We asked you to submit your questions to candidates standing in the 2024 General Election.
From all your submissions, we chose 10 that represented the broad issues you wanted answers to.
We asked every candidate we had contact details for to respond.
We’ll be publishing them in the run-up to the General Election with the responses from the candidates who replied from each constituency.
These are the answers are from candidates standing in the Penrith & Solway constituency.
What will you do to address the damage caused by Brexit, and what will you do to improve trade with the EU?
Mark Jenkinson, the Conservative Party
We should all deal in facts. We had access around 43 active trade deals as EU members, which we would be paying an expected net £16bn for today.
We have replicated all but three of these – Bosnia, Montenegro, Algeria – and are now free to enter into negotiations bilaterally to improve on them should it wish to do so.
We have improved deals with Japan, Singapore and Ukraine and are in the process of improving our deals with Mexico, Switzerland, Israel, Turkey and South Korea. We’ve struck new deals with Australia and New Zealand and are close to completion on free trade agreements with India and the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council.
By 2023, the UK’s departure from the EU had allowed us to remove tariffs completely on 47% of all product lines entering the UK, making products cheaper for UK consumers and businesses.
In real terms, our export market has never been bigger. Our post-Brexit UK trade reached record real terms highs.
Any ‘damage’ appears only to be to the credibility of those who said that leaving the EU would be damaging, and who have since tried to blame the impacts of Covid and Putin’s war in Ukraine on our departure.
Susan Denham-Smith, the Green Party
Big question and short answer time.
Ideally we would like to reverse Brexit but in the meantime, making it easier for people in professions we need such as health work and hospitality to be able to work here would be a big step in the right direction.
