No, I would like to make some progress on addressing the point of the petition. It asks us: “Why wait?” Well, we have been able to do some waiting since the petition was created in September. It is worth considering what has transpired since then, because that helps to answer the question.
Take last month’s phase 1 agreement, which was a great success for the Government and testified to the fact that the EU wants a good deal, too, and is willing to make concessions to achieve it. After the referendum, a strange doom-monger alliance of ultra-remainers and Nigel Farage ran around insisting that we would have to pay a punitive “Brexit bill” of more than £50 billion—that was before anyone had included the implementation period until December 2020—yet last month the overall settlement, including the implementation period, turned out to be much lower. We were told that the EU would insist that its courts had jurisdiction over the enforcement of EU citizens’ rights here, yet last month we got a time-limited option for our courts voluntarily to refer unclear cases to the European Court of Justice. On the Irish border, we were told that Northern Ireland would have to have a separate deal and, in effect, remain part of the EU for customs purposes.