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Rev. Martin Smyth: I rise to try to clarify some of the suggestions that have just been made by the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman as I did not have an opportunity to intervene. Are right hon. and hon. Members really aware of what we are legislating for at this stage? It is suggested that people could be elected to a forum and that thereafter that forum could place a bar on its membership. I believe that that will leave us open to continuous legal wrangling. Even on the question of the negotiating bodies, we have watched what has happened in the courts of Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein councillors and others have gone to the courts to obtain a legal interpretation and judgment. The House should legislate clearly rather than leave matters for speculative discussions and innumerable law cases thereafter.
7.15 pm
Mr. Nicholas Winterton (Macclesfield): I want an assurance from my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State. As he knows, I have mixed views about the Bill and its purpose. I wonder whether at any stage we will get Mr. Gerry Adams and Mr. Martin McGuinness and their ilk to accept the principles of Mitchell and, therefore, whether my right hon. and learned Friend will be prepared to consider on-going negotiations with Sinn Fein and the IRA, as he has carried on negotiations with them for many months. If it is clear that Mr. Adams, Mr. McGuinness and other leading representatives of Sinn Fein who will be elected to take part in the discussions and the examination which the forum will undertake, cannot and will not meet the Mitchell principles, will negotiations take place? Or will my right hon. and learned Friend find a way around that so that he can continue to negotiate with the IRA and Sinn Fein? The commitment of my right hon. and learned Friend and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to finding a permanent peace and the reintroduction of the IRA ceasefire is not in doubt. The doubt is how far they will go in undermining the principles of the Union, which I support, to find the platform on which negotiations can take place.
In putting that question to my right hon. and learned Friend, am I right in thinking that there will be a point beyond which he will not go? If certain leading representatives who may be part of the forum cannot meet the Mitchell principles or the criteria laid down in clause 2--the grounds for excluding delegates that we are currently discussing--will my right hon. and learned Friend have the courage and the principle to refuse to negotiate with Mr. McGuinness, Mr. Adams and others with whom in the past he has been in positive on-going negotiations? If he cannot give me a proper answer to that question and say that if they cannot meet the criteria he will not negotiate with them, what are we talking about in this debate tonight?
Mr. Robert McCartney:
Perhaps the Secretary of State would clarify the basic principles relating to the issue now before the House. Will acceptance of the Mitchell principles and of the necessity to address the issue of decommissioning be a necessary preliminary to allowing a party into the discussions and not a condition for staying in the discussions? I suspect that, instead of taking a firm and principled stand and saying to those gentlemen who espouse violence as a means of obtaining political ends, "You cannot participate and discuss with democrats unless you accept the principles of democracy", the Government
Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood):
Please forgive me for coming in late and not having listened to the debate that preceded my intervention. It is beholden on Her Majesty's Government unequivocally to clarify their position with regard to the eligibility of delegates to take part in the negotiations. It is all very well to finesse the issues and to seek to obfuscate them. However, I believe that no reasonable democrat could quibble with amendment No. 2--which is in the name of the leader of the Ulster Democratic Unionist party, the hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley), and in the name of the leader of the Ulster Unionist party, the hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble).
It ought to be utterly fundamental that those who are associated with the use of violence for political ends or those who maintain the capability of continuing to pursue violent means in the course of seeking their political objectives are excluded. If we cede this point, the whole process will become fatally flawed because it will give an equivalence of status to those who use horrendous and unprincipled means of wreaking mass murder with those who have eschewed for principled and noble political motives those methods that we so utterly deplore. There has to be an element of trust in the position adopted by Her Majesty's Government. I hope that they will not obfuscate the issues and that they will explain why they exclude amendment No. 2, if they so do.
Sir Patrick Mayhew:
This has been a full debate, and rightly so. The amendments cover important matters and they are perceived as going to some important facets of the negotiations. It may help if I put the debate into the context of the Government's policy as it has been explained hitherto. The Government's policy has been to seek to secure all-party negotiations, by which it is meant negotiations including all those parties with a democratic mandate, with the purpose of coming through to a comprehensive settlement based on consent, if that proves to be possible.
It has always been made clear that those parties which shall be entitled to take part as having a democratic mandate shall be those which have declared themselves to be committed to democratic principles and to peaceful methods. For obvious reasons, there can be no place in a democracy for people or parties who are prepared--if they are negotiating as parties--to threaten, or by implication threaten, that they will use violence if they do not get what they want by democratic and peaceful purposes around the table. Putting it another way, people in a democracy cannot be expected to sit down and negotiate with other parties that are not prepared to disavow their willingness to rely on violence in the sense that I have just described it.
That has always been a qualification of the Government's policy of bringing in, if possible, all the parties with a democratic mandate. That has been fleshed out in what is now the Command Paper agreed between
the two Governments as offering their best judgment as to what may receive most acceptance in a way with which we are now familiar. Again, it may be worth spelling it out. So far as Sinn Fein is concerned, it is specifically stipulated in the document--in the ninth paragraph--that it shall not be entitled, first of all, to continue with any ministerial contact and, more particularly in the context of what we are discussing, it shall not be entitled to enter into the negotiations unless there has been a restoration by the IRA of the ceasefire of August 1994.
The point has eloquently been made by my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) that that would not be enough. I agree with that, because we know that the ceasefire was broken and that it did not prove to be a permanent or a true cessation of violence. This is where the requirements that are stipulated in the Command Paper become vividly important as to what shall happen when the negotiations begin, because perhaps it is rather more important or significant than the restoration of the ceasefire.
At the beginning of the negotiations, each and every participant--by which it is meant, in the scheme of things, each and every participating party--shall make it clear that they are totally and absolutely committed to the Mitchell principles, which have come to be called the Mitchell six, of non-violence and of democracy. In the interests of time, I am quoting from memory but, I think, accurately. They have already been referred to by the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington).
Without taking up the time of the Committee by looking up the principles and reading them extensively, they include a commitment of the parties to abide by the outcome of democratic discussions and, if they dislike the outcome, to commit themselves exclusively to democratic and peaceful ways of changing them. Just as important--and perhaps more immediately important in the context of what has been occupying us for the last hour or so--they include a commitment to the total and verifiable disarmament of the weapons held by paramilitary organisations.
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