Orders of the Day — Northern Ireland Constitution (Amendment) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 13 Rhagfyr 1973.

Danfonwch hysbysiad imi am ddadleuon fel hyn

Photo of Mr Frank McManus Mr Frank McManus , Fermanagh and South Tyrone 12:00, 13 Rhagfyr 1973

I am sure that the House will be delighted to know from the hon. Member for Antrim, South (Mr. Molyneaux) that God is in his Heaven, that the Orange Order is not split and that things are all well. I was tickled by one of the hon. Gentleman's suggestions. He said, with some justification, that the administration should not be as big as it is but perhaps half the size. I am wondering where he will get the half to make up the seven and a half. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will enlighten us on a future occasion about how he will get round that matter.

When the Secretary of State came to Northern Ireland first, he said in relation to the extremists that the policy would be to discredit, to isolate, and ultimately to defeat them. Her Majesy's loyal Opposition have obviously made a reasonable effort to isolate myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Ulster (Mrs. McAliskey). I trust that we have not been discredited. We are very far from defeated. But it is all part of the double standards of democracy which have emerged in the process of this debate particularly. For example, hon. Members on both sides of the House are told that they have a perfect democratic right to register their protest, to make their point and to air their point of view. But the minute that we start to do that we are labelled as extremist. The only way to escape being labelled as an extremist if one disagrees with the Government, it appears, is to shut up and say nothing. The moment one disagrees with this eminently reasonable solution which has been arrived at by reasonable men, once one takes issue with that, one is automatically an extremist.

I had no learned doctor teaching me about democracy, but it strikes me that that is not a proper attitude. If one says that a Member of the House has a right to put his point of view one ought to let him do that, and one ought to consider on its merits what he says rather than slapping a label of extremism on him, from whatever side of the House he may come.

We are also asked, "What is your alternative? What would you have? Would you have, instead of this, a return to anarchy, more anarchy or worse anarchy?" The simple answer to that, from where I and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Ulster stand—and, now, many hon. Members on the Government side of the House—is that we are not in the business of offering alternatives. We are those people on the outside. We have no power of any sort. It is not our job. Our function in the democratic system—I believe that this is what democracy is supposed to be about—is to examine what is presented and to say that we dislike it if we find in it things which we do not like. It is an insufficient reply from the Front Bench of either side of the House to say, "What would you offer in return?" That is far too simple to be sufficient.