I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman because, as a historian, I think he raises an interesting question: to what extent have economic forecasts ever been accurate? He might wish to study the assessments of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which have on the whole been consistently gloomy over the seven years that I have been in the House. He would be hard pushed to find a record of any Government being successful in economic forecasting, because all sorts of assumptions have to be made. As a previous Prime Minister once remarked, it is so often in life that events shape things, rather than our own forecasts of what the future might look like.
The hon. Gentleman helpfully takes me back to my point, which is that all these forecasts and assessments of potential impacts depend on a huge number of variables. They will alter by individual company, by sector, by technology and by much else besides. Whatever any Government trying to deliver such an assessment could come up with in terms of the net benefits for different scenarios, they will inevitably prove inaccurate. Therefore, arriving at impact assessments in the definition that the Government use—with clearly quantified conclusions and benefits—would almost certainly prove misleading.
To publish such assessments is to share them with every negotiating partner of the UK and would be a huge own goal. Instead, we should expect the Government to continue doing what they have been doing: setting out their strategy in broad terms, as the Prime Minister did in her Lancaster House and Florence speeches. In due course, a third speech may be needed to shed light on what our Government feel about those important terms, “convergence”, “alignment”, “equivalence” and “mutual recognition”; to highlight the benefits of our services to us and to Europe; and to say why a broad and deep partnership will benefit both us and Europe, including in regard to the sectors of defence, security, research, aerospace, nuclear energy, development, academia and many others besides.
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I urge the Government to resist commissioning an economic impact report and analyses of different scenarios under their negotiating strategy; likewise, I urge the House to resist asking for that. Neither will help those who are charged with negotiating, and delivering for our country, a new relationship with the EU that will benefit citizens of Europe, wherever we live. I say that as someone who has tried to defy the unhelpful terms used earlier by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield), for whom I otherwise have considerable respect.
I voted remain because of the short-term risks to my constituents and our country. I voted for article 50 to honour the result of the referendum. I support the Prime Minister because in these negotiations I trust her to steer us between the exaggerated descriptions of Hades and nirvana. I do not fall into the category of Brexiteer, extreme Brexiteer or extreme non-Brexiteer; I fall into the category of a Member of Parliament trying to help his constituents through an incredibly difficult period. In that context, I am grateful that the Opposition are not going to press amendment 348, and hope they never come back to it.