My Lords, I was very moved by the speech of the noble and right reverend Lord, the former Primate of All Ireland. I hope I can say without causing too much offence that I wish all the leaders of Christian denominations in Northern Ireland and Ireland as a whole had behaved over the years with his generosity of spirit. In saying that, I include the members of the Church of which I am a member. In his remarks, he reminded us of the terrible collateral damage we can do to things that really matter if we simply blunder forward, motivated in some cases by dogma in what is, after all, very largely a faith-based project. I am sorry to use that expression after referring to the noble and right reverend Lord, but that is what it amounts to.
I do not want to go through all of the arguments that have been so persuasively used or all the evidence that has been stacked up. I spoke about this issue briefly at Second Reading because I feel passionately about it. As an addendum to the Good Friday agreement, I chaired the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland. The report was denounced at the time by some Members of this House and by some present members of the Government. I remember one calling that policing report “a moral stain”, but it has stood the test of time. I am delighted that we have not had the same number of police officers killed in the last 20 years that we had in the preceding 25 or 30 years, when 300 died. I therefore feel very strongly about this and I entirely endorse what the noble Lord said earlier about the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union in taking these things forward.
I remember when I was a junior Minister in Northern Ireland—a destination, according to the Prime Minister’s friends, that she regarded as a Siberian power station. I remember how important it was to meet Ministers from the Republic in Brussels. Very often, they were meeting representatives of Northern Ireland or the Northern Ireland Government for the first time in serious official discussions, so all of that matters. I want to point out the dangers involved when you wrap up together the border.
There is a wonderful book about the border by Colm Tóibín, called Bad Blood. That is not the sort of place for which you can provide easy technological solutions. We have heard a lot about that Smart Border report, which was a consultant’s report to the European Parliament. I thought I had to take it seriously, because I heard it advocated on the “Today” programme by one of the self-titled “Brains for Brexit”, who gave a whole interview about the importance and the value of this report. So I read it, and the first thing he says is that he does not know very much about Northern Ireland. You can say that again. He goes on to point out that the report does not cover agrifood or things such as phytosanitary standards, and says that while he talks about how you can speed up customs arrangements, he does not remotely suggest that you can do without a border or customs arrangements between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
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We can go through all those arguments about whether it is possible to do without a hard border. As was pointed out earlier, the Prime Minister—before the Brexit referendum—made her position absolutely clear as the then Home Secretary. At the same time, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said that it was scaremongering to suggest that we would need a hard border. I think I am right in saying that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, the former Chancellor, said that we would need a hard border, and she had to correct him. It was a brave thing to correct the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, about anything, but she did so. But in fact, he was right, because you do have to have a hard border. Borders are not just about geography or the identity that people want. They are about different regulations and rules.
When Pascal Lamy said recently—but no, this is dangerous. He knows what he is talking about, and on top of that, he is French and knows what he is talking about, so we clearly should not take any notice of what he says. He said the other day that he could not think of any example, anywhere in the world, of a virtual border where there were different customs arrangements. You cannot. People have talked about the United States-Canada border. President Trump will be very interested to hear that there is no hard border between Canada and the United States. We have talked about Sweden and Norway. I noted that when the Swedish Trade Minister was here the other day and was asked about this, she said, “It’s as easy for Swedes to export to Norway as it is to land a man on the moon”. So that does not seem a good example to make the case that there is an easy answer to the question the Prime Minister addressed in the negotiations that led up to the December agreement—or rather the consensus, as we have to call it now, or the December proposal. She said then that we were absolutely against a hard agreement or border controls.
We have to ask these legitimate questions, because we are talking about a difficult border, the economic relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union. How we resolve those issues, and without doing damage as well to the Good Friday agreement, is an unresolved puzzle—one of the consequences of this faith-based project.
Some people have said that we should not bother too much—the Good Friday agreement is not really a problem, and it has been made up by the Irish and the Europeans to try to put pressure on us. That is not the position taken by Tony Blair, Sir John Major, Bertie Ahern or Senator George Mitchell. They all think that there is a problem in maintaining the Good Friday agreement because of what has been happening. One has to take that seriously. If it was not a problem, why did the British Government make so much of it in the agreement—the consensus—with the European Commission in December? There is paragraph after paragraph about the paramount importance of the Good Friday agreement and not damaging it in anyway. If this is just a notional agreement, for the birds, why did British negotiators spend so much time arguing and talking about it, and committing themselves to doing everything in their power to defend it?
It is also important to remember that the Good Friday agreement and the border are not just about customs controls and surveillance cameras. This is also a question of identity. At the heart of the Good Friday agreement was a difficult but fairly straightforward deal. In return for the republican nationalist community saying that they would not argue for any change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, except through democracy and the ballot box, they were told in return that they could demonstrate their identity—British, Irish, European—as they wished. They could be both British and Irish. I cannot think of many things that go to the heart of identity more strongly than borders. The border is absolutely fundamental to what the Good Friday agreement was all about.
There is one further point that some noble Lords made which has made me less generous-spirited than the noble and right reverend Primate would want me to be. That is the suggestion that this is all made up by the Republic. It is not an issue for Northern Ireland or us but a problem for the Republic. Is it not an issue for us? Are we going to break our word in a treaty we signed, or turn back on what we promised in December? If we break our word like that, who in future will be prepared to have any sort of agreement with us? Is it not an issue for us? Let us be honest—it is not something I am particularly proud about—the Government are propped up by the DUP, with a very expensive crutch. To keep things moving, we even have to cover up—this comes back to something we were discussing with my noble friend Lord Young at the Dispatch Box: political funding—where the DUP gets its money from to ensure that this crutch does not collapse from underneath us. So do not let anybody tell me that this is not a profound issue in British politics as well as an important issue because of the collateral damage that will be done to the Republic of Ireland as well as Northern Ireland if we get this wrong.
There is a danger here of our behaving in a reckless and shameful way. It is easy for people from this side of the water to go over to Northern Ireland and give their little lectures about generosity of spirit, healing and hope. I remember how, after a meeting in Northern Ireland, when I had made a pretty speech along these lines, a woman said, “It’s all very well for you. You go back afterwards. We have to live with the consequences of what goes wrong”. In this House, with so many
former Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland, and so many others who have dedicated a good part of their lives to Northern Ireland, we should think about our responsibility for trying to ensure that this extraordinarily rickety construction we have put together, which has kept the peace in Northern Ireland for some time, is not blown apart. There is a danger of that happening unless we show statesmanship and have the courage to stand up for things that should matter to us more than I sometimes think is suggested.