EU-UK Summit

Chris Murray Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Greg Smith]

Clearly, in any trade negotiation an agreement is made between two countries. The difference with a negotiation on, for example, our accession to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, or the trade deal-lite that the Government managed with the United States and the Trump Administration, or indeed the India trade deal, is that there is no dynamic alignment. No foreign court will be the arbiter of UK law, UK standards and our sovereignty.

The principle on which I believe people voted for Brexit was that we would be in control. There was a very good reason why the Vote Leave campaign came up with the “Take Back Control” slogan; it resonated with the British people. However, that slogan will only ever mean something if we actually are in control. This deal, which we saw being announced with some glee by the Prime Minister the other day in the Chamber of the House of Commons, gives control in many areas—certainly on agrifood and the carbon trading mechanism—back to the European Union, and takes it away from this House and this Parliament.

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman talks about control, but that result was mainly motivated by immigration. After the Brexit vote, annual migration tripled to 900,000. Does he call that control? Also, does he welcome the fall in net migration to 400,000 that was announced today? If he does, would he call that reasserting control on migration?

[Greg Smith]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was a leave voter himself, as I know many traditional Labour voters around the country voted for Brexit. I certainly voted for Brexit and campaigned for it. I think the hon. Gentleman is making some presumptions as to why people voted. My central pitch when knocking on doors in that referendum was the point around control and sovereignty, and that it would be this Parliament that set our laws. Dynamic alignment blows a huge hole in that.

I will touch briefly on a couple of other factors that have come up in the debate. There is a point that is made that somehow Brexit has been economically damaging. In the Government’s own rationale—[Interruption.] It is always good to have an audience laughing, but I am going to quote from the Government’s own rationale. They talk about declining trade and so on from 2018. I hate to break it to them, but we had not left the European Union in 2018. The withdrawal Act did not come into effect for years after that. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2018, for example, UK food exports were £10.6 billion. Guess what had happened by 2024? They had gone up to £11.34 billion. We need a little greater clarity in this debate where we get the dates right and compare apples with apples, rather than apples with pears.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Murray (Edinburgh East and Musselburgh) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) and my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) on securing this important debate.

I represent a city that has phenomenal ties to Europe. Edinburgh was made by Europeans and continues to be a big European player, but that predated our membership of the EU, and it endures after Brexit. I am in my late 30s, staring middle age in the face, and throughout my adult life there has been a continual movement of increasing confrontation, aggression and mistrust in the relationship between the EU and the UK. I hope that this summit marks the point at which that movement stops, and we stop the continued degradation of this most important relationship.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that the pendulum should swing back towards rejoining the EU, no matter how much everyone says that. There are people out there who say the pendulum should swing that way, but I and my party say to those people that they should not fall into the trap that the Brexiteers do: to become too nostalgic, and long for something in the past rather than facing the future. We do not need to go back to our previous relationship with the EU; we need to reset it for modern times. That is what the announcement from the Government and the EU does.

Whatever the structures of our relationship with the EU, on the big, global issues of our time there is huge overlapping strategic alignment. Whether on the role of technology and data, on when we talk about confronting climate change and the energy transition, on the rise of China or on the menacing role of Russia, we very much share strategic interests with the Europeans, and need to work with them to achieve our goals. That is why I welcome these important steps to reset that relationship, particularly on defence and security but also on agrifood, SPS and energy. As other hon. Members have said, it is fantastic to see those steps, and they are particularly important for Scotland.

I am delighted to deliver on the promises that I and the Labour party made to my constituents at the election. It is perplexing that there are no SNP Members at this debate to discuss our relationship with Europe, because they have spent the last 10 years arguing for greater access to the energy market for Scotland, for a youth scheme, for access to Erasmus, and for greater access to EU markets for Scottish food and drink, and those are exactly what this agreement stands to produce. This is exactly what they have been calling for all these years, so of course they have called it a surrender. People say that Reform deals in grievance; let me tell you, it has nothing on the SNP.

In the brief time I have, I want to talk specifically about border security and home affairs. As a member of the Home Affairs Committee, I think that there are some significant steps in the announcement that will, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake) said, be central to the Labour Government’s mission to make the streets safer. Dealing with things such as upstream migration and practical solutions to returns, record sharing and cybercrime are utterly critical. Let us be clear: assertions of national sovereignty mean nothing to cross-border criminals. We have to deal with the problem at source. International crime, especially immigration crime, is by definition a cross-border phenomenon and so requires a cross-border response. That means co-operation with neighbouring countries that face the same issues.

Ten years ago, before being elected, I was the justice and home affairs attaché at the British embassy in Paris. We dealt with things such as Europol, European arrest warrants and data sharing on criminals, having a massive impact on the people represented by the House of Commons. I know the importance of those concrete measures that do not grab headlines but that make a real difference to people’s lives. We dealt with the UK-France channel and in those days, 10 years ago, we did not have small boats—they were not something that we had to worry about—but we obviously do now. Something changed in the interim. We need to work out what that was, and address it. I argue that, as we have discussed, the lack of the Dublin convention makes it structurally much harder to deal with the small boats crisis. Nobody in this room would argue that our constituents are not demanding that we deal with that crisis.

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Member is right that there are all kinds of existential threats that face this country and other countries too, but the Government’s job is to deal with the effect of those threats as they alter life here in Britain. Co-operation is part of that, but in no way does it absolve national Governments from taking responsibility for those threats in relation to national and local priorities. Mass migration is a good example; I regard it as the greatest existential threat, among many. That has to be dealt with in this country.

[Chris Murray]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that the point of a Government is to deal with the challenges that the country faces at the time. That is why I would argue that it was insane to stand like King Canute on the shores of this country asserting that a Rwanda scheme was going to work, when it clearly, patently would not—as all the expert advice said. If we want to deal with the issues that migration brings, access to Eurodac—the fingerprinting scheme—the Schengen information system and the Dublin regulation would make a concrete difference to the immigration threats and challenges that we face. I would argue that simply asserting that we are losing sovereignty any time anyone tries to deal with the issues constructively and substantively does not achieve the point that the right hon. Gentleman was trying to make.

We are running out of time, so, to briefly sum up, we cannot assert control and crackdown on crime without those kind of instruments. I am pleased to see that the agreement deals with that. Can the Minister give us any information on what the plans will be on SIS 2 and Eurodac, and specifically on the Dublin convention? As we have heard, I may be joined in asking that by the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), who clearly wants to see us join it too.

As a Member for Edinburgh and the Edinburgh festivals, I have to raise the point that touring musicians and actors contribute massively to the economy and the creative industries, which are one of the UK’s greatest strengths. The city of Edinburgh puts on the biggest ticketed event in the world after the Olympics, every year, with the Edinburgh international festival and fringe.

As a beneficiary of Erasmus, I add my support to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds). There is a situation in this country where middle-class children get to do international travel. As a languages graduate, I absolutely support that, but we need to spread it. There are many children out there who want those opportunities, and we should be facilitating that. So can we make sure that it is as broad as possible?