Iraq Inquiry Report

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Thursday 14th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman is very right. We expect the military to do its job when we commit it to war. I use the word “we”, but I was not an MP at the time and, like most of the rest of the citizens of the UK and Scotland, I did not support the action in Iraq. When we ask the military as a collective to do a job, we should be prepared to do our job and deliver change if necessary. We should not run away or be scared of such decisions. We must remember that there was a Butler inquiry in 2004, which the Evening Standard branded a whitewash on its front page. When the Government thought that they could get inquiries of a certain type, they were quite willing to have them.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The hon. Gentleman and other Members have made very important points. Is it not hugely important that we remove this false parliamentary rubric of having no inquiry while troops are in the field? Otherwise, Governments will have a perverse incentive to keep troops in the field in a possibly disintegrating and changing conflict situation, and will be suspected of doing so, in order to avoid an inquiry?

[Mr MacNeil]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point. He probably knows that I am a great admirer of his thoughts and ideas. He makes a very good point about this perverse incentive that a Government can have to keep a war going to avoid an inquiry. Hopefully, that is not a reality, but given the machinations of politics, we can never know. There may be a desire to get over another couple of weeks or another month, or to kick the can down the road that little bit further. The can was certainly kicked down the road a decade ago. A pivotal thing changed between 2006 and 2009—the Prime Minister of the day changed, from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown. People can draw their own conclusions from that, but I do think that was significant. I will wait for the inquiry to see just how significant it was.

As hon. Members have said, we cannot have this Parliament running away from the reality of what it committed other people to doing. Ultimately, the Iraq war cost 179 UK lives. As the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) said, that does not take into account those who were wounded in body or mind, or the knock-on effects on families, loved ones, and those dealing with people wounded in body or mind. The war has taken quite a toll on people in the UK, and it has cost the lives of 4,800 allied soldiers. Sadly, those figures, terrible as they are, are dwarfed by those for civilian casualties in Iraq. The lowest estimate is 134,000, but the number is possibly four times higher than that. The war also created 3.5 million refugees. For goodness’ sake, there are lessons that we must learn about what we got ourselves involved in, and what we might do again if we do not have the courage to face up to what was done.

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[Mr MacNeil]

I am grateful for that intervention. As was said earlier, the UK risks becoming an international laughing-stock because of this infinite, eternal delay with this report. My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the delay is annoying many people. It is certainly not to the satisfaction of the families, many of whom would concur with what he said about the EU referendum. Roger Bacon, whose son Matthew Bacon was killed in Basra in 2005, said:

“To allow the referendum to get in the way of it seems to me to be completely wrong and smacks of political manoeuvrings that should not be taking place really.”

Interestingly, the former member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and former Labour Member representing Thurrock, Andrew Mackinlay, called for the publication of Chilcot not to get lost in the case of the European referendum. He said:

“It would suit the security and intelligence services and some people in high places for it to be ‘lost’ in the flurry…of final days of the referendum campaign”,

so let us have it soon at the beginning of May. That is when this report should be out, on the Government’s word. We are looking for the Government to keep their promise and for John Chilcot to keep his. The families certainly deserve that.

[Mark Durkan]

Some of us know John Chilcot and have worked with him, because of our backgrounds and roles. When he was appointed to carry out this inquiry, I was accused of being uncharitable in saying that although he had many attributes, I did not think he would be found in the “Yellow Pages” under I for independent or C for challenging. Perhaps he will prove otherwise. He conducted the review after the Castlereagh raid, and what he did then was what my party and I predicted he would do—come up with an outcome that would entirely suit the security services and be more about their interests. That shows that this man is well attuned and sensitive to the interests, demands and requirements of the security services. The idea that he has written a report that will need serious national security checking is somewhat preposterous.

[Mr MacNeil]

Those are interesting words from the hon. Gentleman. That brings us back to the Prime Minister’s statement that the national security checking for the Saville inquiry took two weeks, and that the expectation was for the Chilcot inquiry to take no longer than that. I expect—and it is the expectation of this Chamber—that the report will be published in the week commencing 2 May. We cannot have anything other than that.

