Debate: We Were Right to Brexit

Thank you and welcome welcome to this gorgeous hall and what a joy it is to be with you in person and to those who are watching welcome as well um i want to say first of all should you tweet iq2 is your hashtag for the evening um you are well aware we're here to debate the proposal we were right to brexit i know how personally many people took The referendum and the months and years after that i think it's probably worth before we start bearing in mind the words of the queen at the end of

the jubilee where she praised the kindness joy and kinship that she felt had sprung up and said that she hoped that the sense of togetherness her own phrase would last beyond the event let's certainly hope it can last beyond this debate in the knowledge that we all need to Leave the same hall and go into our small very beautiful and often very damp island and live together um i should make one full point of disclosure um i have no dan socially we've met a couple of times dominic grieve i waved at once in central london

he did not wave back to me a social and professional snub that will cause him great suffering in the evening to come Before we start we're going to ask you to submit your pre-vote to get an idea of where your opinions lie and of course to see if our speakers managed to change your opinion at all if you haven't done so um you can hold up your phones and scan the qr code behind me or use the link that you received before the event please vote for the motion against the notion or if you are

unsure undecided if you're watching on the live stream just click on the polls button to Vote we'll announce the pre-vote results after we've heard the opening speeches um we have a lovely panel here a fascinating panel and a high profile panel um and i'm not going to run through all of their biographies you probably know them and we'll introduce them one by one the format of the evening is relatively simple each speaker will address you for nine minutes um i will do That it was terrible sorry i'll try and make more noise at eight minutes

and they'll need to wrap at nine we will then um put a couple of points back and forth to them we'll announce the pre-vote and then we'll move to questions um and i'll probably repeat this but it is questions rather than statements points to be made to our speakers rather than points you are making to the rest of the audience if you can work out my fine delineation There let's move straight to the debate um the first speaker who is in favor of the motion is lord hannan daniel hannon former conservative member of the european

parliament for southeast england of course a prominent and very positive campaigner for brexit one of the very few who went on and made the case for the sunlit uplands that were going to emerge may yet emerge out of brexit and he has nine minutes dan Well johnny thank you very much ladies and gentlemen thank you all for coming i'm conscious that this is something of an away fixture this is not just a london crowd but a cool part of camden so this is you know this is manchester city at old trafford as it were this

is this is everton uh at anfield or uh or ian botham doing a tour of pakistan or or rishi sunak coming to boris's birthday party this is uh no then the king commanded and they brought daniel And cast him into the den of lions i i want to start by echoing the point that johnny just made or rather that he as the bbc's royal correspondent echoed from the queen's majesty about togetherness i'll tell you my single biggest regret about the referendum and its aftermath was the polarization and the nastiness that followed which i have to

say i don't remember From the campaign itself i was out manning street stalls campaigning almost every day and very often we would run into campaigners from the other side in their blue stronger in t-shirts and we'd pose for selfies together and we'd wish each other luck and it was still a fairly civil and civilized conversation i remember speaking from this very stage about a week before the vote uh with adam zamoyski and the late roger scrutin Among others and it was a a a an edifying disagreement about trade and tariffs and sovereignty and money and

all the rest of it the the the way in which both sides went into purity spirals and made this about identity and about what kind of people they imagined on the other side i think is my single biggest regret and so i don't want to add to the polarization tonight so let me begin By making what i hope would be in normal circumstances a completely uncontroversial point which is that whatever decision we'd made in june 2016 there were going to be positive and negative outcomes there were risks and gains we're staying in there were risks

and gains with leaving let me add that not everyone will have got the version they wanted i was uh as some of You will know i was a i was an afterman all the way through i thought we should have gone for a swiss type deal i think it would have saved us a lot of trouble to have gone for an off-the-shelf deal i didn't get exactly what i wanted neither will robert have done neither will boris have done right because all of these things are compromises so i'm not going to try and argue here

that everything is perfect but perfection is not for this Sublunary world but i am going to argue that it is better on balance than the alternative would have been first of all let me make the point that the predictions of disaster that were made not just by campaigners which is fair enough both sides are obviously going to put their best gloss on things but were made by the official bodies the bank of england the chancellor of the exchequer The treasury imf the oecd spectacularly failed to materialize we were told that if we voted leave the

stock exchange would immediately collapse it carried on rising we were told that if we voted leave unemployment would surge it fell and fell and fell fell to its lowest level uh prior to the coronavirus there were more people in work than ever before in british history we were told that house prices would collapse they Rose we were told that there would be disinvestment there would be this massive recession again this was this was not the remain campaign saying this we were told by the treasury that there would be a recession in 2016 stretching into 2017

that emphatically did not happen in fact you know we can argue the toss about whether it would have been even better had we stayed in or whatever and you know Necessarily we're dealing with alternative histories there but the one thing which i want to to say i think fairly uncontroversially is that it was not catastrophic and that the evidence of that is that prior to the uh coronavirus the uk economy had outgrown the eurozone economy so whether it might have been even better or whatever look you'll all have your own views but the the prediction

of an absolute calamity Failed to materialize as by the way did the various predictions of non-economic calamities we were told that if we voted to leave scotland would immediately leave the union in fact support for the united kingdom according to the opinion polls rose in scotland after the vote we were told that if we voted to leave there would be refugee camps in kent that all of the the the sort of refugee Infrastructure would move in some unspecified way to to british soil of course that didn't happen and in fact we were told that if

we voted leave that the country would become more closed to migration that has emphatically not happened if you look at the numbers of visas in any category given this year they are higher than pre-referendum higher Than pre-brexit whether you're looking at work visas student visas family unification we have become a much more global country and with the bonus that as levels of immigration have risen concern about immigration has fallen because people are prepared to to sustain a quite a large degree of immigration provided they know that it is legal and Controlled uh rather than out

of their hands which was of course what we argued at the time finally we were told that we wouldn't get any trade deals and i have to say that this country has signed more trade deals in a shorter time than any other country i think ever it's true a lot of those replicate where we were with the eu but that was done and we've now moved on to the others we're about to join the trans-pacific partnership a huge growing block Representing nearly a third of the world's gdp we are likely this year to become the

first western country to have a serious fta or an fda of any kind with india and of course we've already got our deals with australia new zealand we're pushing ahead with south america the gulf and other places i also think we've passed the two big tests one foreign and one domestic as an independent country the first foreign Test was of course the war in ukraine we were in the front line defending european values we started earlier and we stuck at it harder we were not under any threat from russia there was no scenario in which

russian troops were going to be marching through kent but as in 1914 as in 1939 we took our responsibility seriously as a defender of european civilization And not only did we leave the defense of ukraine the supply of weapons but we were the first country to lift all of our tariffs and restrictions on ukrainian exports i'm glad to say the eu followed a few weeks later now of course you could say well that we could have done all of those things in the eu realistically i don't think anyone in brussels is actually arguing that that

would have happened we've set the the moral tone and our neighbors Followed and then of course the first great national test was how to respond uh to the virus and we had we effectively won the vaccine race twice first uh with the first jab uh in the world and the the quickest vaccine roll out and then with the quickest booster round and again you might say well technically we could have still done that uh if we were in the u come on look at what almost every Remainer was arguing at the time that we had

to go into the eu vaccination procurement scheme that we were going to be killing people if we didn't do it even as a non-member we had to go along with what they were doing does anyone seriously imagine i'm i'm sure neither dominic nor stella will be shifty enough to try and argue this that we would had we been a full member that we would have been able to resist that Pressure so i think we have passed with flying colors but i have to finish on this point the eu let's recall this is the only actor

