European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Paul Girvan

Wednesday 5th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr Dunne), although I do not agree with his analysis of this agreement, nor will I be voting in the same manner as him next Tuesday. He talks about the importance of supporting this deal because we have to get on with delivering on the view of the people of the United Kingdom to leave the EU, but this deal does not do that. It does not deliver on the referendum result, nor does it deliver on the promises and the manifestos on which his party, my party and the Labour party stood at the last election, when people gave a second endorsement to the belief that we are better off out of the EU. This deal, because of its concentration on a mythical problem that will exist between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic when we leave the EU, has tied the United Kingdom into a range of measures that will damage the economy and damage the Union.

[Paul Girvan]

I have just attended an event with a hand-picked group of businesses and organisations that the Secretary of State requested, and they told me to support this deal. Why are they so wrong?

[Sammy Wilson]

I will go through the reasons why they are wrong. This deal emphasises a mythical problem on the border—a problem that does not exist. The current practice means that trade can go across the Irish border, with taxes being collected, with goods being checked for conformity with regulations and with animal health being protected, yet we do not need a hard border. Indeed, all the parties to this agreement have said that they will not, in any circumstances, have a hard border. Only a couple of weeks ago, the EU and the Irish Government were assuring us that even if there is no deal, a hard border will not be imposed, because a hard border is not necessary. What we have in this withdrawal agreement, with the Northern Ireland protocol and the UK protocol, is designed to do only one thing: thwart the wishes of the people of the United Kingdom to leave the EU.

That is because we have only a number of options. The UK as a whole could stay in the single market and the customs union. If the Government wish to free themselves from that, Northern Ireland has to stay within the single market and the customs union. I defy any Member of this House to say that they could go back to their constituents, tell them what the Attorney General told the Cabinet was going to happen to their constituents and find that they would not be chased. First, their constituency would have to regard the rest of the UK as a third country, with the implication that they could not trade freely with the rest of the UK. They would have barriers placed between their part of the UK and the rest of it, and businessmen would face all the impediments. Indeed, the legal opinion makes it clear that there would be friction in trade—in other words, there would be additional costs, delays and barriers, and there would be distortions to trade, yet that is what this agreement entails for Northern Ireland.

We can get out of that only by doing one of two things. First, we could reach a future trade arrangement that the EU says is sufficient to allow us to be out of that arrangement completely. It could even insist that if we reach a free trade arrangement, we still have partly to stay within those restrictions, including more than 300 EU regulations which would be applied to Northern Ireland. Just in case the EU has missed any, it says, “Any future new ones that fall within the scope of this would also have to apply”, so we would have different laws from the rest of the UK.

EU Withdrawal Agreement: Legal Advice

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Paul Girvan

Tuesday 13th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

First I must say that I am not addressing this issue as someone who is qualified in law, but I am addressing it as someone who represents a part of the United Kingdom that is most likely to be impacted by the agreement that is going to be made with the EU because of the insistence of putting Northern Ireland at the forefront in an attempt to tie the United Kingdom to the EU and its institutions for the long term.

[Paul Girvan (South Antrim) (DUP)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the people of Northern Ireland are looking, most importantly, for clarity in relation to our constitutional position? How might any backstop impact on our constitutional position within the United Kingdom? It is vitally important that we have clarity on that at this stage, and it would be good to know if that was included in any of the legal opinion the Government already have.

[Sammy Wilson]

I want to come on to that point.

I am sympathetic to the arguments the Government have put forward today: we cannot simply open the door and allow the legal advice given to Ministers to be published willy-nilly. However, to be fair to the Opposition spokesman, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), although the wording of the motion may be a bit broader, he has made clear the specific information he requires, and that information is not the legal advice that will currently be given to Ministers as they go into negotiations and thus compromise the negotiating position.

There is an irony here: no one has compromised the Government’s position more than the Government themselves in these negotiations. They willingly accepted the EU agenda and timetable and sequencing for the negotiations. They uncritically accepted the nonsense about a backstop for Northern Ireland—a problem that does not exist and which can be dealt with by the existing trade facilitation measures in place. And over the months we have had Ministers or Departments leaking economic reports that have been used against the Government in these negotiations. We should be careful about suggesting that somehow or other what is being requested today will undermine the Government’s position in the negotiations. What it will do is inform this House and the people who will be affected by the outcome of these negotiations of exactly how they will be affected. It is important that we have that information.

There are a number of reasons why I think this is an exceptional situation. As has been said, this is an important issue. It is important for the people of the United Kingdom as a whole, because there is the prospect of a UK-wide backstop, which would keep us in the customs union and tied to the common rulebook, or tied to the single market rules. It is also important for the people of Northern Ireland, as they would find themselves hived off from the rest of the United Kingdom and kept as some kind of vassal state or annexe by the EU—we would not even have the ability to decide what regulations applied to trade and the production of goods in our part of the United Kingdom.

Secondly, this will all be tied up in a legal agreement. Therefore, if there is any deviation from that, there will be reference back to the agreement made, so it is important that we understand what exactly has been legally signed up to, especially as the EU tends to nit-pick legally on all of these things. It is important that we know exactly what the issues are.

Thirdly, the Government have already been ambiguous about what the backstop might mean. We have been told that it is only an insurance policy and it will never be used, that it will be temporary and will apply only for a certain period of time, and that it will be replaced by a free trade arrangement. But what we need to know is, if it is going to be temporary, who will make the decision at the end of the day as to whether or not it is terminated? What will its scope be? Who will adjudicate on it—who will be the adjudicators of that agreement? And if it is only an insurance policy, in what circumstances will that insurance policy be applied? As has already been pointed out, as some Cabinet Ministers say that when this was presented to them in December of last year what it meant was unclear, and it was not even in a legal form at that stage, it is important that the legal implications of the agreement are spelled out for us.

