Devolved Administrations: Memorandum of Understanding

Lord Bew Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for securing this debate, and I support strongly the themes of his speech, in particular when he talked quite correctly about the tendency of Westminster to devolve and forget. The noble Lord speaks with the authority of someone who was not only a Minister in the devolved Parliament in Northern Ireland but also for a time an acting First Minister. He pointed out the tendency of those in the devolved regions, perhaps particularly in Northern Ireland, to forget where the money actually comes from. There is remarkably little understanding of the reality of the UK’s intervention throughout the politics of Northern Ireland, and the points he made are profound.

I would go slightly further. The Question tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, asks that we should,

“review the operation of the Memorandum of Understanding”.

I think it is inevitable that over the next two years we are going to have to make substantial changes. One obvious reason is Brexit, which looms quite large over many passages of the existing 2013 memorandum. It is perfectly clear that it is going to lead to changes to that memorandum of understanding with the devolved regions. We have to remember that in the case of Northern Ireland we are talking about a great clutter of understandings and that, as a consequence of Brexit, all of them are either going to go or will have to be amended in a serious way. I sense that there may well be understandings with the Irish Government about the representation of Northern Ireland in the European Union and agreements there. That was in the days when there were agreements between the Irish Government and the British Government—halcyon days as regards European policy. My understanding is that documents from quite far back into the last century may be lying around, so no doubt there will have to be a big tidy-up and substantive change.

I want to support another point made by the noble Lord, Lord Empey. He is quite right when he says that the way we have gone about devolution in this country is haphazard and we stumble in and out of it in what is sometimes an unreflective way. Perhaps I may remind noble Lords of speeches made both in this House and the other place on the introduction of Scottish devolution. They do not read well because 85% of them say, “This is the answer to Scottish nationalism. Once we introduce devolution, we will never hear of it again. This is the benign compromise that will definitely work”. Well, we did hear of it again and we had a really close-run referendum.

Perhaps I can say as an aside that all that was often based on the Irish argument: “If only we had done this in Ireland in the early part of the century, we would not have lost Ireland and devolution would have worked”. That was very strongly supported by Conservative thinkers and historians of the highest quality. Is it not obvious that Scottish nationalism has far weaker historical roots than Irish nationalism? We know that in the period after devolution in Scotland there was a major thrust towards independence. What makes it so widely accepted that had we given devolution to Ireland in the early part of the 20th century, given the much stronger historical roots of Irish nationalism, there would not have been a strong thrust towards independence thereafter? The great problem was identified at the time by Sir Edward Carson, which is that once a devolved Parliament is set up, it is extremely difficult for Westminster, even though it may say that it will maintain supremacy, to gainsay that. You can say every day of the week that that is what you are going to do, but in fact it is very hard. We live by conventional wisdoms on devolution which are not put under any sort of profound or deeply based examination. But we have it and it is there. It is now part of the constitution of the United Kingdom and we have to look at its best working.

When we look at its best working, we have to talk about amending the memorandum. It is a working model for a world that is just about to change. Let us take just the last week in Northern Ireland when we had the public hearings into the renewable heat incentive. Here, we are talking about millions of pounds of public money going astray. At first glance, it looks to me as though we are not talking about some awful scheme of dishonesty, but that we have a devolved administrative and political system incapable of, or that has great difficulty in, coping with a problem of moderate complexity. Yet we propose to say that the same political community—if it returns to power in the next few months, as I devoutly hope—can have the power to deal with corporation tax, which will have every clever lawyer in the world crawling over every detail, and which is a problem of even greater complexity.

In conclusion, I suggest that we need to look at the memorandum again, with a view to stiffening it; the key point is transparency, as said by the noble Lord, Lord Empey. I agree with the light-touch transparency measures he suggested, but I draw attention to the recommendation in the House of Lords report on the constitution that talks about making provision for more discussion of the affairs of the Northern Ireland Assembly on the Floor of this House. We can no longer just lock it away. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for introducing the debate.