to have put however briefly to have invoked a border in ireland for the sole purpose of preventing vaccines reaching the united kingdom and what i infer from that is that although we are trying to be good Neighbours although we recognize that we want the eu to prosper just as we wanted to be secure we wanted to be rich we want them to be wealthy neighbors so that they're good customers and we like them they have still not got over the idea that britain is a recalcitrant province that needs to be taught a lesson and brought

to heal ultimately i would rather live in a generous open global country interested And engaged in the affairs of every continent including europe than in one that cannot get over its relations with its biggest market and closest neighbor and that's why i am happy to live in a global britain prosperous independent and free thank you thank you very much dan uh let's hear our first speaker against motion it is of course dominic grieve qc who was the mp conservative mp for beckensfield former Uh shadow home secretary attorney general as well and expelled from the party

um in the astonishing constitutional contortions of late 2019. dominic thank you [Applause] it's always a pleasure to have a discussion with dan whether it's on uh brexit europe or anything else his politeness is legendary and uh i have to say it makes a change From being called a french streter or other vile epithets which on occasion have been directed my way but i have to say that before coming here this evening my wife who is pure yorkshire said to me all you have to do is just go along and tell them in plain anglo-saxon how

it is i couldn't disagree more with dan the evidence 18 months after we've come out of transition is that this is the biggest mistake in Modern british history making massive self-inflicted wounds on our body politic and our unity damaging to our economic well-being our security and indeed our sovereign power of influence in the world now it may all have been done for very good reasons and i don't doubt dan's sincerity for one bit just before the referendum he wrote a tremendous blog on ian martin's reaction Piece and which interesting ian martin has written an article

today expressing some misgivings about brexit and he said this it's 24th of june 2025 and britain is marking its annual independence day celebration as the fireworks streams through the summer sky still not quite dark we wonder why it took us so long to leave the years that followed the 2016 referendum didn't just reinvigorate our Economy our democracy and our liberty they improve relations with our neighbors the united kingdom is now the region's foremost knowledge-based economy and so on well we're only three years away from that magical date and the evidence is entirely to the country

we know that the office of budget responsibility Government quango in a sense but independent has told us that the reduction in our gdp is going to be in the long term four percent as a consequence of brexit unless of course it's made up elsewhere seven out of ten exporters called by the british chamber of commerce just recently have said they have put it been put at a severe competitive disadvantage And the food and drinks organization has pointed out from its members that their exports are down 23.7 percent on those of 2019 there are massive costs

to what we've done the government is going to need a time when it says it wants to get rid of civil servants 50 000 customs officials to deal with our own customs checks as and when we decide to Bring them in and that requires 205 million customs declarations a year costing between 15 and 55 pounds each for every business and individual who has to do it and where are the compensations dan you spoke about these foreign trade agreements but apart from the rolled over agreements we could have had with the eu we haven't got them

The united states is much keener to do a trade deal with the eu than it is with us the idea of a trade deal with china is for the birds and i have to say i think a trade deal with india is rather unlikely and this wonderful trade deal with australia the government's own figures is it will reduce the cost of food products by one pound a year per household 0.002 Addition to our economy over 15 years our financial sector is suffering enormously this is 80 of our gdp now dan in his great paper his

polemic told us this wonderful thing financial services this is 2025 vision are booming not only in london but in birmingham leeds and edinburgh too after britain left the eu's regulations became even more heavy-handed driving More exiles from paris frankfurt and milan to us no other european city could hope to compete well we've lost 7 000 jobs from the financial sector in london that's the current position and in addition to that 400 financial firms have moved uh which do euro dealing Have shifted off about 1.5 trillion of assets one firm has pointed out aqueous that 99.6

of its european share dealing is now done from paris and remember this isn't just abstracts because all this is about ultimately tax revenue for the government which it loses so i find it very difficult amsterdam has overtaken us as the leading trading Venue for share trading so where's the future that was promised with that now perhaps with deregulation but i have to say i'm not sure we're going to get it because actually deregulating on your own unless you do it in company with others is in practice impossible and immigration well we're very short of people

to work in this country i know 500 000 power 000 people short in september 2021 to provide basic services it's one of the reasons why unemployment's so low but instead of a flexible mechanism by which people could come here and work and go home we have a much less flexible mechanism which then requires us to deal with hundreds of thousands of visa applications i really wonder if the public suddenly decided that as long as it's a visa application they're happy with it But if it isn't they're not the truth with that is that this suggestion

that was made at the time has absolutely no validity to it now leveling up leveling up agenda is about pumping money into places which need leveling up well all i can say is that whereas we were pumping in 4.5 billion pounds of eu money before we left which the Government promised it would replace as part of its leveling up agenda actually the maximum they can afford at the moment is 2.6 billion per anna so how does that help the prime minister's aspirations and i turn to influence because i think it really does matter because i'm

old-fashioned conservative i understand about influence and i'm very proud of my country but i have to say it absolutely beats me How brexit makes us more influential i spent my time as chairman of the isc between 2016 and 2019 being visited by foreign delegations from countries outside of europe saying britain's role in our area is weakening you are over-obsessed with your domestic problems you're not looking at us and we're looking elsewhere for friendly influence even with the ukraine ultimately i'm very proud of what we're Doing in ukraine for the ukraine very much in favor of

it but i simply say this france and germany are the lead countries on the policy of the eu towards the ukraine and the eu is divided on policy towards the ukraine does britain have more influence over that in or out of the eu that's ultimately where the key decisions will be made along with the united states And as divisions appear that's where the problems will come from and our ability to influence those is reduced and our behavior of the northern ireland protocol which highlights so completely the problem that we have in bringing a proper brexit

about is going to damage our ability to do that still further and that brings me to my final point i can't escape the fact that on monday 148 of my former colleagues in parliament voted to get rid of the prime minister And they did it because he was dishonest and because he's a charlatan and because he's doing great damage to this country but he isn't there by accident he got there dan because in the middle of the inability to deliver a sensible brexit by proper means people turned to somebody who would do it by fraud

and that Is what is now haunting our country's politics and our well-being and i have to say it's a direct consequence of what we did in 2016. dominic thank you dominique thank you very much um ended only four seconds over you were very very disciplined thank you i'm our third speaker tonight arguing in favor Of the motion is professor robert toombs historian of france and britain fellow of st john's college cambridge whose most recent book is this sovereign isle britain in and out of europe robert thank you thanks very much it's good to be here

and a rather younger audience than i expected often it's rather middle-aged people come to these things i'm glad to see that you're not so i think that probably means you're more uh Shall i say favoring the other side than you are favoring our side um i had some qualms about leaving the eu back in 2016. i was subject to project fear like most people were i wasn't sure how it would work and i certainly hesitated about voting i eventually voted leave since then i got involved more actively i certainly was not actively involved in the

campaign before Because it seemed to me that the the the vote had to be carried out and uh i'm rather being rather proud that the that i helped to form a group called briefings for brexit which uh had the signal honour of recently have been hacked by the russians so we so we must be doing something right they accuse us of of um plotting Against the state anyway but that's not the reason why i was in favor and am in favor of having left the eu i think big reasons for doing so are the same

