Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:30 pm on 25 October 2000.
In that case I am extremely grateful and I can spare the Committee yet another boring disquisition on the subject. I shall proceed to the subject of this amendment and look forward very much to what the noble and learned Lord has to say in due course.
It has been said by other noble Lords that one has to emphasise how important emblems are in human affairs. After all, man is not an entirely rational beast, to put it mildly, except perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who I believe is entirely rational. The rest of us do not enjoy the noble Lord's rather unique attributes. We mind very much about emblems. I notice that when a nation throws off the colonial yoke, one of the first things it does is to invent a new flag. That is a matter of enormous moment to that nation as it is to institutions acquiring their own emblems: not only a flag, but badges and all the other paraphernalia of nationhood.
There is good reason for that. In that symbolism is embodied--or we hope will be embodied--all that we wish for our country and all that we believe that it should stand for. In the flag and the emblems there is contained the shorthand of why we want our country to flourish. It seems to me that that should be as true of the United Kingdom as it is of India, South Africa or France. I sometimes wonder whether nowadays we have reached a condition in which all of us are browbeaten into being ashamed of being British when we have perhaps rather more to be proud of in our history and traditions than most other countries. The Committee may consider that a chauvinistic view, but it is one that I hold.
So long as the Province of Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom it seems to me to be entirely right that the institutions of Northern Ireland should reflect that fact. We should not be ashamed of that, particularly when we are talking about the emblems of the RUC, or of the police force that may or may not succeed it. The emblems that have been so important to the RUC as it has nobly discharged its duties, particularly over the past 30 years, encapsulate not just the symbols of what has come to be thought of as the dominating tribe in the Province but also, as my noble friend Lord Glentoran has said, symbols of Irishness itself. Surely it is sensible for us to think carefully before throwing away our history.
It is interesting to note that since 1997 it has been clearly implied, particularly by certain Members of this Government--although, I am sure, not by the noble and learned Lord--that history began in May 1997 and that we should begin to be ashamed of, and forget, what happened before that. I believe that one of the more recent Members of this Chamber chaired a commission which rather clearly implied that, although he was careful to deny it under questioning. It is interesting to note that while this process has been going on, the public's interest in history seems rather paradoxically to have increased. People are perhaps beginning to understand that history and our past are at least as important as anything else to our understanding of the present and future. There again it seems to me that there is an additional reason for our being careful before we idly throw away emblems which encapsulate a great deal of which we should be proud and which make an enormous difference to our perception of ourselves, our esteem of ourselves and the polity in which we live.
That is perhaps rather a blindingly obvious analysis, but there is another point which I believe makes it particularly important in the Province. I was never a soldier but I am perhaps one of the few people of mine and a younger generation who has been shot at and bombed. I have noticed that that rather unpleasant experience tends to concentrate the mind and to produce rather different assumptions among those who experience such dreadful events than among those who merely watch them at the movies. I notice that for soldiers, or people who are in the front line even if they are not soldiers but who are effectively policing a difficult situation, emblems and the traditions of the forces in which they serve become increasingly important. In my limited experience of such things--many Members of this Chamber have far greater experience than I of this kind of thing--it seems that these matters loom large in maintaining the esprit de corps, the traditions and the good behaviour of the bodies concerned, whether it be a regiment, a band of guerrillas or a police force.
Therefore, it seems to me that we may be asking rather more than the Government perhaps think if we remove the emblem of the RUC and expect the new police force to start afresh with traditions which emphatically will be very much the same as those which are embodied in the cap badge and the aspirations of those who wear it at the moment. I hope, therefore, that for those reasons the Government will think carefully before refusing to accept my noble friend's amendment, or at least a version of it.
I also hope that they will take into consideration one further point of which my noble friend, with his great experience of the Province, quite rightly made great play in his remarks. We are aware how delicate the peace process is and how delicately poised it is at the moment. I sense among the majority side in the Province at the moment a growing feeling that the Government perhaps do not realise to what extent they will depend on their good will if we are to pursue this process to its conclusion. One of the things the Government could certainly do to show that they at least hold the Protestant/Unionist tradition--indeed, as we know, there are many Catholic Unionists in the Province, although that is something many of us are prone to forget--on a par with the nationalist tradition is to look sympathetically at my noble friend's amendment. I suspect that that would make more difference than perhaps the noble and learned Lord might think to the prospects of Mr David Trimble this coming Saturday.