Sammy Wilson
East Belfast · Democratic Unionist Party · Northern Ireland
“I only use it to show the divisions that there are in the SDLP. <BR /> <BR />What kind of individual have we got who is laying down and who made this report? First of all, there is an irony. The day I met Mr Bain was about three months after he had written letters and made threats and things like that.”
“If the Commissioner for Standards heard some of the things that Mr Allister has said in the Chamber when he is not on the side of Sinn Féin and is not in cahoots with them, if he heard some of the things that he has said about Sinn Féin, he would be apoplectic. He would have a heart attack.”
“If we accept that we allow the commissioner upstairs to dictate his view of what a debating Chamber should be, we do harm to all of us who like to see a bit of fire and passion in debate. Of course, he did not have to make the complaint because the Ena Sharples of the Assembly was happy to go running.”
“Quite frankly, I do not care what the outcome of the debate is, but the reason for the petition of concern was very clear. This whole episode is not about people being concerned about the standards in the Assembly, and it is not about whether people have abided by the code of conduct.”
“<BR /> <BR />One of the bits in the interview that I really enjoyed was when, at one stage, he demanded from me an answer that I could not give him. I had not read the Hansard reports, and I had not done any work for it because I was not all that concerned.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I start off with an apology: sorry we got it wrong as far as Mr Bain was concerned. <BR /> <BR />I will start by saying that I welcome the debate. I have been waiting for the debate. Indeed, I have probably prolonged my time in the Assembly to take part in the debate, because there is an important issue at stake.”
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“Members should think of their own interests, think of the interests of the Assembly and kick the report out where it should be.”
“<BR /> <BR />All that I can say is that the Standards and Privileges Committee may feel that it has a good chance to have a snipe at a member of the DUP, but let it bear in mind that, if we go down the route that we are heading, instead of having a debating Chamber here, we will have a languid, slumberous essay-reading centre that will be of use to nobody. That is not what this place should be about. For that reason, I believe that people should reject the report and its findings. Indeed, the SDLP and Sinn Féin ought to remember, as was pointed out, that they are and have been quite happy, for their own party political interests, to protect people who have been guilty of far worse offences than I have been accused of.”
“I do not know who you mean. If you thought that I was referring to Mr Bain as a quango-crawling bureaucrat, I had not mentioned him. I was just saying that, in the world of bureaucrats, where you do not cause offence because that would stand in the way of and impede your career, you will not engage in the kind of language that we engage in. In the House, we debate issues that make people angry, that people are concerned about and that people are frustrated about. Of course, we will use all the weapons of language. We will use all the methods that there are in debate. The words that we use and the manner in which we use them are all-important.”
“He does not even understand that, when you want to stress and make emphasis etc, that is the way you behave. He would find much of what goes on here offensive because, in the world of quango-crawling bureaucrats with their oily handshakes and their —”
“<BR /> <BR />One of the bits in the interview that I really enjoyed was when, at one stage, he demanded from me an answer that I could not give him. I had not read the Hansard reports, and I had not done any work for it because I was not all that concerned. He pointed at me and said, "I can bring you back here until you give me an answer." I pointed back at him, and I thumped the table. He recoiled in horror, eyes bulging, mouth gaping, lips twitching, face paling. When he finally recovered himself, in his most magisterial voice he said to the note taker, "Let it be recorded that Mr Wilson thumped the table and pointed his finger at me." Is that the kind of person we want dictating the kind of language and the way that we can conduct our debates here?”
“I only use it to show the divisions that there are in the SDLP. <BR /> <BR />What kind of individual have we got who is laying down and who made this report? First of all, there is an irony. The day I met Mr Bain was about three months after he had written letters and made threats and things like that. It was two days after Prime Ministers and world leaders had walked through the streets of Paris demanding freedom for a satirical magazine to use abusive satire against the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people in the world who describe themselves as Muslim. Yet, while world leaders were marching in defence of that, Mr Bain thought that it was OK for him to have an investigation of whether somebody in this Assembly could use robust language. It kind of showed how out of touch — or it showed the difference that there is.”
“Indeed, Mr Speaker, you are absolutely right. I told the Member off in the corridor of the House of Commons for making such an unkind remark.”
