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EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK

No thank you.

There is much we can now do to mitigate the costs of Brexit for our constituents, including securing a sanitary and phytosanitary veterinary agreement with the EU. I ask the Minister to give an update on the progress of that. Colleagues on the living standards coalition of MPs found that securing such an agreement could reduce EU food import prices by between 3% to 6% in the next few years. That will go a substantial way to reducing our constituents’ cost of living.

In order to move forward, we have to look at where we are now and see how the world sees us. In my previous job reporting on trade from Brussels as a British journalist for a British newspaper, I would often attract wry comments from other members of the European Commission and community about my nationality and the choices that my country made. During the years of the Brexit negotiations, we had five Foreign Secretaries and six Business Secretaries, so no wonder they had some comments about my Government.

Contrast that with the reception that our Prime Minister had at the Munich Security Conference. I was in the audience and heard the spontaneous applause when the Prime Minister declared that

“we are not the Britain of the Brexit years anymore”,

that we must

“build a stronger Europe and a more European NATO”,

and that

“there is no British security without Europe, and no European security without Britain.”

Security does not just mean defence—it means food, energy, and climate and the environment, and I am proud that in my constituency we have one of the last remaining European institutions headquartered in the UK: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which will build on its new site. Soon, it will raise the British flag alongside the flags of all its partners.

5.12 pm