Thank you, Mr Hollobone. I am pleased to be able to begin the summing-up speeches, but I am in two minds because a little birdie told me that the Division bell may go at around half-past 6. I wonder whether we should try to get through the debate by then, rather than having a hiatus of perhaps an hour and a half and coming back for the last few minutes.
The events of the past week or so have made this debate even more topical. By far the most significant thing to happen in the past week has been the Prime Minister, not once but twice, going on the record and saying, “We can stop Brexit.” She no longer talks about there being two options—her deal or no deal. She now talks openly about the possibility that Brexit may not happen.
Interestingly, in her lengthy contribution, the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) never actually said we cannot stop Brexit. She attempted—not very successfully, in my humble opinion—to explain why we should not stop it, but she never tried to say we cannot stop it. I invite the Minister to tell us, right at the beginning of his response, whether he agrees with the Prime Minister that Brexit can still be stopped. Once the Government conceded that point, the debate would become very different. I still believe that we can stop Brexit, if that is the will of Parliament and the will of the people. How do we know what the will of the people is without asking them? That is a question that some people may want to answer.
I believe the Government tried not to have to present a coherent argument that we should not stop Brexit because, once all the facts have become known and people, I suspect including a lot of MPs, realise just what it involves, there is no longer a coherent argument. The recently departed Brexit Secretary admitted that he did not realise how important trade between Dover and Calais was to the UK economy. If the person who led negotiations on the UK’s behalf did not fully understand what Brexit was about, what chance did the 34 million other people who took part in the referendum have of understanding all the intricacies and details?
I could almost understand the rationale for saying, “Well, maybe it’s a bad idea and maybe a disastrous idea, but we have to go through with it anyway because
it’s what people voted for.” The truth is that none of us has the right to say what those 17.5 million people voted for. We know they voted to leave the European Union. I think it was the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake)—it may have been someone else in his party—who said immediately, “Now we know where people voted to go away from, but we’ve no idea what they voted to move towards.” We can guess that not many of those people voted deliberately to make themselves, their families, their towns and their communities poorer.
We do know that those people voted for some kind of Brexit in a referendum that, by today’s standards, would not get a clean bill of health as free and fair. The leave campaign, in its various guises, stands accused on a number of counts of breaching spending limits that are there to stop the wealthy elite from buying our democracy. We know there were large-scale breaches of data protection law. We know that the leave campaign lied to us. How else can we describe the £350 million on the side of the big red bus?