Spending Round 2019
Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, I want to make three points. The first is not about the spending review at all; in that, I shall be following a precedent already established in this debate. It seems to me extraordinary—completely mad—that we should summon Parliament because there is a major constitutional crisis and then for Parliament not to discuss it. We should not be talking about the spending review today; we should be having a debate on drawing the right lessons from the constitutional crisis. Ministerial Statements, in which Ministers can answer questions with well-prepared, brief, non-committal and necessarily limited responses, are no substitute; that is not a proper debate. We need a situation in which the feelings of the country can be expressed through Parliament about the traumatic experience we have been through. It is our greatest constitutional crisis—actually, our only constitutional crisis—since 1789. We should certainly pause and think about it.
If a visitor from Patagonia asked any of us what the British political system was about or consisted of, we should probably say at least two things: that we believe in the rule of law, which means that everybody is subject to the law and everybody is equal before the law; and that we have a parliamentary democracy. No one in this House would disagree with either of those two answers to that question. A couple of weeks ago, the Prime Minister put it about through Mr Cummings that he was not subject to the law—indeed, that he proposed to break it. That was unprecedented in our history. As for parliamentary democracy, it cannot exist if the executive branch feels that it wants to get rid of Parliament because it is a bit of a nuisance—simply to suspend Parliament by Prorogation for however long the Prime Minister of the day may want. That is not a parliamentary system; it is despotism with a purely ornamental parliament. There are lots of examples in history and in the present world of that sort of political system, but it is not one that any of us would want to identify with. But Mr Cummings was not putting around dark hints about that; the Prime Minister himself was committed to the idea of a Prorogation that we know now was illegal.
We have come very close to a precipice. I feel a wonderful sense of relief that we have not fallen over it, as we could well have done so without really being conscious of the political and constitutional consequences of what we were doing. It would have been very difficult to retrieve the position. That is my first comment, which has nothing to do with the spending round, as colleagues will have noticed.
Let me turn to the spending round. A classical way of making yourself popular in this life is spending a lot of money. If you can spend a lot of money at somebody else’s expense, you are doing very well. That is what the Government are doing, to try to create popularity. Of course, some of their causes are very good ones—defence, the NHS—so the Government are being quite successful, according to the opinion polls. I am, however, very frightened by the whole process. One of the two key figures has been mentioned already this afternoon: we are increasing public spending by 4% per annum. The whole House will be aware that the rate of growth of output in this country is not 4% or 1% but less than 1% per annum. Which of us would run a business or our family’s budget based on spending 4% more every year when one’s income is increasing by 1%? It can lead to only one outcome—a very difficult one. States do not go through the bankruptcy court, but we know from our experience in the 1970s what happens if we overspend.
Public debt in this country has now reached a frightening level. For 20 years before 2010, public debt was 40-something per cent of GDP; it varied between the low and the high 40s, but it always stayed in the 40s. It is now nearly 100%. That is an absolutely terrifying turnaround. Then you have a position where the Government are proposing now to go ahead with these spending plans, without any clear forecast of what the economic rate of growth will be. I totally agree with the comments that have already been made and I never make economic predictions, but it would be a brave man or woman who excluded the possibility of a recession in the event of a hard Brexit. There could be a recession in other circumstances as well; there is an awful lot of investment already flowing out of this country, which is extremely worrying. The Bank of America has moved hundreds of its staff, most of whom earn hundreds of thousands of euros every year, to Paris and installed them there. That is one small example, but there is a big loss of demand. There are people setting up in financial services in Amsterdam and Dublin in preparation, not just for a hard Brexit but for any Brexit. We are being very complacent at the moment and the Government are being utterly irresponsible in committing themselves to this level of spending without having the courage to answer the question about what they predict the rate of growth of the economy will be in the future.
