European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Graham Stringer

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting
Tuesday 7th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He will not necessarily take this as a compliment, but Tony Benn could have made those points, because they have run through the arguments of both Conservative and Labour Members who support leaving the EU ever since we joined in 1972.

Not only is it better that those decisions be taken here, but it is often assumed that the EU is good for the economy and the protection of trade union and environmental rights, yet quite a lot of evidence runs counter to that. I am not an expert on fishing, but the discard rule has been an environmental disaster in the North sea. I understand quite a bit about trade union protections and legislation and I never get a satisfactory answer from my side about the Laval and Viking decisions of the European Court of Justice. Not only do they undermine the minimum wage and the nature and definition of a trade dispute; they are effectively unchangeable, as we in this country cannot change laws made by the ECJ. That is what is fundamentally wrong with being a member of the EU.

I have no doubt that there will be changes when we leave the EU—people will be able to claim there has been a negative economic change there or a positive one here—but that happens all the time. Where has our paper industry gone? Has it been helped by the EU and its regulations? What about our agrochemical industry? It was essentially destroyed by European legislation, but I do not hear people in this Chamber arguing against the EU in that regard. It is accepted—I do not know why—that the EU will always be good for these things.

If new clause 4 were to be put to the vote, I would not join my colleagues in support of it. I agree with what Labour Front Benchers have said—that we should use the debate on the Bill to improve things—but going over the debate we have been having in this Chamber since 2016 will not do that. I have no idea—I have not counted up the time—but my guess is that we have spent as much time in this Chamber discussing the 2016 referendum, at which we committed to giving the people the choice, as we did debating both the Lisbon and Maastricht treaties put together. I understand, however, that Front Benchers do not intend to put the new clause to a vote. I hope they can be more constructive as we continue this debate.

[Sammy Wilson]

The Democratic Unionist party will be supporting clause 33, though tomorrow we will be tabling amendments to the Bill, because, although we accept that it is essential to get out of the EU as quickly as possible, we believe that the terms of the withdrawal agreement are detrimental to Northern Ireland. The purpose, however, of any amendments my party puts forward will be to assist the process of leaving the EU and to ensure that the whole UK leaves. That is not the case with new clauses 4 and 36, which are designed to extend the period for which we stay in the EU and would make it much more difficult to have a clean break.

Have we learned nothing from the tactics the EU has used over the last few years? The longer the period, the more it can hold back, and the more demands it can make. We have seen that time and again.

The last Parliament made it clear that it would not give the Government the support that they needed to move forward with a deal. The EU dug its heels in deeper, and did not try to be accommodating. What is important about clause 33 is that it draws a line, sends a signal and makes the position very clear. It says, “Here is the deadline: now get on with the negotiations.” No clearer message could be sent to those who are negotiating on the EU’s behalf.

Indeed it is significant that, although we were formerly told that a trade deal could take years to negotiate, the language is suddenly changing because the arithmetic in the House has changed and the Government’s will is different. We are now being told, “Well, it might not be as difficult as it was for Canada and Japan. After all, we are starting from the same place, and we have a lot of the same regulations”—and there are a number of other reasons why the negotiation might be easier than we were previously told that it would be.

EU Referendum Leaflet

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Graham Stringer

Monday 9th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

As has already been pointed out, the people of Northern Ireland have not yet been subjected to having to read the dodgy dossier that has been published by the Government. No one should be surprised that it is not an objective assessment of the case for staying in or leaving because, as a number of hon. Members said, the Government made up their mind at the outset that, regardless of what happened in the negotiations, they would put forward the case for remain. No doubt, when the leaflet eventually makes its way through the Royal Mail’s postbags to my constituents’ houses, they will treat it with contempt because they will know it is not an attempt to set out the facts and figures.

We have just finished the Assembly election campaign in Northern Ireland, and the question I was most commonly asked on the doorstep over the past three and a half weeks, even though it is nothing to do with the Assembly election, was, “Are you in or are you out?” From the conversations I have had with thousands of my constituents, I have absolutely no doubt which way they will be voting on 23 June.

