Scotland within the United Kingdom

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I anticipated my noble friend’s question. We should not talk any longer about the divisiveness of 55% and 45% and should focus on ensuring that we deliver as best we can for the 100%.

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add something about understanding the context of what happened in those last 10 days. I am deeply worried. I absolutely welcome the publication of the Command Paper today and fully congratulate everyone involved in the campaign. Many on the other side of the argument conducted themselves well—not everyone but most people. We are now in a situation where expectations have been raised almost exponentially by the vow given in the last 10 days of the campaign. None of the three main parties’ proposals published today meet that expectation. The discussions that take place over the next few weeks must be serious. They must look at the detail of what my noble friend Lord Robertson, the noble and learned Lord and I spent weeks, months and years in the mid-1990s looking at when trying to get tax and financial proposals right for the Scottish Parliament. Unless these discussions are meaningful and go deep into the detail, we will not reach a settlement that will stand the test of time, even if we also solve the other issues in the United Kingdom that have been mentioned by noble Lords. I ask the noble and learned Lord to urge all those involved to be very careful. Having raised the expectations, we do not want to bring them back down again and find ourselves in a never-ending debate and unable to move on to other issues.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, is right to emphasise how much detailed work went into the constitutional convention proposals, in which he, I and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, were involved, and the work in terms of the taxation proposals now embodied in the Scotland Act. It is now two and a half years since that Act was passed. That shows the time that it has taken to get them implemented and to get it right. I agree that we should be under no illusion about that. I do not think for a moment that the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is under any illusion as to the challenge he is facing.

On the final point made by the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, about getting on with the powers and using them, he and I did a couple of events during the referendum campaign where we said some of the things that the Scottish Parliament had done. I very much hope that a right and proper debate about the extent of powers will not be used as an excuse for not using the powers that are already there. They should be used to tackle many things in Scotland, including education, health, transport and policing, which are crying out to be addressed.