My third point is about Brexit, but also about Brexit and public spending. The British public have been defrauded over Brexit in a number of contexts, not least over public spending. Many of the public were persuaded by Mr Johnson’s dishonest campaign that Brexit was a cash generator and that we would get lots cash out of Brussels, including £350 million a week—or whatever it was—for the health service. In fact, we now find that, far from being a cash generator, it is a very considerable consumer of cash. We are having to spend hundreds of millions subsidising Welsh farmers, particularly lamb farmers, who would otherwise go broke. We are spending billions on subsidising Scotland to protect it from some of the potential impact of Brexit. We are spending a lot of money in Northern Ireland for the same purpose. This includes overt bribes for the DUP, which, as the House knows, I deeply disapprove of. It is a form of corruption and nothing else, and nevertheless very expensive.
There may be many other such things, but then there is the obscenity of spending £140 million, I believe, building a vast lorry park in Dover. This kind of expenditure does not yield a penny in increased output and it is not, under any circumstances, an investment. On the contrary, it is part of simply making our commerce —our external trade—more difficult and expensive. It is an anti-economic move and a way of spending money to deprive the public of future wealth, rather than spending money to try to enhance future wealth. It is a crazy policy, and one that involves, as I said, the defrauding of the British people, who were led to believe one thing about Brexit and are now, sadly and uncomfortably, discovering something very different.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, it is very enjoyable to hear the noble Lord, Lord Young, having the freedom of the Back Benches, and I hope we are going to hear far more from him in that capacity. We should, of course, be debating the great crisis we are facing in our nation’s affairs, but he was very pungent in his remarks on BBC News yesterday about what the Government should be doing, with which I agree.
This has actually been a very enjoyable debate. I would also like to say how much I enjoyed listening to my old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Horam—I learned a lot from him in his very long political career, particularly in the earlier stages—and he had a lot of interesting things to say.
The document we are discussing is very flimsy, and not backed up by any economic analysis from the OBR. The question is: does it represent a turning point in our attitudes to public spending and tax? Are we finally getting away from the policy of the last decade, which has basically been to hold public spending down below the rate of economic growth so we can achieve a gradual reduction in the ratio of debt to GDP when we think we can get away with that, but cutting taxes instead when we face political trouble? So the question is, are we moving away from that framework? Are we now accepting that both infrastructure investment and some types of social investment by the public sector make economic sense because they add to economic growth potential? One should not just be looking at the pure number of the deficit but should be asking oneself how much within the public spending envelope will add to growth potential and is therefore a sound investment.
Are we facing up—I think none of the political parties is--to the great demographic challenge we will face in the next 10 years?. According to the IFS and the Resolution Foundation, if we are to maintain present standards of pensions, health services and social care, tax as a proportion of GDP will have to rise by 5% because of the challenge of demography. I think that this is where the Government ought to open a public debate.
As we were discussing at the Labour conference in Brighton, the tax burden on the top 1% or 5% can certainly go up a bit; the broadest backs should bear the heaviest burdens. However, the fact is that we will not enjoy a decent quality of welfare state and public services in this country unless we can make the case to the public overall for a general increase in taxation. This is going to be difficult in an environment of Brexit—
Lord Davies of Stamford
I am listening to my noble friend with great attention—he is a great expert on these matters. As an alternative to increasing tax, would it not be possible to consider some compulsory universal insurance system, such as happens on the continent?
Lord Liddle
I would include compulsory social insurance or hypothecated taxes as part of the general remark that I made. However, we are going to have to find new ways of funding our welfare state because of the demographic challenge. This is going to be difficult if Brexit goes ahead because, even if we avoid no deal, which we have legislated against, the kind of medium-term deal that Boris Johnson has in mind—the Canada-plus, free trade agreement—is not the smooth Brexit that the economic forecasts of the OBR have relied upon. It is a much tougher, harder Brexit than the customs union and regulatory alignment that Mrs May was aiming for. It will have more serious economic consequences for the country, and I worry about that a great deal.
Of course, you could not possibly justify, as a result of Brexit, a temporary increase in the government deficit, but you can only do that for a time. We saw in the 1970s that there had to be an adjustment for the higher price of oil, and we saw after the 2008 financial crisis that there had to be an adjustment for the fact that the deficit had risen as a result of the cost of saving the financial system.
