My Lords, I rise to speak with some trepidation as, apart from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, this has been a convention of like-minded people, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, put it.
I have just come hot-foot from a Committee A (Sovereign Matters) meeting at the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly in Cavan. We were addressed by the Taoiseach at some length and by other Irish Ministers. There was much discussion of these matters during the day. However, no Irish Minister said, “Whatever you do, when you get back to London, make sure that this protocol Bill is stopped”. It is simply not a contentious matter in these negotiations. That is a simple fact. A very large percentage of what has been said today about the need for good faith and how dropping this blunderbuss will strengthen our position is, with the kindest of respect, totally irrelevant.
The EU has decided, for its own perfectly good reasons—it is keen to reach this deal; I utterly believe in its good faith—that this Bill will not stop substantive negotiation. What it would do, if the majority opinion in this House were to prevail, is stop the Government’s attempt to bring the DUP back into the Assembly. That will be its only real effect. Neither the Taoiseach nor the other Irish Ministers said a word about it yesterday at Committee A (Sovereign Matters), because
this Bill is not central to them. What is central to them is the ongoing negotiation, which is proceeding with good faith on both sides and from which I sincerely hope for a result. It is very important to say that.
A great part of what has been said is, I am sure, very well meant but, to put it bluntly, totally irrelevant. It is not the realpolitik of the moment. That is very important to understand. Dropping this Bill will not transform those negotiations into a better or worse state. They are going on now; they are facing some very difficult problems—I think there may be some progress—and we can certainly hope, as I am sure everybody in the House does, for an outcome on this. But it is simply pointless, bootless and, worst of all, deeply irrelevant to keep arguing and going on about the need to drop the Bill because it would lead to greater faith in negotiation. The negotiations are already in play, in good faith—end of story. However, it would have an effect on our ability to get the DUP back into government.
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Now, I said at Second Reading that I consider the DUP to be moving, bluntly, too slowly on this matter, and it does leave the Government’s strategy in an exposed position—we must be clear about this.
However, the Government must follow international law, and international law in Article 1(5) of the Good Friday agreement is quite clear: where they are faced with the potential for long-term alienation of a particular community, the UK Government have to act. That is their responsibility under the international agreement in the United Nations not to allow the long-term alienation of one community. That is why the noble Lord, Lord Caine, in recent weeks, on a matter of concern to the nationalist community, has pushed through the Irish language legislation in this House, which is principally to address potential alienation in that community.
That is where we are with international law, I am afraid, and that is the prior international agreement, so the Government have to attempt, in a serious way, to end the alienation with the unionist community, which every poll—if we are talking about opinion polls—and every election result shows is total on this point. The Government have an absolute responsibility to act; they are acting under an international obligation.
Again, I am always amazed how little discussion there is in this House about the reality, because we cannot talk about the protocol Bill on its own without acknowledging the fact that the protocol itself—both in Theresa May’s version and in Boris Johnson’s version—commits in many places to the primacy of the Good Friday agreement being observed. The primacy of the Good Friday agreement is not a new doctrine produced by the last Government and supported still by this Government, as I understand it; it is actually there in the protocol.
Therefore, when you say, “This is illegal” and “That is illegal”, you have to realise that you have to talk about the interaction of two texts. In March 2019, the then Attorney-General—supported from the Front Bench in this House—said that the Good Friday agreement was the prior agreement and that in certain circumstances the protocol could be resiled from. It was said in this
House, and nobody objected. I remember when the importance of the primacy of the Good Friday agreement was asserted from the Front Bench; nobody said a word.
Now at that very time—and I look at the noble Lord, Lord Dodds—I was trying to persuade the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, to do a compromise deal with the May Government to get it through. What the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, said in effect was, “That is very interesting”—about the primacy of the Good Friday agreement—“and that could be the way forward, because it could be a way of protecting and balancing our rights, but I do not believe Parliament on this matter.” The way you have all behaved in the last hour and a half shows that he was entirely right not to believe Parliament. He said, “We need more than that, though it is an interesting opening gambit.” That is why it was said by the Attorney-General on that day on 12 March—the Attorney-General gave the Brexit Secretary the authority to say it—in an attempt to do a deal. But he said no. Why did he say no? Because he thought lots of people would not follow through, and you have just proven in spades that, unfortunately, I was wrong when I told him to compromise, and he was right, because that is exactly how you have functioned.