The failure to publish this report has, I think, left us uninformed about other engagements that took place subsequently to Iraq. The UK’s military action since Iraq has, it can be argued, been a chaotic mess. That certainly seems to have been the case in Libya, where we led a bombing campaign costing 13 times more than the amount spent on the rebuilding of Iraq. Had Chilcot been published, we might have had some hard lessons set out in black and white to guide any Government planning any military adventures or interventions in the future to plan for the peace afterwards, not to leave a vacuum and not to leave an opportunity for terrorists to move in and destabilise a state. We were selling ourselves short and other countries particularly short when the launch of the report was delayed, and we are doing so now through the interminable delay to its publication.

Let me conclude with the words of a woman I greatly admire—Rose Gentle from Glasgow, the mother of the Royal Highland Fusilier Gordon Gentle, who was killed 12 years ago in Basra at the age of 19. She said that she was “disappointed” by the latest news from the inquiry, and added:

“We thought it should be out a lot sooner than this. I thought it would be out by the end of the year, because they have everything there. It’s another let-down. It’s another few months to wait and suffer again.”

That was said on 29 October 2015, nine years after the initial debate on Iraq in this place. Bereaved parents such as Rose Gentle should not wait a day beyond the first week of May 2016 for the publication of the Chilcot report.

Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean and Europe

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Wednesday 9th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I sat through the debates yesterday and today and want to address a number of the points that have come up rather than just rely on some of the helpful and poignant briefings we have received from so many people.

One of the first things I want to do is acknowledge the tenor and content of the speech made by the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) as well as the scope of the motion. Contrary to the attempts by the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) and others to misrepresent it, people need to recognise that the motion clearly listened to the points that many Government Members made in yesterday’s debate, when they said that in all the focus on the refugee crisis as it is manifesting itself in Europe we should not forget the refugee crisis in the camps in some of the countries surrounding Syria or the significant commitment that the Government are making to the efforts to support people affected by conflict in Syria and elsewhere. The motion clearly does that. It attempts to achieve consensus on some of those concerns and on the valid points made by Government Members yesterday.

The most questionable point made by the hon. Member for Gloucester was when he complained that the motion

“calls for a Government report to be laid before the House by 12 October 2015 detailing how that number can be increased”

and stopped there. He forgot to say that the motion continues:

“encompassing refugees already in Europe and including a plan for the remainder of this year to reflect the overwhelming urgency of this humanitarian crisis”.

That is the point. If those of us who have signed the motion had been saying that we wanted to see refugees who are already in Europe admitted as part of the 20,000 the Government are looking to admit over the next few years, Government Members would say that we were trying to deny people in the camps the opportunity to be part of that number. Our concern is not that people who are in the camps should not be admitted—we welcome the Government’s interest, although again we would welcome an increase in the numbers—but that we cannot ignore those who are already in Europe. It was the overtone of disqualification in the Prime Minister’s statement the other day that particularly concerned me.

In the debate yesterday and today, many hon. Members touched on what prompted so many of our constituents to mobilise and get in touch with us. A little over a week after the media were full of the photographs of the Prime Minister on a beach in Cornwall, a different beach photograph emerged in the media. It brought out those words of Seamus Heaney about something having the ability to

“catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

That is what that photograph of Alan Kurdi did.

We heard the response from so many of our constituents and we know what the response has been internationally, but let us be clear. That photograph stirred our constituents and in turn seemed to spur the Prime Minister into altering his tone, but let us think about another Alan who might arrive on a beach or somewhere else in Europe, having survived his perilous journey, but alone and unaccompanied. What is the message in the Government’s response to that Alan? “He is disqualified. He is outside our consideration.” We even heard from the Prime Minister today that, yes, we do have to take care as to what we do with unaccompanied children and how we treat them, but being careful is no reason not to show them care and consideration, which appears to be the Government’s position. That needs to be revised, improved and altered.

I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has had his attitudes to this long-running problem reconditioned. Remember, he was one of the leaders at the EU Council who went along with the idea that Operation Mare Nostrum was somehow encouraging people on to the seas. The line back then in autumn 2013 was, “If we run rescue operations, we will only be encouraging more people on to the seas.” At least now, thankfully, we have the Royal Navy, the Irish navy and others helping to rescue, but it took the disasters of April this year to force that rethink. The same caution from the Government Benches that we have heard in the past two days—that we have to be careful not to encourage people to make those perilous journeys—was exactly what was behind the disastrous decision in relation to Operation Mare Nostrum, which did nothing to discourage the perilous journeys and meant that people were not saved and too many lives were lost.