“If we accept that we allow the commissioner upstairs to dictate his view of what a debating Chamber should be, we do harm to all of us who like to see a bit of fire and passion in debate. Of course, he did not have to make the complaint because the Ena Sharples of the Assembly was happy to go running. She is maybe not so much "the harridan in the hairnet" as "the busybody on the Benches". Of course, she is well known for criticising members of her own party, as her party leader will tell you. In fact, a rather unkind remark was made to me when I talked about this debate to one of her colleagues in Westminster who, rather unkindly, told me, "Don't take her on; she's bigger than you". That is maybe an indication of what the relationships are like in the SDLP. She took the complaint —”
“If the Commissioner for Standards heard some of the things that Mr Allister has said in the Chamber when he is not on the side of Sinn Féin and is not in cahoots with them, if he heard some of the things that he has said about Sinn Féin, he would be apoplectic. He would have a heart attack. If there is anybody who uses language that Mr Bain would find offensive and would think stands outside the code of conduct, it is Mr Allister, who has the same approach to politics as I do, which is that this is a debating Chamber where you have a bit of fire in it, you have a bit of passion in it, you have a bit of enthusiasm in it, you put a bit of fervour into it and, if you are angry, you are angry and, if you are mocking, you are mocking. <BR /> <BR />This is the whole point about the report.”
“No, I will not give way, because I do not have time. <BR /> <BR />For that reason, I will not make an apology. I will not do an insincere apology. By the way, for the record, I do sorry if I have to do sorry, but I only do it if I am genuinely sorry and believe that I have made a mistake that has to be corrected. I have no difficulty in doing that. <BR /> <BR />I accept that Mr Allister did not make the complaint. Indeed, I suppose, in my opposition to Mr Bain's report and the Committee's report, I am standing up for Mr Allister as much as I am for every other Member of the Assembly.”
“If the definition of "thug" is a member of a gang, a professional assassin or someone who seeks to do their victim in by stealth, I think that the term "thug" was appropriate and therefore still stands. As far as I am concerned, Mr Allister willingly allowed himself to be used as a tool by Sinn Féin.”
“Quite frankly, I do not care what the outcome of the debate is, but the reason for the petition of concern was very clear. This whole episode is not about people being concerned about the standards in the Assembly, and it is not about whether people have abided by the code of conduct. This is all part of the ongoing petty, party political point-scoring exercise that started when Sinn Féin and the SDLP set about attacking Nelson McCausland. <BR /> <BR />I make no apology for the way in which I addressed Jim Allister on that occasion, because he willingly allied himself with Sinn Féin. In fact, he became the most effective cosh that they had during that, and he was rewarded for it by a Chairman who gave him far more leeway than anybody else in the Committee ever got.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I start off with an apology: sorry we got it wrong as far as Mr Bain was concerned. <BR /> <BR />I will start by saying that I welcome the debate. I have been waiting for the debate. Indeed, I have probably prolonged my time in the Assembly to take part in the debate, because there is an important issue at stake. That issue is whether we, as an Assembly, tolerate interference in freedom of speech in the Assembly by a bureaucrat who wishes to impose his standards on us rather than allow freedom of expression, which there should be in any debating chamber. That is the crucial part that people have to bear in mind when looking at the report. <BR /> <BR />People have made much about the petition of concern.”
“I do not think that there is any contradiction between Lord Morrow's point and what I was saying. Mr Lunn illustrated it much better than I did. This is confusing legislation at worst and tokenism at best.”
“The Member has made the most compelling case that I have heard tonight for rejecting clause 20 in its entirety. I would like to think that he would follow the logic of the arguments that he made, which have been really compelling, and push this through so that we can actually get rid of this clause.”
“Even if the police stop him and ask who he has in the back seat, he will say that he has treated that person as a member of his family for the last 10 years. The legislation allows him to do that.”
“The Member will well know that had I gone wider than clause 20, to which the relevant amendments referred, the Speaker would have ruled me out of order, because, of course, at this stage we can refer to only the amendments we are debating. There are other aspects of the Bill that I am still unhappy with but that are not subject to amendments tonight, therefore could not be addressed.”
“Given the statistics that the Minister has given, that 83% of deaths of people between the ages of 14 and 24 are caused by drivers between the ages of 17 and 24, is the logic of his argument not to ban driving until people get to 24?”
“The alternative to the amendment may be for the House to oppose totally that clause 20 stand part of the Bill. That, to me, would be the much better solution, though I am not so sure that it would command widespread support. If I thought that it would command support, that would be a much better avenue to go down than the amendment we are debating at the moment.”
“In an environment where there is a greater expectation of that, we should not be legislating just because a road safety lobby has made this kind of push.”
