Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill — House of Commons, 2019-07-09
Topic: Civil Rights
Layla Michelle Moran (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith). I rise to speak in support of new clauses 1 and 10, and the string of amendments, especially amendment 9, which is a very important compromise amendment when it comes to what we are trying to do today. I will start with the issue of equal marriage It will not have escaped us all that it was London Pride just this weekend, and we had a message from the Prime Minister to the LGBTQI+ community across the UK, in which she said: "I will only be your Prime Minister for a few more weeks. But I will be your ally for the rest of my life." As other hon. Members have mentioned, an ally is not simply someone who stands up and says, "I’m with you." An ally is someone who stands up and does something. In successive Prime Minister’s questions, we keep hearing the word "legacy", and what a legacy this would be for the Prime Minister. When she was Home Secretary, she helped—pushed by my dear friend Baroness Featherstone, the former Member for Hornsey and Wood Green—to put through the equal marriage legislation, and she could be the Prime Minister who allows that legislation to apply across the UK. I sincerely hope that is where we get to today I hear the worries about our having to take these decisions, but the fact is that there is no devolved legislature for us to supersede right now; the Northern Ireland Assembly has not sat for two years. I contacted Members of that body this morning to say, "We’re doing this. Is there any particular message that you would like me to send to my fellow Members of Parliament?" Stephen Farry—an MLA for our sister party, Alliance—said that he would obviously much prefer it if MLAs were able to implement such measures themselves, but wanted to convey the following message: "Don’t be frightened". They are behind what we are trying to do. We forget that the democratically elected Northern Irish MPs who sit here, very rightly expressing the views of their constituents, represent just one of many parties in Northern Ireland, the majority of which support equal marriage, as was shown in the vote in 2015. The Alliance party has been challenging and requesting reform of the petition of concern for a while because of the outcome of the 2015 vote, so it is worth reminding ourselves that we should be—in this case, anyway—pushing at an open door. And we can see it ourselves; 76% of people in Northern Ireland want equal marriage I was grateful to be able to visit Belfast and speak to students at Lagan College. It is all a bit of a mess there right now, but the families of some of those students would normally have voted for the DUP. The students said that they were embarrassed that Northern Ireland did not have equal marriage and that they would much rather see it brought in. They did not understand how society had moved so far in one direction, yet Northern Ireland was lagging behind Interestingly, Barnardo’s has come out for equal marriage, as has the Children’s Commissioner for Northern Ireland—and so have the businesses I have spoken to; they told me that Northern Ireland not yet having equal marriage sent a message to the workers they were trying to attract: "This is a slightly odd place." That is not at all a reflection of what Belfast is actually like. Northern Ireland needs to move with the times. It is entirely right that this place does what Northern Ireland had already asked for before the power-sharing arrangements broke down, and it is for that reason that I am proud to be a co-sponsor of new clause 1 I turn to the thornier issue of abortion. No one here can fail to be moved by what we have heard—not just by Sarah Ewart’s story, but by all the others too. Until I became an MP, I did not realise that there was this extraordinary discrepancy between the law on abortion in Northern Ireland and in the rest of the UK. I simply did not know, because in the UK media, in general, this kind of thing is not really spoken about. So one of the very first things I did when I was elected was to sign the amendment that allows Northern Irish women to access abortion in the UK. We know that that is not enough—that such provision needs to be closer to home.