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

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 19th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 1 is in my name. I also support Amendment 2 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Empey. Amendment 1 would provide that the

“First Minister and deputy First Minister be referred to as Joint First Ministers reflecting their identical status, powers and responsibilities.”

At Second Reading, I indicated that the Good Friday agreement provided a level of hope and expectancy back in May 1998, and that we in Northern Ireland want

“to use the architecture of the Good Friday agreement to work together in partnership, reconciliation, parity of esteem and respect for difference. Those are the kernels we urgently need to build the political stability and resilience of government.”—[Official Report, 29/11/21; col. 1234.]

We need to revert to that position through the title of Joint First Minister for the good delivery of policies, for proper identification, for equality, for reconciliation and, in terms of that good delivery of policies and operational matters, for the people of Northern Ireland. Why do I say that? To recreate that hope and sense of fairness and equality that we all felt back in 1998.

Central to the Good Friday agreement were consensus and the principle of consent. As I said, the agreement contained the infrastructure and architecture that provided the framework for people to work together with respect, mutual understanding, trust and confidence in each other. Those basic principles were also discussed at St Andrews but there was a change of emphasis in terms of the appointment of the First and deputy First Ministers, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, will refer to when he introduces his amendment.

Now, we need to build on this Bill and return to that vision of 1998, which created the infrastructure and architecture to manage differences and realise a better shared future based on partnership and working together in Northern Ireland. It is important that we revert to the spirit of the 1998 agreement. I believe that this amendment in my name, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, has added her name, would ensure that the Joint First Ministers are classified as such to demonstrate that they have identical status, powers and responsibilities. I firmly believe that this would confer on the people of Northern Ireland the sense of responsibility that the Northern Ireland Executive have, and it would help them to see people physically and ethically working together because, to all intents and purposes, both posts are equal. This also needs to be reflected in the way they are elected, hence my support for the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Empey.

Both amendments would provide a solution to the Government in that they would de-sectarianise the Assembly election coming up on 5 May; diminish the focus of the election on, “Make me First Minister and do not let that other party and them ones get in”; and ensure that the election concentrates on health, post-pandemic recovery, jobs, education, the economy and improving the lives of people, which is what politics should be about and which we discuss in this House and the other place on a day-to-day basis.

I note that the Minister indicated in Committee that he was sympathetic to the intent and import of this amendment but felt that, at this stage, the Bill was not the “right vehicle” as it is about the legislative commitments in New Decade, New Approach. In the past week, we have seen other commitments that were definitely outwith that agreement that were going to be made but, as I understand it, will now not be made. What is the position of the Government now? Are they and the Minister acting on their behalf prepared to accept this amendment, which would help to stabilise the institutions, diminish the volatile situation and further prevent the instability that currently exists or could exist in a post-election sphere?

If the Government cannot accept this amendment today, can the Minister give other types of assurances to your Lordships’ House about how it can be, shall we say, discussed or legislated for in terms of negotiations in the future?

I have a word of warning. My belief and understanding is that things may not be all that settled in the post-election sphere and that, therefore, it may be better to do things at this juncture to bring about that necessary political stability. In that vein, I beg to move.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the amendment that the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, just moved, and I say that as somebody who was not a fan of the Belfast agreement when it was signed. I opposed it, I hasten to add, not on orange or green grounds but on democratic grounds—being Ulster Catholic on one side and Scots Presbyterian on the other, I always felt I had a bit of a personal stake in power-sharing. However, I did not like the way that there was no proper opposition, the way it enshrined all the parties being in office, and the implication that things would become a scramble to reward supporters of those parties with public sector positions. I lost that argument—Northern Ireland went in a different direction and there is now a consensus behind it.

However, having gone down that road, it seems, as the noble Baroness says, that this is closing a loophole. We have decided to create these two positions as effectively coequal. The only difference between them is one of nomenclature, and if that is causing a sense of inequality or, if you like, forced competition in elections, as the noble Baroness said, it seems a quite small alteration that this amendment would address. Of course, I understand that the Bill is primarily about something else but I reiterate her call and hope that my noble friend the Minister will keep it under consideration.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I too speak in support of Amendment 1 in the name of my noble friend Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick. In doing so, I will say a word or two about the fairly dangerous context that Northern Ireland politics is now in.

There is no greater or more enthusiastic supporter of devolution than I but where processes put in place for the best of motives are abused, there is an obligation on us all to rectify that. Regrettably, there have been examples in the recent past where the implementation of legislation passed at Westminster—because, for whatever reason, it could not be passed at Stormont—has been thwarted by either the DUP or Sinn Féin.

That was the case for payments for those severely injured through no fault of their own during the Troubles, which were disgracefully blocked by Sinn Féin despite being in statute as a legal obligation—as a result of an initiative taken in your Lordships’ House—until it was humiliatingly ordered to obey the law by High Court judges. It is perfectly legitimate for the DUP to oppose the protocol but it is not legitimate unilaterally to seek to block it. How can one party alone in a devolved Administration seek to block an international treaty agreed between the Government of the United Kingdom whom they support and the European Commission?

Amendment 1 seeks to improve the Bill and thus strengthen the institutions supporting devolution in Northern Ireland. I hope that the Bill will have the support of noble Lords across the House, and I particularly welcome the recent commitment in the letter from the Minister to early commencement, as well as his Amendments 8, 9 and 10, which I support but which I will not speak to now.