now as they were in 2016. and i guess i'm a bit of an idealist on this matter because i think of it more in terms of europe the debate or the discussion that takes place in this country is almost entirely about us it's an amazingly insular one i Don't think mr grieve once mentioned europe as an entity as a as an institution and that's what i'm going to do because that's what i think it's really ought to be about the eu is first of all damaging to democracy it's an undemocratic indeed a consciously and deliberately

anti-democratic institution it's run by a rather corrupt elite which despises opposition It's it's one aspect of what political scientists call the withdrawal of elites they withdraw into institutions so they're no longer accountable to their voters the eu is run in secret and not surprisingly less than a quarter of the people of europe feel that they understand how it works that's natural because that's how it's meant to be if you were annoyed about illegal consumption of birthday cake Which i'm sure many of you were you must be incandescent at what the leaders of the eu get

up to christine lagarde chair of the european central bank was found guilty of complicity in malvestation of 400 million euros of public funds the present president of the commission ursula van der lion was found in 2016 to have plagiarized her ph.d dissertation the man who represents europe to the World joseph bohel had to resign his position as chair of the european uh university institute because he kept secret the fact that he was being paid 300 000 a year by a spanish energy company those are the sorts of people who who run the eu if it

was a brilliant success we might might put up with this but it's a failure too in its fundamental aims of peace and prosperity it's impoverished a Large part of europe through the euro system 20 of the eu's member states actually saw their growth rates fall after they joined [Music] there's been a popular decline in support continuously since the 1990s in france which is the country most similar to us among european member states only about only about a third of the people say They trust the eu the world's changing europe's becoming less important economically and politically

we may lament this but it's a fact the 20th century was continental the 21st century will be oceanic that will be the theater of power of geopolitics of commerce who said that emmanuel macron the economic importance of the eu to britain has been declining continuously For decades it's still worth about 13 of gdp but this is mainly trade with four or five eu countries so most of the eu is in fact pretty irrelevant to us we have a huge deficit in trade with the eu though it's actually improved since we left and we have a

surplus with the rest of the world so it's clearly advantageous for us to diversify or to continue to diversify our trading relations and to encourage this by the sort of trading Policies that dan hannon referred to the growth in our exports to the eu have been increasing by 0.5 percent a year since the early 2000s six times faster have been our exports to the rest of the world that's where our future interest lies those are the reasons for voting in 2016 but there are new reasons since i would say and daniel Has mentioned some of

them so i won't go over them again the covid crisis yes we could have produced vaccines inside the eu but when the government decided not to it was it was roundly criticized by the opposition it seems to be very unlikely that we would have developed our vaccines without having members of the eu less than one tenth of The people of europe are happy with the way the eu handled the kovid epidemic the eu has proved divided and weak at best over ukraine we are much more decisive and principled i'm glad to say and i find

it very difficult to believe that our sovereign power of influence as mr grieve put it has declined the eu has proved antagonistic and rigid in its dealings with us which i admit took me and many others by surprise David frost said it surprised him i'm sure it surprised theresa may i thought we could expect a friendly desire for good relations from our european friends and partners but the determination of the eu to punish brexit is unmistakable and indeed unconcealed the eu wants to keep britain as the captive market for its exports unable to compete freely

and as a sort of political satellite too a plan which Was recently revived again by by macron for all these reasons the eu has exploited the ireland situation in a reckless manner risking political instability and summary refusing every proposal to solve the problem practically its representatives have frequently used provocative language and tried to interfere in internal politics admittedly with the encouragement of some remainer politicians Almost as unforgivable with the shameful attacks on the astrazeneca vaccine by america macro and the eu and one could also mention crude threats over fishing so of course one might conclude

that we should regret leaving the eu or contemplate rejoining because they're a nasty a lot than we realized but that's not a course i favor and finally project fear has proved empty it was fear that motivated most of The remain vote two-thirds said that they voted mostly out of economic worry or fear of isolation and i was nearly one of those a million fewer jobs said the cbi 8 million job losses said remainer mp heidi allen an emergency budget and tax rises said george osborne a recession half a million job losses falling wages said the

treasury by the way it's the treasury figures that are still being quoted by the obr Which mr grieve referred to although they've been wholly discredited in fact after the 2016 vote the economy grew faster than the eurozone unemployment fell and wages rose so all these fears have proved unfounded although there's a constant attempt to keep project fear alive by blaming every setback on brexit automatically siding with the eu against the british government on every occasion Irrespective of the facts now what is the real economic situation now sorry is that one minute or is that the

end ah okay food prices are going up the fault of brexit well they're going up more in the euro zone gdp growth is higher in the euro zone and it was in 21 2021 2022 we have had a fall in our exports to the eu but they're mainly due to oil uh because we don't produce as much and we Don't sell as much as we used to but in goods there's been no fall in our exports to the eu and as i said earlier our net trading position that's to say the comparison of exports and

imports to and from the eu has actually improved since 2016. for many of our leading companies over 60 of their trade is now outside the eu but but i'll stop there um conclusion brexit i think was a rejection of pessimism and declinism the idea that we Were not capable of governing ourselves we were too weak to exist as a as a separate and independent nation and it was an endorsement of national democracy and for that reason alone we were right to brexit [Applause] thank you thank you very much robert i should say when one speaker

is up the other two speakers huddle like this i'm training to hear what they have to say to each Other but we will hear it out loud our final speaker making the case against the motion is stella creasy labour mp for walthamstow since 2010 and chair of the labour movement for europe stella it's always marvelous when your mother's in the audience did anybody notice that both the speakers for the proposition got their defense in early suggested that you wouldn't be open-minded on this that you probably had already Made up your mind i wonder what it

is ladies and gentlemen that makes them not be confident in the case they want to make this evening and i think it's something rather simple it's that i'm not sure we've actually had the brexit that they promised us i think we might have had brexit in name only so let's look at the actual evidence of this and i talk about brexit since it actually happened not 2016 but actually when we did leave the single Market and join this wonderful free trade agreement because all the evidence suggests that we have all the economic and social hit

of leaving the european union but none of the freedoms and benefits that were promised no one least of all daniel i know can be happy with that daniel i think of rather affectionately as the kaiser soze of brexit you didn't see him coming but we've all seen the consequences to be fair to daniel he Wasn't one of those people promising us that net migration would be under a hundred thousand a year that was michael gove it is now 239 000 a year he didn't drive a bus with 350 million for the nhs written on the

back of it too far the nhs has had more money that's down to the pandemic not brexit and he didn't say we would take back control of our fish but the new research showing this year that significant eu access to the waters Around the uk remain indeed to those of six to 12 nautical miles that we were promised would be ours and ours alone and in fact the evidence shows us that since we left the european union the brexit trade deal means that exporting fish and seafood costs more and takes longer so the fish is

less fresh and the customers have been lost so perhaps have more chips and less fish with your national disk thanks to brexit daniel did say we could do better than Being part of this regional association he calls it largest trading bloc in the world to everybody else but no matter geography wasn't important to him the uk is yet to implement though since we left the european union a single brand new trade deal that it couldn't have had under the existing terms of the european union even in our relationship with japan indeed the only point of

contention about the new trade deal with japan is whether we are worse off than We would have been if we'd stayed in the european union daniel didn't argue that we would need to leave the single market but has now argued that we should never have left but it would be mad to go back it's a bit like being locked out of your house but then saying it's madness to go and see a locksmith and get some keys cut so that you can actually get back in so this this brexit that nobody will take responsibility for

