Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill

Roberta Blackman-Woods Excerpts

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

[Paul Masterton]

I would be incredibly frustrated by that. I will come on to the point about cherry-picking, which the hon. Member for Belfast East made last night. I do not pretend to be an expert on Northern Ireland just because I lived there for a bit and I still have friends there, but my strong instinct is that the people of Northern Ireland are not convinced that devolution is coming back any time soon, and that they do not particularly care who makes the decisions, as long as the decisions are made.

We heard the list of 67 issues from the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee report. I am frustrated with myself because, had I properly thought about this, there might have been good reason to table 67 discrete amendments—keyhole surgery amendments—to give Ministers incredibly limited powers, strictly for the purposes of doing certain things, such as implementing some of the strategies that have been gathering dust and making some changes to legislation. People in Northern Ireland want and need those changes now, but they do not particularly care who enacts them.

The point about cherry-picking is right. These are the wrong issues to use as test cases. What we are doing is messy, divisive and emotive but, by the same token, I do not think it is wrong to do it. Therefore, I will support new clause 1 and amendment 9. I think that they have been neatly and carefully drafted, to continue, as far as possible, the optimism that there will be a restored Executive and Assembly. If there is, those provisions will fall away. I will not support new clause 10 because—as my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) and others set out—it goes too far in making underlying changes to legislation.

I will sit down and shut up now. I will just add that I find the whole situation in Northern Ireland completely unconscionable, but not because I am a dyed-in-the-wool Unionist, who bizarrely wants to roll back devolution—I am not. We have to accept that this is the United Kingdom’s sovereign Parliament. Allowing Northern Ireland to effectively wither on the vine only serves the interests of Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin is the blockage to getting the Assembly up and running. I can see no evidence that that situation will change, certainly not in the next few months. Unless we change the underlying structure of how the Executive and Assembly are formed, it will be open to Sinn Féin to collapse them at any point in the future. At one point or another, we in this place must say that we will stand up in the interests of the people of Northern Ireland, whichever side of the community they are from, and, in certain discrete measures, neatly and tightly drafted, introduce the effective change that they need and are crying out for.

We shall be back here in six months’ time, and I hope that a large number of those 67 issues will be up for consideration. I also hope—this is directed at the Government Front Bench—that we will deal with the legislation properly and will not try to rush it through in two days, which has led to all the issues of scrutiny that have been raised by Opposition Members.

I think that this is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but we are where we are, and I shall be supporting a couple of the amendments today. Let us hope that my negativity and pessimism are misplaced and that by the end of October we will have a brand-new shiny Executive, but I suspect that I will not be holding my breath.

[Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)]

I rise to support new clause 1, along with amendment 9, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), and new clauses 10, 11 and 12, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy).

The reality facing women in Northern Ireland is that, under current legislation, they can be sent to prison for life for ending a pregnancy. Abortion is not available to women in Northern Ireland in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, rape or incest. That is not a situation that we would tolerate for any of our own constituents, and we should not be tolerating it for UK citizens in Northern Ireland. The UK Supreme Court takes the same view, and has stated that the lack of access to abortion for women in Northern Ireland is a breach of their human rights.

I think it very unfortunate that the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) and the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) sought to undermine committees of the United Nations and CEDAW to try to make points that should not be made in the context of this very important issue. I think that that was unacceptable, and that all of us in the Chamber should be upholding the UN’s findings and supporting all the reports and recommendations from CEDAW.

It is not even as if the legislation in Northern Ireland actually prevents women from having abortions. It prevents some women from having abortions—those who, for a variety of reasons, such as poverty or a set of family circumstances, are not able to travel to England. That is an appalling situation for women in Northern Ireland, and we must do something about it.

I thank all those who have campaigned for many decades in Northern Ireland to change the law relating to abortion. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Kingston upon Hull North and for Walthamstow, who have done so much in continuing to raise the issue in Parliament and with the Women and Equalities Committee. I suspect, however, that I am the only Member in the Chamber to have campaigned against the abortion laws in Northern Ireland for decades. I began campaigning with a group of women for the Abortion Act 1967 to be applied to Northern Ireland. We thought, even back then, that it was important for women throughout the UK to have the same access to abortion, wherever they lived, and for their human rights—although I doubt that was the language we used at the time—to be upheld uniformly.

[Diana Johnson]

I commend my hon. Friend on her perseverance over all these years of campaigning for this. Hopefully, we will see some change shortly, but it is important to recognise that there have been decades of campaigning by so many strong, brave women and men.

[Dr Blackman-Woods]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments.

I want to address some of the comments made by Members in the Chamber, particularly those representing Northern Ireland constituencies. They will know that I do not often speak on Northern Ireland matters because I respect the fact that they are the elected representatives for the area. Nevertheless, as we have seen demonstrated today, the issues we are discussing are about upholding human rights right across the UK.

I, too, honestly wish that the issue of abortion rights and extending them to Northern Ireland was being addressed by an enlightened Assembly in Northern Ireland, but unfortunately, as we all know, the Assembly is not sitting and is not likely to sit for some time, so we have a decision to make this afternoon: do we sit on these Benches, twiddle our thumbs and think that maybe sometime in the next three, five or 10 years we will get around to making a decision about abortion and what is happening to women in Northern Ireland? I hope we do not make that decision.

We all assume that women in Northern Ireland are able to travel to England to secure an abortion, but of course, not all woman can, so we still have women in Northern Ireland accessing backstreet abortions. It is hard to believe that this is happening in our country in this day and age.

I did not know decades ago that I was going to be in a situation one day where I could do something to secure better access to safe abortion services for women in Northern Ireland, but I am in that position, and all of us in this Chamber are in that position today. I hope that we will set aside the arguments about devolution, important though they are, because at the moment we cannot get a solution to this problem through the devolved Assembly. What we have to do instead is wake up to the opportunity that we all have to stop women in Northern Ireland having to travel to England for an abortion and to enable them to access safe abortion services the way any other woman can in the UK. It is also wrong to say that this will open the floodgates to unregulated abortion; we heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Kingston upon Hull North and for Walthamstow about the frameworks that have been set out to deliver regulated abortion services in Northern Ireland.

This is not an issue that has been delayed for two-plus years while the Assembly has not been sitting; it has been an issue for four decades, if not longer, and we must act now to protect the women in Northern Ireland.