Strengthening the Union

Pete Wishart Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

Mr Speaker—[Interruption.] I am sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have clearly had yet more of that whisky—I keep referring to you as “Mr Speaker.”

Madam Deputy Speaker, my hon. Friend makes two important points. First, he says that we need to be able to come together as a single United Kingdom to make sure that our UK internal market continues to function and continues to bring the benefits that are needed across the internal borders of our country. He also looks ahead to my points about how we can relate to each other in the governmental work we need to do to get people those benefits, as new responsibilities transfer to Edinburgh, Cardiff and, once an Executive are formed, Belfast.

Our commitment to bringing powers closer to people can be seen in the major steps already taken to decentralise governance in the UK, creating new combined authorities in seven city regions, headed by elected Mayors, and devolving to them new powers and budgets. There are Mayors, of course, across England—in Greater Manchester, the west midlands, the Liverpool city region, Tees valley, the west of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, and Sheffield city—and they demonstrate how local, visible and innovative leadership can be key to building stronger economies and fairer societies.

English votes for English laws, meanwhile, embeds fairness and balance in Parliament’s law-making process, strengthening England’s voice just as devolution has strengthened the voices of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland within our Union. These measures are about accountability, effectiveness and empowering institutions to take action to make things better for the people to whom they are accountable.

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

The Minister has very conveniently skipped over Brexit. Over the weekend we learned that a no deal Brexit is now likely. For Scotland that could mean conditions akin to a state of emergency, with “Protect and Survive”-type leaflets being given to families and businesses. How does that help to strengthen her Union?

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[Lesley Laird]

I wish to make some progress.

It is Labour that will protect people in the workplace and create the opportunities needed for young people. People will not get that from the Tories nor from the SNP, which continues, incredibly, to count zero-hours contracts as a positive destination for school leavers. It is a Labour Government who will ban zero-hours contracts and deliver an industrial strategy to create high-quality, high-skilled jobs. It is Labour that will always respect devolution, unlike the Tories, who at every turn during the Brexit negotiations have simply ignored Scotland’s devolution settlement, while the SNP’s opportunism has sought to sow division and discord.

Britain needs Labour and our approach, which recognises and respects all the nations of the UK. We will continue to stand up for and protect the devolution settlement, which we, the Labour party, founded.

[Pete Wishart]

This debate is about the Union and the constitution. I thought that Labour’s great innovation was a UK-wide constitutional convention, where Scotland will be a federal part of a new arrangement. Is that still Labour’s policy, and if so, could the hon. Lady talk a little bit about it?

[Lesley Laird]

The hon. Gentleman is right: that was in our manifesto and we will continue to work on it, because we believe it is the next evolution of devolution.

Britain needs investment, and only Labour will deliver. It cannot afford any more of the Tory version of austerity that we have experienced for almost a decade, with millions needing food banks, or SNP timidity, which acts as a conveyor belt for Tory austerity, with millions more cut from Scottish public services without so much as a whimper. It is Labour that has a vision of renewal, transformation and shared prosperity, with an additional investment of £70 billion in Scotland over the course of two successive Labour Governments.

Even on the simple things, this Tory Government cannot get it right. Only last week, Scotland’s invisible man in the Cabinet, the Secretary of State for Scotland—I note that he is not here today—missed another opportunity to show leadership and solidarity with the residents and businesses displaced by the fire at the Glasgow School of Art, by failing to push for UK Government assistance. That was an open goal, yet the Secretary of State put the ball over the bar once again, with a mealy mouthed response and, like so many of his colleagues before him, telling local government to take the strain.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and what fills it too often these days is narrow nationalism, petty jealousies and grievance. It is hardly surprising that we are missing opportunities to strengthen our Union when the Tories clearly do not understand devolution, never mind believe in it. And they are sleepwalking into a nationalist trap, because their instinct is to pass the buck, while the Scottish Government’s instinct is to draw powers from Whitehall and hoard them in Edinburgh, undermining local government at every turn.

