Sammy Wilson
MP for East Antrim · Democratic Unionist Party · United Kingdom
“I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The Foreign Secretary has said that his concern is for the behaviour of some settlers on the west bank, and I think we all share that, but does he accept that the fear of losing votes to the Green party and the independent Members on the Bench behind me is also…”
“It is a sad state of affairs when ordinary people feel compelled to take direct action against illegal immigration into our country as a result of successive Governments failing to stop the invasion of our country by illegal immigrants, aided by criminal gangs.”
“The Chancellor has rightly identified trade frictions as a major impediment to economic growth. As a result of the Windsor framework, the internal market in the UK has been severely disrupted by EU-imposed restrictions on trade, which mean customs unions, mountains of paperwork and physical barriers. What steps does the right hon.”
“We would not need these regulations were it not for EU regulations having to apply to a certain part of the United Kingdom because it is regarded as part of the EU, regardless of the democratic vote of the British people to leave the EU. This is not about protecting biodiversity.”
“Because they are now subject to all these additional regulations. If they do not abide by those regulations—we have already seen this—those goods can be seized, destroyed, re-exported or detained by DAERA in Northern Ireland. That is not something which is just a maybe; it happens currently.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. The Minister outlined why these regulations were necessary and gave what, to most on the Committee, would be an acceptable argument: they are to protect biodiversity in Northern Ireland and to ensure that diseased plants are not accessing the Northern Ireland market.”
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“The hon. Gentleman will know that positive discrimination of the sort that he mentions has been exercised—and on a huge scale—in Northern Ireland, where there is 50:50 recruitment into the police force. His proposal would safeguard people from discrimination, but sometimes people who get jobs feel that they have got them not on merit but because of positive discrimination. Does he agree that his new clause would protect them from that? Indeed, many Catholic recruits to the Police Service of Northern Ireland have said that they would rather have been chosen purely on merit and not as a result of positive discrimination based on law.”
“The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. That seems to be a trait among the equality industry right across the United Kingdom. Is he aware, for example, that in Northern Ireland the Equality Commission, which has come down very hard on employers where there is an imbalance between those who come from the Catholic community and those who come from the Protestant community, has gross inequality in its employment practices, employing many more Catholics than Protestants, and justifying that as well?”
“The hon. Gentleman has indicated that he has no difficulty with faith schools, but he suggested earlier that faith schools should not be allowed to promote a certain belief that people felt harassed by—and, indeed, that they should be covered by this legislation. He cannot have it both ways, can he?”
“I think that the whole House recognises the importance of the Bank of England’s acting as lender of last resort to ensure the liquidity of the banking system. However, does the Chancellor accept that that then places an obligation on these banks not to cause liquidity problems for their customers by the unilateral withdrawal of overdraft and loan facilities or unexpected changes in those conditions? What price has he sought to extract from the banks for this continued level of public support?”
“I have already written to the Minister about the money being spent by the HET and the alleged inefficiencies in how it is being spent. What steps is he taking to ensure that the tens of millions of pounds currently being spent by the HET are spent in an effective and efficient manner?”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way—I thought that his speech would not be inclusive, but I am glad that it is. Does he accept, first, that he was wrong about the origin of the Parades Commission? It did not come about as a result of Patten. Secondly, he was wrong to link the quietest summer that we have had with the Parades Commission. The reason why we had a quiet summer with parades last year was that Sinn Fein has been tamed in its opposition to parades as a result of my party’s work to make it accept the rule of law and the police.”
“That parades take place without violence is down to the good sense and good community relations that exist in a place, so let us not attribute successes to the Parades Commission for which it is not responsible.”
“The SDLP will always want to defend the status quo, and as the Parades Commission came about not as a result of the Patten commission, but nevertheless because of nationalist demands, it must stay, even if it does not work, even if there is a better way and even if there are still things that it has been unable to resolve. A number of arguments have been put forward. The first is that we should look at how many parades take place without any violence or confrontation, as if that were down to the Parades Commission. In many cases the Parades Commission simply has no input. It receives the applications and rubber-stamps them, but it does not do anything else.”
“Rather, the judgment is that those who, through protest, have a record of causing street disorder are the ones to whom we must pay most attention. Therefore, the bias is towards them. The hon. Member for Foyle talked about what would happen if we disturbed the Parades Commission. Despite the fact that the SDLP claims to be a radical organisation, there is no group of people who want to maintain the status quo and the establishment more, regardless of how badly it is seen to work, how inadequate it is or how much times have changed.”
