Northern Ireland Executive Formation

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Julian Smith]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her remarks and comments. This deal, above all, guarantees the Executive a seat at the table as we implement our Brexit deal. It also underscores our commitment to ensuring, in law, unfettered access for goods from NI to GB, and it reconfirms that all the arrangements for Northern Ireland in our Brexit deal are subject to the consent of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. The SNP warmly welcomes the re-establishment of devolved government in Northern Ireland. I am sure we all recognise the importance of the restoration of devolved government to Stormont and, in particular, the positive impact that could have on the everyday lives of people all over Northern Ireland.

The people of Northern Ireland have been left without local government for three years amid Brexit and amid a crisis in their public services. There is no doubt that this absence of government has had a profound impact on their daily lives. All the work that the parties have put into enabling the restoration of devolved government must be applauded, and their efforts must be warmly welcomed, as the Secretary of State said. There is no doubt that the new Government have a huge task ahead of them, but the spirit in which the agreement was reached provides them with great opportunities.

I heard what the Secretary of State says about funding. Last night the Government committed to an additional £1 billion in support of this agreement. To be clear, we believe that that is a necessary and welcome investment, but can the Secretary of State confirm today that those moneys will be subject to the Barnett formula?

In the agreement and in the Secretary of State’s statement, the UK Government commit to a new deal for Northern Ireland in the context of it being dragged out of the EU against its will. Is he able today to detail more fully to the House what this new deal will involve, and to identify some of the specific measures that are planned?

[Julian Smith]

Going back to the financial package, there will be £2 billion up front and then, obviously, the usual Budget arrangements in March. It is not for me to comment on those Budget arrangements—I think I would get into huge trouble with the Treasury if I did —but all of us in this House and across Government realise that, when the Executive come forward with their programme for government and as they work through the coming months, we need to stand ready to assist them.

The Executive need to take a different approach from the one they have historically taken. They need to reform. We are setting up a board, and we are looking at how to encourage greater productivity. I was slightly disappointed to hear this week that water rates have been ruled out. The Executive need to look at their own revenue-raising measures, as well as coming to the UK Exchequer for cash.

Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

People in Northern Ireland and further afield will be watching this closely with great hopes for progress. It seems that there is the potential for progress, but time is running very short. There is no doubt that people in Northern Ireland, as we have heard, have paid the price of an absence of devolved government. This is now the best and perhaps the final opportunity to restore these institutions, so it is critical that every effort is made to secure a deal.

That deal will not come without significant effort and without compromise from all of those involved. There is an indication that a joint paper will be published by the two Governments later in the week. The movements of the Secretary of State are welcome, because we need to be clear that the consequences of not securing a deal before 13 January could be much more profound than simply another Stormont election. We know that the Secretary of State previously suggested that, in the continued absence of a Government at Stormont and with Brexit requiring significant Executive direction, a return to some form of direct rule will be required. We have heard from the Opposition spokesperson who has expressed similar thoughts. Any return of direct rule would undermine previous political and peace agreements, and that would be most regrettable.

The Scottish Government are absolutely committed to all the institutions of the Good Friday agreement and to making sure that their stability and the stability of the peace process is not undermined amidst the Brexit chaos. I am sure that the Minister knows that both the EU and the US Congress have said that there will not be a free trade agreement with the UK if Brexit in any way undermines the integrity of the peace process.

Just like in Scotland, the recent general election has again reinforced the Northern Ireland electorate’s choice to back parties that wish to retain EU membership. It is wrong and undemocratic that Brexit is being imposed on Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is absolutely crucial that the UK Government respect the wishes of the people in Northern Ireland and the pillars of the peace process. They must find ways to avoid interfering with the delicate balance of these relationships, which have been so hard won.

As part of a deal to restore Stormont, it has been widely speculated that Northern Ireland businesses would receive Brexit mitigation and, indeed, Northern Ireland business organisations have said that they will seek more than £100 million to mitigate the effects on the economy. We do not begrudge that financial help, but if there is to be a Brexit mitigation package for Northern Ireland, that is an admission of the costs to business and communities, so such a fund must also be replicated in Scotland.

Indeed, as part of the Prime Minister’s deal, Northern Ireland firms will already have access to the European single market, which is denied to Scottish businesses, and that risks placing them at a major competitive disadvantage. If we reflect briefly on the last Parliament, the UK Government failed to ensure that the funds handed to the DUP were subject to the Barnett formula, which again meant that Scotland’s budget was denied more than £3 billion.

This debate will be of interest to viewers in Northern Ireland in particular. As has been discussed, some of those viewers may well be nurses, who perhaps would usually be on shift, but today are on strike. That strike of nurses in Northern Ireland today is absolutely testament to the need for decisions to be made locally. People in other places might be unaware of the strike, or they might be unaware of the unprecedented nature of the strike, which is in protest against pay and staffing levels that the nurses say are unsafe. There is no doubt at all that the lack of government and political direction is deepening the crisis in Northern Ireland’s public services and their capacity to deliver for people. For example, the latest hospital waiting time figures show that nearly 300,000 people in Northern Ireland are waiting for a first appointment with a consultant; that represents a sixth of the whole population. On average, there is a four-year wait for knee and hip operations.

These issues are incredibly serious, and only a functioning and devolved Government are capable of tackling them. It cannot be left to a dysfunctional and disinterested UK Government to do so. That prospect in itself must give renewed impetus to all the parties involved in the talks to do everything they can to ensure that they come to a compromise, so that everyone in Northern Ireland can be rewarded through the return of their own Government. Previous talks have overcome divisions much more significant than the issues currently blocking progress, so we know that this can be done, and it really must.

