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7.17 pm
Mr. Nick Hawkins (Blackpool, South): I pay tribute to the important words of both my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) and the hon. Member for Belfast, West (Dr. Hendron), who represent the different communities and the different sides of Belfast. It seems that many of the powerful comments by the hon. Member for Belfast, West are an argument for the renewal of the emergency provisions powers. With his great knowledge of the west Belfast community, the very fact that he speaks about the recent murders as being undoubtedly the work of the Provisional IRA is itself a powerful argument for saying that normality is very far from having been restored to the streets and the estates of Belfast.
Although I was very impressed by the extent to which there appeared to be normality in the centres of Belfast and Londonderry when I last visited the Province during the summer, I feel that the recent sad, tragic and brutal murders are cracks in the peace process, which show once again the importance of renewing the powers.
In addition to the arguments adduced by the hon. Member for Belfast, East in his powerful and effective speech, other important issues need to be considered by the House. The Labour Front-Bench spokesmen find themselves in an extraordinary position. They have tabled a reasoned amendment to the motion when their leadership has suggested that the party is now tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.
Here we have the most important powers against terrorism, which is the most serious of crimes. One might think that in the spirit of the new Labour party there might be a return to the bipartisanship that was so welcome on Northern Ireland matters. Far from it. The Labour party says that it intends to vote against the Second Reading of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Bill. Opposition spokesmen have searched desperately through the Bill to find some excuse for voting against it. That is opposition for opposition's sake.
I want the Opposition to return to the old days of bipartisanship in Northern Ireland. Unless and until they support the Government on every piece of anti-terrorist legislation, the voters of Britain will never take seriously any of the weasel words of Labour spokesmen from the leader downwards on the strength of the Labour party's policy on crime. If the Opposition will not support us on measures against terrorism, they cannot be taken seriously. It is a measure of the desperation of their opposition for opposition's sake that the Opposition intend to vote against these important and crucial powers tonight.
When we consider the importance of the powers contained in the Bill, we can see clearly, especially in view of the recent murders by the IRA masquerading as Direct Action Against Drugs, that it would be premature to remove the emergency legislation while the terrorist organisations are intact and their weapons are available to return to violence.
No one prays more fervently than I for a complete and lasting peace in Northern Ireland. I admit that, when the peace process began, I was extremely cynical about its prospects. I was delighted that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland embarked on it and worked on the twin-track process with the leadership of the Irish Republic. I am delighted that the peace process has gone as far as it has.
However, the terrorist organisations still have their arsenals of weapons. Terrorist murders are still committed by Provisional IRA, as the hon. Member for Belfast, West clearly described, as did the hon. Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone (Mr. Maginnis) in a powerful speech on security matters on behalf of the Ulster Unionists.
The case is undoubtedly made for further renewal of the emergency powers, even if the Government have rightly said that, as soon as the security situation permits, the Government may ask Parliament to suspend individual provisions of the Act or to introduce them in a lapsed form. With terrorist murders happening, sadly, regularly in the past few weeks, it is clear that we cannot yet suspend the emergency provisions. Although we welcome the fact that terrorism has declined markedly since September 1994, when the ceasefire was announced, continuing murders highlight the need for special security measures in the Province.
Labour Front-Bench spokesmen say in their reasoned amendment that one of the reasons they propose to vote against the Second Reading of the Bill relates to the recommendations of Mr. John Rowe QC in his analysis of the security situation. I was proud to serve with Mr. Rowe on the Bar Council for several years and I served under his chairmanship. I know what a superb lawyer he is and what a careful analysis he has made, but it must be for Her Majesty's Government to decide what is in the best interests of the security and the legal situation. They have clearly considered carefully the implications of the security situation. There is no doubt in my mind that their analysis is right.
Several hon. Members who have spoken this evening, not least the hon. Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, have made it clear why that is. The changes that have been made to security procedures have been
implemented solely on the professional advice of the Chief Constable and the General Officer Commanding. The Government are right to say that they cannot and will not take unnecessary risks with people's lives.
I am sick to the back teeth of hearing spokesmen for Sinn Fein day after day and night after night on the radio and television speaking weasel words to excuse terrorist actions and the actions of the IRA. They have refused to contemplate the surrender of their weapons and the renunciation of violence. They come up with all sorts of weasel words to excuse terrorism. While they do so, they will not be taken seriously as part of the peace process. They do not deserve to be treated as democratic politicians. I have no doubt that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench are right to continue to state powerfully than Sinn Fein and the IRA and all their works cannot be treated with respect as democratic politicians until the weapons are surrendered and we have a real ceasefire.
