Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs and Vote Leave and Leave.EU being questioned by the Commons Treasury committee * My snap PMQs verdict * PMQs verdict * PMQs - Verdict from the Twitter commentariat 6.32pm BST That happened repeatedly in the euro campaign. It has happened repeatedly in this campaign as well. Calls go out from Jeremy Heywood’s office in the Cabinet Office saying, ‘You don’t want to be on that side or bad things might happen to you.’ All sorts of people in the Cabinet Office call people all the time and make threats, some more overt and some more covert. I don’t want to say Jeremy Heywood himself has particularly and specifically done anything. But everyone close to how government operates knows the power of the Cabinet Office and the power of the cabinet secretary and the power of, subtly-worded in a very English way, threats. I think there’s a pretty good chance of that. I have spoken to people in government, in Whitehall, in the Cabinet Office who have actively been thinking about some of these schemes. One of the most obvious schemes, if Cameron and Osborne are desperate, is for them to announce some kind of ‘We will amend the 1972 European Communities Act to ensure it will not do blah, blah, blah in the future.’ They were thinking about some kind of scam like that in the hope that it would persuade Boris to support them. Of course, that did not work. Boris stuck to his principles ... But they are clearly thinking about something like that. It would not surprise me at all to see Cameron and Osborne on stage offering something like that, possibly with representatives from the European Union saying, ‘Oh yes, we’ll do this new deal, don’t worry.’ A single market in services would actually be deeply destructive for Great Britain. We attract the biggest proportion of investment into the European Union precisely because we have a different legal system to Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain etc. We have a common law system, courts, contract, insurance, etc etc, which is the reason why we suck in all this money from around the world. The idea of harmonising all our rules on all of this with Greece would be disastrous for these investment flows. So I reject your premise. The idea that we want a single market in services is false. Harmonisation of all of these rules is damaging, often. I witnessed exactly the same process on the euro campaign in 1999 when they lied repeatedly about their membership. They lied about how many members they had, they lied about how they were surveying them. They persistently lied about business opinion, and they have been doing the same thing on the EU. The CBI is so dishonest. It won’t even tell you how many members it has got. That’s the scale of its dishonesty. 5.49pm BST Tyrie thanks Cummings for his evidence. They have been going for more than three hours, he says. And that’s it. Continue reading...
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