Withdrawal Agreement: Legal Position

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney General]

I was puzzled as to what I was to answer. I disagree with my hon. Friend. We will leave legally on 29 March. To get back, we would have to apply for accession under article 49. We will be in a fundamentally different position on 30 March, if we can get there—and we have to get there, because that will honour the verdict given by the British people on 23 June 2016. The best way of ensuring that we do that, whatever the unsatisfactory elements that I accept are involved in this deal, is to take the key to the door of the cell, and get out on 29 March. This deal is the best means of doing that.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

In the Attorney General’s somewhat bombastic responses to hon. Gentlemen and hon. Ladies, he has not addressed the issue to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds) referred: the backstop down the Irish sea. Will he outline the legal implications of Northern Ireland entering into a customs union with no voice or vote for an indefinite period of time, which to all intents and purposes would create a united Ireland without the mechanism of a border poll, a vote called for within the Belfast agreement?

[The Attorney General]

The hon. Member puts his finger on something that I do regard as being one of the undesirable features of the backstop, which is that there will be rules passed relating to goods. The trade in goods is a narrow field of human and public life, but rules will be passed and the people of Northern Ireland will not have the right of representation in their passage. That is why I think it is essential it should be temporary, why we must strive to make it so, why the extension of the implementation period is a real option in those circumstances, and why I believe, for the reasons I have already given, we can avoid it or avoid it being of any great length.