United Kingdom’s Withdrawal from the European Union

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Lady Hermon

Friday 29th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

I do not intend to spend a long time referring to or looking at the political and parliamentary skulduggery and chicanery that we have had to go through to get this motion here today. Suffice it to say that we are breaking and ignoring the legislation that this House passed, to comply—on the day when we are meant to be leaving the European Union—with a deadline that has been imposed on us by the European Union. There is certain irony in that.

As far as the withdrawal agreement and motion before us are concerned, our position has not changed. Over the past number of weeks, we have sought to work with the Government, to try to find a way of getting either legal assurances or legislative changes that would enable us to move this process on. Of course, we want to see a deal because we want out of the European Union and we want a clear path to how we do that, but that has not been possible because the withdrawal agreement itself so ties the hands of the Government that it is impossible to find a way to secure the kind of assurances required to make sure, first, that the United Kingdom is not broken up and, secondly, that we have a clear way to ensure that the Brexit that many of us expected to see delivered will be delivered. It is our regret that that process has reached an end.

In the Alice in Wonderland world in which we now live, the Attorney General said today that this was not a meaningful vote. It is a meaningful vote to many people who want the delivery of our exit from the EU. It is meaningful to the people of Northern Ireland, because if this goes through, the people of Northern Ireland will find themselves stuck with a legally binding agreement that puts Northern Ireland outside the United Kingdom, and it could be there forever at the insistence of Brussels.

[Lady Hermon]

rose—

Northern Ireland Budget (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Lady Hermon

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 9th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson]

There are plenty of other aspects of the budget that could have been related to the concerns that Labour Members have been expressing. In that regard, Scottish National party Members are no different—they too have expressed great concerns.—and the same applies to the Liberal Democrats, who are nowhere to be seen. At least some Labour Members are present, but none of the rest has turned up.

This is not a satisfactory arrangement. I think I should use some of my speech to talk about how we got here, why we are here, and who is responsible for the fact that our budget is being dealt with in this way in the House of Commons.

[Lady Hermon]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sammy Wilson]

I am sure that the hon. Lady will have an opportunity to make her point later, when she makes her own speech.

This is the second occasion on which the Northern Ireland Budget has come to this House. On the first, in an act of political cowardice the then Finance Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly, Máirtín Ó Muilleoir of Sinn Féin, refused to bring a budget to the Assembly. Sinn Féin has always liked to hold its hand out for British pounds, but it does not like to make the hard decisions that must be made when it comes to spending money in a responsible way. No budget was brought to the Northern Ireland Assembly in November 2016 when it should have been, and, shortly after that, Sinn Féin collapsed the Assembly.

That was very convenient, because Sinn Féin did not have to make the hard decisions. They wanted the post and the responsibility—they wanted all the kudos that was involved in being head of the Department of Finance— but they did not want to make the hard decisions. It was convenient that the Assembly collapsed—or that Sinn Féin collapsed the Assembly—because that meant that Sinn Féin did not have to put their hand up for a budget.

I have been in that position. When one has to allocate money across Departments, there will always be people who are disappointed, and there will always be criticism. One will be told that one should have prioritised this and should not have given money to that, or that, magically, one should have produced for everyone money that just was not there, which, of course, is not always possible.

The budget came to the House of Commons on the first occasion because of Sinn Féin’s failure to produce a budget; on this occasion, it has come here because Sinn Féin made it impossible for anyone else to produce a budget. Having collapsed the Assembly, Sinn Féin then refused to return to it, appoint Ministers, and enable the Assembly to make decisions about how money was spent and allocated and to present a budget for the people of Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin preferred to engage in a game of blackmail: they would not allow the Assembly to be set up unless all the parties in the Assembly agreed to their agenda, before they were even in the Assembly. Sinn Féin knew that that agenda would have been impossible to deliver had it come to votes in the Assembly—even some of the nationalists would not have voted for it—so what did they do? They sat outside and said, “We have a veto. Under the rules that currently govern Northern Ireland, if we are not included in the Executive that Executive cannot sit, and that Executive will not sit until we get our way and are given promises that the policies we want will be implemented.”