The arguments that have been made today are clear. I share the concerns of the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), in that I do not want to see a situation in which some Members have the legal position explained to them and others do not. We have not sought that. If we are going to make a decision on this most important issue, we should know the full implications and they should be spelled out to the public and to the people of Northern Ireland. The people of the United Kingdom should know whether the Government are binding them to an arrangement it would be impossible to get out of, collectively or just for the people of Northern Ireland. They need to know what the scope of that would be, and what the lawyers are saying about it.

For those reasons, we will be supporting the motion if it goes to a vote tonight. If the Government have decided that they will make the legal information available, that will be a step in the right direction. I suspect, given what we are hearing from Europe about the shape of the agreement, that that would expose just how damaging it would be to the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland Budget (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Paul Girvan

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 9th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson]

It comes back to the point I was making about the allocation of the budget and the way in which decisions are made. First, decisions are based on historical decisions made by the Assembly. Secondly, unfortunately, I have to say—this is why the current system is not acceptable and has to be changed—that when allocations are made by civil servants, we cannot be sure that the finance available will always go to what the public might want to prioritise, because bureaucrats see different priorities. For example, I had a long discussion with the permanent secretary in the Department of Education when we found out that some of the additional money that was available for schools and was meant to go to frontline schooling actually went to finance the deficit of the Education Authority. By the way, after the amalgamation of five education and library boards, that authority was still spending as much on administration as the five boards had spent, even though the idea was that one authority would lead to rationalisation and therefore cut costs.

When civil servants are making these decisions, they will often have different priorities, because they see things from the point of view of administration and bureaucracy, and sometimes that will be more important to them than what politicians would see as the priorities. Politicians are being confronted on a day-to-day basis by parents with youngsters with special needs, teachers who are teaching bigger classes, and headmasters who are having to say to parents, “We need you to provide extra money for books, paper and everything else.” Therefore politicians will often have different priorities.

But here is the point: in the absence of devolution, we do not have people in place who are perhaps tuned into those things as priorities. That is one of the disservices that Sinn Féin has done to the people of Northern Ireland. In its pursuit of its ideological goal involving the Irish language, it is prepared to see bad budgetary or spending decisions, or decisions that do not reflect the priorities of the public.

[Paul Girvan]

The common funding package used for education has shown up glaring inequalities. There are primary schools in my area that are allocated £2,400 per pupil, yet there will be another sector of education that receives up to £15,000 per pupil. This inequality should not exist. I would have no issue with such policy decisions if we had an Assembly in place, but without an Assembly in place to make decisions, we cannot make those changes.

[Sammy Wilson]

This goes back to my point about the Irish language. Those inequalities often exist because of the preference given under the Good Friday agreement to Irish language legislation, which has consequences in terms of small Irish language schools. Some secondary schools have opened with as few as 14 pupils, which is very costly and has led to the kind of result that my hon. Friend raises. That cannot be changed by a civil servant. That is a political decision, and that is why we need an Assembly up and running in which such decisions can be made, meaning that we can look at funding inequalities and decide whether we should change the priorities.

What is important is that we have a means by which the budget can be spent. The Secretary of State said that there is no difficulty with allocation, but there is a difficulty, as I have explained, with accountability, and the issue with the Department of Education has already been raised by two Members. Different Departments have reacted in different ways, however, and I am pleased that the Department of Health has allocated the additional money it obtained as a result of the confidence and supply arrangement to frontline services. Thousands of people across Northern Ireland will benefit from the allocation of that money to reduce waiting lists for elective surgery. Some people were facing two-year waiting lists, but will now find their waiting time reduced. The results can therefore depend on how Departments react.

Although the Secretary of State has said there is no difficulty in allocating the money, there is a difficulty in accountability, and I take issue with her on that. I have had conversations with permanent secretaries, and difficulties are emerging in the allocation of spending. For example, the permanent secretary in the Department for Infrastructure told me recently that he would have difficulty making a decision about the York Street interchange, for which money has been allocated in the infrastructure budget. He argued that he would not be able to make a decision on that. We have already seen the difficulties over getting the broadband money spent in Northern Ireland, and we know that there are decisions to be made on health reforms. If the health budget is going to be sustainable in the long run, health reform is required, but in order to spend some of the money in the budget on that reform, a change in the nature of some hospitals will be required, including the movement of some services and the concentration of services in other hospitals. According to the courts, those decisions cannot be made by civil servants; they have to be made by Ministers.

The same applies to the school estate. One way of getting more money into the classrooms is through the rationalisation of schools. We have additional school places in Northern Ireland, but in some areas there is a shortage of school places and in others there is a surplus. That requires decisions to be made about school closures and about opening new schools but, again, those decisions need to be made by politicians. I think the Secretary of State is wrong when she says that we do not have any difficulty when it comes to allocation. We are heading towards that difficulty now.

At the other end of the spectrum, I am already in discussions with officials in certain Departments and someone has already mentioned the number of assistant chief constables who are on temporary contracts. They cannot be given permanent contracts because no one is there to make that decision. Applications for a whole range of disabled parking bays are queuing up for a decision, but there is no one there to make those decisions. That might not be an important issue in the global sense, but it is important for people with mobility problems who cannot park their car outside their door. Then there is the issue of school minibuses. Directives have been issued in Northern Ireland to say that teachers need to have a public service vehicle licence to drive those minibuses, even though teachers elsewhere do not have to have them. Many schools have had to give up providing sporting and other after-school activities. It requires a Minister to make decisions on those issues as well. I could go on.