I welcome what the Secretary of State said yesterday: that we must not allow the threat of EU retaliatory action to influence Ministers in exercising their powers under the Stormont brake. I also welcome the clear commitment the Prime Minister gave to me recently: that the application of the Stormont brake is entirely a matter for the United Kingdom. It is a strand 1 issue under the terms of the Belfast agreement and does not involve a role for the Irish Government in relation to these matters. That is a very important principle for us.
The Prime Minister has indicated to me that in this process the wishes of Stormont will be respected, but I have made it clear that in exercising the Stormont brake we are simply applying in our terms the potential of a veto by the United Kingdom Government on one aspect of EU law. This does not deal with all of the
problem, and that is the difficulty we have. The continued application of EU law in Northern Ireland is what creates the problem in our ability to trade within the internal market of the United Kingdom.
It is important that the Government of the United Kingdom take stock of where we are now. I understand that the Foreign Secretary is to attend the UK-EU Joint Committee on Friday to sign off the Windsor framework, and that today’s indicative vote in this House will be used as the justification for doing so. Surely though, our shared objective, as espoused earlier by the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), is to see the political institutions in Northern Ireland restored; we need therefore to continue to engage with the Government to get this right.
My party is committed to doing that. We are committed to continuing to work with the Secretary of State and with the Prime Minister, but that has to be about delivering on the commitment given to protect Northern Ireland’s place within the internal market of the United Kingdom, and to ensure that where EU law is applied to facilitate cross-border trade, it does not impede our ability to trade with the rest of our own country in the internal market of our own country. That is the bottom line for us, and until that is resolved, I cannot give the Government a commitment to restore the political institutions. It is what I want to do, but we need to get this right. I want Stormont to be restored on a sustainable and stable basis, where there is cross-community consent and consensus, but that does not exist at the moment. We need that consensus to be restored.
For our part, we will continue to work intensively to solve these issues, doing so in the knowledge that what has already been achieved was achieved because we were not prepared to accept the undermining of Northern Ireland’s place within the Union of the United Kingdom—the economic Union of the United Kingdom. That is what we stand for. That is what we will fight for. We want to get it right, and we will work with the Government to achieve that.
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