Oddly enough, it seems that Sinn Féin are holding up all political progress in Northern Ireland so that the 4,000 Irish speakers in Northern Ireland can see Irish road signs and can be spoken to in Irish when they telephone about their rates bills, although they can all speak English. We are being held to political ransom. We have Irish broadcasting and Irish schools, and £197 million is spent on all kinds of Irish-medium education. We spend money on Irish festivals, and we allow Irish street names if enough people in the area want them. Despite all that, one of the reasons we are discussing this budget here tonight is that because 4,000 people in Northern Ireland claim to be Irish speakers, Sinn Féin say that unless an Irish language Act makes Irish an official language—which would mean hundreds of millions of pounds of expenditure—they will not allow any progress.

The hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) said that he did not want to become involved in an argument about who was right and who was wrong, and who was responsible. However, if he looked at even the surface of what is happening in Northern Ireland, he would be able to point the finger of blame—and, by the way, the blame does not lie with the Government at Westminster, although I know that the favourite activity of the Scottish National party is to blame them for everything. The blame for this should not be laid at the door of the Government at Westminster; it should be laid at the door of those who know that they have a veto, who have used that veto irresponsibly, and who are quite happy for this budget to be pushed through the House of Commons today without the level of scrutiny and accountability that would have been possible in a Northern Ireland Assembly.

[Sammy Wilson]

It does not surprise me at all. Sinn Féin have introduced this hurdle because they do not want the Assembly to be up and running anyway. I shall say more about that in a moment. Sinn Féin prefer the political vacuum, for a reason. The Secretary of State must bear that in mind, as must the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), who said that he hoped that this was not part of some creeping direct rule. There was a contradiction in his argument, because he then said that we were moving towards a crisis, and that there must be pressure for action. He was right.

There are decisions that need to be made, and we need a process for that. It is clear, however, that one of the parties required to set up the Northern Ireland Executive is determined not to be in that Executive. Its members prefer to sit on the Terrace of the House of Commons, lobbying Ministers and Members, rather than coming in here, and rather than doing their job in Northern Ireland as well. We see them all the time, sitting about this place collecting millions of pounds for not doing their jobs, and at the same time complaining about the outcome of the process. They have pointed the finger at the DUP, and one of the arguments they have made is that my party and those who asked the Government to implement this budget are supporting Tory austerity. However, I can say that we have probably done more to alleviate the impact of austerity in Northern Ireland than Sinn Féin or all the other parties put together, because, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds) has pointed out, the confidence and supply arrangement that we reached with the Government was what resulted in the additional resources the Secretary of State has referred to becoming available to the Northern Ireland budget.

I know that the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North would have liked to have had the same benefit. I thought the SNP was opposed to outsourcing, but it appears that it wants to outsource the negotiations on its budget to the DUP, saying to us, “You go and do a deal with the Government and then we will reap the benefits of it.” I think the Government may well be prepared to make the benefits of that kind of confidence and supply arrangement available to the Scottish National party if it is prepared to back the Government in the same way as we have done.

In fact, we had the situation last week when the SNP was so determined to annoy Members of this House that it called votes when we were in the Smoking Room cheering on England to get them through to the quarter-finals—they are now in the semi-finals. What were SNP Members doing? They were doing their best to disrupt our night of enjoyment. They can hardly expect a confidence and supply arrangement from anybody in this House when they behave in that way.

I accept that this is a difficult budget. In cash terms, it is a flat budget. The amount available to Government Departments in Northern Ireland is no different from that in the previous year, and that does present challenges. It presents further challenges when the allocations are based on decisions that the Assembly made nearly two and a half years ago. It set certain priorities, wanting to see over the next five years an extra £1 billion put into the health service, and of course that meant that, since the cake had to be sliced up, other Departments would find that their budgets faced cash reductions.

While this has presented challenges, those challenges have been reduced somewhat due to the additional money obtained for the reform of the health service, the additional money for frontline services in health and education, and the additional money for broadband, infrastructure projects, mental health and areas of severe deprivation. Indeed, some school budgets, or parts of school budgets, have been protected because breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and so on have been able to have money allocated to them from that severe deprivation funding.

[Lady Hermon]

I want to pick up on the points made earlier by the right hon. Gentleman’s party colleague the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) about schools in his constituency, because I must add to those concerns my worries about school budgets in North Down. The right hon. Gentlemen has called on the Government to boost health and education, and the Government in turn have delivered that through the confidence and supply arrangement, so how on earth can it be that budgets in North Down for primary and special care schools are so stretched? Please will the right hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) explain that to the principals and parents in my constituency?

