Constitutional Commission

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I must declare an interest as I had a memo published in the Kilbrandon commission’s report; one can find it in the second half of volume 10. That shows my age.

It is a huge disappointment to us all that the commitment in the 2019 Conservative manifesto to hold a commission on the constitution is one of the many promises that our Prime Minister has broken. We need one; there is general agreement here that we need one. It is a huge disappointment that we have such a London-based Government. The resentment against them is not only in Scotland, Wales and parts of Northern Ireland; we are increasingly seeing it in the north and south-west of England.

It is a puzzle for many of us that the most devolved part of England is London itself. It has more powers than the regions and allows two levels of representative government, whereas we in Yorkshire are told that we all must have only one level. The new model for this absurd, single-tier government that has just been imposed on North Yorkshire was very reluctantly accepted by the people there.

The assertive, aggressive unionism that this Government respect is as disastrous as the unionism represented in the 1880s and 1890s. The extent to which AV Dicey, the authority on Westminster sovereignty, was quoted to me last year by a government Minister as defining our approach to sovereignty, governing this Government’s assumption that they are allowed to tell everyone what to do, is part of what is wrong. Remember that AV Dicey wrote what he wrote because he was avowedly against Irish home rule and aggressively unionist. What did it lead to? The division of Ireland and nearly a civil war.

That is where we are. I recognise that Boris Johnson is very much part of the problem. Last weekend, I was talking on the phone to one of my Scottish relations, who I know voted Liberal Democrat in the local elections in Edinburgh. He said to me, “If he’s still there in three or four years’ time, I know which way I’ll vote in another referendum”. That is there—the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, knows it—in the way a lot of people in Scotland think. I am going up to Scotland tonight; I have no doubt that, tomorrow, lots of people will tell me much the same thing. We need to address this. We cannot ignore the problem.

I merely wish to add that resentment in the regions of England about what is going on is also rising. If you saw the Yorkshire media’s response to the integrated rail strategy provisions, you will have seen the extent to which the assumption is that everything is done for London: “You don’t begin to understand what happens in the north and you’ve cut down the degree of autonomy that we thought we had, even in local government”. We need a constitutional commission. We need to consult as widely as possible, using citizens’ consultations, if we are to hold this country together. We should not ignore the real possibility that the United Kingdom could disintegrate.