Sophy Ridge on Sunday Interview with Owen Paterson Conservative MP

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS

SOPHY RIDGE: Brexiteers in the Conservative party flexed their parliamentary muscle this week and succeeded in forcing changes to the Prime Minister’s Chequers plan but the EU this week indicated that there may need to be even more concessions, something that is unlikely to go down well with our next guest, Owen Paterson. Hello, thanks for being with us today.

OWEN PATERSON: Hi, good morning Sophy.

SR: It’s been a tough week for the Conservative party hasn’t it, for the government. In your view is Theresa May’s Chequers plan dead?

OWEN PATERSON: Well I think Michel Barnier gave you a grievous blow yesterday or the day before with his comments and if he is looking for yet more concessions, which is inevitable, I think it will be very hard to get it through Parliament. You talked about Brexiteers having a week, all I’d like to make the point is that we’re just asking that the government delivers what was promised at Lancaster House which we promised the people in our manifesto which is to very clearly leave the single market, leave the customs union and leave the ECJ and the reason we don’t like the Chequers deal is it does not do that in a clean way and will restrict our ability to do trade deals around the world. So our amendments this week were designed to get the government to follow its own policy but to answer your question, I think Barnier knocked it on the head. I think we should follow David Davis’s advice this morning, he’s done a big interview, and go back and look again and ideally we should go to what Donald Tusk offered back on 7th March which was a free trade deal like Canada, that’s much the most optimal arrangement, but if we don’t get a free trade deal, we should be looking at World Trade terms. I never talk about no-deal these days because the rest of the world, 98% of world trade is done under World Trade terms and we should begin to plan for that which is exactly what David Davis was recommending if the FTA, which he proposed, could not be cobbled together.

SR: It’s interesting listening to you talking about going out onto WTA terms, my previous guest Dominic Grieve was absolutely scathing about the idea of no-deal, he said that it would be catastrophic, it would leave the country in a state of emergency and he was pretty determined to stop it happening. I mean it does feel that the two wings of the Conservative party are absolutely at loggerheads on this.

OWEN PATERSON: Well yes, I think you will see a rerun of Project Fear attacking WTA from every angle but you must take someone very respectable and knowledgeable on this subject, Professor David Collins, he published a paper through Politeer on Friday clearly recommending this route. Obviously the optimal arrangement would be to have a free trade deal something like Canada plus, that would be much the best as Tusk offered in March, but we should be very clear now that if Barnier is pushing for yet more concessions on Chequers, which for someone like me is wholly unacceptable anyway, we should be beginning to prepare for what are World Trade terms. I watched Dominic, I just watched the clip and we’ve been in parliament together for the same amount of time, 21 years, we know each other well, we’ve done lots of things together. There are so many things that I agree with him on but just this one big issue sadly I don’t and I have yet to see the evidence that WTO is going to be a disaster as is forecast.

SR: Let’s talk about some of the specific examples of what it could mean. The worry that people have is that tariffs would mean price rises, 10% on cars, 10% on clothing, 22% on food and if you removed tariffs for one country we’d have to remove them for all countries under those rules which then means that our domestic industry would suffer.

OWEN PATERSON: Well at the moment we hide behind a tariff wall keeping prices up artificially because we’re in the customs union and lots of economists say this would be a huge boom for the UK because we could reduce prices. We have tariffs on all sorts of products, we could actually go to zero tariffs if we wanted, we could certainly go to zero tariffs on products which we don’t produce ourselves and there have been estimates that families would be about £2300 a year better off with cheaper goods and cheaper food. That would be a huge boom to this country.

SR: What about British industry?

OWEN PATERSON: Well very important, that would benefit all industry because all industry would have access to materials and components, all around the world. The people who dominate the airwaves on this issue are those industries which sell into Europe which is only about 12% our GDP. It is very important but it’s not 100%. 100% of our economy would benefit if we had access to the whole world and no tariffs, that to me would be a huge boom and there are lots of senior economists who support that view and write about it on a regular basis and I very much hope over the next few weeks we can get this message across.

SR: We haven’t got much time left on the interview, I wish I had longer with you of course, but one quick thought on Theresa May’s future. Dominic Grieve was suggesting it was people like yourself who supported Leave in the referendum who could bring the Prime Minister down, is that something that you could consider happening?

OWEN PATERSON: Well I think this is complete nonsense, all this talk about leadership. She’s the leader, she’s taken us through the Article 50 Bill, she’s taken through the Withdrawal Act as it now is, she made a good speech at Lancaster House. I think it’s a great pity she appeared to diverge with David Davis whose White Paper sounds to me from what I’ve seen of it, the leaked bits, very much a sensible proposal to go ahead. We want her to deliver what the Conservative party was elected to do which is to leave the single market, to leave the customs unit and to leave the remit of the ECJ. Any distractions about leadership is a complete nonsense in my opinion.

SR: Owen Paterson, thank you very much.