Perran Moon

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Butler. I thank the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart) for securing this debate. There can simply be no argument: Brexit has been one of the most disastrous decisions that the UK has made in modern times. This extraordinary moment of self-harm has irreparably damaged the British economy and society, and for what? There are longer queues at airports, bureaucracy at the ports and hundreds of thousands of boats crossing the channel every year. Let us never forget that there were no small boats before Brexit. Ten years on, Brexit has perhaps had the greatest impact on Cornwall, as my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham) mentioned. Thanks to the tireless campaigning of the late Member for Falmouth and Camborne, Candy Atherton, Cornwall secured objective 1 status from the EU, which greatly supported our economic development according to all metrics. As was mentioned, Cornwall received over £100 million a year, which included support for the Eden Project, Newquay airport, our combined universities, superfast broadband and improvements to the A30. It was a transformational programme. The Vote Leave campaign promised that not a penny of that funding would be lost. It said that the money we sent to Brussels would be reinvested back into Cornwall, but that promise never materialised, and we are now looking to the Government to reinstate our economic development funding in the devolution deal that the Prime Minister alluded to at the Dispatch Box yesterday. We have lost not only our objective 1 funding, but the common-sense free trade we once had with our closest neighbours and allies. All told, Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster, and the time has come to rethink and renegotiate a relationship with our nearest trading partners, our allies and friends in the European Union.