what Has it given us well as ian martin that well-known ramona has told us exports to the eu i'm sorry to report robin robert rather are down almost 12 percent that's not an insubstantial figure indeed the uk in a changing europe's research an independent body shows that brexit has predicted 25 fall in imports why does that matter because the fallen imports isn't just about whether you can eat french brie or have A german sausage it's actually about the money and the impact that you have on our production lines two-thirds of international trade is products that

we use as inputs in our chains of production and supply chain what does that mean in practice for all of us it means it's much harder for our businesses to make do little wonder that eu uk trade relationships are down 33 and it is mainly small businesses we might be a nation of shopkeepers but Many are shutting up shop as a result of brexit indeed it has affected the cost of living the biggest crisis that we now face post-pandemic the increase in those trade barriers has led to a six percent increase in food prices again

not my words the uk and are changing europe independent research inflation and food products that britain tends to import from the european union like fresh pork tomatoes and jams was much more pronounced than that tuna or exotic Fruit so basically ladies and gentlemen you're left with a hawaiian pizza and not much else because you cannot eat red tape but you've got an awful lot more of it as a result of brexit and that is a hit not just for trade but also for our tax take because the obr again an independent body i'm sorry to

disappoint you rob it shows that economic growth is down four percent as a result of these trends and every one percent of loss of growth is a Nine billion pound loss of revenue for the nhs for social care for our policing but what about those regulatory freedoms we were promised surely surely those are those sunny uplift lands well the reality shows us that since we've left the european union very little has changed and it's not hard to see why the divergence tracker shows us that for all those freedoms that were hard fought by people like

daniel and robert there are only 27 cases of actual Divergence from those thousands of restrictive rules that the eu brought us in let's have a look at what some of those might be those benefits that you are voting for if you vote yes tonight well they do include trophy hunting but not fogar and fur because of course nothing is too good for the workers um it is about compensation on flights uh the government is using divergence to make sure that you don't get as much compensation if your flight is delayed If you are sat at

gatwick in the coming weeks do think about that one as a benefit of brexit um also non-recognition of blue badges for disabled people again a point of divergence that the government has yet to do anything about for those 2.3 million of people for whom a blue badge is a critical way of moving around the country as again uk and changing europe point out the benefits of brexit document the Government produced all 105 pages was not short of ideas but many of those ideas were things that you could have done in the european union anyway and

most are recycled and possibly asking readers of the sun as jacob rees-mogg has now done to come up with ideas isn't the best use of those few civil servants that have actually come into the office's time because the truth is any radical divergence is unlikely to be possible Because what it does to businesses ask them to choose it asks them to choose whether they would only trade in the uk or whether they would only trade with europe or whether they want to run two separate regulatory regimes and with an audience nearby of 600 million customers

it's not hard to see why business is calling for the government not to be radical and indeed there are some regulations you probably do want to keep for good reason for example right now The government is having to reconfigure our airline safety regulations the ones that we've had from europe that meant that planes were flying to ap could be equally safe everywhere we're having to redo we haven't in the two minutes i've got left you've got time to talk about services or employment rights but when people talk about european red type that's often what they

mean the fact that you can have an employment contract At all that comes from europe that equal pay is underpinned by european law and we know from the bcroft report where this government is intending to go on those things and indeed libertarians such as daniel robert are often fond of telling us about the dangers of these overbearing states but when the state itself is taking away your rights who is it who's left to look after you and one of the challenges here is that the eu was giving you many more Protections than you might have

realized including on decent consumer rights whether you could indeed just buy one charger for your phone i don't know about you but i'd rather carry around one cable than many again something that this government has decided not to pick up we haven't even talked about the shame that is what is happening in northern ireland as a result of playing fast and loose with the good friday agreement But if we got bryno has the eu changed might be your question well surely we've achieved that we've given them the short sharp shock of walking out well not

really actually the eu has worked together in ukraine and we have been outside the room looking in the eu again has started to work together on refugees yet we are outside the room looking in and deciding to deport people to rwanda what have we got out of europe then well fewer politicians we don't Have meps like daniel was we've got those blue passports and the crown stamp on your pint glass and some people have made an awful lot of money out of it crispin o'day a hedge fund manager who lately contributed 650 000 pounds to

the pro-leave campaign made 220 million pounds betting as the pound collapsed post-europe and of course it is given work for politicians like myself when you've got 1500 pieces of legislation to rewrite we can do that rather than deal With the cost living crisis or climate change or the social care crisis so the answer is you must vote that we were wrong to do brexit but also we now need to fix it that's not about rejoining that's not on the table and it's not something i'm advocating but it is about accepting responsibility and your vote tonight

for the point that dominic and i make is to make people like daniel and robert take responsibility because daniel you quoted The henry the v speech from the fifth speech rather when the campaign run the band of brothers who fought for our freedom um not least because that speech talks about those who were not there should hold their manhoods cheap when they weren't fighting with you and i'll leave you ladies and gentlemen think about what manners they're talking about because frankly the brexiteers got this country by the short and curlies but as Mark queen margaret

in henry vi taught us wise men nurse sit and wail their loss but cheerily seek how to redress their harms so by voting with myself and dominic tonight you are sending a message to robert and to daniel to be a little less of a hooray henry and much more like maggie thank you [Applause] thank you thank you very much thank you stella um uh In a moment in a moment i'm going to announce the results of the pre-vote um before i do that can i just try and stitch this panel together a little bit um

dominic grieve said that the brexit vote had damaged our sovereign power of influence i hope i don't misquote you though i'm fairly sure i got it right um on the opposite side dan said that the first foreign test was the war in ukraine a suggestion that Really of a completely different view of sovereignty and power dan dominic said that because we were outside the eu room on the ukraine we had lost influence your suggestion is that this this test had been passed can i ask what what the test is that you see and how it's

been passed you would expect dominic and me to disagree but how about we allow either vladimir zelinski or vladimir putin to to determine this that they both see us As respectively their greatest adversary or their greatest supporter in the case of ukraine if i made that there's one thing that dominic absolutely got me on in which i hold my hands up he's right i totally failed to foresee the once in a century pandemic all of the all of the predictions that uh the more extreme remainers were making during the campaign about backed up motorways in

kent and grounded flights and empty Shelves and people not being able to travel all of that came true of course for us as for every other country in the world okay but i think that it is only fair to say because we're hearing all this stuff about we're slower growing this year we are slower growing this year because we did our growth spurt last year because we came out of the pandemic before uh can i put a point to you you you said and you you described your hesitation in The vote you said you were

surprised and you were a professor i don't know a french history of surprised by the antagonism that britain um faced from the eu and i i i i'm hesitant to quote voltaire to you on the execution of admiral being when he said it was to encourage the others he of course said it in french are you that surprised that france and germany the netherlands were going to be such hard negotiators when we had Decided to leave um what i thought was that they would see that that it was in their long-term interest to have a

good relationship with us as their largest customer the most powerful european state their main protector in fact the main protector of european security after the united states and that this would they would take a long-term view of this and accept a democratic decision instead they tried to reverse that Decision or to aid those who are trying to reverse it by making the negotiations as difficult as possible and i would say abusing their position over things like ireland okay they were helped by the poorly weakness of the theresa may government and also by the divisions within

the house of commons after her disastrous election semi-defeat uh but yes i i i don't blame the eu for Being hard bargain bargainers i do criticize them for being short-sighted okay thank you very much um lastly stella can i just ask you you you gave a long list of rights that we may or may not have given up that we may or may not diverge from do you see any value since we're discussing whether we were right to brexit to re-grounding those rights in the british parliament and making a shorter line of connection between Voter

