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Brussels, this is important. Fundamental.
Lord Bew, Trimble's adviser for the Good Friday Agreement: "There is one gt problem with the backstop: it does not protect the GFA. People do not have democratic control. [It] is a top-down imposition on how NI matters will be handled."
Lord Bew, Trimble's adviser for the Good Friday Agreement: "There is one gt problem with the backstop: it does not protect the GFA. People do not have democratic control. [It] is a top-down imposition on how NI matters will be handled."
"There is a huge gap between the Good Friday agreement and the backstop; there is no avoiding it. You can defend this on lots of grounds, some of which I absolutely accept, but you cannot defend it on the grounds that it is defending the Good Friday agreement."
"It is constructed on an entirely different principle: top-down, not bottom-up. This is a huge difficulty that will have to be attended to; otherwise, we lose the template of the Good Friday agreement, which all parties in Northern Ireland accept."
"Even now, when we cannot make it work, everybody accepts that that is the basic template for a settlement. If we throw it away, which will be the effect of going along these lines, we will be taking a massive risk with the stability of Northern Ireland."
Link to the speech here: hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2018-12-…
