Scotland Bill

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Scotland Office (Lord Dunlop) (Con)]

My Lords, the United Kingdom is the most successful multinational state the world has ever known. On 18 September last year, people in Scotland voted in record numbers and by a clear and decisive majority to keep together our United Kingdom. However, last year’s referendum showed that nothing can be taken for granted; our union is precious, to be sustained and cherished day in, day out. There is no national forum more committed to protecting and strengthening the union than your Lordships’ House. Time and again the United Kingdom has shown its resilience and capacity for renewal in order to meet the needs and aspirations of successive generations. This Scotland Bill sits within that tradition. The Bill balances the strong desire of people in Scotland for more decisions to be taken in Scotland, closer to those they affect, while retaining the strength and security of remaining part of the larger UK.

I have only been in this House a short time, but long enough to appreciate the wealth of constitutional knowledge and experience in all parts of the House. This wealth is evident in the quality of those listed to speak today. I look forward to hearing what I know will be thoughtful and well-informed contributions, in particular the maiden speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem.

Your Lordships have already made valuable contributions, including in the recently published reports of the Constitution Committee and the Economic Affairs Committees. From the outset of this debate, I want to recognise and acknowledge with respect the strong feelings already expressed, both about process and substance. I accept that the process has been unorthodox. Then again, the events of last September were unprecedented. The very future of the United Kingdom was at stake. In those circumstances, no stone was left unturned in the defence and preservation of our country. Who among us can say honestly that, faced with the same circumstances and responsibilities of national leadership, we would not have responded with the same sense of urgency and determination?

The task now is to help Scotland move on, building on our shared values and experiences, to forge anew the close bonds of kinship and friendship and sense of common purpose and endeavour that is the glue of any successful nation state. In rising to the challenge, we have a clear choice. We can continue either to pump things up, or we can try to calm things down. I confess to being a firm supporter of the second approach, not least because I am certain that those who want separation would prefer the first.

I hope that we all share a strong desire to work together to bring our nation together, and for those of us who believe passionately in the union to be united in delivering, through this Bill, the promises made to the people of Scotland.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

Is the Minister saying that the vow was the way in which the referendum was won? My view is that the vow was not necessary; the no vote would have won anyway.

[Lord Dunlop]

Fundamentally, I think it was the economic arguments that were decisive in the referendum. When the country is at stake, you want to do everything possible to maximise the no vote. That was what was done.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie. She and I were a double act during the referendum and spread fear throughout the land. I shall take up one of her final points. She talked about faith and trust in the process and the vow, or the promise, or whatever you call it. I agree that Ms Sturgeon will be cracking open the champagne bottle, but whether we pass this Bill or not, she will be cracking open the champagne bottle because the one thing the SNP is very good at is whingeing. It has raised it to an Olympic sport.

I believe that a promise is a promise and should be kept, but there is something that overrides that, and it is the well-being of the Scottish people—and, indeed, the people of all of the United Kingdom. It should not be above our capabilities to sort this and get a move on with the fiscal framework. Contained within this, there are a number of traps that could cause huge damage to the Scottish economy and therefore to the Scottish people, but, as was pointed out in my noble friend Lord Hollick’s excellent speech and in the excellent document from the Economic Affairs Committee, there are real threats to the performance of the United Kingdom economy. I shall pluck one from the air: borrowing rights and borrowing costs. If they are not resolved, we could find ourselves in a Greek situation: we could be into the Varoufakis school of economics. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, who I know is a friend of Mr Varoufakis.

The faux outrage that we have had from the SNP in relation to the powers in the Bill was absolutely predictable, and it will wish to keep it going because what it is most interested in is process. The longer we keep on at process, the less we look at competence. I will come on to some of the competence issues later. The Scottish Government do not want this legislation on the statute book before the next election because if it is, they will have to say what they are going to do with it. They have powers from previous Acts that they have not used. So there are issues here which we need to address in Committee, but there are some which the Scottish people need to be made aware of because the constant undertone of whingeing and complaint drowns out those who are raising real concerns about the competence of the Scottish Government.

[Lord Maxton]

I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness has said. Will she make it quite clear that the SNP is interested only in an independent Scotland, not in devolution in any form whatever?

