| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. John Taylor (Solihull): Last Tuesday—eight days ago—in the Committee Corridor, an Order in Council was treated as a statutory instrument. The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, the right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy), offered the Committee a lengthy litany of things that would need to be done by way of acts of completion prior to elections being held. Will the Secretary of State say—either now or later today, after a period of reflection—whether the litany offered to the Committee must be thoroughly and entirely discharged before there can be elections?
Mr. Murphy: I shall talk to my right hon. Friend during the course of the debate so that I can answer the hon. Gentleman more fully on that point, but I am assured that she said that getting acts of completion from the IRA was an important part of getting all the institutions involved—of which the Assembly is only one—up and running. That has been made clear for
months and months. Assembly elections were not held because we knew that the Executive—the Government of Northern Ireland—could not be active unless there was trust and confidence between the parties involved. That trust can be established on the basis of acts of completion.
Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire): I do not want to turn this debate into a Question Time about Northern Ireland, but does the Secretary of State accept that the postponement of the elections in itself has become a barrier to achieving the acts of completion and the normalisation of the political process that we all want?
Mr. Murphy: I have no doubt that the issue of the elections is hugely important. I shall return to it in the debate on Second Reading, but I fear that I would be stretching the patience of Mr. Deputy Speaker if I did not stick to the timetable motion before the House.
Rev. Ian Paisley (North Antrim): Perhaps it would be helpful to those of us from Northern Ireland if the Secretary of State were to inform the House, at an early stage in the debate, whether the Government were minded to accept the amendment on this matter agreed in the Lords in the past few days.
Mr. Murphy: We will come to the relevant clause later in the debate, but I can tell the hon. Gentleman that the Government do not intend to send that amendment back to the other place. My right hon. Friend the Minister of State will deal with that particular clause later, and will refer to that matter.
Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock): Will my right hon. Friend answer a timetable point? Although everyone agrees that there is a need for urgency in this matter, I am waiting with bated breath for his explanation of why it all has to be dispatched in one parliamentary day. If there is no Committee stage—as was the case with the previous legislation piloted through the House by the Secretary of State—will that mean, ipso facto, that that Lords amendment is accepted?
Mr. Murphy: We must wait until we get to the Committee stage to discuss the details of the amendments.
The return to devolved government requires trust and confidence in the community that departures from the fundamental values of the agreement—including, crucially, the definitive ending of paramilitary activity—will be addressed with determination. In that regard, we believe that the independent monitoring commission has a fundamental role.
That explains our anxiety to have the commission in place as soon as possible. Developing that confidence remains a serious challenge to all participants in the process. The sooner we can have all the arrangements in place, the sooner we can formally establish the commission. That, we believe, will be a substantial step along the road to creating the conditions for a real step forward.
The Bill will place the IMC on a proper statutory footing, and so allow it to undertake the full range of its functions as soon as possible. However, its passage
would also send an important signal that the Government are committed to taking the steps that we have outlined as essential to promoting trust and confidence. We very much hope that it will be possible for elections and a restoration of devolved government to take place as soon as possible. The passage of this Bill will help to maximise the chances of such progress in the near future.I am aware that we have sometimes had cause to ask the House to consider legislation relating to Northern Ireland in relatively quick time. I hope that Opposition Members—and, indeed, Labour Members—will draw some comfort from the terms of today's guillotine motion, which allows us scope for nearly a full day's debate, should the House so choose.
I hope that hon. Members will agree that the compressed timetable for the Bill's passage, although always regrettable, is necessary in the circumstances, in the interest of the political advance that I believe all sides of this House wish to achieve.
1.46 pm
Mr. Quentin Davies (Grantham and Stamford): The Opposition reject, absolutely and with passion, the Government's pattern of imposing automatic timetables on all Bills. We are not alone in that. The whole country, and anyone in the world brought up to observe democratic principles, will consider the motion deeply offensive to those principles and to the spirit of the parliamentary system.
In pragmatic terms, the motion is unnecessary. We would have been perfectly happy to discuss a reasonable timetable for the Bill with the Secretary of State. That would have allowed proper reflection between Second Reading and Committee, between Committee and Report, and then between Report and Third Reading. That is what should happen in any parliamentary system that is not being made a mockery of by an arrogant Government, but I am afraid that that is the case today.
Mr. Murphy: I think that the hon. Gentleman is rather over-egging the pudding, but does he accept that the length of time available today is, in essence, the equivalent of almost two days' debate in the House?
Mr. Davies: The right hon. Gentleman will not mind if I reveal the private conversations that we have had, as they are very much to his credit. I would not reveal anything from a private conversation that was not to his credit, or not within the spirit of that conversation. However, the agreement that we came to resulted in our getting more time than we would have got otherwise. Of course I am grateful for small mercies—for crumbs from this almighty Government's table—but that will not prevent me, or those of my colleagues who have the same problems in other departmental areas, from making genuine protests. There must be no mistake about the seriousness of our feelings about the attitude to Parliament taken by the Government since they were first elected.
I have said already that the Government's approach would be offensive to anyone of genuine democratic principle and bent. I am sure that that applies to many
Labour Members too, and the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) has just expressed his view on the matter. It has nothing to do with party politics, but with the manner in which Parliament should operate. Let there be no misunderstanding of our strong feelings on the subject.That said, the arrangement to which the Secretary of State referred means that we have more time than would normally be the case on a Wednesday, especially when a statement and other business have also been scheduled. We have been promised nine hours on the Bill and, in that spirit, I shall ask Opposition Members not to adopt our usual course of dividing the House and voting against the timetable motion, but to do everything possible to allow us to use the greatest possible proportion of the time to discuss the substance of this very important Bill.
I wish to leave one thought on the record. The Secretary of State in many ways endorsed everything that I have said. I noted his comments, and he said that the proposals in the Bill were "complex proposals in a completely new field". They are indeed, and I entirely endorse his description of the Bill. However, I hope that he appreciates that his description is the greatest possible indictment of the perfunctory way in which the Government and their Whips—not the Secretary of State personally—believe that Parliament should discharge its obligations.
Rev. Ian Paisley: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Davies: I am not going to take interventions, as I want to get on to the substance of the Bill. There should be no misunderstanding on any side of the strength of the Opposition's feelings on this very important subject, which goes to the heart of the way in which Parliament operates.
1.49 pm
Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock): To divide the House on the motion would compound the charade of the process before us. I welcome the fact that the Conservatives do not intend to divide since that would be a waste of our time. None the less, it would be wrong to let pass the way the Government are bouncing through a Bill in one legislative day. I listened carefully to the Secretary of State, but he did not answer my question about why we have to go through all stages in one day. He will try to imply that I and others do not understand the gravity of the situation or the need for expedition. We do, and there is no reason why the Bill must go through in one fell swoop.
The Secretary of State is making a habit of this. He behaved the same way on the legislation deferring Northern Ireland elections to such an extent that the House was denied a Committee stage. That was reprehensible, and I rather thought that even this Secretary of State might have learned that that truly offended Parliament. It may sound old-fashioned, but there are those of us who believe in this place and its job of scrutinising and probing the Executive and examining legislation. I had hoped that the Secretary of State would not repeat what he had done.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |