Mr. Jonathan Powell:

I thank the Chair and the committee for inviting me to this session. I am sorry that I cannot be there in person. The Good Friday Agreement is something that I feel very strongly about. I devoted a good part of my life to the process relating to it. I have been involved in many negotiations in my life, but this particularly one was the most important for me and the one that I think has achieved the greatest benefit for all.

The Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent St. Andrews Agreement have been remarkably successful in bringing a lasting peace to Northern Ireland. They have not solved all Northern Ireland’s problems from sectarianism to repeated political crises but they have so far prevented a return to the misery of the Troubles.

What the agreements did was to take the poison out of the issue of identity and allow us to return to normal politics where parties wrestled with the practical day-to-day problems like health and education. We must remember that in the end the Good Friday Agreement was an agreement to disagree. Unionists still wanted to remain in the UK and nationalists and republicans still wanted to be part of a united Ireland. We did not solve that problem but both sides accepted the principle of consent if the status quo was to change, and that meant they could pursue their different aims politically, and purely politically and peacefully, rather than by violence. It also meant that people in Northern Ireland could feel Irish, British or both.

This happy compromise has been upended by the impact of Brexit. As was pointed out at the time of the referendum, the UK leaving the Single Market and customs union would require a border somewhere. The Brexiteers pretended there was some magical answer where there could be a border through technology or some other means but if that were the case there would be no need for borders anywhere in the world. It was never a credible solution to the problem. The then Prime Minister, Theresa May, struggled, I think honourably, to try to find a solution with a Heath-Robinson type scheme involving the whole UK remaining in the customs union. Boris Johnson instead opted for a border in the Irish Sea, something Theresa May had said no British PM could agree to. This option is certainly massively better than a border on the island of Ireland, which would be disastrous for the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process but we must recognise that it does raise issues for unionists about their identity. It does put a border between them and the rest of the UK. Unfortunately for the unionists, there are only these two choices. In six years of trying, no one has been able to suggest an alternative. Therefore, we will have work with the protocol and the border in the Irish Sea.

The current British Government has embarked on a policy of escalation by threatening to unilaterally abrogate the Northern Ireland protocol which they themselves negotiated and signed. As a result, they have broken international law and undermined the UK’s international reputation, alienated our allies in north America and Europe at a moment when we need them most and have potentially triggered a trade war when the world economy is struggling with a cost of living crisis. The main casualty will be the Northern Ireland peace process itself. That does not mean we are inevitably destined to return to the Troubles but rather that it creates a permanent political crisis where we cannot get the institutions up and running again and Northern Ireland is left without a viable Government for the foreseeable future.

The solution seems perfectly obvious. The British Government should be negotiating and trying to de-dramatize the issue, rebuild trust with the EU and find solutions to the undoubted practical problems that exist as a result of the protocol. This will require the EU to be flexible, and I think that they have been flexible, but they must be even more flexible around implementation. It also requires the UK to drop ideological demands such as those around the European Court of Justice.

From my experience of negotiating in Northern Ireland and around the world, negotiations only work if there is trust between the two sides. I fear what the current British Government has done is to destroy that trust. That will make it very difficult indeed to get negotiations going again. In fact, I find it hard to imagine how that will happen with the current Prime Minister in office. I fear we may have to wait until he has departed before we have serious negotiations. I hope I am wrong, because I do not want this political crisis to be prolonged. That is my current view.

I will stop there. I again thank the Chair for inviting me to speak to the committee.