I join all those who have spoken today, other than the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), and endorse and embrace pretty much everything that has been so ably said. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) said, this is not just a simple case of our having a debate, which of course we should have had some time ago in order to assist the Government in this extremely difficult process, but of having the debate that we should have had in the run-up to the EU referendum.
I do not know whether the good people of Vauxhall actually did sit and discuss the intricacies of the customs union and the single market. Perhaps they did. That might explain why, of course, they voted to remain in the European Union. What we are seeing—I am sorry that I am repeating myself here—is the dawning of a Brexit reality. In that reality, businesses the length and breadth of our country are worried. They are extremely worried, especially those in the manufacturing sector.
On Tuesday, a real-life business in my constituency, which employs 750 people, came to see me. Such is the atmosphere in this country that it has not allowed me to tell Members its name, because it is frightened of the sort of abuse that many Members on these Benches have received and to which we have become accustomed. We will not give up, and we will speak out, because it is not about us, but about the generations to come and indeed the people in our constituencies who now, in the real world, face the real possibility of losing their jobs.
What did this company tell me? It makes a world-leading medicine. I am enormously proud to have it in the borough of Broxtowe. The reality is that, as it uses specialised medicinal ingredients, it imports them into our country. In Broxtowe and Nottingham, it puts them altogether and makes a world-leading medicine. Some 60% of its exports go directly to the European Union. Tariffs do not concern it so much. They concern the car industry where margins are so tight that any imposition of a tariff simply will see those great car manufacturers, which employ 425,000 people—people, whom I am afraid, the hon. Member for Vauxhall, casts to one side—move their production and new lines to their existing facilities in countries such as France, Germany and other places.
Returning to the pharmaceutical company that came to see me, any delay at all of those basic ingredients will have a considerable effect on its ability to produce, and time costs money. Any delay also means that it has to look for warehouse spaces—and it is doing this now—so that it can stockpile. I am talking about the sort of expanse that we can barely begin to imagine. It is looking for warehouses so that it can store and stockpile both the ingredients and the finished products. It fears that any delay will affect its business of exporting into the European Union.