My Lords, I join the so far unanimous voices of all who have spoken in this House and am grateful to the two additional noble Lords who have spoken in the gap. In particular, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Reid who identified just why the Government need to address this issue.
The noble Lord, Lord Empey, is of course to be greatly applauded for his persistence with regard to this issue. His previous Bill is now extended in this Bill, which makes it clear what exactly ought to be achieved. The previous Bill of course fell foul of those practices in the Commons which result in the exhaustion of time. An awful lot of Members of Parliament and others—I count myself, as a former Member of Parliament, in this category—have suffered the loss of a Bill directed towards an unexceptionable cause when the waywardness of parliamentary procedure sees that the Bill does not progress as it deserves. Most of us at that point, I think, give up on the endeavours. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, is greatly to be congratulated on the fact that he has persisted with these issues and brought this Bill before the House. He may begin to think that he somewhat resembles Sisyphus, who constantly had a burden to bear and roll up the hill, but Sisyphus was never successful, of course. We hope that the noble Lord, Lord Empey, will be successful with this measure or, at the very least, if the Bill itself cannot be commended, that the Minister will indicate that the Government will take progressive action to give effect to its most crucial propositions.
We have no doubt about the justice of this cause and wish the Bill well. A considerable number of Members in the House of Commons support this issue. The constituency of my honourable friend Jim Fitzpatrick includes Canary Wharf, which featured in
one of the horror stories of a period when not just Northern Ireland but the great cities of Manchester and Birmingham suffered attacks. London suffered several attacks during that period—enough to present difficulties in sustaining certain aspects of normal life in the capital, not least because of the threats to public transport. When my honourable friend Jim Fitzpatrick pursues these issues in the Commons, he represents his constituents in a way which they have the right to expect. Noble Lords from Northern Ireland have reflected exactly that consideration with regard to the people they used to represent in the Commons. We have become acquainted through all this with that dreaded word “Semtex”, which I think very few of us knew anything about until the Libyan Government began to obtain supplies of it from the Czech authorities and then began to disseminate it, in particular to the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Other Governments have made more progress on this issue than ours. We all recognise that the law is different in other countries. The Americans can take executive action that is not open to the British Government to pursue in the same way. The Government have now had several years’ opportunity to devote real thought to this issue, given the pressure from noble Lords and Members in the other place. Therefore, I hope that the Minister will indicate that the Government will come up with some constructive proposals.
I recognise that the Minister has drawn the short straw. Having to respond to the first debate on a Friday is bad enough. However, having to do so when he has a fairly thin case to deploy, or has had in the past, is an even more onerous burden. However, he is a competent and capable Minister whom we all respect. I know that he will have pressed his civil servants to ensure that he has an element of constructiveness in his response today. I do not think that the House will take kindly to a repeat of the forestalling by government which has gone on in the past in response to the arguments put forward on these issues. The Government need to give us some encouragement. I am not expecting the Minister to say that the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Empey, will sail through both Houses without contention. I am not even going to ask the Minister to say that it is bound to succeed. All I am asking him to say is that the Government have a duty to respond to the Bill’s demands for constructive action.
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