Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill — House of Lords, 2022-01-19
Topic: International Affairs
Jonathan Caine (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I am grateful to everybody who has spoken in this debate. If the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, said one thing that is incontestable, it is that this has been a very wide-ranging debate indeed. Following the comments of my noble friend Lord Empey, I might try to do something which seems increasingly unfashionable in the House these days, which is to stick to the Standing Orders and confine my comments to the amendments before the House, and not repeat at length arguments and debates that have taken place in Committee and on Second Reading The issues covered in the amendments before us were debated at length in Committee on 13 December. As I made clear at the time, I am not without a great deal of sympathy for the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, and my noble friend Lord Empey. Indeed, I am on record over a number of years as saying that I prefer the 1998 model of appointing the First and Deputy First Ministers, which was subsequently changed at St Andrews. I do not for one second doubt the sincere motives of the noble Lord, Lord Hain, in seeking the agreement which he achieved in 2006 and implemented in 2006-07, but my personal preference is always for the parallel consent model of 1998. As a number of noble Lords have said, a cardinal principle of the political process and the implementation of agreements in Northern Ireland since the mid-1990s has been the sufficient consensus rule. My noble friend Lord Dodds of Duncairn made that point very powerfully, as did my noble friend Lord Bew. The sufficient consensus rule means that any significant changes to or departures from those agreements require the support of parties representing majorities of unionism and majorities of nationalism. Indeed, that is how we got the Belfast agreement in the first place As some noble Lords have mentioned, this Bill is about implementing New Decade, New Approach. I was involved in a lot of the discussions between 2017, following the collapse of the institutions after the resignation of Martin McGuinness, and July 2019. In fact, to digress for just a second, I was very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hain, for his kind words absolving me of any responsibility for the actions of a number of Conservative Secretaries of State. He then made the exception of Julian Smith—who, of course, was the only one I did not work for, but I take his comments in the spirit in which I hope they were intended As I said, this is about New Decade, New Approach. During the discussions that formed the basis of that document, a number of these issues were raised. There was not sufficient consensus, and they did not appear in the final document I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, that none of this is to say that the Government have a closed mind to change in future. The Belfast agreement has not stayed set in stone over the years: there were changes at St Andrews and at Stormont House. Indeed, I was interested to hear my noble friend Lord Hannan say that one of the reasons he was opposed to the Belfast agreement was the lack of opposition. Actually, in the Stormont House agreement—the fresh start agreement—and subsequently in New Decade, New Approach, there are provisions to facilitate the functioning of a proper opposition within the Assembly. So, things do not always remain static. We are open to change so long as those changes are consistent with the underlying and enduring principles of the Belfast agreement, which have to be based around inclusive power-sharing government In asking the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment and my noble friend Lord Empey not to move his, I will give a clear commitment from the Dispatch Box: these issues are not going to go away, and after the election, whatever the outcome might be, I and the Government are very happy to have discussions with the political parties to test the appetite for any further reforms along the lines suggested in this afternoon’s debate. In that spirit, I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, to withdraw her amendment.