accepted the new clause and amendment, even though they clearly seek to undermine, if not wreck, the great advances made in the White Paper. I shall speak, as I like to think I always do, with openness, frankness and honesty. When I became a Business Minister in David Cameron’s Government in 2015, I would be the first to admit that I did not know the finer details of how many of our manufacturing industries and businesses actually worked. I knew about supply chains and their value, but I could not claim, in any way, shape or form, to be particularly familiar with them. I relished my brief, though, so I was soon enmeshed in the manufacturing sector in particular. For example, I had responsibility for the automotive sector, aerospace and, of course, the steel industry, which many Members will remember was having a particularly difficult time. I soon became not quite an expert, but I certainly knew my brief. I understood how supply chains worked, the value of frictionless trade and what this thing called "just in time" was really all about. I had never actually seen it, though, until Friday, when I went to the Toyota factory at Burnaston, which is just outside Derby. I would make it compulsory for every single Member to go to Toyota—they could go to another car manufacturer in Swindon, or to Nissan in Sunderland, as I did shortly after the EU referendum—so that they could begin to understand what a supply chain is, why it relies on frictionless borders and what "just in time" means Let me give Members a bit of history about that remarkable Toyota plant just outside Derby. It is actually a legacy to Margaret Thatcher. It opened at the beginning of the 1990s. Some of us are old enough to remember those times and what had happened in many of our traditional manufacturing industries. My right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), who is sitting next to me, has a business in her constituency called Brush. It is a long-standing business that has provided good-quality jobs for generations. I had Siemens in my constituency. At one time, I had a number of miners who worked in local pits in north Nottinghamshire and in Derbyshire. In due course, those pits closed, as did Siemens When we talk about Brexit, people extrapolate all sorts of things from the vote. One thing that definitely occurred—I know that it occurred for people in my constituency—was that a number of people voted leave because they felt left behind by what we call this global world and the global way of doing business. These people used to work, often down the pits in Nottinghamshire—I am from Worksop, so I understand the sort of lives that miners had and I have no romantic attachment to the coal mining industry—and in factories such as Siemens in high-quality jobs. Those jobs invariably paid good money, but they also added even more value to people’s lives. It was not just about the fact that it was work, which is, in itself, the right thing to do; it was not just the wages, which, in the deep coal mines in Nottinghamshire and at Siemens, were very good; and it was not just the trade and the skills that they conveyed—it was also that feeling of community and being valued. It was about all those great traditional British manufacturing values, which, in truth, began to disappear through the ’80s and into the ’90s. What the great Japanese car manufacturers brought back was much of that high-valued, highly skilled, super-effective and super-efficient manufacturing industry. That practice was not just confined to the automotive sector, because it runs right across many other sectors in manufacturing, which makes up 20% of our economy I say to all Conservative Members, "Shame on you if you have a manufacturer in your constituency that you have not been to to understand how a modern manufacturing business works and how it needs frictionless trade for the supply chains to work. Shame on you if you have not taken the opportunity to go to those places that might be outwith your constituency, but where your constituents work." I say that very gently—