Devolution is a process, not an event, and I am clear that those powers must be devolved all the way to the point where they can most effectively be delivered. To make a difference, politics must be about vision. It must be about ideas and how they can be fulfilled. It must be about the vision of how life can be made better for every household and community in the land.

In our 118-year history, the Labour party has been in government for only a little over 30 years, but every one of those years saw a Government for the many, not the few, and strengthened the Union by giving people hope—hope that, by the strength of our common endeavour, whether it be in Cumnock, Coleraine, Cardiff or Croydon, we achieve more together than we achieve alone. That is the way to strengthen our Union. Labour today, like Labour in the past, has a vision that will benefit all our people—men and women from the north, the south, Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I say respectfully to Government Members: your ineptitude, selfishness and brand of politics have played into the hands of those opportunists on the SNP Benches. Do the Union a favour. Do the country a favour. Do the millions of people whose lives are worse off under this rotten Government a favour and move over and allow Labour to govern and to invest in our people, our communities, our public services and our industries, and in the process, to strengthen our Union via the ties that bind our people together through a vision of sharing, equality and opportunity for all.

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[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

It is a real treat to be able to speak in the Chamber. As a Member who is not particularly frightened of his own voice, I have kept remarkably quiet during this term, largely owing to the hard work of the HS2 Select Committee. The hon. Member for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield), who is in his place, has also been putting his shoulder to the wheel to ensure that that railway line does one thing that strengthens the Union, which is to draw the north and the south closer together. I have plenty of reservations about it, but that, I think, is an outstanding quality.

I am particularly thrilled to be able to speak today, because one thing that I find so powerful about the Union is that it is in our DNA. My grandmother was a Power and was born in an Irish whiskey distillery of that name. My mother is Scottish, and I am very proud to wear the Davidson tartan, particularly the hunting tartan as it makes a very smart tie indeed. My constituency is, of course, how Walt Disney would have portrayed England if he had had the chance: truly beautiful and wonderful in every way. It grows every single crop that UK farmers around the country can produce; Herefordshire is the only county that grows them all. Then, of course, there are my own choices.

[Pete Wishart]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I hope it is a point of order.

[Pete Wishart]

We have just noticed that the Government Front-Bench spokesperson has scuttled out of the Chamber without listening to all of the Front-Bench speakers in this debate. It was the Government who called this debate. They could have called it on anything else, but they chose to focus on strengthening the Union. We now no longer have a Front-Bench spokesperson to listen to the Front-Bench speeches. Surely that is not in order; there should be somebody there.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I have no idea whether the Minister has gone out temporarily, but there is another Minister on hand. I do hope that we are not going to have this debate interrupted by endless points of order, because people want to contribute; it is not fair.

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[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

It seems a curious pleasure to be speaking in this debate this evening. Just when we thought the House was going to adjourn early for the summer recess to assist a beleaguered Prime Minister, we find ourselves here, debating the Union. With the UK facing an unprecedented crisis, with a rudderless Government, a leadership in crisis and a divided party about to face the Brexit precipice, the most important thing that the Government can think of to debate on the day before Parliament adjourns is the Union. I wonder what businesses in Scotland think about that. What will EU nationals who are worried about the future think about it? What will academic institutions think about it, and what will hard-pressed families seeing such a massive reduction in their household income because of their Brexit make of the obsession of these Conservatives to discuss the Union on the day before we adjourn for the long summer holiday?

[Douglas Ross]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way on this point, because it is important. He is criticising the UK Government for having a debate about strengthening the Union. The Scottish National party has had two debates in this term. Its last one was on the claim of right. Why did his party not choose European topics to discuss when it had the opportunity?

[Pete Wishart]

I will tell the hon. Gentleman what we will do: we will try to help him out with the issue about strengthening the Union. You know me, Madam Deputy Speaker; I try as much as possible to be helpful in these debates.

