Scotland’s Place in the UK

Debate between Viscount Thurso and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Thursday 6th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

What a considerable pleasure it is to follow the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil). Rarely can a speech with such a terrible lack of facts have graced this hallowed Chamber. What a load of perfectly emotional clap-trap!

[Mr MacNeil]

rose—

[John Thurso]

Do sit down, dear boy.

When I originally put my name down to speak in this debate, I intended to stick to the dismal science, as Governor Carney called it in his address in Edinburgh, and to confine myself to the facts as they have been exposed in the Treasury Committee, but alas, the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), was the first to be called and did a far better job than I could.

When I listened to the extraordinarily good and trenchant speech by the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), I was struck by the fact that we should not run away from the emotion involved in this decision. I would therefore like first to touch a little on the “heart” issues before I return to the “facts” issues.

Not long ago, I had the honour of addressing a group of Girl Guides in Thurso who had asked me to come and explain the consequences of independence or the potential for Scotland of independence. I felt it was very important to try to give as balanced a view as I could and to explain both sides of the argument before giving my conclusion as to why I preferred to stay in the Union. Like the hon. Gentleman, I started by giving a bit of history. I did not quite go back to the Romans, but I did point out that it was not until, I think, 1468 —it was certainly around that part of the 15th century—that the northern isles came into the Scotland we now know. The administrative construct of modern Scotland, therefore, existed for less time than the Union.

It is important to put that in context, because we are so often given a wonderful diet whereby somehow the great Gaeldom goes back for millennia to some distant point in history and are told that if we do not give Scotland its independence we will be denying it its destiny. The plain fact is that that is just a load of emotional tosh. We should set it to one side and understand the true history.

If we look back a little further to the battle of Largs, we will see that, up to that point, Caithness and its people owed allegiance, through the Earl of Orkney—one of my ancestors—to the Norsk side and the King of Norway. Were Scotland to find itself in the impossible position of being independent, I think I would join my good friends from the northern isles in seeking independence and going back to that earldom.

We need to assess the risks as well as the benefits, and I hope the debate will be calm and rational. When I first joined the Treasury Committee, we looked at globalisation, and that is what we need to consider in order to understand what is happening in business. When we talk about what might happen to business, we have to consider where companies would be best regulated. The financial services industry in Scotland may well think that business would be better off regulated in a different jurisdiction. We have to think about companies that have treaties with other sovereign nations and may not continue to build things in Scotland if it becomes a separate country. We also have to think about whether people who wish to invest in the United Kingdom would go to Scotland or elsewhere in the UK. I would suggest that the simple, practical commercial decision for most of them would be to go elsewhere in the UK. The benefits cannot be marginal and nor can they be uncertain. If Scotland is to seek independence, the benefits must be substantial and proven, but that case has not yet been made.

We are a brave heart nation. That is a great Scottish characteristic, but another one is the canny heid and this is a time for canny heids. Otherwise, my grandchildren will one day read the headline in one of the Scottish newspapers, “Will the last person leaving Scotland snuff out the candle?”

Lobbying

Debate between Viscount Thurso and Angus Brendan MacNeil

Tuesday 25th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso]

I am going to disagree with the hon. Gentleman in a moment for a simple reason. In relation to visiting a Minister, the key is not in the Bill or in any legislation that we might pass. The key is the ministerial code; the key is the fact that the visits by that company or any other company will be published. I agree with hon. Members who said that there should be more information; wider detail should be published about meetings. At the moment, the quarterly register often just says “general discussion”, and that is not good enough. I urge those who are responsible for the ministerial code to look at toughening it up in some way and perhaps publishing the code a little more often than quarterly. Such things could be done tomorrow; they do not require legislation.

The second point is the difference between in-house and third-party lobbyists. I think we are all going in the same direction, but it seems to me that one has to start somewhere. To me, the third-party lobbyists are a good place to start. As the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) said, it is better to make a start than to go for perfection. If Oxfam turns up to see the Secretary of State for International Development, it is pretty obvious what is going to be talked about. It is far more important that when Messrs Grabit and Nickit turn up to lobby on behalf of an unknown firm, we have a registration of who they are and what they do. That is far more important than making every single company that has someone in house working for them register that fact.

In my party’s 2001 conference motion on regulation of professional parliamentary lobbying, which I am sure was on everyone’s lips at the time, we said:

“No parliamentarian … at Westminster should be a director of, an employee of, receive any reward from or hold a stake in any of the duly registered professional parliamentary lobbying companies. … A statutory register of such professional lobbying firms should be set up and supervised by the Commissioner on Parliamentary Standards.”

In 2006, my colleague David Howarth, the then Member for Cambridge, sought to insert an amendment into the Companies Bill to cap the amount spent on lobbying. The then Government declined to accept it. So my party has a long history of seeking to do something about lobbying. The important thing now is to be clear who is doing the lobbying. That is why registering the professional lobbyists is so important.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

Is not one of the problems of the recent scandal not so much the lobbying but the payment of politicians, who may be part of the operation of that lobbying. It is not the lobbying per se; it is the payment, the money, the feeling of corruption.

[John Thurso]

I am delighted to welcome the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) to his place. That is something I touched on at the beginning of my remarks. He makes an important point. In the recent scandals involving a Member of this House and three Members of the other place, nothing in this Bill or any other Bill on lobbying would have changed anything. What they did is already against the rules. My advice to any Member of this House is that the day someone comes to them and says, “Would you like £24,000?”, they are being offered a sting. None of us is worth that amount.

I was once almost the victim of a sting. A gentleman came to see me and asked me if I would chair his company. I said, “Yes, but first I need to do due diligence and see a set of accounts. Secondly, you have to look at my CV and see whether I have the skills you want. Thirdly, if it is ever anything to do with Parliament, I can have nothing whatever to do with it.” Needless to say, I never heard from him again.