European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

My Lords, a distinction is made on purpose between access to the single market and membership of it but most of the speeches made on behalf of Remain make that confusion. No one is arguing—or at least I have never met anyone who does—that we should not have access to or do business with the single market, in the same way as they will still want to do business with us. The question is whether we want to be members of it. I so agree with what my noble friend Lord Howell said about the fact that the world is changing now. For a start, the single market is a trade bloc, and it has a long and noble history of being one. It is based upon German technological protection and general French centralisation and protection. That is the foundation of it philosophically. Britain is a high-seas trading nation and, I think, should not be part of that market, but of course it should of course be trading with it. No one argues otherwise, although of course one has to point out that it is a fairly sluggish market because that is what protected markets are.