Budget Statement

Lord Empey Excerpts

Friday 12th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP) [V]]

My Lords, like others, I wish to congratulate our maiden speakers today. I am particularly pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, in their places. I have worked with them before and look forward to doing so again.

My noble friend the Minister will not be surprised that I wish to address a few matters concerning the Northern Ireland protocol. I know that he has done a lot of work personally to make this system acceptable, but I fear that the principles behind it will in fact make it ultimately unsuccessful. I point out that both Her Majesty’s Government and the European Union say that they had to come to this arrangement because they want to support the Belfast agreement in all its forms. As a negotiator of that agreement, I assure my noble friend that the protocol is the very antithesis of that agreement and will probably be fought out in the courts in the coming weeks. There are many of us—and many of us want to talk to him and the Government—with ideas for workable alternatives that will not disrupt trade to the extent that it has been disrupted.

To point out the scale of the problem, the trade flowing across the border from the United Kingdom to the Republic of Ireland is one-tenth of 1% of European trade flows. How is it that we have ended up in such a political mess over such a modest amount of trade? It is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. There are alternatives that respect the single market of the European Union, which we have no wish to damage given it was our idea in the first place. I would like the Minister to confirm that he and his colleagues would be prepared to meet with some of us to consider our proposals.