Debate contribution: Dual Market Access
Debate contribution by Mr Jim Allister KC on .
- MLA
- Mr Jim Allister KC
- Party at the time
- Traditional Unionist Voice
- Date
- 18 June 2024
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Opposition Business
- Heading
- Dual Market Access
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 4496960
Read the official Assembly record
Text
I will vote against the motion, fundamentally because it embraces the most anti-democratic concept available in a democracy: a people of part of the United Kingdom should be disenfranchised from controlling and legislating for the laws that govern much of their economy. I have already made this point, but I make it again: to be a member of the EU single market, which sadly we are, you have to subjugate your own sovereignty to that of the EU. In the case of Northern Ireland, that means that to enjoy the misnomered benefits of the single market, we have to subject ourselves to 300 areas of law that we do not make and cannot change: EU laws — foreign laws. The motion embraces that anti-democratic concept of disenfranchising the people of this part of the United Kingdom by making them colonial slaves to a foreign jurisdiction.
My mission to educate the Member will never cease. I remind him again that the United Kingdom voted to leave. It was a single vote for a single nation. Sadly, we in Northern Ireland did not get Brexit; we got left behind. That is the source of the problem. The Europhiles of the House are very keen to talk about their democratic credentials when it suits them, but, on this subject, we get stony silence. They do not want to defend the right of their electorate to pass the laws that govern them. That is the Achilles heel of the entire concept of the EU single market. As for the panacea of dual access, where is it? Mr Kennedy, the US envoy, told us about the wonderful avalanche of companies that were just waiting to come. Where are they? The truth is that it is our services industry that has expanded, not our manufacturing industry. The irony is that services are not covered by the protocol; they remain within a United Kingdom context. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Being in the EU single market is not benefiting the economy of Northern Ireland; instead, it is fettering our relationship with our biggest partner, hence the fundamental assault on our economic prosperity that access to the dual market brings. It all comes back to the fundamental question: is it right — can it be proper — that a people be governed by laws that they do not make and cannot change? My answer is that that can never be right. It did not have to be like this. There was an obvious answer, which actually emanated from some of those who worked for the EU. Sir Jonathan Faull, Professor Weiler and Professor Sarmento all suggested that the answer to the Irish border problem was mutual recognition, and so it was. However, the Irish Government, in their political pursuit of unifying the island of Ireland through the protocol, rejected what is the basis of international trade elsewhere: if you want to make goods that are destined for a foreign market, you make them to the standards of that foreign market and vice versa, and you mutually enforce each other's laws. That is the fundamental element of international trade. We do not need a protocol. We do not need that which is encumbering our economy. What we needed was what exists elsewhere: mutual enforcement of each other's laws on goods. Instead, we have put up a partitioning border in the Irish Sea, and we are now spending £192 million building border posts to enforce that which is wholly unnecessary when it comes to securing trade between and within two independent sovereign entities, such as the EU is and such as the United Kingdom should be. The motion is laced with its political ambition of dismantling the Union, and the protocol is the greatest aid to that imaginable. That is why it is couched in the terms that it is. I welcome the fact that the DUP has found reverse gear from 'Safeguarding the Union', when it was embracing the idea of dual market access. The DUP now tells us that it wants rid of EU law. Good, because you cannot have dual market access and you cannot be in the EU single market if you are subject to EU law. The volte-face of Gavin Robinson is welcome. It is a pity that he was one of those who told us the lies that the Irish Sea border was gone and therefore lost the trust, as his party did, of those who are of a unionist persuasion.
751 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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