and law what i see is a government that is willing to use the henry viii powers that whatever rights you have in the uk parliament they will supersede them in a small committee of 16 people for whom they've stacked in favour of them so actually i think never more has it been important to have a third party standing up and defending you and giving you somewhere to seek redress and That puts me at odds with the libertarians i find rather bizarre but then i also never thought i'd be a red arguing against red tape and

yet this government is bringing even more of it as a result of brexit lovely thank you very much indeed um so the pre-vote um was as follows in favor of the nation 21 against 65 percent and the lucky undecideds are 14 let us go to questions there are Microphones going to be sort of passed around the room um or run to you at various points um i have to say when i do these things generally i rarely let the microphone get into the hand of the audience because they refuse to give it back please do

give it back i think we're going to go first of all we have some guests from mill hill school here and i think am i right josie First of all i would encourage everyone with thoughts and questions to offer them but in the form of questions a rising intonation at the end of the sentence is the clue that it's a question uh josie when you're ready would both groups not agree that it's still too early to know whether we were right to brexit thank you very much indeed i'd say a pretty good question um was

it is it too early to decide whether We were right to brexit um from your side daniel dominic i've always said nobody can tell what the situation is going to be like in 20 years time i said that at the time of the referendum in 2016 long-term projections about a country's future are very difficult but the short to medium term projections are i think absolutely startlingly clear which is that we have taken a significant economic hit Which i think will take us into a form of stagflation i'm old enough to know what it was like

it's what took me into politics as a conservative in the 1970s when we were just joining the then eec but actually the benefits of it were not hadn't made themselves felt which really came in particularly with margaret thatcher's single market which we're now out of and i think that the evidence is overwhelming And what is most remarkable and i think this really is clear is that daniel and robert can both argue that you know if you wait another five years things are going to get better but actually it is really hard to identify a single

concrete benefit that has come to us from leaving the eu either of a material character i cannot think of one you know all right putting the crown on we could put we could put a crown on the pint glass without leaving We could have had blue passports without leaving if we chose to we could have decided to do our own thing on vaccines if we had been in the eu so these things are non-existent we have great freedom of action so i simply cannot see what the benefits are at the moment i accept you know

in this wonderful thing that daniel wrote in 2016 there were aspirations Which he plainly believed would be sufficient to give us a much better sense of national well-being and economic security and wealth for everybody by going but they just haven't happened and i doubt they ever will okay daniel tell you the other thing that i failed to predict apart from the once in a century pandemic i could not have predicted That the majority of mps in parliament would pass an act saying we will not permit britain to leave the eu except on terms that brussels

likes how do you expect the eu to respond when they're given that opening and so all of the criticisms we are getting about the short-term difficulties about particularly about the northern ireland protocol those were products of the ben act and and the politicians who voted To take the power away from the government and to give the eu that extraordinary uh which they couldn't get over a negotiating advantage were featured prominently uh stella and dominic so i don't think that they get to make that criticism daniel can i can i ask you to address jose's yes

there was an excellent question so that was that i thought it was it was a very good question that's part of my Answer right the the now that there is a majority uh in parliament it's a different story so we we're dealing with some of the the legacy of the terms on which we left the other thing that is just never debated that seems to have completely disappeared from our discourse is what's happening in the eu and one of the oddest things is that the eu has become this kind of symbol against which people measure

themselves one way or the other the the flaws in The european project the lack of democracy this the the the sclerotic wave of decision making the corruption those things have completely disappeared from our debate and so we have to constantly ask ourselves what is it that is the alter what would we be doing if we'd stayed in i cannot think of any example in the long term of a country that has become poorer and less successful as a result of becoming more independent and i don't expect us To be the first exception thank you very

much just hang on one second if you would dominate for those um uh watching from the comfort of their own homes or in far-flung way stations please do feel free to ask questions online they do come up here i will throw them at the the panel at various points very briefly if you would dominate the ben act was passed because we learned in august 2019 that the prime Minister unconstitutionally and he lied about this was intending to provoke parliament so as to enable him to carry out a no deal brexit that people like stella and

myself considered would be so disastrous for the country that it couldn't be contemplated so that's why the ben act was enacted if the prime minister had behaved differently in july 2019 it wouldn't have been necessary can i just pop one at you please either of you really because you'll be aware There is a very significant strain of thought amongst those who voted leave and who are very unhappy with the process the parliamentary process afterwards that people such as yourself maybe not yourselves but that you went out of your way actually to overturn the referendum result

did that cross your minds did it cross the minds of your colleagues stella what i mean this goes back to josie's question which is how long do you wait After you've done something to review it and see whether it's achieving what you want to do as i said do we actually have the brexit that we were promised and i i think it's a bit difficult daniel to lecture this audience about corruption in the european union when you look at what's currently going on in my workplace right now in the conduct of the prime minister um

or Or indeed to offer the fact that a pandemic happened as an excuse as to why you couldn't have predicted this is the point i think it was harod wilson who said events dear boy wasn't it you know that these things happen or maybe it's macmillan apologies i'm showing my age um the point is that things happen to your country so the question you must always ask yourself and always be hungry for is is this the in the best interests of our country What you saw from the outside was a parliament that was sclerotic not

because people weren't trying to act in the best interest but because they didn't know what people were trying to achieve in the first place and my question jose is how long do we wait when we've seen the damage that is already happening we're seeing the businesses going out of places we're seeing the loss of opportunity that's coming i don't know whether you've ever Thought about studying abroad but i talk to young people who've lost erasmus and feel that they've lost something rather special and and they look at things like the pandemic and think what else

might happen because we can never fully predict the future we can recognize that spending all of our time in the place i liked called hogwarts gone wrong going through 1500 pieces of paper only to reconfirm the rules that we are already Abiding by is a colossal distraction from the challenges that we need to face in this country and i think we owe it to your generation to use our time wisely i am not convinced that this has been the best use of people's time and that's why i'm not here to call for us to rejoin

you might find that for surprising as the chair that i moved for europe but i am here to challenge people like dan who on the one hand want us to go back into the single market but on the other hand Want to find anybody else to blame to take responsibility because you broke it but we've all got to fix it for your generation okay okay we'll leave it there thank you very much thank you stella um of course you do robert of course you do well when when people start talking about what is it that

we've actually gained and what are we going to gain in the future i and when i hear dominic and stella talking Like that i'm it makes me think of some red-faced colonel in the 1920s saying to mrs pankhurst tell me one thing that women have got from getting the vote and the answer to that is they get democracy they get a say in the way the country's run and that is above all what brexit brings okay okay let's let's let's leave that one there i'm going to come to the audience but just to prove to

the people watching from beyond that your questions Really do matter i'm going to take one from sarah who has written him a swift answer from one of you i think on either side would probably be best to both sides do you think the staff shortages we are experiencing now are made worse by brexit dan yes and they could be addressed i mean brexit gave us power over immigration how we exercise that power is up to us and i am strongly in favor of liberalizing so that we can admit people Who don't uh earn up to

the threshold for example uh we have a huge shortage of qualified chefs you can see lots of restaurants that are not able to offer we should be we should be uh bringing in qualified chefs from bangladesh or whatever i mean how can anyone argue against curry's tasting better or whatever right so we should be much more we should be much more global in our immigration policy okay okay thank you Very much we find ourselves in agreement that the shortage is due to brexit the difference is that in the past there was huge flexibility in the

