My Lords, I will be brief. The noble Lord, Lord Morrow, referred to this instrument as a “humiliation”. I am not sure whether he meant a humiliation for the country or something else, but we can be in no doubt that it is a humiliation for Parliament that a foreign Parliament should send us an instrument—a law made by it with no reference to us—and invite us to cut and paste it into the form of a statutory instrument that we are required to rubber-stamp.
I cannot think of another democracy, inside or outside Europe, which would be willing to have laws made for the internal trade of part its own country and for part of its own territory by a foreign Parliament on this basis, with no participation or representation, and be expected to accept it and hand it on in this way.
We are told that the justification for accepting this humiliation—although this has not come up in the debate, as such—is that it is the price of maintaining the Good Friday agreement. That would not be an
argument wholly without merit, if it had substance—but it has no substance, because the Good Friday agreement is not being maintained. It is not being maintained in its internal arrangements or on its east-west strands, or north-south. It is largely defunct; the only part of the Good Friday agreement that is still fundamentally alive is the question that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom unless and until there is a vote that supports transferring it to the Republic of Ireland. That part of it remains alive; the rest is functionally dead.
So we are not actually achieving our objective in doing this, but meanwhile we accept the humiliation, which no doubt in a moment my noble friend is going to rise at the Dispatch Box and defend. With a name like Harlech, if he were proposing this in relation to Wales, I imagine that he would resile, and resile firmly from doing so, but in the case of Northern Ireland it appears to be acceptable, despite the manifest evidence that the claimed benefit of doing so is not actually arising. I look forward to hearing what my noble friend on the Front Bench is going to say.
But I look forward almost with more interest to what the noble Baroness on the Labour Front Bench is going to say. I have to take cognisance of the fact that I understand, or am told by outside interests, that there is the prospect or possibility of a Labour Government in the next year or so. I do not countenance it myself, but to hear what the Labour Party has to say about what it will do about this in government—and the noble Lord, Lord Weir, is correct that we need to look forward—is absolutely crucial on this matter. In my view, it will find that, if it thinks that this is going to be solved in some way by greater alignment of the whole of the United Kingdom with the European Union, it will quickly run into the fact that there is a price to be paid. The European Union will regard that there is a price to be paid for that alignment, in loss of opportunities elsewhere. Those hard decisions—and of course I am not expecting to hear the answer to those decisions today—will land very firmly at the feet of any incoming Government who might arrive in the next 12 months. The Windsor Framework and the arrangements put in its place are absolutely central to how any incoming Government respond to them. So in some ways, the most interesting speech of the day, I am sure, will come from one of the two noble Baronesses—I am not sure which—sitting opposite, and I look forward to it.