The hon. Gentleman—my hon. Friend—has raised a very interesting point, and it is exactly the point that I was about to make myself. The two candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party—one of whom will, we assume, be the next Prime Minister of this country—are currently vying with each other to be the most no-deal Brexit candidate. That is very dangerous for Northern Ireland, and we know it would be disastrous for the whole of the United Kingdom economy. Those who read the article by Carolyn Fairbairn, the director general of the CBI, this morning will have seen a very well argued case for why the whole United Kingdom would suffer, but because she knows Northern Ireland she also makes the point that a no-deal Brexit would be massively dangerous for Northern Ireland.
The simple reality is that we know the following from many different sources. As the outgoing Chief Constable of the PSNI warned, the hard border across the island of Ireland which would inevitably follow a no-deal Brexit would become a potential target for the terrorists. A hard border, by making a target for terrorists, would lead certainly to members of the PSNI being put at risk and also potentially people more generally across Northern Ireland. Those are a serious warnings that we ought to take very seriously.
The Prime Minister said in an answer earlier this year that technical solutions effectively involving moving the border would still mean there is a border. Some involve equipment which could come under attack and some involve a degree of state surveillance that, frankly, I think would not be acceptable to the people of Northern Ireland. We have a very real situation here: a crash-out Brexit is massively threatening to the people of Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland more generally.