Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Lord Hain Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hain]

As an amendment to the motion that the bill be now read a second time, at end insert “but this House regrets the continued failure of the political parties in Northern Ireland to agree to form an Executive; and calls on His Majesty’s Government to introduce legislation that introduces new rules for executive formation in Northern Ireland, such that any political party eligible to join a power-sharing Executive, but which refuses to do so, will have withheld from it (1) its Assembly party funding, (2) the salaries of its Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs), (3) the salaries of its MLAs’ staff, and (4) MLA office and travel expenses”.

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I particularly welcome that the noble Lord, Lord Empey, is in his seat. I wish him and his family all the best. I thank the Minister for moving Second Reading. I fully support his Bill in these circumstances.

This amendment is procedurally unusual and puts down a marker only in order to highlight a deeply troubling gridlock in Northern Ireland’s self-governance that is relentlessly ravaging the very foundations of the Good Friday agreement. From 2007, when a settlement I helped to negotiate under Tony Blair brought the unlikely duo of Ian Paisley senior and Martin McGuinness to share power, there was a decade of DUP/Sinn Féin- led self-government as stable as Northern Ireland was ever likely to get. That was then collapsed by Sinn Féin for three years. Now, post Brexit, Stormont has again been collapsed, this time by the DUP, for over a year. I hope that the current UK-EU negotiations over the protocol will resolve that, but I am not sure they will.

Meanwhile, public support for the carefully negotiated system of self-government is in danger of collapsing completely in the midst of the worst cost of living crisis for generations, the NHS in Northern Ireland facing a worse crisis than anywhere else in the United Kingdom—costing lives—and other manifestations of dysfunctional public administration causing serious problems.

This amendment does not point fingers or apportion blame. Any political party has a right to refuse to serve and to use that as leverage. The problem is that the political architecture necessary to achieve the Good Friday peace accord requires cross-party government, so a refusal to serve collapses everything and amounts to a veto. There has to be a cost for doing that, and my amendment would impose one, not so much as a penalty but more as a deterrent.

I fully understand why the DUP believes it was betrayed by Boris Johnson and the noble Lord, Lord Frost. No doubt Sinn Féin believes it had good grounds for collapsing Stormont in January 2017. But this amendment stipulates that, if any party did that in the future, it would lose the millions of pounds that come with doing the jobs that the vast majority of the electorate in Northern Ireland rightly expect it to do. At current levels, that would total over £5 million for the DUP alone and a similar share for Sinn Féin. I urge the Government to consider legislation to that effect.

A situation in which one party or another can simply walk away and paralyse Northern Ireland’s self-governance because it does not get its way is anti- democratic. This issue will have to be addressed by the Government if the devolution settlement, which was so hard won, is to survive. I urge the Minister and his colleagues in the Cabinet seriously to consider this. I beg to move, although I will not seek to divide the House at the end of the debate.

Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Lord Hain Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, my speech was written days ago. I did not rewrite it; it said exactly what I intended to say, although some critics seem to have imagined that I was trying to say something else. I was not speaking for the Labour Front Bench nor claiming to; I was speaking as a former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who cares deeply about Northern Ireland and is desperately worried about the implications of yet another suspension for the democratic legitimacy of the carefully constructed politics of Northern Ireland, and for the voters of Northern Ireland—younger ones especially, who have become increasingly cynical about politics. We have to be extremely careful about that.

I enjoyed listening to the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Foster. It was good to hear her speaking with such authority and expertise as a former First Minister, and I look forward to hearing much more.

The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, was, as always, an able and persuasive advocate of his unionist cause. He is right that no such Motion, amendment or anything else was tabled when Sinn Féin collapsed the Executive. All I can say in mitigation is that I did not think this was going to become a habit, which is what concerns me. Also, in 2006 I not only threatened to withdraw salaries, expenses and funding for the parties, but gave notice under employment law to all employees in the Executive of Assembly Members that unless we made progress, which we did at St Andrews, that would all be withdrawn. That was applied to every party and was not discriminatory.

Nobody wants to chuck out the Good Friday agreement, least of all a former Labour Secretary of State, since we negotiated it. My participation in the 2007 settlement between the DUP and Sinn Féin, primarily, cemented that into self-government.

At no time have I attacked the DUP for its stance over withdrawing from the Executive. You will not find me criticising the DUP anywhere in Hansard—in the House of Lords reports—or in broadcast or media interviews. I understand its position and why its members felt the protocol was a betrayal of the unionist cause. Where I have been critical is that this whole mess was created by Brexit, and by a hard Brexit. Noble Lords would expect me to say that, as an unadulterated remainer, but I did warn about it. I was always worried about this kind of consequence and that is why I agree, as I think we all do, that the priority now is to get a deal with the European Union on the protocol and resolve all the issues. To use Jeffrey Donaldson’s phrase, we should sort the protocol; I agree with that.

We have to ensure that this current impasse does not become some kind of permanent, ongoing thing. That is the danger in having repeated collapses of the Executive. Next time, it could be Sinn Féin for some reason or other; it has done it before and could do it again. We have to be extremely careful to construct an agenda by consent. If that needs an amendment to the Good Friday agreement, it would have to be by cross-party consent, of course. That may not be possible but we cannot have these repeated collapses of the Administration. That was the purpose of this amendment, which is why I moved it, but I am now happy to withdraw it.

Lord Hain’s amendment to the Motion withdrawn.