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

I agree with my noble friend and will come back to that point later. The debate on the fiscal framework is interesting, particularly the intervention by Professor Anton Muscatelli, who is no fan of those of us on the union side. The work by him and by the Economic Affairs Committee, and some of the comments from the Scottish Government, reveal that the Barnett formula, and the process we have had up until now, delivers the best possible deal for Scotland. It is interesting that there is now back-tracking, with people saying, “We are going to get less”, or, “We could get less” as a consequence of losing chunks of the Barnett formula. This makes the case that we were all making during the referendum campaign. The SNP was trying to get the Scots to walk away from that very formula.

The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the real significance of the fiscal framework is the no-detriment deal. I will get this in before the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, does. That deal is,

“unworkable and will simply create ongoing disputes”.

I would take this one stage further: you have to define what detriment is. You cannot conclude that something is detrimental until you have set out the parameters of what detriment means. The overall deal gives the Scottish Government the power to design a significant part of the welfare system and control income tax. We have to reflect here, in the short term, on issues of competency, because there are impacts for all of the UK and how we are perceived internationally—and the omens are not good.

This is one of the reasons why we have had such histrionics from the other place about this legislation. Audit Scotland has already revealed that the Scottish Government are running a deficit: an underspend of some £350 million. This is at a time when our health service and education system are underperforming and crying out for money. Speaking as somebody who has been a Finance Minister, it is an even greater sin to have an underspend than an overspend, because it means that you have not done your planning properly and it raises issues of competence or cynicism. What is more, we have never been given a proper explanation of why previous powers have not been used. We also have lots of examples of how money has been misspent. In the past week, there were two cases of IT systems that are not even going to be used because they were so badly specified.

The performance of individual departments within the Scottish Government also gives me real cause for concern. Many Scots are really concerned about what is happening with Police Scotland. We have had some terrible tragedies recently. I was quite astonished to discover that the Justice Minister had not met the Chief Constable for four months. That is a shocking statistic and I am really concerned about it. We have 2,000 fewer police staff in Scotland.

The other area I have a concern about is one that we in Scotland have always been extremely proud of: our health system. The headlines may be about people dying on trolleys, but behind that there has been a 0.7% fall in real-terms spending on NHS services and new hospitals in Scotland over the past six years. Bed blocking has increased from 200,000 in 2011 to more than 612,000 last year because of a lack of community support, 71% of vacancies in accident and emergency staff are unfilled for six months and 2,000 NHS nursing jobs were cut in Scotland when Nicola Sturgeon was Health Minister.

I am a proud bus driver’s daughter from Coatbridge. It is a coincidence that I am standing behind my noble friend Lord Reid of Cardowan as both of us went to the same school and both of us got our opportunities because we were given a good Scottish education that allowed us to go to university. The gap between Scotland’s most and least deprived children stands at 12% in reading, 21% in writing and 24% in arithmetic. There are 4,000 fewer teachers in Scotland and the figure that really sickens me is that fewer people from poor homes in Scotland are now able to go to university—down at less than 10% when it is more than 12% in the rest of the United Kingdom. That shames Scotland and it must be put right.

I suspect that many Members of your Lordships’ House would not be aware of the fact that the budget for bursaries and grants in Scotland has been cut by £40 million and that the total value of student debt in Scotland stands at almost £2.7 billion. It is the SNP Government’s biggest financial asset. That is absolutely shameful. Against that record of incompetence we have to look at agreeing the legislation in this House without knowing the detail of the fiscal framework.

Many of us in this House are a bit long in the tooth. We should be able to come up with ways to examine the fiscal framework in time to meet the promise before the legislation is enacted. If we cannot see the detail of the fiscal framework—if we cannot see the workings, as they used to say in primary school—if the Government would be prepared to release to us the minutes of the discussions between the UK and Scottish Governments, we would at least have a flavour of where it was going.

The noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, referred to the jollity that there would be if this Bill was not passed. In the other place there was a lot of criticism from the SNP Benches about how bad this legislation was. Yet did they put down amendments? Did they vote on those amendments? One very important amendment that my noble friend Lord McAvoy referred to was about abortion being devolved to the Scottish Parliament. They put down an amendment on that because they support it. They did not put in tellers. What could be more cynical than that? You have the amendment, you have the debate but you run away at the final hurdle because you are frightened of the nature of the debate that it will create.

I apologise that I have taken longer than the advisory time. As noble Lords may gather, I feel very passionately about this. The noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, referred to the fact that he listened to the results on the night and heard the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. I listened to the results outside Stirling—Stirling in South Australia. The next day, when I went into shops, as is my wont, people would come round the counter when they heard a Scottish accent and shake hands and say, “We are glad that Scotland is part of the United Kingdom and will continue to be part of it”. If we muck this up, that is not going to be the case.

I will shut up now and look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem—the second most beautiful place in Scotland after Coatdyke—and I very much look forward to hearing the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Dundee. Before he became an earl, he was actually the Tory candidate in the famous Hamilton by-election in 1978. Of course, he bears a very famous name in that, in 1924 or 1925 I believe, one of his distant ancestors—standing as a prohibitionist —defeated Winston Churchill in Dundee.

I too congratulate the two maiden speakers, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem—or Ming; I have known him for a very long time. He has had three distinguished careers: first, as an athlete; secondly, at the Bar, where he was a very distinguished lawyer; and thirdly, in politics—and I hope that career will continue. He also had a fourth one; I think I am the only person in this House who can claim to have played rugby against the noble Lord, Lord Campbell. He always accused me of being a dirty player, and he was not as distinguished on the rugby field as he was elsewhere—I am sorry he is not here to hear that.

Almost everything I wanted to say has been said. I will concentrate on two aspects. First, we must stop bringing together devolution and nationalism; they are not the same thing. We must emphasise and keep emphasising that point. At the end of the day, devolution is a democratic process—and I am not saying that the SNP is not a democratic party. That is why some of us campaigned for devolution. I know that some people opposite opposed it, but the fact is that we were in favour of devolution because Scotland had become out of sync. Therefore, it was right that we devolved power to a Scottish Parliament. The alternative was to get rid of Scotland, to be honest. When my late friend Donald Dewar said that devolution was a process—although I gather it has been denied that he ever said it—what he meant was that democracy should go below the level of the Scottish Parliament to local authorities and local communities, and that is what democracy means. It means people taking decisions at the point at which they want and need to take them. Devolution has to be a two-way process. Some powers should perhaps be taken back from the Scottish Parliament and given back to this Parliament, or even given to the European Parliament; I do not know. The fact is that devolution is a two-way process and it has to be.

Secondly, we have had a long argument and, quite rightly, a discussion about fiscal autonomy and the fiscal arrangements being made by the two parties, and a large part of me agrees with everything that has been said about that. But a part of me also says that it does not really matter, because whatever the fiscal arrangements this Government come to with the Scottish Government, at some point or other the Scottish Government are going to say no. What the SNP wants is a fight. It does not really care what the arrangements will be. It just wants a grievance. What it wants is an independent Scotland. We have to stop appeasing it, and to some extent this Bill is an appeasement for the SNP. That is what the vow was; it is what the Smith commission was, to some extent. It was an attempt to appease the Scottish nationalists in their demand for the nationalist case. We have to stop that. We have to start fighting them.

We might start fighting them by asking a very simple question: why do you want to separate from the rest of the United Kingdom? What is it that divides us? I speak with an English accent because I was brought up in Oxford. My mother and father both spoke with Glasgow accents, Scottish accents, because they were brought up in Scotland. My brothers and my sister live in England. My nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and grand-nephews live in England. They do not consider themselves Scottish. My brother may consider himself Scottish, but he does not really consider himself a Scot. At the end of the day, I am typical of many people. What is it that divides us from the rest of the United Kingdom? The answer is: nothing. Religion and language do not divide us. There is not even a natural frontier between England and Scotland any more. Until we start asking those basic questions of, “Why do you want to go? What is it that divides us?”, and start fighting nationalism, I fear that Scotland may very well slip uncontrollably down the route towards becoming an independent country, which I personally would regret and I will fight all my political life—what is left of it—against.