“<BR /> <BR />The one thing that I have got to say is this: I believe that the Assembly needs to think very closely about the way in which, sometimes willy-nilly, it passes legislation, often for the best of reasons, that restricts the freedom of individuals in a way that hurts them. Such legislation does not actually achieve the objectives that we want, or is sometimes contradictory to those objectives. Lots of references have been made tonight to people who live in rural areas, and the fact that, because of public transport cuts etc, there is not the mobility that we would like for them. Well, let us not pass legislation that further restricts mobility, especially for a group of people who need mobility for education, work and their social lives.”
“I will bow to Mr Allister's advice. Since he is agreeing with me tonight, but probably will not tomorrow night, I will agree with him and take his advice on this issue, if that is indeed a better way. I have said that, if the amendment is pushed to a vote tonight, I will be voting for it, albeit with the qualification that it does not go far enough, does not address the real issue that needs to be addressed in clause 20 and that I think that the Assembly will need to come back and look at further and perhaps more radical amendments to it. In the meantime, maybe over the summer the Minister will think more about this issue and come back with an amendment that the whole Assembly can agree with and which deals with what I believe is an inadequacy.”
“<BR /> <BR />However, I hope that the Minister is minded — after some of the things that I have said, I hope he will be more minded — to rethink this over the summer. We have had the debate. Let us not push it to a vote tonight, because we can come back with this amendment if the Minister does not move, or, I hope, with an even more radical amendment at Further Consideration Stage so that we do not have this kind of confusion. All that I can conclude is that either we are engaging in tokenism or we have an example of total confusion, but neither makes for good legislation. I believe that this will only bring the ire of the people affected by this legislation down on the Assembly. <BR /> <BR />I will give way to Mr Allister.”
“It is absurd. I hope that I have illustrated, by some of the points that I have made, that clause 20 is badly thought-out. I accept the amendment that Mrs Overend proposed. At least she is trying to exempt some people some of the time from the restrictions. However — this is where I agree with my colleague Mr McCrea — I do not think that it goes far enough. For most young people now, 10.00 pm is not a realistic time to have for coming home. Even if they start off at 7.00 pm, they are not likely to be home by 10.00 pm. For that reason, I believe that the clause is so flawed it needs to be fundamentally changed. It has been useful to debate the amendment, and if Mrs Overend pushes it to a vote I will probably vote with her.”
“<BR /> <BR />I will go further than that. In amendment No 15, which the Minister proposed, you could have a situation where — this is particularly relevant in Northern Ireland — someone could get their licence in Letterkenny or Monaghan, have it who for one day and come to a social event or to meet their friends on the other side of the border and could have as many young people in the car as it will hold but they would not be subject to any restrictions. Indeed, it is worse than that. They could come from France, where they drive on the wrong side of the road. They could have had their licence for only a couple of days. They could get on to the roads in Northern Ireland, and, as a result of amendment No 15, they could drive the roads with a group of those vulnerable people in the car.”
“The person sitting beside them could have had their licence for a year and could have been banned from driving for poor driving behaviour and got their licence back again. According to the legislation, it is quite all right to have that person who has proven to be an irresponsible driver sitting beside the young driver who has just got their licence and to then stick three people in the back of the car. All I am trying to do, Minister, is show that, if the objective is the protection of life — your assessment is that young drivers who have just got their licence are likely to be subject to peer pressure — you have not removed that peer pressure. If they need to have somebody responsible with them, you have not met that qualification; they can have the most irresponsible person beside them, yet they will be exempt from the restrictions.”
“I am glad that the Member raised that, because it brings me to my next point. It is not just that they have to have had a driving licence for three years; they can have had a:”
“<BR /> <BR />I noticed that Mr Maginness — I think that it was a slip of the tongue, but it illustrates the logic of the case — said that, according to the legislation, it would be OK, provided that the driver was accompanied by somebody over the age of 24. There is a certain logic in that, but that is not what the legislation states. The driver can be accompanied by someone who is 21, a person who is in the very age group that the Minister says is likely to include the young raker — the one who will disregard safety. Provided that you have somebody of the same vulnerable age group sitting in the seat beside you, you can have three people between the ages of 14 and 24 in the back seat. Furthermore —”
“They can carry a brother or a sister who is between the ages of 14 and 24 or someone who is a child of the family, even if the child has never lived in the same household as the driver, just as long as they are treated by the driver as a child of the family. They are also allowed to carry a half-brother or a half-sister and so on. The Minister may say that you are less subject to peer pressure from those groups. I doubt very much that that is the case. If the young driver is vulnerable to being egged on or whatever, he or she is as likely to be egged on by a member of the family, a half-brother, a half-sister, somebody whom he or she treats as a child or somebody under the age of 14. If the restriction is designed to protect the young driver from peer pressure, the legislation does not do that.”