market because people would come and go from countries very close to ours to provide those services and now that's having to be replaced by a ponderous bureaucratic system which in many cases bringing people in who for a variety of reasons will probably never Leave even if the economic circumstances change which on people's concerns for example about population growth is a legitimate one i cannot understand how the system which has been invented by daniel and the government is in any way better than the one we had previously and i also make this prediction there are of

course controversial subjects on immigration about whether people think it's Desirable or not but there's been a lot of evidence over the years that it's a thing which makes people very anxious i think in many cases wrongly but it's there and every government in the last 40 years has had to grapple with it i have to say that my own prediction is if there is very large scale immigration through the visa system we will start to get exactly the same concerns expressed over again okay thank you very much indeed um gentleman Over in the corner sorry

we're just going to do one on each on that side if we could just so we can get through a number of questions gentlemen in the corner would you give me your name yes you sir would you give us your name before you kick off ian gregory in 2019 the british people gave an overwhelming majority to the great charlatan boris johnson because the alternative was dominic and stella now they so disdained your points of View stella could you explain why the british people so distrusted the eu give three reasons why do you understand that distrust

of the eu can you explain it or would you like to avoid that question okay um no i i i'm not sure i'm not sure great charlatan is part of the prime minister's official title um so we should probably probably stick to that if we can stella you seem to be Racing to give him johnny i think if the cap fits someone should wear it um i what you're talking about is not unusual i i work in a profession where nobody has any trust in what we do what you're talking about is politicians and i

am somebody who's championed reform of the european union because frankly when you hear these kind of conversations i i'm sorry I'm mortified and i want to be explicit i'm mortified on a platform we're talking about importing people to make curry when actually this is about skills and treating people with respect um i don't i don't think it's me who sounds like a red-faced retired colonel from another century on this panel but i do recognize what you're talking about about politics and politicians that's why many of us try for example to Promote things like citizens assemblies

because in other countries they've been used because that well ian i'm trying to address your question because my point is it's not unique to the european union for people to distrust public institutions indeed it's in that distrust that the project fear that came from the leave campaign thrived there were people from far away i speak as somebody who was on the council of europe for several years working with my Colleagues from different european countries we were not unique in this trusting the european union the question as the question that churchill put is you know this

is democracy what is the alternative and the reality is we are following the rules that you are seeking to be discharged from that european commissioners etc are making so have you actually had any of these benefits that you were claimed to or you were simply creating a time wasting exercise for Those of us in the house of commons okay i'm dominic i'm job sorry your side has had a lot of time at the moment let me let me try and redress it a little bit 2019 election was won by the prime minister for two reasons

firstly uh people looked at jeremy corbyn and considered that he was a completely unacceptable person to become prime minister and i think they were very understandable in those circumstances even though he's genuine i think it Would have been disastrous and secondly the prime minister lied to them the fraud was to say that he had an oven-ready deal that would deliver brexit and which included the northern ireland protocol and as i explained to him in one of the last speeches i ever made in the house of commons the northern ireland protocol and the way he was

selling it was false okay let's let's leave that there look um you have praised what praise has Been made for the the youth of the audience and i see a young lady right at the edge there first of all yes that's right you if you could and then a gentleman here who's patiently had his hand up so we'll go from this young lady on the edge there to the gentleman there young lady please your name first if you would um georgiana hi georgiana um is there any realistic possibility that we could actually Be richer in

the future because we are poorer now due to brexit okay thank you very much let's get another question and then i'll pop that if i may to the panel uh sir you had your hand up there play past the microphone yes thanks my name's thomas mason i like johnny i'm a bbc journalist so all my opinions have been surgically removed but um i'll attempt attempted observation um one and it might be a first world problem um but after brexit my favorite Choice of danish craft beer subscription from from mckellar was no longer possible uniquely to

citizens of the united kingdom and i believe now having gone back to copenhagen i can get it but it's an extra 35 pounds a month yeah let's have a question um when will there be less bureaucracy and also are we still european because i was still european france at the channel tunnel on saturday um the border guard said europeans this Way i said we're still european thank you sir thank you very much indeed thank you very much always good to know about your beer habits as well thank you we appreciate that uh let's start with

um georgina's question if we could robert if i could put this stupid which was no not at all essentially she asks um if though we may be poorer now and i understand that is a matter of debate and discussion um is it possible that we Can end up as a richer country as a result of brexit going to the core of our motion in fact whether we were right to brexit are you confident i think you spoke about in the to the aei you spoke about brexit being a gamble i think you used that phrase

are you confident that we will end up richer even if we are undergoing what dan has described as i think transaction costs um at the current period am i confident yeah i'm confident That we can certainly end up richer whether we will depends very much on the government that we vote for i agree with the with the the speakers on the other side of the house that um we've seen very little progress so far i think this government has been lamentable in its inability to take the opportunities that brexit opened up and i hope the

future government will be rather more effective at doing so but the question is one that Dan referred to are you better off as an independent democracy or are you better off in the long run as part of a declining and rather corrupt multinational bloc and i think the answer for me is definitely the first it's a gamble on democracy and i'm willing to take that gamble every time thank you very much indeed um i don't know which one of you would like to address georgina's question i mean that there must be there must be a

Possibility in your mind that we end up we may when nobody can say we can't just looking further forward it's possible the eu might collapse all sorts of things could happen but i don't really think so i think in the short term there's two routes daniel and robert both i think listening to what roberts just said believe that the uk should turn itself into the singapore of the north east atlantic this has been a dream Of a section of the conservatives supporting uh mps but it's a minority historically that requires societal changes of a really

profound character and 22 years in parliament has made me realize a long time ago that i don't believe this is sought or desired by anything other than a tiny minority and that's why johnson is quite incapable of delivering it and what has made some members of the Erg in his own party so angry with him it just is never going to happen so the alternative is that we need to accept that we need to be able to trade much more freely than we're doing at the moment with our nearest neighbors and that then means starting

to accept some of the rules and if we accepted the phyto-sanitary rules then a lot of most of the northern ireland protocol problem would be solved And some of the things which are upsetting people at the moment and they're going to be even more upset when they go away this summer and see some of the consequences could be removed but those are the choices i mean ultimately we could rejoin the eu although we will have lost all the advantages that mrs thatcher and others negotiated for us to give us an exceptional position in it which

makes me so upset So it's not for tomorrow or indeed and i share stella's view we have to be realistic about where we are but the one thing i'm absolutely convinced is undeliverable is the vision which in a sense was set out in daniel's article which he wrote three days before the general the referendum in 2016 and what robert has just echoed now i don't believe it's practical politics and i don't think it'll ever happen thank you Very much indeed right um i've got gentlemen right at the back there and a gentleman who's been waiting

very patiently at the front here just to make the microphone people write your name first and then i must confess i'm a reporter at the express but i'm here for personal terrible confession to have to make a journalist first of all i'd like to say that you know miss degrees think about a small Minority a question remember yeah no no i'll get 52 is a weird minority i must say but on the wider point i think there's an elephant in the room we're really missing here is that there's a country in eastern europe currently subject

to an invasion by by a power that the eu has really failed to stand up to in my opinion you've had the germans for a long time again the question jack yeah the question of course of course but somebody else was Afforded the time to speak about holidays so i think i'm a creditor please please thank you so much so um i think a little bit about that is that the germans failed on swift whereas we were quite hard line and we're offering this support but berlin is now saying that they're offering more support with

