Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill

Lord Mackay of Clashfern Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and I am only sorry that when I took politics at Queen’s he was not a lecturer then; he came in several years later. His speech was very interesting and I think we are all much better informed because of it.

It will be no surprise to Members of your Lordships’ House that I support the protocol. I say that rather advisedly because it is a matter of contention in Northern Ireland. We must remember that the protocol arose out of Brexit and that is the fundamental issue. The people of Northern Ireland, including me, voted to reject Brexit and they wanted to remain in the European Union, but history is history, and we have to respect particular outcomes.

Therefore, in this context, it is vital that we see a successful outcome to the current negotiations between the UK and the EU. We want to see a successful outcome covering such important issues for the people in Northern Ireland as the SPS veterinary agreements, medicines, customs issues and the democratic deficit. The UK Government published a Command Paper back in July. I did not agree with the content. The European Union then produced a series of non-papers—as they are characterised—in October. Both sets of papers naturally form the basis for the ongoing negotiations.

Quite honestly, I think that it is preferable at this stage to allow the negotiations to take their course. Can the Minister advise us on what stage they are at? The Minister and I, along with the noble Lords, Lord Empey and Lord Dodds, were at a meeting yesterday with the Minister for Europe, Chris Heaton-Harris, who sits in the other place. He could not necessarily give a timetable for the completion of the negotiations, but it is vital that they are dealt with in an expeditious manner and provide solutions for all the people in Northern Ireland, including the business community and wider society.

I am a supporter of the protocol, but I want to see those—let us call them—mitigations whereby the people of Northern Ireland are able to trade within the UK internal market and the EU single market and we are all able to realise the opportunities. We have already seen those benefits so it is important that they are documented and emphasised in terms of new businesses and new opportunities for investment. They are there.

Those in the business community do not want to be saddled with the politics of this issue. They want to see business opportunities opening up in this post-Covid situation and the whole community in Northern Ireland prospering. It is much better that we await the outcome of these negotiations, which I feel should be dealt with in a very expeditious manner. Many people have been talking about instability. It is those who were perhaps involved in actions of instability who are creating the instability.

It is important that we refrain from such language and try to go back to encouraging both participants in the negotiations to complete them as quickly as possible, covering all those areas, so that outcomes are achieved that bring an improvement for all the people of Northern Ireland.

[Lord Mackay of Clashfern (Con)]

My Lords, Northern Ireland has been a matter that I have thought of as very difficult in this situation for quite a long time. I believe that the explanations that have just been given by the two speakers who went before me are vital in trying to get a settlement that will be sufficiently good for all the interests in Northern Ireland. If we are going to do that, it will be by a pretty full solution to a difficult problem.

In my view, there are no reasons just now to create more difficulty than we have to deal with. Therefore, I am very much in favour of what has been said in regard to the law about this and particularly the negotiations situation, which we need to solve. Negotiation is the only way in which we will get this right, and I hope and pray that the negotiations will be entirely successful and that the people of Northern Ireland will get a bargain that will work for them from now on.

[Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord. I share his wish for a successful outcome to the negotiations that addresses the fundamental problems that are part of the Northern Ireland protocol. However, I fear that time is very short now and there is little willingness, from what I can see, on the part of the EU to address the fundamental points. It has put forward various mitigations but none of them addresses the governance issue which we are talking about today, none of them addresses the democratic deficit, and none of them addresses the fact that part of this United Kingdom in the 21st century will have laws made for it by a foreign institution, in its interests, over which no elected representation of that part of the United Kingdom has any vote or say. That is an outrageous position.

We have to address this point. The points that have been set out in the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, have gone to the heart of trying to address this matter by saying that we have a problem. I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said, that the most recent agreement had in it something that Theresa May’s agreement did not, which really was a role for the Assembly. He is right and reminds us that when people now tell us that Theresa May’s deal was a great deal for unionism and we should have accepted it, that was not the case. It did not have any democratic legitimacy, it created a regulatory border down the Irish Sea and it would have put Northern Ireland completely inside the customs union. A lot of revisionism goes on over these matters.

The problem is that although the agreement gives a role to the Assembly, it does not give it any democratic say. The issue of the democratic deficit cannot go away. You cannot have citizens of this part of the fifth-biggest economy of the world having laws made for them that separate us from the rest of the UK—and will separate us more and more over the years to come—and create differences, not just small regulatory ones but massive differences, to our economy when we have to align with the European Union while England, Scotland and Wales go down a different path.