Queen’s Speech

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I will concentrate this afternoon on the future of the United Kingdom—the first order question whose significance trumps even the weightiest Bills announced in the gracious Speech.

Of what do nations consist? They possess a physical geography and a political geography. Languages, too, are powerful shapers, as are shared memories—yet nationhood is not just a tangible, practical matter, but a thing of the imagination as well.

Out of all the ingredients that bind, there comes an emotional geography. It is the quality and timbre of the emotional geography of the United Kingdom that exercises me most about 19 September and after—if, as I fervently hope, Scotland has voted to stay together with the rest of us. We may well—I am sure we will—breathe a huge sigh of relief on the evening of 19 September, if such is the outcome, but the “us” question will remain live and testing in the aftermath. My greatest fear is that our islands will experience a creeping estrangement on the part of Scotland, which the further devolution of substantial powers, as proposed by all three mainstream parties, will do little to assuage and may even encourage.

What we will need from Friday 19 September, literally, is a sustained effort devoted to nation rebuilding—and by “nation” I mean the United Kingdom. We must apply every ounce of ingenuity to find ways in which to work together even more effectively as a union to pursue a new unionism, as the noble Lord, Lord Lang of Monkton, put it with great eloquence during our debate on 30 January—a sentiment echoed powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in his introduction to the recent report from the Conservative Party’s Commission on the Future Governance of Scotland. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan of Rogart, has long urged a constitutional convention to examine our wider constitutional arrangements—a view I firmly support. I welcome warmly the new All-party Group on Reform, Decentralisation and Devolution, created by the noble Lords, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock and Lord Purvis of Tweed, of which I am a member.

In the event of a decision to stay together, there will be a chance for those of us who cherish the union and love Scotland but are without a vote there to join in fully the national conversation about the future of our islands and the development and refinement of our constitutional arrangements for the purposes of ever better union. I would like to think that your Lordships’ House could have a substantial input into such a conversation. We have, if I can put it tactfully, been around the block a bit, given our average age. We bring together in this Chamber all the constituent nations of the union and a deep reserve of accumulated experience of all parts of the UK, with great swathes of the rest of the world. I am confident that our fine Constitution Committee will be in the vanguard, but it might be useful if we thought, too, in terms of creating a special ad hoc Select Committee on refreshing the union.

Much will depend on the tone and pitch of reactions to a vote to stay together in these crucial days to come in September. There should be no trace of crude triumphalism and great respect shown to those who voted for independence. The yes vote, of course, would settle the Scottish question for ever; a no vote will not, even if the margin is substantial on 18 September. The Cabinet has forbidden Whitehall to draw up any contingency plans for the aftermath of a vote to separate. I ask the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, for whom I have a mighty respect, to urge his colleagues on the Cabinet’s Scotland committee to prepare for the months and years after a no vote a rebuilding and refreshing of a still United Kingdom with a special sense of that crucial emotional geography.