Brexit: UK-Irish Relations

Lord Cope of Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cope of Berkeley (Con)]

My Lords, it is time to resume the debate on the Motion tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Jay. I congratulate the Select Committee on its report, and indeed its early appearance is especially valuable. It has been said by some that for the British Government negotiating Brexit, the Northern Ireland border with its various ramifications is perhaps the most intractable part of the problem. Personally I do not think it should be, although clearly the new customs arrangements could prove to be difficult depending on the agreement on customs partnerships and in particular which products or services turn out to have different customs tariffs once we are outside the EU.

I was involved in Northern Ireland border matters during two periods of my somewhat varied ministerial life. The first was in the Government of the late Baroness Thatcher when I was the Minister of State in the Northern Ireland Office with responsibility for security and finance. That was until 1990. A couple of years later I became the Paymaster-General in Sir John Major’s Government with responsibility in the Treasury for customs and excise across the whole of the UK. Meanwhile, on 1 January1992 while I was doing other things, the Northern Ireland borders stopped, and with the start of the single market the customs posts which had been in place since 1923 were removed. So I had a before and after view of the start of the soft border. By the way, the customs posts had been attacked 484 times between 1969 and 1992, and of course they did not in any case cover the whole border. During the Troubles no one could ever have called the border “frictionless”.

There has been some media talk about closing the border again, but anyone who thinks that it can be a closed border does not know the border. Neither President Trump nor even Benjamin Netanyahu could build a wall along it. In any case, our Government, the Northern Irish parties, the Executive when it exists and the Government of the Republic have all ruled out a closed border. So the question is how we will live with it.

I would not like noble Lords to get the impression that the coming of the single market ended the incentives to smuggling. Many of the problems then were connected with security and terrorism, but the incentives for smuggling were also to do with the differences in excise duties on tobacco and fuel, for example, as well as VAT rates and compensation amounts from the common agricultural policy, and for that matter the controls on contraband of one kind or another: weapons, drugs and much more. The security situation is now quite different, but there are still plenty of differences in VAT and the rest which the border authorities on both sides deal with now without the customs posts. Smuggling is of course always with us and the possibility of differential customs tariffs after we leave the EU must be seen in the light of that. We cannot know what divergences there will be at least until we get somewhere in the trade talks.

Both legitimate cross-border shopping and smuggling were and are worthwhile activities for those who engage in them. Many people from the Republic come up to shop in Northern Ireland quite legitimately, as they have for many years, to our traders’ and our revenue’s benefit, and that will continue. VAT was supposed to have been harmonised throughout the EU, but of course it is not despite all the rules and arguments we have seen. But since that time technology has advanced in customs and excise as it has elsewhere. When I was a Minister we were dealing with the introduction of electronic customs declarations through a programme called CHIEF, which has now been superseded by a new digital system known, for the benefit of the MoD I suppose, as CDS—the Customs Declaration Service. Similarly, the Common Transit Convention which covers the traffic about which my noble friend Lord Howell spoke between the Republic of Ireland and the EU and so on operates well, as does the so-called authorised operators scheme. I believe that these electronic measures and no doubt others to come are dealing with the quite severe problems we have now and will be able to deal with the problems that we are contemplating in the course of this debate.

On the more general position of the talks, I am not in the least surprised that Monsieur Barnier is shouting and banging the table about money. The whopping great hole in the EU budget is getting nearer and so far I have not seen anything in the media about serious discussions among the 27 on how they are going to deal with it. We will fulfil our obligations but they need to discuss what they are going to do to balance their books in the future.

It is of course important that the common travel area should continue, as others have said, but why should it not? The Governments concerned in Dublin, London and Belfast all agree about that, and Brussels should too. I see no reason why it should not, just as it recognised it when we went into the EU in the first place. Similarly, the single electricity market runs well and all concerned want it to continue, so it will.

The British-Irish Council and British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, which I served on, should both continue. We are fortunate that these bodies from the Belfast agreement and before are up and running, and I agree with the Select Committee’s encouragement to UK Ministers to devote more time to these bodies. The ending of the more or less daily procession of Ministers to Brussels will help them to achieve that. We all know that these discussions are serious and complex and that there is a long way to go, but I think that the Northern Ireland border aspects should be some of the easiest to agree in the talks.