Windsor Framework (Retail Movement Scheme: Plant and Animal Health) (Amendment etc.) Regulations 2024

Motion to Annul

Moved by

That an Humble Address be presented to His Majesty praying that the Windsor Framework (Retail Movement Scheme: Plant and Animal Health) (Amendment etc.) Regulations 2024 (SI 2024/853), laid before the House on 9 August, be annulled.

Relevant document: 3rd Report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (special attention drawn to the instrument)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for kindly meeting me last week to discuss these regulations and for having a larger meeting with all the Peers from Northern Ireland on where aspects of the Irish Sea border are affected and where Defra has responsibility. I am very grateful for her time and consideration.

I am deeply concerned by these regulations which we are discussing tonight. Part of the reason for praying against this statutory instrument is to ensure that your Lordships genuinely understand just how important they are, not just to Northern Ireland but to the whole of the United Kingdom.

Ever since the broadcast of the recording of the private meeting where Michel Barnier said that the policy was to use Ireland in order to secure the broader Brexit purposes in relation to the United Kingdom, many of us have felt strongly that the people of Northern Ireland are being used as pawns in a bigger game. We have always worried that the European Union would use the imposition of EU standards on Northern Ireland—as a result of the protocol and the Windsor Framework—to pressurise the rest of the United Kingdom not to diverge from EU standards and so miss out on some of the benefits of having a competitive advantage from leaving the European Union.

The regulations before us tonight provide a very clear articulation of this strategy, but in a form of smoke and mirrors. They impose on Great Britain the same entry requirements for rest of the world goods as to the European Union. This is supposedly in order that those goods should be able to move freely from Great Britain to Northern Ireland without the interference of the Irish Sea border, because the whole of the United Kingdom—not just Northern Ireland—has, in this regard, submitted to EU standards for these areas. This is being presented as some kind of trade off: GB submits to EU standards and then the border, for that purpose at least, can disappear.

We know that there is another way of managing the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that does not involve disenfranchising anyone and which respects the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom. That, of course, is mutual enforcement. Surely our newly elected Government, rather than parroting the same old line of the previous Government, should insist that that solution be discussed now and all their relationships reset—which I know is the great new word about what will be happening with the European Union. I have no doubt that the EU would respond by saying that it prefers the Irish Sea Border way of managing the border—I wonder why?—over mutual enforcement. But, as the honourable Member for North Antrim, Jim Allister, wrote in the Telegraph Brexit Bulletin after his mutual enforcement Bill had its First Reading last week in the Commons, if the EU continues to insist on the Irish Sea border as if mutual enforcement did not exist, it

“will have to own the consequences of needlessly being the instigator of the largest disenfranchisement operation in the Western world, in violation of the Belfast Agreement and the territorial integrity of the UK”.

The nonsense of what is happening on the ground is apparent to all. The Irish Sea border transparently is not even working because people from the south of Ireland are continuing to travel over the border to Northern Ireland’s border towns, filling up their white vans with cheaper “Not for EU” goods and taking them back to the Republic of Ireland for sale. It just proves the utter nonsense of the European Union proclaiming that this is all about protecting its single market.

Now the Government are on the verge of making matters much worse by seeking to validate this injustice. In 1972, it was determined that in the future it would be wrong to force on a reluctant community majority voting on controversial issues at Stormont. There have now been no majority votes on matters of controversy at Stormont where any community has objected for over 52 years. Yet, on 31 October, less than two weeks away, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is required to send a message to the Assembly asking it to vote on the most controversial proposition to ever come before Stormont in 103 years. The motion will be to endorse Articles 5 to 10 of the Windsor Framework. The practical effect of voting for this is, first, the endorsing of an all-Ireland single market for goods and thus the removal of Northern Ireland from the UK single market for goods—a precursor to unbundling the UK and forming an all-Ireland economy. The second would be the creation of an all-Ireland legislative framework to govern the all-Ireland single market for goods, where the legislation is made by the Republic of Ireland and 26 other countries, but not Northern Ireland or the UK. The third would be to renounce the rights of the people of Northern Ireland to be represented in the legislature making the laws to which they will be subject in 300 areas for up to eight years.

This hugely controversial and, frankly, indecent proposition—no elected politician should be asked to renounce the rights of their constituents to be represented in the legislature making the laws to which they are subject—is to be dealt with by majority vote. The EU pushed for this not to be a cross-community vote and the last Government meekly folded—supported, I have to say, by the Labour Opposition.