If that will be the case, who will bear the pain? The people who cannot afford to bear the pain, and the people whom this document completely neglects, are poor working families. There is nothing in this document to relieve the burden that they have faced in the last 10 years. This is a gross generational unfairness: I get a nice real-terms increase in my pension every year, but what do the young mother and her children get? They get their benefits frozen as a direct result of the Government’s policy.
Most of these people are not people who do not work. They are not, to use that horrible language, scroungers; they are people who work the living daylights out of themselves, sometimes with two or three jobs, in order to meet the family budget. This squeeze on working families is having a dreadful impact. The Resolution Foundation, one of the best independent think tanks of the past few years, suggests that we will have something like 1.5 million children in poverty— 37% of all children—if we continue on our present policy path on tax credits, universal credit and the rate of benefits. That is unacceptable. Even in the period that we are talking about, there is a 4.1% increase in departmental expenditure in the coming year but further cuts in benefits are going on. It cannot continue. I notice in Cumbria the dreadful impact that is having on the ground. We have a great increase in demand for our children’s services, from parents who cannot cope with bringing up their children themselves, and the costs of our children’s services are rising dramatically. This will become as big a challenge as social care unless we address it.
The big question is: is this a turning point? I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, from his new position will be able to say positively that the policies of the past nine years have been abandoned.
Lord Cormack
You have not heard what I have to say yet!
As I was listening to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I could not help but remember a speech that I heard at my first State Opening of Parliament way back in 1970. The Address was moved by the then John Nott, later Sir John Nott, and he made a remark that has always stuck in my mind: he said that the real poor of the 20th century are those without hope. You can repeat that statement and advance the century, because it is still those who have no hope—who do not feel that they have a future—who are the real poor. I very much hope that the various promises made in this document, unsubstantiated in some ways as it is, can be carried forward and expanded.
I really want to talk about something else, because this is an extraordinarily artificial debate. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, hit the nail on the head in his opening remarks. Here we are, back from a brief September session that was, it turns out, illegally brought to a close. I am very glad that, like the Leader of the Opposition, I boycotted what turns out to have been not the Prorogation ceremony. We are now in the middle of a constitutional crisis, the like of which this country has not seen for a very long time indeed. I am not sure I would go back to 1789, with the noble Lord, Lord Davies—
Lord Cormack
The noble Lord actually said 1789, but we will not bandy this across the Chamber. One could say that 1911-12 was a great constitutional crisis. However one looks at it, and whatever one’s views of the decision that was unanimously reached yesterday, I do not think that anybody can deny that this is a great constitutional crisis. I pay tribute to the Justices of the Supreme Court. I think that they did indeed act without fear or favour; they were not taking sides on the Brexit issue. They were ruling—and I say this with some feeling of embarrassment and shame—on the conduct of a Conservative Prime Minister who should not have played fast and loose with Parliament and who should not have sent us packing on 9 September, having himself even said that he might keep us here until 12 September. I believe that the matters we have been discussing today, in an unsatisfactory form, through Statements and now this debate, illustrate the fact that there is indeed an agenda that would have kept us more than busy for most of the five weeks. Now we still do not know what is going to happen. I imagine that there will be a short and perfectly proper Prorogation in a couple of weeks, followed by a state opening and a Queen’s Speech on 14 October. However, we do not even know for certain whether that is going to happen. We have an extraordinary situation: a Government who are in a significant minority and discussing financial plans and promises that they do not know whether they will be able to discharge.
