| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire) (LD): As you will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, since the last time that we had a debate on Northern Ireland, the Liberal Democrats have elected a new leader. There is a new shadow Cabinet, but I am still here. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), in his benevolence, has granted me the opportunity to continue to speak on Northern Ireland and, indeed, Wales, which proves that he is far from Ming the merciless, but Ming the merciful. Since the last Ming dynasty lasted 275 years, I am both relieved and delighted to have found favour with the new emperor.
I thank the Secretary of State for introducing the Bill and explaining its various provisions. On the whole, Liberal Democrats support the motivation behind them, but, once again, we have several serious concerns. We will therefore try to improve the Bill as it progresses through the House.
The hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) correctly pointed out that we had a debate on the possible unintended consequences of the Short money for Sinn Fein. I remind him and the House that the problem with that debate was not the sincere intent of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, but the confused attempt by the Leader of the House to explain what was going on, which led many Liberal Democrat Members to vote as the hon. Gentleman would have liked: against the proposal. I say to the Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office, the hon. Member for Delyn (Mr. Hanson), who is likely to wind up today's debate, that it is important that a lesson be learned from that debate. Individuals have become cynical and think that while the Government might intend to do one thing today, a future Secretary of State or Minister may do another thing tomorrow. In Committee, I intend—I hope that hon. Members of all parties will do this—to ensure that we really understand the consequences of such a wide-ranging Bill. The hon. Member for Foyle described the Bill as a dog's breakfast, but I would more charitably describe it as a catch-all Bill that covers many matters. The worst thing that could happen would be that the Bill had precisely the opposite outcome to that intended by the Government, but that is more than possible, given the history of other legislation.
13 Mar 2006 : Column 1192
Let me turn to the details of the Bill. We have little worry about the intention in clause 1 of introducing anonymous registration in Northern Ireland to mirror clause 10 of the Electoral Administration Bill. As the Secretary of State indicated, the power would allow individuals to register anonymously if they feared that their safety, or that of any person in their home, would be at risk if they could be identified from the electoral register. Given the changing threat of terrorism in Northern Ireland, I can only say that I hope that the number of people for whom the provision might be necessary will be small and decrease over time.
I am curious about how the Government will achieve anonymous registration. The clause allows the Secretary of State to lay an Order in Council to achieve such registration. However, will the Minister explain why such a measure is not simply in the Bill? Why, once again, do we have to go through the increasingly unsatisfactory Order-in-Council process? Why is it not possible to extend the provisions on electoral administration to Northern Ireland now, because the Government could thus achieve their aim earlier than they would by using the Bill? Perhaps there is a procedural explanation, but I have not heard it, so I hope that the Minister will deal with my point.
We are disappointed that the Government intend to abolish the annual canvass that was introduced by the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002. The annual canvass has proved to be pretty successful in Northern Ireland. The introduction of individual registration, with personal identifiers, has been a matter for debate throughout the whole of the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland it has led to a much more accurate and robust electoral register than those compiled under the system of household registration. There are roughly 1.2 million people on the register, which is an estimated 91 per cent. of the voting age population.
I understand the Government's concern at the continued decline in numbers of people registering, and we must make sure that the procedures are not so onerous that we are discouraging registration. That is a fair point, but I fear that by extending the period of time between canvasses to 10 years, the Government have back-pedalled far too far and will, as an unintended consequence, achieve the exact opposite of what they seek to achieve. Can the Minister, in his summation, explain why a period of 10 years was chosen? Would not a shorter period be more sensible—if not an annual canvass, then a canvass every four years to ensure that the registers are comprehensive in advance of Assembly elections?
There is a logic to tying the registration of individual voters to the timing of Assembly elections. It is not clear to me why the Government would choose a period—10 years—which will necessarily alter the synchronisation of the electoral registration process with the elections, which should be on a fixed time scale once the situation normalises.
Rev. Ian Paisley: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the fact that people can register up to a few days before the voting date leaves them no excuse for not being on the register?
Lembit Öpik:
The right hon. Gentleman is correct. In theory, there is every opportunity for people to register,
13 Mar 2006 : Column 1193
but it takes some proactivity from the individual elector to do that, whereas the suggested process of registration, if I understand it correctly, produces some back pressure to encourage individual registration. If there is to be a formalised period between registrations, the Government should seriously consider synchronising that process with elections that happen on a fixed time scale.
The Secretary of State and the Minister may want to consider another suggestion. Would it be possible for the chief electoral officer to send to every household every 12 months a sheet of paper containing the details of members of the household who are on the register? Perhaps the Minister intends that to happen anyway, in which case I would be delighted to hear that reassurance. It would allow people to confirm that their details were correct, or to ask for certain different people living in that household to be registered. It would mean that every individual did not have to re-register every year, which is what the Government want to change, but we would still have a more accurate picture every year of the state of the register. The system of individual registration has worked in Northern Ireland, and it would be wrong to undermine it.