unlimited timeline i find it interesting to suggest that the question's coming sir that there's any suggestion that britain hasn't stood up as an Independent self-governing nation and i would like to know no i'd like to know that why why a given example of how we failed on the ukraine crisis okay thank you now look i need to go back to this question of whether we're still europeans and then we'll come back if we could to the ukraine um or to ukraine forgive me definite article mistake lord hanuman are we still europeans some people will feel

very european others less so i speak french i speak Spanish i've lived in works all over europe personally i've always felt much closer to the commonwealth than to the eu but that's a question for everyone to me you know we don't want laws about that i do want to say one thing though that i think makes europe different right we are currently engaged in trade talks with the trans-pacific partnership with mexico with the gcc with mercury with others none of them none of them is saying that A condition of trade is that we have to

apply their standards behind our own borders the only organization that tries to do that is the european union and that's why ultimately i think it is the wrong model and that's why we will be more prosperous long term as a global economy relying on reciprocity on mutual recognition of standards than tying ourselves to the regulatory model of the one bit of the world that in proportionate terms is not Growing thank you very much stella on this question of our european nature but i also i'm not doing my job as a local mp i don't suggest

you sir that you can find much better craft breweries in walthamstow i mean goodness me northeast london has to have something to offer to itself um jack your question from the express reflects the the central challenge here is the idea that it must either always Be either the uk or the eu why can't we collaborate with i mean that's where daniel and i agree daniel has written about the importance of collaboration with other nations absolutely we've wanted to all act as one to challenge peter and i sit here as the only person on this panel

who has actually been banned from russia so jack i think i know a little bit about standing up oh and dominic to be fair dominic has um as well It's not about whether one is belarus nothing really i listen as i said before it's a pity ban but it's something my point jack is that absolutely we should be challenging the hungarians we should be challenging the germans do you think we are more likely and more capable of doing that inside the room in those negotiations sitting around that table fighting our corners standing up for what

we believe is right rather than Outside you genuinely believe we have more influence shouting out well you're showing that yourself right now with your heckling and that may be the challenge here it's not always about us versus the european union absolutely there are things we want to change about the european union whether we're inside or outside it i'd say as somebody who does a lot of work on refugee rights i've long been concerned about how the european union approaches refugees i've Long been concerned about how the express approaches refugees but i recognize and i went

to the council of europe and i've stood up in parliament to have that debate because i'm not frightened to fight for what i believe in why are you so frightened for britain being in the room fighting for its values and challenging the germans directly rather than having to do it in bilaterals outside the room what a waste of time and effort and energy that only Can help putin actually if we want to tackle putin we do speak as one and we push the germans and the hungarians to go further faster rather than pulling our punches

which is what happens when you're not in the room that's always been the challenge with this and it's the same with dan's point i can't let him get away very briefly the idea that there isn't something to fight for right now the european union is looking at some stats some basic standards mean That whether you're buying something you would know whether it was tat now i don't know about you ladies and gentlemen i buy an awful lot of tap i'd quite like to know whether the things i'm buying are durable the european union is setting

some common consumer rights and our government has to make a choice about whether it's going to give you that information and i'd say in a cost-living crisis knowing whether what you're buying is tap and will fall apart In five minutes or actually it's worth investing it's quite an important thing to do not everything the european union doing is is bad not everything the uk does is good what we need is some political reality jack rather than some hot air and i'd say the express has a role to play in that too okay no i'm gonna

i think stella has made yourself opinions very very clear we've got a gentleman right in the front here thank you very much for your Patience and thank you for all your questions and do send them in from home sir thank you my name is john i'll be trying to be very very quick i have a question from mr grieve and miss creasy um ursula von de la and mario draghi and emmanuel macron have all spoken very recently about their desire for the eu to move towards qualified majority voting to determine member states foreign and security

policies that implies that most Decisions about the most fundamental issues for example policies towards our relations with the united states the involvement in ukraine and russia would be made by politicians completely removed and unaccountable no democratic accountability to national electorates you both either are or have been democratically elected national politicians how could that ever be an acceptable outcome to you okay let's have one One of you answer on this issue um so our ability to influence or indeed block because we could that measure has gone and this is this is precisely the point we will

find that the eu takes decisions which actually do have quite profound effect on us even out of it without our input the eu isn't a perfect organization i mean i entirely agree with so many of The criticisms made of it rather bizarrely i spent most of my career being described as a euro skeptic but i have to say to you by leaving it we have made a colossal error because what it does has a direct bearing on us and our influence and ability to work inside it to achieve our national goals and help them achieve

the goals that we think are desirable for them as well has completely gone so there's no point in raising this Issue they will do what they want i suspect it won't go through for a whole variety of reasons but because actually other member states also have differing views from the french but the simple fact is our influence there and our ability to manage that is gone okay thank you very much let's take a question on online and this probably drills down to a lot of people's opinions or feelings about the issue and it's very simple

from Anonymous could we have evidence in figures of the benefits of brexit does this go back um my proposals to this question of whether it's too early or it's too confused because of the issue of the pandemic dan do you do do you feel the the the the exit love in the figures well we heard a lot of the figures uh in robert's speech the the difference between what was predicted and what has Actually happened we were the fastest growing european economy last year because we came out of the uh the lockdown earlier we are

predicted to be 19th out of 20 on these this year yes so okay i know that's an important point right if if if everyone falls back to from 190 and then last year i go from 90 to 100 and this year you catch up i am better off right i mean it's There's no point in grabbing the the snapshot and uh and pretending do you think there are figures that say definitively we're on the right path or is it too early to make an obvious point robert was correct that it's up to us brexit on

its own doesn't add all subtractive farthing what it does is it removes constraints and it allows us to make different choices and which choices we make Will determine how prosperous we are so we could we could have gone the kobe needs to roof and ended up like venezuela we could end up like singapore we could end up somewhere in between the two but do you know what i would rather live in a country where that is democratically decided even if i'm sometimes on the losing side of the vote then live in a policy where those

decisions are made for me and imposed without democratic consent okay let me Put the question if i made the opposition i don't know who wishes to pick up out of the two of you this question of figures definitive figures on the benefits of brexit you look as if you feel a bit too early don't worry i'm sorry you need to decide between yourselves i mean i i just think i'm perplexed robert because i think if someone came to you as an academic where they hadn't evidenced the basis for Their claims you would want to see

the basis for their claims the the information that i've presented in my presentation came from uk in the changing europe which is an independent think tank at the kings at king's university from the office of budget responsibility again another independent body set up by government to hold politicians like myself to account so that the facts weren't challenged it was opinions that were in contention um I the the data is very very clear we have taken an economic hit as a result of brexit our imports and our exports have been affected daniel i love the fact

that you play fast and loose with the time frames that you looked at when you look about 2016 we hadn't left the european union then we sank so low then the figures hang on down down hang on please sorry stella i know fact facts aren't up for debate but discussion is and i welcome the fact That you are being honest about that that you were looking at different time frames but you cannot move away from what the officer budget responsibility uk are changing europe the lse data has shown us it's the lse that's been looking

at the impact of inflation and directly segregating it to prove that leaving the european union has made the cost of food more expensive and as somebody who has the constituency with the ninth highest level of child Poverty and has people who aren't choosing between heating or eating because they can't afford to do either i am desperately concerned about that and desperately concerned about the impact of brexit it's not the only thing but it is a big thing and everything you are talking about is talking about bringing more complexity more risk of those factors getting worse

