Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 29 June 2022
I support the amendment in the name of my colleague Sarah Boyack and I support the Government motion.
The member for Airdrie and Shotts and I are veterans of the 2017-19 UK Parliament. We had front-row seats for the tragic and horrible spectacle of the constitutional vandalism that the Conservative Party perpetrated on this country. I was nine years old when the Good Friday agreement was signed, so I have only ever known peace in Northern Ireland. It was, therefore, appalling to see peace and my generation’s prospects being threatened.
In wrestling with the difficulties of the 2016 Brexit vote and considering how to make sense of it and deliver a workable solution, it quickly became clear that there were only three options. The whole UK could remain in the single market and customs union—or something that was very closely aligned to that—or there could be a hard border in one of two locations: between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland or between the island of Ireland and Great Britain.
The Conservatives, under Theresa May and later Boris Johnson, made three promises that were logically incompatible—I summarise that as the Brexit trilemma. They promised that we could leave the single market and customs union but have no border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and no border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. That was simply impossible to achieve: something had to give. The fantasy that things could be squared off was impossible to deal with in that session of Parliament, which led to the disastrous outcome of the 2019 general election and the no-deal—in all but name—Brexit with which we ended up.
Option A was the 2019 withdrawal agreement and the Northern Ireland protocol that Johnson negotiated with the EU, which broke the promise that there would be no border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Johnson lied to the Democratic Unionist Party—his erstwhile partners in sustaining the Conservatives in power—when the UK agreed to a de facto customs border in the Irish Sea, with checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Now, Johnson brazenly and outrageously denies that he agreed to that and, to try to cover his tracks, he threatens to renege on the deal. If the UK reneges on the withdrawal agreement with the EU, that will undermine the Good Friday agreement by forcing a return to a border on the island of Ireland, thus breaking promise 3, which was that there would be no border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. In effect, that will result in a no-deal Brexit and economic disaster for the UK—and, of course, the United States will never sign a trade deal with the UK if it does that.
The UK will then try to claim that the EU is to blame for this disaster and for that border. That is the most outrageous lie that has been perpetrated on the people of this country—including people who perhaps voted in good faith against what they thought was EU bureaucracy and so on, but without fully understanding the implications of the problem that would be faced with Ireland.
Theresa May’s 2018 deal with the Irish backstop pretended to achieve the fantasy of squaring off the situation, but in reality it would have kept the whole UK de facto in the EU customs union and single market for goods, if no other solution could be found, which would have broken the promise to leave the single market and customs union. Effectively, Theresa May was held hostage by her back benchers.
That deal was rejected by the UK Parliament. I am proud to say that I worked as much as possible with colleagues across parties to achieve as much as we could by way of compromise to secure agreement to remain in the customs union and single market and to achieve that alignment. There was Ken Clarke’s proposal, for instance. We worked as much as we could on that. However, the vandals on the back benches of the Conservative Party put paid to that, which led to May’s resignation, to Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister and to the whole thing unravelling.
What we saw through 2017 to 2019 was the most appalling constitutional vandalism, and we are now wrestling with the consequences of it. That is why we should reject the proposals and reject everything that the Conservative Party has visited on this country—the misery that it has visited on this country over the past five years.