Windsor Framework (Retail Movement Scheme: Public Health, Marketing and Organic Product Standards and Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations 2023
Debate between Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee and Lord Bew
Lord Bew (CB)
My Lords, I rise to speak to the regret Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey. She and I are very old friends and have agreed and still agree about many things, and I regret not being able to support the regret Motion that she has put before the House tonight, although I agree with much of what she said and much of what has been said from the DUP Benches.
I was particularly encouraged to hear the noble Lord, Lord McCrea, say that the crucial thing was the response to the seven tests. That is a very important matter. I also noticed that the first test makes reference to Article VI of the Act of Union, and the fulfilment of that promise. I regard that as somewhat encouraging. As the noble Lord, Lord McCrea, is a man of great honour, I am certain that he will hold to that position, as it is a matter of some substance. What has happened is that we have moved away from the seven tests, and much of the discussion tonight has moved away from the seven tests.
To go to the heart of the regret Motion of the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, the Windsor Framework is actually based on technical data-sharing and agreed application and reinforcement. This is a key part of it. In late 2022, I think, in a series of asks, we were able to say to the European Union that we have a new technology that permits us to do things in a new way. The Windsor Framework is not just about that, but it certainly builds on that. Of course, if we refuse to share data, the EU can respond by not accepting the easements that it has put in place and the changes that it has made. But this is a two-way street, and it cannot act arbitrarily—it is as simple as that; it is that sort of agreement. It is important to understand that.
Numerous solutions have been suggested to the 2017 agreement—the UK-EU agreement, which was a major defeat for the United Kingdom. A snap election was called, and the Government were really on their knees. The Irish Government pushed for certain advantages, which it won—and we are still here tonight, six years later, having not escaped from the toils of that Irish negotiation. It is on record that Irish officials were surprised at the ease with which the UK Government conceded. That having been said, it is water under the bridge; we are still here after six years trying to sort it out, but we have an international agreement, and the May withdrawal agreement did not even mention the Northern Ireland Assembly. It is obvious that we have moved on a considerable degree over seven years, in respect of the Government, with regard to the opinions and views of the people of Northern Ireland, the Stormont brake being an obvious example in the Northern Irish Assembly.
I feel that I should say one thing. The latest polling gives the Windsor Framework 60% support in Northern Ireland. It is correct to refer to the polling at the weekend, as the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, did, which shows strong support for the union. There is very strong support for it still in Northern Ireland—there is a very substantial lead. But it is also true, although support for the union is at 50% in that report, and for a united Ireland 30%, if I remember rightly, that support for the Windsor Framework is running at 60% in the latest academic polling. Sometimes, when one listens to the rhetoric about how terrible it all is, one would think that the people of Northern Ireland must be incredibly stupid if 60% of them think that it is actually working quite well and they are prepared to support it. It is worth bearing that in mind.
The opinions of other people in Northern Ireland do matter. I have stood beside the DUP through many debates in this House and supported its objections, but the opinions of the whole community also matter in the consideration of these outcomes. The 2017 report was unleashed in our lives and pockmarked everything since—for example, the concept of the island economy. This is also related to the so-called mapping exercise, brilliantly intellectually deconstructed in the Irish Times by Newton Emerson a couple of years ago. These concepts—duff, essentially—play into British official documents, and the United Kingdom Government say that they will continue to support these things, some of them slightly fantasy elements.
We are nearing the end of the road. The government White Paper that accompanied the Windsor Framework marks a gradual detachment by the UK Government from this level of green fantasy. This is not to say that there is not an island economy in agri-food, by the way, which is one reason why a hard border would have been very difficult, but overall there is not an island economy. The island economy argument has been used by the TUV in particular to say, “We have created an island economy; this will lead to a politically united Ireland”. The difficulty with that is that it is exactly the same argument that Jim Allister put 25 years ago about the Good Friday agreement—which has now been supported, I am glad to see, from the DUP Benches. It is exactly the same argument he put then. Twenty-five years ago, the facts did not bear him out. The island economy was not a growing thing that was going to lead there—two economies on the island of Ireland leading to political unity—but, 25 years later, heigh-ho, we are back with a version of the same argument.