The Government are desperate. We saw the degree of their desperation when the Prime Minister visited Northern Ireland at the beginning of this campaign. He brought together farmers and told them that their crops will die in the fields, that their bank balances will be slashed, that European money will end and that we will no longer be able to feed ourselves because of the disaster that will befall Northern Ireland if we drop out of the EU and no longer have the support of the CAP. He ignored the fact that, as most farmers know—a large part of my constituency is rural—EU support for agriculture in the United Kingdom has been falling because support is increasingly being directed towards eastern Europe, and that many small farmers are crippled by bureaucracy and the CAP’s requirements.

Of course, the Prime Minister pulled out the ultimate card: he said that somehow or other the peace process might be in jeopardy. I lived in Northern Ireland right through the troubles, and I never, ever heard any IRA spokesman say that he was determined to bomb the life out of people in Northern Ireland to stay in the EU. It was never an issue with republicans. Indeed, it is significant that, until it got embroiled in the politics of the Irish Republic, Sinn Féin used to be a very anti-EU party. Suddenly, because it wanted to curry favour with voters in the Republic, it decided that it was pro-EU. Saying that the peace process will somehow be in jeopardy is another scare tactic.

In Northern Ireland, whenever we get into trouble with the peace process, we can be sure that political leaders whose names the President of the United States has never heard before will get a telephone call from the White House. “Jimmy, how are you?”—I cannot do an American accent, so I will not even try—or, “Peter, how are you?” and the soft-soaping starts. It has been no different in this referendum campaign. The US cavalry has ridden to the rescue of General Cameron, who is making his last stand. I believe that he knows it is his last stand. He cannot convince the people of the United Kingdom to go into the reservation of the EU, so he has to bring in the American President to frighten them, but I think the American President’s ham-fisted attempt has not weakened but strengthened the leave campaign.

Many Members have already talked about the false arguments in this document, and I want to pick up on one or two of them: first, that the cost of living is going to go up. How do they justify that—on the basis, primarily, that the value of the pound will fall. However, our exchange rate goes up and down. We have a freely floating exchange rate mechanism, because we are not part of the euro. Our exchange rate goes up and down all the time. We live with the consequences of that: sometimes it helps our exporters and sometimes it is to the detriment of our exporters; sometimes it brings down the cost of living because imports become cheaper, and sometimes it puts the cost up—but that is what happens without a fixed exchange rate. Our membership of the EU will make no difference to that—but that is the main way in which the cost of living could increase, according to the Government leaflet.

We have had that reinforced by the Chancellor’s predictions and the Treasury’s model up to 2030. I taught economics at one stage and the one thing I know about economic models is that we do not rely on economic models to tell us what is going to happen in 2030 when we are living in 2016. A Treasury model also told us that the deficit would be wiped out by now. The Treasury revises its estimates almost on a yearly basis, because economic models are subject to a whole range of assumptions. If we are looking 14 years in advance, how can we possibly know what parameters to put into an economic model? We are certainly not going to be able to tell people, “You are going to be £4,302.22 worse off,” which is what the Government want people to believe.

That is the first scare tactic. The second is the idea that people will not be able to go on their holidays any longer, they will have to get a visa to go to the sun and flights will cost more. For those who are concerned about carbon footprints, that would be a compelling argument, but it does not really play much with me. Again, that is based on what? The price of flights has come down not because of the EU, but because of people such as O’Leary, companies such as Ryanair and easyJet, and competition between airlines. That has nothing to do with the EU, yet it is rested at the EU’s door.

Next is the argument that millions of jobs will be lost because it is more difficult to get access to European markets. However, in my constituency, there are companies that do research for the pharmaceutical industry; one firm has 140 workers who research new drugs and, as a result, drugs worth £750 million are produced across Europe from the patents for which they are responsible. Do people buy that information because we are part of the EU? No, they buy it because the research is good quality, and the drug has been tested and is capable of being marketed.

In my constituency, too, Schrader Electronics provides valves that tell drivers whether their tyres have gone down, without them having to look at them. The valves are sold to car manufacturers all over the European Union, as part of the supply chain. On 24 June, are those manufacturers likely to say that they will no longer buy the valves? Of course not, because the technology is good and the price is good. The company is part of the supply chain and will remain part of the supply chain.

