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

Lord Empey Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I will make a few brief remarks in relation to Amendments 1 and 2. At the outset, I say that most people who live in the real world acknowledge that the Belfast agreement is a flawed piece of work. It is not perfect, and those of us who try from time to time to point out the imperfections are frowned upon as anti-democratic in some way.

I and my colleagues cannot support Amendments 1 or 2, not least because they are very much outside the scope of the Bill and the New Decade, New Approach agreement, which focused on ensuring the stability of the institutions. The appropriate vehicle for scrutinising the existing rules and appointments is the Assembly and Executive Review Committee at Stormont. This should certainly not be tagged on to the coat-tails of the Bill.

Your Lordships’ House should keep very much before it that, to put it mildly, the Northern Ireland Assembly is in a very difficult and precarious position. The protocol, which has already been referred to, has virtually put the Executive and the very existence of the Northern Ireland Assembly on life support. We were always told that nothing could move forward in Northern Ireland without the consent of the majority, and the consent of the minority. Of course, no unionist supports the protocol. But, somehow, we have been told, “Just suck it up and get on with it”.

Some time ago, when Sinn Féin sought to bring changes to welfare reform, it pulled the whole edifice down. Not only did it not get its demands at that time around welfare reform, but it then added three other demands and said that it would not go back until those were met—and nor did it go back until they were met in totality. They were steamed through the other place, and the Northern Ireland Assembly was given no say whatever. So the abuse of the cross-party and the majority of the majority and the majority of the minority has well and truly been kicked into touch.

Some of us are conversant with how decisions were agreed to assist in getting devolution done. That would not have happened if there had not been a St Andrews agreement. Again, everyone who lives in the real world recognises that. I know that some, even in this House, refuse to recognise that, but it is a fact.

The DUP is also opposed to Amendment 2. The purpose of the Bill is to legislate for measures agreed under the New Decade, New Approach deal, not to undo and tear up previous commitments at St Andrews in the absence of political consensus. It should be said that NDNA is a package, not a single item on its own, but that has been ignored to all intents and purposes. I know that at a later stage we will hear about a very useful amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and I add that that is helpful.

Some seem to be asking for a full reset of the institutions, but we certainly are not. That is not in keeping with the spirit of what has been agreed. I said that the Executive and the Assembly are now in a very difficult place. This House should be ever mindful of that and keep it before us in all our deliberations. I reiterate that had it not been for the St Andrews agreement element of the devolution settlement then there would never have been an Executive and an Assembly at Stormont. Those who do not acknowledge that are just living in denial.

I listened intently to what the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, said. She said that the St Andrews agreement had changed the emphasis on the First Minister and Deputy First Minister in the Belfast agreement, or the Good Friday agreement, as some call it. I say this: the identical status never existed, even in the Belfast agreement. There was always a difference between the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister, which helped to make things happen, so it did.

Furthermore, in the last election in Belfast North we had a very hard-working, industrious full-time Member of Parliament, Nigel Dodds, now the noble Lord, Lord Dodds. What did the SDLP and Sinn Féin do? They locked horns and a cabal was formed to oust that hard-working Member of Parliament. Who did they put in? Someone who declared, “I will never attend Parliament”, but has a fully paid-for political office while continuing to run his legal business elsewhere. Is that double-jobbing? It seems that it is not, yet if someone were to sit in Parliament, the Assembly or a local council and do that, it would be. We really need to catch a grip of things and try to realise what exactly is going on. This behaviour should be called out. Not only did the SDLP and Sinn Féin come together in Belfast North; as a quid pro quo, Sinn Féin stands aside in Belfast South to help to elect the SDLP.

Let us be very careful about rushing ahead and doing things in Northern Ireland without the consent of the majority in Northern Ireland. That is exactly what is happening at the moment. We have a protocol that is strangling our economy, but that does not seem to matter. We will continue to work for the changes in the protocol—indeed, it has to go; it is a massive hindrance. It will be one of the uppermost things that will help to destroy the Belfast agreement, and indeed the Executive and the Stormont Assembly.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, after that contribution it is difficult to know where to start. I begin by saying to the Minister that this is the first piece of legislation of substance that he has had to deal with. He will obviously have detected that this Bill is supposed to implement elements of New Decade, New Approach, and I suspect that he will notice the absence of references to that and its substance, as people have moved on to other things. My party is not a party to the New Decade, New Approach agreement and did not support it. There are elements within it that are okay, but we did not agree with the totality of it. Of course, the Bill is before us only because various abuses of the system have taken place over the years, and this particular piece of legislation is trying to patch up holes in the bucket.

There are differences between the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and the amendment from my noble friend Lord Rogan and me. One deals with how to describe the offices of First Minister and Deputy First Minister, and the other deals with how we identify and arrive at them. The reason why we have suggested going back to the original in Amendment 2 is relatively obvious. First, it is what was agreed at the talks. Secondly, it is what was there when the people of Northern Ireland voted in the referendum to pass the agreement. Therefore, it has the legitimacy of being agreed by the parties at the time—those that participated —in strand 1 at Stormont. Neither Sinn Féin nor the DUP participated, but those parties that did put that proposal to the electorate before anything was operated at Stormont the first time.

