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

Debate between Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and Claire Hanna

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 26th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)]

When we last debated this Bill in June, the context was that Sinn Féin had just threatened the collapse of the institutions. Fast forward back to groundhog day, and we are here again with the DUP dangling the future of those same institutions before us. The context of both those threats is the same: the pandemic is still rampant, there are issues in the education service, we have the worst health waiting lists in these islands by a mile, and, without a climate change plan, Northern Ireland is a laggard with no binding targets at all. That seesaw of instability and stop-start governance is the last decade and a half in microcosm, with each of the two lead parties replicating the same tactics and threats, and criticising each other for doing the same, with each particular episode draining away the confidence and belief of the people of Northern Ireland in power sharing.

I fear that, with this Bill, we have missed some of the opportunities to improve governance, cohesion and the sense of possibility that the institutions were based on. For all that the letter and spirit of the Good Friday agreement have been invoked in recent years, either for or against Brexit and the protocol, that spirit of power sharing and genuinely working the common ground in the interests of people in Northern Ireland through mutual endeavour are quite absent from today’s Assembly. In our amendments in Committee and today, the SDLP brought forward practical suggestions to try to improve the atmosphere and improve governance. We have been very clear—this was echoed by a number of witnesses in Committee—that no amount of rules and regulations will force the parties to share power properly unless they truly believe that it is the right thing to do, but it is appropriate that we should try to improve the mechanisms involved. The Good Friday agreement always allowed for that level of evolution, and that is something the SDLP has supported before—for example, in the introduction of opposition provisions.

It is a fact that the Good Friday agreement was negotiated by the widest possible range of political voices, that it was put to the people and that the people in the north and south of Ireland endorsed it. The St Andrews changes, which include a lot of the flaws, were not endorsed in that way. They were negotiated by, and for, the two large parties and imposed without recourse to the people of the island, and that shows. The flaws in the election of the First Ministers are illustrative of the rot and the culture of mistrust in the Assembly. There has been much discussion in recent months about the concept of parallel consent, when in fact the election of joint First Ministers, as was, is the centrepiece of parallel consent and the most real example of it in strand 1.

In the early years of the Assembly, the First Ministers were elected from the Floor of the Assembly by a majority of all present and both designations. That allowed for cross-party consensus building and coalition building, which have disappeared in the last decade and a half. That was done to spare the blushes of the larger parties because they did not want to be seen to be endorsing each other in the voting Lobby, but that has had, and continues to have, a knock-on effect on the wider political discourse. We know that leadership in any organisation comes from the top, and it is the same in Northern Ireland. These changes, which we have tried to address through amendments, will allow each Assembly election to be reduced to a first-past-the-post race to become top dog, even though, as others have pointed out, one cannot even order paperclips without the say-so of the other. This will serve to suck all the oxygen out of the political discussion and allow every other issue to drain away.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend that it is beneficial for the good people of Northern Ireland to have a functioning Northern Ireland Assembly rather than getting edicts from here in Westminster. Does she agree that it was even more destabilising for Northern Ireland when the UK Government, as part of the Brexit deal, signed a Northern Ireland protocol that they had no intention of honouring? Is that not even worse for the people of Northern Ireland?

[Claire Hanna]

I agree entirely. Among the many things that we discussed under the Good Friday agreement, the primacy of the rule of law and of trust are contained in that as well. They have gone out of the window in recent months, which is having a knock-on effect in Northern Ireland.

I regret that our amendments were not adopted, but the mechanisms that we tried to insert into the Bill were around that sense of joint purpose and common endeavour, as well as accountability. When the First Ministers were elected by the MLAs, they were accountable to the MLAs. The failures of the current process became very clear when Members of the Assembly tried to hold to account Ministers who had been responsible for terrible governance failures in the renewable heat incentive scheme. It became very clear that the First Minister did not feel that she was accountable to the Assembly, and indeed, due to those changes, she was not.

It is also worth saying that the mechanisms that we proposed would have been compatible with an overdue review of designation. I very much agree with the point raised by, among others, the Chair of the Northern Ireland Committee that, as currently operated, the designation structures for people opting to be nationalist, Unionist or other are locking in sectarianism. They were very well-intentioned; they were designed to manage a traditional conflict between two traditional communities, but Northern Ireland has evolved and it is appropriate that we should look to evolve those structures as well.

The Minister referred to the Bill being New Decade, New Approach, no more and no less. It is a missed opportunity, but it is worth saying that it includes some things that I do not remember from New Decade, New Approach, including the removal of key phrases and mechanisms from the ministerial code of conduct. It is still not clear who had problems with the language on transparency and accountability as it stood in the original agreement and in the 1998 Act, but I use that as an illustrative example that it is not a faithful transcription of the New Decade, New Approach all-party agreement and therefore other mechanisms could have been advanced.

Although we agree with the thrust of the Bill, we are beset and bedevilled by a culture of veto and stand-off, and this would have been an appropriate opportunity to try to fix some of those things. For example, to the best of my knowledge, the Assembly has not delivered a single piece of equality legislation. I listened to hon. Members speaking about why we could not pass equality legislation, in this case in the form of language legislation, because there is so much to do on health and education. There is no doubt about that, but those same parties have been running the show for a decade and a half, and in many cases they hold the specific ministerial briefs about which they speak. Every other region of these islands is able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Equality provisions can be advanced while meaningfully delivering for the people of Northern Ireland.