Good Friday Agreement: Impact of Brexit

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I remember when my father was posted as a lieutenant-colonel from the Indian Army to the British Army in Warminster, Wiltshire, seeing the Troubles as a young boy living among soldiers. I then went back to school and to university in India, and came back for my higher education here in the UK. In 1982, just as I was about to move into the International Students House in Regent’s Park, there was a tragic attack on our soldiers there. As an Indian coming over here, I have witnessed and felt the Troubles as a young boy and a student.

Later on, I had the privilege of going to Northern Ireland with the UK-India talks and seeing it on the ground after the Good Friday agreement. Anyone who goes to Belfast today will see the high fences and barriers that still exist, in spite of that agreement. The Good Friday agreement was precious. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, who is not in his place, won a Nobel Peace Prize for it. We are grateful to everyone involved who enabled what is now an amazing 20-year-old peace process to have happened. What is happening today? For the sake of something called Brexit, we are threatening the very union and the very peace of the United Kingdom. At the heart of the Good Friday agreement was north-south co-operation and east-west co-operation—they were absolutely interlinked.

Look at the movement of people, to which the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, alluded. There is a free travel area between Ireland and the UK. We are not in Schengen. If somebody gets a visa for the UK, they can go to Ireland; if somebody gets a visa for Ireland, they can come to the UK. However, that is in the context of being in the European Union. People such as Arlene Foster say that the Good Friday agreement is not sacrosanct and praise Boris Johnson’s Brexit vision. But the Good Friday agreement was created in the context of the European Union and the free movement of people, goods, services and capital, and of the UK and Ireland united in this context.

Now we have the backstop. I remember sitting next to an EU Prime Minister who said, “We’ve got the backstop”. I said, “How can this backstop logically work? It cannot work”. There is no workable backstop in the way that it is being proposed at the moment. In fact, Sammy Wilson initially described a Canada-style trade deal as “too vague”. We have the DUP saying that it will not have a border between Ireland and the UK, and Ireland saying that it will not have a border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. How will this work in practice?

The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said that Northern Ireland is the Achilles heel of Brexit. Then, there are those who say that this is the tail wagging the dog. How can they say that? Let me put it into context. Two of our children were not old enough to vote in 2016, but before March 2019 they will be old enough to vote. They are part of the more than 1.5 million people who did not have the franchise at the time, and it is their future that has been decided by something that is two years out of date. What are we doing?

When we negotiate with European Union members, they are the baddies because they are bullying us. Hang on: we elected to leave and then we drew our red lines—no customs union, no single market and no ECJ. How will that work in the Northern Ireland situation? It cannot work in practice.

The irony is that the Government say that they are implementing the will and mandate of the people. However, the referendum was two years ago and the facts have changed—the world has changed. I remember taking part in a debate on a European Union Committee report before the Brexit vote. It said it was going to be so complicated that it would be impossible. The most complicated part is the Northern Ireland issue, but it is just one of the complicated aspects.

Goods move freely. Recently, I spoke at Board Bia in Ireland, where an example was given. Baileys Irish Cream is made in Dublin, goes to be bottled in Northern Ireland, comes back to Dublin and is then exported around the world. It is frictionless. There are goods going from Dublin across the sea and across the land to Calais. It takes 10 hours and is frictionless. If you try to take goods around, it takes 40 hours. Are we going to give up all this?

What about identity? What about the will of the people? The reality is that the latest polls show that 80% of the readers of an Irish newspaper reject sacrificing Northern Ireland peace for Brexit. The Northern Ireland result was 56% to 44% to remain. What about their will? On the one hand, we are told that we will have separate arrangements to keep them out. On the other hand, we are told that we have to respect the will of the whole of the UK. Will the Minister square that circle for me?

There is the sad and dangerous potential that Brexit could reignite conflict in Northern Ireland. I really hope that that does not happen. How will it work in practice if we have a common regulatory area and a separate customs union for the whole of the UK? You would need a single market as well to keep the Northern Ireland-Ireland-Britain relationship going. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, asked, what about the control of free movement of people? If there is free movement of EU people into Ireland, they can freely move into Northern Ireland and therefore they can move into the UK. This is an absolute nonsense.

The great Jacob Rees-Mogg says that any divide in the customs regimes governing Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK after Brexit will be completely “impossible”. So there we have it; he said it. And Nicola Sturgeon is now saying that, given that the Scots would be competing for investment as well, any backstop deal would lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom. I conclude by saying that it is Great Britain and Northern Ireland that make up the United Kingdom. Let us never destroy that.