Iain Duncan Smith Quotes

I am an optimist about the UK. We have been involved in trade with our European partners, which we will always be doing whatever this relationship is. We are a member of the EU. That gives us benefits. But we have to figure out where that is going. In the world, we are a global trader already.

I do not share the half-in, half-out attitude to the EU of some in Britain. Britain's place is in Europe.

I personally hope and wish that Britain will stay part and parcel of the European Union.

I believe something very deeply. That Britain's national interest is best served in a flexible, adaptable and open European Union and that such a European Union is best with Britain in it.

I think the U.K. would be perfectly successful as a standalone country, part of the European marketplace like Norway and Switzerland but without the expensive E.U. bureaucracy.

I remember when we ignored Europe and we were totally committed to the Commonwealth and the former Empire, and thought imperial preference was the only thing which enabled us to survive, that was a mistake, and it's a similar mistake to feel Britain can't be a hugely successfully country - economically and in any other way - outside the E.U.

I strongly suspect that there would be a positive economic advantage to the U.K. in leaving the single market.

The most difficult part of Brexit will be to figure out the trade regime between the U.K. and the rest of the E.U. because the level of trade integration between the members of the E.U. is the deepest in the world and integrates regulations that govern how products and services are produced and sold within the E.U.

No one voted for a Brexit that will tie us to the E.U.'s customs rules and prevent us striking meaningful trade deals of our own.

I don't want to leave euro or leave the European Union.

No one can be in any doubt that Britain is becoming more like Europe, though few in an increasingly economically illiterate media seem to realise it.

All of us in Parliament now have a responsibility to get on with the process of leaving the EU and securing a more prosperous future for Britain as an open, global, trading nation.

I do not doubt that there are many countries that will wish to trade with the U.K. post-Brexit, but understandably they will wait to see what the U.K.'s ultimate relationship with Europe will be.

If the U.K. wants to leave the E.U., we need to stay in the single market.

Leaving the E.U. enables the U.K. to be more engaged with the global economy, not just the European economy.

There can be no halfway house, where Britain continues to be out of Europe in name but is still run by Europe. There can be no halfway house when it comes to rule-taking and law-making from the E.U., and there is an overwhelming sense of frustration that Britain is being taken advantage of by the E.U.

At the core of the European Union must be, as it is now, the single market. Britain is at the heart of that Single Market, and must remain so.

We were talking about really getting Europe on its feet. It was our hope that there would be a breakdown of trade barriers in Europe first, and then eventually a breakdown internationally, which would help increase trade with Europe.

I would like a UK fully engaged in Europe, but I can't decide in place of the British. I see that for the moment they want to be more in retreat.

Perhaps our own opposition to even the level of European integration we have now, let alone any more, is well known.

The choice is not normally between the north and south. It might be between Britain and Europe.

The North American Free Trade Agreement marked a fundamental change in the global trade scheme.

I want completing the single market to be our driving mission. I want us to be at the forefront of transformative trade deals with the US, Japan and India as part of the drive towards global free trade. And I want us to be pushing to exempt Europe's smallest entrepreneurial companies from more EU directives.

A country like France now does two-thirds of its trade within the euro zone.

The only way in which a European union, embracing Britain but excluding eastern Europe, could become economically healthy would be develop the closest sort of trading relationships either with this hemisphere or with Africa.