Well, there was nothing new in the statement today, but I still welcome the opportunity to debate this issue, because it does point out the utter absurdity of the Labour Party's position on the deal that it wants with the EU, encapsulated in one sentence of the statement, which says that they want

'A compromise which at the bare minimum needs to involve a commitment to a permanent Customs Union over and enshrining the Chequers commitments to regulatory alignment.'

Well, what a preposterous position that it is. We will remain subject to decisions taken by the EU, but in which we have had no part to participate and in which we've not had a vote. The Commission—. We've got at the moment one commissioner out of 28. The Council of Ministers—. We've got 8.5 per cent of the votes on qualified majority voting decisions and we've got roughly 10 per cent of the seats in the European Parliament. If we were to leave the EU on the kind of arrangements that the Counsel General has set out today, we would have no votes whatsoever in any of those decisions, and yet we would be subject to whatever decisions the EU made. That, whatever it is, is not Brexit. And this, I think, points out the fundamental hypocrisy of the Labour Party's position, because they claim to want to respect the result of the referendum whilst on the other hand committing themselves to a policy that actually produces the exact opposite of leaving the EU except in the even more damaging situation whereby we can actually have no influence whatsoever over decisions in which currently we do at least have a minimal part to play.

And let's be in no doubt that the EU would have no interest whatsoever in taking decisions that were in our interest and indeed, very often, would have every interest in doing the opposite to favour their own member states over the interests of Britain. We would actually be in a worse position than Turkey is now, but at least Turkey is prepared to accept that ignominy because it is, at least theoretically, a candidate member of the EU, whereas, we would be the opposite; we would be on the point of departure, so why on earth would we want to make those commitments whilst we were legally outside the EU? It does go to the very heart of what leaving the EU should all be about—taking back control, making decisions for ourselves, making our own laws and having the British people, ultimately, as the sovereign body that determines the way in which Governments behave. Because the European Commission has made it absolutely clear what the customs union is about. It's about a system of common rules—I'm quoting from one of their documents—that goes beyond 

'the Customs Union as such—with its common tariff—and extend to all aspects of trade policy, such as preferential trade, health and environmental controls, the common agricultural and fisheries policies, the protection of our economic interests by non-tariff instruments and external relations policy measures.'

That is everything that goes to the very heart of trade and we would be giving up all that under Labour's proposals. We would, in fact, be in a state of vassalage, as Boris Johnson has previously pointed out. And as Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, has said, there are arguments for remaining in the EU and there are arguments for leaving the EU, but there is no case whatsoever for giving up the benefits of remaining without obtaining the benefits of leaving. And that is exactly what the Labour policy would mean.

And does the Counsel General not agree with me that the customs tariff that he wants to commit ourselves to in perpetuity is actually a tax on the poor, a tax on working people? There's a 15 per cent tax on footwear and clothes imports, for example, an 11.5 per cent tax on coffee, a 17 per cent tax on oranges, which we can't grow in this country anywhere, anymore than we can grow coffee. And there are lots of senseless tariffs as well. There's a tariff of 1.7 per cent on swords, cutlasses, bayonets, lances and scabbards; a tax of 15 per cent on unicycles. Now, I don't know what threat the importation of unicycles poses to the British bicycle-making industry, but I can see no justification for that whatsoever. There's even a 4.7 per cent tax on umbrellas with telescopic shafts. There are 12,160 of these absurd impositions upon working people. But also, of course, in many other respects, there are taxes on food and other necessities of life—a 5 per cent VAT on central heating fuel, for example. These are all things that are going to hit the poorest hardest, and that's what the Labour Party is committing itself to.

So, I do agree with the Counsel General in one respect: that the tragedy of the situation we've now arrived at—and he said this in answer to the Conservative spokesman—is that Theresa May has made no preparations whatsoever for coping with the dislocation that a 'no deal' arrangement would inevitably involve. We should have spent the last three years actually putting together, in outline, our trade deals with the rest of the world. We haven't even begun that process. And also we should have put in process the technical infrastructure for how to cope with trade flows across the United Kingdom borders, with a tariff regime if one were to be imposed. But also—and my last point is this—part and parcel of what the Labour Party proposes is a permanent open-door immigration policy, in effect, because that also is an essential part of the four freedoms that the single market entails.