Queen’s Speech

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, as a member of the Association of Military Court Advocates, I associate myself with the remarks of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, and tell him that we shall be addressing the issues at an international seminar at Yale University in the autumn.

I may be from Wales, but it so happens that my four children would be, under Mr Salmond’s plan for Scottish independence, entitled to Scottish passports—although not, it seems, my grandsons Angus, Finlay and Murray.

My family’s links with Scotland derive from coal mining and two mining communities, one in north Wales and the other being the West Lothian coal field. My late father-in-law, who trained at the Polkemmet mine near Whitburn, came to manage Gresford colliery in Wales, among others. At that time, it was still recovering from the dreadful disaster of 1934 in which 266 Welsh miners lost their lives underground. That terrible event drew miners together: the hymn tune “Gresford” became “the Miners’ Hymn”, played by colliery bands in Wales, Scotland, Durham and the north-east, Cumbria, Nottinghamshire and Kent.

Nobody in Gresford claimed the coal for Wales. Nobody in Fauldhouse claimed the coal for Scotland. The people of Britain—drawn together by hardship and adversity, by lost lives in the Great Wars, by poverty and privation—struggled to pool their natural resources and talents to build together a modern liberal country, in which citizens are guaranteed equal social and economic rights. The noble Lord, Lord Reid, set out those rights in his excellent speech this morning, so I will not repeat them.

While this struggle was happening, nationalism was an irrelevance. Saunders Lewis and the Reverend Valentine, founders in 1925 of the Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, the Welsh National Party, thought it right to set fire to an RAF training camp and aerodrome in the Llyn peninsula just before the Second World War. They ensured that the official policy of their party to that war was neutrality. Neutrality was also advocated by Douglas Young, the then leader of the SNP, which was founded in 1934. They all ended up in prison. A later generation has sought to give nationalism in both countries a more respectable face, but the central aim of independence remains. Why do nationalists wish to break up the common venture of the United Kingdom? Why is devolution, which surely enhances the distinctive identities and cultures of our different peoples but keeps us together, not enough?

What nationalism has succeeded in doing is create tensions within and between the constituent nations of the United Kingdom as to who gets what and what is fair. Nationalism complains about Westminster government and of domination by London. It resents the English, yet there is now increasing discontent in England over Scotland’s share of public spending. There is a perception in England that additional funding enables the Scots—and the Welsh—to enjoy popular policies, for example on tuition fees, which are not available to the English. There is indeed a political question to be resolved which has no mention in the gracious Speech, no doubt because of the imminent Scottish referendum.

In the end, it comes down to the Barnett formula. Under that formula, the amount spent on public services in Scotland is much more per capita than is spent in England and significantly greater than in Wales. The position as between Scotland and Wales would be reversed if the Barnett formula were replaced by funding based on the actual needs of the people, as the Lords Select Committee under the noble Lord, Lord Richard, rightly pointed out in 2009. We have a splendid paradox: Mr Salmond warns the Scots that a no vote means abolition of the Barnett formula and the removal of their mother’s milk but, on the other hand, the Welsh Labour Government say that Barnett must go. The people of Wales may not vote for or against the tax-raising powers that we shall soon be debating in the Wales Bill unless Barnett is replaced.

What devolution must be about is the use of all the resources of these islands to support and develop those areas of the United Kingdom that are most in need—to spread the load, to ensure equality and opportunity and to relieve poverty whether in Wales, Scotland or those areas of England and Northern Ireland where the old industrial or rural economy has collapsed. We stand together. We build together, as we always have. When this referendum is out of the way, all of us, whether Scots, Welsh, English, Irish or a mixture of all or any, have serious business to do.