My Lords, a number of other noble Lords have added their names to my new clause. It is perhaps appropriate to say—as the number of Members in the Chamber is declining—that I have to begin with a confession. Some noble Lords might be rather surprised that what I say will sound remarkably like a statement of government policy. That is because it largely is. I have read very carefully the Government’s position paper on Northern Ireland and Brexit; I have read the other seminal documents—the Mansion House speech and so on—and my speech, I hope, will reflect what I understand to be the Government’s policy both on a frictionless border and on the relationship between the border and the Good Friday agreement.
If at the end of this debate the Minister, with his customary civility, says “What’s the problem? We’re going to do all this anyway. Why bother to put this new clause into the Bill?”, my response will be that while I totally expect him to honour his word and do what the Government have said, I think the Prime Minister and others, such as the Minister, need some support at this moment when a number of their colleagues and Conservative Party Members in the other place,
who are very keen on the over-the-cliff, on-to-the-rocks Brexit, are making it rather more difficult for the Prime Minister to square circles than should be the case.
We have debated these issues. We have debated the relationship between the Good Friday agreement and the border on a number of occasions: at Second Reading, in Committee and on Report. On Report we passed an amendment on a customs union, which has significant relevance to this. I am not going to go over all that ground again. The vote on a customs union led to the present-day custodians of constitutional propriety calling for fire and brimstone. They were fresh, of course, from their views on the independence of the judiciary, and I do not think any of us take any of that too seriously.
I will not go through all the arguments that were used in those debates. In the debate on the customs union, I will be telegrammatic. I think a number of noble Lords found it difficult to discern the cornucopia of trade possibilities that await us once we have left the customs union. I think it is also true that a number of noble Lords thought that we would have our work cut out to try to replicate some of the existing trade agreements that the European Union, with us as a member, has made elsewhere, for example, with South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam and others. I think it is fair to say that a number of noble Lords pointed out that there are 44 non-EU members of the Commonwealth which have trade agreements with the European Union and that 49 of the poorest countries in the world have access to European markets without any tariff or control over quotas.
During that debate we enjoyed this spring’s parliamentary game: hunt the virtual border. We travelled around the House, we looked under Benches, we looked under the Woolsack, but nobody could find the virtual border. We went from continent to continent looking for it. Since then, I have heard one or two people suggest that it has been discovered and is the border between Switzerland and France, two countries which, I am happy to say, have not been at war for 200 years. That has been referred to as a model of a virtual border for us. Well, if you look up the facts, you discover that the average minimum waiting time for a lorry going from France into Switzerland or the other way is between 30 and 45 minutes, that they have to go through customs checks and, in addition, they have to fill in two lots of VAT forms. Just to make the position absolutely clear, I am indebted—I think this is probably the first time he has been mentioned in this House—to Mr Cyril Kinsky of Wiltshire. He wrote to the Times last week about the frictionless border and noted that he had recently been in Switzerland and had travelled into France to shop at the local French supermarket. He had bought four chickens—poulet fermier, I am sure. He had brought them back into Switzerland, where he had been stopped and hit with a heavy fine. I hope the chickens were tasty. They were certainly not frictionless.
Why is there such a problem that we address in this new clause? There is a problem because, as the excellent Northern Ireland position paper makes clear, the current substantive position in Northern Ireland and the Republic—that is, the existence of a frictionless border—is not to be changed by Brexit. The Prime Minister,
perhaps as well as or more than anyone, understands the problem. Two days before the referendum, she said, in effect, that you can be in a customs union and not have a border but outside a customs union you have to have a border. That situation is made much more complicated when you look at the provisions and rules of the World Trade Organization.
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We are hoping to become on our own a member of the WTO and are presumably looking for some concessions as we make all these trade deals around the world. Presumably we will want to follow the rules. We should know that under the World Trade Organization, the European Union as a free trade area has to be able to demonstrate that it has a border with a country which is not a member of the same free trade area and that there have to be checks on that border.
That will sooner or later be true of us when we enter any free trade agreements with anyone—unless, of course, every trade agreement that we enter with everyone has absolutely no tariffs attached at all. The World Trade Organization is absolutely clear that any agreement reached with one country has to apply to all the others. It is called the most favoured nation status. On those grounds as well, we face some difficulties.
As Comrade Lenin said in his famous pamphlet, What Is To Be Done?, what indeed is to be done? Some have taken to blaming the Republic of Ireland. Initially, there were even some who said: “The answer is for the Republic of Ireland to leave the single market, leave the customs union and leave the European Union, then there would be no problem with a border”. They stopped short, I think, of suggesting that we should send back a viceroy, although there are one or two of us in the House, I have to say, who have certain experience of these matters. I am sure I speak for my noble friend Lord Luce as well. We have experience in these things which we could perhaps put in the Government’s hands.
Others blame the Republic for other reasons. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union said that the problem was because the Leader of the Fine Gael Party, the Taoiseach, was in the pocket of Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin and Fine Gael—I think the Secretary of State must have been away the day they did Irish history at school.
I am pleased to say that the Prime Minister has been absolutely clear on this point. She said in her Mansion House speech that it is not good enough to say:
“We won’t introduce a hard border; if the EU forces Ireland to do it, that’s down to them. We chose to leave, we have a responsibility to help find a solution”.
Why is that? It is because we recognise the relationship between the border and the issue of identity in Northern Ireland and the relationship between the border and security.
We have been looking for a solution. The Prime Minister is doing that this afternoon, we are told. Various proposals leak out—whether they are true or not, I do not know. The efforts of the Prime Minister were described the other day by the chairman of the European Research Group, I think it is called—I have to say to the House that I find a little of him goes a
long way—not as unwise but as “cretinous”. I certainly would not use that language. I think what the Prime Minister is trying to do is to underline the fact that the border is closely related to the survival of the Good Friday agreement.
