The intention of the Bill is clearly to stop any such use of the stick against this country, and that is what it does. It is a protection, it is a safety net, it is an insurance policy, and it is a very sensible measure.
In a spirit of reasonableness, we are conducting these checks in accordance with our obligations. We are creating the sanitary and phytosanitary processes required under the protocol and spending hundreds of millions of pounds on helping traders. Under this finely balanced arrangement, our EU friends agreed that Northern Ireland—this is a crucial point—would remain part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, able to benefit from free trade deals with other countries, which we are now beginning to strike. It ensures that the majority of goods not at risk of travelling to the EU—and that is the majority of goods going from GB to Northern Ireland—do not have to pay tariffs.
But the details of this intricate deal and the obvious tensions between some of its provisions can only be resolved with a basic minimum of common sense and good will from all sides. I regret to have to tell the House that in recent months the EU has suggested that it is willing to go to extreme and unreasonable lengths, using the Northern Ireland protocol in a way that goes well beyond common sense simply to exert leverage against the UK in our negotiations for a free trade agreement. To take the most glaring example, the EU has said that if we fail to reach an agreement to its satisfaction, it might very well refuse to list the UK’s food and agricultural products for sale anywhere in the EU. It gets even worse, because under this protocol, that decision would create an instant and automatic prohibition on the transfer of our animal products from
Great Britain to Northern Ireland. Our interlocutors on the other side are holding out the possibility of blockading food and agricultural transports within our own country.