I was sorry to read of the serious floods on a couple of tributaries to the Rhine. Erftstadt was among the cluster of badly affected towns and is twinned with Wokingham. Wokingham sends condolences for the loss of lives in this disaster, and sympathy for all whose homes and lives have been disrupted. The pictures reveal the brute force of too much water scouring away roads and foundations, tossing cars into heaps of wreckage and reshaping the landscape in an unwelcome way. We wish the rescue services well and hope early action can be taken to restore essential services and provide homes for those who are suffering.

This week the Commons passed unanimously an important motion to sort out the issues with the EU concerning Northern Ireland. Noting that this got very little attention in the media, I need to set out here what was agreed. I assume the BBC ignored it because it did not offer them the usual opportunity to interview a lot of Remain MPs willing to slag off the UK and put the EU case. To the BBC many pro Brexit MPs speaking for the majority view are non persons unless they can be damaged by a story.

The motion stated:

“That this House
supports the primary aims of the Northern Ireland Protocol of the EU Withdrawal Agreement, which are to uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement in all its dimensions and to respect the integrity of the EU and UK internal markets;
recognises that new infrastructure and controls at the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic must be avoided to maintain the peace in Northern Ireland and to encourage stability and trade;
notes that the volume of trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland far exceeds the trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland;
further notes that significant provisions of the Protocol remain subject to grace periods and have not yet been applied to trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and that there is no evidence that this has presented any significant risk to the EU internal market;
regards flexibility in the application of the Protocol as being in the mutual interests of the EU and UK, given the unique constitutional and political circumstances of Northern Ireland;
regrets EU threats of legal action;
notes the EU and UK have made a mutual commitment to adopt measures with a view to avoiding controls at the ports and airports of Northern Ireland to the extent possible;
is conscious of the need to avoid separating the Unionist community from the rest of the UK, consistent with the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement;
and also recognises that Article 13(8) of the Protocol provides for potentially superior arrangements to those currently in place.”

So Parliament agrees with the majority in the country at last over this issue, agrees that there is no need to bring in over the top measures the EU wants which have not yet been brought in, and recommends alternative arrangements to the current EU style Protocol. The government Ministers who replied to the debate welcomed the views of those of us who drafted and backed the motion, and the Opposition parties allowed it go through without too many pro EU complaints.

To some of you the wording will be too soft, but the significance is the wording was accepted by all. More importantly the actions that follow are also clear. The grace periods on further excessive EU intervention in NI trade should be permanent as there is no need for the powers and inspections they threaten. The EU and UK should look for an alternative to the Protocol. Parliament sees that the current EU version is alienating the Loyalist community in NI and is therefore contrary to the Belfast peace Agreement. The UK proposal of mutual enforcement and continuing checks as needed away from the border makes sense. Imposing a disproportionate number of checks at NI ports on GB/NI trade makes no sense and is illegal under the Agreement,

The government was committed to protecting the integrity of the UK internal market, and has reaffirmed its commitment in accepting this motion. If there is no early success in EU/UK talks along these lines then it is clear the UK has to take unilateral action, as it is legally entitled to do as set out in the debate. The EU should stop belaying and obfuscating and see that it has at last united the UK Parliament against its view and actions.

On Thursday the PM gave a speech setting out his vision of levelling up. It rightly concentrated on the differences in lives in different parts of our country, drawing attention to big variations in average life expectancy, in likelihood of getting a degree and obtaining a well paid job, and the differences in ability to buy a decent home. The speech both accepted that governments of all persuasions in the post 1945 world have tried to reduce these inequalities, and that the divergencies have remained.

The new ground in the speech was the understanding that successive governments have in practice reinforced the success of the richer areas, drawing ever more talent into places like central London . This has led to the need to invest heavily in public transport and other public services there to cater for all the extra numbers going to work and living in such places. In a vivid topical analogy he said investment has followed success creating a world where you “hang around the goalmouth rather than being the playmaker”. The draw of London has meant many people facing long, expensive and often vexatious commutes, and relentless pressure for more housing investment and development in the South East. As a result two thirds of the country’s graduates from the top 30 universities end up in London.

He was clear that a socialist egalitarian agenda which entails levelling down as well as levelling up is not the way to go. “We should not want to decapitate the tall poppies. We don’t think you make the poor parts of the country richer by making the rich parts poorer”. What you need is more of the potential playmakers to stay in or move to other cities that can as London does attract talent, investment and new jobs.

The big issue is how we help create these new success stories. The digitalisation of the UK is part of the answer, where the PM tells us 60% now enjoy the benefits of faster broadband, up from 7% two years ago. I will return to these issues and examine the government proposals to help level up. Central to it all, as this speech states, is to help many more people on their personal journeys to success, to home ownership, to business creation or to better skilled and better paid jobs.

