EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, in two minutes it is not possible to deal with the inadequacies of this legislation and the treaty—from security to services, and from bureaucracy to our diminishing global influence—but I will just say this on security. The withdrawal from Europol and Eurojust, the failure to have real-time entry into the Schengen database, and the way in which we have withdrawn from the European arrest warrant will be regretted for a very long time to come.

I want to look to the future. The Minister mentioned Gibraltar and the issues concerning Northern Ireland. The two taken together—the proposed treaty for Gibraltar and its remaining in Schengen, and the single market, which effectively continues in Northern Ireland, with the border running down the Irish Sea—paint a very different picture for the future which will be exploited by those in the Scottish National Party who seek to use every opportunity to reopen and re-engage with the destruction of the United Kingdom. I believe that this deal accelerates the possibility of a united island of Ireland within the next 25 years. It is a century since the 1921 legislation was introduced as part of the agreement on partition. A century later, we are faced with the contradictions that exist in terms of Northern Ireland and its relationship with the European Union and the contradictions that are therefore accorded to its relationship with the rest of Great Britain.

All those things bode extremely ill for the future and, to top it all, we have replaced the Brussels bureaucracy—used so much in the Brexit arguments—with the bureaucracy that we see today on our borders in terms of distribution, hold-up and diminution in trade. It is a disaster.