Brexit: UK-Irish Relations

Lord Hain Excerpts

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, it is not the fault of the Minister, whom I like and admire—he is from Wales, after all—that the important issues raised in this report are no nearer to being addressed now than they were when it was published a year ago. We are supposed to be engaging in negotiations with the most profound implications for our country since the Second World War, yet we are alarmingly ill prepared.

First, the Chancellor proposed that there should be a transition period up until the next election in 2022, during which time arrangements would stay more or less as they are now: the Labour leadership has now rightly argued that we would remain in the single market and in the customs union. But within days the Chancellor was forced to perform what is colourfully known in sections of the British media as a “reverse ferret”. So we have the International Trade Secretary prodding at the accelerator, the Chancellor grabbing the handbrake and the Prime Minister sitting in the back staring out of the window as the cliff edge gets nearer and nearer.

The Government’s paper on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and between the UK and the EU is long on good intentions and aspiration but breathtakingly short on practical detail as to how it will actually work after Brexit. It restates that no one wants a return to the hard border of the past and that there should continue to be free movement of people and goods. It calls for “flexible and imaginative solutions” eight times. No wonder this repeated rhetoric has left EU diplomats rolling their eyes.

References to maintaining the integrity of the Good Friday agreement run through it, but the reality is that once the UK leaves the customs union in less than two years, the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland will fundamentally change. It would seem that the Government’s favoured way to deal with how to square this particular circle is to pretend that the circle does not exist and invite the EU simply to ignore the border on the basis that 80% of north-to-south trade is carried out by,

“micro, small and medium sized businesses’.

Since, in the words of the paper, it is not “economically significant international trade”, it can be waved through: all 80% of it. So there will be no border checks and indeed no,

“physical border infrastructure … for any purpose”.

That means not just no border security posts but no CCTV cameras or number plate recognition equipment—none of the earlier-promised fairy-tale technology replacing customs officers. It is not so much a frictionless border as a telepathic one. Rather like the poor, “smugglers” will always be with us, it would seem. This is less a solution to the problem than pie-in-the-sky fantasy. No wonder that, reacting to the Government’s Irish border paper, the European Union accused the UK of “magical thinking”.

But are not the Government playing a much more ominous game than that? They are in effect saying to the EU, and Ireland in particular, “As part of the divorce settlement you can have the border. Do what you like with it. The Irish border will be your customs union frontier—you deal with it”. If the EU wants to know who or what is coming from outside the customs union into the EU through Northern Ireland, that is up to the EU, Ministers say. If that means a “hard” border, that will be the EU’s fault, not ours. That is a very dangerous game to play with the peace process in Northern Ireland.

A hard Brexit will undermine and destabilise the delicate balance of the three strands of the Good Friday agreement: relationships within Northern Ireland, between Belfast and Dublin and between London and Dublin on which the peace settlement is based. But cynically dumping the border problem on Brussels leaves one obvious problem for the advocates of the hardest of Brexits: how to reconcile the demand that we “take control of our borders” while leaving open the one that is closest to us: a back door through the Irish border to illegal, uncontrollable migration and easy jihadi entryism.

The Government invite us to believe that this long, winding and porous external European Union customs frontier—with 300 or so crossing points along its 300-mile length and farms with a foot in each jurisdiction—can be safely left unpoliced. Smugglers, customs fraudsters, people traffickers and terrorists will behave impeccably out of respect for Irish solidarity. Small companies, accounting for 80% of cross-border business, do not matter. Large ones will nobly abide by all the rules and standards required of the single market and voluntarily pay all their tariff duties.

In the much-vaunted new free-trade nirvana that awaits post-Brexit Britain with no Irish border controls, US chicken, New Zealand lamb, Australian beef, Chinese steel and Indian cars can be imported into Belfast, sent a couple of hours down the road to the ports of Dublin or Cork and exported tariff-free to France or Germany. Surely this is nonsense on stilts.

However, my major concern is not simply pious platitudes by Ministers on the border; it is that the border looks like becoming just another bargaining chip in the negotiations with Brussels. But these thorny and intractable issues around the border would not arise if we remained in the customs union, as the Taoiseach has rightly argued. In my view, the only way of resolving the border conundrum is for Northern Ireland to be within the same customs union and single market as the Republic—either Northern Ireland alone or, far more preferably, the whole of the United Kingdom. It is a fact that you can leave the European Union and still stay within the single market and the customs union. That is a fact, despite the Government’s dogmatic denials. However, the International Trade Secretary believes that he can find free-trade suitors after the UK’s divorce with Europe. Good luck to him and all who sail in him, I say.

But is a bad free-trade deal better than no free-trade deal? Anyone who has read the transcript of President Trump’s interview with the Wall Street Journal in July will know that he expects chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef to be on its way here before the ink is dry on any free-trade deal. If there is no EU deal and we end up trading on WTO terms, the Northern Ireland Meat Exporters Association has said that,

“our export trade will be decimated”,

and that it,

“would have immediate and devastating consequences for jobs in farming, processing and the wider rural economy”.

If the farmers of Northern Ireland have a problem with that, who speaks for them? For there is still no Executive and the Government continue to wring their hands and dither, as indeed they have done so disturbingly for most of this year.

What if post-Brexit trade deals on whatever terms have an adverse effect on Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales? The International Trade Secretary’s solution is simply to bypass them. We are told that he does not even want representatives from the devolved Administrations to sit on any new board of trade that may be set up.

The proposals set out in the position papers and elsewhere, even as negotiating gambits, are delusional, contradictory and potentially very damaging. They do not address the very real issues that the excellent report of the European Committee has raised. In Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen told Alice,

“I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”.

Judging by what the Government are putting before us, she is clearly not alone.

What is proposed is not a Brexit for the United Kingdom nor even for Britain; it is a Brexit for the ideological hard right and we go down that path at our great peril, especially for Northern Ireland and the hard-won peace and democratic process, which, tragically, this Government seem airily casual about and so ignorantly indifferent to.