Pete Wishart

Most definitely. I thoroughly agree with the hon. Lady. It is hard to think of any sector that has not suffered as a result of our leaving the European Union. She is right to reference the steel sector, although it could be any sector. I am pretty certain that today we will hear quite a lot about how leaving the EU has disastrously impacted so many sectors throughout the United Kingdom. I want to get on to immigration. How do we start to deal with the subject of immigration? It is perhaps the saddest but funniest part of the whole saga. Immigration was supposed to be the one thing that Brexit would fix. That seemed to be the whole point of it: it was about taking back control and stopping uncontrolled immigration. But what did we find? Immigration skyrocketed and reached the extraordinarily high level of 1.47 million in the year to March 2023. Without a doubt, leaving the EU closed the door to EU immigration. Net migration from the EU has been negative since June 2022. The conveyor belt of talent that had been coming to the UK for the best part of the past two decades was stopped. After closing off Europe, we quickly discovered that we actually quite liked having EU people working in all our different sectors, from hospitals to farms, hotels, restaurants, universities, care services, businesses, the City and our creative sector. We all found that we actually needed people from the EU and people quite liked employing them.