Scotland Bill — House of Commons, 2015-07-06
Topic: Public Lands
Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): What my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) provides is the Castlebay answer to the Scottish question, to which the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) should listen with great care. It is always put forward with the ultimate good will I am in a race against time because I have 3% power left in my iPad and I want to read into the record the following quotation: "The Scottish Government agrees with the Islands Councils that marine activities in the territorial waters of Scotland adjacent to the islands can have impacts on the community as well as delivering financial benefits to the local economy. The Scottish Government committed in Scotland's Future to ensuring the island communities benefit by receiving more than 50 per cent of Crown Estate seabed leasing revenues The marine assets of island communities are key to their future and the wealth that is generated should be reinvested to safeguard that future. The Scottish Government will therefore ensure that 100 per cent of the net income from the islands seabed is passed to island communities." That is a clear statement from a document entitled "Empowering Scotland’s Island Communities", which I launched as First Minister last year with the three island convenors from the three island authorities, and which was broadly supported, particularly because it made the point of support not just to local authorities but to island communities, and it encompassed all the island communities of Scotland There was a similar declaration of intent in the principles agreed in the Smith commission. The bona fides of the Scottish Government on this matter, I may say to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), have just been demonstrated massively in the general election in the support that was gained across these communities and in Orkney and Shetland in particular. Given these substantial bona fides, the agreement and the Smith commission, why on earth does he feel it necessary to write into the Bill what the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government should do with powers that are devolved There is nothing in the actions or performance of the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament, and the massive support that they have received across island communities, that should put anyone in any doubt of the intent, once the Crown Estate revenue is devolved, to make sure that our coastal communities and our island communities benefit in full measure. It is the very antithesis of devolution to write prescriptively into legislation what will be done after the powers are devolved. From someone who admitted in the Chamber today that he could not find agreement, or consensus, as he put it, when he was Secretary of State for Scotland to get the power devolved in the first place, it takes substantial brass neck to put forward the amendment that he tabled Speaking of brass neck, although he does it so elegantly, the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) was found out three weeks ago by jumping to the bait of —I was going to say the tabloid press, but the tabloids were innocent in this matter; it was the disreputable press—The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, The Times and so on, added to on this occasion, disgracefully, by The Guardian and Channel 4, which leapt on to the totally misleading, erroneous story that a plot was afoot to cut the Crown revenue. As has been pointed out factually, the Crown revenue does not come from the Crown Estate. It is merely used as a proxy for the level of the royal grant The hon. Gentleman attempted to reinterpret his mistake and his charging in to get a few column inches—I had better call them inches in his case, as opposed to centimetres—in those disreputable newspapers, by telling us that it was some elaborate ruse to tempt out the monarchist tendencies in the Scottish Government so that he could ensure that those loyalist noises would come from the Scottish Government, as they were outraged by the very suggestion that any republican sympathies had broken out. The hon. Gentleman would have done himself more credit if he had just said, "The press got it wrong and I got it wrong, and we should all look before we leap where these matters are concerned."