Constitutional Settlement

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 11th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, it is always a good thing to follow the noble Lord, Lord Steel. He is someone whom I have known, liked and admired throughout my political life. It was good to hear him endorsing so warmly the objective of his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, to establish a convention to look at the constitutional challenges to the United Kingdom as a whole. That must be right. I would argue that if ever there was need for an example of the dangers of pragmatism without a strategy, it is in the story of constitutional reform in recent decades in the United Kingdom. We have not had a road map of where we are going or our objectives and what we are ultimately trying to sustain, which is very foolish of us all. It is high time that we had a strategy to which we are all working.

I have something in common with the noble Lord, Lord Steel. His father was a pillar of the kirk. My grandfather was a minister of the Church of Scotland and secretary of its foreign missions. Originally, he was in the United Free Church but was part of those who brought the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland together again in 1929. He could not have been more Scottish but if you delve into his family history, there is migration from Ireland to Scotland and from Lancashire to Northern Ireland. The story of the British people is very complex. While my father could not have had a family more rooted in southern England—Hampshire and Surrey and, to some extent, East Anglia—if we go back far enough into that family history there are all sorts of issues about exactly where they came from, including the Middle East or wherever.

We are not just dealing with the pieces of a puzzle. We are dealing with people, their origins and their stories. We have to be sensitive about that. My mother was always completely loyal to her Scottish origins. Emotionally, she felt strongly about Scotland and deeply attached to her Scottish family. But being in London during the Blitz, as a young boy I saw her change. She also developed a deep-rooted sense of loyalty to that part of England in which she was living—London and the south-east—which would never change. She went to her grave committed to the people of the south-east of England. But that was not to deny her Scottish origins. It was to build on them and to enjoy the change of which she was a part.

Perhaps I might add that my wife’s story has Wales, England and France in it, which again is an illustration of this complexity. I always say that her grandfather was one of the Welsh who came to England to educate the English. In the 12th century, the north-west corner of England in which we live was part of the kingdom of Strathclyde. The Vikings and the Welsh tribes had more or less colonised that part of England. It was so difficult, resistant, obstinate and wild that the Normans got fed up with it and ceded it to the kingdom of Strathclyde for a while before it was taken back. Those are only glimpses of the complex story of the United Kingdom but it is just as well to remember the human dimensions that are there.

For myself—the House has heard me say this in one context or another on many occasions—the starting point of political reality is that we are locked totally into an international community. From the moment we are born our destiny is that of an international community. We as a generation of politicians, whoever we are and whatever our convictions, will be judged by the success we make of that international reality. Any temptation to deny it is leading the British people badly astray. We have to make a success of that international reality.

However, when I was serving on the Commission on Global Governance, which was chaired by the former Swedish Prime Minister and Sonny Ramphal, the former Secretary General of the Commonwealth, I came to a mind change in my own attitude. As an internationalist, I suppose I had been a bit intolerant and insistent that we had to build the international institutions that were going to make a success—I am a bit dogmatic about this—of our future. It was a very interesting commission in which to work with people from all over the world and I came to realise that we, in a sense, were part of the problem because in the age of globalisation and impersonal technology, there was a real crisis among people in the world about their sense of dignity and identity, and of their importance as individuals. All those remote systems were making it worse.

I became convinced that we had to generate a political reality in which we recognised the importance of identity that then went on with leadership to say, “We can’t possibly run the world on a base of a lot of separate identities. We have to have effective co-operation to make a success of our approach to this international reality”. I think that we could take a look at the United Kingdom in that context and I am glad that there have been references in this debate to the possibility of a federal United Kingdom. I wish that that had been much more thoroughly examined and I hope that it would be one of the things that would be looked at very closely by any convention that was established.

Of course, there are all sorts of issues, including the disparity in size between Scotland and England. But I sometimes wonder whether we would not in the end have a much stronger United Kingdom if it was a federal United Kingdom, rather than one that was simply being imposed. That brings me to the decision on the form of the ballot in Scotland. I am sorry to introduce a word of dissent but I am not sure that I am very relaxed about this yes-no approach. We will get a result but will we get a settlement? Even if there is a significant majority against independence in Scotland, there will still be a significant minority who are not reconciled to this prospect. It seems to me that it would have been wiser to include that third question, which was, “Or would you prefer more authority and a stronger place for Scotland within the United Kingdom as a whole?”. At least there is an issue to be examined again by a possible convention.

I would only say this about Scotland, but I can give another dimension to this complex reality. One story that I was brought up with in the Scottish part of my family was about the businessman in Scotland who had been building up his business and had various problems to resolve. He had taken them to St Andrews House and had success but, finally, there was a problem that he simply had to take to London. When he came back, his family all gathered round him, feeling rather anxious about how he had got on there. He said that it was fine. They asked him, “But how did you get on with all those Sassenachs?” He looked at them rather puzzled and said, “Sassenachs? I didn’t meet any Sassenachs—I only met the heads of department”.

That reality was reinforced for me as a young Member of Parliament in my first PPS job at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government for England and Wales. At our weekly meeting between senior officials and Ministers, there, towering in the room, was a great rugby-playing Scot who was, in fact, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry. We have a very complex story to tell.

I say to my friends in Scotland that they should not, in considering their own future, believe for a moment that everything will be resolved with the issue of independence or no independence. They should look at the fraught, divisive, warring history of Scotland—and still there are all the issues of the borders, the central belt, the east coast and the highlands and islands, which all have very strong identities of their own. They are not all happy to be dominated by any one particular part of Scotland, which might be concentrated in the centre. So there will be challenges ahead.

I conclude by repeating what I said earlier. I do not want to overegg it but I believe that our approach to constitutional reform in the United Kingdom in recent years has been a disaster and will be seen as such in history. What the hell were we trying to do, where were we trying to go and how were these pieces meant to strengthen and underpin our ultimate objective? We need to get that ultimate objective very clear.