Brexit: Deal or No Deal (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I voted remain in the referendum because I was convinced that the consequences of a pro-Brexit vote would be destabilising for the island of Ireland—and, indeed, I think they have been destabilising. This afternoon, I attended with great pleasure the European Union Select Committee meeting chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, who I am glad to see back in his place. A very valuable discussion about Irish matters was held.

It is therefore with surprise that I find myself agreeing with noble Lords who have expressed unease about the quality of this report. I must tell the House that that is exactly how I feel about it—particularly the section entitled “Box 7: ‘No deal’ and the impact on Ireland and Northern Ireland”, which is quite exceptionally weak. This bears on the broader point, which has been made before, that the report does not really deal with the bad side of no deal for countries other than the UK. Although it is referred to glancingly in a number of places, it is a classic case of where something is very important but the report just slides over it gaily as if it did not know what everybody in Ireland was talking about. The section is very weak.

Let me explain. If there is no deal and we are forced to crash out on WTO terms, it is widely believed in Ireland that the consequences will be disastrous for the Irish agricultural sector. In a small country, 30,000 to 40,000 jobs is a lot. The widely respected Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin has said it, the Central Bank of Ireland has said it and the Department of Finance has said it. At the national ploughing championships this year, where thousands of Irish farmers meet, that was the subject of conversation. Is there any reference in our report to the consequences of no deal for Ireland and that obvious fear? No, there is not. Instead, there is a reference to the dairy industry in Northern Ireland and the possibility that it will have more difficulty selling into the Irish Republic.

I invite your Lordships to a little thought experiment. Close your eyes and think of our supermarket shelves stacked to a huge extent with products of the agricultural industry of the Irish Republic; and then think that those products are not there in the same quantities as before, because there is a significant WTO tariff on them. Who do your Lordships think is going to gain? Where do your Lordships think the dairy farmers who might gain as a consequence of the absence of those products from the Irish Republic are from? It is of course the dairy farmers of Northern Ireland. A moment’s thought would tell your Lordships that that is the likely reality. I do not believe we will ever reach that point, by the way, and crash out without a deal. I believe that eventually there will be a free trade deal, but it is a very serious weakness of our report when the most obvious aspects of reality and current fears on the island of Ireland are not referred to at all. That is a problem.

That has to be referred to, but it is part of the wider problem of not fully acknowledging the downside for other countries in the European Union if there is no deal, while dwelling extensively—at great length in this report—on the difficulties and downsides for this country of no deal. I am sure that many of the downsides of no deal for this country referred to in the report are listed entirely accurately, but it is remarkable how airy and light we are about the problems for others. The Irish issue is a very dramatic example of it. It is worth stressing—especially with the commitment given by the Minister, Robin Walker, to the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly—that even in the event of no deal, Britain will give rights for the common travel area to Irish citizens. That too is not referred to in our report. It will mean, among other things, the right of Irish citizens to come and work here in a privileged way as against those from other European countries. I do not understand it in any other way. They will continue to have the same rights as they have now.

At any rate, this is a generous and liberal thing to offer; as indeed, by the way, was the report produced by the Government last summer about the various technical means by which you could ensure, or at least help to ensure, a soft border. However, I see no sign that the European Union even understands the scale of that concession. Its reference to it is extremely vague, and it is not clear that it quite understands how generous we are proposing to be to the citizens of the Irish Republic even in the event of no deal—again, this is not referred to as a consequence of no deal. I am not quite sure how European countries might feel about it, but that is the offer we have made. No thanks have been received from anywhere for this, either in the Irish Republic, which just noted what Robin Walker had said, or in the European Union more generally. But if we do not mention ourselves, in our own reports, that we have made this generous and liberal attempt to facilitate developments, why should we expect other people to mention it or even to notice that we have done it? It is a matter of very considerable importance that we have done this. I express my regret about the balance in our report, but my unease is real. I find myself very reluctant to say it, because in general I do not feel that about the excellent reports from the committee.

I turn to a point made by my noble friend Lord Teverson, which touches also on a point made by the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard. They are both really talking about the same problem but from a different angle, which is the reference made at paragraph 49 in the progress report agreed before Christmas between the Prime Minister and the European Union. My noble friend Lord Teverson has already quoted this passage, which says that the UK,

“will maintain full alignment with those rules of the Internal Market and the Customs Union which, now or in the future, support North-South cooperation, the all-island economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement”.

Now there is a real question mark as to the actual meaning of that sentence, and I hope that the Minister can perhaps help us with that point tonight in his conclusion.

There is no subject in our modern life in which the wish is father to the thought more than Brexit. In this case, Brexiteer paranoia that the UK has signed up to some all-singing, all-dancing model of wide-ranging alignment—with which the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, expressed unease—fuels a particular reading of the report. On the other hand, remainer enthusiasm, as expressed by Matthew Parris’s article last Saturday in the Times, assumes that we have already sold the pass and have conceded in this sentence that there will be a soft Brexit and so on.

I accept that the language is ambiguous, but just want to give an Irish perspective on it. First, none of the most skilled Irish commentators—Patrick Smyth, the European editor of the Irish Times, for example, and I think also Dan O’Brien of the Independent—takes the grand reading. They argue that even for Ireland, it is not actually clear what these words definitively mean. The word “fudge” is used frequently in the most serious Irish commentary.

Patrick Smyth’s phrase is that we have no reassurances and no guarantees in this formula. There is a reason for that. His article says that Stormont has a veto in the interpretation of this document because it has a reference to the Good Friday agreement. There are already a number of forms of harmonisation or alignment between north and south. Back in the day in 1998, I was involved in the debate that led to the first initial list of these forms of harmonisation being agreed. It has now been somewhat extended. They are not controversial to the DUP but it means that, if you take seriously the protection of the Good Friday agreement, built into that agreement is the fact that the Northern Irish Assembly has a veto on how this develops, as Patrick Smyth points out twice in his piece. It is therefore very hard to believe that such a limited set of ideas can be the basis, as some have said, of an all-singing, all-dancing deal between the EU and the UK. The language is ambiguous, and if possible I would like the Minister to give us some clarification on that point. As I say, anything that is a fudge—and this is increasingly seen as a fudge in Irish terms—is unlikely to be a template for a wider and harder agreement on a large scale.

Having said that, there is also a reference to the role in this of the DUP. This House should note the very positive and irenic speech—a breakthrough for her in many ways—given by Arlene Foster in Killarney at the weekend, which signalled a willingness to work with the Irish Republic to produce a benign settlement of these difficult concerns. This is a positive development. People should not be especially concerned that the DUP wants a hard border, any more than anyone else in Ireland wants one. Frankly, no one in Ireland wants a hard border.