Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Lord Dodds of Duncairn Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)]

My Lords, I will speak to my amendment to the Motion and make some more general comments about the budget the Minister has brought forward. I join with the noble Lord, Lord Hain, in his remarks about the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and his family. I offer him our best wishes at this time.

It is important to remember how we got to this sad point, because we certainly believe that the budget for Northern Ireland should be set in the Northern Ireland Assembly in Stormont. It is a matter of deep regret that we find ourselves in this position this evening because the Government brought forward the Northern Ireland protocol and continue to implement it, albeit with significant grace periods and other measures that have not been fully implemented.

For the purpose of context, we should remember that, when the Executive ceased to function in Northern Ireland, the Sinn Féin Finance Minister, Conor Murphy, had been working on a budget from October 2021 to the spring of 2022. When he brought forward a budget, he failed to find any other party in the Northern Ireland Executive, which discussed the matter, to agree to it. So nobody should run away with the idea that having the Executive and the Assembly back will lead to some kind of wonderful outcome as far as the budget is concerned, because Sinn Féin brought forward a budget which was rejected by all the other parties—that was the state of play when the Assembly and the Executive finished. I remind your Lordships that at the start of 2017, Sinn Féin again held the Finance Minister position and the then Minister and his colleagues collapsed the Assembly and the Executive and refused to bring forward a budget for Northern Ireland, even though we were facing a very short timescale. It is important for context that your Lordships are aware of those points.

On the amendment to the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, I fail to recall that any such amendment was brought forward at any point during the three years when Sinn Féin collapsed the Executive. Indeed, I asked the Library to check how many vociferous statements had been made by members of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, Northern Ireland spokespersons, people who take an interest in Northern Ireland, and Front-Bench spokespersons, and I found very few examples of them being prepared to come out and say, “Sinn Féin is at fault for the collapse of the Assembly”, or to seek any kind of punishment or redress. Instead, it was dressed up in all sorts of talk about the parties needing to come together. So it is interesting—and it will not be lost on unionists in Northern Ireland—that we have this approach to unionist parties, at a time when unionists are making the point that they cannot operate a protocol which is injurious to the union, the very thing we are there to defend and promote. The purpose or import of the amendment to the Motion would be, in effect, to expel a party from the political process: it would have no resources for offices, no staff and no salaries—nothing.

It is interesting, again, that when Sinn Féin refused to take their seats in the other place, extraordinary efforts were made to ensure that they received all the benefits of office, including salaries and staff. They even get a parliamentary allowance; it is not Short money, but it is actually looser than Short money and can be spent on all sorts of political promotion, courtesy of the UK taxpayer. Not a word is said about any of that; there is silence. That too is not lost on unionists.

The fundamental reason we are in this position this evening is the Northern Ireland protocol. The Minister said that he was disappointed about the lack of a functioning Executive, but I thought he would have mentioned the protocol and the disappointment we all feel in the unionist community in Northern Ireland—and, indeed, people beyond that—at the damage done by the protocol over the last few years. To suggest that we should now, in effect, expel parties—including the main unionist party—from the political process in Northern Ireland, which is the real import of the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, is a fundamental rewriting of the Belfast agreement. We are that told that it is important to have all these safeguards for the agreement, but the very things that are now being suggested are completely undermining any basis on which the Belfast agreement, as amended by St Andrews, is predicated. People talk about protecting the Belfast agreement, but they are quite happy to jettison at the first opportunity the fundamental requirements of the agreement when it suits them. When the rules come up with a result they do not like, they then change the rules. Yet we are told that the protocol is necessary to protect the agreement.

I have set out in the amendment to the Motion the reasons why the Bill is, unfortunately, necessary and why the Northern Ireland protocol, in our view, has to be replaced. It is incompatible with the Belfast agreement, as amended by St Andrews; it breaches the principle of consent; it undermines the three-strand approach of the political process in Northern Ireland, which has been the basis of people’s approach to the Northern Ireland situation for many years; and it undermines the cross-community voting mechanism. The idea that we have any kind of democratic consent in the Northern Ireland Assembly to the protocol, many years after it was implemented, but only on the basis of a majority vote—the only vote of any significance, which cannot be held without a consensus, or which is capable of being turned into a consensus with a cross-community vote—again undermines the agreement. It is undemocratic.

It is important to spell this out, because anyone listening to this debate, having heard the Minister outline the position, would think, “It is all just some arcane dispute between the Northern Ireland parties in Belfast; if only they would get their act together”, but it is far more fundamental than that. The Northern Ireland Assembly, if restored, will be denuded of powers to legislate over vast swathes of the economy: agri-food, manufactured goods and so on. VAT will be applied differently in Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. We have already seen some of the outworking of that in the Budget Statement by the former Chancellor, now Prime Minister. State aid rules are applied completely differently, as we are under the EU regime. What self-respecting elected representative of the Northern Ireland Assembly, of whichever party, wants to celebrate and argue for a situation where they are deprived of the ability to make laws in over 300 areas of legislation that, rightfully, are mainly devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly, but reserved to Parliament in some cases? It defies logic, it is not democratic and it is contrary to the New Decade, New Approach agreement, the basis on which the devolution settlement was restored in 2020 and which committed to the restoration of the United Kingdom internal market.

