This afternoon’s amendments focus on the disapplication of the protocol and the extravagant powers that the Government hope to grant themselves. Our amendments, consistent with our amendments tabled
on other days—I think we are on day 712 of this Bill—seek to balance and, where necessary, curtail those powers, to ensure that Ministers have due regard for the views and the needs of all the people in Northern Ireland and their elected representatives.
Through amendment 49, we also propose to formalise the safeguarding of the Good Friday agreement. It is referenced just once in this Bill, where I believe it is being used as an amulet to defend against repudiation of an international treaty. We are told repeatedly, although it does not reflect the understanding of the agreement that many of us have, that this Bill is about protection of the Good Friday agreement, so it is difficult to see why codifying that is being so forcefully rejected. As a lifelong and committed follower of John Hume, I am always very pleased when his ideas get a new airing and a new audience. However, it is frustrating when the concepts and ideas he spent his life developing and persuading Northern Ireland to adopt—many people took a lot longer than others to finally adopt those views, while we all seemed to happily operate in this framework—are misrepresented and distorted, as they have been at some stages of this debate. John Hume argued and finally persuaded, through the Good Friday agreement, which has enormous consent in Northern Ireland and is sovereign in Northern Ireland, that consent should rest on the will of the majority of people in Northern Ireland. Crucially, he framed that within the architecture and the institutions of the three-stranded approach in the agreement, which explicitly saw Ireland’s and the UK’s joint membership of the EU as underpinning that, and underpinning the relationships east-west and north-south, regardless of Northern Ireland’s constitutional settlement.