Strengthening the Union

Sammy Wilson Excerpts

Monday 23rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

I am sure that we will come on to all those points during the debate. However, the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) were right to raise them, because it is in recognition of such issues that the Government plan to create a shared prosperity fund for the whole of the United Kingdom. We share those goals; we share those opportunities.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

I am sure that many Members from all over the United Kingdom will point to the inequalities and the lack of growth in some parts of our economy, but does not being part of the United Kingdom mean that fiscal transfers from parts of the UK that generate more revenue than others help Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and many English regions?

[Chloe Smith]

That is precisely my point. When we see what we can do as a larger economy—when we see how we can attract the finest and the best across the UK economy —we also see that we are in a position to put that back into public services, including the NHS and many other services that are admired around the world, and which work together to make everyone’s lives better. That is true throughout the Union.

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[Chloe Smith]

I confess that I am not in possession of that information, and I am not in a position to give the hon. Gentleman the answer to that question right now. I wonder whether the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), might be able to assist with that a little later in the debate.

I want to move on to the importance of devolution, which is a matter of interest to us all. Our powerful devolved Governments and Parliaments are important elements of our Union’s strength. The Union is best maintained by giving the different nations of the UK the ability to pursue their own domestic policies while protecting and preserving the benefits of being part of that bigger UK family of nations. The UK Government respect devolution as an exercise in better governance and as a way to bring the delivery of services closer to the people who need them, while making use of the benefits of scale across our four nations. Since 1998, the Government have transferred powers to ensure that they sit where they can most effectively be delivered, and the Scotland Act 2016 transferred a wide range of powers to the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament. The Wales Act 2017 has delivered clarity for Welsh devolution and accountability for the Welsh Government, meeting the commitments that we made in the St David’s day agreement. Devolution in real terms makes a difference to people’s lives across the UK.

Northern Ireland makes a major contribution to the Union, and also derives great benefits from it. The principle of sharing the economic and political strengths of the Union continues to serve the interests of the people of Northern Ireland, and we are working each day to ensure that that remains so. The principles that define Northern Ireland’s place as an integral part of the United Kingdom are of course enshrined in the Belfast agreement and its successor agreements.

[Sammy Wilson]

Northern Ireland suffered from 40 years of terrorism at the hands of those who wished to overturn the democratic wishes of the people of Northern Ireland. Will the Minister accept that one of the benefits of the Union was that the people of Northern Ireland did not have to stand alone against that terrorist threat but were able to bring to bear all the powers of the security arrangements that were available in the United Kingdom in order to defeat terrorism? Was not that an important benefit of the Union?

[Chloe Smith]

Yes, I think that is right. The right hon. Gentleman also reminds us of the importance of the principle of consent that is there in the Belfast agreement—namely, that the UK Government govern for the benefit of all communities in Northern Ireland on the principle of consent.

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[Ian Murray]

I was not here for the urgent question, so I cannot clarify those figures, but I can say that in my eight years in the House the Opposition have won three votes, so breaking those pairing arrangements has obviously not affected the operation of Parliament, and I do think it important to maintain the pairing arrangements.

Then we get on to the way the Government have dealt with the Brexit process in terms of devolution. It has not been the Secretary of State for Scotland’s finest hour. I am sure that if we could wind the clock back to April, May or June and have those debates again, the Government would have dealt with it differently. We had promise after promise at the Dispatch Box from the Secretary of State, and all those promises were wiped aside. I intervened on the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) at least nine times, if not more—maybe he can tell us during his contribution—to ask when it was all going to happen, what his objections were and how they were going to resolve those devolution problems, and I am still waiting to hear the answers. I look forward to him telling us when I intervene on him during his speech later.

Then we have a Government in chaos, with resignation after resignation after resignation: the Secretary of State in charge of the negotiations to take us out of the EU, gone; the worst Foreign Secretary in history, gone; and all just a few parliamentary weeks away from having to agree the final EU deal.

Then we have the question of a hard Brexit. Everyone is going, “What’s a hard Brexit? What’s a soft Brexit?” However, when we look at what the Government are doing, we are hurtling towards a no deal Brexit. The Government put together—cobbled together after two years—what they now affectionately call the Chequers agreement. The following week, they undermined that very same agreement by accepting amendments to the Trade Bill and the customs Bill that have driven a horse and coaches—a “corse and hoaches” if you have been drinking the same whisky as the Minister who opened the debate—right through that agreement. Not only did those changes undermine the agreement, but the EU had already ruled out the agreement in its original form. We are heading for a hard or no deal Brexit, and all that is happening in the Government at the moment is that people are trying to fight for the keys to No. 10, rather than for what is in this country’s interests.

Everyone in this House, to a person, will absolutely agree that there should be no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, the Government have set red lines in the Brexit process that make that completely and utterly unachievable, which undermines the fabric of the United Kingdom. I keep asking Ministers this question, but I cannot get an answer, so it would be interesting to hear an answer from the Scottish Conservative MPs this evening. If the Government can argue, with the red lines that they have set, that they will no longer require any kind of border equipment on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, if the UK and the Republic of Ireland are in two different trade and customs arrangements, how could they possibly argue, in the event of another independence referendum, that we would require a border between Scotland and England?

[Sammy Wilson]

The hon. Gentleman is restating the oft-repeated myth about the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. I do not know whether he noticed that EU negotiators—Juncker and Barnier—promised the Irish Government this week that there would not have to be any kind of checks at the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, even in the event of no deal. If there can be no checks with no deal, we can have no checks with any sort of deal.

[Ian Murray]

That is an extraordinary comment. We will see what happens come 29 March 2019 or after the transition period. I just do not think that the right hon. Gentleman can achieve what he wants to achieve with the Government’s current negotiating position.

The Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson promised during the 2017 snap general election that, if Scottish Conservative MPs were sent to Westminster, they would stand against the Prime Minister’s hard Brexit and deliver what would be in Scotland’s best possible interests—[Hon. Members: “She never said that.”] Well, if she did not say that, perhaps the Scottish Conservative MPs can tell me what she did say. Ruth Davidson stands up day after day, week after week, to rail against her own Government here at Westminster, while the 13 Scottish Conservative MPs loyally traipse into the Lobby to put through the hard Brexit and everything else that is upsetting for Scotland.

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[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.

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[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

I thank the hon. Members for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Lesley Laird) for their sartorial support for this debate, with the former’s Union Jack dress and the latter’s dress with a flower of the Union in Northern Ireland—the orange lily—displayed so prominently. In fact, I was thinking of pairing them—

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

With the tie of the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard)?

[Sammy Wilson]

An orange tie. They would blend in well at that great celebration of Unionism in Northern Ireland on 12 July.

The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) has challenged and mocked this as an irrelevant debate that has just been thrown in at the end of the parliamentary term, but this is an extremely important debate for the people of the United Kingdom.

Speaking from a Northern Ireland perspective, I know that the Union is not just academic or some kind of constitutional thing. People in Northern Ireland died fighting against a terrorist campaign to ensure that we stayed within the Union. This debate is important, because it is important that people right across the United Kingdom understand the value that they personally, their countries and their regions obtain from being part of the United Kingdom.

There are, of course, the economic benefits of being part of a country that is the fifth largest economic power in the world, which means that people in Northern Ireland have access to the internal market. Some 66% of the goods we produce in Northern Ireland find their way into the market of the rest of the United Kingdom, sustaining hundreds of thousands of jobs.

I mentioned in an intervention the fiscal transfers within the United Kingdom that ensure that the parts that require them, because of either geographic disadvantage, historical disadvantage or the changing structure of their economy, receive the money to sustain their economies. Some might argue that the transfers are not enough, but the fact is that we benefit from being part of a large economic unit. Of course, we also benefit from the protection of the security umbrella that the United Kingdom affords to us. Again, we benefit from the United Kingdom being a major international military power. As independent nations, none of us could ever sustain those things. In Northern Ireland, of course, we benefited within our own territory when we had the support of the military in defeating the terrorist campaign we experienced for 40 years.

There is also British soft power, with the connections that a country the size of ours has across the world. I could go into a lot of examples, but just recently the jobs of 6,000 workers at Bombardier in Northern Ireland were sustained because of the connections that this country’s Ministers have with Boeing and with the United States Government. They could make the case for protecting those jobs and for ensuring that Bombardier was not closed out of US markets.

I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) will mention all the historical connections, such as in the names of towns. Londonderry, of course, owes its importance and its prosperity to the merchants from London who went there, invested in and improved that part of Northern Ireland. Newtownards in his constituency is a new town formed by those who came to settle there and develop the economy.

The Union is important to all of us, and I have given examples from Northern Ireland. Of course, the Union is always under attack from nationalist elements, and we have heard that here today. All countries, all relationships, go through difficult times, and it is easy to say, “Ah, but if we were in a different kind of relationship, it would be better.” The grass is always greener somewhere in the distance, and we have heard a lot of examples today—“If we were not part of the United Kingdom, we wouldn’t have to suffer this and we wouldn’t have to experience that,” but, as I have said, as independent countries we would face all those problems without the support of the bigger Union.

The most recent example has been Brexit. Nationalists in Northern Ireland have used Brexit to try to drive a wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Despite all the nationalists’ arguments about Brexit, the surprising thing is that the latest poll by UK in a Changing Europe, which is not sympathetic to the Brexit cause—indeed, I do not think it is sympathetic to the Union—found that, even with all the propaganda that has been spread, only 21% of people in Northern Ireland would vote to leave the United Kingdom.

I do not accept the argument made earlier that Brexit means dividing Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, which is not our main market anyway. Indeed, only last week, the EU and the Irish Government confirmed—indeed, they boasted about it—that, even if we left without a deal, no infrastructure would be placed along the Irish border. That is not me saying it, it is not a Brexiteer saying it, and it is not a partisan person saying it; this is the EU negotiators, who had been telling us that the border was an insurmountable problem. Suddenly it is not when they want to give reassurance.

I will quickly make a few points on what can be done to strengthen the Union, because I want to keep to the 10-minute limit. First, we have to make sure that there is a fair deal for all parts of the United Kingdom. I criticise this Government too, but Labour Governments and Conservative Governments have both fallen into the same trap, with policies often tending to be London-centric or south-east of England-centric, without considering the impact of tax and trade policies, for example, on regions. In Northern Ireland, we are sitting with a land boundary with a country that has done away with air passenger duty and reduced VAT on hospitality and the tourism industry, skewing the market. Again, when devising policies on a national basis, it is important that we consider their local impact.

Secondly, we have to celebrate important events around the Union, and there will be an opportunity in the near future, when Northern Ireland comes to its centenary in 2021, to celebrate the fact that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. I hope they will be not just Northern Ireland celebrations but national celebrations. We recently had the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the RAF, which gave a reminder of its importance to the nation in a colourful and dramatic display. Those kinds of things can be unifying to a nation.

Thirdly, recognition has to be given to the fact that there are devolved Administrations. Although they cannot override national policies, proper consultation should be undertaken and proper cognisance given to the views of devolved Administrations.

Lastly, it is important that the Government are not seen to be centralised here in London, which means that we need to spread out the administrative arrangements and administrative facilities across the UK, so that we know we are part of one nation and we can be proud of that and of our long history. Everybody across the UK needs to be aware of the sacrifices we share, as well as the benefits, so that they become supportive of the Union.