“We don’t know how they reached their decision at the end of the day, but we ticked all the boxes that they asked us to tick. However, the police came in afterwards and, on the basis of what they said, the attitude of the Parades Commission changed.” Whether the hon. Members for Foyle and for South Down like it or not, the police already have an input. They are already in the front line and are part of the decision-making process with the Parades Commission anyhow. I believe that in many instances the police make the judgment as to who presents the biggest threat. As most of those who are involved in the loyal orders are ordinary, decent, hard-working, law-abiding, solid citizens, the judgment is that they are not the ones who will cause the trouble.”
“The third reason is the bias that is seen in the Parades Commission, whether in its make-up—there is a long history of objections to what is seen as its biased make-up—or, even more so, in the decisions that it makes. In many instances, especially where there are contentious parades, those decisions seem to be made on the basis of who presents the biggest threat. The more that a group is prepared to lean on people or—this is the worst of it—the more that it has a history of being able not only to make the threat but to deliver it, the more weight the Parades Commission seems to give to its arguments. The suggestion has been made that taking away the Parades Commission would put the police in the front line. However, on many occasions people have come to me and said, “Look, we believe we made a good case to the Parades Commission.”
“If the parade waits two or three minutes for them to arrive, the police will want to take action and refer the parade back to the Parades Commission because of a breach of the conditions. Had the jobsworth thought it through, he would have realised that it would be far better to have everybody included in the parade, rather than having some stragglers arriving after it starts. That is one of the problems, and I could give lots of other examples. Being that prescriptive sometimes causes problems that are not necessary and that, had the parade not been referred to the Parades Commission in the first place, would not have arisen.”
“The implication is always that there is something contentious about the parades. People resent that. Secondly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Lagan Valley (Mr. Donaldson) pointed out, the Parades Commission is an arbitrator, but does not seek to facilitate or mediate in these contentious situations. Sometimes, arbitration itself can do damage. People have come into my office complaining about the prescriptive conditions laid down by the commission. A pedantic jobsworth in the Police Service of Northern Ireland might apply those prescriptive conditions if, for example, a parade has not started at 7 o’clock on the dot, even though it might be waiting for a busload of people to arrive. Sometimes that busload of people will be held up as a result of police activity.”
“First, every parade or public demonstration—indeed, every public activity on the streets of Northern Ireland—must first be referred to the commission. I get people coming to me in my constituency who want to arrange motorbike ride-outs and classic car rallies, as well as civic parades and sometimes church parades for uniformed organisations. All of them have to be referred to the commission. The point that many of them make to me is that there is nothing contentious about their activities—in fact, many of them are cross-community activities. Yet they have to pass through the filter of the Parades Commission and be applied for. Many of the Orange parades and those of other institutions are not contentious either, but they have to be filtered through the commission as well.”
“However, if we are to complete the devolution of policing and justice, we cannot do it in isolation from ending the contention surrounding the parades issue. If anything will destabilise policing and justice, it is the fact that we remain without the machinery to resolve the contentious parades in Northern Ireland. As others have pointed out, the Parades Commission has not been the vehicle for doing that, despite some of the points made by the hon. Members for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for South Down (Mr. McGrady). I want to address their points in a moment or two. However, for those two reasons, it is important that the issue is addressed. The anger against the Parades Commission has been generated for a number of reasons.”
“I think of the fears and hurt of those people, many of whom are constituents of mine. As I said, I am not a member of an Orange lodge, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, the Royal Black Institution or any such order. However, many of the people involved are good, solid, law-abiding citizens who believe that the actions and intervention of the commission in the activities in which they wish to engage regularly—for example, marching to display their culture, history and religious beliefs—almost sullies those honourable activities. The subject is important for a second reason that has been pointed out by a number of hon. Members already. We are moving towards the completion of devolution in Northern Ireland, and a lot of hard work has gone into it. I believe that it is a desirable goal and we should pursue it vigorously.”
“Unlike many of my colleagues who have spoken this evening, I am not one of Northern Ireland’s serial paraders, but I do believe that the issue is important. I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael), who initially took the view that perhaps there were more important matters to discuss, but as my right hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson) said, we have on other occasions sought to raise other issues, such as the economy. Of course, however, many of those issues are now dealt with by the devolved Administration, so that is where the debate on them takes place. The debate concerns an issue that, for a number of reasons, is important. The first is that the treatment of one section—a decent section—of Ulster society by the Parades Commission has caused deep hurt.”
