Queen’s Speech

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. I agree with much of what she said about the state of the courts and the justice system, and I particularly wish to echo her call for the Lord Chancellor to be restored to his former status.

I support the Motion for an humble Address. On the whole, I welcome the Government’s programme and look forward to taking part in Bills as diverse as those on procurement, transport and HS2. However, I have serious concerns about some measures, particularly the Online Safety Bill, where I thought the case made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and seconded, if you like, by my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, was completely compelling. I have very serious concerns about that.

I am anxious to ensure that the conversion therapy Bill protects young people from irreversible surgical and chemical interventions. I also want to be clear that any measure to tighten the parole system, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, does not delay the resolution of the continuing scandal of prisoners serving historic indefinite sentences for public protection.

However, I want to give the bulk of my remarks today to the question of Northern Ireland, on this day in which we are discussing our constitution. The noble Baroness, Lady Merron, said that she regretted a number of measures that did not appear in the gracious Speech. I deeply regretted the absence of a clear commitment to repeal the legislation putting the Northern Ireland protocol into effect. We have subsequently heard more about a Bill that did not appear in the gracious Speech than we have about any of the measures that did appear in it, but we still have no idea what that Bill might contain. It needs not to tinker with the protocol but to remove it.

Let me deal with two objections. The first is the “You signed it” argument, quintessentially ad hominem in character. Implicit in that is the idea that, if the Northern Ireland protocol is not working, the Brexit deal as a whole was a bad deal. That is far from the case. Any major project that might be undertaken, such as building yourself a house, may go perfectly well in a large number of respects but none the less have a flaw—you find the garage block roof is leaking. Of course, you can spend a very long time arguing about who was responsible for that, and you can even spend time litigating about it, but none of that actually fixes the problem. The focus of government has to be on fixing the problem—that is what the Government have to do. I hope we hear no more of that argument, which, as I say, is almost childish—a political point-scoring.

The second argument is that we may breach an international agreement. This was an argument advanced frequently and with vigour during your Lordships’ debate of Part 5 of the Internal Market Bill, but I noted then that a number of noble Lords, not least those with judicial experience, said that there might be a case for doing so if a harm could be pointed to. With more than a year’s experience, we can now point to the harms done by the Northern Ireland protocol. I shall not, because I do not have the direct experience, dwell on the harms done to the economy—perfectly predictable harms, as the European Union insisted on an almost overnight transition from the sourcing of the inputs of that economy from one market to another. I shall not expand on the split between the communities that has been sharpened and which now threatens the institutions of the Good Friday agreement and the peace process, because I do not have the intimate knowledge of Northern Irish politics that others bring to your Lordships’ House.

I end by pointing only to the damage that the Northern Ireland protocol is doing to us and to our union—to our United Kingdom. We have discussed human rights a great deal today. How can we consider ourselves a United Kingdom when tax rates such as VAT are set in part of our United Kingdom by a foreign power with no representation by the people who suffer the incidence of that tax? How can the Government be said to be discharging their obligations to the welfare of all the people within their territory if some of those people are dependent for the supply of medicines on legislation passed unilaterally in a foreign Parliament? If the present situation continues, we will in effect have given up on the union.

We have not seen the Bill. As I said, I hope it is comprehensive. I say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that we will not get a third chance to put this right. A measure that goes off at half cock will simply not do.