United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Monday 21st September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

If I may, I will come to the right hon. Gentleman’s point very shortly, and then I will happily give way to him.

We would not take these steps lightly. We hope it will never be necessary to use these powers, and we would do so only if, in our view, the EU was engaged in a material breach of its duties of good faith or other obligations. We would, of course, always activate appropriate formal dispute resolution mechanisms with the aim of finding a solution through this route in parallel to any domestic legislation. I draw the Committee’s attention to the statement that the Government made on 17 September .

[Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

Can I ask my hon. Friend to go just a little further than he has just gone? He has explained already that the Government may end up in a position where entirely outrageous behaviour on the part of the EU might lead to a conclusion that no Government could possibly accept. Can I ask him to confirm that in those circumstances the Government would explore to the fullest all the options available to them within the withdrawal agreement before resorting to any breach of international law outside the withdrawal agreement—accepting, of course, that there would come a time when if the Government did not act unilaterally it would then be too late to do so?

[Mr Walker]

I absolutely hear what my right hon. and learned Friend has said, and I draw his attention to the words of the Prime Minister, who said that we would simultaneously pursue every possible redress under international law, including those provided by the protocol. In those circumstances, in addition to our steps under domestic law, we would—if we had to—make it clear that we believed that the EU was engaged in a material breach of its duties in good faith as required and provided for under the withdrawal agreement and the Vienna convention on the law of treaties.

--- Later in debate ---

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

There is so much wrong with this Bill that it is difficult to know where to start, but in the time I have available, I will concentrate my remarks on clauses 40 to 45. Those are the clauses that allow this Government to break international law and renege on the legally binding agreement that they themselves negotiated and signed up to less than a year ago—a fact that, try as they might, they can never escape from. I will also speak to amendment 41, which deals with preserving the integrity of the Good Friday agreement, on the basis of which peace has been secured in the north of Ireland for more than two decades and which seeks to defend international law from a Government who believe that somehow, uniquely and exceptionally, it does not apply to them.

On 16 June, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster stood at the Dispatch Box and said that the Government were “faithfully implementing” the withdrawal agreement, including the Northern Ireland protocol. Just 83 days later, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland stood at the same Dispatch Box and said that, yes, the Bill did break international law. This unprecedented political handbrake turn left everyone from a former Prime Minister to the United States Congress scarcely able to comprehend what they were hearing—namely, that the United Kingdom was prepared to go rogue if it did not get its own way, and to ditch its own Northern Ireland protocol. It is a remarkable, not to say ludicrous, position for a Government to find themselves in and one that suggests that this is a Government who have scant regard for the law and a particularly cavalier attitude to the Northern Ireland peace process, displaying as they do very little knowledge, understanding or care as to the consequences of their actions.

I know that we live in strange times, but who would ever have thought that we would be debating whether a UK Conservative Government could knowingly break international law and that this House, led by the self-styled champions of law and order on the Conservative Benches, would be about to say that, yes, it could? Let them be in no doubt that, in doing so, they are signalling to the international community that the United Kingdom is a bad faith actor, an untrustworthy partner whose adherence to international law is based solely on expediency. They might want to ask themselves why—why would any Government find the UK an attractive partner with which to enter a legally binding trade deal in the future?

This is a United Kingdom Internal Market Bill, but it has already attracted international attention, and none of it has been good. Even the USA, on which much of the bright post-Brexit future has been predicated, has said that anything that undermines the Good Friday agreement will have dire consequences for the UK, and that there will be no trade deal forthcoming. Did any Conservative Member think that that would not be the case? Is anyone in this House unaware of the political investment that the United States has in brokering peace in Northern Ireland? Did anyone think that, having worked so hard to secure a peace deal, the United States would just watch it crumble into dust when it proved to be an inconvenience to the UK Government? I tell you what, Madam Deputy Speaker, if they did think that then, they certainly do not think it now, because the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, declared that this UK Government must respect the Northern Ireland protocol and that, if they violate it, there will be no chance of a US-UK trade deal. That position was backed up by presidential favourite Joe Biden, who said that any deal between the UK and the United States is contingent upon respect for the Good Friday agreement. The world is telling the UK: do not breach international law, do not become that rogue state, because there will be consequences if you do.

This Bill confirms what many of us have suspected for a long time: there is no long-term or strategic thinking at the heart of this Government. Everything they do is based on expediency and is designed simply to get them off whatever immediate and inconvenient hoop they happen to be caught on. That such behaviour inevitably leads to far bigger and more complex problems further down the line seems to matter little. They are like an errant child trying to avoid facing up to their responsibilities and are prepared to say or do anything to kick that further down the road and avoid the reckoning. They have run out of road and been reduced to using the Good Friday agreement as a bargaining chip, and are on the brink of becoming an international law breaker. This Bill in its current form will see the United Kingdom cross the Rubicon. It has embarked on a course from which it cannot come back. The mask has slipped and any remaining shred of moral authority that the United Kingdom may have thought it had will have slipped with it. The consequence of this Government’s action is coming to a head, and it is a disaster entirely of their own making.

[Jeremy Wright]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara). My reservations about clauses 42, 43 and 45 of the Bill were expressed, I hope clearly, on Second Reading, so I do not need to repeat them. Those of us who have reservations and understandable concerns about the effect on the rule of law of what the Government are proposing need, I think, to answer one question, which is whether there are any conceivable circumstances in which international law could properly be broken by this country. I cannot come to the conclusion that there are no conceivable circumstances in which that might be the right course of action. If there were to be a fundamental threat to the social or economic fabric of this country and breaking the international law was the lesser evil, I can accept that that might be the right thing for this country to do it, but if we were to contemplate such a course of action three things would need to be true.

The first thing would be that there was specific authority to break international law, not general latitude. It seems to me that we have made progress on that. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) and others on negotiating with the Government in the way that they have. I am delighted to see amendment 66 brought forward in the Government’s name as a consequence; and as my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) said a moment or so ago, it is perfectly right that the House of Commons should have the opportunity to give its specific view on the specific circumstances that may obtain at that point.