I am pleased to be called to speak in the debate, but I am disappointed that it is on another Bill that is a manifestation of political failure. It is the latest in the diet of political failure that the people in Northern Ireland have been fed, and attention is rightly on the current abeyance of the institutions. However, the truth is that the stewardship of the Good Friday institutions has been abused for the past decade by partisan positioning. The people who pay the price, time and again, are those who are waiting for health treatment for want of reform of health and for want of workforce planning, the children who are sitting in an inadequate school estate because of delayed development decisions, and the people sitting in the cold and getting sick because of it, waiting for cost of living support payments that reached other regions many months ago.
We should be in absolutely no doubt that, despite the nihilist anti-devolution rhetoric that we have just heard, the responsibility to govern and the refusal of it does have a measurable impact on public services. Nobody is saying that the parties in charge over the past decade have done a particularly good job of running those services, but it is absolutely the case that having no Ministers degrades decision making. We should be in no doubt, either, that the normalisation of crisis politics is wearing people in Northern Ireland down, entrenching division and making our society even sicker.
Anybody listening to the speeches from DUP Members will have had a mind-bending experience. I am going to stick to the scope of the Bill, but I want to clarify that nobody is dismissing the hurt that many ordinary Unionists feel about Brexit and the protocol; that is why many of us advocated exhaustively for better solutions, which were dismissed, while DUP Members were gleefully all about their selfies with the European Research Group. However, we are being honest with people about the fact that the Northern Ireland Assembly does not have a role in that negotiation.
In the debate about restoring the institutions, people are frustrated at the idea that the DUP is the victim in all this, when the people I, my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood), the hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry) and many others represent
are the people who have been Brexited against our will. Are we tearing everything down? Are we punishing the health service? No—we are turning up for work every day to try to find solutions.
We have heard it demonstrated today that no solutions are going to be acceptable. Perhaps I imagined the years of debate about blockchain and all the other technical solutions to Brexit that were put forward, including by the DUP, but we know there is no bottom line that is going to be met. Instead, we have the promulgation of a “them’uns did it” narrative that the protocol is somehow a creation of Irish people, nationalists and foreigners in the EU, rather than a proposal by the UK Government to get themselves off the hook of the original Brexit trilemma and the fact that we cannot reconcile a hard Brexit with the geography we have. In all the debate I have heard over the last six years, including today, I have yet to hear a solution to that.
The Good Friday agreement is about solutions. That agreement and the institutions it created were supposed to give life to the aspirations of everybody in Northern Ireland, regardless of their community background or their view on the constitutional issue. Instead of people being able to see opportunity in politics and opportunity in public service, they just see dysfunction, an Assembly not sitting and—with respect—a UK Government who are not interested.
People in Northern Ireland know that our future is not fixed. They know the experience we are having right now does not have to be the experience that we have forever, and people are beginning to look clearly at their options. They see the Stormont dysfunction and the merry-go-round here, and they can see a very clear contrast with the Government in the rest of the island of Ireland, who are stable and delivering a budgetary surplus that can mean investment in public services.
The Social Democratic and Labour party has always been clear about our desire to create a new Ireland on the basis of consent, and we have rejected the scorched-earth approach of others that would see a new Ireland rooted through dislocation and disarray, but the hard truth is that those creating chaos in our institutions are absolutely scorching the earth. They are driving more people every day to think about a new paradigm in which they can enjoy good governance, run their businesses and raise their families.
Our primary political objective will always be meeting the needs of people in the here and now. That is why we support the provisions in this Bill—reluctantly, because we know it is required to keep the show on the road, and it does just that and no more.
We acknowledge the need to postpone an election. Elections are supposed to put power in the hands of the people, but the reality is that an election, had it been run next month, or in March or May, if the veto was not removed and the blockage was not removed, would do no such thing. It would not put the people in the driving seat and it would further disrespect the mandate that those people expressed six months ago.
We acknowledge the need to give clarity about interim political decisions, but—I appreciate that the Secretary of State understands this—it is no substitute for democratically accountable Ministers. We are not over the last governance black hole that caused much of the degradation in public services that we are currently experiencing.
However, the SDLP is equally clear that DUP intransigence cannot be rewarded by either direct rule or indirect rule. In the absence of an executive, even with the mitigations in this Bill, the Conservative party would be in the driving seat on major decisions. That does not reflect the will of the people as expressed either this past May or in 1998 with the Good Friday agreement. That agreement was about creating devolved institutions that reflect the views of people who are Unionist, people who are nationalist and people who are neither.
Plan A for the SDLP is a devolved Executive as chosen by the people in May. But we have tabled new proposals that would give a formal consultative role to the Irish Government and a role to the First Ministers-designate, who should be chosen from the two largest traditions—[Interruption.] People can call that what they will, but we are very clear that if strands 1 and 2 are deliberately paralysed, strand 3 and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference should be consciously operated. Parties should know that that will be the recourse and the consequence of their choice to hold strands 1 and 2 of the Good Friday agreement to ransom. The institutions of government rely on Unionists, nationalists and others working together in our substantial common interest, and that principle should be hardwired into any governance decisions—even those that are operating only temporarily.
We acknowledge the injustice of MLAs who are not fully at work continuing to receive a full and decent salary at a time when so many are struggling, and when those with trade unions are losing pay because they are striking to improve terms and conditions and the public services that they deliver. We regret the collective punishment and untargeted scope of this approach.
As the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) outlined, there are many decent and talented people in all the parties, including the many who have stepped forward for election for the first time this year. I spend a lot of time trying to persuade people of all political backgrounds to go into politics. It is difficult enough to attract talent—many of us now on these Benches had our pay cut last time the Assembly was in abeyance—but it is harder when you say, “These are the terms and conditions. This is the abuse you’ll get on social media. These are the hours you’ll keep. And by the way, for a few months every year, you’ll struggle to pay your mortgage and childcare bills because of the intransigence of others.” We have tabled an amendment that would direct that tactic at those who are creating the problem and who refuse to allow even the nomination of a Speaker.
We have also proposed by amendment a means of electing First Ministers and a Speaker. That would move us away from the culture of veto and the focus on binary designation, neither of which have, in recent years, proven healthy for discourse or decision making, unfortunately. That reflects our desire to evolve and reform the institutions without jeopardising the fundamental principles of power sharing and mutual respect. There is absolutely no attempt by the SDLP to move away from those principles, which have been at the core of our party and everything we do for the last five decades and more. But if that is only ever expressed
by veto and by blocking the people of Northern Ireland from having a decent life—if that is the only tactic that people appear to be prepared to use—we will absolutely look for solutions.
If the DUP continues to be abstentionist in the new year, post any EU-UK deal, and given that an Assembly election while those are still the conditions will not put power in the hands of people, we will explore reform with more urgency—