The Union (Constitution Committee Report) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Cormack
Main Page: Lord Cormack (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Cormack's debates with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
(1 year, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberI am very glad to follow that note that was so splendidly outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria. It is a great pleasure to speak in a debate where an Italian-British Member of the House of Lords has given us such a fine maiden speech. I welcome and congratulate him. It is also a delight to see the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, back in our Chamber; he has done so much to advance the cause of democracy and to enlighten people about the history of our great nation.
When I was asked, at a sixth-form conference many years ago in my then constituency, if I would define myself, I said that my identity is English, my nationality is British and my civilisation is European—and I stand by that. I am a member of a mongrel family: my family comes from Scotland; I consider myself English. My eldest son, who lives in and was educated in Scotland, is married to a Scot, has Scottish children and considers himself Scottish. But we all consider ourselves British and members of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—a great, even if small, nation.
I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and her committee for giving us this thoughtful and penetrating report. I am sorry that it has taken a year to debate it, although it happens to be an appropriate week to be debating it. But we have to face up to the central dilemma, one that my very dear friend Tam Dalyell and I and others faced up to in the 1970s, when we were arguing against devolution, not out of any spirit of animosity or hostility but because, as Tam defined it, those who were campaigning in Scotland, or many of them—the SNP—did not believe in devolution, because they believed in independence. It is a perfectly honourable belief to hold, but completely contrary to the idea of sharing and devolution. The right reverend Prelate made some very good points in his speech, and we need to reinforce for the younger generation just how vital it is to understand the benefits of devolution.
I would like to see what I would call an internship programme. I have a group of Americans who come over every year for such a programme, and I would like to see British students from England and Scotland interchanging within their Parliaments. I would also like to see a contingent of British Members of the United Kingdom Parliament spend some time in Scotland and, indeed, in Cardiff and Belfast, and have a reciprocal facility for the members of those devolved Parliaments. Where there is ignorance, there is frequently hostility; where there is knowledge, there is frequently friendship. I believe that there is too much mutual ignorance as to the values and virtues of our separate countries within the United Kingdom, and we should try to do something to bridge that gap, particularly for future generations. The right reverend Prelate is right: young people do not just take it for granted, as I did. I was brought up in Scotland, because my father was given a commission in the RAF when I was six months old—that is where I spent the war years. So I have that built-in affection, but others do not, and it is our duty to try to create a system where they do.
My Lords, I am a mongrel Scots-Englishman, with a father who served in a Highland regiment and a son in Edinburgh, so I am a natural unionist. However, it is clear that, if we are to maintain the United Kingdom, its constitutional arrangements must change. We should face the real possibility that we might not maintain the union.
As I came in today, I was thinking of the conference that took place in Prague in 1990, in which one of the Czechoslovak participants said, “I am Czech but my brother has decided he is a Slovak.” I remember, two or three years later, teaching students from what had been Yugoslavia—many were struggling with deciding whether they were a Bosnian, a Croat or a Serb, and feeling, as one of them said to me, “orphaned” by the collapse of the state.
The electoral system that we have at the moment accentuates the difficulties of holding the union together. We have, based on roughly half the population of Scotland, a phalanx of SNP MPs in the House and an underrepresentation of the other currents in Scottish opinion. We have a Conservative Government dominated by southern England, a Labour Party that represents Wales and the north, and a further party—mine—that hangs on to bits of south-west London, bits of north-east Scotland and wherever else we can manage in our electoral system to get through. That accentuates the problem, and I fear that, if we were to have another five years of Conservative Government, the union would break.
I want to talk briefly about chapter 7, on the governance of England, and chapter 3, on parliamentary sovereignty. This report rightly addresses the problem that England is the most overcentralised state in the democratic world and that it will be increasingly difficult to sustain the balance between England and the three devolved nations unless the governance of England is itself transformed. The political and economic imbalance within England is starkly portrayed by the betrayal of the grandiose promise of levelling up. Small packages of funding, distributed by Ministers according to opaque criteria, offer gestures from the centre without any sharing of power. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, that there is a link here with public disillusionment in western politics and a sense of powerlessness, which I hear from friends and neighbours in West Yorkshire, when they say that “those people down in London” are neglecting Bradford, Leeds and the trans-Pennine rail route. That is all part of the disillusionment with our constitutional democracy.
I have lived between London and Yorkshire for 40 years and have witnessed the widening gap between London and the north, while local government has been weakened and shrunk through successive reorganisations, and local control of finance has shrivelled. The Government’s approach to the reorganisation of local government, as others have said in the debate, has been incoherent, with evident political bias in redesigning the shape and size of the new authorities and the powers that they are given. Almost every authority in Yorkshire and the majority of Yorkshire MPs stated their clear preference to maintain district authorities within a “One Yorkshire” regional authority. The Government nevertheless insisted on four sub-regions, each with an elected mayor but without an elected assembly to hold the mayor to account. London has a regional authority with local governments beneath it; the rest of England is denied that.
The regional centres of government that linked central departments to the concerns of the north-west, the south-west and elsewhere were abolished 12 years ago. The Government now think that sending contingents of civil servants to Durham or Lancashire to continue to carry out the instructions of Ministers in London amounts to some form of devolution. If they were to return to the regions and cities the powers that they held 50 years ago, the civil servants would, of course, naturally follow.
The Conservatives promised in their 2019 manifesto to set up a constitutional commission, but broke that pledge, like many others. I hope that the next Government will address the governance of England as a high priority. We will not succeed in reducing the acute inequalities between the south-east and the rest unless the political imbalance is redressed. As paragraph 267 of the report says:
“The devolution framework should include steps to achieve greater coherence in England’s sub-national governance arrangements to improve democratic accountability. We recommend the development of devolution within England should ensure greater alignment between subnational bodies to create functioning economic geographies which also respect local identities”.
Hear, hear. I agree strongly, and the Government are absolutely failing to do that.
A reformed second Chamber should play its part in this. Interparliamentary relations would work better if Members of the second Chamber were elected, directly or indirectly, on a national and regional basis, and saw it as their job to assert those regional and national concerns against the dominance of London. When I was appointed to this House, I hoped and assumed that I would make the transition from an appointee to an elected representative from Yorkshire when the next stage of reform brought us regional and national representation in the House. But Labour hesitancy on this, as on so many other issues, and Conservative opposition in the Commons, blocked the 2011-12 reform.
This report reminds us that we will have to return to that, in spite of the resistance of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack.
I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame. I hope that his expertise as an international lawyer will feed into our debates on the topic of sovereignty and its place in the constitution of a multinational state. Constitutional discussions in the UK are blighted by the undue reverence still given to the views on sovereignty of Albert Dicey, an academic whose interpretation of sovereignty was twisted by his embittered opposition to Irish home rule and his consequent insistence that sovereignty was indivisible and rested in the Government who held the confidence of the Imperial Parliament. Sovereignty in the contemporary world has to be shared—upward and downwards, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, was saying—with other states, and with the constituent bodies of states. The ideologues who deny that sovereignty can be shared with our neighbours are the same people who resist sharing it with Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It is they who threaten to destroy our union, just as their great-grandparents destroyed the union between Great Britain and most of Ireland. That is a real threat, and we have to adapt our constitutional arrangements to prevent it.