It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). While listening to this debate, it struck me that it is Valentine’s Day today—you would not know it the way that this place carries on, with everyone going at each other hammer and tongs. Perhaps we should go back a little bit and remember why we are in this situation. We are in this situation because people voted to leave the European Union. I backed remain, but I had a strong mandate from my constituency: two thirds said that they wanted to leave. I regard it as my job to make sure that we execute those instructions and leave the European Union.
It is important to remember why people voted in the way that they did: they believed in building a land of opportunity; they believed in building an independent sovereign nation; and they believed in taking back control of our borders, our trade policy, our money and our prospects across the world. Many Members of this House reject that view to this day, but that is what people wanted to do, and they are not wrong to have wanted that. They are not wrong because, in recent decades, Europe has been in relative decline. A few decades ago, it had a third of global GDP; today it has just 15%. Some 90% of future world growth is coming from outside, not inside, the European Union.