I have disagreed with the noble Lord, the former Secretary of State, over his decision in 2006-07 to make changes following the St Andrews agreement, because the changes to the methodology for electing the First Minister and Deputy First Minister were not in the communiqué for St Andrews, but they appeared in the draft legislation immediately after it. The differences appeared at the time to be relatively modest—unless you looked at the minutiae—but they are actually very profound. The reason why we negotiated the arrangements as set out in Amendment 2 is that it was designed to give political, public and constitutional expression to the partnership of the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister.

The regret that I have is that we were perhaps influenced to some extent by what was happening in Scotland at the time, where its devolution was coming together, and the names of the titles of the two officeholders perhaps are misleading. Some people saw them as hierarchical; I do not. I think I am the only person in this Chamber who has held the office. I can tell your Lordships that they are equal, and I will tell you why. In the first week I held the office, with the late Seamus Mallon, we were unable to agree on the notepaper heading for the department. The department was incapable of sending out any correspondence for a week, until such time as we agreed on what the notepaper looked like.

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[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords for the responses they have made to these amendments. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and my noble friend Lord Lexden, that it is my intention to make these reports as comprehensive as possible while, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, mentioned, respecting the boundaries of devolution. I will take away her comments, and those of my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, to try to ensure that the reports are as far reaching and detailed possible. I also reassure my noble friend Lord Lexden, with whom I go back many years, that I am totally committed to recognising and upholding the sovereignty of the United Kingdom Government, and of this House, with respect to Northern Ireland. It is part of the United Kingdom, and he knows well that this is a situation that I wish will endure for ever.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

I welcome the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. In his capacity of spokesperson on the union, can the Minister give us an assurance that he will be able to give us similar six-monthly reports and debates on what is happening in Scotland and Wales?

[Lord Caine (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his intervention. I think that is a matter that I will have to raise with my noble friends in the Scottish Office and the Welsh Office.

The noble Lord, Lord Dodds of Duncairn, mentioned the transitional arrangements. If I can put it as plainly as possible, under the current rules, if either the First Minister or Deputy First Minister were to resign, there would be a seven-day period by which there would have to be a renomination before an election was triggered. If that were to happen up to seven days before Royal Assent was given, it would apply retrospectively once Royal Assent had been given, and the provisions of this Bill would kick in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, once again my noble friend the Minister is suffering from mission creep as far as the Bill is concerned, but I think he will have to concede that we are past the post on that and we are where we are.

The genesis of this issue is obviously our decision to leave the EU. I do not want to reopen that debate; we spent years in this House arguing the toss. However, before the vote I and my colleagues—many of whom are actually not Europhiles at all; many are very hostile to the EU’s federalist tendencies and all the rest of it—visited Prime Minister Cameron before the vote specifically to find out what his plans were in the event that the UK decided to leave the EU. It was a fairly elementary thing to do. We came away from that meeting clear in our own minds that our own Government had not worked out how our situation was going to be dealt with in future negotiations with the EU. That made us feel very uneasy.

What we are talking about tonight, and have been talking about for the past few years, is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. As the noble Lord, Lord Bew, eloquently pointed out, we are fighting from a much-weakened position. The negotiations pertaining to the European Union started off disastrously. First, we agreed how much money we were going to pay it before we knew what the deal was. Then we put Northern Ireland matters on the table and separated them from trade. They should never have been separated from trade. It was a disaster and, unfortunately, you could see it coming. It is not any surprise. All of these problems—virtually without exception—were anticipated. That is the tragedy of it: it was avoidable and Brexit, as far as Northern Ireland was concerned, was not thought through in sufficient detail. We knew it was going to be difficult, and that was compounded by poor negotiating strategy and implementation.

Our little Province is now left with this mess that we now have. What we have here, and what the protocol currently is, is the product of a proposal from our own Prime Minister. He wrote his explanatory note to the European Union on 2 October 2019, and he proposed the border in the Irish Sea. He proposed border inspection posts; he proposed that the European Union rules would be followed; he proposed that all goods coming from Great Britain would have to be notified to the authorities before they could enter Northern Ireland so that they could be subject to inspection on EU rules. He also included a section on consent whereby the Assembly and the Executive would have to give their ongoing consent. However, he made the point that there must an ability to exit them: that is what he said in the note to the European Union. Of course, you cannot exit them if you are not in them, so the implication is that you are in them before you can get out of them.

This was our own Government’s proposal. As to the point made by the noble Baroness, that would have implied that even though the document accepted a border in the Irish Sea and all the other downstream consequences, it at least accepted that there was a road for the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive. The one tricky point about that was that, at the time this note was written, there was no Northern Ireland Assembly or Executive to give their consent to anything, because they were out of business. It was a flawed process right the way through.

I point out to my noble friend Lord Hannan on cross-community consent: if you take that through to all decisions, Northern Ireland, as a unit, would not have left the European Union because there would not have been cross-community consent. We have to be very careful where we draw the lines here.

I do not understand—and probably to my dying day I will never understand—why some Democratic Unionist colleagues here, on the day that this was announced, endorsed it. Arlene Foster backed it as

“a serious and sensible way forward”.

They were perfectly entitled to argue that consent paragraphs were in it, but why would you even contemplate, as a unionist, a border in the Irish Sea, border inspection posts, people having to notify from Great Britain before they send a box of goods to Northern Ireland? Consent or no consent, I just do not understand it.