For anyone who flies on an airplane, every third seat is made in Northern Ireland—anyone sitting on seats A or D is probably sitting on one. Why? Is it because we are part of the EU? No, it is because we have a manufacturer that produces a competitive product.

I could go on. People buy our goods for those reasons. All around the world, we sell goods to countries that we do not have trade deals with. So what about the idea that, if we left the EU, suddenly we would not get a trade deal with it? First, the supply chain would demand that the goods are bought anyway and, secondly, if the product is not competitive, people will stop buying, but if it is competitive, they will keep on buying. The argument is that it will take us years to negotiate a new trade deal. It will not, for the simple reason that, if firms want our products, they will continue to buy them.

On the last argument to be made, I have to say that the Prime Minister has been despicable today, invoking the war dead. It shows desperation to say that people died for the European Union, or for a united Europe. They died for a Europe free of dictatorship; they died for a democratic Europe. The whole essence of the EU is that it is not a democratic institution—some people do not even try to defend it as that any longer—and it is not an institution in which the will of the people is reflected in the decisions made; the will reflected is that of people who believe they know better than the elected politicians. The bureaucrats believe that they can develop an efficient system of government, free from those pesky politicians with their mad ideas and everything else. For the Prime Minister to invoke the war dead was an absolute disgrace.

We have seen the security argument, unfortunately, blown apart in Paris and Brussels. Terrorists, because of the Schengen arrangements and open borders, can wander around Europe like jihadic nomads, crossing borders, planning and plotting, and then killing. That is why we need to have control over our own borders. That is why we need to be out of an institution that leaves us open to that kind of terrorist activity.

I made an intervention about this earlier, but it is significant that the Government’s own document eulogises the fact that our special relationship with Europe enables us to opt out of and to distance ourselves from most of the major policies of the European Union. If there is a compelling argument, it is in the Government’s own document. We do not want to be part of the euro, because we have seen what it has done, the devastation that it has wrought across economies in European countries, the youth unemployment, and the way in which democratic institutions have been undermined in Italy and Greece as a result of the requirements to stay in the euro. Looking at the arguments in the document, we can also opt out of Schengen, another essential part of the EU.

By the way, the Government say that no country has been able to negotiate a trade agreement with the EU without allowing free access to labour. That is not true. Many countries outside the European Union trade freely with it, and they do not have to accept anyone and everyone who wants to move from EU countries to their country, but the document makes that claim—although the Government say that part of our special relationship is that we can opt out of that as well, and we can opt out of any other interference. If it is so good to be able to opt out of those policies, is it not even better to opt out of the EU altogether?

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

Three people are standing, and I intend to call the Scottish National party spokesperson at 7 o’clock. People can do the arithmetic themselves.

Air Passenger Duty

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Graham Stringer

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson]

I will come to that in a moment, but we must make it clear that APD started off as a green tax and that it is still regarded by many as a tax that is meant to cut down emissions from the aviation industry. Like many other taxes that started off as green taxes, it is highly damaging to the economy.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

Given the hon. Gentleman’s views, I expect that I will agree with most of what he says, but he is wrong on that point. I went back to Hansard and checked what the Government said at the time of the introduction of APD. It was not introduced as a green tax. It has been stolen by the green movement, but it was introduced because the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, thought that aviation was under-taxed, even though that was not the case. I agree with most of the hon. Gentleman’s points, but the tax was not introduced as a green tax.

[Sammy Wilson]

I am not going to go back into the history of Hansard to dispute that point. However, whether the tax has been hijacked, or whether it was originally intended to be a green tax, it is still cited today as one of those taxes that we need to hold on to if we are to cut our carbon emissions.

There is, of course, general concern about electricity prices, the cost of air travel and a whole range of issues affecting the UK economy. The previous Government were, of course, the same on green issues as the present Government, but the zeal of UK Governments to deal with such issues is not found in other parts of the world or of Europe, and that places us at a disadvantage. We have to stop this King Canute attitude to climate change whereby the UK Government think that they can somehow use fiscal powers to affect what is happening to the climate across the world, although they are damaging our own economy at the same time.