Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Gordon of Strathblane and Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale

Tuesday 6th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, for introducing the Bill and sitting so patiently through a very long debate. I am happy to report, as you will all notice, that we are in fact into the second day of the debate—it is just that we have not had a night’s sleep in between.

Administrative devolution in Scotland is over 125 years old. The Scottish Office was set up in 1885. The change that we had in 1999 was to give democratic control over the administrative devolution, and this measure does very little in the way of increased powers, because so much was already devolved. It simply tries to ensure that the elected representatives of the Scottish people in the Scottish Parliament are more responsible for raising some of the money. All my instincts tell me that you will get better government if you make the politician who makes the promises also raise the money for it, be responsible for it and get the opprobrium from the electorate. My instincts would be to let them raise 100 per cent of the money and see whether they want to promise so much. We do not quite go that far—we have the figure of 35 per cent. In fact, I would be happy to go further.

I make one general observation about the Bill as it stands at the moment. If it is only going to be 35 per cent, I would much rather that it was 35 per cent that covered 100 per cent of expenditure in certain clear areas, so that there was clear responsibility and we knew who was responsible, rather than 35 per cent of all areas. Any decent politician, even if he has totally mismanaged his expenditure of his 35 per cent, will blame whatever has gone wrong on the lack of the 65 per cent, or its not being 70 per cent, and so the blaming of Westminster will still continue. It is an end to this blame culture that we have to try to get through in Scotland. As I said in a previous debate, the Scots enjoy blaming other people for their problems: if you can blame the English, you score double; if you can blame English Conservatives, you hit the jackpot.

I take the view that Scotland is already independent. It is entitled to be, and already is, in the sense that nobody is stopping us doing exactly what we want. We are a totally free country. If we decided next year to be a full, autonomous, independent country, the tanks would not roll up from Carlisle to stop us. We are an independent country; we simply chose to live in an economic union with our neighbour to the south. That union has endured, as has already been mentioned, for several hundred years and has been hugely beneficial to both parties. There would not have been such industrial growth in 19th century Scotland had it not been part of the British Empire. As has already been alluded to, the Scots did rather well out of the British Empire, sometimes in a rather unsavoury way. When we are talking about increased tax-raising powers for the Scottish Parliament, any objection to that is based not on issues of entitlement, but rather, I think, on whether it is imprudent, impracticable or would have unfortunate side effects.

Perhaps we should look at practicability first of all. It is very important to recognise that we have a land border with England. I would refer the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of the Shaws, to the experience of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: there was constant smuggling going one way or the other, depending on which economy was doing better at that moment. In my view, if there is a land border, there are three alternatives: either we leave the rate of excise duty, or whatever it might be, to be fixed at Westminster; or we devolve it, with the clear understanding that all the Scottish Parliament will do is mimic what Westminster does, but at least it is apparently deciding this for itself; or we create the possibility that the Scottish Parliament will choose a different route, in which case we have to be quite clear about how we are going to police that. Are we actually going to have a customs post at the border?

For example, the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, mentioned the possibility that Scotland might raise excise duty. That would be very acceptable to the medical profession, but the licensed trade would go out of business in Dumfries, as it has done in ferry ports on the south coast of England, and the M74 would have to be widened still further to cope with the traffic going down to pick up cheap booze south of the border. This is a very small island. People will vote with their feet and buy things where they are cheapest. You can impose whatever taxes you want; I will go elsewhere and buy those goods cheaper unless you physically stop me. A lot of taxation proposals will founder on this test, as it is simply not practicable to enforce them without a customs post at the border.

We must also consider the fact that, if we are not going to have a separate currency, passport controls or customs, there are severe limitations on what we can do differently from our near neighbour. That has led most people so far to think that we are much better off being part of that larger neighbour as a unit, so that we can at least influence the rates of taxation and the policies reached, rather than being outside it, and so simply having to copy our neighbour and imitate what it is doing.

There is another consideration which I think on grounds of prudence would give us pause before we introduced a different form, which is the question of Scotland’s size and relatively sparse population. We are, after all, about 30 per cent of the UK land mass but only 10 per cent of the population or slightly less. That would make me, frankly, very worried about going it alone on anything involving transport, broadcasting, rolling out broadband or anything else. It stands to reason with those costs—the cost of broadband rollout, for example, would be a lot higher proportionately in Scotland than in London, which has two and a half times the population but could do it at a fraction of the cost.

There are other issues of unintended consequences. Reading the Scottish media during recent months, you get the impression that we are looking for a variation in the rates of corporation tax and income tax so that we can be lower than the rest of the UK and attract all the high-flyers. Who are we kidding? Scotland has a higher dependency on public services than any other part of the UK. If you raise less in taxation, you have less to spend on public services so that is another area where we have to be cautious.

All I really look for from this Bill is that, while nobody can say that anything is a final settlement, let us at least hope that it can be a stable one, because uncertainty is bad. My noble friend Lord Foulkes has already referred to things such as the green bank. Would any UK Government prudently site any UK activity in Scotland over the next few years? You might as well site it in Dublin. If it is going to be an independent country, you cannot take the chance and we are in danger of losing out on some things unless we get some certainty.

The final point I would make is that in many ways this debate is a bit unreal—and not just because it is well past my bedtime. The fact is that the real action is taking place offstage. This Bill is out of date; the sea change took place last May. I am well aware that, in the past, support for the SNP has fluctuated quite wildly and it may well do so again. I do not think that it is downhill all the way or anything like that, but it is a pity that there is no representation of the SNP in the House of Lords. I think that is the fault of the SNP and I would genuinely like to have heard its voice answering in the debate and explaining why some things that some of us have been saying are, in its view, wrong. I would be genuinely interested in that debate.

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale]

Would the noble Lord want to comment on the fact that this whole debate, which has taken some several hours this evening, has been filled with speeches from Members on all sides who are here at the nomination of, or at least have a connection with, the political parties in the Chamber? In fact there was only one Cross-Bench speech, right at the beginning, from the noble and learned Lord, Lord McCluskey. Perhaps there is an issue being highlighted here about the geographical spread represented in the House by the Cross-Bench Peers—an issue that might be for the commission to look at in terms of future debates about Scotland in this House.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane]

I genuinely disagree with that observation. It is not a question of the overall representation of Scotland but the nature of the political representation. The SNP has chosen to set its face against the idea of anyone taking a seat in the House of Lords. That has disadvantages for the nationalists, because the honest truth is that they would get a fairer hearing in this Chamber than in any other because we are not up for re-election and running the risk of losing seats to them. That is a mistake.

My final plea would perhaps come from recognising that I know some quite sensible people in the SNP. I disagree with them but they are not madmen; they are people who immediately realised, with the huge majority that they got last May, “Hold on—this independence thing—what are we going to do?”, so they have now dreamt up independence-lite. I fully accept the strictures that have been made already. They have not spelt out what it is, because the honest truth is I do not think that they know but they perhaps recognise that what might be traditionally thought to be independence is neither possible not desirable. We have to help them reach a conclusion which the rest of us would find acceptable. Independence-lite and devo-max, to use chattering-class lingo, are probably not all that far apart. I am quite happy to have a sensible dialogue with the SNP and listen to a reasoned case for further devolution of tax-raising powers. I do not think it possible but I am very happy to listen.