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Opposition Day
[6th Allotted Day--second part]
Patten Report
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): I should inform the House that Madam Speaker has accepted the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.
Mr. David Trimble (Upper Bann): I beg to move,
- That this House welcomes the well-deserved award of the George Cross to the Royal Ulster Constabulary; condemns the Government's decision to remove its Royal title; and calls for the postponement of the implementation of other controversial recommendations in the Patten Commission Report on Policing in Northern Ireland until the 'new dispensation' on which it was predicated has truly arrived.
On the Patten report and the position and title of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, it is ironic that the Government amendment almost quotes from the terms of reference given to the Patten commission under the Belfast agreement. The first sentence of the terms set out in the agreement requires the Patten commission to
Instead of producing proposals that would encourage widespread support for the police, the report will discourage such support. It has already discouraged support by its total lack of recognition of the service and sacrifice of police officers. On 29 October 1999, in a thoughtful interview in the Belfast News Letter, Monsignor Denis Faul commented on that point, saying:
In 1995, in a community attitude survey for the Police Authority for Northern Ireland, Catholic respondents divided equally on the question of a name change. The name was not seen as a major reason for low Catholic recruitment. We all know that there are different reasons for that. After the Patten report, the authority commissioned a new survey to see whether that position had changed. It had not. Fewer than half--45 per cent.--of Catholic respondents thought that the Catholic community would give more support to a renamed police force. A similar number--41 per cent.--thought that a name change would make no difference at all to Catholics.
Dr. Nick Palmer (Broxtowe):
Does the right hon. Gentleman not feel that if a mere change of name would increase support by 45 per cent. of the Catholic community, it would be worth doing?
Mr. Trimble:
I was making the point that there was a near equal division within the Catholic community on the significance of a name change, even after the Patten report. I shall come later to Catholic support for the RUC, and the hon. Gentleman may be interested by the figures that I shall give.
The Police Authority survey also found that a significant proportion thought a name change would decrease Protestant support for the police. My conclusion is that the change would bring little gain, and appreciable loss.
The Patten report has further discouraged widespread support through its proposed changes to the badge of the RUC. Again, it offers no evidence or argument for discarding symbols that are in fact inclusive. There are three symbols--the Crown, the shamrock and the harp of Brian Boru. A member of the Government--whom I shall not name--told me that he had seen the RUC badge only comparatively recently, and that he thought that anyone who set out to design a badge of an inclusive nature for the police force of Northern Ireland would find the existing badge ideal. I agree entirely with the good sense of that member of the Government, but I would never dream of outing him.
Patten discourages support for the new arrangements by its ban on the Union flag. Once again, it disregards the report of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, which said, in 1998:
Patten also discourages support for the new arrangements by proposing that there should be discrimination against Protestants in the recruitment of regular and part-time police officers. That is a clear departure from the Belfast agreement, in which the Government undertook
In a press release in September last year Mr. Patten, in presenting the report, said that one of the key objectives of the report was to:
Patten is trying to do something quite separate and he has got himself confused. He is trying to take the constitutional issue out of policing, as if it was still a live issue. He is trying to deal with the situation as if the state and institutions of Northern Ireland should be neutral as between the two competing national identities. The agreement itself would take the constitutional issue out of Northern Ireland politics and institutions if parties would accept and implement the agreement in its entirety. The commission failed to observe key constitutional aspects of the agreement.
On constitutional matters, the agreement went beyond a mere acceptance of the consent principle. The relevant section of the agreement is paragraph 1, which states that the parties
Patten seems to have assumed that there should be such neutrality. In doing so he was following an out-of-date agenda associated with one interpretation of the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1985 with its overtones of joint sovereignty. But the Anglo-Irish agreement has been replaced by the Belfast agreement with its clear line on sovereignty. I am sorry to see that some people still seem to operate within the pre-Belfast agreement mentality. I was particularly disappointed in an article by Sean Farren, a leading member of the SDLP, which seemed to indicate that that party has not yet fully absorbed the implication of the Belfast agreement provisions on sovereignty.
On the other hand, I have to acknowledge that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has somewhat greater awareness of this. I noticed in a speech that he made last week a reference to a need for a reasonable balance and:
There is also a striking contrast with the recently published report of the review of criminal justice in Northern Ireland. Its recommendations with regard to the courts are in complete contrast to Patten's recommendations on the police. The review suggests that the title should remain the royal courts of justice, that the badge which is the royal coat of arms should be retained and that the Union flag should continue to be flown.
