Scotland: Devolution

Lord Elder Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elder (Lab)]

My Lords, moving as we are towards the end of a long debate, I start by wishing the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Kelvin, well and his fellow committee members the best of luck. I say that as someone who spent eight years, I think, on the Scottish Constitutional Convention, most of them on its Executive, who was in the Scottish Office at the time of the White Paper and Bill and who, more recently, was on the Calman commission, so I kind of know the course.

I want to make a couple of general points. First, I suggest very strongly that we take care with the language we use in discussing further devolution. In the years running up to 1997, when we were talking about devolution we said that everything was reserved and then published a long—an increasingly long—list of things that were to be devolved. That was reversed in the 1998 Act, which says that everything is devolved except a much shorter list of central powers that are to be reserved. The issue is not just what powers we need to devolve—I am, of course, prepared to look at further powers to be devolved—but what powers we need to retain if the union, which was backed in the referendum by a substantial majority, is to be upheld. The SNP will always want more powers. We should be more careful, as was Scotland in the referendum vote.

Some of the more extreme suggestions—devolving all income tax, VAT, social security—look to be ending the union by the back door. If all that is left is defence and foreign affairs, and perhaps a residual and declining Barnett formula, then the Scottish people will feel that they have got rather less than they expected. The SNP of course wants to become a member of NATO, a nuclear-backed alliance, though it does not want to have anything to do with nuclear weapons. The fear is that, if we end up with this further great swathe of economic powers being devolved in some way, the majority in the referendum will feel hugely and rightly let down.

There has always been a school of thought in Scotland that you could stifle independence by granting more powers to the Scottish Parliament. That has always seemed to me to be flawed. If you argue for more powers in all circumstances, then you are actually arguing for independence, but with a slightly longer timetable—and that is not what Scotland voted for.

Secondly, I note the very tight timetable that is being followed by the new Commission. I wonder whether we might be in a better position if the same degree of urgency had been shown about the introduction of the Calman proposals, particularly those about tax. I declare an interest both as a member of the Calman commission and as someone who had a heavy hand in these tax proposals.

The commission reported in June 2009 and I believe that the tax changes are going to be introduced in 2016-17. These are substantial powers, and I should have liked to have seen how they might have changed the argument, had they been introduced rather more quickly. It is after all one of the ironies of devolution to Scotland that the income tax powers in the Scotland Act, backed by the people of Scotland in a separate referendum question, were allowed to lapse, not because they were not in the interests of the people of Scotland— who had voted for them explicitly—but because they did not fit well with the very narrow party aims of the SNP.

I hope the day will come when the debate in Scotland is not about more powers alone, but that we will move on to the vastly more important point of what is to be done with the powers that are there. For goodness’ sake, let us get back to the business of health and education policy, the power of local government, and all the rest. That is what is now needed.