“<BR /> <BR />If we are to have the restriction and we are concerned about young people who get their licence, are subject to peer pressure and put other people in the car in jeopardy, we should at least be sure that we are not putting the age group that the Minister is talking about in jeopardy. However, let us look at what the legislation allows. Even though young people who have just got their licence are in the vulnerable group and are subject to the six-month restriction, they can take somebody under the age of 14 in the car. If they do not have the experience and are likely to be subject to peer pressure, is it OK that they can carry passengers of 12 or 13?”
“<BR /> <BR />The Minister has not indicated to us — I suspect that he could not even tell us — whether, in that 17- to 24-year-old group, the problem rests with those who have had their licence for some time, who feel that they are Jack the Lad now that they have been driving for a year and who are more confident, and, because they are more confident, they speed. If that is the case, the restriction is meaningless, because it will apply only for the first six months. We do not even have the evidential base on which to judge whether the restriction is an essential restriction.”
“Let me come to the restrictions. The argument has been that 17- to 24-year-olds are responsible for 83% of the deaths of young people in that age group. The Minister gave the percentage. He has not given the number of people involved. I do not want to sound callous, but the numbers are important. Every death is a tragedy for a family. Nevertheless, if we are going to introduce these restrictions, we have to ask ourselves, first, whether they address a real problem and, secondly, whether they will resolve that problem, given the number of people involved.”
“Many people, especially those who are brought up in rural areas and are used to driving tractors about the place and maybe even driving cars on country lanes etc, are competent after six months. However, I have to say, Minister, that, for someone whose party continually harps on about wanting to deal fairly with people from poorer backgrounds, you have placed a lot of restrictions on the new test. They include the whole logbook system, the cost of that and even how it will be implemented. Can a family member fill it in? Does it have to be a qualified driving instructor? If that is the case, what is the additional cost? That will make the test more expensive for many low-income families and people who do not have a great deal of money.”
“I would not mind if there were some logic or even a compelling case for the restrictions, but the Minister has not produced the evidence, and the Bill certainly does not deal with the issue. Indeed, it is confusing and sends out contradictory messages. I want to look at those in a moment or two. I raised this at Second Reading, and I am glad that we at least have an amendment now, albeit, I think, a flawed one. At least it starts moving towards dealing with an issue that is not properly treated in the Bill. <BR /> <BR />I welcome a couple of things in the Bill. I welcome the fact that the Minister has reduced the period after which people can apply for their test from 12 months to six months. I raised that issue at Second Reading too.”
“It is probably just as well that we are debating this part of the Bill at this time of night. We have buried one of its worst aspects at a time when, probably, very few reporters and very few others are watching the debate. Yet the amendments that we are looking at are important, and this is an important part of the Bill. In fact, it is perhaps one of the most important, because we are contemplating putting restrictions on young people who have just gained a licence, which is, for many of them, one of the best things that ever happen in life. When young people get a licence, they gain their independence. Suddenly, we are going to introduce restrictions.”
“I thank the Member for giving way. He quotes a figure of 83%. Whilst every death on the road is a tragedy for the families who lose a loved one, will he accept that the actual numbers are very low? It averages out, I think, at about seven per year. I could be wrong on that, but I think that it is about seven per year. If that is the case, the question is this: is the kind of restriction that we are talking about — and we can talk about how ludicrous and contradictory the restrictions are — really proportionate?”
“I hear the point the Member is making, but what is the point of Consideration Stage and Further Consideration Stage if not to bring forward amendments? To make a criticism about when the amendment has come is, in my view anyhow, a very weak point, otherwise we would not have this stage of the Bill. This stage is specifically to pick up on amendments that were not made at Committee Stage.”
“I understand the point that the Minister is making, but since he has already ruled out carrying family members as part of these restrictions, is he saying that Mrs Overend's amendment is faulty because she ignores two thirds of the day, whereas his Bill ignores fatalities that might occur among family members?”
“Will the Minister give way on that point?”
“He quoted the percentage; perhaps he could give us the number of individuals covered by the figure that he just gave.”
“I am not so sure that the Minister gave any answer to my question. Surely, if there is a record of tyres that have been taken off, there should be a record of how those tyres have been disposed of. Given that around this time of year, tens of thousands of tyres are dumped on to bonfires by companies that, presumably, took money from customers, why can his agency not simply call with tyre companies, check what tyres have been changed, ask where they have been disposed of and, if no reasonable explanation can be given, prosecute?”