No one wishes the Prime Minister greater success in reaching a deal than I do. As I made public on many occasions, I would have accepted the deal that Prime Minister May achieved, all those months ago. I very much hope that we can have a deal and that we can be out on 31 October, much as I will greatly regret that, because this long saga has to be brought to a close. The fact is that Parliament has now decreed—rightly, in my view; I strongly supported the Benn Act, as it is now called—that we should not leave without a deal. What I have been concerned about this afternoon, in answers to two Statements delivered by my noble friend Lord Callanan, is that he has not come absolutely clean, by saying what will happen if, on 31 October, the deal has not been concluded. I hope that the Leader of the House will be able to do so in a few moments’ time. Parliament has decreed that it should be concluded before we come out. Having had one constitutional crisis because of the way in which the generally accepted rules of Prorogation were neglected, we do not want another crisis because an Act passed in Parliament through both Houses is ignored. I hope that, tonight or before we rise tomorrow—though we are of course back next week—we will have a clear and unequivocal statement. I would appeal to the Prime Minister, though I do not suppose that he will necessarily read—
Brexit: UK-Irish Relations
Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)
My Lords, I can state my views on this subject fairly rapidly. To me the whole thing is a sad nightmare. What we are doing is destroying and throwing away a great human achievement, in this case an economic institution, that of the single market. We are setting at possible risk—I put it no more highly than that, and in saying these words, I simply summarise my impression of what has been said by 15 or 20 speakers in the debate—a delicately and carefully balanced negotiated deal in the Belfast agreement. We are also depriving ourselves in the case of Ireland by leaving the European Union of hundreds of opportunities in the course of any year for collaboration with Irish officials and politicians, for working together and finding a common ground for solving problems within the context that we are completely equal because we are both equal members of the European Union. If we take those three things together, it would be quite surprising if there were not some nasty consequences. All of this, as far as I can see, is for absolutely nothing at all. I look around 360 degrees and I cannot see a single gain or benefit that we will derive from this destruction, and that is very sad.
Does this paper before us from the Government help or hinder? I cannot say that I find it a very impressive production. I rather dislike its tone and I find the content distinctly weak, jejune and rather muddled. I will mention the tone first. I was quite shocked because I thought that it was distinctly arrogant. There is not the slightest trace in this document, from beginning to end, of any sense of recognition of or sensitivity towards, let alone any form of apology for, the disruption that we are causing our neighbours. I say that because it is true. No one here in the House of Lords is going to disagree with my view, but it does not sound like that in the document at all. We have decided on the Brexit project and this document is saying to the Irish, “Right, this is a new ball game now, and you have got to move. You have to move quickly too, because we are impatient and we cannot wait around. By the way, no action is not an option, so get on with it”. That is how I read this document and that is exactly how it is drafted. It seems to me that the Brexit department needs to take on some people with a background in diplomacy. Perhaps they can make a bid for a few good ambassadors. It might help the department in packaging what is anyway the pretty unpalatable material that it produces.
As for the substance, which I suppose is more important still, it seems that the department officials had not looked at it for more than two afternoons. They start by saying that, given that 80% of the cross-border trade in Ireland is carried out by small traders, that is all right and they can continue to trade as they do now. But what will happen with the remaining 20%? You might say, “If it is all right for 80%, why not take a risk and let the entire 100% carry on with the present regime?”. After all, we are taking risks with immigration into the common travel area. In the future, if you ask a Romanian, a Pole, a Frenchman or a German who is living in this country how long he or she has been here, they will not be able to verify the answer because they will say, “I came through Ireland”. If we are taking some risks in that area, why not take some risks in the area of trade?
But what the Government are suggesting is a quite different proposal for the 20% of businesses that do not qualify for the small traders’ exemption—I think they call it the authorised economic operators scheme. It is clear that there are a lot of potential problems with it, none of which it looks like the Government have identified because, if they had done so, I suppose they would have mentioned them. The idea is that if a country is exporting to the United Kingdom and the resulting exports are going on to the Republic of Ireland or elsewhere in the EU, or the other way around, the exporter will pay at the first frontier he comes to, whether it is the UK or the single market frontier, the duty rate which is the maximum duty as between the EU and the UK. If their product carries a duty of 0% for the UK but 10% in the EU and it is landed initially in Ireland it then pays 10%, but it is going to the UK so it does not need to pay 10% but 0%. Then, when the goods have been shipped into the UK, there is a rebate of the duty that has been paid at the frontier.
