Windsor Framework (Retail Movement Scheme: Public Health, Marketing and Organic Product Standards and Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations 2023

Lord Empey Excerpts

Monday 4th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I will be brief. The noble Lord, Lord Morrow, referred to this instrument as a “humiliation”. I am not sure whether he meant a humiliation for the country or something else, but we can be in no doubt that it is a humiliation for Parliament that a foreign Parliament should send us an instrument—a law made by it with no reference to us—and invite us to cut and paste it into the form of a statutory instrument that we are required to rubber-stamp.

I cannot think of another democracy, inside or outside Europe, which would be willing to have laws made for the internal trade of part its own country and for part of its own territory by a foreign Parliament on this basis, with no participation or representation, and be expected to accept it and hand it on in this way.

We are told that the justification for accepting this humiliation—although this has not come up in the debate, as such—is that it is the price of maintaining the Good Friday agreement. That would not be an argument wholly without merit, if it had substance—but it has no substance, because the Good Friday agreement is not being maintained. It is not being maintained in its internal arrangements or on its east-west strands, or north-south. It is largely defunct; the only part of the Good Friday agreement that is still fundamentally alive is the question that Northern Ireland will remain part of the United Kingdom unless and until there is a vote that supports transferring it to the Republic of Ireland. That part of it remains alive; the rest is functionally dead.

So we are not actually achieving our objective in doing this, but meanwhile we accept the humiliation, which no doubt in a moment my noble friend is going to rise at the Dispatch Box and defend. With a name like Harlech, if he were proposing this in relation to Wales, I imagine that he would resile, and resile firmly from doing so, but in the case of Northern Ireland it appears to be acceptable, despite the manifest evidence that the claimed benefit of doing so is not actually arising. I look forward to hearing what my noble friend on the Front Bench is going to say.

But I look forward almost with more interest to what the noble Baroness on the Labour Front Bench is going to say. I have to take cognisance of the fact that I understand, or am told by outside interests, that there is the prospect or possibility of a Labour Government in the next year or so. I do not countenance it myself, but to hear what the Labour Party has to say about what it will do about this in government—and the noble Lord, Lord Weir, is correct that we need to look forward—is absolutely crucial on this matter. In my view, it will find that, if it thinks that this is going to be solved in some way by greater alignment of the whole of the United Kingdom with the European Union, it will quickly run into the fact that there is a price to be paid. The European Union will regard that there is a price to be paid for that alignment, in loss of opportunities elsewhere. Those hard decisions—and of course I am not expecting to hear the answer to those decisions today—will land very firmly at the feet of any incoming Government who might arrive in the next 12 months. The Windsor Framework and the arrangements put in its place are absolutely central to how any incoming Government respond to them. So in some ways, the most interesting speech of the day, I am sure, will come from one of the two noble Baronesses—I am not sure which—sitting opposite, and I look forward to it.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

I just wanted to remind the noble Lord that the reason we have the arrangements we have is because the Government proposed to the European Union in 2019 that we have a border in the Irish Sea, that those trading with Northern Ireland traders would have to notify the relevant authorities before goods were sent to Northern Ireland, and that we had to comply with EU rules and EU law. That was proposed by the United Kingdom Government to the European Commission in October 2019. So we have shot ourselves in the foot.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to be reminded of that, and I remind the noble Lord that I was not a Member of your Lordships’ House when the Northern Ireland protocol came to a vote, and when the Windsor Framework came to a vote I was one of only two Conservative Peers who went through that Lobby to vote against it. So whatever “gotcha” moment arises from that question, it applies to somebody else and not to me. I also refer the noble Lord to the word of wisdom from the noble Lord, Lord Weir, about looking to the future and trying to resolve something: it is not going to benefit us greatly if we look back and point fingers about who messed up in the past. That word of wisdom is one that we should take to heart.

As I say, I look forward to hearing from my noble friend but almost as much to hearing from the Front Bench of the party opposite.