English Votes for English Laws

Wayne David Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Eagle]

I think the McKay commission, which was convened by the Government, made some sensible suggestions, and I am surprised that they were dismissed so easily by the Government.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a major constitutional issue, and that what is therefore required is a non-partisan, non party-biased approach, which, sadly, is lacking?

[Ms Eagle]

I agree with my hon. Friend that changes of this kind are much better made on a cross-party basis, in an attempt to reach consensus, than by means of the partisan, semi-secretive process with which we are now faced.

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[Ms Eagle]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Scotland Bill is the result of an all-party agreement made in the middle of the independence referendum by party leaders. It was called the “vow” at the time and it was led by the Prime Minister, with whom I know the hon. Gentleman has a love-hate relationship. A vow was made to the public of Scotland that that had to be delivered, so it is a bit difficult to say that we were not going to deliver it until after a constitutional convention. But evolving devolution and the settlements evolving at the moment surely make the case for us to have a more holistic look at how we deal with a range of issues, including the fact that the other place is now 900 strong. We read today that the Prime Minister has tried to get another 100 peers appointed to the other place, while we are trying to see the size of this place shrink. A constitutional convention should be taking a serious look at a range of issues so that we can balance our governance arrangements once more.

[Wayne David]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, to be fair to them, the last Government did begin a process of consultation, establishing the McKay commission to look into the whole issue? It took a great deal of evidence, and produced an interesting and, in many ways, sound report, but this Government have chosen to put that in the bin and make a set of half-baked, partisan proposals.

[Ms Eagle]

That is part of the problem: we have never had an explanation from the Government as to why the very sensible, well-debated, well-researched views of the McKay commission have been completely disregarded.

We appear to have a Government in a hurry to offend and to govern by provoking grievance and division, which is no doubt why they laughably refer to themselves—

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[Wayne David]

I am grateful to my colleague for giving way on the question who takes an interest in these matters and who is present today. Does he agree that it is notable that so few English Members are present to debate English-only laws?

[Pete Wishart]

I am looking round the Chamber and I see the usual suspects—those who take a real and deep interest in these matters—but I expected the Chamber to be full. Apparently, this was one of the most important issues during the election campaign. English votes for English laws was the issue that most upset the Conservatives’ English constituents in the general election campaign, and the slogan was, “100 days to deliver English votes for English laws”.

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[Pete Wishart]

There’s a thought and a prospect! We already know that there could never now be a Scottish Prime Minister or a Scottish Cabinet Member for any of the devolved areas, such as Health or Education. John Reid, for example, would never have been able to do his job. I do not miss that, but this is how having two classes works its way through.

[Wayne David]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree—this is my understanding—that not only will the Speaker make a certification, but he or she will not be able to give reasons for it?

[Pete Wishart]

Worse than that, the Speaker’s certification will not be open to challenge. Because of parliamentary privilege, there will be no means to challenge it.

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[Ian C. Lucas]

In the Committee I will not be able to move the amendment, because I will not be a member of the Committee, and I will not be able to vote on the amendment. Members from England will have twice as many votes as I will, even though our constituents go to the same hospitals—as is the case with the constituents of my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson). It is outrageous.

[Wayne David]

My hon. Friend has made a series of powerful and practical points about what the proposals might mean in practice. Does he agree that the NHS in England is so large, compared with the NHS in Wales, that it has a huge influence on Wales, which Wales does not have on England?

[Ian C. Lucas]

That is certainly the case.

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[Wayne David]

Another relatively small example—people might think it is such—shows the complexity of the situation we are talking about. In the run-up to the first police and crime commissioner elections, a mistake was made in Westminster because the election ballot papers were not bilingual. The legislation to correct that had to come from Westminster because it was an electoral matter, and it was done belatedly. Westminster clearly has the power to legislate on some Welsh language matters.

[Ian C. Lucas]

I was talking about the implications of giving Welsh MPs—dare I say it?—the same rights as MPs from England. Let us suppose, for example, that a future UK Labour Government dependent on Scottish and Welsh votes for an overall majority wished to lower tuition fees in England, and this was vetoed in a Committee comprising English Members only. After the Committee, the Education Secretary would have to defend in the House a policy with which he disagreed. In effect, he would be the Education Secretary for England, but England could have a Conservative majority. A Labour Minister cannot be responsible to a Conservative majority, so the logical solution would be to have a Conservative Education Secretary. However, there cannot be two Governments at the same time, one for devolved matters and the other for non-devolved matters. A Government have to be collectively responsible for all their policies, not just a selection of them. That is the type of situation that the Standing Orders will create.