That raises all kinds of problems. First, there is the administrative cost of doing that. Secondly, how do you follow through those goods? What kind of document is required? You can hardly wait for an invoice to be met. You do not have bills of lading in contexts of that kind with land borders. You certainly do not get a stamp at the land border because there is not a land border, according to this paper. That is left completely open. It is unclear how that will happen. What is more, if you are a country that has done a deal either with the EU or the UK to have zero-tariff access to what they think is your country and they then find that it is not zero-tariff access any more—that you have to pay a 10% tariff, even though you are not due to pay it, then you get it refunded but you might not get it refunded if various risks arise—then the whole deal you originally signed in your free trade agreement has been retrospectively changed. Quite legitimately, you would complain and demand compensation under the WTO rules and so forth and invalidate that particular kind of agreement. There is an enormous number of problems about this, none of which has been gone into in this paper at all. One reads it without any sense whatever that the people who have written it have really dealt with this matter thoroughly and seriously, which they ought to have done.
The other thing is that it seems the Government do not understand what the single market is that we are destroying. What they have in this paper is a picture in which there is a variety of different regimes and different types of people. It is immensely complicated. The whole market is fragmented. You might be a small trader. You presumably have to go through some bureaucratic process to prove that you are a small trader, or a bigger trader, or a trusted trader. What about the new business? What about the guy who is not registered? How long does it take to get registered? Why should we impose some penalty on new businesses, or just on ordinary individuals who decide they want to ship goods from one side to another? Since you have said that all the other procedures that have been developed will obviate the need for a border, what happens to those who are not part of the special deals? Where do they stop? Where do they get policed? Where do they get checked, or do they not get checked at all? Since the paper says there will not be any physical border, where and how are these people monitored and checked? What they have done is to go through the border without paying any duty. None of this is gone into at all.
It seems to me that, if we are to have useful debates on these papers, it is important for us to be quite frank about what we see as their shortcomings. Maybe that will help the Government to get them right for next time round when they bring them to the attention of the Irish—our potential partners in any special arrangement—or in the negotiations that go on in Brussels. Even though I am sure some people have not enjoyed my remarks, they may nevertheless find them useful in due time.
Railways: Intercity Express and Electrification
Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, I am grateful for the comments my noble friend Lord Bates. Clearly, as a north-easterner, he is very concerned and happy that there is to be investment there. He is quite right to point out the change that has taken place. This positive piece of work will go on there. Not only will north-east England benefit from new employment opportunities, there will be the possibility of even greater employment opportunities because of the railway factory and other places that will enhance and put further work there. He is right that this is a real piece of work about which the coalition Government can be really be proud. As I say, this is a real good news story.
Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, it is not often that I welcome a decision of this Government, let alone feel inclined to congratulate the Government on anything. The only other major infrastructural decision they have taken over the past nine months—the decision to veto the third runway for Heathrow—was absolutely deplorable. However, today I really congratulate them. Those three projects are going to be enormously important for the economy of the country and clearly the most important one of all is the high-speed rail link. Will the Government do everything possible to accelerate these projects now this decision has been taken? We in this country generally take far too long to implement infrastructural projects. The longer such projects take to be built and to be commissioned, the more you postpone both the internal return and the external return and the more you damage the economics of the initial decision. Will the Government take a close look at the lead time for such projects in France, Germany and Spain between a decision being taken and the first high-speed train running, and will he try to make sure that they treat that as a target, which this country should seek to beat?
Lord Shutt of Greetland
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Davies, for his contribution. I hear exactly what he says about lead time, and I will take back to the department his comments on that. Let us hope that these things can be speeded up.
Bloody Sunday Inquiry
Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Davies of Stamford
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd. I have the greatest regard for him as an eminent jurist and I am sorry that he will not agree with at least one of the things that I am about to say.
I have read that part of the report that is available in print. It seems to me to be a clearly argued, thorough and convincing report and I hope, trust and pray that it brings closure to the families of the victims and to the two communities in Londonderry—or Derry—and in Northern Ireland. It is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, and his colleagues.
