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EUROPE MATTERS
I am not a europhile Neither am I a europhobe. If it were not for the fact that the relative success of our present social and economic environment is dependent on our links to Europe I would be indifferent to the questions surrounding the possibility of Brexit. Deciding to leave the European Union would not be an issue if we were not already deeply dependent on Europe for so many aspects of our lives our food our medicine our employment and above all our security. It is no accident that Western Europe has been free from international conflict since the coal and steel community of the post-war years gradually metamorphosed into the common market and eventually into a single market of 500 million people. This achievement is not negligible and we ignore it at our peril in this the centenary year of the end of the Great War. It is time for the government to take stock and draw back from the brink of what many people believe will be a self-inflicted disaster. It matters not to me how this potential disaster is avoided. Is it a disaster ? Yes it is. Instead of enjoying free access to a single market of 500 million we are proposing to try to create from scratch a bigger and (for us) more successful single market One involving the countries of the commonwealth who have already restructured their economies and markets after we gave up imperial preference many years ago or one involving China or America... We need to get real and think again. Neither China .... nor America nor any other part of the world is going to do us any favours.
Should we have done more to demonstrate our interest in a shared European future? Of course we should and we should not be allowing false news inspired by Putin's Russia to be influencing our domestic choices about the future role of our country. I am old enough to remember the national humiliation that followed Anthony Eden's disastrous invasion of Egypt in 1956 and I don't relish the prospect of another humiliation. We need instead to renew a working relationship with the countries of Europe and to develop our mutual interests not commence a mutually destructive trade war and reduce the limited number of our friends in this increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world so heavily at the mercy of Trump and Putin and other populist leaders. Giving up the real achievements of the past 45 years is as if we had learnt nothing from the first 45 years of the 20th century and what ?... we may ask should we do to assist our neighbours, the Irish ? for whom the Bay Gateway was constructed after 60 years of effort so as to improve and facilitate the two way trade route through Heysham to and from the European markets To construct a linguistic fudge is not a solution to a problem and the Irish situation is a real problem .... or is it ? It isn't at the moment but only because the Good Friday agreement built upon our shared membership of the European Union to devise a stable future of coexistence with a frictionless border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. I don't want a return to "the troubles" and I believe no one wants to increase the distinctions between Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK. Conservatives in particular are still "The Conservative and Unionist Party".
I have met and shaken hands with the late Ian Paisley, but a Brexit that inevitably creates difference between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK is no basis for maintenance of the long-term territorial integrity of the UK which is the vital single domestic market into which Brexit will initially cause us to retreat. Northern Ireland is not the only part of the UK and its dependencies that wants the status quo to be strengthened not damaged by a semantic fudge. Need I mention Scotland ? Need I mention Gibraltar ? These are not narrow single issue reasons for taking a view on Brexit. They are totally different to a dislike of immigrants fuelled by a failure to recognise immigrants as being no different to those many of us here today who are descendants of earlier generations of immigrants. My father went to the same secondary school as Enoch Powell .... but that does not make me think of immigration as a reason good enough to reverse the old saying that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. But is Brexit capable of giving us "Two in the bush"? Mrs May says that in the long run we will be better off with Brexit despite the short term downside. She may be right but she is wrong to suggest that the possible long term higher income is worth its cost. For a few the interest rate at which the future is discounted as a basis for taking today's decision may be low enough for her to be correct but for the majority of us the present cost of the losses in the intervening years is greater than the present value of the potential future Bonanza and as a critic of economic decision-making once exclaimed "in the long run we are all dead."
The world is not the same carefree place that it was in June 2016. In choosing Brexit on that occasion, the voting public knew little about the reality of the option in front of them. Some say the purpose then was to give the toff Cameron a kicking. We are better informed now of the riskiness of the decision. When there was such a huge gap in public understanding about the economic consequences and trade offs of leaving the EU it seems right that MPs try to resume their role as representatives rather than delegates. But if MPs cannot themselves find a way forward, a people's vote may help and that is why I am seconding this motion.
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