[Sammy Wilson]

It comes back to the point I was making about the allocation of the budget and the way in which decisions are made. First, decisions are based on historical decisions made by the Assembly. Secondly, unfortunately, I have to say—this is why the current system is not acceptable and has to be changed—that when allocations are made by civil servants, we cannot be sure that the finance available will always go to what the public might want to prioritise, because bureaucrats see different priorities. For example, I had a long discussion with the permanent secretary in the Department of Education when we found out that some of the additional money that was available for schools and was meant to go to frontline schooling actually went to finance the deficit of the Education Authority. By the way, after the amalgamation of five education and library boards, that authority was still spending as much on administration as the five boards had spent, even though the idea was that one authority would lead to rationalisation and therefore cut costs.

When civil servants are making these decisions, they will often have different priorities, because they see things from the point of view of administration and bureaucracy, and sometimes that will be more important to them than what politicians would see as the priorities. Politicians are being confronted on a day-to-day basis by parents with youngsters with special needs, teachers who are teaching bigger classes, and headmasters who are having to say to parents, “We need you to provide extra money for books, paper and everything else.” Therefore politicians will often have different priorities.

But here is the point: in the absence of devolution, we do not have people in place who are perhaps tuned into those things as priorities. That is one of the disservices that Sinn Féin has done to the people of Northern Ireland. In its pursuit of its ideological goal involving the Irish language, it is prepared to see bad budgetary or spending decisions, or decisions that do not reflect the priorities of the public.

Northern Ireland Budget (Anticipation and Adjustments) Bill

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Lady Hermon

2nd reading: House of Commons & 3rd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 20th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson]

I am just picking at random from one Department, and I could do the same with every other Department. When it comes to spending the money, the Secretary of State has two options, or a combination of both. It can either be made clear to civil servants that they have the power to make decisions—I do not think that that is a particularly good way of doing things—or there is a mechanism whereby decisions about the spending of the money can be made politically, and that will require intervention. Otherwise, we will find that Departments receive the money and continue to spend it as they are doing at present, without any policy development and without considering the changes that have occurred in Northern Ireland.

[Lady Hermon]

There are not two options, but three. The third option, and the one that we all want to see, is for the DUP to get back into talks with Sinn Féin to establish the Executive and the Assembly. What exactly is holding up the DUP getting back into those talks?

[Sammy Wilson]

That is actually where I was getting to. Unfortunately, the decisions that we have had to date—a budget statement two weeks ago, the Northern Ireland Budget (Anticipation and Adjustments) Bill today, and a full budget Bill probably in June—are not the inevitable consequence of reluctance from the DUP to do the work that is required. The very next morning after election day last year, we were saying, “Let’s get back into Stormont, and let’s do these things.” We did not lay down any conditions, but Sinn Féin laid down conditions that fell nothing short of blackmail.

Sinn Féin made demands for things in the talks that they knew they would not have got through the Assembly. Even when it came to the Irish language, they could never have persuaded the other parties, some of which have said they are sympathetic to some movement on the Irish language, to give them the kind of Irish language Bill that they wanted. So, what did Sinn Féin do? They made the decision not to go back into the Assembly until they had been given an assurance that there will be delivered, as a price, some things that they could never have negotiated, debated, argued for or persuaded anybody to give them had they been using the Assembly mechanism. The hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) continually tries to share the blame, but let me make it clear that we are having this debate today not due to any reluctance on behalf of my party; it is because we will not give in to the kind of blackmail that we have experienced from Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin make things even more difficult, because even if someone was daft enough to give them what they wanted, they create such a toxic atmosphere in Northern Ireland that they would be pilloried for it. For example, an MP, who was elected to this House but did not attend, was seen dancing around a garage at midnight, mocking the victims of IRA terrorism—people who were taken out of a minibus on their way home and gunned down—and then they say, “We want to sit down and talk about the way forward and about respect.” When the former Finance Minister does the same, it is impossible to reach an agreement that would get us back into the Assembly.