The police and the courts are part of the same system. It would be wrong to have such a completely different approach to symbols within the same system. There should be consistency and it is clear what that consistency should be. The Government have not yet responded to that review. I hope that they are not so determined to defend Patten's mistakes that they extend his mistaken approach to the courts system itself.
One of the interesting aspects of the review is its survey into community attitudes. The opening part of the review makes a brief reference to symbols, merely saying that the Crown symbols "did not feature prominently". The review reports that the courts achieved high confidence ratings from the public: 70 per cent. of those surveyed had confidence in the fairness of the system. Ratings for component parts of the system in some cases were higher: 77 per cent. had confidence in the judges, 75 per cent. in juries, 74 per cent. in the police and 72 per cent.
in lawyers--a finding that will come as a considerable surprise and as a great relief to many hon. Members. In each case when those overall figures are analysed in terms of religion, there is a spread between Catholics and Protestants of about 10 to 15 per cent, with Protestants having higher confidence levels.
bring forward proposals for future policing structures and arrangements, including means of encouraging widespread community support for those arrangements.
We would agree with those objectives, but the flawed and shoddy Patten report fails to meet those terms of reference.
An opportunity for unity was lost this year in the failure to honour and respect the 302 RUC men and women who were murdered and almost 9,000 who were severely injured defending the Catholic and Protestant parts of the community. Even the Patten Report itself inexplicably failed to pay a sufficient decent and detailed tribute to the 302 dead and the thousands wounded.
The report has also discouraged support for policing by ordering a change of the title of the Royal Ulster Constabulary without presenting any rational argument
for that or a shred of evidence in support of the change. By contrast, the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs commented in a 1998 report that:
Until there is a change in the status of Northern Ireland, inevitably many of the symbols of government will be British. There is no clear reason to make a special case for the RUC by changing its name without changing the name of other organisations which are also either "Royal" or "British". The official symbols associated with the force are not central to the status of the RUC in the eyes of the community. They attract the loyalty of many in Northern Ireland. There is no good reason to change them.
The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee took that view just two years ago, and the Government should hold it today.
As Northern Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom, the Union Flag is the appropriate flag to be flown over police stations.
Patten also discourages support by its insensitivity towards RUC widows and disabled police officers. The report contains just a score of lines about widows and
disabled police officers. It recommends that additional resources be made available to help those people, which is welcome, but the scant recognition for them, added to the grievous insult of removal of the force's royal title and symbols, has added to their pain.
as a particular priority to create a statutory obligation
on various public authorities
to promote equality of opportunity in relation to religion and political opinion.
That obligation was carried into law by the section 76 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998, but, within two years, Parliament is being asked to derogate from that priority by enabling what is called 50:50 recruitment of regular officers and a targeted recruitment of 1,000 new reservists only from Catholic nationalist areas, however those may be defined. In the report, Patten claimed that he would put human rights at the core of policing. Those measures make a mockery of that claim. In all the ways that I have mentioned, Patten fails to fulfil its terms of reference.
take politics out of policing.
That is a nice little soundbite, but it does not stand up in the light of the report. Many people in Northern Ireland find it ironic that someone who says that he is taking politics out of policing proposes a police force that is to be dominated by politicians and district policing partnerships, again dominated by politicians--and constructed, particularly with the gerrymandering of Belfast, in such a way as to enable certain paramilitary- related politicians to exercise undue influence over policing. That is not taking politics out of policing. Not that I think that that objective is correct: in the right way, politics should be involved in policing; it is proper for elected politicians to be involved in police policy and the accountability of police officers.
recognise the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status.
The key word there is "legitimacy". The same paragraph states that the parties acknowledge that that choice
freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union.
6 Apr 2000 : Column 1213
Again, the emphasis is on legitimacy. The parties are recognising the legitimacy of Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom. Put simply, all the parties to the agreement, whether or not they will acknowledge it, are accepting British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. There cannot then be any objection to the normal and reasonable expression of that sovereignty.
The Belfast agreement did not create a neutral state or envisage only neutral symbols. There is only one sovereignty in Northern Ireland and there should be no unreasonable restriction on the exercise and display of that sovereignty. The agreement acknowledges that there should be sensitivity in the use of symbols and emblems for public purposes, but there would be no need to acknowledge the need for sensitivity if we were dealing with a state that was neutral.
a sensitive use of symbols, so that more than lip service is paid to the principle of consent.
Patten did not even pay lip service to that principle. Clearly, I agree with the Secretary of State that we need more than lip service to be paid.
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