Jonathan Reynolds

I am grateful to the hon. and learned Member for bringing this urgent question and for putting his community’s concerns on the record; I understand how strongly he will feel about them. There is much that I could say and criticise about the previous Conservative Government’s approach to a lot of things, but the approach that they took with the Windsor agreement to balance the obvious, practical problems and realities of Brexit—of leaving the single market when Ireland is in the EU and the customs union—alongside our commitments under the Good Friday agreement to observe what we have all signed up to and want to support is fundamentally better than when they threatened to break all kinds of international laws and agreements with key partners. It was the better way to find a way through them. I absolutely accept and understand that this issue is difficult and complicated, but I can tell the hon. and learned Member that that is not just the perspective of the UK Government, in terms of working with our colleagues and ensuring that these issues are reflected in the agreements, but what we hear from the other side in these agreements. When we explain what we need to see happen around agreements such as this, we see that the US is absolutely committed to peace, to the Good Friday agreement and to the sound working of the Windsor agreement. The hon. and learned Member has raised a number of specific questions, and I will ensure that we deal with them. We will meet with him and a delegation of MPs and ensure that we are in correspondence with him, as we have promised to be with the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. This approach is complicated, but it is far better than the one we briefly glimpsed in that difficult period when the Conservative Government did not have the Windsor agreement in place. Fundamentally, there is a difference between goods entering Northern Ireland and therefore entering the UK and goods entering Northern Ireland if there is a risk of them entering the single market more widely. This is a sound system to deal with that, and I accept that we must make it work. This is not our system, but we recognise what the previous Government were trying to do. Whether the hon. and learned Member wants it or not, I offer him an absolute, unequivocal agreement that we will work with him on any concerns he or his community have to ensure that we get this right to the maximum degree possible.