European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Wednesday 21st March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

Tempted as I am by the noble Lord’s seductive words, we must realise what is achievable and what is not achievable. With both major political parties proclaiming that the single market cannot remain, we have to concentrate on what can remain or can be replaced by something essentially similar—a customs union. As I said, I am tempted. I am not unsympathetic, but we have to be realistic.

[Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, who wills the ends wills the means. The Government committed themselves to an open border, to my knowledge, some 20 months ago. I was very happy to hear a previous Secretary of State make that commitment quite explicit in a public space. I then asked: how? We are still waiting for any answers as to how, and cynicism is growing. It does not seem that the Government are thinking about the answer to that question.

It is, of course, a number of questions. Borders do different things for the movement of goods, the movement of people, the movement of animals and many other things. But I point to three things that are important. First, on goods, the Government have suggested that there may be a technological solution by which tariffs do not require a hard border—meaning installations at the particular line of demarcation—but are dealt with, quite handily, by electronic means and previous preparation of detailed dossiers on the content of each, in this case, lorry rather than container. It is a seductive view, but it is radically incomplete.

The Government have also on occasion suggested that they would be happy to see small traders, as it were, fall below the radar for enforcement. In the island of Ireland we are quite good at subcontracting the movement of things to small traders if that is advantageous. It has been done for various commodities. One need only think of diesel for a good example. It has also been done to my knowledge for various other things such as getting double subsidies on animals—I will come back to animals in a moment—by having the headage payment both north and south of the border. We have to expect that, as we get divergence of legislation and regulation north and south of the border, the incentives for what I believe are these days called “imaginative arrangements” will grow and will be a matter of subcontracting to the small traders. I do not believe that the electronic fantasy is more than part of the solution to the movement of goods, which speaks directly to whether we expect a customs union or the customs union to continue or whether it does not. I suppose these small traders might be looking forward to the latter solution, but I do not think they really are.

The movement of peoples seems very important. We have entirely free movement of peoples on the island of Ireland. That has not always been so, but we have it again. It is fundamental to life. But if people enter from the European Union into the Republic of Ireland, where they will have freedom of movement, they can then go to the north—to the UK—and come over here without passports. I find that quite a lot of my noble friends are not really aware of that, probably because, when they go to Ireland, they go by air and have to show a passport. It is not necessary, however, to show a passport when crossing the Irish Sea. That is one of the meanings of the phrase “common travel area” and has been with us since the 1920s. It is, incidentally, much stronger than the Schengen arrangements because, in the common travel area, when we move across from one jurisdiction, the UK, to another, the Republic of Ireland, we can vote and we can serve in the armed services. These are real differences. This is a deep and long-standing arrangement. However, it means that people will have to identify themselves—for example, when taking a job or when going to a National Health Service hospital for an operation—to be sure that they are entitled. That is what that one word, “passport”, meant.