United Kingdom Internal Market Bill Debate

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Department: Northern Ireland Office

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts
Monday 21st September 2020

(3 years, 7 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Bernard Jenkin Portrait Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
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The hon. Member says it is not the fault of the EU, but can we just remind ourselves that it was the United Kingdom Government who gave an absolutely cast-iron guarantee that we would put up no infrastructure on the border between north and south in Ireland? It was the EU that kept threatening to do that, even though alternative arrangements could be developed to obviate that need. I fail to understand why people just do not want to believe that, except that they want to blame the United Kingdom Government, not the EU.

Claire Hanna Portrait Claire Hanna
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It is funny, but we do not hear so much about the alternative arrangements, and this from a party that has us all queuing around the estate because it could not put in place any alternative arrangements for voting. We heard a lot about them for a lot of years, but the magic sovereignty dust that was supposed to solve all of our problems has not yet been produced.

However, it is true that the choices, and they are very difficult choices, are being forced by that Government. We wish that the Government had picked the first of those options. We wish they had picked a higher degree of alignment with the EU, but they did not, and they cannot keep reopening the wound every time they try to deal with the contradictory promises they made. Whatever Bill the Government bring in, the choice will be the same. You cannot opt out of the biggest free trade bloc in the world and then feign shock when the trade is not completely clear, and you cannot refuse to do the first of the two things and then pretend that they are going to happen.

To suggest that any of this is about protecting the Good Friday agreement or the people of Northern Ireland is beyond a parody. We have worked intensively with businesses and other parties to try to address some of the barriers that we accept will exist, but we have to remind the House and others that it is this Government’s choice and the failure of the DUP for the last three years to do anything about those choices that has brought us to this point, and people must own those decisions. The Joint Committee is the place to address those difficulties and those operational issues, and there are the dispute mechanisms.

We see and we very much acknowledge the anxiety that east-west barriers to trade create, but even with the politics and the identity issues stripped out, it is a regrettable fact that the sea border is more practical and more manageable than a border across the island of Ireland, given that there are three such points of entry into Northern Ireland and 108 border crossings between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. I do not say that to be hurtful; I say it because it is true.

I bit my tongue several times during the speech from the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), whose opinion is always considered. I bit it for a number of reasons. Not only because of course your party opposed giving a consent mechanism to the Northern Ireland Assembly on article 50 and opposed giving consent on the sequencing, but because you speak about the sequencing. We have seen what has happened with the gamification of the sequencing and the gamification and using of Northern Ireland as a pawn by the UK Government in order to achieve outcomes and to justify no deal. The last thing I had to bite my tongue about was your saying that the petition of concern is not used as a veto. Members can look it up, but your party has used it 86 times. It used it numerous times to veto, for example, equal marriage for absolutely no reasons of offence to the United Kingdom.

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When we make arguments about the Sino-British treaty over Hong Kong or the territorial integrity of Ukraine, when we say that those who have committed crimes against humanity and genocide should be brought to justice, when we make arguments for a world trade system—a legally binding international financial and trading system—about the Paris climate change agreement, or, in our own specific national interests, on Gibraltar, the Falklands and maritime claims, we are undermining our place on the world stage. That is what the Government have done and are continuing to do. I urge all those across the House of principle and conscience who believe in global Britain—we might have disagreements over other things—and believe that this is a country of fair play and decency, which keeps its word and can be respected and influential, not to support these clauses and to speak out against this Bill.
Bernard Jenkin Portrait Sir Bernard Jenkin
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I am grateful to have caught your eye, Dame Rosie, so that I can respond to some of the comments that the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) was just making. I respect that he feels passionately about these matters, but to equate these clauses with genocide or the annexation of territory against the will of a sovereign state is absolutely ridiculous. It completely misunderstands the degree of doubt that exists about what international law means when interpreting international agreements.

Damian Green Portrait Damian Green
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My hon. Friend is ascribing the things he most disagrees with to me—[Interruption.] No, he did say “my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford”. I am sure that the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) would wish to take ownership of his own ideas.

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Bernard Jenkin Portrait Sir Bernard Jenkin
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I apologise to my right hon. Friend. His name was in my mind because it was on the monitor before the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth spoke.

It is important to see these clauses in the wider context. My heart sank when I picked up the first draft of the agreement, because this was not the departure from the European Union that I had expected to see expressed in the text of the agreement; it was the same oppressive, impenetrable text with endless references to the treaties as they exist. The withdrawal agreement was clearly a concerted attempt by the European Union to continue its influence, even through the direct applicability and direct effect of European Union law on the United Kingdom.

Kirsten Oswald Portrait Kirsten Oswald
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Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Bernard Jenkin Portrait Sir Bernard Jenkin
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No, I am not going to give way. I am going to be very brief.

