Northern Ireland

A lot of this is quite surreal, because it falls into the grounds of piffle. I remember sitting in the Select Committee on Northern Ireland, and the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), telling me, in October 2019, “This will all be light touch—you won’t even notice it.” We have spent the last four years now trying to unravel the heavy hand of Europe and still need to prise those fingers off what is happening in Northern Ireland. We have also been told that yes, there was a problem, and we all now know what the problem was: this House failed to stand up to Europe and allowed Northern Ireland to be a buffer zone to protect its single market and threw our single market down the toilet in the process.