EU: Future Relationship

Lord Jay of Ewelme Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB) [V]]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bowness.

I hope that the negotiations succeed and I am glad that Michel Barnier is in London today to push them along. I cannot believe that either side would willingly allow them to fail. For the Government to do so, and to heap more difficulties on an economy already reeling from Covid-19, would be the height of folly. After the ferocious blame game that would surely follow, the more sober commentators and historians would blame both sides for a massive failure of statesmanship—surely not the legacy that any Prime Minister would seek.

There are of course difficulties still to be overcome, particularly, though of course not exclusively, Ireland. For many of us, even before the referendum, Ireland has always seemed the most difficult issue of all. That is why the EU Committee’s first report after the referendum, which I launched at a press conference in Dublin, was about Ireland. The dilemma is simple: you can have a border between the north and the south, risking violence and intimidation with which a depleted Northern Ireland police force would have difficulty dealing—for which, let there be no doubt about this, both sides would be blamed—or you can have a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which would damage the integrity of the United Kingdom. Let us hope that the keenest minds in Whitehall are working with their Irish counterparts and the EU to find a way through. I confess that I cannot easily see it. However, to do anything to jeopardise the Good Friday agreement would be folly.

The worst possible course would be to go back on a treaty that the Government signed with much aplomb less than a year ago and, in doing so, to break international law. That would not solve the problem of the Irish border, but threatening to break international law, and saying quite openly in the House of Commons that that is the Government’s intention, raises an issue far larger than Brexit, and no midnight compromise would make any difference to that. It is the threat to break international law because it happens to suit us that puts us on the same level as countries that we have sought and will seek to influence. Such influence relies on trust, and it is trust that is vanishing. Threatening to break international law does nothing to advance Brexit but it seriously damages our pretensions to branch out beyond Brexit and find an influential role as global Britain—a real and depressing double whammy.