Scottish Representation in the Union

Gordon Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gordon Brown (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Lab)]

I asked for this debate on the constitution this evening because in the run-up to the election, when other issues—the national health service, the economy, national security and defence—will clearly be pre-eminent considerations, it is doubtful whether there is any other way over the next two months that this House can give detailed consideration to a set of constitutional challenges that, if not thought through or if mishandled, will in time threaten the very existence of the United Kingdom.

I am not here as an advocate of the status quo. I start by recognising that this House of Commons is England’s Parliament as well as the United Kingdom’s and that we should agree a Commons Committee reform that allows for detailed debate on English-only measures by only English Members. With reform of the Lords, reform of regional and local government, reform of the voting system and reform of the Commons itself also part of the queue of complex, interrelated and interconnected constitutional issues that are in need of democratic resolution, I believe that some kind of convention of the people or, if that is rejected, a Speaker’s Conference, which you might chair, Mr Speaker, is now the best way of ascertaining whether the United Kingdom can finally move from what is a 19th-century constitution to a modern, 21st-century one.

If the Union is to survive, it will have to be built on the interdependence of our four nations, and it will have to guarantee equality of status within the United Kingdom. My argument tonight is that with the announcement of English votes for English laws, which means nothing other than restricting the right of Scottish Members to vote in this House, the Government are deliberately driving a wedge between Scotland and England and, in so doing, they have asked the wrong question, and they are now getting the wrong answer.

However, at the very time that we should be attempting to unify and reconcile the four nations of the United Kingdom, building on the fact that the Scottish National party wants to be part of the UK currency, and on the fact that the nationalists’ economic case for independence has fallen as a result of the halving of oil prices, the Government have summarily rejected one of the central recommendations of the Smith commission, which they set up, which was:

“MPs representing constituencies across the whole of the UK will continue to decide the UK’s Budget, including Income Tax.”

The Conservative party has got this wrong, because it presumes, as Members now on the Government Benches have always said, that the fundamental anomaly in the British constitution is that Scottish MPs can vote on English-only laws, whereas English MPs cannot vote on Scottish-only laws. In retaliation for what they see as Scots pursuing a Scottish interest, they wish to pursue and enshrine an English interest above a common UK interest that could bind us together.

But what is called the West Lothian question is, in truth, only a symptom of the problems we have to deal with. The central anomaly, and the real asymmetry from which all else follows, is the basic, and indeed unchangeable, imbalance in the size of the four nations. England represents 84% of the UK population, Scotland represents 8%, Wales represents 5% and Northern Ireland represents 3%. England sends 533 Members to this House, compared with 59 from Scotland, 40 from Wales and 18 from Northern Ireland—117 in total against 533. It is obvious that when we start from such a profound imbalance and asymmetry—such a huge inequality in population and voting shares—fairness of outcome cannot easily be secured by a blanket uniformity that treats the minorities exactly the same as the majority. It follows that the rules needed to respect and reassure the minorities, who might always be outvoted, have to be different from those needed to uphold the majority.

The challenge is not unique to Britain. The United States, Australia, Spain, Switzerland, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria and many other countries have had to find ways of managing the gross inequalities in the size of their constituent parts without undermining their unity. As the price of keeping the United States together, California accepts that it has just two Members of the US Senate to represent its 38 million citizens, while Wyoming has the same number to represent just 500,000 citizens—one Senator for 250,000 people in one part of the country, and one Senator for 19 million in another.

Similarly, the price New South Wales pays for Australian unity is having one Senator for every 580,000 people, in contrast to Tasmania’s one Senator for every 40,000. Fair treatment for minorities and national unity are achieved in the Spanish Senate, the Swiss Council of States, the South African National Council of Provinces and the Brazilian, Nigerian and Mexican Senates not by the crude and blanket uniformity that is characterised by English votes for English laws, but by special arrangements that recognise that minority rights have to be respected and upheld so that the provinces, states or nations can be held together in one Union.

With the Leader of the House’s announcement that he would exclude Scottish representatives from voting on what he now calls consent motions, including annual consent motions on tax issues arising from the Budget, he is breaking with the old-established practice of other countries, breaking with our own constitutional history, and breaking with all sensible advice in creating what the Government now boast is the English veto, making ours the first and only Parliament in the world where two classes of representatives will exist and where some representatives are clearly more equal than others.

