Scotland Bill

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Wednesday 28th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

My Lords, I was never a Secretary of State for Scotland but I was the shadow Secretary of State for Scotland. I was to be relieved of the great burden of being Secretary of State by being moved to deal with wars, conflicts and troubles between states in the world. I found that an immense relief after nearly four years of looking after the Opposition in Scotland, against the noble Lords, Lord Lang and Lord Forsyth. This is the first time I have dipped my toe into the piranha-filled rivers of Scotland, but I do so because this is a particularly important issue. I hope that my noble friend Lord Barnett, with whom I have had some exchanges over the years on this subject, withdraws the amendment tonight. This is not the time and not the place for looking at this subject.

I was one of those who did not think that we should be having these debates at all, and that the Calman commission should have stayed on a shelf until the great debate that is now taking place in Scotland was completed. This is an ingredient of that debate which, sadly, has not really been debated widely in Scotland at all. My noble friend Lord Elder, who was a member of the Calman commission, perhaps disagrees with me but I do not remember anybody mentioning the Calman report during the last election in Scotland. Ludicrously, when we were all fighting the SNP, nobody mentioned the fact that there was this report which was to give the Scottish Parliament extra powers. Devo-plus was on offer but, strangely enough, nobody mentioned it.

Given that the SNP won the election, against the odds—and against the expectations of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and myself, who drew up the electoral scheme in the first place—and got the majority in the Parliament, we needed to reassess at that point what the alternative was to be to the separatism of the SNP. However, we are here. We are where we are, but this is not the right way to go about it. If we are to have a needs-based assessment—and I have been through the same briefings that were involved in this—it has to be one for the whole of the United Kingdom.

I am interested that the noble Lord, Lord Deben—or whatever he is calling himself at the moment; I can see why he wanted to disguise himself in this new iteration, but I just do not remember the name itself—goes on about this great redistribution within the union. It is strange to hear this pure form of redistribution coming from a Conservative ex-Minister.

The issue needs wider debate and that should take place, but not at the moment in the context purely and simply of the Barnett formula and only in relation to Scotland. That is unhelpful at present. In Scotland today we have a bigger debate going on that will determine what sort of country we and future generations are going to live in. We therefore need to be very careful with the language that we use, the facts that we use and how those facts are deployed. Sometimes we fall into the same trap as those on the other side of the argument, the separatists, who manipulate the figures and move them around.

In the last analysis, the discussion will not be about identifiable public expenditure on its own—because if it is then that, unfortunately, is an argument that the nationalists will take to us. Expenditure is only one part of the balance sheet; income is another, and they can make their argument about that. Number-crunching, as I know only too well from many other contexts, can produce the numbers that the statistician wants to produce at the time. Let us have the broader and wider debate within which we will have to consider how the UK’s finances will be managed, but I do not see why, this evening, on the eve of an Easter Recess in an ill attended House, we should start using arguments that may well be used against us.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

My Lords, I disagree with the noble Lord, “Lord Barnett of Formula”. I have never disagreed with him before. I used to write briefs for him and he never paid the slightest attention to them. He was a brilliant Chief Secretary who did not bother about the arguments but simply explained that there was no money, which was a much better argument than any of the ones that I produced.

I disagree with putting this new clause in the Bill for the reasons that have just been given. I disagree with looking at it in a Scottish-only context. I confess that I had forgotten the report of the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, but I disagree with the kind of criteria that the noble Lord, Lord Lang, was reminding us of. That on its own is not enough. Periphery and distance matter. I do not know of any state that I have lived in—France, America—where distance is not a factor. The purity of the position taken by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, does not really work. If you have an extremely sparse population on highlands and islands, the cost of communications and that sort of thing is much higher. That sort of need may well be built in to the formula that the noble Lord, Lord Richard, is talking about, but it is not just criteria such as poverty: it is the problem of dealing with poverty, which is more difficult if people are on a distant island. I do not know who to give way to first.