European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-05-02
Topic: International Affairs
Christopher Francis Patten (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, a number of other noble Lords have added their names to my new clause. It is perhaps appropriate to say—as the number of Members in the Chamber is declining—that I have to begin with a confession. Some noble Lords might be rather surprised that what I say will sound remarkably like a statement of government policy. That is because it largely is. I have read very carefully the Government’s position paper on Northern Ireland and Brexit; I have read the other seminal documents—the Mansion House speech and so on—and my speech, I hope, will reflect what I understand to be the Government’s policy both on a frictionless border and on the relationship between the border and the Good Friday agreement If at the end of this debate the Minister, with his customary civility, says "What’s the problem? We’re going to do all this anyway. Why bother to put this new clause into the Bill?", my response will be that while I totally expect him to honour his word and do what the Government have said, I think the Prime Minister and others, such as the Minister, need some support at this moment when a number of their colleagues and Conservative Party Members in the other place, who are very keen on the over-the-cliff, on-to-the-rocks Brexit, are making it rather more difficult for the Prime Minister to square circles than should be the case We have debated these issues. We have debated the relationship between the Good Friday agreement and the border on a number of occasions: at Second Reading, in Committee and on Report. On Report we passed an amendment on a customs union, which has significant relevance to this. I am not going to go over all that ground again. The vote on a customs union led to the present-day custodians of constitutional propriety calling for fire and brimstone. They were fresh, of course, from their views on the independence of the judiciary, and I do not think any of us take any of that too seriously I will not go through all the arguments that were used in those debates. In the debate on the customs union, I will be telegrammatic. I think a number of noble Lords found it difficult to discern the cornucopia of trade possibilities that await us once we have left the customs union. I think it is also true that a number of noble Lords thought that we would have our work cut out to try to replicate some of the existing trade agreements that the European Union, with us as a member, has made elsewhere, for example, with South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam and others. I think it is fair to say that a number of noble Lords pointed out that there are 44 non-EU members of the Commonwealth which have trade agreements with the European Union and that 49 of the poorest countries in the world have access to European markets without any tariff or control over quotas During that debate we enjoyed this spring’s parliamentary game: hunt the virtual border. We travelled around the House, we looked under Benches, we looked under the Woolsack, but nobody could find the virtual border. We went from continent to continent looking for it. Since then, I have heard one or two people suggest that it has been discovered and is the border between Switzerland and France, two countries which, I am happy to say, have not been at war for 200 years. That has been referred to as a model of a virtual border for us. Well, if you look up the facts, you discover that the average minimum waiting time for a lorry going from France into Switzerland or the other way is between 30 and 45 minutes, that they have to go through customs checks and, in addition, they have to fill in two lots of VAT forms. Just to make the position absolutely clear, I am indebted—I think this is probably the first time he has been mentioned in this House—to Mr Cyril Kinsky of Wiltshire. He wrote to the Times last week about the frictionless border and noted that he had recently been in Switzerland and had travelled into France to shop at the local French supermarket. He had bought four chickens—poulet fermier, I am sure. He had brought them back into Switzerland, where he had been stopped and hit with a heavy fine. I hope the chickens were tasty. They were certainly not frictionless Why is there such a problem that we address in this new clause? There is a problem because, as the excellent Northern Ireland position paper makes clear, the current substantive position in Northern Ireland and the Republic—that is, the existence of a frictionless border—is not to be changed by Brexit. The Prime Minister, perhaps as well as or more than anyone, understands the problem. Two days before the referendum, she said, in effect, that you can be in a customs union and not have a border but outside a customs union you have to have a border. That situation is made much more complicated when you look at the provisions and rules of the World Trade Organization.