However, I am concerned that, while we are discussing how best the institutions underpinning devolution can be made to function more effectively, there is a threat from the DUP to bring down those very institutions. Threats, veiled or otherwise, to collapse the Good Friday agreement institutions, whether over the outworking of the hard Brexit policy the Government disastrously pursued—supported by the DUP—despite repeated warnings about the inevitable outcome for Northern Ireland, or because the democratic process may produce a result that some parties may dislike, do not serve the people of Northern Ireland and their democratic self-government at all well.

The Government have a responsibility to do all they can to ensure that the long-term stability of Northern Ireland is not jeopardised in the way I fear is currently the case. The whole House acknowledges the Northern Ireland expertise and long experience of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Caine, who is not to blame for successive Secretaries of State since 2010—Julian Smith honourably excepted—failing to play the genuinely honest broker role essential for sustaining and deepening the Good Friday peace and democratic process which this amendment is designed to support.

At Second Reading, I intervened on the Government’s proposals to deal with the legacy of Northern Ireland’s past and I do so briefly again today, because I fear that this too is heading in the wrong direction and could pull down the institutions if we are not careful. We have yet to see anything of substance on the legacy legislation since the publication of the Command Paper back in July 2021, but what we do know is deeply disturbing.

Surely, the Government know that a proposal that creates an equivalence between military personnel and the people who murdered them is unacceptable? Surely, they also know that a partial amnesty covering only veterans is incompatible with both our international legal obligations and the imperatives of the Good Friday process? Surely, the Government also know that telling victims that those on all sides of the conflict who murdered their loved ones and carried out unspeakable atrocities will be able to sleep easy in their beds, while they have to live with the pain, grief and trauma of what those people did to them, is also completely unacceptable. I hope that the Minister will listen because I know he is sensitive to these matters.

This is a circle the Government should not be even trying to square. They must abandon their current amnesty plan and listen to those who are offering a truth-seeking alternative based on Operation Kenova, headed by former Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, which has been praised by victims and which, by the way, rightly includes the possibility of prosecutions if evidence unearthed leads that way, as has been the case under Kenova.

It is a notable political feat to manage to produce a legacy policy that every political party in Northern Ireland, along with every victims’ and survivors’ group, is opposed to. In the foreword to the Command Paper the Secretary of State promised a time-limited period of intensive engagement on the proposals contained in it. He has been promising “intensive engagement” on legacy since March 2020, when he unilaterally dumped the cross-party Stormont House agreement. His understanding of intensive engagement is not even close to that which those of us on both sides of the House who have worked to see progress in Northern Ireland over many years would expect—including, I suspect, the noble Lord, Lord Caine, although I would not expect him to publicly acknowledge it.

I realise that this speech has strayed a little from the amendment in question, but I think it essential to put this on record to try to encourage rethinking by the Government, in order to enable the Minister’s objectives to progress with this Bill and ensure stability where there is danger of instability.

Where there has been engagement it has been between special advisers and “sources” in government-supporting newspapers, which received far more detailed briefings than those who will be directly affected by these ill-conceived legacy proposals. The most recent engagement of that kind, in the Daily Telegraph before Christmas, revealed that even the Secretary of State for Defence found what was being proposed unacceptable. The reality is that there has been no meaningful engagement.

When the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Caine, winds up this debate perhaps he will be able to tell the House precisely how many engagements with the WAVE Trauma Centre and/or other victims’ and survivors’ support groups in Northern Ireland were initiated by the Secretary of State from the publication of the Command Paper in July last year to today’s date. Is the answer none, as I suspect may be the case? I understand that he may not have the detail to hand, in which case I would be grateful if he would write to me with the information as soon as he has it.

Meanwhile, in concluding, I place on record my profound disquiet, along with other former Labour Secretaries of State—including my much-respected noble friend Lord Murphy, to whom I spoke only the other day and who cannot attend these proceedings, as he would have liked to do—about the dangerous drift of government policy on Northern Ireland, which has managed the singular feat of alienating each and every one of the local political parties, the Irish Government, the United States President and the European Union: all partners, some statutory, to the hard-won Good Friday agreement. I urge the Secretary of State to change course before it is too late. Meanwhile, I strongly support this amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Suttie (LD)]

My Lords, in response to the very measured intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Bew, I have two points. The first is that the Bill is about implementing some of the remaining elements of New Decade, New Approach, so we do not believe that it is the right place to make the changes set out in the amendments by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey. Secondly, as the noble Lord said so powerfully, given that discussions are ongoing between the Government and the European Commission, the amendments would be deeply unhelpful to making progress at this time. For those two reasons, we strongly oppose the amendments.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I have not heard anyone really deny the central point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey. I have heard some brilliant and enlightening speeches but even that gorgeous threnody of the noble Lord, Lord Bew, for past agreements, his great melody against it, did not defy the central point that cross-community consent was supposed to be the basis for every major decision. The pact that we made with the communities of Northern Ireland was that important constitutional issues of this kind would not be decided by simple majoritarianism but would require the consent of both communities. As the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, says, that was the basis on which the whole previous dispensation was overturned, so we cannot in conscience arbitrarily withhold that principle on this one issue. I will therefore support the noble Baroness’s amendment.