However, it would be quite wrong not to say on the occasion of this debate in this place that there is a big problem, which has been referred to several times: this inquiry took so long and cost so much that the Government have, apparently, decided that we can never do such a thing again. I totally agree with my noble friend Lady Royall that that is a regrettable decision. It deprives the country of an enormously important check and balance in our system of governance. Of course, we hope that nothing so horrific will ever happen in our history again, but we all know that that is unlikely to be the case. I am extremely worried about the abandonment of the whole concept of an inquiry of this kind.
Before we take such a definitive decision—this is where I think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, will not like what I have to say—I hope that we will look again at the way in which this inquiry was conducted. I am certain that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, acted with the greatest integrity and professionalism. I do not for one second suggest—to anticipate what might be in some colleagues’ minds—that there was any financial motivation on the part of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Saville, in this matter. I do not doubt that he could make vastly more money doing other things. Whether that is the case for all the lawyers involved, I really do not know. However, I attended the inquiry on one or two occasions and, rather more frequently, I followed it on the internet and, at the time, I was frankly appalled at the leisurely pace at which it was conducted. Sometimes a witness would not turn up and, so far as I could judge, there was no sanction at all for that. The inquiry would simply be postponed for two days, there apparently being no alternative work programme in place. I was quite shocked by that. Also, as we heard this afternoon, it took five days to cross-question Ted Heath, the Prime Minister at the time of those events.
Rather than just abandoning the idea of having such inquiries, however, we owe it to ourselves and the country to find a way in which, in future, such inquiries can be viable and can be conducted with a greater degree of discipline and a rather more focused, businesslike management of the whole process, which I am sure is possible. It may be that different financial incentives have a role in that. I just mention in passing, without in any way suggesting that this would be appropriate in such a judicial activity, that in the City it is now normal, before lawyers are hired for any transaction, including the most complicated and the largest, where the complexity and the time involved can least easily be predicted at the outset, for the lawyers to be asked to quote a fixed price before they are appointed. There may be alternative structures that should be considered. We should not just abandon the whole mechanism without thinking about how it might be made more viable and realistic in future.
That said, I should like to make just four points about the general context in which this horrific event took place. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames, has just reminded us, this is a moment to try to seek historical truth. One has to start with the fact that these events took place against the background of a march organised by the Civil Rights Association. Most people taking part in that march were clearly entirely peaceable in their intentions. One has to ask: why was there a march in this country organised by the Civil Rights Association? The reason is that, at that time, and during the whole of the 50 years for which the Stormont Government existed, there had been serious abuses of civil rights. Indeed, the civil rights of the Catholic minority had been systematically suppressed for all that time. There were problems in housing and education. There was deliberate gerrymandering of constituencies. There was a terrible problem with job discrimination in the employment market. It was not just that the Government of Northern Ireland acquiesced in job discrimination; from time to time, they promoted it. Lord Brookeborough, who became the third Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, urged unionists to employ only Protestants—to use his phrase, to employ Protestant lads and lasses—and vaunted his employment of 100 per cent Protestants. That was the background. In those days, there was a culture in Northern Ireland that it was a Protestant state and that if the Catholics did not like it they could go down to the Free State or, after 1948, to the Republic.
Only two people, or groups of people, did anything about that. One was a very brave man, Terence O’Neill, who was bitterly attacked from within the unionist party—many of the attacks were co-ordinated by the Reverend Ian Paisley—and politically destroyed. Some people will recall the extraordinary furore that was created in Northern Ireland when Terence O’Neill visited a Catholic school—it was the first time in the 40 years since Stormont had started that a Prime Minister, or any Minister, had been in a Catholic school. That indicates the psychology at the time.
The only organisation to do anything about that was the Civil Rights Association. It organised a number of peaceful demonstrations, which were turned violent by extreme unionists—many of them also organised by people extremely close to the Reverend Ian Paisley. There was disgraceful violence in Armagh and at Burntollet Bridge, just outside Londonderry, in 1968-69. Against that background, it is of course not justifiable or forgivable but it is perhaps humanly understandable that a climate—a fertile field—was created in which extremists and terrorists from the IRA could present themselves as being the defenders of the Catholic community, which was under such attack and systematic discrimination. That is not a happy story.
