G7 Summit

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who has pursued this line of thinking for many months. I must say that I think there is a better and more elegant way of doing this. We can excise the offending bits of the treaty. We can make a great deal of progress. We can have a new treaty. It will be a vast improvement. I think that Opposition Members should look forward to that and should be encouraging and supportive of this Government’s efforts in getting us out of the EU in a way that they voted for time and time and time again.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The Prime Minister insists the UK will be ready for no deal, while at the same time duplicitously using threat to force the European Union to cave in to his non-existent alternative arrangements. Will he admit that a no-deal scenario would be catastrophic, or will he continue to face both ways—deceive the public and use no deal for his own electoral gain?

[The Prime Minister]

I am afraid I do not agree with what the right hon. Lady said about no deal. As I said on the steps of Downing Street, I think there will be bumps on the road, but this is a very great country and a very great economy, and we will get it done. I am afraid that the most fatal thing to getting a deal is for this country to show that it is so apprehensive about coming out on other terms as to accept anything that the EU prescribes. That is, I am afraid, the course down which the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) is beckoning us to go. That would be a disaster.