My friend Lord Trimble, in his last public act, introduced a paper for the think tank Policy Exchange by Graham Gudgin. It argued that
“there are two distinct economies on the island of Ireland. The Republic of Ireland is a sovereign state, fully part of the European Union but also one the world’s largest tax havens … With different currencies, different fiscal and monetary arrangements including different interest rates and VAT excise duties, and with separate legal systems, the two areas are distinct … Only 4% of the goods and services produced in Northern Ireland cross the border to the Republic while 16% go to GB; 31% of imports to NI are from GB. Only 2% of the Republic’s exports go to Northern Ireland … Currency, tax rates, excise duties, social security systems, government spending regimes, interest rates, credit and banking rules and business law all differ from those across the border”.
This is really quite important: there are two economies on the island of Ireland, and the Northern Ireland one is locked into the UK in a massive way.
In his realistic worst-case scenario about the future, Dr Gudgin acknowledged that
“the NI economy will be less different from the Republic than would have been the case without the Protocol but little less different than has been the case for decades”.
Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)
I entirely agree with what the noble Lord has to say about this construct of an island economy, which came about during the time that the Assembly was not sitting for three years due to the Sinn Féin boycott. It was allowed to gain currency at that time. Does he agree with me, however, that given that the supply chains between Great Britain and Northern Ireland are so intricately connected, trade diversion is the one thing that people are very concerned about? In other words, “It is too difficult to bring from GB into Northern Ireland, so we will look for other supply chains”—that is a real problem.
Lord Bew (CB)
I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention; I accept that point. There is a significant argument by an esteemed economist about how serious and significant that really is, because we have no figures for the impact of the Windsor Framework. What figures we have go back over several years, and we cannot work out the impact of the Windsor Framework on this problem, which is important.
The government White Paper notes that the Windsor agreement
“marks a decisive break from … the political concept of an ‘all island economy’”—
something that was prioritised in the 2017 document, with the UK Government’s agreement, over Northern Ireland’s place in the UK economy. We have moved on. The island economy is one area where the British Government have been carrying out a major work of rectification to get away from the humiliation of 2017 and that agreement.
I turn briefly to EU law. Again, it is not mentioned in the seven tests. I have heard regularly over the last few days that EU law is dominant in Northern Ireland. Well, okay. Continued alignment with EU law applies to only about 20% of Northern Ireland’s economy. When I heard about the dominance, I thought: is this the Northern Ireland I live in, with its large state sector—larger than in any other devolved region—funded by the UK taxpayer? Is this the Northern Ireland economy I live in, in which the service sector, totally outside the framework of the EU, is the growing sector? There is a question mark about the price to be paid for access to the EU market, which many of our businesses want, but it is not dominant: we are talking about around 20%.
There is an argument here, I accept, and there are people in this House who will never accept that EU law is worth accepting, no matter the value for individual businesses and so on. But it is important to say that what we have in Northern Ireland—well, let me put it this way: changes since the transition period have been remarkably small. There has been nothing of impact in three years since the transition period ended. There is a well-developed marketplace in Northern Ireland, completed over 20 years ago. It is not a building site full of rubble waiting for some spectacularly ambitious, slightly crazed architect to come along and construct something new and wild—it is set in a particular mould; that is how it is. It is rather humdrum to say it, and in any case most manufacturers in Great Britain follow EU regulations because they export to the EU or provide goods to other companies that export to the EU.
The issues of EU law and the island economy are two areas that are very important to talk about; they dominate the current debate in Northern Ireland. It is important to say that, as far as EU law is concerned, there is, and always will be, a division of opinion on that point. However, it is also the case that this is not the first time in our history in Northern Ireland that we have been dealt with in an unequal way in a trade agreement between the British Government and the Irish Republic. In 1938, exactly this happened. If we look at the debate in this House on 10 May 1938 on what was a very bad deal, a humiliation for the British Government in the end, there is no question but that Northern Ireland businesses are treated unfairly and without equality. There is no doubt about that at all, and the point is made very eloquently by the unionist MPs.
However, a broader political decision was made within unionism: you can get hung up on things that offend you, that are bad news and that stick in your craw, or you can look at it in terms of the wider interests of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. On that occasion, they made a deal that involved unemployment insurance payments for thousands of shipyard workers on the dole in Belfast that could not be met out of Northern Ireland resources. They made a deal for those shipyard workers—an economic deal in the interests of Northern Ireland which, when the Attlee Government came in with the welfare state, turned out to be an absolutely wonderful deal. In other words, they looked at the problem in the round, did not obsess about the one area in which nobody will agree or be happy, and acted in terms of what was the lesser of two evils.