Brexit: UK-Irish Relations

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I enter the debate with some trepidation given the contributions from people who have much greater experience of direct negotiations and of life in Northern Ireland. However, I am a member of the EU Committee and fully participated in this inquiry. I add my thanks to the staff for their hard work and for the support they gave members. I appreciated being able to work with the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, who I hope will be back with us after the Recess, and with the noble Lord, Lord Jay, whose knowledge and perspective I found incredibly useful. I appreciated his speech today.

I came out of every meeting of this inquiry thinking, “Crikey! I never thought of that before. How are we going to get hold of that? How are the Government going to deal with that?”. This is one of the real issues around Brexit. I do not believe that anybody faced up to its complexities during the referendum campaign, and we are now living with the incredible consequences. I do not think any of us expected them, and I certainly do not think that we were ready for the level of work and detail that will need to be gone through in order to achieve the sort of outcome that everybody here today and Ministers want. None of us will get any of those outcomes without a lot more detailed work.

I am disappointed that we are having this debate so long after we produced the report. I am horrified that the Government did not produce their response until an hour before this debate started, as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, said. I have not seen it yet. That gives me no confidence about the capacity of the Government to deliver on the negotiations. It makes me think that they are not ready. Why on earth did we trigger Article 50 so early when we were not ready to respond on the issue that the Government have said is one of the most important to sort out early in the negotiations?

I echo other noble Lords about how the Government will meet their ambitions. In the evidence heard in Dublin and Belfast and here in Westminster, we were all struck by those who lived and worked on either side of the border. The noble Lord, Lord Bew, has mentioned this, which was almost a relief to me because I wondered whether I dared talk about the border when he tells me it is not important. I hope that when he reads my speech he will understand why I decided to continue to talk about it. People talked about the number of times they cross the border on any day of the week and on every day of the week. Those in the food and agricultural trades talked, for example, about cattle reared on one side of the border, slaughtered on the other side, taken back for butchering and then sold on the other side of the border or to the other side of the British isles. They said how complex all that was and asked what on earth was going to happen. They talked about the movement and production of milk, and I realised how much milk on the mainland comes from the north, or at least is in the north at some stage. The cows are all over the place. But it was not just the movement of cattle or even the movement of people, but also public services. In some border areas, the main hospital or health centre is across the border and the ambulances cross the border without ever being stopped. People were worried about public services where they had been developed across borders.

If the border does not matter, that is fine, but my anxiety is that the Government are making the right sort of noises about their ambition. The letter from the Minister today and the report that was produced two or three weeks ago give us the right sense of where they want to get to but there was no confidence from the people we talked to that the IT solutions were going to be ready, or feasible for what might be necessary. Whether you talk about the border or the common travel area, at the end of the day, we are talking about where the border with the European Union is going to be. Are we really going to negotiate a border that does not matter with the European Union? At the moment, the only physical border after Brexit will be the one between the north and south of Ireland. Our ambition may well be that it is frictionless, that nobody notices it and that we are able to do what we are doing now, but that comes back to the fact that this will be our only physical border with the EU once we have left. How are the Government going to reconcile that with their overall ambitions? I do not have a clue how they are approaching that. I know that the approach that it should be done by Ireland was not well received in Ireland. We have to think that one through, and the Government need to let us know where they are going.

Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the EU all want to see the peace process moving forward. But we have had indications today from speakers from all sides in the north of Ireland, and from the others, of just how difficult that will be without Brexit, let alone with it. I hope that the Government are looking at this much more clearly than we have heard so far today.

Wherever people are coming from and whatever position they are in, the problem will be in the detail. The problem with the papers and the rhetoric from the Government is that it appears that we are saying that we do want to have our cake and eat it. I believe that by sounding like that with the European Union, we are actually undermining our acceptance of the integrity of the European Union and where it is coming from. It does not want to fracture even more, and therefore has to pay attention to its integrity in the way we go forward. That means that we have to negotiate with a lot more humility.