No, I am going to make some progress.
I strongly refute the fallacy that to depart from the Windsor framework is to breach international law. On the contrary, to perpetuate the infringement of our territorial integrity is to breach international law itself and, indeed, the Belfast agreement, which was built on consent, of which there has been none in respect of the
current arrangements. The correct application of international law is to the effect that agreements that contradict the regulating principles, including respect for territorial integrity, are themselves the villains of the piece.
Having set out everything that is wrong, let me come to the solution. The Government have always told us that we cannot conduct sanitary and phytosanitary checks away from the border. It cannot be done, so we must have a border—in our case, in the Irish sea. But this week a statutory instrument was laid before this House that does exactly that. It does it for goods that come from the EU, via Northern Ireland, to GB. It says that the goods can be checked wherever they arrive, such as at factories or other premises; they do not have to be checked at the border. If we can do that for goods coming through Northern Ireland to GB, why can we not do it in reverse? Of course we could check goods without tampering with sovereignty; we could do so anywhere within the territory of the United Kingdom. It is not the impracticability of carrying out the necessary checks that is the problem; it is the fact that under the surrender of sovereignty it has been insisted that they are carried out in the Irish sea border.
That brings me to clauses 16 to 18 and the concept they would permit of mutual enforcement. I readily accept that the clauses draw heavily on the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill 2022—which found the approval of the previous Parliament—but they are none the worse for that. What they do is simple: they say that two respecting neighbours—that is what I hope the United Kingdom and the EU are—with the necessary trust between each other can operate a system where they mutually check the goods flowing through their territory to ensure they meet the standards of the recipient territory. That is a fundamental tenet of much of international trade. It is something that can be built upon in respect of this matter that the United Kingdom says, “Yes, we know the EU wants to protect, it tells us, its single market and, yes, we want to protect our single market, so we will undertake, by virtue of criminal sanction for those who do not, to check that goods flowing from our factories to your consumers, from our territory to your territory, meet the standards you set, and we expect you to do the same.” That can be done without any of the paraphernalia that we presently have.