Scotland: Independence Referendum

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

My Lords, about 24 hours ago I introduced, on a whim, a Private Member’s Bill called the Scottish Referendum (Consultation) Bill, which aims to make provision for certain Scottish people resident outside Scotland to be consulted ahead of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. This was not a plot. I was brought up to believe many things, one of which was that if you were Scottish you had to be a “Mc” or a “Mac”, but only two of each spoke today. As your Lordships know well, there was an extremely important Scot, or Scottish-Italian, called Machiavelli, so I will try, in a certain Machiavellian atmosphere, to suggest something to noble Lords. I am not proposing that Alex Salmond has any Machiavellian tendencies, but he did live in a place called 6 Charlotte Square that belonged to us once upon a time, and I should quite like to get it back.

A name such as “Selsdon of Croydon” does not make you seem very Scottish. However, I am a Baronet of Polmood in the County of Peebles, and my grandfather was MP for Glasgow, Lanark and North Down, and ended up in Croydon—so I am totally United Kingdom. I feel very strongly about these things because we also played a great part: we were the Scottish line, McIlwraith, McEacharn & Co. We shipped more people to Australia than anybody else. Live meat went out, and then, with Scottish help, we developed a chilling machine that allowed us to bring dead meat back, meaning sheep and lambs. Over that period, we shipped thousands of people. Of course, we became Lord Mayor of Melbourne and got a knighthood there, having got a baronetcy in Scotland as well. Therefore, I am Sir Malcolm McEacharn Mitchell-Thomson, Baronet of Polmood in the County of Peebles, and Baron Selsdon of Croydon. Once I saw in a train a sign that read, “Do not pull the chain when the train is standing at the station”, to which someone had added, “except at Woking or Croydon”.

I approach this today with a sense of humour because there are now some great opportunities for us to consult Scots around the world. Noble Lords will find a brief in the Printed Paper Office which the Library helped me to prepare, which says that effectively 5.5 million people were born in Scotland, of Scottish birth, of whom 79% are in Scotland, 15% in “Other UK”, 3.8% in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and a few in the United States. However, the relationship is not necessarily by birth. Everyone has a domicile of origin at birth, normally from their father. In Scotland, that domicile of origin is of the earliest recorded ancestor, and it passes through the male line from one generation to another unless and until a descendant specifically acquires a new domicile of choice. If the parents were not married at the time of birth, the domicile of origin passes through the female line, and it is estimated that that and related issues may have led to up to 40 million people fairly claiming Scottish ancestry. I feel that we might have a duty to consult these people before the referendum. How that should be done is surely fairly simple.

In my case, with the different family names that I have, I am not ashamed of being a Selsdon of Croydon but I would rather be, as I am, Malcolm McEacharn. Over time, if we look at how the movements went, we can see that the Scythians were the first to come across, of course. They arrived, and when they got to Ireland, or Scottish Ireland, they were welcomed there, as were all guests; then they were told that there was no room so they should go over to the kingdom of Albanectus, which was in fact Scotland—or, maybe, in those days, Albania.

If we look back at our history, it is one of migration; within the Scottish blood there is a desire to travel and to move and to make the best of what you can wherever you may be upon the face of this earth. So the challenge to government is how it could possibly arrange some form of consultation with all those 20 million to 40 million Scots who live abroad, in the empire or wherever it may be. I leave noble Lords with that thought. This is not a major speech, but I think that we have a duty to try to consult the wider diaspora before we make final decisions.