I’m committed to doing what’s right for our country
CAST your mind back those three years to when our nation voted on Brexit.
Wherever you stood at the time you could never have predicted we would be where we are now.
At that time even the hardest line Brexiteer was talking about how easy it would be to do a trade deal with the EU.
No one of any significance, not Boris Johnson, not Nigel Farage, not Michael Gove, was talking about a crash out, no deal, self-destruct Brexit.
And yet today that is what this government seems most likely to be pushing our country towards.
We know, because of leaked government documents, that that will lead to unprecedented disruption, shortages of medicines for things like diabetes, shortages of food, queues of lorries at Dover, our biggest port, industry, agriculture being ground down, unable to deliver and unable to compete. Not Project Fear, but government analysis.
The longer term is just as bleak. Our manufacturing industry and our farmers would face tariffs whilst this government says it will let all countries export to us without the same.
So we’ll see floods of cheap goods and food flowing in when other countries have got a surplus on their hands and us as a place to dump that surplus.
Not very sensible economics and very dangerous for agriculture, industry and jobs - very dangerous for a town like Rochdale.
We’ve now got as well the threat, which Prime Minister Johnson originally denied, that the government will suspend our Parliament.
Even in the height of the World Wars, Parliament continued to sit. Breaking our carefully crafted constitution would be astonishing.
In the middle of a constitutional crisis with a nation more divided than ever, it can’t be right that our unelected Prime Minister blunders on not caring where he’s going as long as he clings to the job he’s coveted for so long.
Parliament has returned and I am committed to doing what is right for our country.
And I am sure that stopping that no-deal Brexit is right.
I expect all Members of Parliament opposed to that no-deal Brexit will come together to do just that.
After that we’ve got to put things back to the people of this country.
Those who want Brexit at any price can have their say as can those who are opposed. It’s not what was promised those years ago but if we are to bring our country back together, it’s the only way forward.