Parliament (Participation of Members of the House of Commons) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, for introducing this Private Member’s Bill which is giving us the chance to debate the permutations of what may be answers to Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian question. I enjoyed the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Adams of Craigielea, and I hope that we will hear more from her in future. I shall speak first from the perspective of the Hanoverian settlement and then from that of the Stuart settlement, which will be true to myself. The orthodox unionist view must be that there are four responses to the West Lothian question. It is worth remembering that the West Lothian question has two manifestations. One is that of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Members voting on to the statute book legislation otherwise devolved elsewhere, especially when the government of the day does not have a parliamentary majority in England. The second is the presence in an England-only department of a Minister who is a Member for a Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish constituency. It has already been mentioned that Dr John Reid was the finest example of that when he was Secretary of State for Health in England. The first response to the West Lothian question is to take a deep look into the Scottish political psyche and muse on the 293 years during which English Members voted into being Scottish domestic legislation and, in so musing, to enjoy some schadenfreude. That is the ““do nothing about it”” option. The protests that are believed to be arising about this in England betray the real truth. The treaties of union of 1536, 1706 and 1800 were the embodiment of England’s political desire to dominate the British Isles. That political aim began to unravel in the case of Scotland in 1885 and, most definitely, in Ireland’s case in 1922. No doubt, English Ministers of the time would have claimed to have been doing that in the name of security. However, all our former local enemies are now fellow members of the European Union, the UN and NATO. The next option must be the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. It has some merit. On the face of it, it aims to prevent MPs from devolved areas voting on English domestic matters. If only it were that simple. As Scottish experience since 1999 shows, UK Bills often require the co-operation of Scottish Ministers or the use of devolved services, in part, for their implementation. I can see that the Speaker would have to certify parts of Bills, possibly clauses of Bills and perhaps even subsections of Bills. That would be quite complicated and probably too difficult. I am also surprised that the Bill does not prevent Peers resident in Scotland voting on English domestic matters. I find that the Bill throws up real problems of governance: a UK government without a three-figure majority would be unable to legislate for England. The third option is to legislate for English devolution in one of two forms. I favour the creation of an English devolved Parliament, but the alternative is the creation of English regional assemblies. Those bodies must have real legislative powers. I reject the regional approach because England is a superpower with 50 million people and the fourth largest economy. It ought to be a single entity. This solution would clearly leave the United Kingdom with a more uniform constitutional structure and the United Kingdom Parliament would deal with reserved UK matters only. It would be a proper federal structure, and my noble friends would like it. However, the line between devolved and reserved activities would have to be redrawn in the light of experience since 1999. It has already been said that Messrs Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling got into a muddle over Schedule 5 and decisions on the Forth road bridge tolls. Confusion is quite easy, even for those who designed the system. I shall leave those who believe in the Holy Grail—the Hanoverian settlement and its parliamentary unions—with their four options and shall consider further possibilities. The creation of a United Kingdom was embodied in the 1503 marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor and was inaugurated by the short-lived Treaty of Perpetual Peace, which collapsed 10 years later on Flodden Field. James IV and his Ministers clearly saw that the security of Scotland could be achieved by a union of the Crowns. That occurred 100 years later when his great-grandson James VI became King of England, Ireland and, fancifully, France in 1603. As a Stuart-style unionist—and I had better mention that I am a member of the independence convention—I am very content with the constitutional architecture of one Crown and three governments of international standing. Not everything in the Stuart era was brilliant, and I do not seek to uphold most of it. However, the future of the United Kingdom or, even better, the British Isles, lies in the earlier manifestation of the United Kingdom. Since Scotland is now submerged within an unnecessary parliamentary union, I believe that the English-speaking peoples of the British Isles would benefit from the resumption of statehood by Scotland. People who live in Scotland would feel better about themselves as a small Nordic-style state, rather than as a small part of a superpower and I suspect that the world community would benefit from the re-emergence of Scottish statesmen in international institutions. They could bring a different British Isles perspective to the top table, as the Irish have definitely done in recent years. I must ask the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, to whom I believe I have given written notice in writing, about the procurement of a referendum for Scottish full autonomy. Last week, the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General was unable to give me any answer to this question. Since I believe that the resumption of statehood is a matter that ought to come from the people, not from any political party or within any multifarious election manifesto, a referendum should be triggered by a petition from the people. So, if this Government were presented with a petition with more than 1,000,000 signatures, as the United Government were in 1950 in the case of the national covenant, would this Government ignore such a petition for a referendum? I hope that the noble and learned Lord will tell the House how the United Kingdom would be prepared to receive such a popular request. This really must have a declared democratic route. Clearly, that would be a big step for Scotland, and I must acknowledge that there would be big issues about, among other things, the budget and the submarine base. The former would be a difficult process of adjusting to the funding of a small country and its different range of government activities ceasing to be part of a superpower. The latter could be dealt with as a treaty port, as was the case in the Irish treaty negotiations in 1922. That said, I must thank the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for allowing us to discuss solutions and responses to the West Lothian question and for the chance to look into our constitutional history and seek what I believe to be the real answer. I shall watch this Bill with interest, both from the point of view of amendment and to see whether the House decides to send it to a Select Committee for further examination of the possible solutions.