I hope that everybody will support the new clause today, including the Minister, wise man that he is—I do not want to ruin his career by all this flattery. The first half puts in the Bill the Government’s commitment to the Good Friday agreement. The second part makes it clear what is meant by a frictionless, or seamless, border. Just in case anyone says, “You can’t rule this or that out for ever”, we have made it clear, after proposed new subsection (2)(b), that we are talking about things that did not exist before exit day and are not subject to an agreement between Her Majesty’s Government and the Government of Ireland. What we are doing in that part of the clause is recognising that the Good Friday agreement includes a specific commitment to the removal of security installations along the border.
There are some people who say, “But there have to be these security installations”. The paradox is that, today and in the past, security installations have produced the exact opposite of security. If anyone did not believe that, they might listen to the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which I am pleased to say has today probably the best relationship that there has ever been between the PSNI and Garda Síochána. The Government plainly understand the importance of the relationship between the border and the Good Friday agreement. In the Northern Ireland position paper, they quote with approval that the border is,
“the most tangible symbol of the peace process”.
That is said by the Government in their own position paper, and I happen to agree with that.
There are two reasons why I think that is particularly important. The first is the issue of security. The Northern Ireland Chief Constable is not threatening or blackmailing; he is recalling history, and is properly concerned about the welfare of the men and women who work for him. I think I am right in saying that the first two fatalities during the Troubles, or certainly among the first fatalities, were two customs officers who were murdered on the road between Belfast and Dublin. The Newry customs house was blown up again and again. What worries the Police Service of Northern Ireland and others is not just the likelihood that any manifestations of a hard border would lead inevitably to civil disobedience but that they would also provoke violence that was totally unjustified.
I think the peace process and the Good Friday agreement were a spectacular success. We have made a bloody shambles of sharing this archipelago for the last several centuries, particularly the last century, but at last the agreement offered some hope. That is why two Prime Ministers, the Taoiseach and George Mitchell have spoken out so strongly in favour of finding a sensible answer to the border and its relationship with the agreement. As the Government say in their own position paper, the issue of identity goes to the heart of the agreement. Anyone who doubts that that is the case should look at kerbstones or consider flags. In 2012 the city council in Belfast decided that it wanted
to reduce the number of times during the year that the union flag was flown. The result: a year of demonstrations and civil disorder, 130 police officers injured and a political office firebombed. Ask yourself this question: why are the Northern Ireland Executive not working at the moment? Because of an argument about identity, about parity of esteem for different cultures and different loyalties. That is why it is not working.
The genius of the Northern Ireland agreement was to extract from nationalists the commitment that they would ask for constitutional change in Northern Ireland only through the process of democracy. However, they were told that they did not have to sign up to be loyal to all the usual symbols of what they regarded as the unionist state. That has not meant “Kumbaya”, it has not meant that everybody loves one another to bits, but it has ended the violence: violence that saw the death of 1,000 police officers and soldiers during the Troubles—twice as many as died in Iraq and Afghanistan—violence that maimed many more and destroyed livelihoods and a lot of the values of civil society.
We should remember something that we very rarely talk about. David Cameron, when he made his extremely well-judged remarks on Londonderry, or Derry, said that things had been done in Northern Ireland in the name of the state which were neither justified nor justifiable. We cannot possibly want to risk going back to that.
During these debates, things have occasionally been said heatedly on both sides to which some of us have taken exception. I do not think I have to say that, although I disagree with a lot of what the Government are being obliged to do and although I think referendums are awful constitutional devices, I do not think that we are teetering on a Weimar edge, with the horrors of authoritarianism lying just around the corner. I do think there are risks to what the French would call our social solidarity in this country when, for example, civil servants are attacked for doing the job they are asked to do by the Government. It was ironic that we in this House were getting criticised for allegedly undermining the Government’s negotiating position when people in the European Research Group and others were busy putting the knife into the civil servant charged by the Prime Minister and the Government with negotiating for us in Brussels.
I am not surprised that the Cabinet Secretary, doubtless to be denounced by the Daily Mail as a member of the establishment—well, yes—said what he did. I was very pleased that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff said what he did, presumably with her cover. I do not want to go back to any of that. There are things I have disagreed with. I did not agree with the proposition that what we were doing was somehow the greatest constitutional outrage since 1689—that covered a lot of history. Nor did I believe that encouraging the House of Commons to do its duty, examine the agreement carefully and take a decision on it was triggering a constitutional crisis.
Something else I heard I objected to much more. It was the suggestion in the debate on the customs union that this House, by talking about that, the border and so on, was playing with fire. I will tell you what I think
playing with fire is: blundering into the politics of Northern Ireland with a policy which is sometimes clueless and sometimes delinquent with a can of petrol in one hand and a box of matches in the other. That is playing with fire. That is what we are in danger of doing.
In the middle of the 1930s, a great Church of Ireland Bishop, Louis MacNeice’s father—an Orangeman, a huge opponent of fascism and anti-Semitism—said this to his diocese:
“It would be well to remember and to forget, to remember the good, the things that were chivalrous and considerate and merciful, and to forget the story of old feuds, old animosities, old triumphs, old humiliations”.
He concluded:
“Forget the things that are behind that you may be the better able to put all your strength into the tasks of today and tomorrow”.
I do not want to go back to the old triumphs, old humiliations, old animosities and old feuds. It would be shameful and dishonourable if this House were to do anything that made that more likely. It would be a stain on our history. I beg to move.
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