My Lords, there is much to be learned from the speech of the noble Earl and I am grateful to be able to follow him.
I want to refer to the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee on the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill. There one can find 11 devastating and fundamental criticisms of the Bill, not one of which has been satisfactorily been dealt with by the Government outside Parliament, in the other place or, I fear, despite his charm and undoubted integrity, by my noble friend the Minister earlier today. That any relatively short Bill, but certainly one of such legal and constitutional importance as this one, should provide so many powerful reasons for criticism is shocking, although, since the change of Prime Minister in July 2019, perhaps unsurprising. One might have hoped that his departure would have made a difference. As for my noble friend Lord Frost’s suggestion that the Bill gives the Government agency, I am, unusually, lost for words.
The Bill is the ugly constitutional twin of the ill-starred UK Internal Market Act, which in December 2019 the then Northern Ireland Secretary admitted deliberately broke international law. This Bill breaks the same treaty but adds to that by permitting government Ministers to make laws, to amend them or to disapply them and our treaty obligations. That Secretary of State is now the Lord Chancellor, the guardian in Cabinet of the rule of law and our constitution. What is the point of making treaties if our Government think they matter only at and for the moment a Prime Minister signs them? What is the point of Parliament if elected Members of Parliament are prepared to delegate to Ministers the most important constitutional duty they have—to make considered statute law and to hold government to account? Of course I understand the politics affecting the Bill, but is it not ironic that it requires your Lordships’ House to uphold democratic and constitutional propriety?
Of course, some will say that the end justifies the means: that the preservation of the union of the United Kingdom is more important than constitutional or legal purity. Even if one tries to ignore the slippery slope that suggests, it is a false dichotomy. As the
Minister of State for Northern Ireland, my honourable friend Mr Steve Baker, recently accepted, extravagant posturing is less productive than diplomacy. The end does not justify the means, because the means are not the road to the desired goal. Worse, if we want to throw petrol on the angry fire of communalism and of separatism within the United Kingdom, look no further than this Bill for the jerrycan.
7.45 pm