Pete Wishart

I join the hon. Gentleman overwhelmingly and enthusiastically. He is absolutely right. It is hard to think of a sector that has remained untouched by the fact that we cannot access European talent. It is a problem for hospitality and restaurant businesses in constituencies like mine, and in the City, where many dynamic figures helped build some of the success stories that we see just a few miles from where we are today. Before Brexit, there was barely a small boat sighted in the channel, and now we are told that that is perhaps the single biggest issue that confronts this country. Various Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries have come up with a variety of different wheezes to try to stop those small boats coming to the UK, but all have been hampered because we left the one international agreement that might have dealt with returning some of those people to the European Union. When we left the European Union, we also left the Dublin III regulation—the one thing that might have achieved some of the ambition that people had about stopping small boats. Then there is the irony that Brexit did not just make it harder for Europeans to come here; it made it harder for us to move around Europe, too. British citizens are now third country nationals in their own continent. We can still travel across Europe, of course, but there is now a 90-day limit in a rolling 180-day period. For ordinary holidaymakers who have been away enjoying the sun, that might mean nothing more than the huge queues that we have seen in some airports across Europe—a minor inconvenience, perhaps—but for businesses it means more red tape, more restrictions and more unnecessary difficulties. For those in my former profession—musicians, performers and other creative professionals—it can mean a bewildering collection of different rules about work permits, visas, carnets and documentation. Brexit has been such a destructive and invidious political project that it has even managed to stop the music moving freely. This Labour Government gave a commitment that they would fix that. We are talking about ambitions, so come on, Minister: stop the Brexit imposition on music. Let the music move freely again. Let the current generation of musicians enjoy the opportunities that I had as a musician. Who knows, we might even have the Prime Minister on a European tour if he manages to get it fixed!