My second point is that, although I have deliberately been harsh on them, this was not entirely the responsibility of the Northern Ireland Government of those days. The buck really stops here in Westminster because the Northern Ireland Parliament was not a sovereign Parliament like the Irish Parliament in the years before 1800; it was a subsidiary Parliament created by the Government of Ireland Act 1920. We had ultimate responsibility for the way in which it was conducting the governance of Northern Ireland and we did nothing whatever about it.
It would be easy to make a party-political point and say that on the whole that period was dominated by Tory Governments, that a ruthless alliance was formed before the First World War by Carson and Bonar Law in their attacks on the third home rule Bill and that it was all the fault of the Tories. I do not say that, however, because I am ashamed to say that Labour Governments of the time—the minority Labour Government of 1924 and the Labour Governments of 1929 and 1945—were equally negligent about this scandal taking place in Northern Ireland. I am happy to be corrected, but as far as I can recall no Liberal voice was raised in all those years against what was going on in Northern Ireland. That was a disgraceful situation.
It was the fault of Westminster, this Parliament that created Stormont. It simply acquiesced in that completely intolerable situation, which ended up in the appalling situation that we have become familiar with over the past 30 years. There are lessons in that for everybody. I cannot conceive of another devolved Parliament in the United Kingdom behaving in the fashion that the Stormont Government and the majority in the Stormont Parliament did, but if that were ever to happen I hope that in Westminster we would not fail in our responsibilities as we did last time.
My third point is that the background to this appalling event—the tragic disaster on Bloody Sunday—is internment. It is extraordinary that the mistake of internment was made at all. British Governments—Whig, Tory and Liberal—throughout the 19th century voted through these two Houses in Westminster coercion Acts that had the same effect and allowed arrests without any judicial process, the holding of people without trial and the suspension of habeas corpus. They were a complete disaster and did not work at all. Many Irish leaders of the time were arrested in this way, including Parnell, who was arrested in 1881. When the coercion Act had been passed and before Parnell was arrested, as he expected to be, somebody said to him: “Mr Parnell, who is going to take over the Irish parliamentary party if you are arrested?”. He responded, “Captain Moonlight will take over the Irish party”, and Captain Moonlight did. The equivalent of Captain Moonlight took over in the 1970s after internment. That was a terrible mistake and we should learn from it, because we could make similar mistakes in other parts of world, overthrowing our constitutional liberties, supposedly in the interests of security, but in fact finding that that sacrifice is entirely counterproductive.
My final point is that, after this ghastly tragedy of Bloody Sunday, we had to face conflict with the IRA for the next 25 years or so. Why did we have to do it? It was to uphold the principle of democracy, the fundamental principle of a free society. Constitutional and political decisions can be made and constitutional arrangements can be changed only by the democratically expressed will of the people, not at the point of a gun. We had to resist the IRA and we did so. I say “we did so”, but the British Army and the RUC actually did so. I accept the appalling criticisms in the report before us, but 99 per cent of time the British Army behaved with incredible courage and great professional restraint. It was because of that, above all things, that we came through and successfully defended that essential principle of a free society.
I also want to say a word about the RUC, which was equally incredibly brave. Many of those men must have felt tempted to drop that profession and get away because it was so dangerous. I am not easily moved to tears, but I have with great difficulty, because grown men do not weep in public, restrained them when going into the police station in Londonderry on more than one occasion and seen the incredible number of names of RUC officers killed during the Troubles in that city. It is absolutely horrific. I make a particular point about the Catholic officers who, of course, were even more vulnerable to revenge attacks and to their families being intimidated and who stayed with the RUC throughout those terrible years. We owe an enormous debt to our security forces—to the British Army and the RUC—in those very difficult times. It is a debt that we must never forget.