We welcome the fact that the Secretary of State has acted, and she has not actually been tardy, because had this Bill been presented to the Assembly, it would have been presented around this time of the year anyway. Some poor Finance Minister in the Assembly would have been standing up and enduring—I used that word deliberately—a six-hour debate about what should be in the Budget, and they would have been gnashing their teeth and continually reminding the Speaker, “This is not what the debate should be about,” and MLAs would simply have ignored him or her and continued to talk about it anyway. The Minister has not been tardy with the timing. If the Bill had been brought forward earlier, we would not really have known by how much Departments would have been underspent or overspent for the year. This is as close to the end of the year as we can get. When it gets to June, the final accounts will be made available, so we will know that if changes and adjustments had been made in the last couple of weeks in the month, they can be reflected in the figures that are given.

[Lady Hermon]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene again. He has painted a very bleak picture, sadly, of the prospects for the restoration of a devolved Assembly and an Executive this side of the summer. That being the case, would he confirm on the record for the victims of historical institutional abuse that, should we have no Assembly and Executive by the summer, it will be in order for the Secretary of State to implement the Hart proposals through legislation here at Westminster? The victims are elderly and infirm and many are not in good health. It is intolerable that they should be kept like this, uncertain about their future and compensation.

[Sammy Wilson]

That will be entirely a matter for the Secretary of State, but as has been pointed out regularly during the debate, one of her considerations when coming to that decision ought to be whether some of the institutions that at least turned a blind eye to the abuse should also be held culpable and have to make some contribution towards compensation. It should not fall totally on the public purse, but the Secretary of State would have to make that decision. Our view, if we were ever consulted on it, would be that yes, there is a role for the state, but there is also a role for the institutions that at least turned a blind eye to some of the terrible abuse that went on and therefore allowed so many victims to experience the terrible things that happened to them.

In conclusion, I welcome the Bill and I think Departments will welcome it, but I warn the Secretary of State that it is but a first step. It is one thing to allocate money to Departments, but it is another to ensure that Departments and the civil servants in them have the guidance, direction and authority to spend the money.

Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Lady Hermon

2nd reading: House of Commons & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 13th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

The Secretary of State has indicated the process by which the Bill has come before us tonight. We will support it, but I believe that it should have come before the House far sooner. The fact that we have lingered for so long before bringing this necessary Bill before the House is a reflection of the Northern Ireland Office’s attitude that we must not offend Sinn Féin. Let us make no mistake about this. It bears repeating that we are here today because of the political cowardice of the Sinn Féin Finance Minister. This time last year, he was faced with a challenging budget, but he would not have been the first Finance Minister to be faced with such a budget. All Finance Ministers since 2008 have had to bring forward budgets that were criticised by pressure groups and faced Departments screaming about cuts, but at least they brought those budgets before the Assembly, argued their case and made amendments when necessary so that the good governance of Northern Ireland could be continued. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir refused to do that.

I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds) wanted to give Sinn Féin the benefit of the doubt, but I believe that it has opted out in this regard. We have only to look at the history. It opted out of the difficult choice on welfare reform. It let the hated Tories bring in welfare reform, but now it is critical every time there is an issue about universal credit, personal independence payments or any other aspect of welfare reform, although it abrogated their responsibility on that one. The same applies to the changes required in the health service. The Sinn Féin Minister had a report, which she accepted, but she then refused to do anything about it because that would have involved hard decisions about hospital closures. Now the same thing is happening with the budget. The Secretary of State should not be too optimistic that he will reach an agreement in the talks that leads to Sinn Féin going back into the Executive and re-establishment the Assembly. It will continue with its list of unrealistic demands as a cover for the fact that it does not want to get into the Assembly in the first place.

[Lady Hermon]

Is it not the case that Sinn Féin has opted out since the Brexit decision? It has played on that decision, making a calculation that it will stay out of the Northern Ireland Assembly while playing up fears of a hard border and a hard Brexit to provoke talk about a border poll, which plays well to their constituency. However, as the Secretary of State has often said, there is not going to be a border poll because there is no evidence that people want to change the status of Northern Ireland.

[Sammy Wilson]

That brings me to my next point. The Secretary of State must be clear about Sinn Féin’s strategy. It prefers the chaos of having no Assembly and no direct rule. That suits it and its republican agenda. It is our preference to have Ministers appointed in Northern Ireland, but if we are not going to have that, we have to move towards a situation in which Ministers can take charge of the Departments in Northern Ireland and plan for the future, in the interests of good government and stability, and to ensure that Sinn Féin’s chaos theory of politics is not put into practice.

