It is with considerable interest that I have been following the debate in these pages over the Police (Northern Ireland) Bill. The consistent theme of your nationalist contributors has been that the Bill has failed to implement the Patten report, has made concessions to unionists at the expense of the SDLP and does not, therefore, provide the basis for the new beginning to policing called for in the Belfast Agreement.
I need hardly point out that these are emphatically not the views of Conservatives and unionists at Westminster, and of the great majority of the public in Northern Ireland. Rather, we see a politically driven piece of legislation that threatens to undermine the ability of the police to fight terrorism and uphold the rule of law, has the potential to politicise policing to a greater extent than ever before, makes the police accountable to boards that could contain convicted terrorists and fails to preserve the proud name and symbols of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Everybody who cares about the rule of law owes a huge debt of gratitude to the RUC. They have stood as the thin green line against the full force of terrorism for 30 years, carrying out their duties with even-handed professionalism.
They have paid a terrible price, with 302 officers murdered and some 10,000 maimed or injured. This sacrifice was recognised in April when the force was presented with the George Cross. It is because of that record of service that we believe the RUC deserves much better than it has received from the British government in the Police Bill.
When Patten was published we believed a large number of the recommendations were sensible and could be implemented quickly. But Patten was a report for consideration, not some kind of sacred text beyond criticism or improvement, and not something that was endorsed in advance and in full by the referendums in 1998.
It is no secret that much of Patten was based on the Chief Constable's Fundamental Review which took place after the first IRA ceasefire in 1994. Crucially, however, that review only envisaged moving to the kind of policing arrangements outlined by Patten when there was a complete end to terrorism and there had been decommissioning. Regrettably, despite some welcome progress, we are still a long way from that scenario. The threat from dissidents - as we have seen again only this week - remains potent.
While the paramilitary groups remain active and retain their capability, it would be absolute madness to introduce any of the controversial security-sensitive measures recommended by Patten. Now is not the time to reduce the strength of the force significantly, phase out the reserves or make changes to Special Branch that could hamper its intelligence effort.
Above all, the Chief Constable must be able to run the police force without political interference. Operational independence remains the single most important constitutional feature of policing in the United Kingdom. It must be preserved. Yet the Policing Board proposed by Patten would massively increase the scope for politicisation. This will be particularly acute on the District Policing Partnership boards (DPPs), especially in areas where one political party or tradition might be dominant. Our fear is that instead of satisfying Patten's aim of taking the politics out of policing, the Bill will have the opposite effect.
That is why the safeguards in the Bill over the activities of the Policing Board, much criticised by nationalists, are essential. Yet in the view of Conservatives and unionists, they do not go far enough. We believe it is fundamentally wrong to have parties represented on the Policing Board or the DPPs that are linked to paramilitary organisations that have not even begun to decommission their illegal weapons. Nor can it be right for people who have been convicted of some of the most heinous terrorist crimes to be eligible to serve on the boards and sit in judgment on the police.
When it returns to the Lords in September, we shall seek to include these further safeguards in the Bill. In the Lords we shall also seek to preserve the proud name of the RUC. There is no convincing justification for scrapping the RUC's royal title, and Patten offers none. This proposal does not have widespread support in the community. Successive surveys have shown that the name is not the barrier to Catholic recruitment, but overwhelmingly IRA intimidation is.
The notion that a police service should be free of all associations with the symbols of the state is ludicrous, especially when acceptance of the Belfast Agreement means accepting the legitimacy of Northern Ireland's position within the United Kingdom.
At committee stage in the Commons, the government accepted an amendment "incorporating the RUC" into the so-called title deeds of the Police Service. It went on to say that for operational purposes the name used would be the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
This is the very least we could accept, though we would have much preferred the adoption of a dual name - the Police Service of Northern Ireland Royal Ulster Constabulary.
But we remain adamantly opposed to the SDLP and Irish Government-inspired amendment that would remove even this minimal concession by defining operational purposes in such a way as dishonourably to consign the name of the RUC to the dustbin of history.
If the government brings it back to the Lords, we shall fight it all the way. I am in no doubt that scrapping the RUC's name could do grave damage to the peace process. It could seriously undermine unionist confidence and affect morale in the police service. Any nationalist who refuses to accept that reality is living in a world of self-delusion.
For years, nationalist politicians told us the reason they could not recommend that Catholics join the police was the lack of an agreement on the political institutions of the state. We now have that agreement. Yet still, for their own party political reasons, they are threatening to continue withholding their support and to boycott the new Policing Board. They should think again.
By continuing their intransigence over this Bill, and disregarding the legitimate concerns of a great many people in Northern Ireland, they could well be putting at risk the very future of the agreement itself.
Andrew Mackay MP is the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland