Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I am honoured. I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil), the second most humble crofter who is at home in this place. I pay tribute to him, because he has been and is an extraordinary Chair of the Select Committee. Despite some of the disagreements that we might have had throughout our deliberations on this deal, other deals and other trade matters, he has carried on and managed to get through a very lengthy trade agreement—at times with great frustration. It is right to pay tribute to him, as well as to the secretariat, who have done an extraordinary amount of work and have found it equally as frustrating as we have when we have not had the scrutiny or access to Ministers that we would like.
It should be no surprise that I support the Bill. Given the course of the debate, we have not spent a great deal of time speaking about the contents of the Bill, which is because it is remarkably uncontroversial in this instance. Wherever we have gone in our objectives and ambitions to sign new trade agreements, we are confounding expectations. It was not that long ago that, when we talked about signing a trade agreement with Australia or New Zealand, those on the Opposition Benches said that it would be impossible and we would not be able to do it in the timescale. Well, we have done it, and now we are looking faster than expected on New Zealand. As I said in an intervention, we are also already in discussions with the Gulf Co-operation Council, India, the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership and Canada, and we have the Singapore digital partnership and the Japan agreement under our belt. To discount those is an enormous mistake, because what the UK has done in terms of Japan and the benchmark for digital trade is truly remarkable. The world is now following our digital trade agreements, and that will be an enormous benefit to our businesses and services, and to this country.
The striking thing in the course of this debate has been the discussion of import impacts versus export opportunities. I am not remotely surprised to hear the Opposition talk about imports that will impact us in the most adverse possible way, but our export opportunities have been underestimated and not given the full attention that they should have been given. My hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) talked about such opportunities, including the exports of machinery and professional services. We have to look at this in the round and not just cherry-pick the bits we think are going in a good way or a bad way; we have to look at them as a whole.
When we look at the Australia trade agreement, we are saying that farmers may have been adversely affected. I do not believe that. What I want to look at is all the trade agreements that we will have signed by the end of
this Parliament. When the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar and I visited the middle east to study whether we should join the Gulf Co-operation Council, we sat with representatives of the small amount of farming done in that region who said that, actually, a trade agreement with them would be hugely advantageous. The NFU has gone on the record saying that an agreement with the GCC will be a massive boon for our farmers and food producers in this country. We cannot look at one trade agreement on its own.