Sammy Wilson: Nigel Farage must resist nonsense arguments by the pro-immigration establishment over the ECHR and Belfast Agreement
Last week Nigel Farage launched his policy to deal with the wave of illegal immigration which has plagued our country, costing billions of pounds to house and support those who break the law using criminal gangs to illegally enter our shores, and causing increasingly widespread social unrest.
He has rightly identified the need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) if his plan to deport the thousands of illegal immigrants is to succeed.
Let's not forget it was one judge, sitting at midnight, not even hearing the UK's case for sending its first plane load of illegal immigrants to Rwanda, who scuppered the Conservative plan for deportations.
He overruled parliament, UK courts and the will of a democratically-elected government in favour of foreign lawbreakers.
That is why we must not leave our immigration policy in the hands of these foreign judges.
There are senior members of the Labour Party and an increasing number of Labour backbenchers who understand why it is necessary to deal with the ECHR issue.
However, influential judges, senior civil servants and lobbyists are determined to undermine and prevent leaving the ECHR.
One of the arguments they are using – and unfortunately Nigel Farage seems to have fallen for – is that to do so will undermine the Belfast Agreement, and therefore taking NI out of the ECHR will be difficult and NI may not leave at the same time as the rest of the UK.
This is nonsense.
In fact, it might be easier to deal with the Belfast Agreement commitment to the ECHR than to deal with the issue of disentangling the UK as a whole from the ECHR, because previous Labour governments made sure the ECHR was embedded in nearly every law which they passed.
As the treacherous Tories proved, all you need is a parliamentary majority and the political will to change the very fundamentals of the Belfast Agreement.
As David Trimble said, they used their majority to tear the very heart out of the agreement when they changed the constitutional status of NI by placing us under EU law when the UK left the EU.
They then went one stage further by removing the other fundamental safeguard for minorities when they took away the requirement for an assembly cross-community vote on controversial issues, because they knew that unionists would vote against the imposition of EU law and the damage which this has done to the Union and our economy.
Nigel Farage should learn from the past.
It is possible to set aside parts of the Belfast Agreement if he has a majority and he should not allow it to stand in the way of a priority policy.
There are two arguments against this.
First of all, the ECHR provision in the Belfast Agreement is essential to safeguarding people's freedoms.
That is not true. Individual and collective freedoms are safeguarded by the laws passed in parliament and the judgments of our courts if those laws are flouted by government or anyone else.
The second argument is that such a move will set us on a collision course with the Republic of Ireland.
That claim shows a misunderstanding of the immigration problem. As protests in the Republic show, illegal immigration is already a huge political and societal problem in that country as well as the UK.
It is also the case that as long as the Common Travel Area exists, illegal immigrants can move from the Republic to Great Britain and vice versa.
That is why – despite the claim that there must be an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic – the Garda conduct regular checks on people movements between the two justifications.
If Nigel Farage gets his way and imposes strict immigration controls on illegal entry into the UK, then the Republic will have to either cooperate with his government or face disruption to the common travel arrangements.
There is an incentive for both sides to avoid this and, of course, as a unionist, I would be totally opposed to the introduction of travel restrictions from Northern Ireland to Great Britain.
Nigel Farage needs to resist the arguments of the pro-immigration establishment, learn from recent political decisions, commit to using his majority if he gets one to set aside a minor part of the Belfast Agreement in order to implement his immigration policy, and use the common travel area leverage with the Irish government to get their cooperation.
That's the message we will be conveying to him as parliament resumes.
l Sammy Wilson is DUP MP for East Antrim.