As has been illustrated in the court action taken by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, among others, the protocol has breached the Acts of Union themselves. Of course, we will no doubt hear more about that tomorrow in the Supreme Court. The Government have vigorously defended the argument that the Acts of Union have been subsumed or derogated from to accommodate the Northern Ireland protocol.

For all those reasons, unionists who have any concern whatever for the future of Northern Ireland, or indeed anyone who is concerned with democracy and the betterment of the people of Northern Ireland, should have concerns about the protocol. Over many months before the Executive ceased to function, when the Democratic Unionist Party actually held the position of First Minister, we warned that we were coming to the point where we had to have some progress on these issues—and eventually that came to a head, as we know. Other noble Lords will no doubt talk about the costs of the trader support services, the digital assistance scheme and the movement assistance scheme, and all that. Taxpayers are paying out almost half a billion pounds—£500 million—and that is purely taxpayers’ support to help people fill in forms digitally, and all the rest of it. That sum could be in this budget, but it has been diverted to deal with the complications of the protocol. That is before adding in the costs to business and all that—and those of us who sit on the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland Select Committee will have heard from companies such as Marks & Spencer, which has spent up to £30 million setting up facilities for moving goods to Northern Ireland. That is just one company. These are extraordinary amounts of money—£500 million on that alone will go a long way to helping some of the problems that we have in Northern Ireland with education, health, policing and so on.

I hope sincerely that we can make real, significant progress towards finding a solution to the protocol problem. The Government have laid out their position in the Command Paper of July 2021, and the Explanatory Memorandum for the protocol Bill said very clearly what needed to be done to have a permanent, sustainable solution. I hope that the Government will hold firm to those commitments. They were not made by the DUP; they were not tests set by us. These were statements made by the Government of what needed to be done, and they cannot easily be put forward and then retracted. Indeed, the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, when he came to Belfast, at a meeting in Bangor when he was running for the leadership, committed to the objectives of the protocol Bill. We will measure what comes out of the talks against those commitments and against our seven tests.

If we are hearing, as we seem to be, that we will be left in a situation going forward where we will still be under EU jurisdiction and EU laws, with the oversight of the European Court of Justice at arm’s length, or whatever it is, that gross breach of sovereignty, as I have already outlined, will be something that unionists cannot accept. We are entitled to be part of the United Kingdom, to have our laws made by our elected representatives and to have internal trade of the United Kingdom flow freely between all parts of the United Kingdom. So we have to have something that will work, going forward.

Some of the talk about green lanes and red lanes and all the rest of it means different things to different people. It seems to us that it is very much based on the proposals put forward by the European Union last October. It could be that it has moved on from that—but we should remember that, even if we solve the issue of red and green lanes and all that, it does not get to the heart of the problem of the differences in terms of divergence and diversion of trade, and the problems that will exist if you have a lot of the laws of Northern Ireland being made by a foreign political entity in its interests, and not in the interests of Northern Ireland, and with no say or vote by anyone in Northern Ireland. That cannot be sustainable going forward.

If we find ourselves in a position whereby the Government do not hold fast to their stated position and the commitments that they have made to the people of Northern Ireland and that they have made about the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and the free flow of trade within the UK internal market, we will be in a position of looking to the longer term governance of Northern Ireland without an Assembly and an Executive. That is unfortunate, but it will be the reality of the situation.

There may be attempts, as we have heard already, to chuck out the Belfast agreement, St Andrews and all the rest of it. I would suggest that that is a very dangerous course to embark on—a very dangerous course to embark on. We need to work to try to restore those institutions, but on the basis of agreements that are already there. As we heard previously from the Dispatch Box and on the Front Bench, the only means of making changes to the current arrangements is by a sufficient consensus of unionists and nationalists to make those changes, and anyone who suggests that you breach that fundamental principle of political decision-making and institution-making in Northern Ireland is going down a very dangerous path, as I said.

So what should happen? We cannot have a return to the situation where, over a long period, civil servants are left to run Northern Ireland, even with so-called guidance. We cannot have years of stasis with no political guidance. This is the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Ministers in His Majesty’s Government are responsible for the good governance of Northern Ireland. Indeed, I think that those words were part of a previous election manifesto commitment of the Conservative Party, where it was made clear that, in the absence of devolution, it is the responsibility of the Westminster Government to make decisions—decisions that will be accountable, whereby we can question and query and hold Ministers to account. Civil servants cannot be put in that position; it is unfair to them and to the people of Northern Ireland.

The choice is not between having no Executive and therefore no Government. There is an alternative—we can have government—and it is up to the Government here to take on that responsibility. I have to say that some people may say that that means that there is decision-making from London as opposed to Belfast, but, over recent times we are already seeing a constant working against the devolved settlement, in any case. We have seen it with abortion regulations and with the legacy proposals, and we have seen it with changing the voting mechanism for the protocol. We have seen it most recently in relation to the statutory instrument due to be brought forward soon in relation to border control posts. All those are devolved issues, yet the Government decided to intervene. So they are already doing it, but it seems that they pick and choose which areas to override the devolved settlement on. So what I am saying is that we cannot go back to the situation where civil servants are running Northern Ireland; we have to have a situation where there are accountable Ministers, if not at Stormont then here.

It is important that these matters are explored in detail, and they have to be explored in this House in this Parliament by the representatives of the people of Northern Ireland.