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was right last Sunday when he said what he would say to Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and others:
Those were powerful words, which I hope and pray will be taken seriously. Until the spokesmen for Sinn Fein and the leaders of the IRA surrender their arms for good, they cannot be taken seriously, and the peace process will continue to be in serious jeopardy, despite the bravery and success of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister's initiative.
As for the future, the Government have rightly emphasised that nothing will be implemented in Northern Ireland without the consent of all the parties in talks, without the consent of the people in a referendum or without the consent of Parliament. That is the triple lock. There is a powerful community in my constituency that emanates from Northern Ireland. It comprises people of both faiths and both communities. It is important not only to all the peace-loving people of Northern Ireland but to all the people of the United Kingdom that the triple lock should continue to be in place. I know that it is a particular reassurance to the Unionist community in my constituency, with whom I have always had good and close links.
Before I conclude, I should touch briefly on what I see as the way forward and what I know my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench see as the way forward. The reaction in the Province to President Clinton's visit and to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister's visits last year clearly illustrated the hope that exists there. I saw that for myself in Northern Ireland last summer. I saw a community which had hungered for peace enjoying after so many years the fruits of peace.
Mr. Maginnis:
indicated assent.
Mr. Hawkins:
I am delighted to see the hon. Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone nodding at those words.
The preparatory talks are intended to give fresh momentum to the peace process, but the murders in the Province by the terrorists masquerading under the false title of Direct Action Against Drugs highlight the need for
all parties in the Province to demonstrate beyond doubt that they are committed exclusively to peaceful means, not least by making progress on decommissioning.
Mr. Robert McCartney (North Down):
The issue before the House is whether the Bill, which would in large measure re-enact the principal provisions of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1991, should receive a Second Reading in what are alleged to be changed circumstances.
I should mention to the hon. Member for Redcar (Ms Mowlam), who unfortunately is not here at present, that, as perhaps the only independent Member in the Chamber, I cast my vote either in support of the Government or in opposition to them as my conscience dictates on the issues before the House at the time. While I am ideologically totally in favour of the socio-economic policies of the Opposition--with whom I have voted as a volunteer, and not as a whipped or pressed man, on every occasion since I entered the House--I shall with little hesitation be voting with the Government this evening.
The central principle in this debate is the extent to which the protection of the lives, personal safety and property of British citizens--particularly those living in Northern Ireland--requires laws that depart in some measure from traditional civil liberties and human rights. It can be argued that the granting of exceptional powers and the diminution of certain rights, such as trial by jury or access to legal advice, ought to be maintained only as long as the threat of terrorism in all its forms justifies it. Without doubt, that is the present case in Northern Ireland.
The existing ceasefire has been described by the accountable Minister of State at the Northern Ireland Office as a military ceasefire, which will be broken only by bombs on the mainland or by attacks on security personnel. While that fine distinction may serve the political objectives of the Government, it offers small comfort to the friends and relatives of those civilians--at present drawn almost entirely from the ghettos of the minority community--who are being mutilated with baseball bats, clubs, staves and iron bars, and murdered almost on a daily basis.
Such people--like the rest of Northern Ireland's citizens--were sold the peace process on the basis of a permanent cessation of terrorist violence. In neither the Downing street declaration nor Government statements at the time of the announcement of the framework document do I recollect any distinction being drawn between military ceasefires and a cessation of violence such as would offer ordinary civilians the protection of normal times.
On the one hand, the frankness of the Minister's language is to be admired, since it reveals what many in Northern Ireland have always believed to be the case: that the peace process, to use that rather nebulous term, was
only in a subsidiary way about the ending or cessation of political violence in Northern Ireland, and that its essential purpose was the protection of mainland British economic and political interests.
Northern Ireland has always been a part of the United Kingdom where, to echo the words of the late Reginald Maudling, a level of violence was acceptable to the British Government that would have been totally unacceptable in any other part of the United Kingdom. The most effective methods of protecting the lives and property of the British citizens of Northern Ireland have always been made subordinate to the political objectives of successive British Governments.
The terrorists have always been nurtured and encouraged by the knowledge that their objective-- removing Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom-- was one upon which successive British Administrations were largely neutral. Concessions could always be wrung from those Administrations at the expense of the pro-Union community. A great number of pro-Union people, like the Czechs in 1938, have rightly suspected that England's peace might be bought at their expense.
