European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Trimble Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trimble (Con)]

My Lords, this is obviously an important debate, but I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I say that there is a certain degree of unreality about it, not just because so many people are anxious to refight old battles but because the discussion is about a negotiation. However, there is no negotiation at the moment, so to a certain extent this is so much hot air, talking about what might happen or what you might do. It is not until we get into the negotiation that we will start to encounter reality.

Therefore I say first to our Front Bench that we should trigger Article 50 as soon as possible, perhaps not even wait until the enactment of this Bill. The more time that is spent before Article 50 is enacted, the more time there is for people to waste their energy and confuse themselves—and there is plenty of that happening. I am not suggesting that immediately after triggering Article 50 things will be easy. They will be very difficult, I think, at that point.

I remember some time ago taking evidence in a Select Committee about the trade agreement, TTIP. A couple of witnesses observed to us that the European Union was a very difficult body to negotiate with. When asked why, one said that it spent so much time getting a common position among all 27 countries that it found it incredibly difficult to move away from that position. When we go in and put down our proposals, they will have already spent time working out their proposals, and I am not sure whether there will be any real progress after that.

As to how one should conduct the negotiation, I agree with the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and my noble friend Lord Lothian, and with yesterday’s speech by my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, which all included good things to bear in mind about the negotiation. But we will just have to see how that works out.

What do we do in the meantime? We have 15 to 18 months to go. Addressing our Front Bench again directly, I think we should bring on the great repeal Bill as quickly as possible so that Parliament can get into it. There will be a lot more meat in that than there is in this Bill, and all the things that people are talking about as likely amendments would be dealt with much better in that context than in the context of this Bill. In fact, as the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, observed in the Times today, this is not a matter of scrutinising or improving the Bill, as all the amendments would put strange new things into the Bill that were not part of it. That is not really what we should be doing at this stage. We should do that at a later stage.

Bringing forward the great repeal Bill and going through its processes is fine up to a point, but there is a huge amount of work to be done alongside or after that, because that Bill will bring all our existing EU legislation into our own system. We can then look at it and consider what we want to keep, what we want to amend and what we want to remove. That will be a huge job, and it is difficult to see what will go into the Bill that will do it. We should start on that job as soon as possible. Saying that we will wait until the exit negotiations are complete is just sitting twiddling your thumbs when you could be doing something useful. We will have to consider how we are going to deal with this. We need a bespoke solution. Trying to modify normal legislative practice could cause some difficulty. Some people are anticipating the largest and most comprehensive Henry VIII clause that there has ever been. I do not think that is a terribly good way of doing it. We will have to find a way. We could then spend time—indeed, this House, with its experience in these matters, could make a significant contribution—sorting out what we do with the inherited acquis, which cannot just be left without being looked at; it has to be considered.

Another thing should be in the great repeal Bill. There is probably a plan for it to be in there, but if not I am sure it will go in. There should be some clauses to meet the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, yesterday. Such clauses could be tailored to provide the parliamentary involvement that he said the courts have indicated will be necessary. We should look at that.

By virtue of getting this Bill going, we underline and strengthen the Government’s position that they are prepared to walk away from a bad deal. It is important that they are prepared to walk away. If you are dealing with a negotiation such as this with lots of rules, it is importance to remember that you have no leverage if you are not prepared to leave the table. At the same time, you have to persuade people that you bring to the table something that is worth having. Those points are not entirely consistent, but you have to be prepared to do it. We will have to be prepared for something fairly tough.

My final observation does not follow from anything I have just said. It goes back a bit. There have been references to David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate our position in Europe, which led to the referendum. My comment is simply this: had Europe really wanted to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union, it should have given him something of substance, something really important, to enable him to win his referendum. Its failure to do that tells you an awful lot about its basic approach.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Trimble Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trimble (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. His description of the difficulties that he saw arising within the European Union and the way in which the European Union has not been governed very intelligently by the people in Brussels was seriously meant and I hope that everyone will reflect on it. But I hope he will forgive me if I go back to the amendment in front of us. It is unnecessary. The amendment asks the Prime Minister,

“to support the maintenance of the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland”.

The Prime Minister does that now. It is in the White Paper, so the amendment is unnecessary for that reason. That is a technical answer to the amendment, but I will move on to a general discussion of the common travel area.

As was mentioned in the debate, the common travel area has existed since 1923. From the mid-1920s onwards, tariff differences existed because tariffs were charged on the Irish border—and those continued right up until our entry into the European Union. So going back to having tariffs is not a new thing for us. Having to have regard to the movement of persons is not, again, a new thing. Noble Lords may not be fully aware that the impact of the common travel area on the free movement of people is not general. It applies only to citizens of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. It does not apply to other citizens.

