Scotland Bill

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

My Lords, the late Donald Dewar once observed that devolution is not an event but a process. I very much agree with that, and I believe that we should look at this Bill as the second.

[Lord Sewel]

This phrase that it is a process rather than an event is attributed to Donald Dewar. I spent some time trying to trace the source of that comment, but I could not find any occasion when Donald Dewar said it. It was said ad nauseam by the then Secretary of State for Wales, for very good reasons, if you looked at what Welsh devolution was.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood]

That has lengthened my speech already, before I finished my first half-sentence. Anyway, it was attributed to him, but the point is that it is true, and I regard this Bill as the second stage of the process of devolution, the 1998 Act being the first stage. It may not be the last stage; there may be a third or even, possibly, a fourth stage to come. I do not think we should be frightened of that. The truth is that we are wrestling all the time with the basic problem that we cannot have a proper federal constitution in this country because one component part is larger than the other three put together. That has been the difficulty with which Governments have had to wrestle, so we end up with what I have always called lopsided federalism.

When he opened, the Minister used a quotation from my Donald Dewar lecture in 2003 when I said that no self-respecting Parliament could exist permanently on the basis of a grant from another Parliament. I believe that is true, and although the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, was very entertaining, he did not address that problem. This Bill at least attempts to do so. After I said that, people in my own party came to me and said, “You’ve made this pronouncement. We agree with it. Will you now chair a commission to work out what we do about it?”. I was very reluctant to do that because I tried to follow the precedent of Speakers of the House of the Commons and not engage in party-political activity. However, I regarded it as a constitutional issue, and so I said I would chair the commission, provided that there were people other than the usual party enthusiasts appointed to it. I was greatly assisted by my noble friend Lord Vallance, who had then just retired as chairman of British Telecom and is a former director of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and my right honourable friend Chris Huhne, with all his economic expertise.

We came up with what became known as the Steel commission report, which was subsequently the substance of our evidence to the Calman commission. The one difference between the two—this has been commented on by many in the Liberal Democrat ranks—is that our commission recommended a far wider sweep of tax-raising powers than is in this Bill or was recommended by the Calman commission. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, put his finger on it when he talked about the possibility of having a wider net of tax-raising powers rather than focusing simply on income tax. The fact is that the Calman commission was the product of a consensus agreement between the three parties taking part in it, and the Bill is the result of a consensus agreement. I have always believed that when it comes to constitutional reform, you cannot expect any one party to dictate how exactly it should proceed. If constitutional reform is going to succeed properly, it has to be on the basis of a broad range of consensus. I therefore find myself in support of the principles of the Bill in its tax-raising powers, although clearly in Committee we can have much more discussion along the lines that we have heard already.

I was very interested in the speech by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Davidson, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord McCluskey, about the fallout from the remarks by not just the First Minister but also by the Minister of Justice in Scotland about the Supreme Court decision on a human rights case. It seemed to me that they were quite paranoid about the court being in London and would be quite happy for cases to go to Strasbourg, which is a most bizarre position for them to adopt. I was incensed by the language used and the insult to prominent members of the Scottish judiciary who serve on the Supreme Court. I thought it was quite intolerable, and that is why I resigned as an adviser to the First Minister on the ministerial code of conduct. As I said to him in a letter at the time, I did so because if now that they had a majority that was how they were going to behave, there would be more and more complaints against Ministers, and I did not want to spend my time refereeing them. I do not regret that decision. However, the issue that they raised in the debate today was echoed by another Donald Dewar lecturer—namely, Elish Angiolini, the immediate past Lord Advocate—whose lecture I went and listened to. She devoted the latter part of her speech to this issue and clearly was not satisfied that we have yet solved the question of how we treat our engagement with the Humans Rights Act with the new Supreme Court. We should return in Committee to the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Davidson, and the noble Lord, Lord McCluskey, and treat them very seriously. I welcome what they said.