[Mr MacNeil]

The perilous journeys would, of course, be ended if people could fly. Sadly, they cannot because an EU aviation directive prevents that, which means that at four times the cost they are taking those perilous journeys.

[Mark Durkan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, which is correct. We know from Amnesty and others that a cogent case has been made in relation to a number of deficiencies in the Schengen agreement and the Dublin regulation, which clearly need to be overhauled in the light of recent events.

I agree with so many Government Members on a number of points that they have made, not least the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer) and the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood). We need to recognise the scale of the whole humanitarian crisis and not concentrate just on those who are arriving in Europe. We have to meet our responsibilities in relation to those who have made it to Europe and in relation to the wider crisis.

The Secretary of State for International Development spoke of her concern not only that other countries were not matching the 0.7% aid target, but that there was a significant shortfall in so many relevant UN appeals. Some of us would say that one of the ways to deal with that is through a global financial transaction tax. Part of the aim of those of us who have supported that idea is precisely to support funding for the sort of international mechanisms and measures that are needed, rather than different UN funds having to busk around different countries trying to gather money for programmes. Although we have heard in these debates about the very good work in the refugee camps and elsewhere that is being funded through DFID and so many NGOs, let us also be clear that UN funding in a number of those camps is being reduced. The level of food aid in some of the camps is being reduced, and education support is not what it should be.

In the previous Parliament the all-party group on protecting children in armed conflict, led by Fiona O’Donnell, produced a report that drew heavily on the lessons being learned from what is happening in Syria, particularly in relation to the millions of children who have had to flee. It noted that when DFID and other organisations respond to such emergencies, in the first order of things little thought is given to education. That might be understandable, but when we consider just how long term many refugee camps have become for other conflicts—look at the Palestinian experience—we see that clearly more needs to be done. The world must respond not only to the immediacy of the refugee crisis, but to the wider lessons about the inadequacy. Obviously the convention on refugees will have to be overhauled, and so many other rules, such as Schengen and Dublin, will have to be revised.

Of course, these islands are outside Schengen. One of the things that I would like to see the UK Government do, along with the Irish Government, is convene a meeting of the British-Irish Council to co-ordinate across the devolved Administrations and with the Irish Government what the response will be across these islands in order to meet our responsibilities for accommodating refugees. That would ensure optimum co-ordination across jurisdictions and between services so that there is no fall-down, breakdown or confusion facing international agencies or domestic charities when it comes to responding. The Government might find, as a result of the information and ideas that would emerge from such collaboration, that they are in a position to reconsider the number of refugees they are taking and the time scale, not least by accommodating some of those who are already in Europe.

Let us be clear that the Government, having previously been averse to engaging with the UNHCR resettlement scheme, and then having been very dilatory in relation to the vulnerable persons scheme, have now moved to strike a tone of some urgency in this regard, but of course limits have been put on it—the Prime Minister appears to have put the guard up on his heart again. The Government must be prepared to do more, but those of us who are criticising them for the number of refugees they will admit or on the time scale must face the wider question about the scale of the problem in the camps, about other conflicts, not least in Sudan and South Sudan, that are driving people into refugee status, and about the need for a much bigger and longer-term response, including proper support for the UN, and a global financial transactions tax would be a good start.

Finance Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, you and others have made the comment that today is a day on which a birthday has occurred, so before I have to, in response to interventions, may I say to the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) breithlá sona dó? Go maire sé on lá.

I should also make an apology, because I missed a birthday yesterday in the debate on the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, which relates to the Budget measures.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman gives me the opportunity to make a bilingual intervention—in Irish and in Scottish. Go raibh míle maith agat agus mòran taing.

[Mark Durkan]

We are getting far off the Finance Bill.