I turn briefly to clause 8 and the changes that it makes to the tenure of the chief electoral officer. I understand that the current chief electoral officer is due to retire shortly, and that the process to appoint a successor is well under way. Can the Minister confirm to me that the candidates for the position were aware of the impending changes to tenure? That does not relate directly to the Bill, but if the Minister could clear that up in his comments or by way of intervention, that would be helpful.
Clause 10 deals with a more important issue. The power to change the date of an election by statutory instrument is a proposal with which we fundamentally disagree. The House may recall that in 2003, the Government postponed the date of elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, not once, but twice. Contrary to the concerns of the right hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley), I remind him that on both occasions we criticised the Government for interfering with the date of the elections. I realise of course that the provision would not allow the Secretary of State to postpone elections, just to bring them forward. Nevertheless, this is a fundamental constitutional issue and should not be decided by way of secondary legislation.
In reply to an intervention, the Secretary of State said something that worried me even more. Asked whether he would insist on proceeding with an alteration to the date of an election even if the parties in the House opposed it, he said, "It is not something I would want to do." The inference was that it was something that he would be willing to do, regardless.
To take a salient example of a democratic deficit, let us remember that the Government were elected with roughly one third of the vote. That means that two thirds of the vote was for parties that opposed the Government's manifesto, yet the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said that he would be willing to force through a change to the date of an election even if the parties representing two thirds of the electorate opposed it. The position is worse than that. If the Secretary of
13 Mar 2006 : Column 1194
State is willing to do that, there is every expectation that he would be willing to ignore the overwhelming view of the parties in Northern Ireland. That is why I am so concerned, and it is to some extent why we were opposed to the change on 17 March 2003, the first change to the date of the elections at that time, and once again we criticised the change on 12 May 2003.
I am not satisfied that the Secretary of State has resolved our concern. More than that, Members of the House and of another place should have the opportunity to debate fully the merits of such a move, and to propose such amendments as Parliament considers necessary. I cannot see why a Secretary of State would be so unwilling to countenance a reasonable debate on the Floor of the House and in another place, if he was so sure of his ground.
Despite the contrary claims, I recall that I and others thought that the Government were trying to help one particular party at the time—the Ulster Unionist party—by changing the date on at least one of those occasions. I remember predicting that that would only have a beneficial effect for the Democratic Unionist party, which at the time did not seem to be a particularly close friend of the Government. We know that that relationship has since been mended, and that the DUP and others are a little worried about the notional nature of the friendships that the Government develop with parties from Northern Ireland.
Let me be clear that there is much to commend the members of the Democratic Unionist party. They are fine and pleasant people one and all, but it is the vicarious way in which one party finds favour, and then another, that causes us concern about legislation that seems to be framed in order to allow Ministers to alter election dates for what we might call reasons of expediency. In any event, we cannot allow democracy and its routine operation to be reduced to a short debate on the Committee corridor, which would deny a vast number of Members the opportunity to discuss such an important issue. We cannot accept the inclusion of the clause in the Bill.
I am also disappointed by the provisions in part 4. Although this part aligns donation controls in Northern Ireland more closely with those in England, Scotland and Wales, it does not achieve full transparency. Northern Ireland political parties and regulated donees will continue to be exempt from the full donation controls until October 2007, after which they will be required to comply with most, but not all, of part IV of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. From November 2007 until 2010 the new measures will require Northern Ireland parties only to submit donation returns to the Electoral Commission on a confidential basis. I fully appreciate that concerns still exist about the publication of donors in Northern Ireland, because of fears for their safety. The new measures are a step in the right direction, but can the Secretary of State guarantee that full disclosure will be achieved by 2010?
Let us be realistic. Even if the Government think that the process must be opaque in order to get everybody to buy into it, they need to take a reality check. For example, I doubt whether, even under those more generous arrangements, Sinn Fein would put on its list of donors the Northern bank, which has been more than generous in making a recent donation to that organisation and its
13 Mar 2006 : Column 1195
paramilitary colleagues. Paramilitarism and illegal action will continue whether or not we require transparency, and I therefore counsel the Minister that we can achieve that objective a lot more quickly. We are likely to have elections in that period of time, and various parties could benefit from the opaqueness that will guarantee them greater funds than would otherwise be the case.
I also have concerns about extending the categories of permissible donors. When the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 was progressing through Parliament, Liberal Democrat Members recognised, in the absence of any similar legislation in the Republic of Ireland, that it would be useful to include Northern Ireland in the ban on receiving foreign donations, because parties that operate on an all-Ireland basis would be able to receive such donations through their offices in the Republic. If the DUP were to put its political headquarters in Dublin, it would have no trouble in obtaining international funds. That point applies to every party, a number of which already do exactly that. [Interruption.] There are, as the right hon. Member for North Antrim has suggested, other, more exotic solutions to the problem, and I look forward to his proposing them in Committee.
