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Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill

Any other bids? Let me go beyond the welcomes to say that I appreciate that the Government have made some amendments that improve the Bill. Should the circumstances ever arise whereby policing and justice powers can be devolved, my party, regardless of what any other party does, believes in the primacy of the electoral mandate. As a party, we are mandated to seek devolution for Northern Ireland. We want that devolution to be stable, accountable, effective and efficient. Those were the principles that we enunciated for many years. I believe that we have moved towards that, making some progress along the way, but barriers still remain. The principal barrier has been Sinn Fein and its relationship with the IRA, to which it is inextricably linked. As a party that was entitled to be in government under existing legislation, it was clearly necessary that it met the standards of democracy, that it decommissioned all its weapons, and that it ensured that there was a complete and unalterable end to all of its paramilitary and criminal activity. Those are all essentials for government. They are even more essential in relation to the devolution of policing and justice suggested in the Bill. When the last report by the Independent Monitoring Commission was published, we said openly in this House that some progress had been made, but that there were still grey areas and loose ends that needed to be addressed. So I am sure that the Minister will accept that many of us were shocked when a spanner was thrown into the works this week by the irrational decision of the Ulster Unionist party to embrace the Progressive Unionist party, whose members are the spokespersons for the UVF. I knew instinctively that the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) would be opposed to that marriage, and that was confirmed during the debate. The relationship undermines her, however, and I regret these circumstances because there will now be a mountain to climb in regard to devolution unless these matters can be undone. We will await the ruling of the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly on this, but the Speaker can rule in favour of the decision of the Ulster Unionist party Assembly group only if she believes that that group is a separate political party. The party’s representatives indicated that they had formed a new political party. That is what the Speaker was instructed by the Ulster Unionist party’s Assembly representatives—