English Votes on English Laws

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Jacob Rees-Mogg

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

No; let me make a bit of progress because I want to stay on the question of Finance Bills.

Even with the measure of devolution of some taxes—I stress “some”—I would suggest that the setting of the Government budget as a whole is, again, treated differently from the passing of legislation in individual policy areas. Will the Leader of the House explain how his proposed new system is going to work for the consideration of estimates? For example, will estimates debates continue to be a vehicle for Select Committees, and how will that work when Select Committees draw their members from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which will be the case in this Parliament, as we can see from the Order Papers for today and and tomorrow?

This goes to the point that the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) made about serving on Committees. I do not doubt that the Committee concerned, with good will, and perhaps even a measure of discussion among the usual channels, could deal with this, but the anomaly has been created and as yet the Government have no answer to it. Where is this going to take us in future? How are Members of Parliament from areas of the country that exercise devolved powers going to interact with Select Committees? If the principle of veto is to be accepted, and if members of the Health Committee or the Education Committee, for example, are to be drawn only from England and Wales, I very much look forward to seeing how the Government are going to set up the Scottish Affairs and Northern Ireland Affairs Committees—good luck to them on that one.

If the principle of the veto is to work, it has to work both ways. For the Scottish Parliament, that means the end of the Sewel convention and the end of the conventional sense—the classic sense—of parliamentary sovereignty as it has been understood in this Chamber in the past, because if we give a veto to the Scottish Parliament on legislative consent motions, then that is the end of Dicey’s classic definition of sovereignty. I am not too unhappy about that—I am quite relaxed about it—but if the House is to undertake something of this sort, surely it requires more than the debate that we are being offered.

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I think that the right hon. Gentleman misses the key point about this being done through Standing Orders, which is that Standing Orders can be suspended by the House in a specific instance or permanently, and that therefore the sovereignty of this House remains unaffected.

[Mr Carmichael]

No. If we are to take this to its logical conclusion—that is to say, to give a veto to the Scottish Parliament on areas that would currently be dealt with by the Sewel convention—then that will not be reclaimed by Standing Orders; it is the end of the supreme sovereignty of this House. That is why we need a sensible, more reasoned debate for which Standing Orders will always be inadequate.