The Liberal Democrats agreed to the exemption of Northern Ireland from those provisions on the express condition that the Government would urgently seek to persuade the Government of southern Ireland to introduce similar legislation, or at least to find some way of excluding parties that also operate in Northern Ireland from their own funding arrangements. Will the Minister tell me whether such discussions have taken place? If they have taken place, the Government have been coy about them. Have the Government actively pursued that matter with the Irish Government? If not, will the Minister explain why we should take seriously the Government's implicit intention of normalising that important element of funding arrangements for political parties in a part of the United Kingdom, namely the north of Ireland?
The Electoral Commission also has concerns about those provisions. In its view:
The commission has stated that it would like the regime to be clarified on the face of the Bill, and it has accordingly asked for a clear definition of the acceptable tests of Irish citizenship in order for the recipients of donations to check the permissibility of donors. Will the Minister take on board those concerns and table amendments accordingly in Committee? If he is unsure about taking that step, will he make a commitment to hold cross-party talks before the Bill enters Committee, because we would be happy to draft amendments that the Government could then accept?
Finally, I shall turn to a matter that other hon. Members have already mentioned—the arrangements for the devolution of policing and justice to the Assembly. The Liberal Democrats are a devolutionist party, and it has been party policy for many years to devolve those functions to the Assembly, and I therefore welcome the sections of the Bill that will enable policing and justice arrangements to be devolved in any form chosen by the Assembly. However, given the
13 Mar 2006 : Column 1196
importance of policing to society, we must be careful about when the functions are devolved, and I support much of what the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) has said about policing in Northern Ireland and the insightful points made by the hon. Member for Foyle.
We all agree that Sinn Fein should come in from the cold on the devolution of policing and justice and that it must take its place on the Policing Board and accept the current policing arrangements. With some justification, the SDLP and the DUP have criticised Sinn Fein for always asking for more on policing, because Sinn Fein has got quite a lot of what it has asked for from this Government but still says that that is not enough, which is a practice that has tried the patience of us all. The Bill includes arrangements for the full devolution of policing, which can happen only when we are sure that Sinn Fein will not act as the dog-in-the-manger party by bleating that there has not been sufficient change to policing in Northern Ireland. Compromises have been made in response to Sinn Fein's requirements, and Sinn Fein now needs to compromise in return.
The Northern Ireland Assembly has been suspended for almost five years. From the Assembly elections in 1998 until the beginning of the current suspension in October 2002, the Assembly went through a start-stop process in which there were various periods of suspension. Even when the Assembly was functioning, there were various crises and resignations involving the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister, and I accept that it would have been quite wrong to devolve policing and justice functions to the Assembly in such an unstable situation. We cannot allow something as important as policing to be devolved to an institution which does not look durable, because it would be disastrous if policing were in the hands of an Assembly Minister one week and a Minister at Westminster the next. Of all the areas in life for which Parliament is responsible, policing is surely one of the most fundamental. There are some hurdles to overcome, some of which relate to political buy-in, primarily by Sinn Fein.
Ministers must be careful what they say about crime. For the Secretary of State to discuss "pure crime" implies a certain naivety about the difference between "proper terrorism" and "proper crime". In recent debates in this Chamber, I have become annoyed, because Ministers appear sincerely to think that Northern Ireland terrorism should be treated differently from international terrorism. Although the Secretary of State claims to see those things equally, as DUP Members have rightly pointed out, they are treated differently. If anyone thinks that a large proportion of organised crime in Northern Ireland is not directly related to organised paramilitarism in Northern Ireland and that money gained from organised crime does not seep across into organised terrorism, they are dreaming and do not understand how paramilitary funding has taken place in the Province.
I counsel Ministers to take a more insightful and circumspect view of how they define crime in Northern Ireland and of how they seek to differentiate it from terrorism. The Government have created that problem by repeatedly describing international terrorism as motiveless, while stating that Northern Irish terrorism has motives that we can understand and negotiate away.
13 Mar 2006 : Column 1197
Although I am tempted to go further down that path, I shall simply say that in Committee we must ensure that what is put into the legislation does not utterly contradict the reality on the ground in Northern Ireland.
Ministers must be able to answer the questions put by the hon. Gentleman. If they cannot do so, I will be concerned that once again we are creating unintended consequences, overlaps and ricochet effects that will come back to bite not the Government, but security and policing in Northern Ireland. When the time comes to give those powers to the Assembly, we must be sure that we are devolving them to a secure and stable institution and that the legislation is also secure and stable.
The Bill contains much of merit, but we are concerned by the changes, one or two of which are in principle, that will serve to create instability. We want to see a proper debate and a willingness to modify the canvassing period for electoral registration, more robust consideration of the principles at stake on altering the date of an Assembly election by an Order in Council alone, and greater transparency when it comes to donations to parties. All those matters require proper attention and debate.
As ever, Liberal Democrats will seek to be as constructive as we can. We will not oppose the Bill's Second Reading, nor the programme motion, which, as ever on Northern Ireland matters these days, provides sufficient time for consideration. However, we will be eager to have informal debates with the Government, if they find that easier, or formal Divisions with them if they fail to listen, in order to try to make the changes that we wish to see in a Bill that covers a great deal and serves potentially to destabilise quite a lot.
6.30 pm
| Next Section | Index | Home Page |