Constitutional Settlement

Debate between Lord Steel of Aikwood and Lord Soley

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, on introducing this debate, which has been very useful. A great deal of good sense has been talked so far. The debate also enables me to repeat what I have said on a number of occasions in this House over the past few years: the United Kingdom has been the most successful, long-lasting political and economic union the world has ever seen. I am glad that other noble Lords have repeated that with emphasis, because we need to get that message over in England, Scotland, Wales and, indeed, Northern Ireland, which is now in a more settled condition than it was before.

However, one of the things that we sometimes forget—this is what I want to talk about a little in this debate—is that with the Act of Union, it is arguable that Britain became a federal state without a federal structure. That in a way is now coming home to roost because generally we are all supportive of devolving power. It is a good thing. One of the problems for the SNP is that it is not clear about what it wants. The noble Lord, Lord Steel, mentioned that the party wants to keep the Bank of England, the sovereign and the Armed Forces. If we had given independence on that basis to the countries of the empire after the Second World War, we would still have an empire. It is nonsense to go down that route.

However, there is confusion about something that we in England need to remember: all too often in broadcasting, the media and government, the word “England” is at times used to mean Britain. We should always be more careful about that because it rankles in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I do not blame them for that. There is of course a problem. We cannot stop the Italians, French, Americans or others referring to England as though it is Britain, but we know the difference, or we ought to.

One of the reasons why I welcome the debate is that one of the advantages of having the government Bill on the reform of the House of Lords, after its failure, was that it focused our views on the key question: if you are going to reform the House of Lords, you first have to decide what you want it to do. That point has been made on a number of occasions. The article published today on progress, to which my noble friend Lord McConnell referred, tries to recognise that we are going through a period of change and that there is an opportunity to get things into perspective.

At the moment, the House of Lords has been used as a revising Chamber. In just one recent Bill, the Localism Bill, 514 government amendments were introduced here. You could say the same for a number of other Bills. The same happened under the previous Labour Government. We were using the House of Lords to do what should have been done in the House of Commons—getting right the role of scrutiny, which ought to be done by the elected Members. One of the fallacies in the debate is that Members of the House of Lords actually legislate. There is an implication that we do so, but in reality, if you look at the harsh facts, we do not legislate. Only the House of Commons has the power to legislate. It can overrule and throw out everything we do. We do not actually legislate, although we talk as though we do. Our problem is that the House of Commons has to be reformed, and I say that as a House of Commons man and chairman, at one time, of the parliamentary Labour Party. We were aware that the level of scrutiny that we were carrying out was not as good as it ought to be. There needs to be radical reform of the way the House of Commons scrutinises government Bills. That would take a large part of the work away from this place.

You then have the question: what is the role of the House of Lords? It does many important things over and above scrutiny. This is where I go back to the question of devolution. I was a great supporter of it and still am. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said that some people argued at the time that it was a slippery slope to independence. We could not have avoided devolution.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

I am following closely what the noble Lord says. One of the advantages if the House of Lords were a properly integrated force in a federal constitution is that it could also be a revising Chamber for the devolved Assemblies, which do not have one. Committees of the House of Lords could perform that function.

[Lord Soley]

That is an excellent additional point which I had not thought of but I take it on board.

Politics is changing in other fundamental ways, as we all know. Political parties are becoming less important but politics is not, and it is the politics of issues. The issues are sometimes national and sometimes local, and they are also driven by new technology. Therefore, issues-based politics is emerging very rapidly.

Interestingly, the Olympics demonstrated how Britain as a whole could celebrate Team GB and yet in Glasgow, Sheffield, Cardiff and Belfast celebrate the individual achievements of people from those areas. In other words, we recognised that the United Kingdom was as one.

My complaint about the SNP is that it tends to see its history as based on the film “Braveheart” rather than on what really happened. The civil war, which is often wrongly referred to as the English civil war, was in fact a war of the three kingdoms. In Scotland there were people who fought for the king and those who fought for Parliament. The same applied in England, Wales and Ireland, and the brutality was quite extreme. The Act of Union finished all that. The civil war changed things for other reasons, but I emphasise that the Act of Union brought about not only the end of the struggles between England and Scotland but a recognition that the United Kingdom could act as one politically and economically. That, I would argue, opened up the possibility of Britain being a free and open society, and it also drove forward the Industrial Revolution. It is a crucial part of our history and I just wish that people could forget “Braveheart” and remember their actual history.

The other thing that is often forgotten is that if you break up a successful political and economic union, the break is not necessarily a clean one. I dearly hope, and indeed expect, that if we are foolish enough to break up the United Kingdom it will not be anywhere near as disastrous as the break-up of the former Yugoslavia—there would not need to be that blood-stained record. One should just think of the break-up of Czechoslovakia into two states and the disadvantages that it has brought to the poorer part of those two states.

A break-up is not automatically clean. I speak as someone who spends a lot of time in Scotland. I was talking to people in Shetland recently and it is clear that they have very mixed views about being governed from Edinburgh. They get quite cross when they hear Alex Salmond talking about Scotland’s oil, as though it will be divvied up for Shetland. Interestingly, if you look at the two local flags that were devised for the islands of Orkney and Shetland, you will see that they reflect the flag of Norway. It is only about 500 years since they were part of Norway. One should not assume that the break-up of the United Kingdom will be as clean and neat as one would like it to be.

There is another reason for arguing for a federal approach to these issues and that is the whole question of England. I have never been a great English nationalist—I am a mix of British people, as are others here—but I believe that in a way English nationalism is more dangerous than Scottish nationalism. We have to be aware that there is a genuine feeling among people in England that they are not having their voice heard as they need it to be heard. Of course, Alex Salmond would say, “Well, that’s good. England can be independent”. However, we need to recognise all the points that have been made here today: we are stronger together than separated, and we need to look at the new settlement.

I wrote today that we need a royal commission, and this is where I am with my noble friend Lord Hughes. I would prefer a royal commission to a more open-ended one because we need to be very focused about this. There are obvious problems with federalism—how you define it with the relative balance of the nations, England being by far the biggest—but they are not insoluble. As was indicated in an intervention, Germany copes with this quite well. We wrote the German constitution, so we should have quite a good idea of how to do this sort of thing. There is a real possibility that if we approach this properly, we can have a good debate on what powers are devolved. One of the great successes of devolution is that we were very clear in saying what was devolved and leaving everything else separate. Once you get into the problem of defining the powers of the central government, you are into writing a constitution, and I would not recommend going down that road. You just need to be very clear about what powers you are devolving.

I have only one minute left so I am reluctant to take another intervention. I am sorry.

The way we do politics in any democratic nation is changing, partly because of new technology and partly for other reasons. In Britain, we have an opportunity to revisit the federal structure that we created in the Acts of Union but without having a formal federal system. If we do that we can look at the role of the second Chamber in that light as long as we also have a reform of the House of Commons in the way in which it scrutinises government legislation. That should not be a primary role of the House of Lords. Frankly, if it were not a primary role for it right now, legislation would reach the statute book in a pretty dreadful state. That is not an ideal way of doing things.