Scotland: Independence

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Tillyorn (CB)]

My Lords, it is very good to have this double-barrelled debate. One sentence in the gracious Speech on such a fundamental issue did not really seem a sufficient springboard for discussion.

I am one of those many Scots, in the past and the present, who have spent a lot of their career and working life outwith Scotland, but I feel myself immensely fortunate that, on retirement from public service 20-odd years ago, I was able to return to Scotland and have a number of different jobs in different areas of Scotland in the many years since then.

One of the most striking things on returning to Scotland in the early 1990s was that deep, deep sense of alienation from London institutions, from government and from Parliament. That struck one enormously. I therefore believe that the vote on devolution and the vote on re-establishing a Scottish Parliament was the right thing to do. Indeed, if anything, it should have been done rather earlier.

Now, there is a real sense that Edinburgh as a capital city has flourished since that period of devolution. Of course, Edinburgh has always been a marvellous city, but now you feel a greater sense of self-confidence in the artistic world, as well as in the political world. You can take the development of a huge number of cultural facilities—the Scottish National Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of Scotland, Our Dynamic Earth and so on—as examples of what has been happening, or you can take a much more prosaic figure. I checked on the number of passenger arrivals at Edinburgh Airport. In 1992, when I returned to Scotland, there were 2,500 arrivals per year. The latest figures I got were for 2012. The number was well over 9,000—a far greater increase than at any other airport in Scotland.

Of course, all this is not simply due to devolution and the establishment of a new Parliament. However, I suggest that it is part of it. I therefore rate devolution and the revival of the Scottish Parliament as a success. Of course, it takes time to establish a new parliament and for its members to get used to using it effectively. It has, however, been done pretty well. So, too, has the work of the present Scottish Government. One does not have to agree with all of their policies and not even with their main raison d’être to recognise that there are many hard-working, dedicated and effective Ministers dealing with the issues facing Scotland.

The question now is: why go further? Why go from an increasingly high degree of autonomy to independence? I can see why, for some people, it is attractive—maybe more so for young people who think, “This is exciting. It is not just a dull continuation of what was going on yesterday. We can experiment with new things. Perhaps I can play a greater role”. The awful thing, however, is that—to misuse that well known phrase—it is not just for Christmas. It goes on, and a vote for independence cannot easily be reversed: it would take decades at the very least.

I do not see this as a rather sterile argument about whether Scots are going to be £1,000 better off or £1,400 worse off, although the noble Lord, Lord Stephen, said that this might be a key issue, and I accept that. I see it far more as a question of whether it is right to dismantle a union which has been of such enormous value to Scotland and to the other nations of the United Kingdom.

The excellent report on the constitutional implications of the referendum—which were described just now by the noble Lord, Lord Lang of Monkton—shows how complex many of the issues are. There are also many, many practical issues in setting up an independent state. You cannot help asking: is it really worth the effort of doing all this?

I shall mention one or two of the issues. Why set up a completely separate foreign service when at the moment there is a Scottish Government representative within a number of important British embassies, such as in Peking? Why set up completely new intelligence services? It is not dead simple. Why go through the trauma of setting up a separate Scottish army when existing Scottish regiments, and the Royal Regiment of Scotland, derived from such famous earlier regiments, have served both Scotland and the United Kingdom so well? Why replace the British Council—I should declare an interest as a former trustee and chair of its Scottish committee—with something different when the British Council serves Scotland so well around the world? Is it worth doing all these things? Surely it would be a great diversion from what is really needed to make Scotland continue to prosper, and what also, as other noble Lords have said, enables the United Kingdom to play such a major role in the world as it does at the moment. We have all benefited from the unity of the United Kingdom and from diversity within that unity.

I have one final point. I suggest that it is a great pity, to put it mildly, that the question is, “Should Scotland be an independent country?”. Most research shows that people like to say yes when they are asked a question; they do not really like to say no. It is therefore a great pity that those of us who take a positive view of the massive benefits of the union will have to tick a negative box. When I come round to putting a tick or an X, whichever it has to be, with my hand I will be doing that in the no box. But in my head and heart I shall be saying yes to the continuation of a union which has meant so much to Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom, yes to diversity within the union and yes to continuing the devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament, to bring effective government and the raising and spending of money closer to the people who are directly affected.