I rise with great sadness to speak against the wrecking proposals in this group that Clauses 1, 2 and 3 should not stand part of the Bill. I regret it very much. If we were effectively to turn our backs on this Bill, as those championing this group would, what would we be left with? The prospect would be carrying on failed talks with the EU for another two, three or four years. We have had two years of it, and we know where it took us to. I am not opposed to talks, and I believe this Bill does not stand in the way of those talks continuing, but let us get on with this business too.
I have studied the EU’s proposals, and I have to say that even if it conceded ground in the areas it is suggesting, we would have no solution. The only thing it is talking about pertains to the difficulties surrounding the economic disruption caused by the protocol. In the first instance, its proposals do not in any way address the present economic difficulties. The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, has already referred to that, and my noble friend Lord Browne will refer to that as well, so I shall not say anything on that.
Right up until the final day of the Brexit transition period, the people of Northern Ireland enjoyed parity with the rest of the United Kingdom in having the right to stand for election and input directly into legislation or to elect others from across our communities to make laws to which people in Northern Ireland would be subject.
However, on 1 January 2021, that all changed. At that point, the right democratically reserved to Northern Ireland citizens to make laws effective in Northern Ireland was usurped in an instant, and the bulk of that power transferred to representatives in another jurisdiction for whom nobody in the Province voted. There are Members of this House concerned about the loss of some delegated powers to Ministers, despite an appropriate role being afforded to Parliament to scrutinise eventual regulations. Yet they demonstrate little in the way of concern for the loss of sovereignty associated with the surrender of law-making powers in Northern Ireland in perpetuity under the protocol governing hundreds of areas of policy.
This would be bad enough in itself, but in order to understand the difficulty, we need to see it in the context of Brexit. The UK was never relaxed about its membership of the EU. According to Professor Vernon Bogdanor, the reason for this was the sovereignty problem: the fact that the UK could be overruled and was not completely in charge of its own legislative fate. We could be overruled in the European Parliament in the context of majority voting. We could be overruled in the Council of Ministers in the context of qualified majority voting. We could be overruled by the European Court of Justice. Of course, we were a part of European governance acting through the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, and, in this context, worked hard to defend our national interest. Many times, we were not overruled, but on occasion we were, and there was ultimately nothing that we could do about it. The fact that, notwithstanding our representation within European governance, we could nevertheless be overruled, informed our lack of sense of being part of the European demos—the problem of the democratic deficit.
Thus, the deficit was not about a complete absence of democracy, but about a shortfall of democracy arising from being overruled in a context where the absence of a sense of being part of the European demos meant that people increasingly felt that government was something that was being done to them rather than something that they were part of. In this context, one of the chief benefits of Brexit was the end of the democratic deficit. We would make our own laws. What then was the implication of the protocol for the democratic deficit? It very properly completely removed the democratic deficit in relation to the EU for England, for Wales and for Scotland, and rightly so.
What about Northern Ireland? Did it result in the removal of the democratic deficit in Northern Ireland, as in the rest of the United Kingdom? No. Did it result in the partial correction of the democratic deficit in Northern Ireland, while it was fully corrected for the rest of the United Kingdom? No. Did it result in the democratic deficit problem in Northern Ireland remaining unchanged but its correction in the rest of the United Kingdom? No. Did it result in the further deterioration of the democratic deficit in Northern Ireland, while it was fixed in the rest of the United Kingdom? No. Any of these outcomes would have had a progressively more and more damaging impact on our politics, as we go down the list—but what actually happened was infinitely worse.
In some 300 areas of law-making—this has been mentioned before—the democratic shortfall that was the deficit was replaced by a complete absence of democracy. In this context, we need to be very clear that attempts to describe the democracy problem with the protocol as a democracy shortfall or a democratic deficit radically understate and obscure the problem. The democracy shortfall or deficit was the problem we all had when we were in the EU. The problem that Northern Ireland now faces is both qualitatively and quantitatively completely different. Far from constituting a shortfall in democracy, it actually presents us with its complete negation, with all that this means for our defaced citizenship.
As my colleague and noble friend Lord Dodds of Duncairn rightly articulated to the House at Second Reading, the perverse and intolerable situation in which Northern Ireland now finds itself is akin to the UN category of non-self-governing territory—a colony of the 21st century. The United Nations charter was very clear in 1945 that countries should be self-governing, and it subjected countries that continued to make the laws of other countries to special scrutiny, requiring that they submitted regular reports to the UN on the state of the jurisdiction in their care.
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