Mr Douglas Alexander

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I will certainly endeavour to extend that generosity. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Andrew Lewin) on securing an important and timely debate, and commend him for his ongoing work on the issue as the chair of the UK Trade and Business Commission. The letter that he and a number of parliamentary colleagues present submitted to the Minister for the Cabinet Office, who leads for the Government on UK-EU relationships, made some excellent points, many of which I will endeavour to address in my remarks today. I will seek to specifically address the three main points that he raised in his introductory speech—the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, the broader alignment and the youth mobility scheme. I also thank all hon. Members who have spoken today. First, I will set out why we must use our strengthened relations with the EU to deliver a long-term UK-EU strategic alliance that grows our economy. I listened with care to the remarks of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith), suggesting that if the Conservative party were in office, we would have the best of all worlds. I struggle to reconcile that with the universe that the rest of us live in: the Conservative Government not only abjectly failed to secure a trade agreement with the United States, but alienated our closest trading partners in the European Union and were in a deep freeze with China. It is not entirely clear what the Conservatives’ grand post-Brexit strategy involved. Let us consider the numbers for a moment. In trade, geography still matters. As a bloc, the European Union is still the UK’s largest trading market, covering 46% or about £813 billion of our trade. It is important to note that the UK is the EU’s second-largest trade partner, but unfortunately, UK exports to the EU were 5% lower in 2024 than they were in 2018, which is the most recent stable pre-Brexit, pre-covid year for comparison, and UK imports from the EU have remained level at about plus 0.4%. Moreover, our overall global trade performance continues to suffer, and we are lagging behind our G7 peers. In 2024, our global trade flows were only 4% above 2018 levels, while other G7 economies have seen an average trade growth of 8%. What explains those trends? There is an increasing body of external research studies, such as those of the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance and Aston University, which demonstrate that Brexit accounts for those changes. That is why it is in both the UK and the EU’s interest to strengthen our trading relationship. Let me turn now to some of the specific issues raised during the debate. The hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry (Stephen Gethins), who I like and admire on a personal level, gave a sadly rather partisan speech in wilful denial of the fact that had his side prevailed in the 2014 referendum in Scotland, we would have found ourselves outside the European Union. A politics of manufactured grievance, flags and new borders is as wrong in Scotland as it is here in England. Thankfully, Scotland made its choice to support a sensible and pragmatic internationalist party in July.