As long ago as 2016, the British people voted to take back control. We voted to re-establish our sovereignty. The last Parliament sought to subvert and undermine that view. In 2019, given the opportunity, the British public voted again, by a substantial margin, to take back control. They elected, with a decent majority, a Government of a party pledged to do just that, and this Government moved with speed and purpose to take back control. Unfortunately, we still need to debate this matter today because of the conduct of the European Union. There is outstanding business. We still have not taken back proper control in Northern Ireland or over our fishing grounds. I am glad to take the opportunity provided by this Back-Bench debate to urge the Government to fully implement the mandate of the British people given to them both in the referendum and in the general election to take back that control.

I have been angered, but not surprised, by the conduct of the European Union. There is a long history of the European Union antagonising neighbours and potentially friendly states and attempting to use distorted, twisted or simply wrong legal arguments to force things in its own direction against the interests of its neighbours. The EU, in the long negotiations with the UK, always said that it respected the UK’s wish to restore its sovereignty and did not wish to deny it, and yet here we have a case where the EU is trying to wrestle our sovereignty away from us in an important part of our country. The EU always promised to respect our internal market, as is reflected in the agreements that we are currently discussing, yet now it wishes to hijack it. It wishes to divert a substantial proportion of GB-to-Northern Ireland trade to the EU for its purposes against the spirit and the letter of the agreement.

Above all, the EU promised to respect the peace agreement. It went on and on about an imaginary border that the UK had no intention of making more complicated or more difficult, and denying the actual border that was already there that was necessary for its purposes and the UK’s purposes for taxation, currency and regulatory matters. It has gone out of its way to antagonise the loyalist majority community in Northern Ireland. That is the very opposite of working with us to promote the peace and to reduce the tensions within those important communities.

So what should we do now? Our Government have shown enormous tolerance, restraint and flexibility. I make no secret of the fact that I would not have shown as much flexibility or restraint as they have done, because I am already very angry about the EU’s conduct. But they are right that we need to show that we have tried to negotiate a settlement. I hope they will have one more go at trying to get the EU to agree to a common-sense approach to these border issues whereby proper trade can be sustained and promoted so that GB-NI trade is also restored and not interfered with by the EU, because that was never part of the idea behind the original agreement.

I hope the Government will have success in these matters, but we do need to be ready now, as soon as possible, to make our own decisions and to make our own moves if the EU is not yet ready to negotiate a sensible solution. There are several on offer in this debate and in the discussions that have been held over the years. The agreement makes it clear that we can indeed move unilaterally and assert our sovereignty where our internal market is being violated and trade is being diverted, and where there are other failures by the EU to comply with the agreement, which are now several and manifest.

I say to the Government: do not delay over the whole of this summer. Take action now. The trade is being diverted now. The community sentiments are being disrupted now. The peace agreement is being wobbled now. The sovereignty of the United Kingdom is being deeply infringed now. There is plenty of evidence for that, and a good case can be made in the court of world opinion for those who are interested. But this is, above all, a matter between the Government and the British people—the people of the United Kingdom as a whole. We, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, owe it to the people of Northern Ireland to ensure that they are fully part of our single market and country, just as we wish them, with us, to have friendly and good trading relations with the EU.

But if there has to be a choice between peace and our internal matters on the one hand, and our trade with the EU on the other, of course we must put Northern Ireland, peace and the integrity of our country first, whatever threats the EU may make. The EU is the disrupter of trade; the UK is the promoter of free trade worldwide. The EU is the one that is doing harm to the constitutional arrangements in Northern Ireland. We must be rock-fast in our support for the people of Northern Ireland, for the constitution of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, and for a good solution that allows the restoration of our internal market.

Yesterday a group of MPs held a debate about the Northern Ireland Protocol. The Conservatives who secured the debate topic all argued the same case. The NI Protocol was meant to be a temporary measure. Its clause 16 allows either party to make unilateral changes if the Protocol ceases to work as intended. It is meant to respect both the EU single market and the UK internal market. The Agreement stipulates it should not be used to divert trade, yet the EU is doing exactly that and claiming it is doing that at the moment by seeking to make GB/NI trade very difficult and NI/EU trade easier.

We all believe the government is right to try to negotiate a fix and we support the detailed proposals submitted to allow both sides to proceed by mutual enforcement. The UK would ensure anything that was at risk of moving from GB to the EU via Northern Ireland would be submitted to the correct EU checks. The bulk of GB/NI trade is internal UK trade and that would be subject to UK only supervision, using trusted trader schemes, electronic manifests, checks away from the border and the rest of the techniques we use for trade within GB. The EU would for its part ensure non compliant or tax dodging goods did not find their way from the Republic to NI. There are well established co-operation procedures for tackling smuggling as there was always a goods border to supervise. The NI/Republic border when we were in the EU was an excise, VAT and currency border but that did not require border posts and cash settlements at the border.

We also believe that the EU is not minded to discuss these things in a reasonable and co-operative way. It is therefore time for the UK to make a unilateral move to assert UK control only over internal UK trade, whilst ensuring respect for the EU single market for any exports from Northern Ireland over the land border. This is quite legal under Article 16 of the NIP , let alone under Clause 38 of the Withdrawal Act which allows the assertion of UK sovereignty where needed.