Thank you, Mr Speaker. In broad terms, I agree with the point the hon. Gentleman is making about air pollution, because the EU is providing the best bulwark against the reduction of air pollution standards in this country.
Let me move on to talk about freedom of movement, as, sadly, few MPs seem prepared to defend it any longer. It is especially sad and worrying that the leadership of the official Opposition are in danger of ceding the terms of this debate to the right. I readily accept that it is easy to blame free movement when the benefits have been enjoyed so unevenly. There are people in my city of Brighton and Hove who have not visited Brighton seafront because they cannot afford to get there. For them, the idea of being able to live, work or study in another country is about as likely as travelling to the moon, but that reality does not justify denying them the right to free movement in the future. On the contrary, it should mean fighting tooth and nail for a Europe of equals, in which the hard-won rights enshrined in EU law do not just exist in the statute books as perks for the privileged, but are genuinely available to all EU citizens. We should have, and we deserve to have, successful policies to redistribute wealth fairly and to create real opportunities for all.
There is an enormous task ahead of us to reunite our country, and it will be made all the more difficult by further economic hardship of the kind that we will have with a hard Brexit which does not have us as part of the single market and does not have free movement. So we absolutely need to know what the plan is going to look like. The justifiable anger and mistrust felt by those who voted leave will only deepen if the many promises made turn out not even to be worth the red bus they were written on. We need to be honest about how people are feeling and why they feel the way they do. We do not need blindly to follow the damaging, blame-laden rhetoric that is being used to distract from the failure of neo-liberal economics to provide the basic needs of all members of our society. Immigration has been systematically and
cynically scapegoated for everything, when in fact what is at the heart of this is decades of not investing in our public services. That is what—