European Union (Future Relationship) Bill

Owen Paterson Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 30th December 2020 Commons Chamber

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

Thank you very much indeed for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. May I give my particular thanks to the technical staff who just reconnected me, having lost the connection?

Mr Deputy Speaker, this is the first time that I have spoken on any subject in the House since my wife’s suicide at the end of June. I would like to thank you and particularly Mr Speaker, and so many other colleagues who have sent extremely kind messages of support. I would like to assure everybody listening that I will work really hard through the next few years to make sure that I can try to stop just one family going through the anguish that mine is currently suffering.

It is a great honour to be called in this incredibly important debate. As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have been involved in this debate for a long time. This is a great day. We have established sovereignty, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) confirmed. One should pay tribute to him for the extraordinary manner in which he has fought this battle over the years; his indefatigable concentration and legal knowledge has been phenomenal. It is great to have sovereignty and it is great to have zero tariffs and zero quotas, which is very good for my constituency and very good for the economy of GB.

I would like to express a word of caution. I am very pleased with this deal for GB, but I am concerned that we have partnership councils, specialised committees, trade specialised committees, working groups and so on. We are going to need a really determined Government to make sure that we use that sovereignty properly and really exploit it, nowhere more than on the issue of fish. I went around the north Atlantic in 2004-05 and wrote a paper on how we should run a sane fisheries policy. It will take real political determination to get fish back in five and a half years’ time when we think that in the channel, for instance, the EU will be going down on cod only from 91% to 90.75%, when it should be on 25% according to zonal attachment. We will need real determination.

There is another area that concerns me. I am chairman of the think-tank the Centre for Brexit Policy—see the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—and we put out a scorecard. According to the legal gurus led by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone, GB comes out of this well. The worry for me, as someone who was shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland for three years and the real Secretary of State for two years, is that Northern Ireland fails. We should remember the words of the noble Lord Trimble, whom I spoke to a couple of days ago. He reminds us that article 1(iii) of the Belfast agreement says that

“it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people”.

I will fight very hard on that.

I would love to vote for the Bill today, but I really cannot vote for a measure that divides the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland will have a different tax regime and, as part of the customs union, it will be under the ECJ, the single market and so on. I am very torn. I wish this deal well, and I hope that we can go to mutual enforcement, which is Lord Trimble’s recommendation, but I will be abstaining.