I will not, because we are under a time limit and other people want to speak. I apologise to my hon. Friend. He and I have debated this frequently.
We are 1% of the world’s population and we represent 3% of the world’s GDP. As a proportion, we are declining yet further. On the question of being in the European Union, we need to get across to people that our effective voice in the world, insofar as we have one, is best deployed as a leading and influential player in the European Union. There will be less interest taken in British views by the United States, Russia, China, India
and other emerging powers if we go into splendid isolation. As I have already said, the idea that we can somehow advance our future prosperity by withdrawing from the biggest organised trading bloc in the world, while at the same time, as a Conservative party, advocating wider free trade wherever it can be obtained, is an absurdity.
That leads me to the other argument: what does “out” mean and what does a no vote mean? I look forward to my Eurosceptic friends providing an answer to that, because Eurosceptics have always given different answers. My former hon. Friend who is now in the UK Independence party, the hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell), has a quite different view of what a no vote means compared with some of my no voting colleagues on the Government Back Benches. Does it mean the Norwegian option? Do we stay in the trading area? That would mean we pay a large subscription, accept free movement of labour—Norway has a higher proportion of other EU nationals compared with Norwegians than we have compared with Brits—and comply with all the legislation, rules and regulations of the single market without having any say in them.
Do we go further than that and have the Swiss model? The Swiss model means we would have some access to the single market. However, in those areas we would have to comply with all the laws and rules that would be directly applied and have no influence on what they are.