Resetting the UK-EU Relationship (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, as I look back over the last decade in Brexit Britain, I am ever more convinced that the arguments for Britain’s wholehearted engagement with mainland Europe are as strong now as they were when I first, in the late 1960s, became a supporter of this country joining the European Economic Community.

Brexit is not an endorsement of treating the European Union as a political leper or pretending either that our near neighbours do not exist or that we do not share a whole range of interests with them. Rather, it indicated that our then way of doing the necessary business with them—at least, this was the case on polling day—did not command the country’s support. Against that background, the national interest demands that we find a different way of conducting that business which is acceptable not only to us but to our interlocutors, who need to have a firm belief in our good faith. No doubt that is much easier said than done.

This excellent report, Unfinished Business: Resetting the UK-EU Relationship, mostly spells out what nowadays might be described as the elite high-level aspect of much of this. As this debate has shown, current geopolitical circumstances show this is a priority. At the same time, we should think about some of the more domestic implications.

I say this because for a number of years I chaired the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership. There are many less high-level and “politically sexy”, but nevertheless very important, issues which need to be taken into account. The point of business is business. The business of business is business and the closer it is to home, the better. Many SMEs I know of which had integrated EU-wide supply-chain businesses found they could no longer compete because of tariffs and bureaucracy. The rules of cabotage have seriously diminished opportunities for hauliers, because the truck that you send abroad has to come home. The current crisis in agriculture, in which I am engaged, owes a great deal to what was agreed as part of leaving. All this amounts to the loss of real jobs and negative growth, affecting real people with great immediacy all the time across the whole country.

It is commonplace to say that one of the reasons for our current national distrust with politics goes back to alienation from the European Union, because it was so distant and failed to understand much of the real world away from the glitzy centre. It is a view I do not entirely share. At least as significant was the estrangement of UK national politics from the European aspect. UK political parties and the House of Commons as a whole always, it seemed to me, resented it. I speak as someone who served for 10 years in the European Parliament with a dual mandate. Rather surprisingly, I was elected on a Sunday and inherited a peerage the following Thursday—neither of which is now possible.

As the report rightly points out, resetting this relationship is an ongoing process, but that process has to provide emotional buy-in by the UK political establishment and the wider public as a whole so that it becomes part of the political normal, to avoid a repeat of last time. The past, as advice to retail investors always points out, is not necessarily a good guide to future performance. But, as this report points out, it has to be the starting point, recognising, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said all those years ago, that no man can stand in the same river twice, since both the man and the river are not the same the second time round. Nevertheless, the national interest demands that we get into the water.

Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 7th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in my few remarks, I first thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for having brought this debate forward. Like him, I have been thinking about the problems of Ireland since my time at Cambridge but, unlike him, this is the first time I have ever spoken about them in your Lordships’ House. I want to comment from the perspective of the union as a whole, rather than Northern Ireland itself. I live in the north of England and have considerable Irish family links—mainly of the Anglo-Irish “Protestant with a horse” variety. I actually live within sight of Scotland, so the possibility of the break-up of our union is much closer to home than anything else, from that perspective.

If you look at a historical atlas, it is remarkable how the boundaries of countries change. There is nothing immutable about what exists now and our systems of governance. We are all subject to that and I do not believe there is an absolute best in these matters. Just as I believe that England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are all stronger and better places together, that relationship can exist only if there is a shared and accepted equilibrium between them. If that is lost then the union, whatever its legal form, is likely to go with it.

I am a supporter of Northern Ireland as an integral part of the union of which we are all part for as long as Northern Ireland wants. It contributes to our way of life and we all benefit; the reverse is true, too. Inherent in these arrangements is a recognition that there is a link, in more than a merely mechanical sense, and that we are all in it together in a real way. It is for this reason that part of the way to accommodate different systems and strains of different places, across our union, is to set them in a frame of devolved or federal administrations, according to variable geometry. This, interestingly, is accepted by the present UK Government acting in their capacity for local government reform in this country. The only real judgment that can be made is whether it works and is accepted.

In our country, for better or worse, the dominant element is England and its relationship with the other three nations is inevitably the most important. Clearly, the character of Northern Ireland’s general relationship with England, and Stormont’s with Westminster, is crucial. If these do not work to both sides’ satisfaction then, sooner or later, the arrangement collapses. A successful union cannot survive a complete falling apart internally.

I chair the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership and business in Cumbria, across a range of sectors, took a very big hit from Brexit and all the economic consequences it entailed. That was true elsewhere, as well. The withdrawal agreement, of which the Northern Ireland protocol is an integral part, saved us from the considerable additional economic damage and chaos of no deal. Yet at the same time, as we know, there were enormous shenanigans—if I can use that word—over the agreed border arrangements between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. I was surprised by how damaging that appeared to be and had not appreciated how strong the commercial links were.

Nevertheless, to those affected it seemed gratuitous, since everyone in this country was being taken out of the single market and suffering the pain that, we were told, was in the national interest. This simply made it worse. To us, this looked like self-obsession to the exclusion of everything else. After all, as I said, we are all in it together and this looked like exceptionalism from those who already receive much more attention, resources and support than we do in Cumbria.

This perception of exceptionalism is perhaps the greatest threat to the union and unionism. After all, unionism in Northern Ireland has to be more than simply not being in the south. Every union has at least two parties and if our union is to survive, every component has to recognise that it is part of the same larger team. If not, it is finished. The point of being in the same team is that we are better off together.