I remember hearing in a news bulletin several months ago that the Irish police had intercepted a car that had just crossed over the unmarked border. Police stopped the vehicle in order to remove from it half a dozen persons who were travelling to work within the Republic of Ireland but had no right to do so. So that is an example of the movement of persons being monitored. How effective that monitoring is is another matter—and whether that monitoring can be done in a more effective way, again, is open. So there should not be any insuperable difference on the question of the free movement of persons, provided that there is serious co-operation between the British and Irish Governments. Without knowing the detail, my understanding is that very active discussion is going on at the moment between the British and Irish Governments about how that could be handled.

If there is a serious problem, it comes with the issue of tariffs. The tariffs that were charged from the mid-1920s to the 1970s were enough to stimulate smuggling. It was a local cottage industry, particularly in South Armagh. If significant tariffs come back, it will create, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, mentioned, another line of activity for the boys down there who will profit from it. They might complain about it but they will certainly enjoy the profit and might not be too keen if someone took the profit away. So one has to be aware that there is more than one side to this.

There will be difficulties if there are serious tariffs, but the difficulties will exist mainly for the Irish Government rather than for ourselves. In the paper mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, Mr Lux talked about installations on the Irish side of the border. That is where they will be, because under EU law there is an obligation on countries that have part of the EU’s external border to have installations on that border. So if installations exist they will certainly exist south of the border. Whether they exist north of the border I am not sure; that is a matter for our Government to consider. However, the difficulties are going to be there.

The difficulty for the Irish Government is not just to do with the installations but with trade. Although the Irish have tried to develop their trade in other ways, their largest market is the United Kingdom. A tariff between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom would have very serious implications for them. Incidentally, their second largest market is the United States. Almost all their trade is done with Anglophone countries; they have very little trade with the rest of the European Union.

That actually points to a solution. When we joined the European Union in 1972 the Republic of Ireland joined on the same day; and it did so because of the economic factors I have mentioned. Those factors are still there. The Republic of Ireland is going to have to think very seriously, in a couple of years, about where their future prosperity will lie. At the moment the Irish Government are probably trying to do what they can to educate people in Brussels about the problems that they will face and about the desirability of having tariff-free access. That is also the objective of our Government. They, too, want tariff-free access, and if they achieve that there is no problem—although we should bear in mind what my noble friend Lord Lawson said in last week’s debate: that as things stand, it does not look as though there is much chance of getting agreement on the absence of tariffs. If we do not get that, the Irish Government will have a problem. We would of course want to be sympathetic and do what we can to mitigate matters; but at the same time that is not something that we need as a major element in this debate.

The amendment talks about,

“the open border … as set out under the provisions of the Belfast Agreement”.

Look at the agreement: what provisions? I do not see any. The common travel area was part of the background at the time that we were discussing this, but to say that this is something mandated by or based on the agreement is not correct. It is just a way of hyping up the argument, in the same way that some people suggest that the current peace might be threatened by what is happening here. That is the equivalent of shroud-waving and is not something that we should be too concerned about.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill (LD)]

My Lords, when the Minister replies to this debate he has a choice. He can focus on the amendment and explain why it is unnecessary—which he can probably do fairly easily. If he does that, but does no more than that, the Government will be losing a very important opportunity, which is to reply to the remarkable speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and seek to reassure the inhabitants of Ireland, north and south, about the very real concerns that have been expressed by my noble friend Lord Alderdice and the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Trimble, among others.

I am not Irish, although there are times when I wish that I were; but I have lived in Ireland as a privileged guest of the nation for 44 years. I am a member of the Bar of Northern Ireland and of the Republic. I have been frequently to the north, as well as living in the Republic. I say to the Minister—if he does not know it already—that the concerns expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, are not debating points; they are very real. As the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, said, Ireland joined the European Community when we did. I think that the Irish were always more European than we were; they saw John Bull’s island as between them and Europe and saw their destiny in Europe—and Ireland has benefited enormously from its membership of the European Union, as have we.

The troubles mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, are acute and I am concerned that, whatever happens with the amendment, which I regard as trivial compared with these issues, both in the debate on Second Reading and in the White Paper the Government have shown a disregard for the seriousness of the issues affecting Ireland as a whole. I urge the Minister, if not today then as soon as he possibly can, to make sure that full reassurance is given to the people of Ireland, north and south, about the concerns that have been expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Hain. That is far more important than the fate of this amendment.