Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Layla Moran

3rd reading: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 9th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I agree wholeheartedly with the hon. Gentleman. It should not be beyond the wit of man to create some sort of process and a mechanism to do this, but, to date, it has been beyond the wit of the men and women in this place and in Northern Ireland to do so. That is because of the thorny issue of how we define a victim in Northern Ireland. I understand that that is a complex area from which there would be many ramifications, but we really must legislate on this.

Finally, on the victim’s pension, I want to pay tribute to the work of the WAVE group in Northern Ireland, which has been quite brilliant in supporting the victims of the troubles and in pressing the case for a pension. It is doing great work, and I know that the Secretary of State is a great fan of all that it has done. I also wish to pay tribute to Sir Anthony Hart, who, I was shocked to learn in the Chamber today, died just this morning. Sir Anthony was a very distinguished judge who took on a very difficult task in 2012 on behalf of the Assembly to undertake a review into the historical abuse in 22 homes run by the Catholic Church, the Church of Ireland and Barnardo’s in Northern Ireland between 1922 and the 1990s. It was the biggest such inquiry ever undertaken in the UK, and it found that there had been grievous abuse of boys and girls in these homes over a very long period, and he found—he undertook harrowing work—that there should be compensation to the tune of £7,000 to £100,000 paid out to those victims. Sir Anthony died this morning with his work unfinished, with the legislation not passed either by the Assembly or by this place, and that is a badge of shame for politicians in Northern Ireland and in this place. We desperately need to act on this, too, because those victims deserve it; they deserve Northern Ireland’s politicians to do it, but if those politicians cannot, they deserve us in this place to take our responsibility and to legislate here.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith). I rise to speak in support of new clauses 1 and 10, and the string of amendments, especially amendment 9, which is a very important compromise amendment when it comes to what we are trying to do today. I will start with the issue of equal marriage.

It will not have escaped us all that it was London Pride just this weekend, and we had a message from the Prime Minister to the LGBTQI+ community across the UK, in which she said:

“I will only be your Prime Minister for a few more weeks. But I will be your ally for the rest of my life.”

As other hon. Members have mentioned, an ally is not simply someone who stands up and says, “I’m with you.” An ally is someone who stands up and does something. In successive Prime Minister’s questions, we keep hearing the word “legacy”, and what a legacy this would be for the Prime Minister. When she was Home Secretary, she helped—pushed by my dear friend Baroness Featherstone, the former Member for Hornsey and Wood Green—to put through the equal marriage legislation, and she could be the Prime Minister who allows that legislation to apply across the UK. I sincerely hope that is where we get to today.

I hear the worries about our having to take these decisions, but the fact is that there is no devolved legislature for us to supersede right now; the Northern Ireland Assembly has not sat for two years. I contacted Members of that body this morning to say, “We’re doing this. Is there any particular message that you would like me to send to my fellow Members of Parliament?” Stephen Farry—an MLA for our sister party, Alliance—said that he would obviously much prefer it if MLAs were able to implement such measures themselves, but wanted to convey the following message: “Don’t be frightened”. They are behind what we are trying to do. We forget that the democratically elected Northern Irish MPs who sit here, very rightly expressing the views of their constituents, represent just one of many parties in Northern Ireland, the majority of which support equal marriage, as was shown in the vote in 2015. The Alliance party has been challenging and requesting reform of the petition of concern for a while because of the outcome of the 2015 vote, so it is worth reminding ourselves that we should be—in this case, anyway—pushing at an open door. And we can see it ourselves; 76% of people in Northern Ireland want equal marriage.

I was grateful to be able to visit Belfast and speak to students at Lagan College. It is all a bit of a mess there right now, but the families of some of those students would normally have voted for the DUP. The students said that they were embarrassed that Northern Ireland did not have equal marriage and that they would much rather see it brought in. They did not understand how society had moved so far in one direction, yet Northern Ireland was lagging behind.

Interestingly, Barnardo’s has come out for equal marriage, as has the Children’s Commissioner for Northern Ireland—and so have the businesses I have spoken to; they told me that Northern Ireland not yet having equal marriage sent a message to the workers they were trying to attract: “This is a slightly odd place.” That is not at all a reflection of what Belfast is actually like. Northern Ireland needs to move with the times. It is entirely right that this place does what Northern Ireland had already asked for before the power-sharing arrangements broke down, and it is for that reason that I am proud to be a co-sponsor of new clause 1.

I turn to the thornier issue of abortion. No one here can fail to be moved by what we have heard—not just by Sarah Ewart’s story, but by all the others too. Until I became an MP, I did not realise that there was this extraordinary discrepancy between the law on abortion in Northern Ireland and in the rest of the UK. I simply did not know, because in the UK media, in general, this kind of thing is not really spoken about. So one of the very first things I did when I was elected was to sign the amendment that allows Northern Irish women to access abortion in the UK. We know that that is not enough—that such provision needs to be closer to home.