Let us see how helpful it might be to the hon. Gentleman to look at a whole range of issues just now and see whether he would put them into the “Strengthening the Union” column or the “Diminishing and weakening the Union” column. Let us start with Brexit. How will we get on with that one? [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman is chuntering away. It is what they do. I say to him that the Scottish people are watching this debate, and they see him chuntering, heckling and shouting away. They are not impressed with him behaving in such a way.

[Douglas Ross]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman is criticising me for apparently chuntering, but the point is I asked him a question two minutes ago that he has not answered. It would be respectful to this Parliament to answer the point, rather than chuntering away through his speech.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I want to emphasise again that using points of order just to get interventions in the debate on the record—the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) was guilty earlier—needs to stop. It is not fair on others. Lots of Members want to speak, and this is not the way we should be having these debates.

[Pete Wishart]

The people of Scotland are watching, and what they are observing is something that they do not particularly like. Sometimes I wish the cameras would swing around when Scottish Conservative Members are at the height of their heckling and shouting, just so the Scottish public could see how they behave in this Parliament, but let us get back to the debate.

Let us look at a number of issues and help the Scottish Conservative Members assess whether those things are helping strengthen the Union. Is the way that the Government are so consensually and deftly negotiating this Brexit process helping to strengthen the Union? That is a hard, challenging question, because we have a Scotland that voted 62% to 38% against this mad, chaotic Brexit. In increasing numbers, Scottish people are deciding they want absolutely nothing to do with it. Some may say that this clueless, chaotic and delusional approach to the most significant constitutional change that Scotland has faced since the war may not necessarily go into the credit column in the debate on strengthening the Union.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. May I ask the hon. Gentleman to face the Chair?

[Pete Wishart]

Yes, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Let us look at where we are when it comes to Brexit. On the Brexit “madcon” scale, we are now at madcon 10. A no deal Brexit has now moved up from being possible to being likely. What does that mean for Scotland? According to a range of civil servants from right across Whitehall, the port of Dover will collapse on day one as Kent and the whole of the south-east of England becomes one big lorry park, while supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of days and hospitals will run out of medicines within two weeks.

The UK Government—for goodness’ sake—are even preparing to issue 70 technical notices to families and businesses in the event of a no deal Brexit. We have had a little joke about can openers, but the Government are advising families to stock up on canned food, and they are telling businesses to prepare for a sudden exodus of EU nationals. That is what the UK Government are now saying to hard-pressed families in Scotland—and that before we even get on to air travel, holidays by the sea and mobile phone roaming.

However, Scotland will be hit the hardest economically by what the Conservatives are planning with their no deal, hard Brexit. Not only would we have conditions akin to a state of emergency, but Scotland’s economy could lose up to £10 billion a year—a fall of 5% in our GDP—with real household incomes falling by 9.6% for each family in Scotland, or by £2,263 per head. There may be some people who say that all these things will help to strengthen the Union, but may I offer the counter-contention? When people in Scotland get the opportunity to weigh up their constitutional options, they could choose the chaotic cluelessness of these Tories or they could decide that they want to manage their own affairs themselves, and I have a good idea of what the Scottish people will decide and conclude.

Let us look at another example of what the Conservatives are doing and assess the strengthening the Union column: what the hon. Gentlemen and the Conservative party are doing to our national Parliament with the power grab. Perhaps that is another cunning ruse to strengthen the Union and make the people of Scotland fall in love with the UK all over again. Devolution has been on an seamless trajectory since 1999—I have been in this Parliament since 2001 and I have seen three Scotland Acts, all of which gave significant new powers to our national Parliament—but with their Brexit, that has all ended, because for the first time devolution has been stopped and they have started to reverse it. The model with the reserved powers arrangement in the Scottish Parliament has served it so well—that has been the founding principle and the thing that has guided devolution through the past two decades—but the Conservative Government have decided that that is enough, and they are not prepared to allow devolution to go any further.

