Owen Polley: ​Lords' revealing Windsor Framework is report unlikely to make any difference to solving Irish Sea border problem

The government, for example, is desperate to ‘reset’ its relationship with Brussels and has decided it dare not irritate European bureaucrats by reopening the issue.

Rather than work with the UK to reduce problems with the sea border, the EU has repeatedly demanded that it be enforced more rigorously.

So far, Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers have been eager to oblige.

At Stormont, nationalists will never be able to admit that the framework causes more difficulties than it solves.

Their short-term goals are to weaken our links with the rest of the UK and make companies here more dependent on trade with the Republic. That project would be hampered by effective action to help businesses.

Irish separatist ideology is far more important to nationalists than economic success. If they helped firms do well, it would confirm that Northern Ireland works best when it is integrated properly with the rest of the Kingdom.

Meanwhile, the pathetic EU-patsies in Alliance would rather our economy burned than admit that we would be better off prioritising trade with Great Britain.

In the wake of Brexit, like many liberals on the mainland, everything British fills them with a kind of self-disgust, while European technocracy makes them weak-kneed and breathless.

Their allegiance to the EU is as blind as the prejudices of the most short-sighted Brexiteer, but of course they either cannot see that or don’t want to.

These sorry circumstances explain why the Lords’ report, while it was certainly revealing, is unlikely to make any difference.

Its emphasis was on ‘strengthening Northern Ireland’s voice in the context of the Windsor Framework,’ and its recommendations were designed to achieve that aim.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that ‘strengthening Northern Ireland’s voice’, certainly from the political perspective, would do much to make the sea border less onerous.

For example, the report supports Lord Murphy’s criticisms of the Windsor Framework Democratic Scrutiny Committee’s ability to examine new EU laws. This panel of Stormont MLAs was supposed to provide ‘democratic oversight’ of Brussels’ decisions and their effects on Northern Ireland. It was sold as a way of ensuring that new EU regulations did not push us ever further from the mainstream UK internal market.

This report suggested, in line with the Murphy report, that the committee should get longer to analyse potential new laws.

However, we know from the UUP’s Steve Aiken and other unionists, that nationalist and Alliance members of the committee are not interested in doing the job they were assigned. Mr Aiken, who is part of the panel, has described it as ‘incurious’ about the effects of new laws and claims that it is effectively ‘comatose’.

If it was interested in scrutinising EU laws properly and assessing whether they push us further from the UK, the committee could benefit from more time to deliberate. Unfortunately, more than half its members see their role as ensuring Northern Ireland stays firmly in Brussels’ grip.

In his evidence to the Lords’ committee, Mr Aiken said some means of removing the panel’s partisanship would be required to make it more effective. It’s difficult to see how that could be achieved while it is made up only of MLAs and his suggestion of adding ‘lay members’ did not gain the pro-EU parties’ support.

The ‘Stormont brake’ and ‘applicability motions’ were two more ‘democratic consent’ mechanisms that were supposed to stop regulatory divergence. In theory, unionist MLAs could trigger these ‘safeguards’ to stop new EU rules, even when they did not have the support of nationalists and Alliance at Stormont.

The government, though, has an effective veto over these mechanisms, which it has used every time they have so far been deployed.

The House of Lords report urged ministers to be ‘more transparent’ about how these tools function. It described the brake as a, ‘mechanism for promoting dialogue between the Northern Ireland Assembly and the … government.’

That might be a realistic assessment, but it reinforces the view of many unionists, like the TUV and the UUP, that the Stormont Brake was always a waste of time.

None of this is to say that the Lords’ report was worthless. Its assessment of the framework was damning, and that adds authority to the arguments against the sea border.

Many of its suggestions were focused on providing clearer, more timely, more accurate information for businesses. The chair, Lord Carlile, called for the Trade Support Service, which is supposed to help companies navigate trade barriers, to be redesigned.

All of this could help businesses slightly, but it would not remove the problems they encounter. No amount of extra communication or information can achieve that.

Nor do any of the report’s recommendations address the growing number of sovereignty issues, as campaigners use the framework to oppose any national government policy they don’t like, from immigration controls, to new trans guidance, to legislation on the legacy of the Troubles.

To confront these problems properly, any plan would need to dismantle trade barriers and restore power over Northern Ireland’s laws to Westminster and Stormont