One minor point which I am pleased to see in the Bill, in Clause 4, is about the Presiding Officers in the Scottish Parliament. It is a direct result of the evidence which I gave to the Calman commission. We had the embarrassing situation in 2002 where, despite juggling hospital appointments with the Easter Recess, I had to take two weeks off from the Scottish Parliament for treatment for prostate cancer. My two deputies had a simply terrible time trying to cope with not just chairing the Parliament, because that is only part of the function, but chairing the committees, the Parliamentary Bureau and the corporate body. They had also to entertain the legions of visitors that we had, because the Foreign Office took it into its head to tell every visiting dignitary coming to this country, “You must go to Scotland and see this thing which has come to pass”. We had constantly to give lunches and dinners to visiting people. My two colleagues told me that they were run absolutely ragged during that fortnight. It was intolerable that the Parliament had no power to appoint a third deputy even for a temporary period. I am delighted that that minor flaw has been put right in the Bill before us.

I share the surprise of others who have spoken that the Bill is silent on the question of holding a referendum. Again to be fair to the Government, I point out that the election of the SNP Government in May came subsequently to the Calman commission’s deliberations and the drafting of the Bill. We should be quite open about that. The Bill has come to us; we shall have to deal with it in Committee; and we should look at that question. There is a real danger that Scotland will find itself sleepwalking into independence unless we tackle the matter. As others have said—the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, was right—this is quite plainly and clearly a reserved matter for the Westminster Government. It is not a question of the SNP Government saying, “Well, we’re elected, therefore we can have a non-binding referendum which we devise—and we organise, by the way, not the Electoral Commission”. That would be intolerable. We should make it quite clear in this Bill that, granted that the SNP has its majority and a mandate to hold a referendum, ensuring that it is done in a proper way is a matter for this Parliament. The Bill has to come to us late, but we have the responsibility to send it back to the Commons for further deliberation.

My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has asked some very pertinent questions of the SNP about what it means by independence, and I hope that we will in due course get answers to them. My heart sinks at the thought that we will have three years of debate and uncertainty about independence or not, with a permanent collective whinge from the Scottish Government that everything that goes well in Scotland is due to their magnificent government and everything that goes wrong is due entirely to Westminster. It is not a situation that we should allow to fester for three years.

The basic question which the SNP has to address is whether people in this country really want a situation where Scots people living and working in London are living and working in a foreign country, and English people living and working in Scotland are living and working in a foreign country. That is what independence means and we should not hesitate to say so.

I also believe that there is a common misunderstanding about the history of how the union came about. It is frequently said, “Oh, well, it was all bribery and corruption that the Scottish Parliament was abolished and people were against the union”. They were not against the union. In 1704, three years before the treaty was signed, Fletcher of Saltoun said that he was in favour of the union,

“to do away with bloody and destructive wars”.

The fact was that there was a perfectly good defence and foreign policy case for the union, just as there was an economic case following the collapse of the Darien scheme and the ridiculous notion that we in Scotland should compete with England in colonial adventures following that disaster.

When there were discussions between the two Parliaments in 1706, although the word “federal” may not have been used—it perhaps did not exist in those days—the discussion was of federal type constitution. When it became clear that the English representatives would not accept that, and that it had to be an incorporating union or nothing, that was the point at which there were riots in the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The truth is that the abolition of the Scottish Parliament was never accepted by the Scottish people. We saw that—although there were other factors as well—in 1715, 1745, through the 19th century, through the early part of the 20th century, the campaigns in the Labour Party, the Liberal Home Rule Bills and the covenant campaign of 1950 which attracted millions of signatures. The abolition of the Scottish Parliament was never accepted. The 1998 Act put right something that was done wrong in 1707. But that is a quite different argument from talking about going back to pre-1707 years and having a completely independent state north of the border.

This Bill is simply a fine-tuning of the 1998 provisions. So long as we treat it like that, it should deserve our support and go through to success.