“A further argument in defence of the Parades Commission is that, if we replaced it with something else, those who wished to cause disruption would test the new arrangements. The truth is that anyone who wishes to contest parades can do that through the Parades Commission, and a new body will not necessarily lead to more people saying, “Let’s test the new body.” Indeed, they would know, given the weakness of the Parades Commission’s record and the conditions that it attaches to its decisions, that that is the body that really needs testing.”
“The hon. Gentleman is right, but his assumption is that, somehow or other, that was to do with the existence of the Parades Commission. Just because we see something happening, and we see a change taking place, it does not necessarily tell us the cause of that change. Indeed, many of the changes have happened as a result of the work of people in their local areas, outside the work of the Parades Commission. That is the whole point of the Ashdown proposals, as I understand them. We want to see more of that work, yet the Parades Commission appears to be acting as a block to it, or ignoring it and rewarding intransigence. People are therefore arguing that the commission should be done away with.”
“The hon. Gentleman asks that, yet he is asking us to believe that something that is not yet in existence will produce the effect that he has described. He asks me for evidence: there is a body on the ground through which, in the past, people have tried to use the rules that it has made to try to stop parades. We know that that has happened. He is speculating about a body that is not even in place.”
“I am going to conclude now, but let me reiterate that, in most cases of contentious parades that have been sorted out, they have been sorted out not by someone arbitrating and saying, “You will do this, and the other people will do that”, but by people sitting down and by mediation. The whole thrust of the Ashdown proposals, as I understand them, is that we should replace this arbitration, which is seen to be biased, with mediation. That is the mature way forward, and I believe that that is an important factor. I am a supporter of the devolution of policing and justice, and I have proclaimed that publicly in a number of different ways. Let me make it clear to the Minister, however, that if we are to have that devolution, we shall also require a solution to the question of parading. Otherwise, it will not work.”
“The Chief Secretary has outlined the work that still has to be done, all of which I assume will be in the framework that he intends to have published by spring next year. What further steps must be taken after next spring that cause the uncertainty that he has expressed as to when payments will start?”
“Will the hon. Gentleman outline how he would approach the issue of compensation should there be a change of Administration following the next election? Would he be happy to go down the route recommended by the ombudsman, or would he be looking for a tailor-made scheme drawn up by his party?”
“From the long IRA campaign in Northern Ireland, we recognise the value to terrorists of being able to set up training bases in the haven of a safe foreign country. For that reason, we believe that the troops in Afghanistan are doing a sterling service for all people in the UK. I also welcome the Prime Minister’s announcement that we are now spending £3.5 billion on supplying troops, but given the reports about the unreliable equipment, the underestimation of the reserves that are required and creaky procurement in the MOD, what efforts are being made to ensure that the money is being spent on the right equipment and on an effective supply chain?”
“Although I think that the whole House will support the stated aims of the Bill, does the Secretary of State not recognise that behind the rhetoric the stark statistics show that 200,000 more children are now in child poverty than in 2004? The Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that the Government’s policies will lead to the target for 2010-11 being missed by 600,000. On that basis, although the Minister claims that the Government are concerned about child poverty the facts show something totally different.”
“I hope that where resources are required centrally for that strategy, they will be made available.”
“This—not some quango—is the place for such scrutiny. Of course, quangos often take on a life of their own anyway. Few quangos vote, or produce reports, to say that they are no longer needed. They always find some reason for their continued existence. I have heard so many times in this House that we have to reduce the cost of government. However, it seems that on almost every occasion when we come forward with some new ideas or policies to deal with a particular problem, we set up more extra-parliamentary bodies. I believe that that is the wrong way forward. I look forward to Committee. I know that the devolved Administration in Northern Ireland will be actively involved in considering a strategy for dealing with child poverty, which will have to cross all the various Departments within that Administration.”
“Its role is to provide the data, to scrutinise and evaluate the policy, to carry out research into child poverty and to have the expertise in dealing with families that experience poverty and so on. We are told that it will not cost very much. We have not even got the Bill through and groups are already saying that the commission is under-resourced and should have more. Let us face it—once such an organisation is set up, the impetus is always for it to be expanded into a bigger bureaucracy and a bigger quango, not shrunk. As the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, the real place where the scrutiny of the success or otherwise of this policy should be undertaken is Parliament. This is where Ministers should be brought to account, whether through Select Committees or in annual debates in the House.”
