EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK

Debate between Pete Wishart and Mike Wood

Wednesday 2nd September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Mike Wood (Kingswinford and South Staffordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler, and to respond on behalf of His Majesty’s official Opposition. I congratulate the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) on securing this debate, but I am sure it will come as no surprise to him or other hon. Members that we see the legacy of the 2016 referendum, and indeed the path forward for our country, through a very different lens.

Listening to the hon. Gentleman, one might almost assume that the United Kingdom was a sunlit, frictionless economic Shangri-La until a single ballot paper cast us into eternal ruin. He told us, echoed by other hon. Members, that leaving the European Union uniquely crippled our economy and that our only salvation lies in surrendering sovereignty through the Government’s grandly titled EU reset, or perhaps going further.

That entire narrative collapses under the weight of hard economic reality. First, let us examine the great myth of the EU single market as an automatic engine of export growth. Ministers speak of the single market as if it were a place where magic happens, but if there was magic, the UK was firmly in the audience wondering when the rabbit would emerge from the hat. As former Trade and Industry Secretary Lord Lilley demonstrated in his Policy Exchange paper earlier this year, during our entire 28-year membership of the single market, from 1992, UK goods exports to our EU partners grew by less than 1% per year, but over that exact same period our goods exports to the 111 countries with which we traded on standard World Trade Organisation terms grew by 87%. In fact, according to the European Commission’s own single market scoreboard, the UK was the member state that benefited least from the goods single market. Rejoining that regulatory straitjacket in pursuit of export growth is the pure triumph of hope over experience.

Secondly, we must address the sheer statistical alchemy deployed by advocates of rejoining. Several speakers have brandished a non-peer-reviewed National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that claims that Brexit cost the UK up to 8% of GDP, but let us look at how the model has constructed that parallel universe. It created a statistical doppelganger proxy that was dominated by the United States and Estonia, which between them provide almost three quarters of the entire weighting for the alternative proxies—apparently—for where the UK could have been without Brexit. It assumed that, had we remained in the EU, the UK would have miraculously mirrored the American economic performance.

To attribute that divergence to Brexit requires an extraordinary leap of imagination. It requires one to pretend that there was no US artificial intelligence boom, no massive American fiscal stimulus—which was possible because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency—no transatlantic shale gas price advantage, no differing pandemic shock, and no North sea oil rundown. In fact, Germany fell 8% behind the same arbitrary index under that model, so unless German departure from the EU has passed us by unnoticed, blaming that divergence on Brexit is simply economic nonsense.

When we examine the actual data, rather than econometric fairy tales, the evidence is clear. Between 2016 and 2025, the UK economy grew by 12.2%, and by 5.3% since we formally left, outpacing the European G7 average. Since Brexit, British economic growth has averaged 1.1% per annum, compared with just 0.1% for Germany. As hon. Members have mentioned, the Office for Budget Responsibility previously assumed an implausible 15% collapse in total UK global trade openness, but as its own November 2025 briefing conceded, UK trade intensity has remained stable at around 65% of GDP and has continued to track peer economies such as France.

The single market was overwhelmingly designed for goods, but more than 80% of the UK economy is based on services. Our services exports continue to boom globally. Even the dire predictions of a mass exodus from the City of London proved dramatically overblown. Institutions such as JP Morgan, which had threatened to move thousands of jobs abroad, have instead been transferring staff back from Paris to London.

Although business investment was undeniably delayed during the post-2016 political paralysis, dragged out by those trying to overturn the referendum, fixed investment to GDP rebounded, reaching 19.6% by the end of last year.

[Pete Wishart]

I have been listening very carefully and patiently to the hon. Gentleman, and he refuses to accept the reality. The House of Commons Library did us a great favour by bringing together all the evidence, which clearly suggests that there has been a fall in GDP and in the performance of the UK economy since we left the European Union. Is he credibly standing there and telling this House that there have been no impacts whatsoever of our leaving the EU?

[Mike Wood]

If we chart it over the last two decades, particularly against German performance, on almost any economic chart we look at, it would be almost impossible to pick out the point at which the UK left the European Union. It is impossible to say from looking at those charts that our economy has grown more slowly than Germany’s, because it has not; it has grown more quickly. Our trade has not been disrupted more than Germany’s—[Interruption.] It really has not; they track almost identically across that chart.

Thirdly, where Britain is succeeding, we are doing so precisely because of our post-Brexit freedoms. The UK digital and tech flat white economy now represents about 15% of GDP—larger than the entire domestic goods sector. As the Growth Commission highlighted, our tech sector is flourishing and leading Europe in artificial intelligence, precisely because it is unburdened by Brussels’ heavy-handed Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act and restrictive AI Act.

Instead of backing British enterprise, the Government are proposing to pursue unilateral dynamic alignment, shackling the 92% of British firms that do not trade with the EU to Brussels’s rulebook, surrendering our precision breeding advantages and hiking domestic carbon costs by linking our emissions trading scheme, which threaten to add up to £100 per tonne to fertiliser prices at a time when they are already crippling British farmers, while paying administrative fees to Brussels for the privilege.