The Standing Orders will, in practice, increase the Conservative majority on English devolved matters from 12 to 105 at a stroke. When Labour set up the Welsh Assembly, there were no Conservative MPs in Wales at all. With a majority of more than 150 in the House of Commons, the Labour party introduced an additional member voting system in Wales to ensure that there was a balanced representation within the National Assembly for Wales. The hon. Member for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach) would not have been elected to the National Assembly for Wales because she kept losing under the first-past-the-post system.

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[Mr Jones]

I was coming to exactly that point. As I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Wrexham, a mechanism has to be devised so that in areas of doubt, of which there will be many, the Speaker can apprise himself of Members’ views and take any wider evidence he requires to make that determination. It seems to me that there would be nothing to preclude him from doing so on the basis of the draft Standing Orders as they stand. My suggestion to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is that an amendment to the draft Standing Orders should be made in order to accommodate that very procedure.

[Wayne David]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an extremely important point, and I can well understand the validity of his case. However, he suggests an interpretation of the draft Standing Orders which means that the Speaker may be asked to make a subjective decision. I suggest that that is fraught with difficulties.

[Mr Jones]

As I just said, it seems to me that a further amendment should be made to the draft Standing Orders to accommodate that.

I am conscious of your strictures about time, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I want to say to my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that I raised this issue as long ago as 16 December 2014 with my right hon. Friend’s predecessor, William Hague, who said in reply to my question:

“In respect of a small number of cross-border issues involving a strong structural dependence—health care in Wales is one such instance—there is a strong case for a wide definition of what constitutes an English matter, so that others can be involved.”—[Official Report, 16 December 2014; Vol. 589, c. 1276-67.]

I ask the Government Front-Bench team to consider that. It seems to me that a sensible amendment could be made to the draft Standing Orders as they are now, in order to accommodate this issue of structural dependence, which is not properly addressed at the moment. As an instrument, the Standing Orders are somewhat blunt as drafted, and need to be refined.

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[Sir William Cash]

May I speak quite bluntly? As it happens, I have great affection for Members of the Scottish National party. They know what they are fighting for and what they want, and it is called independence. Let us not be fooled, however. The hon. Gentleman has put his finger on it. The plain fact is that SNP Members do not like being outvoted in the United Kingdom Parliament. That is what this boils down to.

The hon. Gentleman has touched on what “devolution” actually means. He may or may not agree with this, but the greatest constitutional experts, Bradley and Ewing, define it as follows:

“Devolution is not a term of art in constitutional law. Unlike federalism,”—

on which the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire constantly harps—

“the nature of devolution within the United Kingdom depends not on a written constitution, but on the legislation authorising the devolution and on the practice that develops on the use of the new structure for decision-making.”

They go on to say that

“devolution has been defined as involving ‘the delegation of central government powers without the relinquishment of sovereignty’”.

That is what the greatest experts say. If SNP Members go off and speak to their constitutional law experts in Scotland, they will find that they do not disagree. Mr Ewing comes from Scotland anyway.

[Wayne David]

The hon. Gentleman’s quote is constitutionally and historically correct, but does he agree that a central tenet of established constitutional practice is that all Members of Parliament should be equal? These proposals will drive a coach and horses through that by creating inequality among Members.

[Sir William Cash]

I shall not cite the obvious George Orwell quote that comes to mind about all animals being equal, because that might be thought to be rather disrespectful. However, the bottom line is that the hon. Gentleman is just not right. When we create different functions, voters expect the Member of Parliament who represents them to be accountable for those functions. This is not a great mystery or great science. It is a simple question of where the lines are drawn. They were drawn by the United Kingdom Parliament and that is where the matter stands.

I want to remind Members about the Scotland Act 1998, although not many who were in Parliament at the time are still here—

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[Mr Grieve]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. I will come back to it, but I will now move on because I do not want to take up too much time.

To move from the general point to the particular one, I accept that what we are debating strikes me as imperfect, but I am afraid I happen to think that a lot of things we have done recently in respect of devolution are imperfect as well. I emphasise that I differ from my party on the vow, not because I think it is wrong to give more devolution to Scotland—there is a powerful argument for saying that Scotland should have more devolution than we are giving it—but because the process we have embarked on appears to me to be essentially incoherent. It is like a car driving along a road and lurching one way and then the other in a series of spins. I do not think that that is a productive way to operate in the long term, but we are where we are.

