Scotland Bill — House of Lords, 2015-11-24
Topic: Government Operations
George Foulkes (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, for his very statesman-like maiden speech—I was going to refer to it as "Ming’s maiden speech" but that might not be appropriate in this setting. It was a tremendous tour de force. I am also very much looking forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, who I know well from the other place As a number of Members will know, not least my noble friend Lord McAvoy on the Front Bench, I have been an enthusiast for devolution for a very long time. I argued for it in the 1970s and was very disappointed at the result of the 1979 referendum, when, although we had a majority, we did not get over 40% of the vote. We were all disappointed but we pulled up our skirts—or our kilts—and fought again and we managed to get it in 1997 in the general election and in 1999 in the referendum. We were very pleased about that. The constitutional convention in Scotland—with, let us be honest, the SNP and the Tories on the sidelines—came up with a great scheme. At least we thought it was a great scheme. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and I served on that constitutional convention and many compromises were made, as he knows I must confess—and I know the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, will say, "I told you so"—that, on reflection, the Scottish Parliament and particularly the electoral system have not functioned as we had hoped and expected. We were told that that electoral system would not result in an overall majority. Yet in 2011 we saw the SNP, with only 45% of the vote, get an overall majority: 69 out of 129 seats. Let us be honest about it. This is something we all have to face up to, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Smith, but everyone here. It may not be known by some of the people south of the border that the result has been an SNP hegemony—control by one party—in Scotland The SNP does not just have a majority in the Parliament, but there is an SNP Presiding Officer—it did not see fit to let another party have that job. There are SNP majorities on every committee—which never criticise, unlike our committees in both Houses of this Parliament. Civil society, through a succession of carrots and sticks, is becoming increasingly subservient to SNP dominance, as are the media. We saw that one of the committees of the Law Society seemed to have been taken over. There are the voluntary organisations: we saw a £150,000 grant, without any submission, being given to T in the Park because there was a little bit of elbowing by someone very close to the SNP Of course, there are no checks on the power. There is no "House of Lairds"—or, even better, a Senate—that might hold the SNP to account. It has total control. Let us not pretend. My noble friend Lady Liddell—I call her the Secretary of State Emeritus—and my noble friend Lord Maxton said this. Everything the SNP does is subservient to its goal of independence. We must never forget that. That is what it is doing. If it agrees, it is a tentative agreement. It is done just because it is expedient to do so at the time. As the noble Lord, Lord Lang, said, we have had three Scotland Bills. The tax-varying powers in the 1998 Bill were never used. The second Bill in 2012 led to the Calman commission and all those powers—tax-raising powers, borrowing powers, the revenue Scotland created—but very little recognition or credit was given to this Parliament for giving that kind of devolution. The SNP keeps asking for more—this Oliver Twist syndrome, which is part of the slippery slope towards independence. That is how the SNP sees it As the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, said, the 2011 election provided the SNP with the 2014 referendum. With no disrespect to the Prime Minister, he was conned by Alex Salmond into deciding that it should be yes/no—and the Electoral Commission went along with that. It is not doing that for the European referendum, which is not going to be yes/no; it is going to be "withdraw or stay in". Of course the SNP made its proposal the yes proposal because it is good to be positive. It chose the date. It used all the resources of the Scottish Civil Service to argue its case Then, just as we were getting near, there was that flawed YouGov poll—and it was flawed. It was out of kilter with every other poll. That led, as my noble friend Lord Maxton said, to the unnecessary vow. It led to panic. It led to the Smith commission. With no disrespect to the noble Lord, Lord Smith, that was rushed and we have ended up with an unworkable proposal. That created the momentum for the 2015 victory; it led to the SNP being elected with—well, it was 56 seats, then it was 55, now it is 54; they are toppling one by one through various means What have we got in Scotland? We have an Education Minister who cannot string two sentences together, a Justice Minister who does not seem to see the need to meet with the chief constable regularly and a Health Minister who is totally oblivious to the failings of the Scottish health system. They are not exercising their powers. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, made a very eloquent plea for the SNP to improve services in Scotland, to improve education, to have innovation and new ideas in the health service, and to improve the justice system to get fewer people in prison—all those kinds of things which it promised it was going to do but has not been doing. It has let the services take over while the First Minister and her Cabinet Ministers go around the country for photo opportunities, campaigning for independence. That is exactly what they are doing—let no one be in doubt about that In an intervention that I made on the Minister, I asked about the now increasingly likely event that the SNP will see that it is going to get these proposals but will be worse off in financial terms than it is currently under the block grant and will decline legislative approval for the Bill. It might well do that. We are in a very difficult position because the Government have no plan B. The Conservatives are doing this and everything else on an ad hoc basis. As for the truth of what went on between the First Minister and French ambassador, I still believe that she did say to her that she would prefer Cameron as Prime Minister to Miliband, because it serves the SNP’s purpose to have a right-wing Tory Government making cuts, doing the kind of things that the people of Scotland do not want. What is the alternative? The Minister could well ask me what my plan B is, but I have said it again and again. It was great to hear the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, come in and say it and to hear the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, say it again. We have the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Pittenweem, and we have heard this now from the Constitution Committee of this House on a number of occasions. What we need is a UK constitutional commission to work towards a federal or a quasi-federal system to deal with the English democratic deficit, to include Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and to provide an opportunity to consider proper Lords reform at the same time. There is a growing consensus for that, and the only people who do not see it are the Government. If the Government continue to fail to understand this and what is happening in Scotland, I warn them now that independence is inevitable sooner rather than later. It is about time that the Conservative Government woke up and did something positive to protect the union.