It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Lewes (Maria Caulfield). Her final statement, outlining the choices facing the Government, which was very pertinent and important. As she said, we cannot continue to remain in this situation, which I have described as limbo, where we have no decisions at all being made in part of the United Kingdom. In western Europe we are the only part of a modern advanced democracy where people who are entirely unelected and unaccountable wield enormous power. And that power is mainly used to do nothing, to stop things—they say that they can’t, that they won’t and that they have no remit, which is an appalling state of affairs in a modern democracy. The only people I suppose who have more power than the permanent secretaries in Northern Ireland are people like European Commissioners, probably equally unaccountable to many people as well. We are leaving the European Union to restore accountability, but in Northern Ireland we are passing legislation to increase and prolong the rule of permanent secretaries in Northern Ireland—with a few exceptions, of course.
There have been certain times when the Government have brought forward legislation to intervene—the Budget is the biggest example, but there are others. We remember that, as part of the Stormont House agreement, Sinn Féin members actually supported and were willing to have direct rule on the issue of welfare payments, because they did not want to put up their hands for welfare reform, changes and cuts in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and were quite happy to see it transferred to Westminster. We talk about their opposition, but to those Members who think that direct rule is such a terrible thing in
Northern Ireland that nationalism would be outraged, I say that they should just remember that Sinn Féin actually encouraged it and wanted it to happen when it came to difficult decisions in Northern Ireland. Sometimes people actually find it very convenient to allow Westminster to take these decisions when it suits them, but, of course, it is an absolute constitutional outrage when it is a different type of decision to be made, and then all sorts of terrible consequences can emerge.