Tag: Northern Ireland Office

That was new policing alongside new politics. "Twenty years ago, we didn't realise the problem the past was going to be," Mr Hamilton says. "There was no commission to deal with the past, no architecture to deal with the past." Procrastination It was not until 2007 that a wider consultation began on the past with a report from a consultative group two years later. Will they proceed with legislation to implement the legacy structure that emerged from political negotiations in 2014, including a new Historical Investigations Unit (HIU) and an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR)? "Policing has been damaged as we know, as headlines will tell you over the past month - or over the past 10 years - by its involvement in trying the deal with legacy," he told BBC Radio Ulster. 'Losing faith' Mr Hamilton has argued, throughout his tenure, that the past must be taken out of policing. In his community, Gerry Kelly sees the damage that is being done in terms of confidence in the PSNI. The question of legacy, the dissident republican threat now into its third decade and how to depoliticise policing are unresolved issues. If they remain so, then the arguments of new policing versus old policing will continue.

A junior minister has resigned over the government’s planned Brexit deal, marking the start of a potentially treacherous day for Theresa May in which she must present the plan to parliament amid talk of more exits and a possible challenge to her leadership. “Worse, we will not be free to leave the customs arrangement unilaterally if we wish to do so.” Vara concluded: “We are a proud nation, and it is a sad day when we are reduced to obeying rules made by other countries who have shown that they do not have our best interests at heart. We can and must do better than this.” The resignation came as the health secretary, Matt Hancock, was sent out to argue that while the deal led to dissent in the cabinet meeting, it had now been agreed to, and was the only plan on offer. On BBC1’s Breakfast, Hancock urged critics to back the deal, saying they must “look at what the alternatives are”. He said: “This is a good deal, in the best interests of the country. One is leaving with no deal, which is not good at all, and the other is having another referendum and potentially no Brexit, and I think that would be hugely divisive, without being decisive.” Hancock declined to confirm reports that a significant minority of the 29 ministers at the five-hour discussion expressed doubts about May’s plan, after cabinet sources said several people, notably the work and pensions secretary, Esther McVey, spoke strongly against it. He added: “The reason we did that is because, although in any negotiated settlement there are compromises, and there are things that aren’t perfect for each individual, you’ve got to look at the deal in the round, the hundreds of pages of it, and this deal delivers on the result of the referendum.” Insisting that there was a good chance the deal could pass through parliament, something critics say is unlikely, Hancock said it counted as a good plan. For a couple of years of negotiation that is a good outcome.” But Starmer was scathing. We’ve now seen it, we’ve read and analysed 500 or so pages. That must be the first time in history that we have a proposed trade agreement to make trade harder, not easier.”