By the Government’s own insistence on devolving all income tax to the Scottish Parliament and then using that as a pretext for banning Scottish MPs from voting on income tax here, there will be a constant national refrain that there are now first-class and second-class MPs: the English who rule and the Scots there on sufferance. I have to ask—

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Brown]

I will give way after this. I have to ask Government Members this: can you imagine Scotland, or possibly Wales and Northern Ireland, being enthusiastic about sending MPs to this place indefinitely if they have to withdraw when the real vote on the Budget—the consent vote, or the veto motion—is being taken on this central economic legislation once a year: income tax rates in the Budget voted on by a consent motion that excludes Scottish and, in time, Welsh and Northern Ireland MPs who also want devolution of taxation? Can we sustain truly positive support for one United Kingdom Parliament for long when it becomes clear that the Government of the day owe their existence to an English majority and ride roughshod over other representation? If anybody is in any doubt about the threat to the unity of the UK posed by English votes for English laws, they should take note of how Scottish National party Members, who want to break the Union, have become its biggest supporters.

It was said of the Hapsburg monarchs that they would never learn from their mistakes. Surely the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats should heed the lessons of history. For decades William Gladstone, when Prime Minister, tried to find a way of balancing what he called the rights of “outsiders”—in this case, the Irish after home rule—and “insiders” without breaking the Union, but then concluded in his final term that it

“passed the wit of man to frame any distinct, thorough-going, universal severance between the one class of subjects and the other”.

He was not alone, for in 1965, when Harold Wilson’s proposal for steel nationalisation was defeated by Ulster Unionist votes, he asked his Attorney-General to devise a formula for two tiers of MPs, and he could not do so. At that time, the Conservative party insisted: “Every Member of this House is equal with every other Member of this House and all of us will speak on all subjects.”

[Sir William Cash]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Brown]

I will finish the history and then I will let the hon. Gentleman intervene.

When, in 1972, the Kilbrandon royal commission again considered English votes for English laws, it concluded:

“in our view, therefore, all Members of Parliament, whether or not they come from regions with their own legislative assemblies, must have the same rights of participation in the business of the House of Commons”.

Then again, in 1977, when James Callaghan had to revisit the issue during the first Scotland Bill, the advice he received agreed with Gladstone that

“no form of ‘in and out’ voting has been identified that would be sufficiently consistent with the basic features of our constitution to be workable”.

It seems that a problem that could not be solved in two centuries the Prime Minister now claims he has mastered and resolved in just a few weeks. I have to say this: if after 50 years in politics and four periods as Prime Minister, Gladstone could not find an answer to this question, and if every subsequent Prime Minister since has found it unworkable and unanswerable within the Union, might it not be somewhat immodest for the Prime Minister, who set up his review in October and published the results in December, to say that he has found the answer in just eight weeks? Might not he have been modest enough at least to listen to and get some perspective from his old constitutional history tutor at university, Professor Bogdanor, who has argued—

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

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Brown]

Professor Bogdanor has argued that while

“English votes for English laws seems at first sight a logical response to the English Question…it is in fact incoherent…a bifurcated government is a logical absurdity. A government must be collectively responsible to parliament for all the policies that come before it, not just a selection of them.”

The reality is that EVEL, English votes for English laws, and this hunt for perfect symmetry in an asymmetrical world risk jeopardising the Union in the long term. Let me quote Mr Michael Portillo—this is probably what the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) wants to say. Mr Portillo said only a few days ago:

“I think it is creating daily a greater division between the two nations, which will lead to a sort of logic that the two nations should separate...The English mentality I think is now increasingly that the two nations are going in different directions: that if you’re a Scottish Member of Parliament you are a second-class citizen to an English Member of Parliament and you will be allowed to vote on certain matters.”

If the Union fell now, it would not be because of what happened during the referendum, the result of which was conclusively against leaving the United Kingdom, but because of what happened since—[Interruption.] The Union will not fall because most Scots demanded independence from the United Kingdom—they did not—but because leaders failed to convince them that they were fully committed to its unity—[Interruption.] It will not fall because a majority of people today want to leave the United Kingdom but because people feel that there is a Scottish interest and an English interest and that the Government have not defended the UK interest.

