Scotland: Devolution

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, it is an honour to be the first to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, on his fine and witty maiden speech. There will be many more occasions when your Lordships’ House will relish his wit and wisdom, his intimate knowledge of the north-east, and his great experience both of what makes a political party tick and of the trade union movement. I already sense a special sense of solidarity with him: he is a devoted supporter of Newcastle United, with the emotional rollercoaster that that brings—I see the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, nodding madly. I am a West Ham boy; I know how he feels.

I declare my membership of the All-Party Group on Reform, Decentralisation and Devolution.

Relief that we are intact as a United Kingdom is still surging through every one of my capillaries, nearly six weeks after we knew the result of the referendum on Scottish independence. However, it is a relief suffused with anxiety, for the referendum campaign showed just how brittle the union had become and how brittle it remains. Now, not only do we have great repair work to do in terms of the emotional geography of the United Kingdom but we find ourselves on a vast construction site for the remaking of multiple aspects of our constitution beyond the sculpting of a new constitutional settlement for Scotland. It is largely without plan, substantial forethought or consensus.

There is a critical, pivotal sentence in chapter 3 of the Government’s Command Paper of earlier this month, The Parties’ Published Proposals on Further Devolution for Scotland. It is this:

“Proposals to strengthen the Scottish Parliament provide an opportunity to reach a strong and lasting constitutional settlement across the UK”.

Perhaps I may offer just a few thoughts on what it takes to frame “a strong and lasting constitutional settlement”.

The coming extra surge of powers for the Scottish Parliament will require constitutional legislation of a fundamental and first-order kind, as will any serious moves towards greater devolution and decentralisation within the wider United Kingdom. Can we reach for the Gladstonian solution of “home rule all round”, with the predominance that that would give to an English Parliament serving more than 80% of our people? Can we somehow carve a surrogate English Parliament out of the existing House of Commons along the lines suggested in the McKay commission report of 2013? Should we follow the developing economic geography of several parts of the kingdom and foster the growth of city statelets? The possibilities are multiple and every one of them stretching.

First-order constitutional legislation, in my view, needs to meet certain tests. It requires durability and predictability in its operation once it has received Royal Assent. For that to be achieved, it needs to live and breathe in a stable yet sensitive relationship with the other adjacent moving parts of the constitution. There is a prior requirement if these tests are to be met: a high level of parliamentary and, by extension, public consensus. To achieve this takes thought, consultation, care and time.

I appreciate the need to move with some deliberate speed towards fulfilling the promises made to the people of Scotland by the three party leaders on the front page of the Daily Record two days before the referendum poll. Great responsibilities rest on the shoulders of the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Kelvin, and the five political parties engaged on the task of converting those proposals into workable practice. However, I fear the consequences of excessive rush, not just for Scotland but for those other parts of the kingdom that will feel the percussive effects of the vote to stay together. Every fibre of me sympathises with the party leaders’ desire to save the kingdom in the last days of the campaign, but placing a series of staccato pledges on the front page of a newspaper is not the most desirable way of refashioning a constitutional settlement that had been 300 years in the making.

We are in the rain shadow of a general election. The metabolic rate of the party competition is rising and will continue to rise. I regret that very soon after the referendum votes were counted, as the English question shifted from a rumble to a roar, political partisanship inserted itself over the matter of English votes for English laws, with the Conservative leadership making it plain they would make EVEL an election issue if Labour did not go along with the idea. That Friday was when the party leaderships should have risen to the level of events and met as fellow Privy Counsellors to agree that, alongside the Scottish timetable, a broadly based constitutional convention or royal commission should be created to range wide and deep over the constitutional questions facing our country.

In the debate on Scotland that we had in your Lordships’ House last January, the noble Lord, Lord Lang of Monkton, whom I am delighted to see in his place, said that we needed to learn once more how to do things together as a union. Here was a shining opportunity to do just that. We need a set of constitutional arrangements that will allow the constituent nations and regions of our United Kingdom to live in a condition of “mutual flourishing”—to borrow a phrase used by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in a different context. For this we need a broader-gauge approach: to think high, to go wide, to fashion a settlement that will endure.

Has the moment passed for this? I think not. I do not know whether the will can be generated within our political leaderships to stand back, rise to the level of events, meet as Privy Counsellors and make a joint proposal for a constitutional convention or a royal commission, but there really is a glittering prize of a better governed United Kingdom to be grasped up there on the higher ground.