“It was not so long ago that we had the head of the Muslim community in Northern Ireland on the radio actually praising this death cult for what it had done when it took over Mosul, and claiming that it had brought order to that city. When people are considering how we deal with this, everyone at all levels of society, especially those within the Muslim community, have to ask themselves what responsibility we have if our families are being drawn into this. We must inform the police, dissuade them, and make sure that there are no more recruits who gun down innocents on beaches and in factories.”
“<BR /> <BR />Whilst there is responsibility for our Government and for other Governments, there are also responsibilities for those whose community is being targeted by this death cult; and it is a death cult, which only wishes to spread destruction, whether it is the destruction of the Tunisian economy, the destruction of the lives of the people who went there on holiday, or the destruction of families. I listened to the family of the gunman, who said that he was their hope; he was the one who had got an education, and yet his mind was poisoned by individuals who wanted to draw him into this death cult. <BR /> <BR />I think that leaders in the Muslim community here in Northern Ireland also need to bear in mind their responsibility.”
“I wish to express, as all other Members have, my sympathy to those who are grieving and who find themselves mourning relatives who went for a holiday and finished up in a holocaust; who thought that they were going to a beach and found themselves in a bloodbath. Since we in Northern Ireland can identify so much with the sudden loss that comes from acts of terror, I think that the sympathy and the empathy of the Assembly should go out to them. <BR /> <BR />On the wider issue, though, this is the challenge for our generation. Many people point to worldwide issues that need to be dealt with, and this is one of the global issues. Friday's violence across three continents indicates just how widespread this is. We in this country need to seriously decide how we wish to address it. People living in this country need to decide how we react to it.”
“Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker, given the accuracy of the BBC in predicting anything in this country, could we perhaps leave it for a day or two to see whether the BBC has got this one right?”
“<BR /> <BR />I commend the Minister for bringing forward a Budget and giving the space for public services to continue, but we cannot continue like this, and we have to reach real decisions before too long.”
“That is the real vulnerability, the real attack on the vulnerable. Let us give people hope, vision and a chance for the future. The way to do that is to behave responsibly and maturely in this place. <BR /> <BR />Martin McGuinness this weekend joined a lot of other people who were complaining about austerity. Some were in Administrations and local government across England or in regional Assemblies in Scotland and Wales. They may have stood complaining about austerity in London, but they implemented budgets in their own Administrations. That is the difference. They understood their responsibilities as politicians; we should understand ours.”
“I would not mind if it was simply the esteem of the guilty parties that went down in the eyes of the public. Unfortunately, and this is bad for democracy, it is the whole of the political institutions and everybody involved in them. <BR /> <BR />I can understand the frustration of the public. We on this side are frustrated as well when we see staring us in the face things that need to be done, should be done and are not being done. I can understand the frustration that the general public has, but we have to bear in mind that the decisions that we make here impact on people's lives; they impact on the vulnerable. People in Northern Ireland will be far more vulnerable if we have a shaky economy that teeters on the edge of low or no economic growth because of bad decisions made in this place.”
“People did sign up to it. Indeed, the SDLP was miffed because Sinn Féin would not even support its petition of concern at one stage, yet suddenly Sinn Féin went back on the agreement. Unless there is a change of heart, all we are going to do is work our way more and more towards that deadline. <BR /> <BR />The consequences of that are twofold. As has been pointed out, the economic uncertainty is not good for business in Northern Ireland. If business is hit with that uncertainty, we are not going to create the jobs that we hoped to create, we are not going to have the growth that we hoped to have, and we are not going to get the tax revenues that we thought we would get. It has all those bad implications. <BR /> <BR />The second thing is that the political standing of this place sinks further and further in the eyes of the public.”
“Indeed, I believe that some of those choices show that they do not really care about the vulnerable, but they still make the choices. When it comes to the choice between political ideology and protecting the vulnerable, political ideology wins every time with Sinn Féin. We have plenty of examples of that in the budgetary decisions that some of its Ministers have made. <BR /> <BR />There are consequences to the impasse that we are in. I know that the deputy First Minister said that he is supporting the Budget conditionally in order to give us time to work our way through the difficulties. I do not know how much time he needs, but the one thing that I do know is that, coming up to the Stormont House Agreement, we were asked for time. We got the Stormont House Agreement, which was an agreement that we thought everyone had signed up to.”