Danny Kruger

My hon. Friend is right. I will cite a very good article in The Spectator last week by Oliver Lewis, who was the deputy negotiator for the Brexit deal and the trade agreement. He wrote rather wearily about recognising the terms that had been agreed by the Government, because they were the terms that the previous Government continually resisted in negotiations. His point, which echoes that of my hon. Friend, was that the way the EU works is to force agreement on headline principles, which, over time, are translated into concrete policy. Where a thin end of the wedge can be driven in, as it can be with this agreement, more and more follows. That is what we should anticipate. It is worth pointing out how thin the terms of the agreement are and how much detail remains to be worked out. We have conceded a set of principles that will allow ever closer alignment and submission to the regime that we painfully left some years ago. We see coming submission to the European Court of Justice, an agreement on rule-taking, a return to the single market in agribusiness, as my hon. Friend mentioned, and paying money into the EU budget. Those were the explicit things that all parties in this House committed to ending when we agreed the outcome of the referendum. In 2019, both main parties agreed to abide by them, and in 2024, they agreed to abide by them and explicitly ruled out submission to the European Court of Justice, paying money and returning to the single market, all of which has now been agreed in principle by the Government. It is only a set of principles, but they are bad principles; they represent the betrayal of Brexit and of our manifestos. I will not go through the specifics, because other Members have done so very well, but I will quickly point out how thin these agreements are. On e-gates, there will be some benefit for the Dordogne-visiting community that some of us have in our constituencies, but it is not a great achievement. Indeed, it is not even an achievement for this summer, so although I hope the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) is enjoying his holiday in France, I do not think he will have benefited from the deal. He will probably have gone through an e-gate anyway, however, because there are already many e-gates that British citizens can use when going to and fro. That arrangement will still need to be negotiated, with each member state operating its own independent policy. We have discussed food, and I will not go on about that other than to say that we have agreed to take the EU’s laws but we do not have any detail yet. Because we export so little, any benefit from a reciprocal arrangement will greatly benefit the EU at the expense of our exporters.