Sensible Conservatives recognise that. Commenting the morning after the referendum speech by the Prime Minister, Lord Strathclyde, author of the Conservatives’ own proposals on devolution, which rejected this approach, said:

“If we are serious Unionist politicians we need to use the language of healing and strengthening...We started off perhaps with…a step in the wrong direction”.

The Prime Minister’s Cabinet colleague, the Liberal party Member who is Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was blunter. He said of the Prime Minister’s speech that morning:

“He went from being a Prime Minister who had absolutely done the right thing in the national interest to making a very partisan judgement on behalf of the Conservative party”.

The implication was that the Prime Minister was putting the integrity of the United Kingdom second not to the express demands of the people of England but to the very vocal demands of the UK Independence party.

[Sir William Cash]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Brown]

I will give way in a minute—[Laughter.] I am setting out my argument, and the hon. Gentleman will have to refute it.

I have said nothing yet about the obvious technical problems of English votes for English laws.

[Mr MacNeil]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

Let me make two points. It is very simple. First, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) is perfectly in order. Secondly, the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) is bearing more than a striking resemblance to an over-ebullient puppy dog. That is not something we want to see in this Chamber. He should take an example in statemanship from the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) and calm himself.

[Mr Brown]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil).

[Mr MacNeil]

Is the right hon. Gentleman giving way? He has to sit down to give way.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He mentioned the Kilbrandon commission, and Labour said to that commission that it preferred a Tory Government to independence. Is that still his view?

[Mr Brown]

The hon. Gentleman has got it wrong again. His colleague the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) was wrong to shout earlier that the majority of Scottish people wanted independence. The majority of Scottish people were clear that they did not want independence, and the sooner the SNP realises that it does not have a majority for that position the better.

[Sir William Cash]

The right hon. Gentleman is overlooking several points. The first is the question of unfairness to the English voters. That is the key issue. Secondly, he asserts that there will be two classes of Members under our proposals. It is not about two classes of Members but two different functions. It was his Government and his party leader in 1996-97 who created the devolution arrangements without making proper recompense for the unfairness to the British voter. That is where the problem lies.

[Mr Brown]

I have already proposed an English committee system that the hon. Gentleman should accept. He is forgetting the lessons of every other country in the world that is trying to hold together minorities in different parts of the country. They have to find a way of respecting the rights of minorities while upholding the majority. Nothing in yesterday’s EVEL proposals answered those problems. It is difficult to define what an English-only Bill is. If we take one possible definition of “separate and distinct effect”, constitutional lawyers say that that would encompass just half a dozen Bills in 10 years. That makes us ask why it has been proposed.

English MPs vote normally as a bloc in the same way as UK MPs, which suggests that this move has been proposed for other reasons. Whatever the practical considerations, the real damage of English votes for English laws is not its mechanical application. The real damage, before a veto is imposed, is the creation of a perception that the United Kingdom is now only about separate interests and not a common interest.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Brown]

I am going to finish.

There is a myth that the Union can survive this new polarisation of Scotland and England. The myth is that it is held together by bonds that are of such long standing that they can overcome what may be seen as a local difficulty. I say to the House, however, that what may have been true in the aftermath of the second world war and its shared sacrifice has given way to a new world where none of our ancient institutions is strong enough or popular enough on its own to hold us together.

The Union cannot survive on mutual respect alone—it is in short supply at the moment—or just on the basis of mutual toleration, a minimalist policy of holding each other at a distance for fear that we will fight. The Union will hold together only if there are things that the people of our four nations believe they have in common; if we emphasise that there are common needs, mutual interests and similar values that make us want to co-operate; and, in short, if there is a belief that we do best by sharing. In the modern world, where countries survive or falter on the basis of a daily referendum of opinion, such sharing has to preserve our historical willingness to share risks and transfer resources between each other to tackle issues such as poverty, unemployment and inequality.

The 18th-century Prime Minister Lord North is today remembered for only one thing, which is that he lost America. Will this current Prime Minister—this is the statesman’s question—now act to ensure that he will not be remembered in history as the Lord North of the 21st century? On 19 September 2014, for purely short-term gain—putting party before country, without considering the long-term interests of our united country, and ignoring the need to reconcile people and bring them together—he may have lit a fuse that eventually blows the Union apart.

I have made proposals for reform. I do not want us to pre-empt a constitutional review. I know that the Secretary of State for Scotland supports the position I am representing. The issue tonight is whether he can persuade his colleagues in the coalition Government and Government Members before it is too late.