This debate between the Government and the Opposition resembles nothing so much as the debate between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscans as to which end of the egg they should open. The only item of any substance in the Opposition amendment relates to the Government's failure to implement the recommendations of Mr. John Rowe's review by removing internment without trial from the statute book. For the ordinary people of Northern Ireland, that is a dispute without substance. Internment has been on the statute book for 20 years without its use being invoked. If the past is any guide to the future political courage of those charged with government, it could remain on the statute book into eternity without being made operative.
What, one may ask, is all the hullabaloo about? The Republic of Ireland has had legislation allowing detention in specified circumstances since 1940, with far less justification than has been and is now being offered in Northern Ireland. I detect no protests from those who speak loudly about the very presence on the statute book of a non-invoked form of detention principle in the United Kingdom relative to Northern Ireland about the same legislation being on the statute book in the Republic of Ireland.
In what other part of the United Kingdom would the Government have tolerated murder, mayhem and the destruction of property on the levels seen in Northern Ireland without not only having detention legislation on the statute book, but actually putting it into effect? Does anyone in the House seriously believe that, if the murder and assassination of judges, members of the public and innocent people had been taking place in Yorkshire, Cornwall or Kent at the level that we have seen in Northern Ireland, there would not have been an all-party bipartisan approach for the implementation of detention procedures in order to stop it?
The assistant Chief Constable of Northern Ireland recently went on the record to state that, on the basis of high-grade intelligence, the police were aware of the identity of the specific killers involved in 80 per cent. of the 1,800 unsolved murders in Northern Ireland. In the other 20 per cent., the police were aware of a small group--perhaps numbering two or three persons--who
were specifically involved in those killings. Those people cannot be brought to justice in accordance with the normal rules and principles of law pertaining in a stable and normal society. They are murderous and homicidal people who are exempt from punishment because of the terror that they can inspire and the punishment that they can inflict upon those who have the courage to give evidence against them.
Let me give the House some scenarios typical of Northern Ireland. Mr. X lives in a nationalist housing estate. He is married, with a number of teenage children and--perhaps within that same estate--he has an extended family of cousins, uncles and aunts. He is an eye-witness to a murder perpetrated by someone he knows and recognises as a person with paramilitary convictions. That person may be so confident of the terror that his organisation inspires that he may not even disguise himself by wearing a mask. The witness informs the police, who arrest the perpetrator; he resists all questioning and is released. The witness refuses to testify out of fear for himself and his family. Without his evidence, the killer goes free to kill again. That is not an anecdotal account; it is a matter that is known to the security authorities.
In the mid-1970s, I had occasion to prosecute four or five men on murder charges. All of them had a peripheral involvement. All of them had made statements, which they subsequently withdrew, identifying the person who pulled the trigger. The statements were not admissible because they had been made by accomplices. The trigger man was arrested and was subjected to interrogation, but because he was a hard case who had probably been well schooled in anti-interrogation procedures, he sat in Castlereagh for seven days and never uttered a word. He was released, and he was again involved in serious terrorist crime. He was imprisoned, released and subsequently murdered by his own kind. That is typical of what happens in many cases in Northern Ireland, and it may be one of the 1,800 unsolved murder cases in which the security authorities are firmly aware of the identity of those involved.
Only too frequently, it is those who are peripherally involved, who are often young and inexperienced people who have acted as look-outs and who have collected information, but who are technically guilty of murder, who are convicted and who go to prison under a life sentence. They are the sort of people who perhaps ought to be released in some form of remission because they were by no means central to the horrible crimes that were committed. But in many cases, those who actually commit the murder--the hitmen, the godfathers--are beyond the law. They are certainly beyond the law that is on the statute book at present.
I have practised law in Northern Ireland for more than 30 years, for 20 of them as a Queen's Counsel. I am dedicated to the principles of the common law for the protection of the individual against the power of the state. Like almost every other hon. Member who has spoken in or been present during this debate, I passionately look forward to the day when it is unnecessary for legislation such as the Bill to be on the statute book. However, one must face the reality that there is a point when judgment must be made about how far the ordinary laws must necessarily be put aside to protect the state and the
overwhelming majority of its law-abiding citizens from an organised, violent and murderous conspiracy that would subvert the principles of justice and order that make democratic government possible.
It is a measure of the impasse that we have reached that the central core of this debate is not whether a measure to secure the removal from society of such violent criminals should be invoked, but whether, uninvoked and unlikely to be invoked, it should even remain on the statute book. That is the core of the Opposition's objection. The measure has been on the statute book for 20 years. It has been held in refrigerated if not cold storage against the day when it may be required to be used, but it is not in operation. One fears that the unreality that surrounds the debate is taken by the vast, law-abiding majority of both communities in Northern Ireland as a measure of the House's understanding of the true nature of their situation.