That is an astonishingly one-sided bargain, a masterclass in the art of the bad deal. The lesson of the past 10 years is that national prosperity is built by businesses working across the UK, not subcontracted to the EU. The economic catastrophe prophesied in 2016 simply did not occur.

Copyright (Rights and Remuneration of Musicians, etc.) Bill

Debate between Pete Wishart and Mike Wood

Friday 3rd December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

I am grateful for the opportunity to resume my speech—this almost feels like a second episode, perhaps of “EastEnders” or “Doctor Who”, with a drum roll but without all the excitement and cliffhangers—and I have a couple of little points to make. I shall be brief, as I know that several hon. Members wish to contribute to the debate.

I did not want to give the impression that I had any difficulty with the traditional model for contractual arrangements with artists. I think that there is a lot in the rights-ownership model, which has sustained the music industry since its inception and has made a huge success of it. It only created difficulties in the early noughties with the advent of digitisation. Music was probably the first discipline that began to experience difficulties with digitisation, and we know the problems that consumed the industry. Its very survival was under threat from pirates and companies such as Napster and so on.

We put in the infrastructure that helped to deal with that, and music has been a massive success since then. Global revenues hit £16.2 billion last year—the highest since 2002. This is the sixth consecutive year of growth. Between 2015 and 2019, revenues enjoyed by labels have grown by more than £200 million. People are making obscene amounts of money again, but not the people making the music.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman spoke about his own illustrious music recording career earlier. Does he recognise that someone who sold 1 million copies of a single in the 1990s typically saw their single reach the top 25 singles of the year, whereas about 1,700 different artists had more than 1 million streams last year? He is right that there is a lot of streaming, but it is being shared so much more widely, so is it not inevitable that many people will receive less?

[Pete Wishart]

People will receive less because they are paid such pitiful, insignificant sums every time one of their pieces of music is played on one of the streaming services. On iTunes, it is 0.003p per play for the artist. Apple Music is a little more generous, with 0.006p. Those are the sorts of difficulties that current artists are having to experience in this whole streaming environment.

The Ivors Academy and the Musicians’ Union have told us how bad the situation is for musicians, so we know how bad it is. They have said that 82% of professional musicians have made £200 per year less from streaming. This is totally different from the 1990s, when someone who did sell massive amounts of singles got real rewards. We are coming into the Christmas season, and someone who is lucky enough to have had a Christmas hit in the 1970s or 1980s—there have not been so many recently—will hit the jackpot, because their song will get played again and again and go right to the top of the steaming charts. All these historic artists will once again earn a huge bonus this Christmas season, and all power to them, because these are fantastic songs that we all love, but that gives just an indication of how difficult it is for modern artists to try to make some money.

Government Policy on the Proceedings of the House

Debate between Pete Wishart and Mike Wood

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart]

I think we have heard enough from the right hon. Gentleman. He took up about 25 minutes of the available time so I shall move on, if he does not mind.

We on the SNP Benches have a little experience of minority government: we are in our second parliamentary session as a minority Government. We had a minority Government with just two Members more than the second party, and now we are just two short of a majority. In each case we have tended to try to function as a minority Government, respecting the view that we do not have a majority and trying to work in consensus and partnership with other parties. The exercise we are doing around the budget is an example of how things can be done in a minority Parliament.

I mentioned fracking: it is important that we come back to the Scottish Parliament on that with another view. On other issues on which we are defeated, we will consult further and try to address the concerns. That is how we govern as a minority Government. I am happy to talk things through with the Leader of the House to help her to understand better. If she wants to come to the SNP, we can give her some lessons about running a minority Government. If she is having difficulty with it, which it seems she is, she can come and have a chat with us. I will not break the confidence of our meeting, as she did to me at the most recent business questions. She can come and have a chat and perhaps we can talk through some of the issues.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

As we have heard, it has been 12 months since the Scottish Government were defeated, and they are still at the consultation stage, whereas in the four weeks since the House expressed a view on the two motions in question, the Government have announced a policy change on the level of next year’s tuition fees, and they have announced different terms of reference for the public pay review bodies. The Government have done exactly what the hon. Gentleman is asking of them in terms of considering and reviewing, and I am sure that those matters will come back to the House.

[Pete Wishart]

I do not think the hon. Gentleman has been listening. I am not making any criticism of the Government—[Hon. Members: “Oh!”] I am not! I am trying to give them some advice about how to do things and I am trying to get their minority status into their head. I am trying to help them to deal with that, so I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman listened to what I have said. It is good that they are reviewing things—that is what minority Governments do, and they should continue—but they also have to allow Opposition day debates to conclude and then vote on them and express an opinion. It is important that our constituents hear us in Parliament deciding on the important issues. It is important that they know our views, and the only way they are going to find out how we think about a particular issue or subject is if we vote on it. That is the only way they can determine it.

I do not know whether the Government intend not to vote on any further Opposition day motions, but I am not particularly interested in what Paul Waugh has to say in the Huffington Post on a particular day. I would like to hear it from the Leader of the House. Perhaps we can tempt her to say definitively, yes or no, whether she intends the Government to vote on Opposition day motions at some point. I will give her the chance to say whether it will be an option for the Government. [Interruption.] She is shaking her head, or—