My Lords, who wills the ends wills the means. The Government committed themselves to an open border, to my knowledge, some 20 months ago. I was very happy to hear a previous Secretary of State make that commitment quite explicit in a public space. I then asked: how? We are still waiting for any answers as to how, and cynicism is growing. It does not seem that the Government are thinking about the answer to that question.
It is, of course, a number of questions. Borders do different things for the movement of goods, the movement of people, the movement of animals and many other things. But I point to three things that are important. First, on goods, the Government have suggested that there may be a technological solution by which tariffs do not require a hard border—meaning installations at the particular line of demarcation—but are dealt with, quite handily, by electronic means and previous preparation of detailed dossiers on the content of each, in this case, lorry rather than container. It is a seductive view, but it is radically incomplete.
The Government have also on occasion suggested that they would be happy to see small traders, as it were, fall below the radar for enforcement. In the island of Ireland we are quite good at subcontracting the movement of things to small traders if that is advantageous. It has been done for various commodities. One need only think of diesel for a good example. It has also been done to my knowledge for various other things such as getting double subsidies on animals—I will come back to animals in a moment—by having the headage payment both north and south of the border. We have to expect that, as we get divergence of legislation and regulation north and south of the border, the incentives for what I believe are these days called “imaginative arrangements” will grow and will be a matter of subcontracting to the small traders. I do not believe that the electronic fantasy is more than part of the solution to the movement of goods, which speaks directly to whether we expect a customs union or the customs union to continue or whether it does not. I suppose these small traders might be looking forward to the latter solution, but I do not think they really are.
The movement of peoples seems very important. We have entirely free movement of peoples on the island of Ireland. That has not always been so, but we have it again. It is fundamental to life. But if people enter from the European Union into the Republic of Ireland, where they will have freedom of movement, they can then go to the north—to the UK—and come over here without passports. I find that quite a lot of my noble friends are not really aware of that, probably because, when they go to Ireland, they go by air and have to show a passport. It is not necessary, however, to show a passport when crossing the Irish Sea. That is one of the meanings of the phrase “common travel area” and has been with us since the 1920s. It is, incidentally, much stronger than the Schengen arrangements because, in the common travel area, when we move across from one jurisdiction, the UK, to another, the Republic of Ireland, we can vote and we can serve in the armed services. These are real differences. This is a deep and long-standing arrangement. However, it means that people will have to identify themselves—for example, when taking a job or when going to a National Health Service hospital for an operation—to be sure that they are entitled. That is what that one word, “passport”, meant.
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Passports are quite expensive, but we have to accept that these days they will have to be biometrically enabled. I think, however, of all the families who live in cities on either side of the Irish Sea and who travel to and fro, often with quite a large number of children. It is a non-negligible matter to think about the movement of people. There is another factor here. It is not only people who live in the north and in the Republic who will have to have passports or ID; it is all our fellow citizens on this island, because you cannot enforce entitlements unless the good guys as well as the bad guys are checked. That means passports for everyone. That means ID cards.
I am not against ID cards, and I think I even have a suggestion about how it might be done, taking a leaf out of the arrangements in a number of states in the
United States, where they have invented a delicious document called the non-driving driving licence. The non-driving driving licence enables people who are non-drivers in, say, the state of Connecticut to get an equivalent licence in another state, which does not entitle them to drive but enables them to have a drink—so it is really important. One of our better bureaucracies is the DVLA, and it might perhaps be able to think out how a system of non-driving driving licences could be a model for the driving licence that has served as an ID card over here.
One obstacle to this is that many, but not all, on the Conservative Benches have a thing about ID cards. But one has to get real and get up to date. Many of my friends on the Conservative Benches carry smartphones, which give away far more details about what they are up to at any given moment than any driving licence, passport or ID document does. We need to start talking about these things and not just making gestures towards passports or electronic tariffs.
Finally, I want to talk about the movement of beasts. When I speak on this topic, I always come back to beasts because they are notably mobile. Much more importantly, plant health does not recognise borders. We must have arrangements for plant and animal health that will not depend on the enforcement of a border. I hear no discussion of this. For example, have the Government considered delegating what Brussels likes to call phytosecurity, and we prefer to call biosecurity, to Stormont—let us hope it is up and running—with the proviso that it may not go below EU or UK standards? That would put, as it were, a double lock on animal and plant safety and standards in Northern Ireland, which would not be the worst of worlds.
These are the sort of problems that need addressing soon and urgently if people are to have confidence in the Government’s commitment to the Belfast agreement and the principles that underpin it. I do not wish to be alarmist, but I do not think we should take for granted anything that might happen if we do not address these questions. Recently, I have been reading about events just before and during the First World War, when we saw the Home Rule debacle, the Easter Rising, the Irish war of independence and the Irish civil war—possibly the most terrible of them all. We are playing with fire. I hope the Government are listening and I hope they will take the principles of the Good Friday agreement as setting a demand for action and not just for rhetoric.