Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Sanderson of Bowden and Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke

Wednesday 28th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sanderson of Bowden]

My Lords, I assume that my noble friend had serious reservations about the terms of Section 30 being agreed with the First Minister. After all, in recent press comments, the First Minister has said, “Will you please leave this all to us in Scotland and we will organise the referendum as we want it?”. I send good wishes to those from the Government who will carry out these vital negotiations but the questions that have to be settled are so important. I support my noble friend in saying that, if we do not get what we want on the question or any of the other important issues, we must have a chance to deal with it at Westminster.

I know that my noble and learned friend when he comes to reply will say, “Oh, but this amendment is not for the face of the Bill”, which I accept. But I believe that he has to give us some sort of undertaking that the very matters which my noble friend Lord Forsyth has raised in this amendment are dealt with and that we will get full and frank discussion of what is involved in this whole exercise.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, I should like to expand slightly on what the noble Lord, Lord Sanderson, and my noble friend Lord Gordon have said. I am greatly reassured to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, that the Economic Affairs Committee of this House will consider the issues around the economics of independence. I have one suggestion to make for the Green Paper proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and that is to look at the impact on employment of the proposal for an independent Scotland—in other words, that Scotland should secede from the union.

In the 1970s, a very effective campaign was run in Scotland led by the Scottish TUC, the CBI and the Scottish Council for Development and Industry for the dispersal of Civil Service jobs. A few weeks ago I tabled a Question for Written Answer asking how many Civil Service jobs in Scotland relate to reserved departments—in other words, United Kingdom departments as distinct from Scottish departments. There are 31,000 jobs in reserved departments. There is no question that these jobs will disappear. No sovereign state offshores significant Civil Service jobs. We do not have any British Civil Service jobs in the Republic of Ireland, in Jersey or in any of the other realms and areas close to our shores. It is inconceivable that we would have a situation where these Civil Service jobs would remain in Scotland.

If I was a Member of Parliament for places such as the north or the south-west of England and I saw the prospect of these Civil Service jobs becoming available, I would be crying out for them. There are jobs at every level, from limited skill at entry level to real leadership jobs with real salaries. Even on a random guesstimate of the multiplier of these jobs, on a multiplier of three, in the wider economy we are talking about something approaching 100,000 jobs directly consequential on the cessation of Scotland from the United Kingdom.

Some jobs will carry a higher multiplier because they are, for example, in science and technology; in the Ministry of Defence, both uniform and civilian; or they have a long supply chain in Scotland. We need to know what the outcome of that is likely to be for the Scottish economy. Like other noble Lords, I do not expect the noble and learned Lord to accept that this amendment should go in the Bill but I hope that there is already within government at least a Cabinet committee looking at these issues. The economic issue is perhaps the simplest. Once we go on to welfare matters, we are into a degree of complexity that will give us sore heads for a long time.

I urge the noble and learned Lord when he replies to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, to take into account the crying need for dispassionate information about the true consequences. Let us take a decision based on fact and not on rhetoric.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Lord Sanderson of Bowden and Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke

Thursday 26th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sanderson of Bowden]

My Lords, it is not the first time that, rather surprisingly, I have had to rise to agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has said. I, too, have had experience of Mr Salmond as a Minister, when I was in charge of fisheries in the Scottish Office. Of course, Alex Salmond was Member of Parliament for Banff and Buchan, which is—as anyone knows—the main fishing area of Scotland. I can assure noble Lords of what the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, just said: we are dealing with an extremely clever, devious man, apparently easy going until things are at a difficult stage, and then he will put the boot in.

I will say just one very sincere thing about this particular Bill, which is vital for us and for Scotland. When we consider the referendum, there must be no weakening of the powers contained in the Scotland Act to hold on firmly to the powers that Westminster has over the constitution. This is what my noble friend Lord Forsyth is getting at. I am extremely worried that there are two consultation papers. There is one that we have already seen and one produced in Edinburgh yesterday. The date for final submissions for the Edinburgh document is May. I am very worried that if this goes into the next Session of Parliament—as we hear is likely to happen—Mr Salmond will again get his way. We must not let that happen. We must ensure, through the Scotland Bill and my noble friend on the Front Bench, that when we face the referendum we have adequate safeguards in our Bill to enable us to tell Mr Salmond, “These are the rules by which we are playing”.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy for the position that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has so eloquently set out. A huge amount has happened in the Scottish debate since these issues were discussed in the House of Commons some months ago. We have to take into account the nature of the change in that debate. If the coalition Government had not agreed to defer the discussion of the referendum sections of the Bill, I would have urged the noble Lord to test the opinion of the House on this Bill, whether or not this is Thursday. We must bear in mind the respect for the Scottish people, and it is to the Government’s credit that they have delayed those sections of the Bill until after the end of the consultation process. The consultation document is excellent.

One reason why I believe that this Parliament is so rubbished by the First Minister and the Scottish National Party is because they have consistently failed to make their mark in this Parliament and in elections to this Parliament. The political parties represented here have a mandate from the Scottish people as well, and we are all clearly parties proud to be part of the United Kingdom. I am a proud Scot, a Scot who is proud of being Scottish and of being British—and I am also pretty proud of being European as well. Many of our antecedents fought on the battlefields of Europe under a British flag, and they did so for freedoms that we enjoy today.

The First Minister wants the referendum to be held in 2014 because of the anniversary of Bannockburn. It is also the centenary of the First World War, when my family paid a price, as did many families, for the freedoms that we enjoy. So we should not be taken up by this “Braveheart” rhetoric of the First Minister.

I am very conscious that it is the will of the Government and of many members of my own Front Bench to proceed with this Bill, and I concede to that. There is a wee bit of an element of tidying up here—I always thought that tidying up in January was an affliction that visited the female of the species and that the male had some sort of genetic in-built gear that stopped the tidying up—as I am told that we must not allow this Bill to go into the next Session of Parliament. I am one of those people who is a wee bit sceptical about a self-regulating Chamber, but people tell me that when you have a self-regulating House you are able to do the will of the House, and I believe that it would be the will of the House to give us extra time to consider the next phase of the legislation.

As I indicated at Second Reading, I wish to probe the Minister about the cost of some of the elements within this Bill, not least of the amendments to taxation. We need to get this discussion and debate on to a grown-up level and learn how the disaggregation of taxation in the United Kingdom will be brought about. If possible, I would love to have a debate on the disaggregation of social security in the United Kingdom, because that is something that the nationalists prepare to move on from very quickly indeed.

Let me be a bit controversial. I do not think that the First Minister wants independence. He is frightened of independence. Why else would he say, “Keep the monarchy, keep the Army and keep sterling”—although going into monetary union without fiscal union is something that we should have learnt one or two lessons about. He is frightened of the consequences; he wants the rhetoric but does not want to take the hard decisions.

I urge noble Lords when we consider this Bill to take the opportunity to probe more deeply into what this concept of additional measures of devolution would mean, because I would not want us this time next year or the following year to come back to these issues, particularly around taxation. I look forward to the debates on these matters, but I thank the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, for putting this Motion on the Order Paper. To our English colleagues it gives some sort of flavour to the issues that we have to address in Scotland, and I am absolutely confident that every one of us in this House, given the oath that we swear when we take our seats, believes that we are proud to be British, just as many of us are proud to be Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and English.