If that is the case, as my noble friend has reminded us, then the Government should be supporting this amendment and putting it into statute.
During the referendum campaign in 2016 two former Prime Ministers, Sir John Major and Tony Blair, both of whom made significant contributions to the peace process, gave speeches in Derry/Londonderry, in which they stressed that imposing a hard border between the north and the south of the island of Ireland would threaten the very basis of the peace process and the stability that the island of Ireland has enjoyed. Both have cogently reinforced their case in recent weeks and are as alarmed as any of us privileged to have served as Ministers in Northern Ireland.
There are more crossing points along this 310-mile border than there are along the whole of the EU’s eastern frontier: 257 compared with 137. The border crosses family farms and separates towns and villages from their natural hinterlands. It is both invisible and ever present, both unremarkable and deeply contested. Even the younger generation on both sides of the border associates the very idea of border controls with conflict and collective trauma. As well as the formal movement of goods, there are many services from cross-border medical and pharmaceutical transactions to people and data movements between supply chains north and south and the infrastructure issues: energy, telecoms, air and rail travel, environmental standards and so on. If, as the Prime Minister insists, Brexit means the UK leaving the customs union and the single market—a rules-based legal entity, not just a political agreement—then Brexit would unavoidably mean the introduction of a hard Irish border.