I am grateful to the Member for his intervention because it has allowed me to have a good drink to ease my throat. He raises some interesting questions which will allow me to clarify those points. I was not going to rake over old coals too much this evening but he invites me to do so.
Let me be clear: my party has always taken a pragmatic approach to special arrangements within Northern Ireland. We recognised, whenever Brexit was imposed on a society that already works through sharing and interdependence, that that situation was going to have to be carefully managed. I did not want to see any checks introduced anywhere on these islands as a consequence of that, but that was always going to be a reality in the context of a hard Brexit. Hopefully the current hard Brexit can be softened over time, which will help in that respect. In so far as those checks can be minimised, I am all for that. Our party has never stood in the way of that particular outcome.
The hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) made reference to the phrase “rigorous implementation”, although we have now heard about
the vigorous implementation of the Command Paper from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). That phrase relates to a letter that was signed by four parties in September 2021 in the context of attempts by the UK Government to unilaterally breach international law. Our position all along has been that modifications to the protocol, right through to what we have today in the Windsor framework, need to be negotiated, where appropriate, between the UK Government and the European Union as the signatories to the new arrangements, and that they have to be legal.
In that context our position has always been consistent. We are a party of law. We are committed to implementing the law where we are required to implement the law, but where the law can be changed through proper process, we are all for that. What we were always against—and remain against—is unilateral action that puts Northern Ireland in a worse position because it undermines trust. The big game changer was when we had a change of Government in the autumn of 2022. All of a sudden the European Union and the UK Government started talking to each other and things started moving really quickly.
I would say that the result that we have today could have been found much earlier if we had had a lot more trust in the process between the European Union and the UK Government—and I certainly did not justify or require the Assembly to be down for two years, causing chaos in Northern Ireland’s public services and a huge number of missed opportunities. My party has always been clear that we want to see things such as the red and green lanes introduced, which was achieved through the Windsor framework. We have also consistently proposed a veterinary agreement, which I would remind the hon. Member for Belfast East that his party initially opposed whenever we put it forward.