Following the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Mr Donaldson), I want to make it clear that my party has not set out to oppose the Bill, but in the talks we worked for a better and fuller agreement than we have ended up with in the “Fresh Start” agreement. We also wanted one that was more competent and more cogent, and we feel similarly in terms of the legislation.
In opening Third Reading, the Secretary of State talked about the purposes of the pledge and the undertaking and said they were unequivocal commitments, but contrary to what he said, the debate on the amendments showed that the pledge and the undertaking are actually going to prove equivocal, ineffective and inert. So they will not even be fit for the purpose for which they have been offered, and that is bad legislation on our part. We regret the fact that Ministers remain tied to the idea that the terms of the “Fresh Start” agreement are themselves somehow adequate when it comes to legislation. The fact is that Ministers are pretending that the tyre is only flat at the bottom when they try to say that this is sufficient. The fact is that there are clear difficulties; there are clear gaps. This will not be fit to meet any of the bumps and challenges that we are going to meet in the road ahead, and we can point to experience to prove that.
On the new clauses that could not be fully debated, just as the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley has addressed new clause 5, which his party tabled, to answer some of what the Minister said, I want to make it clear that our aim was never to pre-empt the legislation that is necessary in relation to the past. That is why we would not have supported any amendment on the definition of victims or anything else.
On trying to make provision to establish an implementation and reconciliation group, our new clause did not venture into any of the possible roles that that group might have in respect of the past. It did not trespass on any of the understandings or discussions so far, but it tried to offer what we offered in the talks, consistent with our advocacy of a whole-community approach to achieving a wholesome society and of
having a tied-in approach by all the parties to taking responsibility for ending paramilitarism and overcoming sectarianism and for moving forward on flags, emblems and all those other issues that the agreement is meant to cover but that are not properly carried forward, unless people think that they are all just stuck in a sin bin to be parked at the office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister.
One of the inadequacies of the latest version of the Stormont agreement is that too many of the issues that should have been the subject of cross-party approaches and commitments now end up named as Executive approaches and commitments at precisely a time when we are possibly looking at fewer parties being in the Executive. So the effort was made to get a cross-party agreement, but we end up with something that is expressed in the language of the Executive. We do not want a situation where parties not in the Executive in future can disown their leadership responsibilities on these key issues and somehow make a prosecution case against the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister or the parties that occupy that office for the failure to deliver on principles and precepts to which we were all meant to be setting our hand in the Stormont House talks and, indeed, the Haass talks before then.
Some of us have tried to offer broader bandwidth to the implementation and reconciliation group because we want a bigger, better, fuller and more meaningful agreement. We really do fear that some of the parties that support the limited terms of the agreement will be the very people who complain about its inadequacy, as we have heard today. More has been said on some of the issues today than I heard said in our negotiations during the weeks and weeks at Stormont House. It is really is a bit much when parties use this place to table amendments to try to show their difference but condemn the rest of us whenever we are consistent with our arguments in the talks. We are being absolutely consistent with those arguments in our amendments today, and in telling the Government to listen to everything that they have heard in the debate and everything that they will hear beyond it and to try to ensure that we have something that is broader, more sufficient and fit for purpose.
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