My Lords, I had been planning to speak on the detail of the amendments. It seems to me to be quite unreasonable, as the noble Lords, Lord Dodds and Lord Bew, have already said, that the whole essence of the Belfast agreement, which was that important decisions would be made on a cross-community basis—a difficult principle for unionists to accept at the time—is now being abandoned the moment it becomes inconvenient. I say that as someone who was rather opposed, at the time, to the Belfast agreement—not on orange or green grounds but because I thought it was unhealthy to have all the parties in power all the time. I thought it would be healthier for democracy to have a more genuine competition. I lost
that argument and we went down this road. It seems a little inconsistent that we should move to majoritarianism only when it suits people pushing one agenda.
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The point ably made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is that this is not really what this or any of these amendments are about—I commend him on his honesty as well as on his customary eloquence. What all these amendments have been about—noble Lords have been perfectly frank about this—is their fundamental disagreement because of their contention that the Bill is illegal; that point was well expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. You can share or not the sense of the noble Lord, Lord Bew, that it is covered by Articles 1 and 2 giving primacy to the Belfast agreement and that that has prior force.
I am not a lawyer—there are many more distinguished people than I am—but I wanted to bring before the Committee one other observation. I sit on the sub-committee that deals with the protocol. We have heard from all the parties in Northern Ireland, and all of them support the unilateral grace periods. Not a single one has spoken out for full implementation of the protocol in the sense of wanting those unilateral grace periods withdrawn. In fact, I do not think that anyone in the European Commission is pushing for either. Other than one or two fairly ill-informed Democratic congressmen in the US, I do not think that anyone at all now says that we should apply in full the protocol without those alleviations and suspensions. I therefore put it to your Lordships that we are already in breach of international law, so the question is simply one of degree.
I very much sense that I am in a majority in this Chamber—I can see very well where most people stand. However, I plead with your Lordships to consider in mitigation that the Government are dealing with imperfect alternatives, it is simply a question of how far you want to go to prioritise one over another, and that therefore some of the more extreme rhetoric that we had both at Second Reading and on the first day of Committee about dictatorships, this being the worst Bill ever, tyranny and so on may be a little misplaced.