Scotland: Independence

Baroness Adams of Craigielea Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Adams of Craigielea (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, on securing this debate. I seem to have spent my whole political life talking about devolution. In fact, those of us who are young enough to remember will know that in every Scottish political programme of the 1970s, 10 minutes would be set aside for someone to ask, “And what about devolution?”. We spent the next 10 years, into the late 1980s, with the word “devolution”, until eventually we set up the Scottish Constitutional Convention, when we brought civic Scotland, political Scotland, religious Scotland and trade unionists together round a table to see what shape we thought this should take. Would this be the answer to nationalism? Could we bring Scotland together without going down the road of separation? That process also took 10 years. This is a long process; it is not something that can be done in a knee-jerk reaction. By taking each issue piecemeal, we have ended up in the situation that we are now in.

When Donald Dewar said, at the start of the Scottish Parliament, that devolution was not an event but a process, the nationalists took that to mean that the process should lead to separation. I do not think that was ever the intention in Donald Dewar’s head. I think that he was looking for continuous devolution—that power going down should continue to go down. What has been missed in all this is local government. In fact, the Scottish Parliament did not devolve more power to local government; it sucked up power from local government. We wondered then why people were not engaging. People will engage only at local level. The biggest issue is not the starting point; it might be for teenagers when they are thinking about nuclear weapons or identity cards but, once they get into their twenties and the price of bread and of houses means something, they want to be involved at local level. We have not looked closely enough at what is happening in that regard.

When we had the Scottish Parliament after 20 years of discussion, we might have thought that we would have a huge turnout at elections. In fact, that was not the case. I think that at the last Scottish Parliament elections less than 50% of the electors voted. So we now have a nationalist Government who were elected by about one-quarter of Scotland’s electors. That cannot be good for democracy. If devolution is about anything, it should be about securing democracy and engaging as many people as we can in the process from the lowest base.

Alex Salmond continually asks us what more powers the Scottish Parliament will have if there is a no vote. That reminds me of when I used to take my children to the fairground when they were small and they wanted to pull out a duck from a fairground stall—and it said above the stall that everybody would win a prize. I do not think that Alex Salmond is looking at all for an answer to the yes/no question; he wants to know what the next prize in the list will be. He is now looking for independence with the union jack or independence without it. You cannot have your cake and eat it.

If the union is to be sustained, the West Lothian question has to be answered. The West Lothian question has always been a matter for the people of England. That became totally confused. The people of England have to decide what shape their democracy takes. We cannot impose that on them from above; they have to decide whether they want an English Parliament, whether they want their home affairs to be discussed in the national Parliament or whether they want an English Parliament with regions within that Parliament. They should not just be told constantly that Scotland is getting more powers, Northern Ireland is getting more powers and Wales is getting more powers. Where do the people of England end up in all this? Like my noble friend Lord Foulkes, I think that if I was a resident of England I would be very annoyed at all of that. I would feel completely excluded and as if I did not matter. I would wonder why England, as the biggest part of the union, did not matter, and why what I wanted did not matter.

We wonder why people are not engaging. I, too, think that we need a constitutional convention for the whole UK to look at democracy in the context of both Houses in this Parliament. Should we have a bicameral system or a single Chamber with an Executive? Should we have devolved assemblies within national Parliaments? Where does local government come into all this? This is a long process, but what we have to do in that process is reach out to everyone, not just to people in certain parts of the UK.