The proposed Standing Orders are essentially very modest—they really are. I am very pleased that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House listened about extending the period of debate and that the Procedure Committee will have an opportunity to look at them, but they are modest. They constitute about as small a shield to English susceptibilities as it is possible to devise. In my view, they will not in any significant way diminish the role of MPs as a collective group in this House.

[Wayne David]

What was the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s considered view of Sir William McKay’s proposals?

[Mr Grieve]

The McKay proposals were good, but they preceded the vow. Once we got to the point of further devolution, they started to look rather inadequate. That is precisely the problem.

Although these measures are not perfect, they meet my constituents’ needs. I have one major anxiety, which has been highlighted before, and it is over the process of certification by the Speaker. If we are moving down this road, it would be better to proceed by way of primary legislation, followed by a change to Standing Orders. There is a question over whether these measures are justiciable. I am perfectly familiar with article 9 of the Bill of Rights, but that does not mean that somebody will not have a go at doing it. In a Parliament where we are increasingly passing power out, to emphasise constantly our sovereignty and expect nobody to scrutinise the different arrangements that we are bringing about seems, in the long term, unrealistic.

That brings me to my final point. My view is that these measures can only be temporary. I am aware that there are other Members across the House who take the view that if we are to preserve the Union of the United Kingdom, we will have to take a much longer, harder and, I hope, more consensual—although that is often difficult to achieve—look at the way in which we conduct our affairs. As I put my Unionism absolutely at the forefront of my political life—I believe that is what my constituents want, too—I am prepared to consider major constitutional change, including moves towards a written constitution. In my judgment, that is probably the only way to provide a framework in which the highly complex and different needs of different parts of the United Kingdom can be addressed. That is not a popular theme because it touches on Parliament’s sovereignty, it certainly touches on article 9 of the Bill of Rights, and I do not for the life of me see how it could ever be done without making the constitution capable, ultimately, of being interpreted by a court. That raises equal problems, but I do not think that they are ones that, in the long term, can be ducked.

I believe that people in the United Kingdom—the evidence of this is overwhelming from the Scottish referendum last year—wish to operate and live together. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) was so right when he said that it is none of our business to put our personal needs, Parliament’s needs, the Scottish Parliament’s needs, the Welsh Assembly’s needs or, for that matter, the Northern Ireland Assembly’s needs before the needs of our citizens. We are here to respond to their concerns.

One thing that underpins my Unionism—this has become harder and harder to stick to over the years, but I have done so—is the belief that the interests of people in Wick, Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and the hometown where my family originated, Hawick, must be every bit as relevant to me as those of my own constituents in Beaconsfield, and must continue to be so even if, as I pointed out earlier, I can no longer intervene on their behalf in the way that I did in the past. Once the Scottish National party starts to consider that, it will appreciate why some of its arguments against the proposals this evening show it in a rather poor light. It is the pot calling the kettle black in respect of comity within the United Kingdom.

The only solution is for those of us who have some goodwill in this matter—that includes SNP Members if they wish to exercise that goodwill—to participate together to create a new structure that will be lasting and enduring for the whole country.

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[Alex Salmond]

There are two reasons why William Gladstone did not come up with the dog’s breakfast before us.

[Wayne David]

I think, from memory, that the quote was, “It is beyond the wit of man.”

[Alex Salmond]

I thought that there was a bit of shoulder in there, but none the less I will accept the hon. Gentleman’s correction, which is well meant.

So these things have been considered before. First, given my experience in the House, to accept the blithe assurances that everything will be all right on the day of the Committee would be extremely foolish, and I am glad the hon. Member for Belfast East does not accept them, and rightly so. Secondly, these matters have been considered, and Tam Dalyell is correct: there are two absolute answers to this question. There is also a third, which my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) has proposed and which is that we could have a federal situation under which we define what the federal Parliament does and what each national Parliament does. That would work as well, although the predominance of England as a nation within these islands makes federalism difficult, but none the less it could work in constitutional terms. What will not work is what is on the Order Paper.

We are told this is the burning issue—the great issue—facing English Members of Parliament, and not just English Members: we are told that the people across the nation of England talk about little else in the pubs, in football grounds or in their living rooms. They are all talking about EVEL, so we are instructed. We are also told this is the great issue Conservative Members have to face so early in this Session. Yet when we come to debate it—let us congratulate the Leader of the House on making the concession of having a debate—what happens? I have come into this debate a number of times through the day and—I shall try to put this as kindly as possible—the Government Benches have not exactly been overflowing with Conservative Members.

