Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale and Lord Strathclyde

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale]

The noble Lord anticipates my next point. The Benches opposite have the temerity to complain when we try to examine the detail in this Bill. That shows an arrogance that none of the participants in the convention, including the party of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and my own, showed on this kind of issue.

That brings me to a second lesson for the Government, if I may give it to the noble Lord the Leader of the House. The first was about wider consultation. The second is about objecting to how the Bill is scrutinised. The Scotland Bill, which was a well defined, self-contained and constitutionally important Bill, came from a White Paper arising from almost 10 years of the widest possible consideration by the convention. It was dealt with in this House by two days on Second Reading, which is very unusual, 10 days in Committee and four days on Report. All 10 days in Committee went on after 10.30 pm, five of them until after midnight. The four days on Report all went on after 10.30 pm.

I was one of the three government Ministers who took the Scotland Bill through the House and I remember this very well. On the Conservative opposition Bench were the very much missed Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Drumadoon, known affectionately some of the time as the Mackay twins. What a difference there was in the way in which we negotiated and behaved towards one another from what we see now. As the Government, we did not accuse or complain about the many amendments and the long hours that the Opposition originated or about the mantra—

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords—

[Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale]

Just let me finish the sentence. The mantra that we kept hearing repeated, which I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, will remember, was that, although the Conservative Party had campaigned for a no vote in the referendum on a Scottish Parliament, it accepted the decision of the Scottish people and all the many amendments were, as it said, only “to make it a better Bill”.

[Lord Strathclyde]

Will the noble Baroness remind us how many clauses were in the Bill when it came to the House?

[Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale]

There were many clauses, but it was one Bill—one self-contained, sharply focused Bill on the Scottish Parliament, quite different from the hybrid Bill that we have in front of us.

I am not claiming that there was some kind of golden age in 1998 when we were in government and the Scotland Bill was being debated. Of course we got tired and we got angry with one another sometimes. However, we kept our cool and even accommodated in the timetabling of the Bill the late Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish’s love of salmon fishing by allowing dates when he could do that.