To me and to the millions of people who listened to any of the debate in the run-up to that important vote—as I said, there was a record turnout in many constituencies—it is clear that it was said time and again that leaving the European Union would mean leaving the customs union and the single market. Someone would have had to be pretty isolated and switched off to ignore that central feature of the debate.
That is the biggest democratic mandate for a course of action achieved by any Government in the United Kingdom. After the referendum, the House voted by a clear majority to authorise the Prime Minister to trigger article 50, which provided the legal basis for our withdrawal and commenced the leaving process. In the recent general election, more than 80% of people voted for parties committed to respecting the result of the referendum. That is why I must say at this point that the amendments recently tabled by Labour, and the move in its policy, confirm our worst suspicions. Labour’s policy is now for us to remain in the single market and the customs union, and it seems likely to accept free movement of people. That looks like remain, it sounds like remain—yes, it is a policy in favour of remaining in the EU.
The instruction from the referendum cannot be ignored. The Government are clear that the British people voted to leave the EU, so that is what we must do. As the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU noted,
“the electorate voted for a Government to give them a referendum. Parliament voted to hold the referendum, the people voted in that referendum, and we are now honouring the result of that referendum, as we said we would.”—[Official Report, 31 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 818.]
The Prime Minister said in October:
“This is about more than the decision to leave the EU; it is about whether the public can trust their politicians to put in place the decision they took.”—[Official Report, 23 October 2017; Vol. 630, c. 45.]
The UK can trust this Government to honour the referendum result. We recognise that to do otherwise would be to undermine the decision of the British people, which would have worrying implications for our democracy.
Right hon. and hon. Members may regret the chain of events I have described, and they may regret that there was not a caveat that the result of the referendum could be overturned by Parliament if it did not like the result of the negotiations, but the time to add that caveat was when the European Union Referendum Act 2015 was passed. I note that many Members in the Chamber—the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green, the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington, and the shadow Minister, for instance—voted in favour of passing that Act. That Act did not say that the referendum result would be the best of three, it did not say that, if we did not like the first result, we could go away and rerun the referendum to get the result we wanted, and it did not say that there had to be a certain result. That was the time to make these suggestions—not now, after the public has voted.