Mr Speaker, I am grateful to you for calling me. You may be disbelieving, but I assure you that I will do my best to speak for fewer than 12 minutes, so I shall be rather more pithy than usual.
For the last 40 years, we have achieved some remarkable transformations in the British economy. We have made ourselves one of the most attractive economies in the world for inward investment, and developed an extremely competitive modern economy in both goods and services. That is not entirely attributable to the single market and the customs union, but they played a very large part. The UK is regarded by many of the great firms that invest in this country as the most business-friendly member of the EU and the most attractive place to invest in a way that gives absolutely unfettered access to the largest developed international free trade area in the world. I personally have never understood why we are seeking to detract from that. In the referendum campaign absolutely nobody made a major feature anywhere of saying that we should withdraw from these arrangements, and certainly nobody advocated the virtues of putting in place at our
ports and borders customs checks, customs procedures, tariffs, regulatory divergence and all the things that cause cost.
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The aim of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is an old friend for whom I have very considerable respect, is rather the same as mine: he takes as the basis of his arguments that he wants Britain to be one of the most attractive, if not the most attractive, place for the investment we need in future years. But, with great respect, I think he employs considerable ingenuity, based on his knowledge of the subject, of course, about the attempts made in other parts of the world to mitigate the consequences of not having a totally open border. The Canadian-US border is not, for most of its trade, totally free; it is not devoid of queues and delays.
The other argument that we have had so far to dismiss our worries on this issue is, “Well, a 20-minute delay compared with a three-minute delay is not going to deter anybody.” The fact is that the major manufacturers—I will stick to manufacturing because it is, I think, what is most accessible to the public. Our remarkable turnaround in the car industry is the most obvious demonstration of where we have got to, but one of the reasons why such companies come here is precisely because they can operate the most modern systems with absolutely no delay: the just-in-time supply lines and everything else we have heard about. It is no good saying, “That doesn’t matter because they don’t have that anywhere else in the world.” Once you change that, there is absolutely no doubt that you are increasing costs quite substantially compared with the costs we have now; that is absolutely undeniable.
During the referendum, some of us tried to raise the threat to our international trade and inward investment that leaving the EU would involve. I debated with a very good advocate on the leave side, Daniel Hannan, who is a very well-known MEP. It was easy to debate with him because Dan was not advocating leaving the single market. It was quite plain that he was in favour; we have quotes from him saying so—he said a lot about it. It was responded to by some of the leading publicised figures, most notably the recently resigned Foreign Secretary. He dismissed any suggestion that trade would change—the Germans would be persuaded by Mercedes just to leave things completely as they were in an as yet unspecified and undescribed way. Now my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) and his supporters are ignoring, sometimes aggressively and derisively, the advice being given to us by all the major international investors in this country—such as Airbus and Jaguar Land Rover—by the CBI and by the Institute of Directors, which is not the most left-wing organisation I have ever encountered. Apparently, my right hon. Friend understands far more about the attractiveness of this country for future investment in the next generation of aerospace and automobiles which we need to anticipate. Nobody is going to close down a factory overnight if we go in for the daftest arrangements, but they will have to compete with other parts of their group for the next major investments, and the UK will go right down the list because everywhere else in the EU will be able to demonstrate that they are more attractive.