Armed Forces: Historical Cases

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Thursday 23rd February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I thank all hon. Members who secured the debate. I will focus on issues that relate to the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, since other Members have fully and eloquently addressed the situation in Northern Ireland. I was not a Member of the House during the Iraq war or when IHAT was established in 2010, so I have looked at it afresh. There are three questions: how we got to the point of establishing it; what went wrong with the process; and where we go from here.

In a debate on a related topic last year, a Conservative Member told one of my hon. Friends:

“The danger of the argument he is making is that the Scottish National party is turning soldiers from cannon fodder into courtroom fodder.”—[Official Report, 27 January 2016; Vol. 605, c. 200WH.]

When he reflected on that statement, he might have regretted its implication, because members of our armed forces should never be regarded as cannon fodder. Too often, it appears that the last thing to concern the Ministry of Defence is the impact of its decisions on members of our armed forces.

Many hon. Members here today are conscious, as I am, that we ask our armed forces to undertake challenging and dangerous operations. We might not always agree with Government foreign policy or defence strategy, but one of the implications of joining the armed forces is, in part, to pass to others responsibility for deciding who is and who is not an adversary. In return, the people who do the job with the commitment and professionalism that they are renowned for are right to expect the fullest protection we can give them. They have a right to expect the laws that they are required to obey to be clear. The techniques that they are taught to use, the training that they are given and the rules of engagement under which they operate must be in compliance with those laws and kept up to date. When we look at the background to the IHAT process, it seems that the MOD failed in that aspect of its duty of care.

In this place, we can endlessly debate the territorial extension of the European convention on human rights versus the application of international humanitarian law, but in the real world that current and past members of the armed forces are in, those are not things to consider at their leisure if they find that a serious allegation is made against them for something that happened many years ago. IHAT was set up in a desperate effort to address that failure, but it was not the right answer and it was not delivered in the right way.

In my constituency, I have been involved with a case in which IHAT dealt very badly with a veteran. It wasted huge resources sending officers from the south of England to the west of Scotland, and that journey was entirely wasted because they had done no homework. There was a real lack of clarity about their status, and they breached confidentiality by asking members of the community for the veteran’s whereabouts. That was completely unacceptable. He was not hiding and he had not done anything wrong. There is no justification for behaving like some kind of military Sherlock Holmes. There was also an utter failure to provide an opportunity for appropriate pastoral care.

I ask hon. Members to reflect on why it was necessary to put in place such specific resources for the Iraq conflict. Is this just another toxic legacy from that conflict that will disappear over time? It is interesting that one of the significant changes in IHAT was the shift in resources from the Royal Military Police to naval police because of the perceived conflict of interest if the RMP was carrying out inquiries into its own former cases. Perhaps the increasingly complex international framework means that resources of the kind put in place for IHAT need to be planned for to ensure that the process is undertaken with a great deal more professionalism and concern for the wellbeing of current and former service personnel.

That brings me to how we go forward from here. In the Defence Committee report to which other hon. Members have referred, there is a clear acceptance that the IHAT process has been flawed and that the problems that it caused were, in many cases, foreseeable and avoidable. The first principle that the report recommends for consideration is the importance of support for current and former service personnel. That goes to the heart of the issue and of our responsibilities, because no one wants innocent members of the armed forces to be unfairly accused of wrongdoing. They do a difficult and dangerous job and for the most part they do it extremely well.

Justice cannot be served unless processes are managed in a transparent, structured and expeditious way. It is important that the MOD accepts that if poor or illegal practices are taught to service personnel and implemented by them, it needs to step up and accept responsibility, rather than letting individuals take the blame. If cases have been disposed of, it must be assumed that they can be reopened only if compelling new evidence is brought forward. Similarly, cases should be opened after 10 years only in exceptional situations.

The decision to outsource so much of the IHAT operation was particularly unhelpful, but the blanket closure of IHAT and derogation from the ECHR cannot be seen as our primary responses. The desire to distinguish between serious and spurious claims is laudable, but no indication has been given of how the difference can be determined without judicial process. Service personnel deserve to know which judicial process that will be and that the choice has been well considered.

Action is needed to provide an alternative and to avoid the MOD being allowed to continue with processes that are not independent or transparent. If our solution is simply to derogate from the ECHR because we are not prepared to put in place the right framework to deliver, we are sending the wrong message on human rights and potentially causing problems for our troops on overseas operations. There is a danger of confusion and uncertainty for them about what they can and cannot do in that context.

I was disappointed to read the Attorney General’s evidence to the Defence Committee, in which he confessed to having no knowledge of the position taken on these matters by other countries that operate within the ECHR. Given the history and the fact that he was attending as a witness, that showed an extraordinary lack of preparedness from the Government’s legal team.

The Government must not pass responsibility for the interpretation of international humanitarian law to troops on the frontline. Differences of interpretation could put our forces and others around them at risk. The Secretary of State for Defence’s justification that

“military advice is that there is a risk of seriously undermining the operational effectiveness of the Armed Forces”

just does not stack up. This might be unpalatable to him and the Government but, looking forward, the truth is that that simply means that the MOD is compromising the defence of human rights and its responsibility to our armed forces as a cost-cutting measure. Whatever the solution is, that is no solution at all.