Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Lord Bew Excerpts

Thursday 7th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, who not only is responsible for this debate but has loved the Province for so long. It is not always the easiest place to love so I am really grateful to him.

I will begin by making the core point about the protocol and the current destabilising effects of the protocol in Northern Ireland. A year ago now, Maroš Šefčovič wrote on behalf of the European Union to the noble Lord, Lord Frost, saying that the protocol was the only means of protecting the single market. I accept that the United Kingdom has a responsibility to protect the single market, although it has turned out, with grace periods and so on, that the threat may not be anything like as great as imagined in theory. He also said it was the only way to preserve the Good Friday agreement. The history of the past year has not dealt kindly with that remark. The Good Friday agreement is dead. All three strands are kaput, not merely in a crisis, but dead. It really has to be brought home that this is where we now actually are.

The crucial question now is did the EU mean it when it said in the withdrawal agreement that it was determined to maintain the Good Friday agreement in all its aspects or is this simply a responsibility of the UK Government? The UK Government have a responsibility under international law to maintain a prior international agreement from the time of the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, that says that the UK Government have a responsibility to maintain the economic rights of the people of Northern Ireland and to deliver political solutions on the basis of equality of esteem.

At this point it is quite clear that the unionist community is ferociously alienated from the protocol. We have to discover where the EU really is on that. Some of the academic commentaries on the protocol, published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, are saying that all the things in it that you might have thought would give comfort to the United Kingdom are actually meaningless and there is no comfort there at all. Does that include the commitment to maintain the Good Friday agreement and to work to preserve it? That requires substantial movement on the UK side. If it does not, the UK must say that it will live up to its obligations under the prior international agreement to maintain the GFA.

Briefly on the union, I will say something that may not go down terribly well with unionist opinion in Northern Ireland. It is very important not to fall guilty of a belief in the project of high unionism. It is dead. The Act of Union, what it says about trade, disappeared with the Government of Ireland Act 1920. One cannot imagine a world in which Irish nationalists do not exist, either in Northern Ireland or elsewhere on the island of Ireland. They took 26 countries out of the Act of Union. To take as an example the Second World War, in which Northern Ireland made a major contribution to the eventual British victory, there was no conscription in Northern Ireland because of the pressure of Irish nationalism. Margaret Thatcher’s Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985 was affected by the pressure of Irish nationalism. Again and again, Northern Ireland has had to mutate due to the pressures that come from Irish nationalism, and the protocol is just the latest in a long line.

I read things saying that before the protocol we had equality of citizenship. There has not been equality of citizenship. The Labour Party does not organise in Northern Ireland. All these things pre-dated the protocol. The union survives only by being flexible. The part of the world that I now live in, County Antrim, has been represented in this Parliament for 222 years. The latest polling implies that it is going to be represented in this Parliament for decades to come, but it is up to the people of Northern Ireland to make what they can of that and not to chase the chimera of a perfect world in which nationalists do not exist and the changes that they have effected in British legislation do not exist. That is incompatible with any serious capacity to maintain the union.

The strength of the union lies in its flexibility. Its durability is related to its flexibility and therefore its ability to deal with many gritty compromises. The protocol is extremely unsatisfactory. The EU has to change its position. The UK has to win the argument that it has obligations to the people of Northern Ireland under its previous international agreement which must be upheld, but there will still be elements of the settlement which reflect the interests of Irish nationalists and the people of Ireland as a whole. This fantasy world that is now developing, where a pure, high union can be restored, having existed before the protocol, simply is not true. It is a delusion and a snare.