Sir Bernard Jenkin

No, I will not give way; I am going to be very brief. Services exports to the EU have rocketed, because there is no single market in services and we export a huge amount to the EU, as we do to the rest of the world. Overall, our trade has boomed since Brexit; our trade with the EU and the rest of the world combined has grown very substantially. Does anybody know what proportion of GDP is represented by goods exports to the EU? Hon. Members are quoting all these businesses from their constituencies, but how representative are they of the economy as a whole? The EU may be our single biggest export market, but it represents only 6% of our GDP. Hon. Members are looking very puzzled, because people have brainwashed themselves. They think that trade is the entire economy, but it is not; trade is only a proportion of the economy. Our trade with the rest of the world has expanded much more in comparison with our period in the single market. For example, between 1997 and 2019, when we were in the single market, goods exports to non-EU countries grew by 85%, but goods exports to the EU fell from 10% to 7.8%. Our exports to the EU were already declining. Why was that? It was because the internal market is a failure. The countries that form the internal market today represented 30% of global GDP when we joined the single market in 1992. These are Library figures that I am citing, by the way; Members can go and check them out. Today, the EU represents 17.3% of global GDP. It is declining; it is losing global share. The United States had 25% of global GDP in 1992 and it still has 25% of global GDP. Why is that? It is because its economy is much less regulated, it has much lower taxes, it rewards enterprise and risk, and it is not mired in the Code Napoléon and the way of cautiously regulating everything that the EU is. If the EU could deregulate, it would possibly be in our economic interests to join it, but it is incapable of deregulating. Therefore, the case for joining the single market has collapsed in the few minutes in which I have been speaking.