Minister Says Nigel Farage's Pledge To Renegotiate The Good Friday Agreement Is "Unrealistic And Irresponsible"
Minister for EU relations Nick Thomas-Symonds gave a speech in Westminster on Wednesday morning (Alamy)
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A Labour minister has said that Nigel Farage's claim that a Reform UK government would renegotiate Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement to make it easier to deport migrants was "unrealistic and irresponsible".
On Tuesday, Reform leader Farage said that if elected prime minister, he would look to renegotiate the Good Friday peace deal for Northern Ireland as part of his plan to stop small boat crossings.
Signed in 1998, the peace agreement requires the European Convention on Human Rights to be incorporated into Northern Irish law.
However, speaking at a press conference yesterday, Farage said he would aim to remove human rights law from the treaty as a way of making it easier to deport illegal migrants, including the ECHR.
"Can we renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement to get the ECHR out of it? Yes.
"Is that something that can happen very, very quickly? No, it will take longer," Farage said.
Reacting yesterday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer's official spokesperson said: "Anyone who is proposing to renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement is not serious."
Speaking on Wednesday morning, the minister for EU relations Nick Thomas-Symonds said Farage's comments were "unrealistic and irresponsible".
"The Good Friday Agreement is one of the great achievements of any peacetime UK government since 1945, and the comment like that just simply shows that Nigel Farage produces outlandish, unrealistic promises for solving problems," he said in a speech hosted by former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove and The Spectator.
He added that, given the Good Friday Agreement has had international support, the move would "obviously not be received favourably" by the UK's allies in Europe and the US.
The Good Friday Agreement brought relative peace to Northern Ireland after decades of violent sectarian conflict known as The Troubles. It was signed by the UK and Irish governments, with the US playing a key role in brokering the deal, before being approved by referenda in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Farage's speech on Tuesday set out how a Reform government would seek to tackle illegal immigration through mass deportations, as the Labour administration faces growing pressure to bring down the number of people arriving in the UK via small boats.
There is disagreement among senior Labour figures over how the Starmer government should approach the ECHR.
Former home secretary, Jack Straw, said that ministers should “decouple” British laws from the ECHR to enable more migrants to be deported, while another former home secretary, David Blunkett, has urged the Prime Minister to suspend the ECHR to deport thousands of rejected asylum seekers housed in hotels.
However, Thomas-Symonds said that although Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is looking at the legal interpretations of the ECHR to ensure it is being implemented "as it was intended", he believes that leaving the agreement would not "assist with getting the international cooperation or the means to tackle this issue".
"In fact, it's going to make it significantly harder to do it," he said.
Former Tory minister and Brexiteer Michael Gove hosted a Q&A with Labour minister Nick Thomas-Symonds (Alamy)
The Cabinet Office minister claimed that Reform UK's pledge to reverse the new trade agreement between the UK and the EU would "take Britain backwards" and cut billions of pounds from the economy, risking jobs and an increase in food prices.
In his speech, he set out the case for the UK-EU reset and confirmed the government’s plans to agree a final UK-EU food and drink deal by 2027, arguing that the Labour government would take “decisions rooted in the national interest, not party interest".
In response to the speech, shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel said: “Once again Labour are trying to justify their EU surrender — but the British public simply won't buy this betrayal.
“Keir Starmer is dragging us back into Brussels’ arms, and looking to once again make this country a rule taker rather than a rule maker, having sold off our fishing communities in the process. The Conservatives will never stand by and let Labour undo the democratic will of this country. We will fight them at every step.”
