Northern Ireland Bill (Allocation of Time)

My hon. Friend says that he has used it only once, but today he referred to Hugh Hefner. When I heard it on another occasion, he mentioned Peter Stringfellow, which only goes to show that he has used the line more than once. However, it is a good line and merits retelling. On a serious point, I am aware that this Bill, like many other measures introduced over the past few years, has generated unhappiness among my friends and comrades in the Social Democratic and Labour party. I sincerely hope that history will record the absolutely central role played by the SDLP in getting us to this point. When I was coming into politics, John Hume was a personal hero of mine and he inspired much of my approach. Although the realpolitik can be brutal—the electoral reality in Northern Ireland means that the Government have to deal with Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist party—that does not mean that we should have less respect for what the SDLP has achieved. Given the time, I shall restrict my comments to the issues of devolution and ministerial portfolios. As I said, this Bill is a small but very important step in the right direction. At the risk of provoking a rerun of the arguments held on the programme motion, I point out that the proposals in it are largely technical. That is not to diminish them or suggest that they are not complicated, but they are not prescriptive. The House is not setting out to tell members of the Stormont Assembly how they must proceed, but the Bill gives them another option in their general toolkit of options for facilitating what is a very important step in devolution. For a short while, I had a role in our constitution that I think was unique. At one and the same time, I was a Minister in the Northern Ireland Office under direct rule, and also a Minister in the Scotland Office, where devolution was fully functioning. That allowed me to see both sides of the Government’s work in relation to the nations and regions of the UK. When I was a direct rule Minister in Northern Ireland, I always said that the form of government that we were able to provide there was not the second or even third best option, but that it was by a long way sub-optimal. I was looking after the Departments with responsibility for agriculture and for the environment, and I see that my esteemed successor in the latter is in his place this afternoon. I was also in charge of the Department for Regional Development, and I am very pleased that the strategic road improvement programme is opening today, after many years of the traffic jams that I inflicted on Belfast. However, the amount of time that we were able to give to such matters was, with the best will in the world, simply nowhere near as much as a local Minister can give to them. That is why I think that devolution will, in principle, result in greater confidence and better government. That is not to say that I always agree with everything that local Ministers do. The devolved Minister with responsibility for criminal justice and policing in Scotland, Kenny MacAskill, is a man with whom I rarely agree on anything. Many of the things that he does as a Minister are wrong-headed, and many of the policies that he pursues are flat-out disastrous, but I would still rather that he was in post, having put a mandate before the people of Scotland and having been elected, albeit that he is making what I regard as mistakes, than that we did not have devolution at all. It is better that we proceed with devolution of criminal justice, albeit at a snail’s pace, with all the caveats, inconsistencies and unintended—or intended—consequences that my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle outlined. That is still better than direct rule. Obviously, because of the separate nature of its criminal justice system, Scotland has an absolutely central aspect of devolution in place. Devolution in Scotland without devolution of policing and criminal justice is unthinkable. The situation is slightly different in Wales, because there has never been a separate Welsh judiciary. Devolution in Northern Ireland will not be complete until policing and criminal justice matters have been devolved. I hope that that happens within my political lifetime—