UK’s Withdrawal from the EU

Debate between John Redwood and Peter Bone

Thursday 14th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams). While I agree with Wales in voting to leave the EU, I am afraid that I found little in his speech—though he put it powerfully and coherently—that I could agree with. I certainly cannot agree with a second referendum, or indeed, to taking no deal off the table.

I have always found that it is a good idea in the House to vote on what the motion says and not necessarily on what Ministers or other Members say in the House, so I thought I had better have a look at what it says today. It is very clear, actually:

“That this House…reiterates its support for the approach to leaving the EU expressed by this House on 29 January 2019”—

so I thought I had better look and see what the House had agreed to, and within the motion that it agreed to were the words

“rejects the United Kingdom leaving the European Union without a Withdrawal Agreement”.

In other words, the motion that we are voting on tonight takes no deal off the table. It does not matter what Ministers have said. It is what the motion says, so I would expect all Opposition Members who do not seem to want a no-deal option to support the Government’s motion tonight, which is exactly the reason I will not be supporting it. It is a badly worded motion—well, no, it is not a badly worded motion; it is deliberately worded that way. I think the Government thought that they could slide it through and that it would not matter. I know that, if I supported this tonight, the Whips would point out to me, “You have supported taking no deal off the table.” That is not what I can do.

I want to go back to when I was a co-founder of the Grassroots Out movement. I travelled the length and breadth of the United Kingdom during the referendum campaign discussing with people what they wanted if they were going to vote to leave. It came down, I think, to a few things. They wanted to end the free movement of people, to stop giving billions and billions of pounds each and every year to the EU and for us to make our own laws in our own country, judged by our own judges. I fear that the current withdrawal agreement proposed by the Government fails on all those tests. Maybe that is one of the reasons why it suffered the biggest defeat in Commons history. Anybody who had suffered the biggest defeat in Commons history might want to go away and think very carefully about what they put to the House, and not tinker around for a couple of weeks before coming back with more or less the same motion, because the same thing will happen. It will get rejected by this House.

Let us look at the tests. Does the withdrawal agreement end the free movement of people? It does not, because there is no future deal worked out, just some sort of political wish list—a political declaration—so it fails on that score. Does the agreement stop billions and billions of pounds being given to the EU each and every year? We know that £39 billion is going to be given whatever happens under the withdrawal agreement, and if the transition period is extended, even more money will be given. Clearly, our courts will not be able to be the final arbiters, because the European Court of Justice has a significant say over our future.

[John Redwood]

Will my hon. Friend confirm that, because the agreement is not about the future partnership, it sentences this House and the whole nation to 21 to 45 more months of the rows, disagreements, uncertainties and problems that we have presided over for the last two years and seven months?

[Mr Bone]

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s intervention. I will deal with that issue in a minute, but I want to finish the point that clearly the withdrawal agreement does not let us make our own laws in our own country, because we would still be tied to the European Union.

The one thing that people say—I hear it from leading remainers—is that they want certainty, but the one thing that the withdrawal agreement and the political declaration in particular give us is uncertainty, with months and months of squabbling and not delivering what the British people voted for in June 2016.

Draft EU Budget 2011

Debate between John Redwood and Peter Bone

Wednesday 13th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Conservative Members clearly have a very simple message for the Minister: we wish her well and we wish her to be strong and fierce in argument and debate, because we think she should be more ambitious. It is not enough just to freeze this budget; this budget has to be brought down. If there is any budget of all the budgets we look at in this difficult time about which we can say, “We can get away with cutting that,” it is this budget. I suspect many Opposition Members would agree with that, were they honest about it. We are talking about a budget of €143 billion or £120 billion, which is more than we spend on the national health service. A big chunk of that budget is down to us, and we get nothing like the value out of it that we get from the NHS.

I therefore hope the Minister will look to the following very important precedent. The last time we had a good battling female Minister who stood up for Britain she was armed only with a handbag, yet with that one piece of equipment she came back with the biggest rebate we ever got: the rebate the Labour party stupidly gave away, and the rebate we need back. That rebate would give us twice as much money as the amount the Government are hoping to save from the cut in child benefit. We know the Minister has the right equipment. She assures me that she has an excellent handbag, so we wish her every success in putting that argument.

The argument to the Greeks, Italians and Portuguese must be that they are having to make far worse cuts than any that are suggested for the European budget. We can cut collectively in a much more sensible way than the damaging domestic cuts they are having to put to their electors. The French have already had riots on the streets over their domestic cuts. I am sure they will agree with our Minister that there are some easy pickings to be had by removing items from this European budget. I therefore also hope the Minister will point out that because this is a levy on all the member states and all the member states are borrowing too much money, every penny and cent of that €143 billion is going to be borrowed. The taxpayers will not just have to pay once, therefore; they will also have to pay all the interest on that and be ready to repay the debt.

Is this really the kind of thing we want to be borrowing money for? Of course it is not. So Godspeed to you Minister: put the case, and win over all those other Governments. They will surely agree with us that it is better to cut the European budget than to cut important domestic programmes.

[Mr Bone]

rose—