Scotland Bill

Lord Steel of Aikwood Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

My Lords, way back in the mists of time—I am talking about 1960 or 1961— I was president of the students’ representative council at the University of Edinburgh. A young man was elected to the council that year on behalf of the first-year students who turned out to be a complete pest. He was always raising points of order, asking awkward questions of the establishment and interrupting other people. I always wondered what would happen to him—his name was George Foulkes. He has continued that wonderful tradition in the House of Commons, in the Scottish Parliament and now here in the House of Lords. It is a great pleasure to follow him and agree so much with his last peroration. He echoed what my old friend and colleague, my noble friend Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, was saying in urging that we should have a proper debate and a proper constitutional commission at some future time to look at the whole future settlement of the United Kingdom rather than these endless piecemeal points. I entirely applaud what my noble friend Lord Campbell said on that matter. I also welcome the report of the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Kelvin, my former constituent, particularly the foreword that he wrote, to which reference has already been made, about further decentralisation within Scotland.

I welcome this Scotland Bill. I said right at the start of the Scottish Parliament, when I was elected its first Presiding Officer, that no self-respecting Parliament could exist for ever on a financial grant from another Parliament. So the proposed transfer of responsibility for raising the bulk of the money that it spends in future, which is the basis of the Bill, is entirely correct. However, I have two concerns. First, as so often happens, the Bill was not fully scrutinised in the Commons, where it was subject to tight timetabling. That was especially so on Report, when the Government tabled many important amendments, some of which were simply never debated at all. If they plan to have this on the statute book before next May’s Scottish elections—which is wise—they will need to aim for Easter. In that case, to do it justice, they will need more days in this House than they have been contemplating so far.

Secondly, and more substantially, I am deeply disturbed at what I see as the growth of a one-party state in Scotland, about which we need to warn the electorate. I do not wish to be misunderstood. I have the advantage, shared by others in this House who have served in the Scottish Parliament, of knowing the personalities in the SNP quite well. I have from my objective chair developed a genuinely high regard for the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and for her two close allies, John Swinney, her deputy and Finance Minister, and Angus Robertson, its leader in the Commons. These people should not be underrated. They also have some talented younger members not yet known here, such as Humza Yousaf, who any party would be glad to have in their ranks. It simply will not do to sneer at or belittle these people as somehow inferior to those we are used to here at Westminster.

However, the one-party state is a real threat. I do not mean by that ludicrous comparisons with North Korea nor Mussolini’s Italy—although some of the cybernats come close to that—but the growing assumption that if you are not an SNP supporter you are somehow unpatriotic or anti-Scotland. I will give two examples. Recently an Orkney friend of mine complained to a Highland MSP that areas such as the Western Isles and Argyll, which happened to have SNP MSPs, enjoyed lower public ferry fares than the Lib Dem-voting islands of Orkney and Shetland, only to get the response, “Well, you know what to do next time”.

The other example is the tendency of the SNP Government to increasing centralisation, as has been mentioned several times already. Scotland is a small country where it is relatively easy to centralise. We have already seen the disaster of abolishing local police forces and combining them into one. Local authorities and health boards are increasingly nervous that their powers are being subsumed by central government, while education and health service targets are being missed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, rightly told the House a few minutes ago. The SNP Government are sort of Teflon coated. Every time these figures are produced, they simply say, “It’s all the fault of Westminster for not providing the money”. That is one of the reasons why the Bill is so important.

The latest threat in terms of centralisation is to the governance of the Tweed river, which, ever since the Tweed Act 1950, has been an outstanding example of good management, involving scientists, the local authorities, angling clubs, fishing owners and landowners. The SNP appears baffled by that Act, which applies Scots law to the English side of the Tweed and English law to the Scottish bank of the Esk in the west. They want to scrap those decades of success and impose a centralised governance on all Scottish rivers.

Last autumn, we in Scotland had a lucky escape in the referendum. At the time, the SNP was able to predict a healthy economy based on North Sea oil prices at over $100 per barrel. They have been bouncing along since at just over $40 per barrel, which would have hit every household grievously had we gone independent without the protection of the United Kingdom. Now we are faced with this new threat: if the nationalist tsunami hits the Scottish Parliament next May, we shall have uncontrollable government of the most dangerous kind. The Bill should be passed with that very serious health warning in mind.