My Lords, noble Lords will remember that, in the course of debates on the retained EU law Bill, we have heard complaints from noble Lords across the House, largely from opposition parties but also from government Back Benchers, that it is outrageous to be asked to sign off legislation without a chance to scrutinise it in detail. We have been told that decisions on whether to retain or discard laws needs close parliamentary oversight and debate. I have to say that I was somewhat taken aback that, even before the publication of the Windsor Framework, the Opposition committed to supporting the Government. Since then, skeleton documentation has been enough to have politicians across all parties vote en masse for the framework, despite the fact that actually that equates to voting blind on yet-to-be-written laws that will apply to the UK that will not be scrutinised, let alone with an opportunity to be opposed, by the UK Parliament.
Today, what we have been asked to do is to nod through an agreement that allows the EU, which we have left, to draft brand-new EU laws to govern trade taking place solely within UK borders. There has been no outrage, though. We are just quite calmly accepting that the future rules on the movements of goods, plants, foodstuffs, medicines, parcels, pets and so on from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will be decided by direct regulation made in Brussels and voted on not here but in the European Parliament, all of which we will never get to scrutinise in the UK Parliament. You sort of could not make it up. It seems an ironic twist as well that the people who will have close oversight of UK laws are—wait for it—the EU. Under the framework, the EU is granted new rights through EU law to be consulted in advance on huge swathes of legislation on UK trade and tax legislation governing the UK economy, all to monitor the so-called competitive risks within the UK single market.
I think that we might suggest that something has gone a bit awry here. Certainly, the process should be scrutinised and our own process should be scrutinised. In this place, concerns are rightly often raised about the overuse of statutory instruments and the delegation of powers to the Executive, yet here we are faced with a statutory instrument and we are able to look at only one part of the framework in the Stormont brake. There is no feasible way of changing anything. That is why I welcome the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, because it gives us a chance to have a debate. I thought the noble Lord, Lord Hain, asked some important questions about delegated powers, but in the end, this House, the other House and Stormont —none of us—have no way of challenging an important document about the conflict about which legal authority will govern the UK. In the other place, the discussion
was reduced to a derisory 90 minutes. We should remind ourselves that the whole framework was announced as a done deal at a press conference that put Ursula von der Leyen centre stage and the UK Parliament, never mind the public, was reduced to being a bystander.
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To top it all, many in Parliament opposed the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill. Do noble Lords remember that one? I was a supporter of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and was criticised, but undoubtedly there were many more critics, particularly in this House, who said that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill should be defeated. What killed off the Northern Irish Protocol Bill? Was it a homegrown legitimate democratic defeat by people who opposed it? No, it was dropped by the Government at the request of the EU.
What I find most galling is the double standards on this issue. Goodness knows, there has been a huge amount of righteous fury over the idea of, for example, a Prime Minister wilfully misleading Parliament over partygate. Everybody has been up in arms, but whichever way you look at it, the overselling of the Windsor Framework has been misleading. Like everyone, when I first heard of the changes, I was open-minded and hopeful. They were presented as a series of practical arrangements, even concessions, that would resolve the problems of the protocol. Many of us who have argued since 2016 that issues around trade and the border could be resolved simply through using common sense and technical methods thought that, at last, common sense had come back. But, as details emerged, we realised that even the word “misleading” is a generous term. Despite repeated boasts that, for example, 1,700 pages of EU law have been removed from Northern Ireland, it is just not true. No EU laws have been disapplied at all, and this surely looks more serious than spin or PR. We have heard how the PR-friendly name “the Stormont brake” is a misnomer because no brake can be applied. There is such a high bar for that brake to be pulled, it is virtually inoperable. It is also a misnomer because it is not politicians from Stormont who can pull the brake, but the UK Government.
Noble Lords might say, “Well, you would say that, Baroness Fox, because you are one of those pesky Brexity types”. Noble Lords should not worry, because they do not have to believe me at all. They do not have to trust what I am saying because the information I have supplied the House with has come from the EU, which I know many noble Lords hold in very high esteem. It is fascinating to compare the Government’s explainer documents, which are full of boasts and claims of major gains, with the much larger, rather drier, forensic EU explanations. Those two sets of documents are almost unrecognisable in describing the same issues, and daily we hear more, again from the EU, not from our own Government.
Noble Lords have heard that a number of us have been following word by word the European Parliament’s agricultural committee, which has suddenly become fascinating. Noble Lords might think that is a misnomer, but because we have been following what has been happening in that committee, we now know about the agricultural inspections, the controls at ports and the 18 new EU officials who need to be present to oversee
the operations of these controls. That should be public knowledge. It should be the Government telling us that, not us finding out from the EU’s committees what they are going to do in this country. How do those 18 new officials standing there overseeing the operation of borders tally with the notion that millions of citizens in this country voted for the EU not to interfere in the internal workings of the UK?
I am also worried—I am getting to the end—about a new narrative that I have picked up from the media, pundits and so on, who have more or less said that we should move on, get Brexit done and ignore those pesky, irritating DUP-ers. As has already been indicated, it sounds as though some of the Government feel the same. It is usually followed by a knowing comment such as, “Who do they represent anyway?”, because the majority of people in the six counties voted remain. I am really worried about the consequences of such an approach, because it is also true that the majority in Scotland voted remain. Unless we are to go down the route of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who at one point threatened that remain-voting London would declare UDI, then of course we do not want that kind of balkanisation of the country.
I also recognise that no union can survive unless it has the consent of its constituent parts. If the Scottish people had voted to leave the union, I would have gone with them and supported them all the way. It is also true that there are people in Ireland who want a united Ireland. That is a perfectly legitimate desire. There are those who argue for a border poll; in a way, I wish them well. Let us see how they get on, but these are absolutely and completely different matters from what we are discussing here. I would not object to Scotland leaving the UK if it wanted to. As I say, if there is a border poll and it goes that way, good luck to them.
But when the UK voted in the referendum in 2016, it was asked as a whole and everybody in the UK was told that this was the most important constitutional question for generations. They turned up in their millions, believing for once that their votes would count as individuals in making a decision for the United Kingdom as a whole. If we say that because a part of the United Kingdom—Northern Ireland—no longer counts in the same way or is not equal, or that because the majority in a part of the UK had a different approach to the EU, as Northern Ireland did, it is okay to develop a new legal relationship with the EU, surely the SNP will see that as making it okay to treat any UK-wide laws as dispensable. It could ignore them and walk away.
I am not interested in Northern Ireland or the DUP so much as I am in the democratic sovereign integrity of the United Kingdom, for the purposes of honouring UK voters. To those in the Tory ranks who say, “Move on; this puts Brexit to bed—it’s done and dusted”, all I can say is that if you think this zombie version of Brexit, with its business-as-usual sell-out of sovereignty, is what all those millions of people voted for, it is no wonder that the Government squandered their 80-seat majority. My goodness, it was a democratic revolt for politics done differently. This is politics done the same. Luckily, the voters are not going along with it.
Whatever happens in this House, that genie is well and truly out of the bottle. It will make itself felt in the future. In the meantime, I will support and vote for the fatal amendment.