In pursuit of the holy grail of an unattainable political situation, the squaring of an impossible political circle that will guarantee the security of the British mainland, the Government, with the bipartisan support of the Opposition, are grappling with the forms instead of dealing with the substance of the problem. To abandon democratic principle in favour of short-term expediency is but to court ultimate disaster. There could not be a less opportune time to remove the detention provision from the statute book. I do not hear people advocating its being put into operation, and I am aware of the political considerations that would have to be taken into account before such a step was taken. But to remove the detention provision from the statute book at present would offer all the wrong signals to the men of terror.
There must come a time when the murder of civilians can no longer be ignored, even if it be the murder of alleged, and certainly unproven, drug dealers. The IRA has, in this case, created a class of psychological outlaw. No longer is it the position--it has not been for centuries--that a man may be outlawed, that every man's hand may be turned against him and that he will be beyond the protection of the law, but the IRA is attempting to use what many people instinctively, intuitively and psychologically feel about those who dabble in drugs and to make such people targets who, the average person would say, psychologically at least, should be afforded no protection.
That is, of course, a fraud and a farce. It is only a pretext on which the IRA can dominate, terrorise and intimidate substantial and significant areas in Belfast, where it can pretend that the RUC and other law enforcement agencies are not welcome. Those are areas in which the IRA can arrogate to itself the power of the state, which it can enforce by utilising the sanction of arms and violence which, in any democratic society, should be used only by the state in accordance with laws approved by its democratic and elected Government.
There can be no place in any peace process for a separate government of people who allege that they are entitled to bear arms. The whole idea that the IRA should not surrender its arms is political. To surrender even one rusty pistol would be to acknowledge that that pistol is held unlawfully and that the weapons held by the forces of the state are lawfully held by them to enforce such sanctions as the lawful Government may grant.
The IRA will not willingly, to use its own terms, either by the back door or by the front door, surrender what affords it its only negotiating power. Why can the British Government, in the form of their personnel in the Northern Ireland Office, be seen entertaining these people in discussions? I speak not only about the IRA, but about all the paramilitary figures who have no political mandate, but who have the power of the gun and the bomb. Would they be entertained if they did not have those weapons? The answer is no. With a mandate of 10 per cent., they would be treated--I do not mean this at all disparagingly--in exactly the same way as the Alliance party in Northern Ireland is.
In fact, as I am sure that the hon. Member for Belfast, West (Dr. Hendron) would agree--I hope that the Minister responsible for security in Northern Ireland will take this into account--the mandate would not even be from 10 per cent. of the population were it not for the massive impersonation, fraud and other unlawful practices that are engaged in by Sinn Fein in every election, and especially in the constituency of Belfast, West. Those people must be made aware that, if they escalate the present level of violence and return to the use of guns and bombs as a method of achieving political returns, there is some ultimate position that the established Government can rely upon to meet that challenge. That may well be the presence on the statute book of a power to detain those who are known to be involved.
It has been mentioned during the debate that democratic Governments all over the world, from time to time, are faced with extraordinary situations where only unusual and exceptional powers are appropriate to answer a challenge. President Clinton visited us before Christmas and gave many people in Northern Ireland a lot of hope, but I remind the House that two Presidents of the United States of America--President Abraham Lincoln, during the war between the states, and President Roosevelt during the second world war--were forced to take steps that doubtless would have incurred the criticism of those on the Opposition Front Bench.
President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, executed prisoners without trial and interfered with the United States mail to such an extent that Chief Justice Taney wrote complaining about those measures. However, the late Mr. Justice Robert Jackson, a distinguished member of the American Supreme Court and the representative of the United States Government at the Nuremberg trials, stated that he was by no means certain that democracy would have survived if President Lincoln had accepted Mr. Justice Taney's criticisms.
More recently, when the United States felt that it was threatened on its western seaboard after the Japanese attack on Pearl harbour, 100,000 nisei, or Japanese, many of whom were American citizens, were interned in 10 camps because it was believed that, in the greater interests of the defence of the United States, it was necessary to protect the state. One could hardly accuse Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt of being fascists, but we have to bring to the debate a sense of reality.
"I believe you can stop these killings and these beatings and if you wish to be taken seriously as democratic politicians, now or in the future, then you should stop these killings and these beatings and you should stop them now and for good."
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