I am conscious that everyone needs to get in, so I will try to be as brief as possible. Most of the things I will say have probably already been said and certainly will be said in the course of the debate. I make no claim to uniqueness.
I rise to support the Government’s Bill with particular reference to clauses 40 to 45, which we are considering today. After all, the free flow of goods and trade in the UK is critical and is part of the constitutional settlement—the settlements between Ireland and GB and, later, Northern Ireland and, earlier, Scotland and England. Those principles are at the core of what we believe and what we consider to be immutable, and therefore they cannot be changed. There are areas in the protocol that, if improperly used, could affect those principles, and that cannot be allowed.
I remind colleagues that in the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020—nobody seems to have referenced this—our potential intentions were very clear in section 38, which was part of the legislation when it was passed. As I recall, the Opposition did not vote against that provision. If that was the case, it sent a very strong signal to the EU that there was every likelihood that we considered that constitutional settlement in the UK to be above the implementation of the
withdrawal agreement, should the agreement end up damaging the settlement. That was quite clear. In fact, it was so clear that when the 2020 Act had passed both Houses, interestingly the EU still went ahead and ratified its end of the agreement through the European Parliament, knowing full well that that was in the Act. If the EU disagreed with that provision or disagreed with the principle, it should not have ratified the treaty at its end, but it made no bones about it and did it.
The effect of clauses 40 to 45 is just to protect the basic implementation of the UK’s internal market in terms of its constitution. I recognise the concerns of my colleagues in Northern Ireland about the application of state aids in Northern Ireland as well, but in this case the provisions allow state aids in Great Britain to be dispensed under the framework devised in this country, and not elsewhere. It seems intolerable to me that we should leave the EU only to find that it has hold of us in a number of ways that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) said, were categorically never the intention.
I do not believe that the Bill actually breaks international treaties, particularly not at this stage. I think article 46 in the Vienna convention on the law of treaties is clear about that. These things are always open to interpretation —I accept that—and different lawyers will take different views, but generally I think that at this stage in particular the Bill does not do that. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) was clear that that was one of the reasons he is prepared to go along and accommodate the Government on this point, and that is quite reasonable.
The combined effect of article 4 of the withdrawal agreement and section 7A of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 is that key parts of the withdrawal agreement and the NIP are already part of domestic law. That therefore makes it impossible for the Government, should they see that the EU is not acting in good faith at this point, to ensure that there is, in a sense, a backstop.
I raised a point with the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) earlier about the EU’s behaviour in this. My point was not, “Look, the EU doesn’t always recognise international law, as applied internally, and therefore we shouldn’t.” That was not the point. The point I was making was that we talk a lot about trust, and there is a lot of debate here about trust, with people saying, “The UK will lose all trust should it do this; no one will ever trust us again”—I do not believe a word of that, by the way, because so many other countries, including the UK, have previously breached international law, for lots of good reasons—but the EU binds it in that it is its right to breach international law.
That was very clear, as I said earlier, in Kadi v. Council and Commission in 2008. The Advocate General made it very clear that the EU does not necessarily have to bind into international treaties with direct effect if they clash with its constitutional settlement. They do so time and again, which has given us a very long list of occasions when the EU has done just that and refused to implement all or part of international treaties. I do not extol its virtues in that regard; I simply regard that as a reality.
What does that say? Does the rest of the world say that the EU cannot be trusted in international agreements? So far, apparently not. So far, it has done deals with a
number of different countries and not one of them has said, “We don’t trust you, because you breach international law,” which it does. But the UK has also breached international law. In fact, it was a Labour Government that refused to implement, in about 2005, as I recall, prisoners’ voting rights, which came directly from the European Court of Human Rights. All that happened was that the Government said no. It took 10 years before that was resolved. It was not resolved because the UK Government—I think at that stage it was a Conservative Government and my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) was Prime Minister—implemented it. No, they negotiated again over its implementation and observance, and came up with a fudge.
That is the point about international law: it is not always directly applicable by the letter. Ultimately, when it is not agreed that things should be brought in, they require negotiation subsequently. That is why I say that my right hon. Friends in the Government are absolutely right to use these clauses of the Bill to make it clear to the European Union that, should it wish to pursue the line that it does not agree to work hard in the Joint Committee to resolve these matters about application, which are always a problem, the UK still reserves its right not to breach its own constitutional settlement, which is a primary cause of most breaches of international law around the world.