The Union (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow a fellow historian, the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, to welcome him to your Lordships’ House and to praise his lustrous maiden speech. His learning, experience and scholarship take him deep into one of the crucial, perpetual questions of our time: the sustenance of liberty, which is now under threat in ways and places that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago. I await with relish the book on which he is currently working, Can Liberty Last?—I fervently hope that the answer is yes—and many fine contributions to come in this House. My new noble friend, if I may call him that, brings his powerful intellect and word power to the defence of the things your Lordships’ House holds most dear. He is very welcome.

I declare my membership of the Constitution Committee and the advisory council of These Islands and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for her leadership of the Constitution Committee. We did a lot of work, but she always made it fun.

When I was young, in the 1950s, we were rather proud of our largely incomprehensible constitution. It brought, so we thought, great flexibility in being unwritten, with very little going wrong that could not be put right by a bit of judicious tweaking by Olympian figures in authority deploying restraint, wisdom and a gift for muddling through. It is not so now. The constitution is still baffling, but very few think it is working well. The union, in particular, has come under serious and protracted strain with the rise of the SNP. And yet, the Constitution Committee has come up with a rarity. The document before us brings a shaft of light amid the thickets of pessimism in which our country seems trapped on so many fronts. The central message of our report is that the union still has vitality and could have still more if somehow a spirit of optimism and mutual respect can be applied to shared problems and future opportunities.

For a short while, I thought this document could have a different distinction—that of the least influential Select Committee report ever—for one of the three 2022 Prime Ministers thought that the solution lay in a single insight: that she should simply ignore the First Minister of Scotland and not talk to her. I have to admit that this was not a possibility that had occurred to your Lordship’s committee. In the end, it turned out to be the only policy of Liz Truss’s premiership that was implemented, albeit for only 45 days. Therefore, Mr Sunak’s working dinner with Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House last week came as a great relief to me and, I am sure, to many others. Who knows, the Constitution Committee may be in business once more in the ideas market, for it is in everyone’s interest, in every part of the kingdom, that the union, in all its devolutionary aspects, works well in both its mechanics and, perhaps above all, its human relationships.

I will finish with a few rather personal words about the union with Scotland. I have been a union man since I was 10 years old, when I first went to Scotland in a tiny Ford Prefect full of camping gear and family, driven erratically by my father from Finchley to the Isle of Skye. Since then, to adapt the opening lines of General de Gaulle’s memoirs, I have always had a certain idea of Scotland—of how we have fought and bled together, taught and read together, invented and manufactured together, politicked and organised together, laughed together and wound each other up, generation upon generation.

My fear is that the road to Scottish independence, if it happens in the coming decade, will be paved by a degree of English indifference for all of the centuries of lives lived together, the intermingling of families and much more. But what a loss it would be for England to lose the intimate companionship of Scotland, whose people have contributed out of all proportion to their numbers, across a mighty range of human endeavours, not just within these islands but across the globe.

The great Walter Lippmann once described public opinion as “maps in the mind”. In my mental map, whatever transpires, there will always be the union. If, as would surely happen, the Anglo-Scottish border eventually became coterminous with the EU’s boundary, there would be customs controls at Gretna, Carter Bar and Berwick. But there will never be customs posts in my mind. If dual nationality is on offer, my wife and I will be first in the queue, pleading her mother and my grandmother. If the Constitution Committee’s report adds but one ounce to the chances of survival of this most special of all the special relationships, it will be worth every minute we spent preparing it, for it is one of the profoundest questions facing the kingdom to come.