Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, like others, I am pleased to see my noble friend Lord Caine on the Front Bench. He has laboured long in the vineyard and it is long past time that recognition for that effort was given—I think we are all of one mind on that in this place. We are also delighted to see the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, on the Labour Front Bench. The noble Baroness was an excellent Minister during her time there and, while the noble Lord did not manage to exercise power in Northern Ireland because he was appointed Admiral of the Fleet before he got that opportunity, we have nevertheless got a pretty good team, with plenty of experience.

This Bill, to be honest, is a bit of sticking plaster, along with many other pieces of legislation that come along. What we are actually doing is trying to fix holes in the bucket that have been created by people who just do not behave properly. We will go into a lot more detail in Committee, of course, but I want to make a couple of points.

The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, made the telling comment that commitments are made and then not delivered. That, unfortunately, is a feature and has been for some time, so it is important to know who makes these commitments. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, pointed to the Library note, while page 2, paragraph 1 of the Explanatory Note says:

“This Bill will deliver aspects of the New Decade, New Approach deal which was agreed by the five main Northern Ireland political parties”.


That is not true. Paragraph 6 says that the five main parties, which it names, entered into a power-sharing Government

“following their agreement to the New Decade, New Approach deal.”

Again, that is not true. My party has never agreed to New Decade, New Approach.

In fact, on 16 January 2020, when my noble friend’s predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Duncan, was in post, I made that point to him. When he referred to it

“as a basis to re-enter devolved government”,—[Official Report, 16/1/20; col. 841.]

I said in response:

“That is not true. This is not an agreement. It is a government Statement and a Statement of the British and Irish Governments collectively. It was shoved into our hands at 8.30 pm last Thursday.”—[Official Report, 16/1/20; col. 850.]


That was 36 hours before the Executive was reformed. We took our positions in that Executive based on our rights under the Northern Ireland Act 1998, not under the New Decade, New Approach agreement. It is necessary to correct that because, with some of the commitments in New Decade, New Approach—for example, on cultural and language issues—the structures envisaged are basically grievance factories in the making.

The noble Lord, Lord Hain, referred to the legacy issues. We have never supported those; we never supported the Stormont House agreement either. It is important that we get our facts straight. We will obviously have an opportunity to tease out some of these issues in greater detail in Committee, but I thought it was important to say that.

The issues about petitions of concern and so on, as well as the commitment to keeping the institutions going, are driven by the fact that people just have not used common sense. Take the Assembly from 2011 to 2016: there were 115 exercises of the petition of concern; 86 of them were initiated by the DUP, 29 by the SDLP and Sinn Féin, and two by my party. That pattern extended to shielding Ministers from sanction even by departmental committees—come on, that is just out of control.

The Bill tries to patch up and fix abuses of the system. One can see why. If people walk out through the front door for political purposes and bring the institutions down, I can understand why it is necessary to try to build in some safeguards. But equally, if we say that somebody can be in office for 48 weeks—effectively a year—without clarity on what they can or cannot do, and indeed against any democratic principle, is it fair or reasonable to expect them to hold office under those circumstances? Can you imagine the situation here if we had that? I do not think it would go down terribly well. I understand that they are trying to keep things held together, but that is because they loosened the glue that held the agreement together in the first place—that is why we have the problems that we have.

We will come to a lot of that detail again when we come to Committee, but it is important to recognise that any institution built on a diplomatic agreement and a diplomatic document will always be under stress. The point has been made about a coalition of five parties. It is not easy; those of us who have been in them for a number of years will know. We can imagine what it would be like if we put Bill Cash and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, together in the one Government; multiply that by what we have to deal with and you get some sense of how difficult it is.

One has to have a different approach than simply implementing things à la Westminster. That is undoubtedly the case. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, rightly pointed out, you have to understand where we were coming from in the late 1990s and what had happened. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, gave us a very vivid example of the backdrop to how the agreement was finally put together. To those who have been saying that Brexit had to be implemented on the basis of a 52% to 48% vote, I remind people that 71.2% of the people supported the agreement. That is a big majority.

That leads neatly on to the comments made by a number of noble Lords about the protocol. People have exceptionally short memories. The protocol is the embodiment of the border in the Irish Sea. It is the legal framework to give effect to the border in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We have to remember where that came from. That border in the Irish Sea was proposed by the Prime Minister on 2 October 2019 in his document. He proposed border inspection posts and that all goods coming into Northern Ireland from Great Britain would be subject to inspection and to EU rules. If that does not bring in the European court, I do not know what does. This is an entirely self-inflicted mess within our own United Kingdom. Sadly, the Prime Minister was not without endorsement for the proposal at the time. The fact is that that is the genesis of it. You cannot expect to fix it without going back to the fundamental points as to where it came from.

The noble Lord, Lord Browne, and others mentioned this legendary Article 16. Article 16 of the protocol, which is part of the withdrawal agreement, is a safeguarding mechanism for the protocol. It is a safety valve so that, where issues arise, renegotiation takes place on a very limited number of articles, Articles 5 to 10. The people who negotiated those are the same people sitting at the table today. I was given a Parliamentary Answer last week by the noble Lord, Lord Frost. It was only a one-liner, but it spelled it all out. He made it very clear that, even if Article 16 is triggered, the remainder of the protocol is unaffected.

Some unionists have latched on to Article 16 as some kind of a way out. Friends, it is not; it is a way to protect the protocol. The only way out is to have an amended treaty. We have to have a treaty because we have a trade treaty with the European Union, and the only way we can effectively deal with that problem is with a new or an amended treaty. Article 16 merely deals with mitigations, welcome though some of them may very well be.

That is a bit of background to the circumstances in which we find ourselves back in Northern Ireland right now. I hope we can make improvements to this legislation. A question for my noble friend is: when will the other piece of legislation we are anticipating come forward? I have no doubt at all that he will give us a chapter and verse on that when he comes to reply.

A number of people have said there are things they would like to see changed, and so on. Even though we may not be particularly agreeable to some of the proposals that are coming forward, we are duty bound to listen to what people are saying. If something is concerning them, we have to listen to what they are saying. If we are not prepared to do that, there is no point criticising everybody else, or criticising the Government for ignoring people or for shoving a piece of paper into your hand 36 hours before you are asked to put your hand up for it. That sort of negotiation does not work. We have to listen to people and to be prepared to negotiate in good faith—it does not mean you agree but at least people would get their opportunity to put their case and have it respected.