Scotland: Devolution

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, has already made this point very strongly. There is one respect in which the referendum result in Scotland has been stabilising for the rest of the United Kingdom, and that is with respect to the experiment in Northern Ireland. There is no possible way, if Scotland had elected to leave the United Kingdom, it could have been stabilising in its implications for Northern Ireland. As a strong supporter of the settlement embodied in the Belfast agreement, along with the noble Lord, Lord Empey, who worked so hard both to see the Belfast agreement pass in a referendum and also to maintain the institutions in the first few difficult years, I am delighted by that really excellent outcome.

In more general terms, however, the mainstream English political mind has had a problem for a century, which is that it tends to be too sentimental about devolution as the answer to problems in the United Kingdom. It may be absolutely necessary—and I have already said that I believe it is absolutely necessary for Northern Ireland, and I accept, in the context in which we live, for Scotland and Wales—but nor has it worked in the way that it was expected to work and we must face up to this. There is a reason for that, I think. For much of the century people believed that, if only we had achieved devolution as a settlement for Ireland, we would have avoided all the violence and the separation of Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom, but this fine magical solution, because of short-sighted behaviour of some major political players, was not made available to us.

However, the Scottish experience of the last few years raises a major question about that. Scottish nationalism, which I accept is a serious force, does not have anything like the deep historical roots of Irish nationalism, yet it came to the point where 45% of Scots, after a sustained period of devolution, were prepared to vote for separation. Anybody, therefore, who thinks that had we had devolution for Ireland earlier in the century that would automatically have switched off the separatist urge is, I think, deluded. None the less, the idea is there and we think about it in a sentimental way.

Often the poor performance of the devolved regions—look, for example, at the performance of Wales in terms of its educational structures in international tests—does not receive the attention that it should. We say, again and again, “Local people making local decisions—it is going to work and it is going to be better”. Actually, not all the figures, if you look at the educational culture of the devolved regions at any level, would for example suggest that that is necessarily the case. In this debate, many noble Lords whose opinions I greatly respect—

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale]

Perhaps the noble Lord would address this point. There is a feeling in Scotland that at least part of that accumulation of support for independence is due to increased confidence. That is partly because Scotland’s performance economically today compared to the rest of the United Kingdom is significantly better than when the Parliament was established. Population decline has been reversed and a number of other improvements in Scottish society have been made. That confidence is perhaps part of the reason why people feel they can take on the additional powers of independence.

[Lord Bew]

I accept the noble Lord’s point, but the same point could be made about Irish nationalism, which also becomes more intense at certain points when there is more self-confidence as a result of good economic performance. Indeed, in the period leading up to Ireland’s break with the United Kingdom, the First World War was a tremendous boon for Irish farmers and most people in Ireland were farmers. So I accept the point.

On the issue of the federalist moment, which so many have conjured up this evening, I have no intellectual objection to it and I understand its appeal, but I just want to express one point of scepticism. In 1910, all the major parties and all the major players had a serious interest in separatism, with Winston Churchill at the heart of it. Why? Because they could see the Irish home rule crisis about to come and they could see the threat of civil war. They could see the danger that the unwritten rules of the British constitution were going to be absolutely torn apart. Federalism was the wonderful, magical way in which all these contradictions could be resolved, everyone could be happily secured in their identity and the Irish could be given the substance of what they wanted. If we could not do it then, when the political class on all sides thought that this was the right way to go, are we likely to be able to do it now, when the pressures are nothing like so great? It may be so, but—this is not a judgment on the concept of federalism; it is a judgment on just what it requires to get people to move in that direction—I am not sure that we are quite there at this point.

The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has already made the point about the reduction of MPs in Westminster from the devolved regions being the obvious solution to the West Lothian question. When I met the McKay commission, I made exactly the same point as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, that this was the approach adopted with respect to Ireland. It is the obvious and logical way of approaching that question. However, we are now in a situation where the McKay commission has decided to go a different way.

I just want to say a couple of words about that commission, because noble Lords are afraid of too speedy a reaction. Sir William McKay, a former Clerk of the House of Commons who deeply respects its traditions, has produced an answer to this difficulty that does not create two fundamentally different classes of MPs, which is the great danger at stake, but allows a greater register of English opinion. If we are in the situation where the West Lothian question will not go away—currently, it is the Conservative Party that is most active on this; in the 1960s, it was the Labour Party, which was furious that a Labour Government with a majority of only five or six had to put up with 12 Ulster Unionist MPs and Labour MPs could not ask questions about what was going on in County Antrim—today it is a different party that finds the West Lothian question hard to endure. However, if we are in a position where we have to act on this matter, a report of this sort may not have the answer but deserves some serious consideration.

Above all, the characteristic of that report, as we might expect from William McKay, is what the union requires to survive: it is dominated by the language of civility. That is the sine qua non for the survival of the UK as we approach these problems.