This is a challenging budget. There has been an increase in cash terms, but there is no real-terms increase. We accept that there have been difficulties in the rest of the United Kingdom, and that Northern Ireland cannot be totally exempt. However, we have put forward a good argument and been successful in highlighting the particular issues in Northern Ireland that need to be addressed, which are different from those in other parts of the United Kingdom. Some Labour Members argue that we need to spend more money on public services, but they seem to be reluctant to see it spent on public services in Northern Ireland. They must explain that inconsistency, however; I merely need to highlight it—[Interruption.] I see the Scottish National party’s spokesperson turning round. Her party makes exactly the same point, but perhaps its Members’ difficulty is that they are angry that they never got in on the act.

This is a challenging budget. I have posed a question to the Secretary of State, because I have experience of this. The Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister has always somehow been exempt from reductions when it comes to budgetary decisions. Many people will find it incomprehensible, at a time when we do not have a First or Deputy First Minister, that the Executive Office should get a 32% increase in its budget. I imagine that most of the budget was drawn up by the Department of Finance, and it is also significant, at a time when the Department of Education is getting only a 1.5% increase and the Justice and Agriculture departmental budgets are going down, that the Department of Finance should be getting a 10% increase. One wonders what influences there have been. These are questions that could and should have been dealt with by the Assembly. We would certainly like to hear the Secretary of State’s explanation of why public-facing Departments such as Education and Agriculture are facing reductions in their budget allocations.

The amount of waste in the education budget in Northern Ireland was mentioned earlier. The 1.5% increase in the education budget will be challenging for schools. I know this from representations that I have had from headmasters in my constituency. We rationalised the administration of education by doing away with five boards and having one education authority, but that still absorbs a disproportionate amount of the education budget. More money is held at the centre by the Department of Education and by the Education Authority.

There is of course another approach that would not involve spending another penny. The Secretary of State and the Chancellor could address the £500 million that was allocated under the Stormont House agreement for a shared future in education. That is not new money, yet the Treasury has tied it up in such a way that it cannot be spent on that shared future. Take the big joint campus at Omagh, which would have allowed for a huge amount of expenditure on education in western Northern Ireland. There is no clearer example of a shared future campus, yet the £140 million allocated under the shared future agreement cannot be spent. There are schools in my constituency with a mixture of Catholics and Protestants that are crying out for expenditure. They are integrated schools in all but name, but as they do not happen to have the right title ahead of their name, the money cannot be spent on them under the shared future programme. I want the Secretary of State to take that up with the Treasury. As we have heard today, even when there is a big problem in the education budget, we still have a huge number of school sites and a huge amount of land that are not being sold by the Department of Education, which could raise revenue that would be available to the public purse in Northern Ireland. We have a tough budget, and the Northern Ireland Assembly could have worked its way through it, but it has not. These are the sorts of questions that have to be asked.

As for the future, I know that the Secretary of State is reluctant to be the one who introduces full direct rule again, but we are going to hit the same problem next year due to Departments’ lack of ability to plan for spending if we do not have Ministers in place. If there is no Minister in place, how can Departments look at new initiatives that may cut expenditure or introduce efficiencies? They cannot. So what will we do? We will trundle along, spending money in the same way as we have always done, because that is all that the civil servants will be authorised to do. The Secretary of State will soon have to grasp the nettle and say that we need Ministers in place who can look through the programmes that Departments need to undertake, who can plan for the future, and who can tell civil servants that they can do things with ministerial authority.

We welcome the announcement that £50 million to deal with pressures in health and education will be available this year, but the hundreds of millions of pounds of infrastructure money can be spent only with planning, which can be done only if Ministers are in place. I tell the Secretary of State not to dally any longer. Do not hold out hope that the cowards in Sinn Féin will take the reins of government and make the tough decisions. They will not, which unfortunately means—we do not relish this—that decisions will be made by Ministers here.

Universal Credit Roll-out

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Lady Hermon

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Lady Hermon]

That is enormously kind, thoughtful and generous of the hon. Gentleman.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

No, it was not; it was selfish.

[Lady Hermon]

No, it was very generous, indeed. Given that the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) said that almost everything is hunky-dory with the roll-out of universal credit, would he and his colleagues not be astonished if the Government did not push this to a vote? The tweeting going on suggests that the Government are going to abstain, but would he not like to have an opportunity to vote?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lady Hermon]

Instead of praising the Government for what they have done today, the hon. Gentleman, I suggest, should turn his mind to the situation in Northern Ireland. We have no functioning Assembly or responsible Ministers to deal with any of the problems that will arise when universal credit is rolled out across Northern Ireland. May I urge him to give a commitment to the House that his party will get together with Sinn Féin, which makes such a song and dance about welfare reform, and restore the Assembly as a priority?

