Queen’s Speech

Lord Trimble Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Trimble (Con)]

My Lords, I start by echoing the praise which has been given throughout this House to the three maiden speeches that we have heard. We have also heard a number of other extremely good speeches, but I want to move on to my own.

I begin with a couple of what might seem like minor points. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, referred in their speeches to the funding of political parties. I come with a suggestion which is borrowed from the German example. In Germany they have a process whereby the person filling in his tax form can tick a box and by doing so a proportion of his tax will then go to a particular body. They use the system in Germany for financing churches, but I suggest that we should use it here for financing parties. It would not mean people paying any more money; some of their tax money would be used for it. The support of the party would then come from ordinary people and ordinary voters. That may not be the exclusive way of doing it, but I suggest it because we clearly have a system that needs repair. It is one suggestion.

Another thing that may need repair is the provisions on human rights. I shall mention two things, one of which is really quite important but has been mentioned only in passing. It was in our manifesto and concerns the application of some aspects of human rights law to the Armed Forces.

Originally, the situation was quite clear: the Armed Forces were bound by the law on armed conflict, which is basically the Geneva conventions-plus. But in recent years—the European Court of Human Rights in particular has been guilty of this—human rights law concepts which previously had nothing to do with armed conflict have been brought into armed conflict law, and they are having very negative consequences there. I was at a conference a month or two ago where a number of persons from various countries, partly in Europe, partly elsewhere, were discussing this issue. A representative from NATO said that NATO is now very worried about the way in which human rights concepts have come into the Northern Ireland conflict. This needs to be fixed or our Armed Forces will become ineffective.

With regard to the manifesto commitment in the Queen’s Speech for a Bill of Rights, I would be willing to see what comes along and I do not think that we should jump to conclusions. There is a lot of jumping to conclusions going on here but let us wait to see what comes. If it is a genuine British Bill of Rights, I do not see a problem. A number of people are saying that the European convention is embedded in the devolved arrangements for Northern Ireland and Scotland, but I do not see a problem there. If the legislative capacity of the Northern Ireland Assembly is such that it cannot legislate in contravention of the convention, and if it cannot legislate in contravention of a British Bill of Rights, I do not see a problem. Therefore, something has been turned into a problem when it is not really a problem.

Earlier, we heard an excellent speech from my noble friend Lord Forsyth. I found myself agreeing with virtually everything he said, but he made one really big point which we should all take to heart and think about, and that is the consequence of this general election for the Smith proposals. Those proposals were endorsed by Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in Scotland, who, between them, got three seats. However, the proposals were not endorsed in the manifesto of the SNP. Instead, it went down the road of fiscal autonomy and got 56 Members. In that situation, in normal politics you turn round and say that the Smith proposals are dead because they have been rejected by the Scottish electorate. However, we are continuing with the proposals. One axiom from literature is that you should never reinforce failure, but that is what we are doing. I think that we should take what happened there as an opportunity to stand back and think about those proposals.

That brings me to what has been coming from a number of quarters here: the suggestion that we need some sort of convention or body, the sense that constitutional matters have been handled on a piecemeal and short-term basis, and the feeling that putting the union on a sounder footing needs more than just repeating a phrase; it needs to be thought through. That thinking through should come not from continually scratching the sore of devolution but from looking at the other end and asking what the core matters of our union are—the matters that must be uniform throughout the state. We cannot say that everything is up for grabs; there has to be a core element.

I came across a suggestion of that from a colleague in the Commons, John Redwood. In his blog last week he said:

“Our union is above all a currency, benefits and tax union”,

and of course for those things there must be uniform standards throughout the kingdom. You can change some aspects and you can devolve matters, but legislation will set the standards. Administration can be devolved and there can be minor variations in these matters but unpicking too much will unpick the whole system. Consequently, we need to think about that as well.

As we know, welfare is a problem at the moment in Northern Ireland. It is an anomaly. For the other devolved bodies, there is no power to legislate for welfare. There is in Northern Ireland, although purely by accident. In 1920 there was no welfare state, so there was no provision for the reservation of welfare legislation to Westminster. After the creation of the welfare state, the Northern Ireland Parliament stuck rigidly to its step-by-step policy and copied GB welfare legislation on to the Northern Ireland statute book en bloc. Northern Ireland voters accepted this. They did not hold Stormont responsible for the ups and downs of welfare policy, knowing that the policy was made in London and that overall they were beneficiaries from it.

That has now been disrupted, but before coming to the specific causes of that disruption, I want to say that if a policy is to be uniform throughout the kingdom, is it really then fair for London to expect the local representatives in a particular part of the kingdom to bear responsibility for the heavy lifting of having that uniformity? I do not think that it is fair but that is what is happening with regard to Northern Ireland.

One then has to turn to the role of Sinn Fein in this matter. A problem arises because Sinn Fein is a single party that operates in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. If it were two separate parties, the problem would not arise. Sinn Fein might evolve organically into separate parties but that will not happen this year or next year, although it is something that may well happen. However, Sinn Fein’s chief objective at the moment, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, is next year’s elections in the Republic. Because Sinn Fein in Dublin opposes austerity, so it has insisted that the party in the north must do the same. There is reason to believe that the northern party tried to adopt a more sensible line but that it was dragged back into line.

The second point to make about Sinn Fein is that once it has said something in public, it will insist on that even when it is clearly bad for it. It foolishly thinks that this makes it look strong. We have seen these characteristics demonstrated over recent months and it is silly to think that they will change.

Last week, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was reported as saying that there was a move in the direction of bringing back the power to legislate to Westminster, which I have suggested before. But it was said that the Secretary of State was thinking that there was still some way to go on this. Why dither when the only consequence of waiting is that hundreds of millions of pounds are taken out of the budget, which would involve huge tax cuts in Northern Ireland? The Secretary of State could cure that tomorrow simply by taking steps to bring back legislation. No doubt Members will have noticed that Peter Robinson, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, has endorsed that proposal on several occasions. There may be a fear that if that is done somehow Sinn Fein will react negatively to it—a fear which I think is completely misplaced. If it does something to damage the Assembly, voters in the south will punish it next year, and it knows that. What it does will be limited.

I shall briefly mention the policy of English votes for English laws. I am indebted here to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, which I heard at a conference we were attending in St Anne’s College many months ago. Apparently, the clerks in the Commons had looked to see how many times a measure had been carried without the support of a majority of Scottish Members. They found that in a 10-year period, that had happened only in the order of four times. Therefore, it is not a big problem.

My final point on that is quite important: the measures in the Commons are supposed to bite on things that relate exclusively to England. If a Bill triggers a Barnett consequential, it is not exclusively English. If it triggers a Barnett consequential, all the people in the devolved areas should be involved and should not be kept out. That is crucial. I have not heard that said and it needs to be borne in mind.