In fact, all the speeches in the past couple of hours have come from this side because of the paucity of Conservative Members in the Chamber. The explanation for that paucity could be that the state of arrogance that has set in among Conservative Members is such that the debate does not really matter to them because the result will go their way at the end of the day. They will see it all right in September and they will get their way, so why should they turn up today? An alternative explanation could be that this matter is not the great issue of state that we were assured necessitated the proposals before us.

I want to spend just a second illustrating the full enormity and absurdity of the document that has been distributed to hon. Members. The content of the paragraphs is bad enough. I have read the one headed “What about Finance bills” a number of times and I am none the wiser. However, I suppose that all the information is crystallised in the remarkable diagram on page 5, which is entitled “Outline of model”. This is meant to make everything clear and to help hon. Members understand the purity of the process. It has been pointed out that a further four stages could be added to the passage of Bills through this House. There is the potential for legislation to become frozen in aspic and totally stalemated. There is also the potential for ping-pong. That can happen between here and the House of Lords anyway, but the proposals seem to offer many more opportunities for ping or pong. The fact that we need a diagram that looks more like the Duke of Wellington’s formation at the battle of Waterloo than a serious coherent proposal for a legislative process should tell us that what is being proposed has not been fully thought through.

There was a reason why William Gladstone did not believe there was an effective answer to the Irish question in relation to the proceedings of this House, back in the 19th century. There was a reason why Tam Dalyell did not think there was an effective answer to the West Lothian question, short of having a unitary Parliament or independence for Scotland. There is also a reason why Bill McKay’s committee did not propose a veto for English MPs, and it is that such proposals will be injurious to the rights of hon. Members and, indeed, to the people they represent. That point was made earlier, and it is absolutely correct. These proposals will create different classes of Members of Parliament with different rights before the House. They will also put the Speaker in the invidious position of having to certify Bills in a way that will deprive certain Members of the rights that other hon. Members have.

I think that I know how the Deputy Leader of the House of Commons will sum up the debate, because she has given certain information to other hon. Members earlier. She is going to rest her case on the security that the financial estimates are within an envelope and are decided in accordance with the Budget resolutions. She will also say that that determines the Barnett consequentials, regardless of what happens. Having been the First Minister of Scotland, I can tell her that that is not the case. A range of things can happen that will alter the Barnett consequentials. Movements between departmental expenditure in the UK can alter them, because the consequential is different for each Department.

We have heard constant reference to the example of tuition fees for England and Wales. If that issue were voted on, the vote would not impact on that year’s financial envelope. A decision was made to raise the top-up fees for English students at English universities, and it was voted through by Scottish Labour MPs—to their great shame—in January 2004, if I remember correctly. The proposal was opposed by the SNP, the only party that has consistently opposed tuition fee increases for English students in England, but the vote was carried by a majority of six.

The argument put to us by the Conservative party and by the Labour rebels back in 2004 was that, if the Blair proposal went forward on tuition fees, it meant, as surely as night followed day, that direct expenditure on education and universities in England would decline and loan spending—loan allowances for students—would increase to enable them to pay the fees. There was not a direct Barnett consequential in that year within the financial envelope, but a policy decision that had been made affected the finances of the Scottish Parliament—of course it did; the logic is inescapable.

I am therefore glad to see the Leader of the House returning to his place. I hope that when he reads Hansard he does not think I have been too ungracious towards him. [Interruption.] He says surely not, but I was just reflecting that I thought it was unwise for him to attempt this patronisation of the hon. Member for Belfast East, because a number of examples from before the Leader of the House was a Member of this House tell us exactly why his proposals are inadequate. No Leader of the House should come here with a document that is clearly inadequate and blithely tell hon. Members to accept assurances that he cannot possibly give if he has not written them down on paper. The spatchcock nature of these proposals illustrates why if the Conservative party, without any great support from its Back Benchers and without any coherent argument, wanted to bring this forward, it should have done so as legislation to be properly scrutinised, not as this codswallop. We have been presented with it last week and re-presented with it this week, and unless the Leader of the House mends his ways and changes his tone and his direction, no doubt we will be re-presented with it in September. I do think that he will rue the day he ever got involved in this total, absolute nonsense.