Jim Allister

No, it most certainly would not. In modern times, there is abundant opportunity to develop a scheme, with the assistance of modern technology, that would allow for mutual enforcement when it comes to something as fundamental as international trade. If a company in my constituency wants to sell buses to Germany—I will stick with buses—it must make them to the standards of the German customer. If a German company wants to sell buses to the United Kingdom, it must make them to the standards of the United Kingdom. That is the fundamental starting point for trade. We create a circumstance wherein each country enforces the standards of the other, and we thereby protect the market of the other. To underwrite that, we introduce a criminal sanction saying that if any company in the United Kingdom breaches those rules, there is criminal liability, and we will look for reciprocal arrangements. That is the essence of mutual enforcement. That would work, but instead, we have sacrificed sovereignty over part of our country to a foreign jurisdiction, namely, the EU. We have said to it, “We will subject all our economy to your rules, which we do not make and cannot change,” and we did that utterly unnecessarily. The real bite of unfairness in that is that many companies in Northern Ireland do not trade outside the United Kingdom—many do not even trade outside Northern Ireland—but they are caught by the same rules as if they did. They must make and market their goods as dictated by the foreign jurisdiction. They need none of the protections necessary for the EU single market, but they face the imposition of unnecessary restrictions. The issue really reduces to this: are we a United Kingdom? If we are a United Kingdom, the laws of this nation should be made by this United Kingdom, not by a foreign jurisdiction, which imposes on my constituents in 300 areas of law. These are laws that we do not make and cannot change. We are a supplicant rule taker. That is so fundamentally wrong. The Minister will give me—and has given me before—a rather trite response: “Oh, that is all because of Brexit!” Sorry, but it is not. It is because we in Northern Ireland did not get Brexit; the Windsor framework denied us Brexit. It kept us in the EU’s customs union and single market, whereas the rest of the United Kingdom escaped. That is why we have this absurd situation where we do not get the full benefit of these trade deals. As a representative of my constituency, I ask other Members of this House: why are my constituents less important or entitled in these matters than those of every other Member from Great Britain? We then have some in this House, such as the hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry (Stephen Gethins), who want us all to rejoin the customs union so that we cannot make trade deals, whether with India or any country. We could then have only the deals that someone else makes for us—it is such absurdity. Those are the fundamental issues that I would like to see addressed. As for getting the best of both worlds, that is a fantasy for Northern Ireland, and there is a very simple reason why. We might have access to the EU market—as GB does through its trade deal with the EU—but we forget that to bring all our goods and raw materials from our main market in GB, they have to pass through an international customs border, with paperwork, checks and extra costs.