The Scottish Conservative MPs sometimes misunderstand the power grab, and I am quite surprised that they have not all been saying, “What powers are being grabbed from the Scottish Parliament?” I have never said that any powers will be taken from the Scottish Parliament—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] Now I have their attention, let me tell them how the power grab works.

There are powers returning from Europe. According to schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998, the reserved powers should go to the Westminster Parliament, but powers in devolved areas should go to the devolved legislatures. What has happened is that all the reserved powers are going back to the UK Parliament, but the devolved powers have been grabbed and given to this House. It is called a power grab because powers that should be given to the Scottish Parliament have been grabbed by this Government. I hope that helps Scottish Conservative Members to understand properly what is happening.

[Sammy Wilson]

Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that what he is describing is a power release from Brussels to Scotland, rather than a power grab?

[Pete Wishart]

I have never said anything about no powers coming back to the UK. The point is that the powers that should rightly reside in the right hon. Gentleman’s Parliament and in my Parliament have been grabbed by the UK Government, and they will now be resting in Westminster, not in our devolved Assemblies. This is really important because our Parliaments—the right hon. Gentleman’s and the one in my nation—depend on the reserved powers model, and if that is broken, devolution is broken.

The Conservatives have started to muck about with the founding principles of our Parliament, and the Scottish people are watching: they are looking at what the Conservatives are doing, and they are not impressed. It is in line with what they are doing with the Sewel convention in relation to taking legitimate decisions of the Scottish Parliament to the Supreme Court to be challenged and possibly overturned. People may say that this all helps to strengthen the Union and that it is a very clever and cunning ruse by the Conservatives to get us back on board with the Union. However, I suggest that, once again, it is undermining their Union, and the power grab was very much to the weakening of the Union cause.

[Douglas Ross]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Pete Wishart]

I do not have time to take any more interventions.

I ask the Scottish Conservative MPs—I may give way to one or two of them later—whether they are helping to strengthen or to weaken the Union in this Parliament. They came down here with 29% of the vote—the “Ruth Davidson opposes a second referendum” party did relatively well in Scotland—but they have lost five percentage points in the past year. Their constituents are watching them whine on about a Parliament and a Government 400 miles away, and they are sick and tired of being represented by people who could not care less about their duties and functions in the House, but everything about a Parliament that they can no longer question, and that is having an impact on what they are doing.

We could get on to English votes for English laws. Does that strengthen or weaken the Union? Well, there is a hard one. We could also get on to the £1 billion that Democratic Unionist party Members were able to secure, of which Scottish Conservatives have not been able to get a single penny. However, let us just sum up where we are in the wider debate. If we look across the range of defining constitutional issues, we find, when the people of Scotland are tested in opinion polls, that independence now stands at 47%, or two percentage points up from our very impressive gains in 2014. We are very much on a journey with all this. Independence remains more or less at the level we had in 2014, and we are not even campaigning for independence at the moment.

The defining feature in all this will be the Conservatives’ Brexit—their hard Brexit—and how the Scottish people start to assess the situation. Scotland is currently tethered to HMS Brexitannia, which is heading full speed for the biggest iceberg ever encountered in political history. Unlike the real Titanic, this HMS Brexitannia is hurtling towards an iceberg at full speed in the full knowledge that that will sink the ship and all the souls on board.

For Scotland, however, there are lifeboats attached to this doomed and stricken liner, and they are marked “Independence”. All we in Scotland need to do is clamber aboard, get them off the vessel as quickly as possible and row towards the shores of independence, security and sanity.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Luke Graham]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I could not agree more. My office has been involved in helping out a constituent who is championing the cause of a former constituent of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) who was involved in the foundation of Singapore. Often overlooked in favour of Raffles, my constituent is making sure that this noble man from Perth receives the recognition he so rightly deserves.

