Scotland: Independence

Baroness Adams of Craigielea Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Adams of Craigielea (Lab)]

My Lords, coming 30th in the debate is not the easiest position, given that most points have already been made. I am now looking for different ways of saying the same thing. I am not surprised to have found myself in agreement with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. Given that the Liberal Party was a partner in the constitutional convention, I fully expected to agree with most of what he said. I was a bit more surprised to find myself in almost total agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Lang, and, God forbid, with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, whom I often jousted with in the other place when he was not a supporter of devolution and I was.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, wondered what would have happened if Alex Ferguson and Tommy Gemmell had not left Paisley to head south. I can tell him, as a resident of Paisley—in fact I was born there—we would have been delighted for them to stay. I am sure that we would have found a junior football team they could both have managed and coached. However, they did come south, and I think that was of benefit to everyone.

My first interest in politics came when I was 17 and I joined the Labour Party. Life was simple then. The Conservative Party on one side and the Labour Party on the other. I hate to say this to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, but the Liberal Party was on the fringes. Life was simple: we all knew where we stood, we all knew who our opponents were. Then, in the late 1960s, up popped Scottish oil and the almost minute Scottish National Party adopted its first slogan: “It’s Scotland’s oil”. That is what I always thought about nationalism: it is a selfish, inward-looking phenomenon. Nationalism is a destructive force; it is not a force for going forward. It sets people against people and countries against countries, no matter what form it takes. In my view, it should be avoided at all costs.

That slogan set off the debate that went on for almost 40 years and led, in the late 1980s, to interested parties—the Labour Party, the Liberals, the churches, the trade unions and civic Scotland—becoming involved in the constitutional convention, to hammer out how we could avoid nationalism but go forward and allow Scotland’s home affairs to be decided in Scotland. That process took the next eight years, and in 1997, when the Labour Government were elected, my noble friend Lord Robertson came forward with the proposal that we should have a referendum to decide whether there should be a Parliament in Scotland or not. There I found myself again divided from some of the people I had been closest to in the argument for devolution. They did not think we should have that referendum; they thought it had been in the manifesto and that we should go forward. They were looking for something different from what I was looking for: devolvement of power, not on a national basis, but bringing power home, closer to people. I found myself in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and I hoped he would include local government. That is where real power should lie. The closest point we have to the people who elect us is at local level.

The phrase by Donald Dewar that is often quoted is that the devolved Parliament was a process, not an event. I do not think for a moment that Donald Dewar meant that that process was further devolving powers to the Scottish Parliament; rather it was devolving powers from that Parliament back to local government and the people who first elect us. That did not happen. In fact, the exact opposite happened. We have watched councils decline in Scotland. There are currently 32; I doubt that will last for very much longer. Power is being sucked up to the centre, albeit the centre has changed. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, who said he had looked at the rising numbers at Edinburgh Airport. If you want to look at things being pulled to the centre, simply look at that. As Edinburgh Airport has grown, Glasgow Airport has declined. Power, jobs and influence are all being sucked into one place in Scotland.

Alex Salmond was never going to be content with a devolved Parliament. He did not want it in the first place. He went along with it and saw it as a stepping stone. We now come to the referendum that he talked us into. It is quite simple—yes or no—but not according to Mr Salmond. We have again been sidetracked down the road of what happens if there is a no vote: “What more powers do we get? What’s the second prize?”. We should not have been distracted down that road. It is a quite clear yes or no, and, like with most things, no should mean no.

I hope there will be a no vote, but that we then look at the whole situation in the UK. I think we need another constitutional convention or conference, whatever you wish to call it, that does not look at it in a piecemeal manner, as we have looked before. That is the difficulty we have got ourselves into: we keep chipping bits off and adding bits on. We need to look at the whole circumstance in the UK—from this Parliament to regional governments, to the Scottish Parliament, to the Welsh Assembly, to local government —to see what has to be done as a whole. I do not think we can continue in the way we are. People are now disfranchised and almost certainly do not feel included. Until they feel they have some input to make at local level, I do not think we are going to see voting patterns increase—rather, they will decline.