The important perspective is to ask ourselves how this debate is going to be regarded in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. These controversies will be seen as the growing pains of the re-establishment of our national sovereign independence as a national democracy. I dare say that none of us has studied the debates on the Great Reform Act of 1832, but I bet they went through exactly the same kind of painful introspection that we have seen in the Chamber this evening. Today we look upon the 1832 Reform Act as a great stride towards the democratisation of our constitution, and history will look back at these debates in the same way and see this moment in our history as the time that we decided to take back control of our own constitutional arrangements and our own national democracy.

I would go further than that. There is no doubt that this Bill will get through this House intact, but some people are suggesting that there will be more of a problem in the other place. There will be those who continue to resist the consequences of leaving the European Union and the consequences of having signed a highly unsatisfactory agreement that attempts to sustain the influence of the European Union far beyond any legitimate role it has in making the laws of our country. That is what we are talking about, in relieving ourselves of these clauses. However, I can assure the House that, in the long run, nothing is going to stand in the way of the British people re-establishing and reclaiming our independence, and if the other place chooses to stand in our way in that respect, I suspect that in the longer term this House, as the democratic House, will prevail.

Brendan O'Hara Portrait Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
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There is so much wrong with this Bill that it is difficult to know where to start, but in the time I have available, I will concentrate my remarks on clauses 40 to 45. Those are the clauses that allow this Government to break international law and renege on the legally binding agreement that they themselves negotiated and signed up to less than a year ago—a fact that, try as they might, they can never escape from. I will also speak to amendment 41, which deals with preserving the integrity of the Good Friday agreement, on the basis of which peace has been secured in the north of Ireland for more than two decades and which seeks to defend international law from a Government who believe that somehow, uniquely and exceptionally, it does not apply to them.

On 16 June, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster stood at the Dispatch Box and said that the Government were “faithfully implementing” the withdrawal agreement, including the Northern Ireland protocol. Just 83 days later, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland stood at the same Dispatch Box and said that, yes, the Bill did break international law. This unprecedented political handbrake turn left everyone from a former Prime Minister to the United States Congress scarcely able to comprehend what they were hearing—namely, that the United Kingdom was prepared to go rogue if it did not get its own way, and to ditch its own Northern Ireland protocol. It is a remarkable, not to say ludicrous, position for a Government to find themselves in and one that suggests that this is a Government who have scant regard for the law and a particularly cavalier attitude to the Northern Ireland peace process, displaying as they do very little knowledge, understanding or care as to the consequences of their actions.

I know that we live in strange times, but who would ever have thought that we would be debating whether a UK Conservative Government could knowingly break international law and that this House, led by the self-styled champions of law and order on the Conservative Benches, would be about to say that, yes, it could? Let them be in no doubt that, in doing so, they are signalling to the international community that the United Kingdom is a bad faith actor, an untrustworthy partner whose adherence to international law is based solely on expediency. They might want to ask themselves why—why would any Government find the UK an attractive partner with which to enter a legally binding trade deal in the future?

This is a United Kingdom Internal Market Bill, but it has already attracted international attention, and none of it has been good. Even the USA, on which much of the bright post-Brexit future has been predicated, has said that anything that undermines the Good Friday agreement will have dire consequences for the UK, and that there will be no trade deal forthcoming. Did any Conservative Member think that that would not be the case? Is anyone in this House unaware of the political investment that the United States has in brokering peace in Northern Ireland? Did anyone think that, having worked so hard to secure a peace deal, the United States would just watch it crumble into dust when it proved to be an inconvenience to the UK Government? I tell you what, Madam Deputy Speaker, if they did think that then, they certainly do not think it now, because the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, declared that this UK Government must respect the Northern Ireland protocol and that, if they violate it, there will be no chance of a US-UK trade deal. That position was backed up by presidential favourite Joe Biden, who said that any deal between the UK and the United States is contingent upon respect for the Good Friday agreement. The world is telling the UK: do not breach international law, do not become that rogue state, because there will be consequences if you do.

This Bill confirms what many of us have suspected for a long time: there is no long-term or strategic thinking at the heart of this Government. Everything they do is based on expediency and is designed simply to get them off whatever immediate and inconvenient hoop they happen to be caught on. That such behaviour inevitably leads to far bigger and more complex problems further down the line seems to matter little. They are like an errant child trying to avoid facing up to their responsibilities and are prepared to say or do anything to kick that further down the road and avoid the reckoning. They have run out of road and been reduced to using the Good Friday agreement as a bargaining chip, and are on the brink of becoming an international law breaker. This Bill in its current form will see the United Kingdom cross the Rubicon. It has embarked on a course from which it cannot come back. The mask has slipped and any remaining shred of moral authority that the United Kingdom may have thought it had will have slipped with it. The consequence of this Government’s action is coming to a head, and it is a disaster entirely of their own making.