Superannuation Bill

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

My hon. Friend says that those terms were “almost agreed”, but that was far from being the case. In fact, one of the trade unions refused to agree to them, sought judicial review and had the agreement quashed. Given that one of the unions had refused to contemplate agreeing to the relatively modest—if we are honest—changes to the current scheme, it would be unrealistic to assume that we could then go back and say, “Oh, PCS, please feel completely differently, and please execute a rapid volte face from your position of a few months ago.” I take the view that the previous Government took, which is that the situation is not sustainable, and that one union cannot be allowed to stand in the way of necessary reform. That is why we have introduced the Bill, and why we are engaged in a concurrent process of negotiation, through which we genuinely want to achieve a long-term, sustainable settlement.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The Minister has stressed that five unions—not the PCS—had agreed to the arrangements in February. How many of the unions are in agreement with the framework that will be imposed by the Bill?

[Mr Maude]

Just to be clear, we are seeking to negotiate a new scheme, which would effectively make the terms in the Bill redundant. I make no bones about this: the Bill is a bit of a blunt instrument. It does not seek to create an entire, comprehensive new scheme. It simply imposes a cap on the amounts payable under the current scheme, so that it will be possible for the scheme to operate in a way that is fair to the taxpayer and to workers in other sectors outside the civil service. This is a complex process, and no one should be surprised that there is not instant agreement on a comprehensive new scheme. We are seeking to negotiate all the terms, but particularly those relating to additional protection for lower-paid workers and to a cap on what can be paid to the highest-paid workers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Durkan]

The hon. Member will recall that, when the Minister was asked to say at what level he thought people were low paid, he said he could not say. It would not be for him to say—it would be almost impertinent to suggest that outside the negotiations—but the hon. Member has rightly recalled that the coalition Government had no problem deciding that £21,000 was the threshold at which people should be protected from the pay freeze.

[Alun Cairns]

I have no doubt that that would be part of the negotiations, but I wholly accept the point that my right hon. Friend has made that one does not start negotiations at the point where one expects to finish, bearing in mind the actions that the PCS Union and some of the other unions involved have taken to date. However, the point about the £21,000 threshold that the hon. Gentleman highlighted demonstrates the compassion and support shown by the Government, and I have absolutely no doubt that that compassion and support can and will be shown towards civil servants in the negotiations that are led by my right hon. Friend.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I can speak more warmly about the prospect of the alternative vote in the context of Northern Ireland than some others have done today. However, before I do so, I join others in expressing serious reservations about the mongrel nature of the Bill. It not only provides for a referendum on a change to the voting system, but scrambles to reduce the number of constituencies and, in that context, would fundamentally alter the procedure by which boundaries are set, including the consultation on and consideration of changes and the opportunities for proper issues of local identity and interest, communal affinity and natural geography to be brought into play. I therefore join others in asking the Government to separate this Bill into its constituent parts.

On the proposals to change the number of constituencies and how decisions on boundaries are made, the problem is not only that the Bill proposes to do away with local inquiries. It would replace local inquiries with a system in which the four boundary commissions would be obliged to present their proposals and recommendations for feedback for up to 12 weeks. They could then have a second go at presenting proposals, with a further 12 weeks in which to take feedback, but then the third set of proposals would not need any consultation or require them to listen to any representations. Many of us have been through boundary change exercises before, and sometimes it was the third version of the Boundary Commission’s proposals that created particular problems for a constituency. The third proposal might have resolved some of the issues that were hotly contested in one constituency, but created brand new, consequential problems for other constituencies. Under this Bill, nobody in those constituencies that would be affected by the final proposals—the ones that matter—would have a chance to raise any issues. We would just be told, “Sorry, it’s the third attempt and this is what we have said. There is no other right of consultation, that’s that.” In fact, compound anomalies could be created by the time of the third set of recommendations by the Boundary Commission, and the idea that that would not make parliamentary democracy a matter of fundamental dispute is something that the Deputy Prime Minister and his colleagues need to think more about.

The Bill provides a quota for constituency size, plus or minus 5%, but clause 9 would create a new schedule 2 to the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986 and that would create a new rule 7, which would allow an even bigger deviation in Northern Ireland. The Bill suggests that the deviation could apply to all constituencies in Northern Ireland, so many could have more or less than a 5% deviation from the quota.

Of course, the constituencies in Northern Ireland are not just parliamentary constituencies, but the constituencies that elect six Members of the legislative Assembly on a proportional representation vote. Therefore, we would end up with serious discrepancies in respect of equal representation in the Northern Ireland Assembly. However, the Deputy Prime Minister, despite all his concern for equal representation and equal value, has shown a blatant disregard of the need for equal value for votes in Northern Ireland for the Assembly, when this House and the parties that negotiated the agreement very deliberately included a multi-seat PR STV system.

On the proposed referendum on AV, I made it clear when the House debated proposals from the Labour Government that AV would not be the SDLP’s first preference, because we believe in the single transferable vote system. However, we agree that AV would be much better than the first-past-the-post system, which—in the particular context of Northern Ireland—traps us into sustaining sectarian impulses in Westminster elections. We have sectarian pacts. When the Tories announced that they were coming to Northern Ireland, they said that they would be no part of sectarian pacts and would go for cross-community votes, but they caved in and, under the pressure of Northern Ireland politics as induced by the first-past-the-post system, they entered into a sectarian pact with Unionist parties. That in turn led to pressure on my party—which we resisted, but we paid a price for doing so—to engage in a sectarian pact with Sinn Fein.

