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

My Lords, we have reached the part of the debate where everything that can be said has been said, but that has never stopped a Welsh Peer—and, may I add, a United Kingdom Peer—from making his own contribution. I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lady Adams, who, in that wonderful tradition of non-partisan docility of Scottish politics, made a contribution in the full traditions of this house. I would be the last person in the world to imagine that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has any partisan motives in what he has put forward. He has spoken as an academic looking dispassionately at the constitution. For me this debate is a happy moment of nostalgia; a return journey to the 1970s, when we had such wonderful debates. It is rather like a bad film—this is where I came in. Most of the issues raised today were raised then. At the time, after a brief sabbatical, not of my own choosing, I had returned to the House of Commons in 1974, when my own party in the previous four years had reached an agreement on devolution. I felt that a number of questions had not been addressed, and, alas, was labelled, along with the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, and others as the ““gang of six”” who asked questions about anomalies, and indeed flirted with ideas such as having an indirect assembly brought from local authorities in Wales, which would go some way to meeting the problem—which was, I concede, far less acute in Wales than it was in Scotland, without the separatist implications. We knew that, although the nationalists were joining with the majority of the Labour Party on devolution, they had a very different agenda: splitting the United Kingdom. We had those debates. Some supported us by night—I think I called them the ““Nicodemus faction””. They included Viscount Tonypandy, who gave us every possible encouragement. I myself was converted to devolution during the 1980s by the policies of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, who was a recruiting sergeant for many in Wales and even more in Scotland. However, I still accept the main point made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker—that many of the constitutional implications remain unsolved, and perhaps will remain so unless we have a more radical look at our constitution. But my experience over those years taught me one clear thing about the British way of doing things—we are not very good at constitutions. We stumble along. We often sleepwalk through minefields without noticing and without reference to the longer term implications of what we are doing. So far as I am aware there is no real precedent in the world for devolution in what is essentially a unitary system. Institutions are not static, they are dynamic, and those within them will seek to move them further along the path. The problem with devolution in a unitary system is that there are no constitutional barriers to moving further along that path, and the usual deals between parties and coalitions and so on might lead to one going further along that path than one would choose. The problem would be very different—I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, may mention this—in a federal or quasi-federal constitution with clearly defined powers and barriers and with a supreme court to act as an arbiter; otherwise, there is a danger of moving step by step to fragmentation. Therefore, we should all agree with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that there is, indeed, a problem, but I reject his solution as dangerous in its implications. Why do I say that the cure is worse than the problem? The noble Lord talked about anomalies. Are we not under our constitution in a House which is an anomaly in itself? So far as I am aware, there is no precedent for a House of this nature, but perhaps someone mentioned Swaziland once. Is it not an anomaly that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, should institute a Bill in this House telling the other place what it should do and what should be the responsibilities of the Speaker? Surely a non-anomalous position would be if the other place itself were to start this Bill. The problem—the in-and-out situation, or whatever—as many noble Lords have said, was raised Cato-like in its persistency by Tam Dalyell, but his motive clearly was that he was against devolution as such. I believe that Tam Dalyell would be the first to concede that. The starting point now is that the devolution settlement, after its teething problems, is settling down pretty well. Where there have been problems at the edges, they have, in a very British and pragmatic way, been solved, by pre-legislative consultations, by meetings in Wales—which, obviously, I know best—between the Assembly and Parliament, and by the proposals in the current Government of Wales Bill about Orders in Council, so, pragmatically, we are, indeed, moving to a reasonable solution. My judgment is that the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, would make Welsh and Scottish MPs second-class citizens here and give a major boost to English nationalism, which in my judgment is not in the interests of anyone. In short, he is playing with fire by encouraging fragmentation. Scottish and Welsh Members of Parliament are, indeed, United Kingdom Members of Parliament. The budget which they vote will affect every part of the United Kingdom. Certainly, every Bill will have budgetary implications that affect us all. Incidentally, tinkering with the constitution has implications elsewhere. The point has been raised about the relevance of this Bill to the House of Lords. Yes, we do not have territorial or constituency responsibilities but most of us have particular links with areas. I wonder how we would seek to divide this House in the way that the noble Lord seeks to divide the House of Commons. For example, it might be done according to where someone has been born. I looked in Who’s Who and Dod’s to check where the noble Lord, Lord Baker, was born. He is rather coy about this, because it was not in Dod’s nor in Who’s Who. I should be proud if I had been born in Wales; in Newport in Gwent. I should say so, so that everyone could hear it.