Even at this late stage, I call on the Government to bring forward emergency legislation relieving the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland of his current obligations to act on 31 October and set in train the most controversial vote at Stormont in its history and the first on a controversial majoritarian basis for over 52 years, as I said.

The vote will effectively silence unionism on the most consequential decision to have ever come before Northern Ireland’s legislature in the history of the Province. It is a huge injustice to abolish the cross-community vote to achieve the continued imposition of the Windsor Framework and an Irish Sea border, contrary to the core principles of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, which requires cross-community consent for key decisions.

This is the greatest myth at the heart of the framework. Its much-flaunted purported objective was to protect the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, but in disapplying the core cross-community safeguards central to that agreement it has cut a huge hole in it. The framework does not protect the Belfast agreement but rather rewrites and reinterprets it for the sole benefit of Irish nationalists, the Irish Government and the European Union. There is no self-respecting unionist or democrat who can or should validate this illegitimate consent vote, because to do so would be to legitimise the claim that the protocol framework is consistent with the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. It is not and it never was, and nothing that has come subsequently, including the worthless Safeguarding the Union deal, has altered that reality.

Northern Ireland is being left, colony-like, trapped under the EU, locked into a fast approaching economic united Ireland, with key safeguards for unionism removed. That is not a basis for political stability and this issue is not going to go away. It will continue to act as a permanent source of resentment for every unionist, as it ought to for every democrat and every Member of this House.

The previous Government decided that they would compromise on Northern Ireland, in the hope that it would be only short-term because the EU would realise that it would be absurd for it to pursue the division of a sovereign state as a long-term arrangement. If we had faced the European Union as a United Kingdom, the extraordinary proposition that only part of the UK could leave the EU would not have been entertained and we would not be in the situation in which we find ourselves, whereby, because Northern Ireland has been denied properly leaving the EU, the rest of the UK is beginning to be compromised as well.

The Prime Minister has constantly referred to his involvement in Northern Ireland, his working there and his support for the union. I suppose that tonight is the first opportunity to hear from the new Government their position on all of these issues. It really is time that some of the warm words about people who respect the union and support the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are actually delivered on—it must be more than warm words. That is why I hope that Members will look carefully at what we are discussing and take from my speech that the regulations we are going to pass—or not pass, perhaps—are very much to the long-term detriment of not just the people of Northern Ireland but the people of the rest of the United Kingdom. I therefore beg to move the Motion.

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and her Motion to annul these Windsor Framework regulations. I understand that these regulations are supposed to make it easier for some rest-of-the-world goods to move to and from Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but there are a number of problems with them, one of which I wish to concentrate my remarks upon.

Let me make it clear: continued barriers to trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland are unacceptable and undermine the integrity of the United Kingdom. The regulations we are debating are based on recognition of the Irish Sea border, an iniquitous imposition upon the people of Northern Ireland emanating from the Northern Ireland protocol, which had no support from any unionist elected representative in Northern Ireland. One might have imagined that if Great Britain submitted to EU standards like Northern Ireland, the border would to that extent be removed, but these regulations do not do that; rather, they build upon a totally unacceptable foundation.

The best way to understand the border to which these regulations relate is to go behind them to the legislation to which they relate and without which they make no sense—EU regulation 2023/1231. That regulation is considerably more honest, in that it does not pretend to define a UK internal market system but simply an alternative international border experience, enabling goods to move from what is regarded as a foreign country, Great Britain, to what it regards as part of itself, Northern Ireland. I sometimes think the Government believe that the people of Northern Ireland are totally gullible and content to believe that a border is not a border if you simply call it by a different name.

Under these regulations, if rest-of-the-world goods enter the United Kingdom at, say, Southampton, being subject now to EU entry standards, they will be able to move freely from England to Scotland or from England to Wales, because it is an internal market. There is no customs border and no international SPS border. But what happens if the business in Southampton then desires to send the goods to the other region of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland? The reality is that it has reached the limit of the internal market for goods and that the goods cannot get to Northern Ireland within the internal market in which England, Scotland and Wales are located. Therefore, we have to leave the internal market for goods, cross an international customs and SPS border, and enter another single market for goods. The goods can leave one internal market for another only by crossing the border, and under the regulations before us there is only the option of using the alternative border experience set out in EU regulation 1231.