Northern Ireland Protocol

Owen Paterson Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Owen Paterson (North Shropshire) (Con) [V]]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on landing this debate at a very timely time. It is a really important debate that I hope the Government are listening to carefully. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd). I do not entirely agree with his analysis but I do admire his intentions.

I still go to Northern Ireland on a regular basis having been Secretary of State, and shadow Secretary of State before that. I am detecting real concern and a sense of bewilderment in Northern Ireland. Businesses are having trouble getting materials. Basic products are not available in the shops: not just food but simple gardening equipment and other elements of everyday life. My concern is that that sense of bewilderment is turning to anger. That is justified, because the people of Northern Ireland are in a different constitutional place owing to the protocol.

It is not just a Northern Ireland issue. I am the chairman of the Centre for Brexit Policy, which is an all-party think-tank—I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Between 2 and 4 July, we commissioned Savanta ComRes to do some national polling and the results are very interesting: 53% of UK adults say it is important that Northern Ireland remains part of UK; 50% say that the protocol is unfair to Northern Ireland and that it is treated differently from the rest of the UK; 57% say that the protocol is a threat to peace and stability in Northern Ireland; and 42% agree that by tying Northern Ireland to the EU single market rules, the protocol acts in way not to implement Brexit. The hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) should listen to that comment carefully.

All of that goes back to the issue of the border, which was always hugely exaggerated by those who wanted the UK to stay in the EU. In the last recorded total of all Northern Ireland’s sales, 68% were local, 17% went to Great Britain and only 6% went to the Republic of Ireland. Going the other way, the Republic of Ireland’s sales to Northern Ireland were only £2.6 billion in 2017—that is 0.16%, or one six-hundred-and-twenty-fifth of total EU exports. It is simply inconceivable that that trade could utterly pollute the single market’s integrity. That trade is being conducted by big international companies such as Diageo and Lactalis—highly competent, professional people who already dealt with the currency border, the excise duty border and the VAT border. The border was always massively exaggerated. There were always other solutions, and certainly better solutions than those we have in the protocol.

Let us look at what is happening. The permanent secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland said to the Stormont Committee for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs that Northern Ireland’s population

“is under half a percent of that across the European Union, yet the documentary checks…represent one fifth of the equivalent documentation right across the EU.”

A monster has been created around a very limited problem. Everyone should listen carefully to the noble Lord Trimble, who won a Nobel prize and put his whole career on the line to work through the peace agreement that was signed as the Belfast agreement with John Hume. He has pointed out that Northern Ireland has 2.5 times more customs checks than Rotterdam. When President Biden was here recently, Lord Trimble made it clear in The Times that the Good Friday agreement is threatened by the protocol because the constitution has been changed and the vital principle of consent—the basis on which he got the Belfast agreement through—has been breached. It is quite clear that laws are now being imposed on citizens in Northern Ireland on which they have no say.

A couple of days ago, Lord Frost of Allenton, who has manfully tried to make the protocol work, reported to the House of Lords that 800 new pieces of legislation have been dumped on Northern Ireland from the EU. It did not have to be like this. Back in October 2018, I took Lord Trimble and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) to see Michel Barnier and Sabine Weyand. We explained that we would respect the single market. We said, “If we sell goods to the US market, we respect their regulations. If we are to sell into the EU’s single market as a third country, we would always respect the regulations.” That is the way forward. They listened carefully, but, sadly, that approach was not pursued by the then Government.

Lord Trimble helped to write an important paper on mutual enforcement, published recently by the Centre for Brexit Policy. It says, in simple terms, that under UK law, and justiciable in the UK courts, all exports into the EU will meet EU standards and vice versa. All the fuss about regulation would therefore apply only to the tiny number of exports. We are not going to see some Indonesian tyre manufacturer trying to smuggle containers of tyres through to west German car plants from Larne and out through Dublin—that is simply not going to happen. Many of these problems could be sorted out through the concept of mutual enforcement. I take my hat off to Lord Frost, who has really tried to make the protocol work, but the EU has been obtuse and pig-headed and rebuffed every attempt.

When something clearly does not work, is causing damage in Northern Ireland and, as the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) pointed out, is clearly a breach of the Acts of Union, we should recognise that, not fight it. We should not overrule the result of the EU referendum and adopt a whole lot of EU law just to sort out a tiny problem on the Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland border. Mutual enforcement is the way ahead. Everybody in the debate should respect the views of a Nobel peace prize winner, and that is his solution. I would like to see the Government adopt it.