The Government told us that the Finance Bill should be taken as part of a whole suite of measures from the Budget, including those in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill. Yesterday, we missed the six-year birthday of the Second Reading debate on the Child Poverty Bill in 2009, when the then shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, now the Home Secretary, said:

“When we talk about child poverty, we are also talking about family poverty. Children are poor because their parents are poor…I would almost like to change the name of the Bill from the Child Poverty Bill to the child and family poverty Bill.”—[Official Report, 20 July 2009; Vol. 496, c. 613.]

The measures in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill and the Budget tell us to forget that child poverty has anything to do with parental and household income, and that the Government are going to abolish definitions of child poverty. We heard from the Chancellor of the Exchequer today at Treasury questions that he believes the Budget is offering a contract: higher wages for less dependence on welfare. He said that people would support that contract. I think more people will see the con trick in what the Chancellor is doing than the contract.

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[Mark Durkan]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. I think many people will wonder about the paucity of attendance on the Benches at such an important debate today. We have been served notice that there will be various amendments in later stages of the Bill, but I think people would have expected a bigger attendance here today. Given the impact it will have on many people with marginal incomes and the consternation that many people feel about MPs’ pay increases and other matters, they will be wondering where everybody is.

[Mr MacNeil]

There are questions about where Labour and Tory Members are at the moment. Will the hon. Gentleman hazard a guess that they are perhaps off at merger talks?

[Mark Durkan]

Maybe they are away celebrating other people’s birthdays. [Laughter.] Maybe the hon. Gentleman, having had so many interventions, can now safely go and celebrate his. We all know he was here and not somewhere else.

In the provisions on the national living wage and some of the other early clauses, the Chancellor seems to be doing exactly what he decried his predecessors for doing: passing legislation to put restraints or constraints on himself. He is advertising in legislation his own behavioural discipline. It is the ultimate political selfie to put oneself into legislation. Some only last for the life of the Parliament, yet are being put into legislation. How gratuitous a political exercise is that? Perhaps that is why other hon. Members cannot see fit to indulge the Bill too much.

Government Members have said that the charter for budget responsibility is a key issue, which it is, but a key aspect of the charter is the welfare cap. In yesterday’s debate, we heard references to the benefits cap—there has been much discussion about the benefits cap, which affects households—but less attention has been paid to the overall implications of the welfare cap, which was first introduced as part of the charter last year. If we look at what the summer Budget, as opposed to the March Budget, does for the welfare cap over the next four years, we find some revealing figures. In the March Budget, the overall welfare cap for the UK for 2016-17 was £122.3 billion; in this Budget, it is £115.2 billion. For 2017-18, it was £124.8 billion in the March Budget; it is £114.6 billion in this Budget. It was £127 billion for 2018-19 in the March Budget, ahead of the election; it is £114 billion in the summer Budget, after the election. For 2019-20, it was £129.8 billion in the March Budget; in this summer Budget, it is £113.5 billion. Over those four spending years, that is a cumulative cut of £46.5 billion, as a result of the charter for budget responsibility and the welfare cap.

Many Opposition Members—or perhaps not many of us, as I think only 20-odd of us voted against the welfare cap when it was introduced—said that what the Treasury was bubble-wrapping as a neutral budgetary tool would turn into a vicious cuts weapon, and now we see it, in the name of the welfare cap. When there is so much discussion about the benefits cap, people forget that the real story is the welfare cap, and that will bear down on people in my constituency and lead to more conflict around the next wave of welfare reform when it comes to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

We heard earlier from the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and we heard yesterday what he thinks the implications of the cap will be. If he was still here, I would be saying to him directly that on this issue he and his party need to catch on; they have been wrong in the past, and it is a bit late to be scrambling now, when they have invited this very situation. Many of us told them that their support for the welfare cap, on top of their support for the last wave of welfare reform in the Assembly, would lead to this very situation, but they told us to forget about those concerns because there was nothing we could do about it.

Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan]

I take the spirit of the hon. Gentleman’s point, but I do not accept it literally. If we are to talk about having a recall power—whether it be in the terms of this Bill or any other—I believe there needs to be a yardstick. If the House of Commons is to adjudicate itself or to ask a select number of us to adjudicate the rest in respect of standards and privileges, there must be some clear standards.