“We believed that grammar schools were one way of giving young people from disadvantaged backgrounds the opportunity to climb the ladder out of that background and impoverishment. When it comes to the delivery of some of the programmes, especially those that offer help with families that have difficulties or that are dysfunctional, Churches in Northern Ireland could have a huge input—and perhaps more so than in other parts of the United Kingdom. A strategy that recognises such opportunities and their strengths should be within the remit of the local administration. That flexibility is good, and we should not turn our backs on it. My last point concerns the need for the commission.”
“Administrations are guided towards certain areas, but some will have different emphases. In rural areas, for example, the issues of poverty might be much different from those in inner-city areas. Giving the responsibility to local authorities or devolved Administrations to draft their own strategies rather than having them imposed from the centre is, I believe, a good idea. Let me consider the circumstances in Northern Ireland. One thing that helps to release people from poverty—it has been mentioned tonight—is a good sound education and once we had a devolved Administration in Northern Ireland, we moved away from the policy that the Government were introducing of doing away with grammar schools in Northern Ireland.”
“Some Members have asked how, if the money available through the Barnett funding mechanism is not ring-fenced, we can be sure that it will be spent on these issues. However, the fact that the child poverty strategy has been brought forward indicates that the necessary resources have to be directed towards dealing with it. I am not sure I agree with criticisms of other aspects of the Bill. The hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) said that the strategy for dealing with these issues would be imposed on, or left to, local councils as the deliverers in England, and that there would be disadvantages to that. Given the different circumstances in different parts of the United Kingdom, that degree of flexibility for local councils or devolved Administrations to bring forward their own strategies is a good part of the Bill.”
“Without the commitment of resources—I am thinking particularly of devolved Administrations such as Northern Ireland, where, given the higher levels of deprivation and child poverty, there are greater consequences in dealing with this—we will not meet the targets for 2010 that we had hoped to meet. Only last week, the House of Lords indicated—the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) will not like to hear this—that Wales and Northern Ireland have lost out on the Barnett formula. As a result, the resources that have been made available are less than what is required to bring Northern Ireland up to the levels that would give us greater equality with the rest of the United Kingdom.”
“There is an obligation on devolved Administrations to bring forward a strategic plan for dealing with this issue. I take the point that it is not simply about levels of income. Perhaps the Bill focuses too much on that, although, to be fair to the Government, the guidance that they have given goes much wider to include housing, education and a range of other things. However, there will still be resource implications that vary across different parts of the country. In some places there will be deeper deprivation, and therefore a greater problem, than in others; the causes of poverty might be much more expensive to deal with than elsewhere.”
“We must not create an expectation that we can meet a target that we were unable to meet in the good circumstances, because we are unlikely to be able to meet it in the circumstances that we will face in future. I take issue with the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), who used the word “slipperiness” in referring to the clause saying that economic and financial circumstances should be taken into consideration. To a certain extent, that is simply being sensible. We are looking at a policy that will apply that far ahead and in circumstances that we cannot possibly foresee and unless we skew all the other policies around it, we must have some way of evaluating the targets that we are aiming for but that circumstances might prevent us from achieving. My next point flows from that.”
“However, even with their commitment to reaching their target of reducing child poverty by 50 per cent., this Government were unable to achieve their targets during the best of economic times. At a time when employment was riding high and public finances were abundant, those targets were not met. This Bill is being introduced in the context of immense pressure on public sector finances, with a period of rising unemployment and the impact of other policies. For example, last week the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change announced a policy that will add, some believe, £230 a year to households’ energy bills. We must therefore be realistic when we set these targets.”
“Those targets will span not just this Administration, but another Administration and perhaps another one after that. At the end, nobody will be held responsible for targets that may be set 10 or 20 years in advance. To throw in a commission in order to try to provide some continuity is something that I am not so sure about—and I will come to the commission in a moment. I am not sure that the approach that we are debating is necessarily the best way forward. Secondly, let us introduce a bit of realism. Hon. Members have already made the point that the issue should not be about simply scoring political points off the Government who happen to have responsibility for taking through legislation and public policy at the moment.”
“The difficulty towards the end of such a debate is that many of the points that one wished to raise have already been raised. However, some of the issues that I want to raise may run counter to those raised in many of the speeches in this debate. First, I welcome the objectives of the Bill. We have had a good run-through this evening of the impacts that child poverty has on children throughout the United Kingdom and the consequences for society in lost opportunities, crime, problems in later life and so on. However, I am not so sure that the approach taken in the Bill is necessarily a good way of dealing with the issue. Hon. Members have drawn parallels between this Bill and the Climate Change Act 2008—some people may know my views on that—under which long-term targets have been set.”
