My Lords, I join in congratulating the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, on chairing these committees. Although the principal committee’s report is over a year old, many of the issues that it pointed to on publication have come to pass. It has been an excellent reference document for those of us who are concerned with what is going on and, indeed, anticipated some of the problems. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, can take some pride in the fact that the sub-committee—a pretty diverse bunch—managed to get a unanimous report. We are therefore here to praise him, but perhaps the day will come, on subsequent reports, when we are here to denounce him, so we had better not get too carried away.
There is an interesting and significant point in the fact that people were able to agree this report. It illustrates that you can achieve something. Enough people in this room sat for years trying to negotiate what became the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. As it was possible to sort out some of those problems, which literally dealt with blood and guts, it is surely not beyond the bounds of possibility that we can sit down with our European partners and deal with this.
The whole thing was not properly thought through from the beginning and people did not grasp the significance of the relationship that we had built up with the European Union over 40-odd years. I am no spokesperson for the EU and do not believe in its federalist tendencies, but the fact is that this Parliament signed up to every single, solitary thing. In many respects, it did so carelessly. Being on the committee dealing with those matters in the other place was almost like being put in a sin bin. We agreed to things of far-reaching significance, which many in this Parliament did not fully appreciate. We are living with the consequences of that now.
To take a case in point, throughout the reports are many criticisms of the fundamental contradictions that exist in the Government’s position—from the point of the referendum to the present circumstances. I will just illustrate one, which our helpful Library note spells out from the start, in its first sentence:
“Under the terms of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland agreed between the EU and the UK as part of the Withdrawal Agreement, Northern Ireland has a unique status.”
That is the fundamental point: our status has changed. People can huff and puff, but that is a fact. It goes on:
“It is part of the UK’s customs territory but is subject to the EU’s customs code, VAT rules and single market rules for goods … SPS … rules to protect animal … health”,
et cetera. So it has changed. For proof of that, when some people decided to take legal action against the Government and challenge the protocol, what was the Government’s defence? “Oh, but we’ve changed the act of union” was their defence. That is being appealed and it would not be appropriate to comment further on it, but I am just making the point.
In parallel with that, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said in the earlier part of this year that there was no border. When he was interviewed later in the year, before the Summer Recess, he had to concede that it was a comment that had not aged well. It was nonsense when it was made and it is still nonsense. The Government have to be much more realistic about where they are. As a former colleague of mine in local government who made malapropisms from time to time said, the cows are coming home to roost. That is what is happening to us now. All these contradictions are confronting the business community and people who are trying to make a living. We as a country are spending hundreds of millions of pounds on providing mechanisms, through the trader arrangements, to deal with the paperwork and to try to keep businesses going. This is an unsustainable position.
The noble Lord, Lord Jay, on numerous occasions used the word “trust”. We have to have a negotiation. We can call it whatever we like—discussions, chatting to the vice-president, or whatever it is—but we have to sit round the table. The European Union is our nearest and most significant trading partner. Looking at the world in the past few months, one can see the necessity for this. The EU was willing to play a significant part in solving our problems in Northern Ireland from the days of Jacques Delors, who was the first person to agree the funding streams that are still going on, so surely, with that sort of approach, it ought to be possible to get a negotiation going that will deal with the downstream consequences of all this.
Under these rules, we are effectively being treated as a third country. My noble friend Lord Caine was talking about Sainsbury’s sausages, but that is what he meant. What nonsense this is. Our committee was given statistics by Professor Shirlow of the University of Liverpool. He pointed out that trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland is equivalent to 0.0008% of European GDP and that only a very small proportion of that would be at risk of entering the EU single market. People on the island will know immediately if there is any attempt to flood the EU single market with inappropriate goods. My party has called for the law to change—I was delighted to see this in the Command Paper—to make it an offence to use the territory of the United Kingdom to send unregulated goods into the single market. That would send a signal to the EU and our traders that that is not something we will allow.
Other issues in the report and the Command Paper can be used as a strong basis. One thing stands in the way of taking the positives from this. If you are trying to get people to invest in the unique situation of having access to both markets, there is one roadblock, which is the requirement for the Assembly to approve it after four years. If you are going to market something to an inward investor, that is a huge roadblock. That is saying that there is a question mark over the investment before you even get started.
While we have that sort of arrangement, which is not satisfactory anyway, getting any gain or advantage will be hugely challenging. There could be potential, but we also have the democratic deficit. I think that the phrase used during the referendum was of a “vassal state”; well, we are the vassal region. We are taking rules over which we have no say or input whatever. It is a constitutional carbuncle. When my noble friend replies, can he tell me and the Committee on what basis did the Government attempt to establish what consent existed for the protocol? Who indicated consent for the core elements within it? How did they judge that?
What we should now be doing—I hope that our committee addresses this—is to encourage a dialogue, sitting down away from the war that goes on in the press. We are in a difficult period in Europe, with elections coming up for the French president and a new chancellor in Germany. These are important times. As my noble friend said, we risk instability in Belfast if we do not deal with this now. We have to sit down with our colleagues in Europe and settle this.