and i guess the question for all of us is how much pain do you Expect us to go through before those sunlit uplands okay um thank you uh robert you were you were criticized there by stella if you'd like to respond on that point about figures thank you um it's strange to blame rising prices on brexit when prices in the eu are rising faster than our prices labor shortages in the eu are at least as bad as our Labor shortages and they're due not to brexit but to the long-term effects of the curb i think

inflation is is generally higher in britain than it is in most food prices food food prices food prices forgive me forgive me that forgive me uh and industrial goods prices inflation is also lower i think now um perhaps i could make an offer or a challenge to to stellar i don't know whether um whether intelligence squared has a website i Suppose it must do i will give all the sources of all the figures that i've quoted and perhaps she could do the same okay okay we're going to leave it there on the questions and forgive

me i know there were lots of people who didn't get a chance both at home and wherever you are uh far flung um or in the hall and apologies for that thank you to all of our panelists for giving um their responses are candid and clear it's time for a closing statement And uh you only have one minute i'm afraid and that will be strict um with the tapping of the glass there is no warning tap this time round stella creasy would you like to start oh sorry dominic would you like to stop you'll take

it now dominic we've plainly made a major error is the country in a better condition today than it was in 2016 that's that seems to me the only way you can answer this question at the moment Of course you can look to potential future but um unless you're going to project a long way ahead and take big gambles rationally when you see where the uk was in june 2016 when we went into that referendum and it took place you saw that in fact we had the fastest growing economy in europe you saw we had more

investment than any other european country and actually we were beginning to perform Economically in a way that was even challenging german performance and you look where we are now our ability to provide the well-being of our citizens has been adversely affected in a major way and on top of that our global influence has been diminished and i listened to all these things about sovereignty but i have to say to you absolute sovereignty does not exist Sovereignty is about making choices about who you cooperate with we've made a choice to stop cooperating and we're paying the

price for it and it's the cooperation with our nearest neighbors thank you very much indeed um i don't know which of you two would like to go first uh robert are you happy to go first okay thanks i tried to talk about the eu and about democracy and the other side answers by talking about having one sort of telephone cable and arguing About statistics we were not only the fastest growing economy in europe in 2016 we've been the fastest growing economy in europe from the year 2000 to the year 2021. um brexit didn't make any

difference about that but my standard my stand on this is not about one years or two years or three years economic growth figures but about the long-term future of the country as a democratic nation and that I think is what we voted for in 2016 what some people try to prevent and what i hope we shall have a government which will eventually carry out thank you very much indeed robert that's excellent thank you and dominic if you would oh i'm so sorry forgive me i've got confused with the bright lights stella of course thank you

everybody needs a bogeyman in life Someone to blame when things get tough the european union has been britain's bogeyman for failing to deal with the endemic challenges we've had in our country for far too long and just as kaiser jose reveals themselves at the end of the usual suspects so you also have an opportunity here to be very clear that you won't be hoodwinked you've seen the lorry parks you've seen the price rises you've seen the people struggling to get visas you've seen the Division in our country and yes you've seen the challenges with the

multiple charging cables for your phones the questions are what are we going to do about it i didn't come into politics to sit and repeat myself i know that might sound surprising and yet what we are doing in parliament is repeating the same piece of legislation because ultimately when it comes down to a union no union is perfect you get out of it what you put Into it we walked away from the european union sir we walked away from our opportunity to block the things that we didn't like now it's time we take responsibility for

sorting out the problems that we have created and sorting out the challenges that our country have and i would much rather spend my time talking about those and making things better for my constituents whether the european union were in it or out of it but do i think we could have Done that more easily in the european union of course thank you very much indeed and to give us our final summary uh dan johnny just very quickly to answer your question about inflation i just looked up the ons figures for may uk inflation was six

point seven percent eurozone inflation was seven point seven percent eu inflation overall was eight point nine percent so there's thank you very much that is always missed out What about the eu and what's happening there i am convinced that if david cameron had come back with a single retrieval of power with one concession he would have won the referendum because he would have been able to refute the idea of a one-way street of a ratchet he'd been able to say look powers can come down it's not always being centralized ponder what the what it means

that the eu was readier to lose its second Financial contributor than to allow any devolution of power from brussels to the national level and since the result in the uk some have reacted in brussels with anger some with scorn some with disbelief no one no one has said oh i wonder why they voted leave i wonder whether whether anyone else might have doubts i wonder whether we might have played that differently on the contrary they've pushed ahead as we Were hearing from john over here with more integration particularly in the fiscal and military fields and

so staying in the eu was never a status quo option staying in the eu means being incorporated into an ever closer policy evolving all of the attributes and trappings of nationhood i would rather live in a free democracy than in a multinational empire thank you very much indeed thanks dan Thank you um it is time to vote and to see if there is a point of order here that if daniel has been able to provide figures let us provide the evidence that when you strip out the impact of the energy costs inflation in the uk

is 1.6 higher than germany three percentage points higher than france and more than three percent points higher than italy indeed uk core inflation is catching up with core Inflation in the us despite the us having a much greater fiscal stimulus that is brexit we're going to we will we will have we will have to leave the city so i need what i what i would like you to do however is to now vote um uh and we'll see if anyone has had their mind changed or swayed by what you have heard tonight that whilst you

are voting um i'd quite like just to pick up a couple of points if i could stella Um you spoke about a bogeyman um that enabled politicians to hide behind it is there anything is there any advantage do you think in there no longer being a bogeyman for westminster politicians to hide behind unable to say that's europe's fault and to take responsibility is there any involvement is there any disadvantage in politicians actually taking responsibility most the problems that you're talking about it's Like the issues around uh refugees and immigration the problem wasn't immigration the problem

was politicians not being honest with you about what the challenges were and how to make the system work and now we're all fearing the consequence for it whether in the nhs or indeed the horrific way that we're now responding to people coming from uh overseas and being sent to rwanda i i'm in favor of politicians being more Transparent and i think fungus of bogeyman rather gets in the way of that okay thank you very much and dan may i ask you i mean bearing in mind the extraordinary number of visas that were issued um in

the last chunk of statistics that came out what last week more than a million visas whatever your opinion do you not think that many of those who voted for brexit will have been surprised and to some degree betrayed by The overall figure notwithstanding your discussion of control i have to say there's no evidence of that either in the opinion polls or in conversations i have a rule of thumb a heuristic if you will that if anyone if any british person tells you that the brexit vote was all about immigration you are talking to someone who

voted remain no leaver thinks that it was about immigration we know that it was about Democracy okay well um i have to say from my own experience which was 10 weeks of travel around the united kingdom discussing this with everyone you could possibly imagine uh immigration played a large part in a significant number of people's decisions um but that is only how you voted johnny no no no that's that's entirely unfair and a presumption um however the good News is uh we do have the results in um i have two sets of results that say

first vote results on my screen so i'm going to take a mad guess and say the one that is slightly varied ah exchange to final thank you very much indeed um we have um a swing in fact the undecideds have plummeted from 14 down to 2 those against the motion are at 67 they were at 65 percent and those for the motion are now 31 they were at 21 so you Can see which way the debate has gone [Applause] and it really only leaves me to say thank you for coming thank you very much for

watching at home as well but thank you to our wonderful family thank you so much thank you very much that's a great pleasure really was thank you robert thank you so much it's a real pleasure to be here with you