English Votes for English Laws

Debate between Wayne David and Alex Salmond

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[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.