Many of the misgivings people have expressed about the decisions of the Standards and Privileges Committee over recent years have been because there has not been an apparent consistent standard in some of the judgments made and the decisions subsequently transacted. If we as hon. Members have misgivings about how those decisions are made and if we do not always understand them, why should we not expect the public to suspect the same thing? Should we be able to say, “Unlike many other people about whom we legislate, and unlike in many other walks of life where we provide all sorts of detailed schedules, guidelines and regulations, we are to be entirely free agents. We are the purest of democratic angels, moved by whatever spirit or inspiration takes us, and we are to be trusted as such”? We cannot present ourselves in that way.

Let me return to core points about the Bill’s deficiencies. As hon. Members have said, it is essentially an expulsion Bill rather than a recall Bill. Recall is meant to put things in the hands of the voters. Calling this measure the Recall of MPs Bill is a bit like the old joke about the two-hour dry cleaners: “‘Come back next Monday and you’ll get your suit.’ “But it says ‘two-hour dry cleaners’ outside”. ‘No, that’s just the name of the shop.’” Recall of MPs seems to be just the name of the Bill; that capacity is not given to voters. Insofar as a role is given to voters in respect of the recall process, it is simply that if someone triggers either of the two mechanisms, 10% will trigger a by-election. I think that the idea of a by-election being triggered by 10% is wrong, particularly if there has been a lot of speculation and felon setting by the media, which hon. Members fear. Those who fear that sort of scenario should certainly oppose the Bill as it stands.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good point about the 10%, but will it not be dealt with by one of the safeguards proposed by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith)? We would have the 5% step, the 20% step and then a referendum involving a binary choice before a by-election took place. Rather than a minority activity, there would then be a majority activity of choosing to have a recall by-election.

[Mark Durkan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. Those of us who were members of the pick-up band that was organised by the hon. Member for Richmond Park wanted to ensure that there could be a trigger other than a parliamentary trigger, or a trigger from the courts, and the idea of putting what could be termed a 5% premise petition in the hands of constituents struck us as reasonable. Having been received, the petition would then have to be tested by a more qualified assessment—the 20% petition—and if that was successful, it would be followed by a referendum which would have to secure a 50% vote before a by-election could take place.

Some Members have expressed the fear that voters will be whipped up into a state of prejudice, and that there will be misrepresentation of people and a disproportionate focus on certain issues. I ask them to consider both the stages and the time scale that are proposed in the amendments that some of us support. It is even possible that the time scale is too long. The amendments would allow more protection and more measured consideration. The right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson) told us earlier that his constituents, who had a very clear view on a very specific issue, were eventually prepared to vote for an MP who held completely the opposite view, because they had reached a more rounded judgment on the nature of the MP’s job, and because they set great store by truth and people being honest about their opinions.

Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan]

I want to take up the Minister’s point that this clause removes a line of discrimination from law. That is clearly what it does—up to a point. It removes a blatant bit of sectarian discrimination that would prevent somebody from remaining in the line of succession if they married a Roman Catholic. However, as we have heard, it still requires us all to subscribe to the notion that the Crown must remain Protestant and that somebody can only be Head of State in the United Kingdom on the basis of one particular faith. That is a sectarian provision.

[Mr MacNeil]

For clarity, it is more than the Crown must remain Protestant; the Crown must remain Church of England. If we are talking about the personality of the monarch’s faith, surely when the monarch crosses a border or moves across the sea, his or her religion does not change.

[Mark Durkan]

Well in some respects, as I understand from the current debate, the sovereign’s religion does change when they cross a border. The Church with which they are deemed to be in communion changes when the sovereign crosses the border from the Church of England to the Church of Scotland, not the Episcopal Church in Scotland. That is just from listening to this debate. We are getting into areas that I know little about and do not particularly want to know a lot about. Some of this debate reminds me of the old advert for Baxters soup: “The difference is in the thickness.”

Yes, obviously there is an emphasis on communion with the Church of England because of the role of the Crown and the governorship of that Church, but there is also the Protestant line of succession, as the Minister has said.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

If the threshold were accepted, would that mean that if neither the first-past-the-post nor the AV systems were acceptable to the people, the single transferable vote must be preferred? The threshold argument has to cut both ways.