Our Union enabled us to have victories not only on the battlefield but in sports stadiums, with Scottish athletes bringing 19 gold, 27 silver and five bronze medals in summer Olympics since 1997—trained, funded and championed by Team GB. In science and technology, it is not about competition between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom but working together. One fine example is that of the Boulton and Watt steam engine. The first one in Scotland was in my constituency in Clackmannanshire, used by the Kennetpans distillery. Clackmannanshire led the way in technology then. I hope that, through the geothermal project that I hope the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will support in this House, Clackmannanshire will once again lead the way in technology and renewable energy.

It does not stop there. We also had Dolly the sheep, funded by PPL Therapeutics and the then Ministry of Agriculture. The Forth Road bridge, which was an engineering achievement of its time, was 78% funded by Westminster. More recently and most excitingly for the “Star Trek” fans in this House—I know there are many on the SNP Benches—a collaboration between a Scottish university, the University of Dundee, and an English university, the University of Southampton, funded by UK Research and Innovation, created a tractor beam. How forward-looking could we be?

What is the Union about? It has to be about more than money. With almost the equivalent of one fifth of Scotland’s population living in England, it is about the shared values that we hold of democracy, justice and international humanitarian aid, as demonstrated by the nurse, Pauline Cafferkey, who was saving lives abroad in Sierra Leone under the British flag, before falling victim to Ebola. When she returned home to the United Kingdom, she received life-saving treatment in London before returning home to Glasgow. That is what true Union is about.

In the United Kingdom, we are proud not just of the nations, but of our proud regions and counties. That is why in supermarkets people champion Devonshire custard as much as they do Perthshire strawberries. Rather than there being just a homogenous bloc of Scotland versus England, people want to know the county, town and village—all around the country—from which the products are sourced.

[Pete Wishart]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman, my neighbour, for giving way—[Interruption.] He is from south Perthshire; he is my neighbour when it comes to these things. There is very little of what he says that we would ever disagree with or dispute, and in fact, we would probably very much endorse nearly everything he says. However, why does he feel that we need a political Union between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom to enjoy all these wonderful relations, our heritage and our shared history? Surely that is not necessary.

[Luke Graham]

I thank my neighbour for his intervention. I am glad that we have so much common ground between us. The simple answer is that it gives our constituents the opportunity to leverage not only the combined power of around 5 million, but the full power of over 65 million together to resource their sports, help to fund their armed forces and push forward science and technology in a way that other countries can only dream of. That is why we have this House: individual Members are equal in it. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire is equal to the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire—certainly in their place here—or the Members for Oxford West and Abingdon and for Dundee East, and for any other seat in the United Kingdom.

There have been three centuries of family and social ties in the United Kingdom. We have competitive spirit in sport, but for every Scotland versus England rugby match that brings up old rivalries, there is always an episode of “Doctor Who” to bring us back together again. No one should be bullied into choosing between being Scottish or British. People can be Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern Irish and British, and be proud of both.

A lot is said in this House about the differences between parts of the United Kingdom, but when it comes to social attitudes surveys, there are very many times that Scotland and England come out exactly the same in what respondents say. In fact, the only difference is about immigration, on which there is usually a one to two percentage point difference between England and Scotland. When we consider how few immigrants Scotland has had compared with England, we can probably see why there is that result.

Our past battles have been shared, but so are our future challenges, such as climate change, the rate of technological advancement and globalisation. On not one of those challenges will we be better facing it alone. It is by working together that we can combine our resources and look forward, so that we can do things such as improve education, invest in infrastructure, champion initiatives and, for example, launch things that bring together citizenship and science and technology and be the country that brings about the first tractor beam.

At Prime Minister’s questions last week, I mentioned the spaceport in Sutherland as an example of what we can do to provide for the future and our constituents together. We used to be a country that ruled the waves. I hope that in the 21st century, we can be a country that reaches for the stars.