Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (Northern Ireland Political Parties) Order 2007

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for the characteristic and forceful way in which he has outlined the Government’s case on this matter. Throughout the difficult debates over the past two years he has never gilded the lily and he has presented the facts to us in a straightforward manner. None the less, what he is proposing today constitutes, as he has said, a double exemption of sorts for Northern Ireland—one temporary and one of longer-term significance—from the normal UK electoral law. To deal first with the temporary exemption, which is perhaps of less deep significance, the Government had obviously hoped that by this point they would be in a position to remove confidentiality protection of the kind that exists in Northern Ireland electoral law and to have complete transparency along the lines of the United Kingdom. It is not the Government’s fault that we are not quite at that point. The violence at the weekend in Carrickfergus reminds us of the ways in which Northern Ireland still, despite the enormous progress made, does not have the degree of stability and peace that there is throughout the rest of the United Kingdom. None the less, although the Government’s position is understandable, the consequence of what has been said here today is that it is most likely that the next general election will be fought in a context in which confidentiality will apply to Northern Ireland electoral donations which will not apply in the rest of the United Kingdom. It is important to keep that in mind. More significant, however, is the Government’s view on the question of allowing Irish citizens to contribute to Northern Irish political parties. This goes against the basic principle of exclusion of foreign donations in our mainstream UK legislation. Irish citizenship is defined in the Irish constitution extraterritorially; it can mean Irish citizens in Northern Ireland and Great Britain, but also in the United States of America. As the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was honest enough to say to the Grand Committee in June 2006, there are a lot of Irish citizens around the world. This is opening a very wide door. I was quite surprised to see in another place—and to a degree repeated today by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—the argument from the Government that opposition to or concern on this matter reflects a failure to grasp the core principles of the Good Friday agreement. The Good Friday agreement is quite correct; it gives a legitimacy to people who consider themselves British or Irish or both. However, this provision gives a legitimacy to those who consider themselves American or Irish or both. It is not quite in line with the Good Friday agreement; it creates in principle a new privileged type of donor. That argument surprised me when I first heard it, but the more I reflected upon it the more it surprised me. Since 1994 I have been a vigorous advocate of the principles of the Good Friday agreement. These principles today are accepted by all the parties in this House; they are accepted—with a degree of reservation by some perhaps—by 108 Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly; and they are accepted by both the British and Irish Governments. In 1994 this was far from being the case. Those of us who argued for it found ourselves often in a lonely place and often opposed, it would appear, by the majority in both communities in Northern Ireland, and certainly by the majority of the parties which currently dominate the Northern Ireland Executive. Now things have changed and I am very grateful for that. However, it is also remembering that in 1994 the Labour Party found itself in an ambiguous position on some of these questions, as indeed did the Irish Government. The argument for this legislation cannot be found in the Good Friday agreement, although it can be found in the broader logic of the peace process more generally. I am prepared to accept that. The Government would have been more honest with us if they had expressed themselves in those terms. In certain respects, though, the argument as presented today actually constitutes a regression from the key principles of the Good Friday agreement. One of the things the agreement does is remove the difficulties that arose from the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement, which created an unhappy marriage between British and Irish constitutional thinking in which it emerged that, for example, a common-or-garden phrase like ““the status of Northern Ireland”” meant an entirely different thing in Irish constitutional theory from what it meant in British constitutional theory. It was not until 1998, thanks in part to the labour of noble Lords in this House today—I refer to the noble Lords, Lord Trimble, Lord Laird, Lord Kilclooney and Lord Maginnis, and others—that eventually this matter was sorted out by the Good Friday agreement, the referendum that led to a change in Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution and the victory of the principle of consent, the guiding principle now accepted by all which governs the politics and the future of Northern Ireland. The key point is that we are now regressing. On one hand we have a formula in the Irish constitution, extra-territorially defined citizenship, which is extremely broad and is something the British Government have no right to expect to be able to define. We are returning to the uneasy world of 1985 to 1998, when the British Government found themselves locked in to meanings that were defined by the constitutional text of another state. I almost said that we were returning to the dark days of Thatcherism in that respect. It would have been better if the argument had been made on a different ground; that is, on the ground of the broader logic of the peace process. I also think that the House has found it easier to accept the provisions because the party that is expected to benefit the most, Sinn Fein, does not appear in the House of Commons. We cannot assume that that will continue for ever. Such is the pace of ideological revisionism within Sinn Fein’s political leadership that it is quite conceivable that it will appear in the Commons within the next few years, and should it do so, it would be a step that I would welcome. However, a consequence would be that, possibly in the context of a hung Parliament, a key group of MPs—which might decide the colour of the next Government, on the polls as they existed a month ago, if not today—would be elected in the context of an electoral law totally different from that governing the other Members of that House. It is not enough to say that we can prevent transfers of money from Northern Irish parties to British parties. The consequence of this legislation goes further: it will create a different type of Member. So far that type of Member does not appear, but they may appear soon and that might affect how Governments operate. It is important to say that, because many of the concerns about Sinn Fein in politics and its financing have disappeared or been greatly reduced because of its relatively weak performance in the recent Irish general election. But although many noble Lords might devoutly wish it, the affairs and representatives of Northern Ireland cannot be kept in Northern Ireland. A Pandora’s box has been opened here. I understand the reasons why the Government have decided to do it. There are justifications in terms of the peace process and of the process that has persuaded the Sinn Fein leadership to give up violence and endorse politics, which are overriding considerations, and the greatest justification of all is the saving of human life that has occurred as a result of that policy. In that respect the Government are on firm ground, but they should not hide from themselves that there is a downside and an ambiguity to what is taking place, to which we will have to pay attention over the years that follow.