Draft Radio Equipment (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2024

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 General Committees

[Jim Allister (North Antrim) (TUV)]

Of itself, of course, there is nothing controversial about the type of USB charger that one might use, but there is something very controversial in Northern Ireland, quite appropriately, about the source of this legislation. Here we are in this Parliament of the United Kingdom and all it can do is to nod through someone else’s laws.

The decision that in Northern Ireland a person must have the EU-style USB charger flows from a decision by parliamentarians in a foreign power. It was the parliamentarians of 27 other countries who decided that this would be the common charger to be used. And, of course, it was the protocol now called the Windsor framework—which did not change one word of the protocol—that decreed that Northern Ireland, in 300 areas of law, of which this is one, would not be subject to the laws made in this place, or in its devolved Assembly.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Would the hon. and learned Member just remind us how Northern Ireland voted in the Brexit referendum?