“I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point about the cost, and perhaps the answer is to administer deportations more effectively, but would it not send the wrong signal if deportations were to stop and we were simply to say that we would look for an internal solution? Would not that encourage even more people to come to the UK, because they would see it as a soft touch?”
“Does the hon. Gentleman agree that his point is made even more poignant by the fact that many people who live in the Irish Republic have brothers, sisters and other family members who have settled in Northern Ireland? The idea of being British, Irish or having joint citizenship is not therefore unusual for them.”
“I think the Minister has missed the point. The new clause is really a request for a reciprocal arrangement to the one that exists for people who live in the United Kingdom and want to claim Irish citizenship. For them, there is an easy route. All the new clause is requesting is that that easy route be available in the other direction. That is why this is a unique situation: people who wish to have Irish citizenship have a method by which they can get it quickly, so to reciprocate in the other direction seems to me to be fairly sensible.”
“Travellers from Northern Ireland are UK citizens, but what the measure that the Minister describes as “limited and proportionate” would mean that all of them would be treated as non-UK citizens, even when they travel within the UK. Leaving aside the practical difficulties, does he accept that there is a real political difficulty with that? If the clause were to go through, a large section of people who regard themselves as UK citizens would be treated as though they lived outside the UK.”
“May I join in paying tribute to those who have lost their lives in fighting to protect our country in the mountains of Afghanistan? I urge the Prime Minister to ensure that sufficient resources and manpower are made available to them to do the job. Will he tell me what assessment he has made of the impact of the climate change package on the public finances, on energy costs and on job losses in this country, especially given the fact that a number of important developing countries have refused to sign up to the targets?”
“While the Secretary of State emphasises the importance of fairness and equality being at the heart of affairs in Northern Ireland, does he accept that the legislation as currently drafted has led to an extensive and unnecessary piece of equality legislation that has led in turn to the build-up of an equality industry that serves few of the purposes that he outlined in his answer, and that therefore any future legislation should be designed to dismantle that industry while ensuring that the principles of fairness and equality remain?”
“I notice the relish with which the hon. Gentleman contemplates the discomfort that he believes the Conservative party may feel if the matter has to go to referendum, but does not his speech suggest that he is afraid of a referendum? He wants to try to reassure the Irish so that they will accept the Lisbon treaty and not protest as they did last time, and he does not want a referendum here, yet he claims that the people of the UK want to connect with Europe. Is not the best way to connect people with Europe to give them a say on whether they want further European integration?”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I apologise for interrupting the flow of his rhetoric, but perhaps we should get down to the reality. We need to look at the examples of the smaller countries that have applied to join Europe, which is something that the eastern European countries are now copying. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that they were attracted by economic bribes, with money being transferred from the larger countries to the smaller ones? Once those bribes dry up, the reality hits and those smaller nations realise that they are in a system that takes away their national freedoms, interferes in their affairs and imposes burdens on them.”
“I knew this question was important, but I did not know that it deserved the acclaim it got from the House earlier. Does the Minister recognise that in many communities churches provide the main source of community activity for the elderly, the young and others, and that because of some deeply held beliefs the infrastructure that would normally be funded through the lottery fund cannot be funded? Will he look at ways of ensuring that those areas that require and rely on church facilities are not disadvantaged?”
“Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. First, may I say that I welcome the opportunity not just for the main parties in the House but for the minority parties to have a discussion on the issue with you and to make recommendations? I believe, as other Members have said, that the very reputation not just of the House but of the future of good governance in the United Kingdom is at stake. May I ask, Mr. Speaker, whether you can give us an assurance that, after those discussions, a report will quickly be given to the House as to their outcome so that the matter can be put behind us and settled?”
“Does the hon. Lady agree that Ford has been complicit in all this? It seems to have walked away from agreements that it had passed on. Surely it must have some obligation to ensure that these were adhered to and honoured.”
“Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the problem was not just funding for terrorist organisations, but arming them by sending hundreds of tonnes of weaponry to Northern Ireland, which enabled the IRA to use car bombs and firearms, which then also affected the UK mainland? Does the hon. Gentleman find it odd that while the matter remains unresolved, export licences for arms supplied by the United Kingdom are being issued to send arms to the very state that sent illegal weaponry to the United Kingdom to kill citizens of this country?”
“Will the Minister also give an assurance that the Government will pursue equally vigorously the issue of compensation for those who were victims of terrorism funded and supplied by the Libyan Government in the 1980s and ’90s?”