I will not give way just yet.
The speech by Mr Barnier today is extremely relevant, and I have the benefit of having the full text here. I will not go through every detail of it, I can assure you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I note that some of the things that he said are highly relevant to what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State rightly pointed out in his speech. On the question of what happens if there is no deal, Mr Barnier said:
“Here also, I want to be very clear: in a classic negotiation, ‘no deal’ means a return to the status quo. In the case of Brexit, ‘no deal'”,
he claimed,
“would be a return to a distant past.”
He is wrong—that is not the case. I think the hon. Member for Brent North said that under the World Trade Organisation tariffs, there would be a 40% tariff on lamb, but even Mr Barnier says that custom duties would include
“an average of 12% on lamb and also fish”,
which is very different from what the hon. Gentleman asserted. I do not blame him—he was speaking from memory, so I am not criticising him—but I am just pointing out what Mr Barnier said.
Mr Barnier also made the extraordinary assumption:
“In practice, ‘no deal’ would worsen the ‘lose-lose’ situation which is bound to result from Brexit.”
Again, he is wrong. He went on to say:
“And I think, objectively, that the UK would have more to lose than its partners.”
That is just not so. He then went on to reveal what is really going on at the EU and with his negotiating position:
“I therefore want to be very clear: to my mind there is no reasonable justification for the ‘no deal’ scenario. There is no sense in making the consequences of Brexit even worse. That is why we want an agreement.”
They want an agreement because they know, just as Allister Heath, the distinguished editor of The Sunday Telegraph, pointed out in an article two weeks ago, that German car makers are getting really worried about the idea that there will not be an agreement, because that is not in their interests either.
On trading relationships, it is absolutely essential to remember that, while we will continue to have some 40% of our trade—although the figure is declining—with the internal market, or the framework of the remaining 27 member states, we run a monumental deficit of £71 billion a year with the EU, as the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) has said. That figure went up by £10 billion last year alone, and we do not even have this year’s figures, which will be even greater. The Office for National Statistics may have indicated to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State how much worse they will be by this time next year.
By the same token, our global trade surplus with the rest of the world, in goods and services, imports and exports—that is the golden thread and the parameter that international trade statistics rely on—is expanding at an enormous, accelerating rate. That is the basis of our future prosperity. I say with respect to Opposition Members that more effective trade with the rest of the world, including taxing companies, will result in greater profitability. Out of that enormously growing prosperity zone, we will be able to pay for the public services that the public want and we want. The national health service will actually have more money at its disposal as a result of our successful international trading relationship with the rest of the world.
Mr Barnier went on to make an interesting observation:
“To my British partners I say: a fair deal is far better than no deal.”
That may be how it looks, but the truth is that they have to be very careful that they do not put us in the position of having to accept the idea of no deal. If that happens, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, the advantages to us of trading on WTO terms are simply not unsatisfactory at all—quite the opposite. We all need to be realistic.
Interestingly, Mr Barnier then referred to the great port of Zeebrugge, which he said he will visit shortly,
“and for which the UK is the primary market with 17 million tonnes of roll-on roll-off traffic in 2016”.
He went on to say that he could not imagine, in the interests of the UK, Flanders and Belgium, that it would be a good idea to have
“an interruption of supply or a highly efficient organisation being called into question.”
We do not want a trade war over ports with the rest of the European Union. As I pointed out in an intervention, it was the EU that introduced the ports regulation. We had a massive row in the House of Commons, including in Committee, and I have been dealing with the issue as Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee for the past two years. It is, however, going ahead, and the reason for that is that there is no way we can stop it. That is the response to the questions that have been asked. The reality is that until we get our sovereignty back and get the ability to run our own ports system on our own terms, we will be subjected to things like the ports regulation, which was put through by a majority vote behind closed doors. Nobody really knows who decided what. I tried to find out, but we could not make any serious progress in discovering who was making decisions. A lot of it, I think, was coming from Hamburg, because it has an enormous interest in preserving its own position.
The imposed rules were rejected by every single one of our 47 ports—not just the employers but the trade unions, which all piled in and said, “We can’t tolerate this new ports regulation.” Yet there it is, going through, if it has not gone through already while we were away for the general election. The bottom line is that our ports are the arteries for the lifeblood of our international trade, and they have been such for four centuries, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said.