Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)

My Lords, the Windsor Framework was not an inevitable product of Brexit, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, claimed—and as has been endlessly claimed. If anything, it was a product of the Benn Act. Or, I should say—to spare the familial honour of that good and worthy man, the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate—it was a product of the 2017 election, which brought into another place a majority of people who made it clear and passed legislation to the effect that we would not leave other than on terms that were agreeable to the EU. They did not put it exactly those terms. They said, “We won’t allow a no-deal Brexit”. If you think about it, that is exactly the same thing. I can tell noble Lords, having been a Member of the European Parliament at the time, that nobody in Brussels suggested a different status for Northern Ireland until the second half of 2017, in response to this extraordinary weakness that they saw on our side. It is extraordinary that we have allowed the Windsor Framework to remain in place, unless we are deliberately wanting the chafing and uncomfortable aspects of it to drive us towards some kind of reintegration. Let us focus on what we can do to solve where we are. I hope this might appeal even to some of the noble Lords present who hanker after reunion. One way of solving all the issues that are supposed to be tackled by the Windsor Framework would be to allow EU regulations as an alternative system throughout the UK; to allow British companies to choose whether they want British or EU regulations. It would be great. We would have some regulatory competition and perhaps some pressure on deregulation. This is not unprecedented. The coalition Government in New Zealand, for example, have recently changed the rules so that any pharmaceutical product approved by any serious country—the European Medicines Agency, our MHRA, the FDA in the United States—is automatically legal in New Zealand, which does not need to do its own regulatory system. If we were to do that, the rationale for the Windsor Framework would collapse and we would become more competitive. In fact, the only argument that I can see against it is that it would solve the problem and therefore remove one of the arguments for going back into the European Union, which I suspect is what motivates some of the people present today.