Queen’s Speech

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

My Lords, I join most of the other speakers today in supporting the idea of some form of constitutional body which will ensure that we do not develop things on a piecemeal basis. I am reluctant to call it either a convention or a convocation because both of those imply rather large bodies. I do not think we need that. I think we need something like a planning authority, as it were. We need a committee that will comment, and have considerable reputational force behind its comments, on any proposals for constitutional change that are brought forward. It should be a committee of both Houses and some others. Let us be perfectly honest about this: MPs would be less than human if they could examine dispassionately possible further ceding of the levers of electoral influence to Brussels or their devolution to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. There is a certain feeling of a loss of their own importance. Quite apart from the threat of asbestos, there is the threat of a functional void for Westminster if too much is devolved away and ceded to Brussels.

One of the advantages of coming from Scotland is that you at least run into MPs on a weekly basis. The great problem of this place, one of the things that makes it quite dysfunctional, is that the two Houses do not talk to each other nearly enough. That is remedied if you are waiting in a lounge for a delayed aircraft or travelling down on the train together. I have new travelling companions. I do not know many of them but I intend to get to know them—I refer to the 56 SNP MPs. First, I will commiserate with many of them because I am quite sure that they did not all expect to get in and quite a few of them will have had to make fairly drastic career decisions at the last minute, as well as family care decisions to cope with their work down here. They come down here and then realise, “Hold on, if I do my job properly I am really talking myself out of a job because if we get more devolution there will certainly be a fairly drastic reduction in the number of Scottish MPs and if we get independence there will be none at all, and I have given up my career which I might not get back into”. I am genuinely sympathetic. I admire their enthusiasm and I hope it does not sound patronising when I say that I just hope it does not go sour. I have a horrible feeling that you can no more vote austerity away than you can declare Scotland a midge-free zone. It is just not like that. If you earn four and spend five you cannot keep on doing that. You can either cure the problem quickly or make it longer, more drawn-out and more expensive. There will in fact be greater austerity if you slow the process down.

Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, I do not know what caused the tsunami in Scotland. I intend to listen to the Scottish National Party MPs to see if they have any idea of what fuelled their success. To some extent, the success is not quite as dramatic as it appears to be because the SNP got 45% in the referendum. In a way, 45% beats 55% any day of the week if the 55% is divided three ways, and that is exactly what happened. To be fair, the SNP share of the vote went up from 45% to 50%, which is a rather crucial figure. So there was that incremental growth but it did not come from nowhere. What they had, which rather surprised me, was tremendous discipline—perhaps that is an unkind word. They fired the enthusiasm of everybody who had voted yes in the referendum and persuaded them to vote SNP. What caused it? Was it a desire for independence? Nicola Sturgeon said that the vote had nothing to do with independence. She said that repeatedly on all the television programmes. It therefore seems strange that she then thinks that Westminster must give Scotland more powers, because the two things do not remedy each other. Her main case was “vote against austerity”, particularly when it is coming from nasty people in the Conservative Party.

Scotland’s position is a rather dodgy one financially. I am not saying that Scotland could not be independent, but looking at the rather bulky White Paper, I see that there are about two pages on finance. On page 75 of the document is the Scottish budget. Although the figures on oil revenues were drastically wrong, one could forgive that being published at the time of the referendum. It was perhaps a legitimately optimistic view of what the oil price and revenues would be. However, once you know that that is a false figure, you are, in my view, in duty, conscience-bound to publish a retraction. A private company would be in jail if it did not do that. The SNP published a budget based on an oil price more than twice what it now is in reality. Not only that but, partly at the insistence of the SNP but also for reasons of encouraging jobs, which everybody in the UK can see the advantage of, we have reduced the rate of tax. The overall universe that is being taxed has gone down and the rate at which it is being taxed has gone down, and that has a dramatic double-whammy effect on the Scottish budget. But a double-whammy is not enough. Nicola Sturgeon then says that they are going to spend more and borrow more. The Scottish budget then becomes a total mess. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that there will be a minimum of a £6 billion hole. The trouble with billions and millions is that they sound the same. Everyone gets very worked up about where George Osborne is going to find £12 million of welfare cuts. By way of comparison, the Scottish £6 billion is, proportionately, the equivalent of six times that welfare cut. Where is that going to come from in Scotland?

I hope that the SNP will move amendments to the Scotland Bill demanding full fiscal autonomy, so that it can be pored over in Committee, particularly in this place, line by line. The SNP will, I hope, have the courage to admit that full fiscal autonomy would not benefit Scotland. If it has the courage to admit that, it will incur the wrath of bodies such as the Scottish Socialist Party. However, let me assure the SNP that that wrath will be as nothing compared with the wrath of the Scottish people if it signs up for full fiscal autonomy only to discover after the event what a disaster it is economically.