Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Empey, with whom I agree about nearly everything, in the closing stages of this debate on a Bill that has a limited but nevertheless most beneficial purpose: to help further the arrangements under which the Province is currently governed and its electoral system administered. As a Conservative and unionist with a long-standing interest in Northern Ireland, I welcome it.

The Bill has been the subject of extensive consultation within Northern Ireland. It has undergone detailed pre-legislative scrutiny at the hands of the Northern Ireland Select Committee in the other place, and has been usefully improved as a result. Such careful preparation is not a feature of all the legislation that comes before this House. As a Member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution, I have from time to time put my name to reports expressing regret that measures have been brought forward without having been given the full and detailed preliminary consideration that they needed. This Bill warrants no such comment, and the Northern Ireland Office is to be congratulated on its thoroughness. The manner in which it has been developed accords fully with the best practice recommended by your Lordships’ Constitution Committee.

From my own staunch unionist standpoint, the Bill has much to commend it. Northern Ireland ought, as far as possible, to be treated in the same way as other parts of our country on issues that affect them all equally. The funding of politics is one such subject. The Bill deserves full support for setting an early date—1 January 2014, less than a month away—after which information about new political donations can be made available without restriction by the Electoral Commission. At the same time, common prudence indicates that the precise moment at which the new power can be used must be determined in the light of security considerations. The Bill rightly leaves the Secretary of State, who I am sure will engage in widespread consultation, to judge when the change can safely be made, and so bring Northern Ireland into line with the rest of the country, in conformity with unionist principles and the wishes of the people in the Province. In a survey carried out by the Electoral Commission at the end of last year, fewer than one in 10 favoured the retention of confidentiality.

The Bill also brings Northern Ireland into line with practice elsewhere in another important respect, by extending the term of the current Assembly from four years to five, and by providing for five-year terms in future. There is nothing inherently superior about five-year intervals between elections; indeed, a powerful case can be made for elections every four. However, the next elections in Scotland and Wales will take place at the end of five years, and Northern Ireland stands to gain no obvious practical benefit from having a shorter electoral cycle. The Bill brings a welcome consistency to this aspect of the United Kingdom’s devolved institutions. All of them will now be re-elected in 2016. Having been brought into a common mould, they should retain it. Elections every five years are to become the rule in Wales as well as in Northern Ireland. It is a rule that Scotland should adopt too.

Much reference has been made in this debate to one particularly glaring disparity that currently exists between the Northern Ireland Assembly and devolved bodies elsewhere. The Stormont Assembly, with a smaller electorate than its counterparts, has a much higher ratio of elected representatives. Electors in Northern Ireland are therefore seriously overrepresented in comparison with their fellow countrymen in Scotland and Wales. The carefully defined power which this Bill gives to the Assembly to reduce its own size provides a most welcome means of tackling the problem. The Assembly should use it to serve both the interests of Northern Ireland, where every opportunity to cut its high levels of public spending should be seized, and those of the country as a whole. Greater uniformity between the various devolved institutions strengthens the unity of the kingdom. At the same time, the important points made by my noble friends Lord Alderdice and Lord Shutt need to be noted most seriously.

The Bill has been given wide support, and rightly so, because it bans elected representatives sitting in the House of Commons and the Northern Ireland Assembly simultaneously. There is nothing new about the existing practice. The first Speaker of the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1921 was also a Member of the House of Commons, and later went on to become Father of it; no one turned a hair. Over the years, his example was followed by a not inconsiderable number of Northern Ireland politicians. Today, in the face of much public criticism, the practice has declined sharply: only three Northern Ireland politicians currently hold dual mandates. However, the practice should cease for one simple and straightforward reason above all: the volume of work that elected representatives have to undertake today makes it impossible for them to discharge their duties adequately in two legislatures simultaneously. The era of part-time politics for constituency representatives that existed until after the Second World War has, for good or ill, gone for ever. The Government should, of course, go further—although this Bill is not the vehicle—and apply the principle of “one representative, one legislature” in all parts of the country, as the Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee recommended in its report on the draft Bill. Action is to be taken in Wales, but should not end there: Scotland, too, should be brought into line. Certain fundamental principles should apply throughout all devolved institutions, and that is one of them.

Should those elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly continue to be eligible to sit in this House? The Government have not so far accepted the arguments in favour of change. Again, there is nothing new about existing practice. Membership of this House and of the Stormont Parliament were combined by the first Lord Brookeborough and by the first and second Lord Glentoran. Today, the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, is a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Effective membership of this House may not require the commitment of as much time as the Commons demands, but even so the practical possibilities of working in this House and in the Northern Ireland Assembly simultaneously are severely limited, not least because the hours of business in both places tend to overlap. I suggest that it will be difficult to secure acceptance in the country at large for the proposition that the two Houses should be treated differently in this respect. The Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee recommended that,

“the abolition of dual mandates should be applied consistently across both Houses of Parliament”.

The case for a consistent approach seems to me to be very strong. That is one matter to which we can return in Committee.

Another matter is the much discussed question of moving towards the creation of a formal Opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Its absence, for well understood reasons, sets Northern Ireland apart from other parts of the country and is incompatible with unionist principle. Disraeli said in 1844:

“No Government can be long secure without a formidable opposition”.

Is there not perhaps a link between the very slow progress now being made in tackling sectarian divisions and improving public services, such as education, and the absence of an Opposition that could hold the Executive rigorously to account? The Assembly and Executive Review Committee has recently concluded that,

“there is no consensus at present to move to a formal Government and Opposition model”.

However, given the growing evidence of increasing support for this move within Northern Ireland, it is surely incumbent on us to ensure that a transition can occur without difficulty in future. Perhaps the most effective way of doing that would be to add to this Bill a clause conferring on the Assembly the power to make the move in due course when agreement has been reached.

Committee may also be an appropriate stage at which to consider action by the current Executive that is contrary to the best interests both of the Province itself and the country as a whole. One example is the severe limitations that have been imposed on the new National Crime Agency, highlighted by my friend the noble Lord, Lord Empey, on several occasions and by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, who knows Northern Ireland well. The noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, of Fermanagh descent, also made a reference to it earlier in the debate. Another well known example is the Executive’s rejection so far of the new Defamation Act, which was the subject of a debate in Grand Committee in June. These issues raise fundamental constitutional questions that relate to the future government of the United Kingdom, as highlighted and expanded upon by my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Empey. They are of immense importance.

In 1966, as dark clouds were starting to gather in Ulster, an incisive analysis of rising disorder was published in the New Statesman by Seamus Heaney, whose death this year has been so widely mourned and has been marked by a special occasion here at Westminster. Heaney wrote sorrowfully of the re-emergence of political extremism,

“directed at the breaking down of any bridges that might exist between Catholic and Protestant; it would create its own Troubles and set the political and religious question back 40 years”.

Tragically, these were prophetic words. Heaney also quoted words used by Keats after visiting Belfast in the 1830s:

“What a tremendous difficulty is the improvement of the condition of such people”.

The difficulty, tremendous now as it was then, can surely be overcome only by rebuilding the bridges that were so cruelly broken down after 1966, while showing true understanding of those whose sentiments are summed up in a well known line of popular verse quoted by Heaney at the conclusion of his article:

“It’s to hell with the future and live on the past!”.

It is surely our duty to do all we can to encourage Northern Ireland’s power-sharing institutions to direct all their attention in one direction: towards the future. The Bill can help us in that task.