Sunday with Niall Paterson Interview with Peter Bone MP Conservative

Sunday 10 December 2017

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SUNDAY WITH NIALL PATERSON, SKY NEWS

NIALL PATERSON: The leading Tory Brexiteer, Peter Bone, offered to travel to Brussels this week to help Theresa May unlock those Brexit talks. She, perhaps unsurprisingly, declined but nevertheless the deal she brought back has received a cautious welcome from leave and remaining supporting MPs alike. There is it seems an uneasy truce on the back benches for now but will it last? Joining me to discuss this, Peter Bone. Mr Bone, many thanks for being with us. I’m trying to understand why people like you, Conservative Brexiteers who to an extent tend towards the harder end of the spectrum, are in any way happy with the deal that was struck this week. Theresa May said she’d won but on every substantive issue it is the UK and not the EU that is given ground.

PETER BONE: I’m not sure, the great thing about today is that we are 474 days away from coming out of this dreadful European Union super state and I must correct you. She didn’t refuse to take me to Brussels, she was thinking about it and it is interesting that within 48 hours they caved in to our demands. On the substantive issue, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and this is a staging post. Am I unhappy with bits of it? Absolutely. The £39 billion that we suddenly found, that’s actually more than £350 million a week and I think we said we might spend that on the NHS.

NP: So where were you? Where were you and your Brexit supporting colleagues when the deal was done? There was an outbreak of peace and calm for once in Westminster, with the exception of Nigel Farage of course.

PETER BONE: Well I don't think he’s a member of the Conservative party yet. No, the serious point is that this is just a part of the process. Now the real issue is when we get to the spring of next year, if there is no proper trade deal done, if it is clear that there is not going to be a deal which is actually what I think will happen, at that stage we have to say we are going to come out, there isn’t going to be a deal, by the way we are not going to give you that £39 billion and we are going to spend it on the health service and social care.

NP: Well let’s take one of the things that was apparently agreed this week, that in the absence of a deal there will be full alignment in Northern Ireland with the customs union and the single market. Now you are grinning there but I am sure you are grimacing inside.

PETER BONE: No, I mean if that was actually true I’d be very worried and I’d be coming on and … but having talked to all the people involved in this, or a lot of the people involved in this, they absolutely say that is not the situation.

NP: Well the Irish seem to think it’s the situation.

PETER BONE: That’s what the Irish think and with these EU negotiations things are written in such an ambiguous way that anyone can think it means anything but the crucial point, they said it time after time, nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and what everybody hopes for is that we are going to have a free trade deal therefore the issue with Northern Ireland disappears but that can only happen if we make proper progress by the spring of next year.

NP: You’ve had a busy week of course, David Davis in front of the committee, on what basis did the Brexit committee not hold him in contempt? We have been told that there were impact assessments, 50 or 60 of them, excruciating detail, the summaries of which have been seen by the Prime Minister, members of the Cabinet. We had a debate in the Commons in which you spoke and then pouf, they don’t exist.

PETER BONE: Well that’s the point, they never said there were these impact analyses, what they said were they were sectorial analyses which they have delivered and the problem is there were two conflicting motion’s in the House, one said deliver everything and the other one said hold back anything that might damage the negotiations.

NP: Surely they should have made it clear for example during the debate on the release of these papers that what people were claiming they were was not what they were.

PETER BONE: And they did. If you go back and look at Hansard, the Minister – I think it was Robin Walker at the time – said time and time again when it came to the issue of contempt, you can’t be in contempt for delivering something that doesn’t exist.

NP: But how much of a dereliction of duty is that though by the government? If we take the government at face value, which your committee has done, when they said they didn’t do impact assessments per se but instead these sectorial analyses, I mean shouldn’t they have done impact assessments? Isn’t one of the first things that any sensible government do at this point is find out exactly what the potential negative impacts of the various forms of Brexit might be?

PETER BONE: Well the sectorial analysis does a lot of that. Impact assessments have a certain formula and it would be absurd to do impact assessments on specific parts of the economy when you don’t know what Brexit you are going to look at and that’s the point. The British people have decided, cutting through all that what the British people have said is end free movement, stop paying billions and billions of pounds to the EU, make our own laws in our own country, judged by our own judges and that’s what the government is actually delivering.

NP: But isn’t the problem that the government doesn’t actually know what it wants as an end state for Brexit? That we have ructions within Cabinet that continue, we don’t have impact assessments – fair enough but I think that’s demonstrably daft to me – but we also don’t have a government that has consensus on what we should be looking at as our end state relationship with the EU.

PETER BONE: Well first of all I think it is absolutely sensible that we don’t waste time on impact assessments and what I just said there – ending free movement, stop paying billions of pounds, own judges judging our own laws is exactly what the Prime Minister committed in the Commons in answer to my question. If we deliver that – don’t forget the major issue was actually free movement, then the money and the making our own laws in our own country – do that and the British people will be very pleased with us. That is really the litmus test.

NP: Briefly because we are just about to run out of time, how confident are you that you are going to get the Brexit that you wanted?

PETER BONE: I am because I don't think the EU are going to do a deal with us and we’ll have a clean Brexit and we’ll spend that £39 billion on the health service and adult social care as actually we promised.

NP: Peter Bone, lovely to see you, thanks for coming in.