[Mark Durkan]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. People might have a variety of reasons for not voting, such as that they do not believe the alternative vote is a big enough reform of the voting system. If people do not vote, that does not mean that they are voting for the status quo.

[Mr MacNeil]

I shall take full advantage of the remaining 30 seconds—

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

Northern Ireland. I did notice that the right hon. Gentleman said the regions of the UK—

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

You can say “north of Ireland” to me!

[Mr MacNeil]

I’ve got the north to my left; I’ve got Northern Ireland to my right. I’m stuck in the middle with you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mark Durkan

Monday 1st November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good and interesting point in that it underlines the general population instability in the UK. Recent scholars of the Union have pointed out that the Scottish percentage of the UK population has decreased. In the years to come, given the pattern of movement in the UK and the way in which the economy is run from south-east England, we might see more MPs from England and fewer from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The hon. Gentleman thus makes a very sensible point.

[Mark Durkan]

The hon. Gentleman spells out exactly the vista that is ahead of us with this Bill. Not only are the different boundary commissions not allowed to take account of the totality of circumstances within the territories for which they are responsible, but they are bound not just by the arithmetic of the UK quota but by the fixed limit of 600 seats. Part of our problem with all this is that we have a fixed limit of seats. There is not one seat more and not one seat fewer; there is just an absolute given number. I can see in that some of the conundrums that will beset this House every single time a boundary review is undertaken.

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[Mark Durkan]

I totally agree with the right hon. Gentleman, who served with great distinction in Northern Ireland, not only as Secretary of State but as Minister of State. He was also the person who chaired the Strand 1 negotiations. Everyone rightly praises George Mitchell for his role, but not enough praise is conferred on the right hon. Gentleman for his role, and for the patience and perspicacity that he showed at that time. I must remind him, however, that in those negotiations, some of us were advocating that Northern Ireland should be granted the alternative vote system for Westminster elections as well. He and his right hon. Friend the then Prime Minister resisted that proposal, however.

[Mr MacNeil]

The crux of my hon. Friend’s argument is the instability that will be caused by the five-yearly boundary reviews. Does he feel that an opportunity was missed in Committee when the House rejected an amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland) that would have established reviews every 10 years? That would have brought greater stability for mainland Members who, rather than looking over their shoulder every five years, would have had some breathing space and a continuous constituency for at least one Parliament. Does my hon. Friend agree that, unfortunately, the other place might have to ride to the rescue of the Commons yet again?

[Mark Durkan]

Again, my hon. and Celtic colleague has spoken with great sense. Hon. Members will regret what they are doing with this Bill. They will find themselves living with the consequences, and comparing the boundary process with the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority process.

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[Mr MacNeil]

Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting—and all of us in the islands must bear this in mind—that there will be a particularly destabilising effect on Northern Irish society? We know what a destabilising effect on Northern Irish society might mean. Is that the main cause of his concern?

[Mark Durkan]

I do not want to dwell on this, because I spoke about it in the context of an earlier amendment, but we should bear in mind that the boundaries will be revised in every single Parliament and Assembly as a result of the Bill. Given the way in which the seats will be distributed in the various parts of the United Kingdom, the chances are that the number of seats in Northern Ireland will fall following one boundary review, rise following the next, and then fall again.

The unsettling nature of the reviews will affect Assembly and parliamentary constituencies. A computer will say, “This is what we have to do,” and it is possible that constituencies will receive the word that the computer says that there must be a reduction from 15 to 14 following the next boundary review. That will be hugely destabilising, and people will feel frustrated when they are told, “Sorry, this pays no regard to the Northern Ireland Assembly.” Another of my amendments, in a subsequent group, would enable the Speaker of the Assembly to be notified formally of all the workings of the boundary commissions. That would make at least some acknowledgement of the impact on the Assembly, which is completely absent from the Bill.

I believe that if the Government are refusing to allow local inquiries elsewhere—and they should not do that—they should at least allow, as a fall-back, a general inquiry in Northern Ireland that will take account of its particular circumstances. I will support any and all amendments that defend local inquiries.

I ask Members to bear my amendment in mind; I ask the Government to continue to acknowledge that there is a deficit in the consideration that they have given to Northern Ireland in the Bill, and to be ready to make up for that deficit.