Ms Stella Creasy

I will not give way; we have already had to listen to the hon. Gentleman. It would be easy to be angry about our performance in Brexit, but these debates are too often fuelled by blind beliefs rather than careful consideration—witness the hon. Gentleman. Do we really understand how bad the Tory hard Brexit has been for this country and the scale of the challenge we face? The challenge is not just about the economic impact of leaving the largest trade bloc in the world. I was just shocked by Tory shadow Ministers in the Chamber being surprised to realise that their hard Brexit means that we do not get information in real time from our European counterparts to help British farmers with bio and food security alerts. We also left Eurodac—for all the people who are concerned about stopping the boats and who might want that asylum data—because, again, they hated the term “Europe”. Countless bands will never get the chance to be the Beatles or Oasis because of the 90-day rule, and 20,000 businesses have given up on trading with Europe altogether, because the only Brexit “benefit” that anyone can quantify is the amount of paperwork it created. The second blind belief, however, is that it would be simple just to go back. We have to be honest. The British problem is that we too often think that the difficult bit is us deciding what our future relationship with Europe should be, and then we tell the Europeans, as if they do not read our newspapers. Some humility is needed, to say the least. In the last 10 years, the continent has faced war and the antics of President Putin and President Trump. It now has new deals on migration and asylum, a new green deal, and trade deals of its own with Canada and the South American Mercosur nations. It has challenged Chinese exports so that “Made in Europe” is now a serious prospect. We are simply an afterthought and casualty of that process. None of that is an argument against looking to the future, but if the status quo is not acceptable, we have to be honest with our constituents about what is and what we should be fighting for. Frankly, we should look at how others have approached Europe. To go into a negotiation and saying what we do not want—“No, no, no”—is to act like a toddler, yet that is too often what the red line approach has been for this country. Let us contrast that with the approach of Mark Carney, who has talked about the shared challenges and the issues facing all of us in the world today. Perhaps the biggest lie of all those told to us in this place was about cakeism and cherry-picking, as if Europe is not flexible and does not want to find ways forward, when it is very clear that it does. The truth that must now be told is that we need to do more than repeat the mistakes of the past. We left the European Union without knowing what leaving would entail. We must not make that mistake again. We must seek the consent of the British people and ask them what rejoin would be and about our future relationship with Europe. That is exactly what the Prime Minister is talking about doing. Twenty-one nations have been through accession, taking an average of nine years to do so. This country deserves better. We need to take the Brexit blinkers off and look to our future—a future that is clearly with Europe.