I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, but I should put it on the record that I do not use Her Majesty’s Treasury figures as the touchstone for reliability or honesty; that is just a personal gripe of mine.
“Scotland’s Place in Europe: People, Jobs and Investment” is available in summary form and in all its 58-page glory. As a bonus, the back page contains the full text of the United Kingdom’s impact assessment of leaving the European Union. The one that I have is actually the Chinese version for those who understand Chinese.
Among the likely—perhaps very likely—consequences, the Fraser of Allander Institute has forecast that GDP in Scotland could fall by £8 billion over a 10-year period; that the real value of wages in the pockets of the people of Scotland could fall by 7%, including those who cannot afford to live on the wages they have just now, never mind on 7% less; and that 80,000 jobs in Scotland could be at risk. The updated document published this week indicates that the cost of leaving without a deal would be of the order of £2,300 for every citizen in Scotland. Our economic output could fall by 8.5%. That has to be the recession to end all recessions.
Exports from Scotland to the European Union currently run at £12.3 billion a year. If we add other exports that we can only carry out because we have free trade agreements as part of our EU membership, that figure increases to a fraction under £16 billion. Some 56% of Scotland’s current international exports are either to the European Union or to countries with which we already have a free trade agreement, and that could increase to somewhere close to 90% by the time we actually leave the single market and the customs union. How much of that is absolutely, unconditionally guaranteed still to be available after we leave? Right now, the answer is nil or very close to nil. That is the economic cost that we could well be subjected to if we leave the single market and the customs union.
I have not even mentioned the horrific social cost. We saw another heart-rending story today of a lady from Spain who has given 15 years’ service to the NHS, but
who has given up and gone back to Spain. Somebody actually queried, “Why is that newsworthy?” Well, given the current recruitment crisis in the NHS, if even just one more well-trained professional leaves, I think it is a bit more newsworthy than somebody leaving a jungle because 250,000 people phoned Channel 4 and asked for them to be thrown out.
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It is established that the Government—almost unbelievably and certainly incompetently—have got us this far without undertaking a proper impact assessment to advise themselves of what might happen to ordinary people in these islands when we leave, particularly if we leave without remaining members of the single market and the customs union. The Government tried to hide their own incompetence by refusing to let the public, and initially refusing to let Parliament, see the assessments that they had not done. They said that publishing even the little work that had been done would be disastrous to the negotiations and give too much of an advantage to the negotiating partners or enemies, as I have heard them described by Tory Members. It would hand over information to the EU that needed to be kept top secret and that the EU could never have got for itself.
Among these jealously guarded state secrets, we find in paragraph 6 of the “Electricity and Renewables Sector Report”, the astonishing revelation that
“Electricity is a fundamental part of modern society. Residential and industrial users rely on its use to ensure basic and vital needs such as lighting, heating or refrigeration are met on a daily basis.”
I am glad that I saw that in the Government’s impact assessment, because I did not know that before and neither did the EU. In the “Defence Sector Report”, we discover that
“The Government is a key supporter of the defence sector”.
And in the “Gambling Sectoral Report”, the EU’s very own James Bonds can now discover that gambling legislation in Northern Ireland is devolved, when there is a Northern Ireland Assembly to exercise those powers, and that a lot of gambling services in the UK are actually owned by companies registered offshore.
Those are the kinds of facts that the Government try to keep from us. They were eventually forced to disclose those facts, but we can only wonder what else the Government know but are refusing to tell us. They do not trust this Parliament or the people of these islands with this information, yet they expect us to trust them to have unfettered rights to decide the future of these islands and the 60 million people who live here.