EU Withdrawal Agreement: Legal Advice

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

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.