Absolutely; I could not have put it better myself. We currently have, in the shape of the single market, one of the finest free trade agreements available to any country anywhere in the world. It is frictionless and tariff-free and, of course, it offers great opportunities for those in the UK service sector to sell their services to 500 million customers. There was nothing about departing from the single market on the referendum ballot paper, so this is a ridiculous red line that the Government should not have put in place. I take this opportunity to gently ask my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench please not to acquiesce to the red lines. The fact that the Government have set them does not necessarily mean that they are correct. I want the Labour party to fight for permanent access to and membership of the single market, and I will not stop making that point.
New clause 2 might look a bit lengthy, but it sets out what we should hope to expect to see in the withdrawal agreement that is currently being negotiated by the Prime Minister and the European Commission. I think that a lot of people expected, having passed phase 1, that this was going to be the moment to talk about trade and the sort of deal we were going to get. That is not where we are in the negotiation. We have entered a period of talks about talks—that is simply where we are in this phase 2 arrangement. The article 50 process specifies that, after we have buttoned down a transition arrangement—I shall come to that in a minute—we can perhaps hope to get a framework for our future relationship. That could easily be a single side of A4 with very warm words saying, “Let’s all work together,” and we would then be supposed to depart on our one-way journey without knowing for sure where we were heading.
2.15 pm
I have put into new clause 2 the sort of basic headings that we would expect to see in a pretty basic trade agreement. If the withdrawal agreement is to be acceptable to me, those things need to be spelled out, because I could not recommend an agreement to my constituents unless we had buttoned down some degree of certainty with our EU counterparts so that we knew what we were to be getting.