Jim Allister KC is the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) MP for North Antrim, and a former MEP and MLA.
Brexit was proclaimed as being about ‘taking back control’. Sadly, in the case of Northern Ireland, the opposite proved to be the case. By being left behind in the EU’s Single Market and under its Customs Code, Ulster has remained, in 300 areas of law, under EU jurisdiction. The Windsor Framework, sadly, changed none of these fundamentals.
These 300 areas of law are not mere incidentals, but central to the operation of our economy. They control our entire agri-food industry, much of our environment and, of course, our vital internal trade with GB. Indeed, the most audacious and humiliating EU law to which NI is subjected is that which imposes their Customs Code, which operates on the basis that GB is a third or foreign country whose goods on coming to NI are entering EU territory!
Hence the resulting imposition of the partitioning Irish Sea border where customs declarations and checks are imposed on British internal trade. This is an intolerable and Union-dismantling imposition.
It is a chilling truth that the Protocol achieved for the republican movement where the IRA failed – it pushed the border to the Irish Sea!
No only are the laws applicable to my part of the UK in these 300 areas being made by a foreign parliament, they are, because they are EU laws, the same laws as prevail in the Republic of Ireland. Hence, the means for delivery of the Protocol/Windsor Framework long-term programme of economic reunification on the island of Ireland.
As the Belfast News Letter editorial observed recently: “The Irish Sea border is an affront to the UK’s constitutional integrity and should be a national issue, but it is a matter the parties want to ignore.”
It is against this background that I’ve introduced my Private Members Bill with the support not just of all unionist Northern Irish MPs but, very importantly, of Iain Duncan Smith and Labour Brexit stalwart Graham Stringer, as well as the leadership of Reform UK. This is a coalition agreed on the unworkability and unacceptability of the present arrangements and determined to offer a better way forward.
The Bill seeks to reverse the constitutional detriment and enable practical solutions to govern the movement of goods from NI to the EU’s territory of the Republic of Ireland.
Clause 1 will set out constitutional imperatives governing all future arrangements. These will require respect for the territorial integrity of the UK and the avoidance of any part of the UK being subject to foreign made laws.
Clause 2 will then temper the effect of section 7A of the EU Withdrawal Act 2018, which is the conduit by which EU law flows into effect in NI, by circumscribing it with the statutory requirement to respect both the territorial integrity of the UK and the common rights of the Acts of Union.
Clause 3 and an associated Schedule will then address how goods should move from NI to ROI and vice versa by making provision for Statutory Instruments enabling both alternative arrangements and mutual enforcement, such as was anticipated under the NI Protocol Bill 2022, which passed the Commons before being ‘pulled’ by Rishi Sunak.
The 2022 Bill had much of the answer on how to manage the border interface with the EU. On the premise that any country selling to another must made its goods for export to the standards of the recipient country, the UK – and the EU – should mutually underwrite such practice by enforcing, through criminal sanction as necessary, the other’s market requirements. It is not rocket science, but a practical way to give assurance to countries trading with each other from different customs zones.
IIDS and others articulated and promoted this common-sense solution, but, alas, Whitehall succumbed to the EU’s expansionist agenda and sacrificed Northern Ireland to its control.
As a result, the Protocol arrangements are wreaking constitutional havoc in respect of NI and its governance, with new impositions evolving all the time – the latest being the requirement, under EU law, for pets, accompanying their owner from GB to NI, to have a ‘pet passport’!
This Bill is designed to reverse the overreach of the Protocol and put relations back on the internationally accepted framework of the EU and the UK each respecting the territorial integrity of the other. Only such can provide the foundation for a neighbourly and successful relationship.
I trust, therefore, that any MP who cares about the constitutional integrity of the UK will find the time to support my Bill. I can’t imagine MPs from elsewhere in the UK tolerating their constituents being disenfranchised and governed by laws they don’t make and can’t change. All I ask that the same approach is afforded to constituents in Northern Ireland.
