Scotland: Devolution

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Wednesday 29th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

It is an enormous pleasure to follow a most distinguished member of one of Ulster’s oldest families with strong family links, as we have heard, throughout the United Kingdom. I take the view that the union on which our great country is based gained no more than a reprieve in the recent referendum. I could not disagree more with those who say that the referendum result made the union secure for a generation. We face the extraordinarily difficult task of putting our United Kingdom on a secure, long-term basis for the future to preserve it for the generations that are to come. Above all, we must work to infuse all four constituent parts of our country with a sense of common purpose which they have increasingly lacked as devolved institutions develop separately from one another in three of the four parts. That should be done by revivifying unionism, of which my noble friend Lord Lang of Monkton and others spoke eloquently in the debate in January.

Once upon a time unionism was practised successfully by the Conservative and Unionist Party, particularly in the days when it was known simply as the Unionist Party, a name which it retained in Scotland until 1965. The Conservative Party needs to recover its unionist mission, and fast, just as the leaders of all political parties need to recover a sense of statesmanship, the central point in the truly brilliant speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy.

I hope that I will be forgiven for dwelling a little on certain aspects of the past, which provide one or two useful points for the present. The extraordinarily difficult constitutional terrain in which we now find ourselves was very familiar to our country’s politicians in the 30 years before the First World War, as they grappled unsuccessfully with the problem of putting the Government of Ireland on a secure long-term basis within the union.

The Irish home rule proposals brought forward by Mr Gladstone in 1886 to provide for limited devolution to a Parliament in Dublin at once exposed to view the central difficulties of Westminster representation and taxation. Mr Gladstone anticipated Tam Dalyell and Enoch Powell by nearly a century. His notes for the great speech in which he introduced the first home rule Bill in April 1886 contained poignant words of enduring interest. He said:

“Ireland is to have a domestic Legislature for Irish affairs”,

and “cannot come here” for,

“English and Scotch affairs … The one thing follows from the other. There cannot be a domestic Legislature in Ireland dealing with Irish affairs, and Irish Peers and Irish Representatives sitting in Parliament at Westminster to take part in English and Scotch affairs.”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/4/1886; col. 1055.]

Scotch, incidentally, was a widely used alternative to Scottish before it became confined to the most delicious beverage known to man.

Gladstone offered the proposed Dublin Parliament very limited powers of taxation. Reluctantly, he reconsidered his initial plan for the total exclusion of Irish representatives from Westminster. His second home rule Bill in 1893 proposed to cut the number of Irish MPs at Westminster from more than 100 to 40 but without restricting the matters on which they could vote. The same approach was embodied in the third home rule Bill, which Mr Asquith introduced in 1912. Indeed, this was the way in which the issue was settled in 1920 when Northern Ireland’s devolved Parliament was created. Ulster was given 13 MPs, significantly fewer than its population warranted, with a subsequent reduction to 12 when university representation was abolished. The arrangement gained general acquiescence with occasional protests from the Labour Party. It is a point on which we need to reflect.

Significantly, no one in the late 19th century contemplated for long the approach which so many favour in relation to Scotland: arrangements to prevent MPs from Ireland voting at Westminster on matters that were to be devolved to Dublin. Gladstone toyed with the idea but swiftly rejected it. Not for him, not for that generation, was the notion of two categories, two classes of MPs, to be seriously entertained. For my part, I strongly deprecate it as incompatible with a successful union settlement.

It is perhaps a source of some comfort and some relief to recall that the severe constitutional difficulties with which we now wrestle absorbed great political intellects in the past. In the end, they found it impossible to devise a constitutional framework that would satisfactorily reconcile devolution with the existing dispensation at Westminster. Will we in the end be led to the same conclusion? If so, we will find that there is another great figure in the unionist tradition from this period who can help us.

This year marks the centenary of the death of Joe Chamberlain, the radical firebrand who entered into alliance with the Conservatives to preserve the union. He said that it could only be done on a federal basis. There was no other way of reconciling devolution with constitutional harmony and fairness.

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of his National Radical Union on 17 June 1886, Joe Chamberlain said that in any rearrangement of our constitutional system we are bound to see that new provisions are so devolved as to be applicable to Scotland, Wales and other parts of the United Kingdom as well as Ireland. In the weeks since the Scottish referendum and the announcements of further devolution to Edinburgh, I have found myself wondering more and more whether Joe Chamberlain should perhaps be our guide at this grave hour in our nation’s constitutional history.