Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol: Scrutiny of EU Legislative Proposals (European Affairs Committee Sub-Committee Report)

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Weir, whom I first encountered some 30 years ago when he was running the Young Unionists. His was a strong and true voice for County Down at the Stormont Assembly, and it will be again in our councils. I add my praise to everyone else’s in favour of the chairman of our Select Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Jay, whose temperate, measured and judicious approach has brought, out of a very disparate Select Committee and with the assistance of our staff, a very useful report. Everything that people said about the House of Lords before I became a Member—how disinterested it could be and how people could raise their eyes above the partisan scrum to try to discern some kind of consensus—has turned out to be true, at least in my Select Committee. For that, I thank all my fellow members.

I associate myself very strongly with the balance of the report. There is a sense, which is very widespread across the channel and in chunks of our media here, that it has always been the UK which is unreasonable, that we created the whole problem, and that any compromise will largely involve movement from our side. However, such a view does not survive first contact with the reality on the ground. The UK could have been extremely unreasonable; we could have stood on the letter of the law and said, “Look, we are a sovereign country, we are doing our own thing, and we are not going to raise so much as a matchstick of infrastructure on our side of the border; what you do on your side of the border is up to you”. That would have been legal under international law.

The Republic of Ireland opted out of our customs union in 1921, to the horror of Lloyd George, who thought that that was the final thing that could have symbolised some kind of continuing relationship between the two states. There would have been no comeback from that, if you like, but we did not do that. We did not do that because, first, we wanted to be good neighbours to the European Union, and, secondly, we recognised an obligation to both traditions in Northern Ireland—so we went out of our way to help the EU deliver on that aim. Let us remember that it is the EU that says it needs the border; there has never been any suggestion of that on our side.

All the provisions in the protocol Bill, which stalled but will come back in your Lordships’ House, are to that end: the red and green channel; Northern Ireland having the same right of taxation with representation that the rest of the world has; the freedom for companies in Northern Ireland that do not export to be able to follow UK regulation; and arbitration in accordance with every other international treaty. Those have been put together precisely so that they do not cause any inconvenience or damage to the EU, yet I do not think that that is acknowledged at all.

I sit on the Joint Parliamentary Assembly between this Parliament and the EU, and there is a very widespread sense there that the UK, as it were, is not moving an inch to try to accommodate its neighbours. In fact, at the last meeting, I made an intervention, saying that I am very pleased that we, on this side, do not require tests or checks on EU imports, and that I hope we will carry on doing that, because these are our friends, neighbours and allies and we should trust their standards. A large number of members were so preconditioned to expect me to have said something else that they all raged at me—“How dare you say that we should not have tests or checks on UK imports”—because people hear what they are expecting. There is an imbalance in the readiness to resolve the issue.

I very much hope that we will use Northern Ireland as a bridge between the UK and the EU, and that it will become a symbol of our friendship, but that requires both sides to recognise that the other side has legitimate concerns. It is a legitimate concern for any sovereign country not to have an internal border or a chunk of its territory governed from overseas without democratic representation. I am sure that all noble Lords in this House wishes the EU prosperity and success—I certainly do; I want it to be rich so that it is a better customer. As David Hume observed in 1777, the increase in the commerce of any one nation, far from hurting its neighbours, must serve to augment the commerce and riches of its neighbours. I just hope that that sense is reciprocated.