If people are serious about supporting the ethic of the Good Friday agreement and a new politics in Northern Ireland, they will recognise that allowing Northern Ireland to move to AV would help to complete the transition to normal politics that the agreement envisaged. Let us be free from the traps of the past that the first-past-the-post system imposes on Northern Ireland and let all people in the United Kingdom have a fuller say in who their MP is with the support of 50%.

Treatment of Detainees

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Last, but certainly not least, I call Mr. Mark Durkan.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I thank the Prime Minister for acknowledging dimensions of this issue that the previous Government either denied or dithered about. Does he also accept, however, that not all of us can join in the canonisation of the security services, because many of us believe that they were complicit in some of worst crimes carried out by both loyalists and republicans in Northern Ireland? Can the Prime Minister address the peculiar sequence that now seems to be in front of us: mediation, compensation, then investigation by this inquiry—and then, presumably, adjudication and publication thereafter? Might that not be a self-frustrating sequence?

[The Prime Minister]

I hope that it is not. We have spent some time looking at this issue, trying to find the right way to deal with it, and we think that mediation, followed by the judge-led inquiry, is the right way to get to the bottom of it. On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the security services, I would ask him to take a wide view and look across the years, across the history and across what the security services do today—not just in Northern Ireland but right across our world—to help keep people in this country, and indeed in this House, safe. I think we should end on the note of paying tribute to those brave men and women—they are never known about, and some of them die in this cause and cannot be mourned properly by their families—and of thanking them for what they do on our behalf.

Saville Inquiry

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

May I thank the Prime Minister for his clear statement? From talking to representatives of the families a short while ago, I know that they would want to be associated with those thanks.

This is a day of huge moment and deep emotion in Derry. The people of my city did not just live through Bloody Sunday; they have lived with it since. Does the Prime Minister agree that this is a day to receive and reflect on the clear verdicts of Saville, and not to pass party verdicts on Saville?

The key verdicts are:

“despite the contrary evidence given by soldiers, we have concluded that none of them fired in response to attacks or threatened attacks by nail or petrol bombers. No one threw or threatened to throw a nail or petrol bomb at the soldiers on Bloody Sunday”.

A further verdict is:

“none of the casualties…was posing any threat of causing death or serious injury.”

Of course, there is also the verdict that

“the British Army fired the first shots, these were not justified and none of the subsequent shots that killed or wounded”

anyone on Bloody Sunday “was justified.” In rejecting so much of the soldiers’ submissions and false accounts, the report highlights where victims were shot in the back or while crawling on the ground, or shot again when already wounded on the ground.

Will the Prime Minister confirm that each and every one of the victims—Bernard McGuigan, 41; Gerald Donaghey, 17; Hugh Gilmour, 17; John Duddy, 17; Gerard McKinney, 34; James Wray, 22; John Young, 17; Kevin McElhinney, 17; Michael Kelly, 17; Michael McDaid, 20; Patrick Doherty, 31; William McKinney, 27; William Nash, 19; and John Johnston, 59—are all absolutely and totally exonerated by today’s report, as are all the wounded? These men were cut down when they marched for justice on their own streets. On that civil rights march, they were protesting against internment without trial, but not only were their lives taken, but their innocent memory was then interned without truth by the travesty of the Widgery tribunal. Will the Prime Minister confirm clearly that the Widgery findings are now repudiated and binned, and that they should not be relied on by anyone as giving any verdict on that day?

Sadly, only one parent of the victims has survived to see this day and hear the Prime Minister’s open and full apology on the back of this important report. Lawrence McElhinney epitomises the dignity and determination of all the families who have struggled and strived to exonerate their loved ones and have the truth proclaimed.

Seamus Heaney reflected the numbing shock of Bloody Sunday and its spur to the quest for justice for not only families but a city when he wrote:

“My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger,

I walked among their old haunts, the home ground where they bled;

And in the dirt lay justice, like an acorn in the winter

Till its oak would sprout in Derry where the thirteen men lay dead.”

The Bloody Sunday monument on Rossville street proclaims:

“Their epitaph is in the continuing struggle for democracy”.

If today, as I sincerely hope it does, offers a healing of history in Derry and Ireland, may we pray that it also speaks hope to those in other parts of the world who are burdened by injustice, conflict and the transgressions of unaccountable power?

The Prime Minister’s welcome statement and the statement that will be made by the families on the steps of the Guildhall will be the most significant records of this day on the back of the report that has been published. However, perhaps the most important and poignant words from today will not be heard here or on the airwaves. Relatives will stand at the graves of victims and their parents to tell of a travesty finally arrested, of innocence vindicated and of promises kept, and as they do so, they can invoke the civil rights anthem when they say, “We have overcome. We have overcome this day.”

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman spoke with great power and great emotion on behalf of his constituents and his city, and I would like to pay tribute to the way in which he did that, and to the service that he has given to them. He spoke about the healing of history, and I hope and believe that he will be right. I know that he represents many of the families who lost loved ones that day, and he has always fought for them in a way that is honourable and right, and has always, in spite of all the difficulties, stood up for the peace process and for peaceful means.

To answer the hon. Gentleman’s specific questions, he is right that the Widgery report is now fully superseded by the Saville report; this is the report with the facts, the details and the full explanation of what happened, and it should be accepted as such. In terms of the people who were killed on that day, they were innocent of anything that justified them being shot; that is quite clear from the report. Let me read it again:

“none of the casualties was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury, or indeed was doing anything else that could on any view justify their shooting.”

That is what Saville has found. I hope that that is some comfort to the families, and to the people in Londonderry who have suffered for so many years over the issue, and that, as the hon. Gentleman says, we can now draw a line, look to the future and build Northern Ireland as a prosperous part of the United Kingdom.