Good Friday Agreement: Impact of Brexit

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Crawley (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Dubs for securing this debate and for his steadfast friendship with Ireland. I want to say a little about both the border and east-west relations.

The signing of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement on 10 April 1998—a day that made me proud to be both a member of the Labour Party and Irish—was the culmination of many years of difficult, often ugly, compromising backroom work by men and women whose goal was to find a sustainable peace in the blood and rubble of the past 30 years. Despite their great differences and fatigued history, they brought about an agreement that has stood the test of two decades and allowed Northern Ireland to begin to prosper and live in its skin as a modern European nation. Many of these peacemakers are past and present Members of this House—I see the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, and the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, in their places. My noble friend Lord Murphy was a proud member of the class of 1998 who did what had to be done and did it well and in the interests of us all.

The agreement marked a deliberate moving on from the Troubles, with their obscene death toll of over 3,600 people and many thousands injured. It set up key political institutions such as the Northern Ireland Executive and the Assembly, which I have had the pleasure of visiting and which needs to be reinstated urgently, as noble Lords have said. It also set up the North/South Ministerial Council to develop co-operation between both parts of Ireland. Today, we see an all-Ireland market in utilities, scores of cross-border business, tourism and environmental initiatives, and of course the EU-funded cross-border peace programmes designed to reinforce the peace process.

We have to continue that work of reinforcement and not allow Brexit to dismantle it. The Good Friday/Belfast agreement saw the border controls between the north and the south move from the security arrangements of the hard border of the past—the checkpoints, the barbed wire, the watch towers and the paramilitary violence—to the modern, peaceful, free-flowing, frictionless commercial border that we see, or hardly see, today.

It is easy to forget as we talk about possible technical solutions in the future, post Brexit, that in our lifetime that border was a graveyard and a battlefield. I listened to Boris Johnson’s “chuck Chequers” speech and I read the ERG’s September paper, half-baked as it was, and I can reflect only that it is as though the shadow of the gunman had never fallen across that border and never could in the future.

We are at a crucial juncture in these negotiations and I genuinely wish everyone involved success, although I have my doubts. I would never accuse the Prime Minister of not acknowledging the historical significance of the border question but I would accuse her of setting her face against practical EU compromises that could unblock the answer and of trying to row back from her official backstop commitment of 8 December. If she continues to be unbending, the whole of the Brexit negotiations are in jeopardy.

Mr Barnier’s clock is ticking, and we all know what that sounds like. I am a remainer, as I have said before until noble Lords are probably sick of hearing it, and if there is any chance for the country to vote again on the terms, no one will be more ecstatic than me. However, if that does not happen and we leave the EU at the end of March, we must stay as close as possible to the EU—the world’s largest trading block. Whatever happens in the next few extraordinary months, we in the UK must continue to have the closest and most friendly relationship with our nearest ally, neighbour and EU member, the Republic of Ireland, with which we share the busiest air corridor in Europe and the second busiest in the world.

That brings me back to the former Foreign Secretary’s speech in the fringes of the Conservative Party conference, when he told us of the fantastic trade opportunities soon to emerge between Peru—yes, Peru—and the post-Brexit UK. His implication was that our EU membership has corrupted our awareness of so many other exciting parts of the world. Now, I mean no disrespect to any Peruvian colleagues but I have to declare that Boris Johnson’s remarks drove me into the arms of the IMF DataMapper. This, as noble Lords will know, is the statistical library of the IMF and is available to anyone who can google. The source reveals that the GDP per capita of Peru is $7,200. The GDP per capita of Ireland is $80,000. The distance for trade between London and Limerick is 595 kilometres; the distance between London and Lima is 6,324 kilometres. Meanwhile, UK exports to Ireland are currently worth $45 billion. If my sums are correct, only about $9 billion-worth of Peruvian exports reach the EU each year, let alone the UK.

It is therefore the height of hucksterism to tell the British people that there is bound to be a pot of gold waiting for us in the Andes—a Brexiteer’s El Dorado— while our commercial relations with Ireland can be safely downgraded if necessary. I am sure that Peru is a wonderful place, but even if the whole of Britain gives itself over to a diet of quinoa and nothing else, Peru is never in our lifetime going to be a major trading partner for us. Ireland, however, is and can be. As the Irish President, Michael D Higgins, said of our two counties during his state visit to the UK in 2014, we live in the shadow but also in the shelter of one another.

The genius of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement was that it allowed different communities in Northern Ireland and in the south to identify with different parts of it and then with the framework as a whole. The open border between north and south and our east-west trade with Ireland, which is so central to the agreement, must be handled with great care in the dangerous slippery months ahead.