[Sammy Wilson]

I am surprised that the hon. Lady, as a Unionist, has not identified where the real problem lies in reforming the Government in Northern Ireland—with Sinn Féin. We are happy to enter government tomorrow with no preconditions to sort out these problems.

That brings me neatly to the point I want to make. When universal credit was first suggested—I was a member of the Executive at the time—we sat down and identified what we felt the issues would be. Even without a functioning Executive in Northern Ireland, changes have already been made in the system there which I believe will show that some of the difficulties that have been raised here today can be dealt with. For example, automatic direct payments to landlords are built into the system. I do not accept the argument that it is good to give tenants money for rent so that they can then pay it back. The money is not part of disposable income; it has to be used for a specific purpose, and therefore there is no reason why it cannot be paid directly. That is what will happen in Northern Ireland, and I suspect that we will not have the same level of rent arrears If that proves to be the case as universal credit is rolled out, I trust that the Minister will learn from it, and will rectify the system in the rest of the United Kingdom.

It was said earlier that 76% of people in the United Kingdom are now paid monthly, but those on low incomes are usually paid on a weekly or two-weekly basis. The first thing that many of my friends on low incomes do when they start a new job is ask for a sub in the first week, because they cannot manage otherwise. For that reason, I hope that what we have decided in Northern Ireland will eventually be replicated in Great Britain, and payments will be made on a two-weekly basis unless people ask to be paid monthly. We recognise that domestic violence is an issue, and that some people may be afraid to ask for the money, especially if they are caring for children. A split-payment system must therefore be considered.

If there is a vote this evening, we will abstain, not because we do not believe that there are problems, but because we believe that it is better to talk to the Government and look for solutions. Let me say this to Labour Members. They know that there are differences between us and the Government—and at times they try to exploit those differences—but we will not be used for the purpose of headline-grabbing defeats of Government flagship policies, rather than trying to find a way of resolving the issues that need to be addressed.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Sammy Wilson and Lady Hermon

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

DUP Members’ starting point on the Bill is, “Does it help us deliver the will of the people of the United Kingdom to leave the EU?” We believe that it does. We believe that it is, in fact, an essential building block.

I have listened to the arguments that have been made today. Some Opposition Members—the hon. Members for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) and the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy)—have made it quite clear that their reason for opposing the Bill is that they do not want to leave the EU. If they had stopped there, I could have understood their argument, but it is rather ironic that they go on to say how undemocratic the Bill is when they are quite happy to stay in the EU with directives and other laws going through without any reference to this House. In fact, 20,000 have gone through, yet those Members want to continue that.

[Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to interrupt his rhetoric. There is one critical point that I would like him to address, and that is that the Bill is not going anywhere without the legislative consent of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly. We have no Assembly in Northern Ireland, so how will the Government get legislative consent?

[Sammy Wilson]

The fact that we do not have an Assembly in Northern Ireland might make it easier for the Government, but we will leave that aside.

The other argument that has been made is that the Bill is flawed and people want changes, yet the only way of getting them is to allow it to go to the next stage where the Minister has already made it clear he will consider amendments, provided that they are not designed as wrecking amendments.

May I make something clear from our point of view? We do not want to give the Government carte blanche to do whatever they wish. First, that is why we wanted to leave the EU. Secondly, we have had some experience of that in Northern Ireland. During the period of direct rule, decisions about the laws in Northern Ireland were made by Orders in Council in this place, which could not be amended. Of course, that sometimes led to bad law.

Arguments have been made against the Bill, claiming that it is a power grab. It is quite clear from what Ministers have said, from what the legislation says and from the restrictions placed on Ministers that that is not the case. First, it enables EU law to be brought into the sphere of this Parliament where eventually, if it is not appropriate, it can be amended through due process. Secondly, Ministers have made it quite clear that the powers in this legislation will be limited. Thirdly, they have made it clear that they will be only for technical amendments and that there cannot be changes, for example, that create criminal offences, change human rights, introduce new tax powers and so on. There are limits on what Ministers can do.