I appear to be the only woman speaking in the debate. To be quite honest, that does not surprise me. Women in Scotland have not been very vocal about this, but when it comes to opinion polls the answer is no. That is because women are not gamblers. Men are more likely to take a gamble on what might be, but women are used to the everyday issues of what happens now: “How do I put the bread on the table? How do I keep the family clothed? How do I pay the rent? Am I going to gamble all that?”. Maybe it will be all right on the night, but maybe it will not. Women’s family ties are important to them. Like the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, I have two grandchildren living in Scotland with a Scottish mother and an English father, and two grandchildren living just outside Cambridge with a Scottish mother and an English father. One set of them will be foreigners. Whichever way we go, the family living in England are going to have foreign cousins and the family living in Scotland are going to have foreign cousins. My grandchildren are all British, and I hope they all will remain British.

I want to ask the Minister what the implications are for education. My eldest granddaughter is 16. She has just sat her Highers and hopes to do very well. She will not apply to university until next year because she is too young, but she wants to look at her options throughout the UK. If, by sheer chance, there is a yes vote in September, she will have to apply to the English universities, I presume, as a foreign student. Young people do not want that to happen. They do not see borders and boundaries in the way that my generation probably did. She finds the thought of a border between Scotland and England laughable. She sees herself as European more than anything.

That leads me to EU membership. If, as we are being told, after a yes vote Scotland will not automatically be a member of the EU—I think that that is the case—my granddaughter will not be applying as an EU student but as a foreign student. She cannot freely travel to Europe, as she would hope to do in a gap year; that will not be open to her without visas and all that comes with it. She will need a different passport. What of EU members living in Scotland at the moment? A large number of them live in Scotland, so what will happen to them after an independence vote? Are they to be cast aside? I was interested to hear one of my colleagues say that Welsh was the second most spoken language in Wales. Can I tell noble Lords that Polish is the second most spoken language in Scotland? That is not a recent event. It comes from the 1940s when the Free Polish Army was stationed in Scotland. It has been for a very long time.

These are very big questions but questions that the Scottish Government are refusing to answer and we have to get those answers before proceeding further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I do not accept that. In a PR election, to win an outright majority of seats—the political reality was that there was an expectation that if we had sought to thwart that, it would have played into their hands. There was the possibility that they would have run their own referendum, which we would have argued was not legal, and we would have been embroiled in a constitutional mire. The fact is, there is a binary question, yes/no, but I rather think that some in the nationalist cause would have liked to have muddied the waters with a third question and allowed us all the time to negotiate among ourselves what the third option would be, thus taking our eye off the ball and not tackling the main issue, which is whether Scotland should be an independent country.

The noble Lord, Lord Birt, made important points about the BBC. As the committee indicates, that is one of the institutions that would belong to the continuing state. He highlighted the detriment that Scotland leaving the UK would cause the BBC: 10% less funding for BBC programmes and for the rest of the UK. He also pointed out, importantly, that of course the BBC is independent of government and any negotiations it had with the Scottish broadcasting service would be akin to the kinds of negotiations that I am sure it has with many other national broadcasting companies throughout Europe and the rest of the world. Unlimited access to BBC services in an independent Scotland would cost money, and it is naive and indeed misleading for the Scottish Government to pretend that everything would just go on as before.

The noble Baroness, Lady Adams, asked about English universities. Access for Scottish students would be the same as for those from other European Union countries. The other thing that is slightly odd is the Scottish Government trying to pretend that English students coming to Scottish universities could be treated differently from those from other European Union countries.

[Baroness Adams of Craigielea]

On that point, given that if Scotland voted yes it would no longer be part of the European Union, how then would Scottish students be treated?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

Indeed, if Scotland was a member of the European Union, they would be treated the same as everyone else from there; if it was not, they would be treated the same as international students from India or wherever. Of course, if Scotland were to be part of the European Union—a point that I think the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is about to latch on to—the idea that you could allow free tuition for students from every other European Union country and charge English students does not have any sound basis. It is difficult to say that you want to enter into a social union with other parts of the United Kingdom but one of the first things you do is charge its students when you are not charging anyone else.