Scotland: Economic Recovery and Renewal

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow those wise and judicious speeches by my noble friends Lord Goodlad and Lord Dunlop. It is also a great pleasure to be able to congratulate my noble friend Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie on securing this Motion and on phrasing it as she did—looking not only at the balance sheet and the economic contribution that Scotland makes to these islands but to the well-being of its people. We often miss that in these debates.

Patriotism is not reckoned in tally sticks. As my noble friend Lady Davidson of Lundin Links points out, it is a terrible mistake to look only at block grants and bottom lines and try to assess nationality in numbers. We should take a moment in this Chamber to celebrate all the contributions that Scotland makes to the well-being of the human race. I cannot think of any similarly sized territory that has contributed more to the happiness of mankind proportionate to its population. Let us think of all the things that Scotland has given us—steam engines, television, telephones, daily disposable contact lenses, golf, toasters, cash machines and, not least, the United Kingdom. We can very easily forget that Great Britain, and after it the United Kingdom, were largely Scottish creations.

One oddity of the age in which we live is that people are determined to see everything through an imagined prism of hierarchy and oppression, so everything is squashed into a pyramid of greater or lesser victimhood. This has given rise to the slightly “Braveheart” view that, in some way, the smaller of the two nations must have been annexed or colonised in some way. That would have been quite a shock to people in England at the time, first, with the Union of the Crowns and then the Acts of Union. If one looks at the response south of the border when James VI was making his procession, there was a general fear that swarms of landless lairds were going to descend on England and snap up all the sinecures and titles. It was the English Parliament that denied His Majesty the title of King of Great Britain that he so craved and that continued to deny the claims of his son.

I occasionally go and look at the ceiling in Banqueting House on Whitehall. Since I was last there, they have put beanbags in, so you no longer have to crane your neck in quite the same way. There is a wonderful iconographic celebration of the union there. England and Scotland are shown as great, fleshy, Rubenesque ladies, coming together and bestowing the crown on the baby Charles I, as Prince of Wales, while the weapons of war are consigned to a furnace. In a funny kind of way, the Stuarts created a sense of shared Britishness, although not in the way that they intended. The shared nationality came out of a common opposition to that dynasty.

It is striking that, when you look at what was happening during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, you see that people were not arraying themselves as English or Scottish; they were making alliances across the border, as royalists or puritans, with Presbyterians and whoever else. In the end, I suppose, it was almost intrinsic in the design of that Rubens ceiling, for which Charles I paid the almost astronomical price—at least, in those days—of £3,000. It looked a bit foreign, and the Stuarts felt a bit foreign. In a shared opposition to this rather transalpine school of art that was thought to influence the dynasty’s thinking, a common Britishness was forged, resting on shared language, manners and beliefs.

Of course, when the Acts of Union went through, people were change-resistant; Parliaments were change-resistant. A certain amount of cajolery was needed on both sides of the border to get the legislation through. For some reason, that cajolery was remembered and resented in Scotland but has been almost completely forgotten in England. Had there been a referendum, I am pretty that it would have gone against England. Luckily, the Acts of Union went through and, as Adam Smith pointed out, having lived through it, the removal of that border opened the door to a united Great Britain, rising above the run of nations. It no longer needed to fret about internal borders and turmoil; it could concentrate on the rest of the world.

In doing so, it lifted the well-being not just of people in this archipelago but of peoples elsewhere, as a family—as peoples with a community of interest and shared affinities that go well beyond simple geographic proximity. It is relationship that I sometimes think was incarnated in that between Boswell and Johnson; teasing and occasionally joshing, their relationship was fundamentally deeply affectionate. Neither of those men would have reached the heights of fame that they have now attained without the participation of the other.

It is a relationship sometimes summarised by what is possibly an apocryphal story but such a good one: that of the highlander at Dunkirk who, observing the total rout on the beaches, told his sergeant, “You know, if the English give in too, this could be a long war”. In that spirit, we see something of our shared national outlook, resting as it does on character and what James VI and I called “similitude of manners”. It was that bridling at injustice and slowness to anger but resolution when roused, if you like, that led the peoples of these islands together on the great endeavours of ending slavery, spreading law and justice around the world, and saving Europe, first from Bonapartist tyranny and then from fascism, and then playing a brave role in saving it from Stalinist tyranny. These were the achievements of a common people, resting not just on proximity but on real affinities of outlook. We have only just got started.