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

My Lords, those who review this debate will surely agree that the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Adams of Craigielea, marked a real high point. We all listened to her with great interest, and some of us rather welcomed her understanding of the conventions and customs of this House and believe with her that the custom of uncontroversiality may be more honoured in the breach than the observance. As she said, in a wholly uncontroversial way, the linkage between the Scottish National Party and the Conservatives has been clearly brought out in this debate, most notably in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market. We understand what she was driving at. We look forward to hearing from her again on many matters, and we are delighted that she is with us. The question also has been raised about the appropriateness of the debate stemming from this House. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, thought that unsuitable; and that was an uncontroversial way of expressing the thought. It does seem very strange—and will seem strange to people from outside this House—that we should spend two hours discussing how to reduce the powers of certain Members of the House of Commons, without considering the anomalies to which this House gives rise. The truth is that the Bill, which we are grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for introducing, since it gives us an opportunity to discuss issues that are worthy of discussion, invites us to consider some of the afterthoughts about the devolution settlement. I disagree with him that these are pressing issues for the people of England or anywhere else in this country. They are of some interest and have stimulated some debate, but, compared with other issues which are constitutional in nature, such as the need to recognise the demands of our public to have greater and more effective control over the Executive, this problem is minor. The Bill can best be understood as the partisan response of the Conservative Party to its declining appeal to the electors of Scotland and Wales in particular. In the general election in 2001, no Conservative Member was returned to Westminster from Scotland. In 2005, one Conservative Member from Scotland was elected. Today, we learn that, in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election, despite the incursion of the new Conservatives with their new leader, David Cameron, that party came a rather poor fourth. It is not necessary to look further for an explanation for this Bill. The party which in Scotland used to label itself the ““Unionist party”” has adopted a new mantra—if you can’t beat them, ditch them. That is comparable to the actions taken by the Conservative Government. It will be well remembered that the government of the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, of which the noble Lord, Lord Baker, was a senior member, decided to dispense with the Greater London Council. If you could not beat Ken Livingstone at the polls, then remove his power base. That approach has been a tradition in the Conservative Party, but it is one to which this House should give no support. It may be deduced that the Bill is partisan in motivation from a comparison with proposals, made with the quiescence of the Conservative Party, regarding the full participation of its MP allies from Northern Ireland from 1922. I do not think that we have heard from the Conservatives before in these debates about how unacceptable that principle was. That is not hard to understand. The Conservative Party has not traditionally displayed any squeamishness when it has held power in Westminster about foisting its doctrinaire conservative policies upon parts of the United Kingdom which have clearly rejected them. A number of noble Lords have alluded to the signal example of the poll tax. I remember particularly well the reform of local government when, accompanied by leaders of district councils from all over the Highlands, I petitioned the then Secretary of State, now the noble Lord, Lord Lang, against proposals to dispose of those local authorities and embrace them all in one Highland regional council. Were we listened to? No, we were not. We were turned away at the door. Those of us who represented Scottish constituencies, as I did for 35 years, experienced that time and again at the hands of unsympathetic, oppressive Conservative administrations with a declining representation north of the Border. It therefore strikes me as particularly tasteless and unsympathetic to come forward with this proposal today. It has within it potentially the most disastrous results for our Union, which that party has so long pretended to value. Alas, it is only when the Conservative Party is in opposition that it is prepared to dress up naked self-interest in the mantle of constitutional principle, invoking Burke and Mr Gladstone when speaking on a Bill which at the time they opposed root and branch and whose principles they never accepted and do not accept today. I happen to believe that this country would be wise to move towards the adoption of a written constitution. I very much sympathise with the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Judd, who attempted to put this debate and the questions that it raises in the much wider context of concern about the direction of our constitutional settlements and how we might seek to ensure coherence and balance of representation in the Westminster Parliament. I doubt whether a royal commission would obtain any greater support on this issue than did the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, who spoke earlier in the debate. But I commend the general principle of putting the test to the people. That example, which might be commended to the noble Lord and, indeed, to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, who spoke earlier on similar lines, is perhaps that which we can recall so vividly in Scotland of the Scottish Constitutional Convention. That represented a very broad cross-section of the public in both institutional and individual terms. Some such arrangement is more likely to produce a long-lasting settlement than will a committee, however distinguished, of the great and the good. If we do receive such a settlement which attempts to deal with the desideratum of tidiness—it has to be said that tidiness has never characterised the British constitution, and the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, was right in his historical description of how it has come about—then we may think it appropriate to look, as a number of noble Lords have suggested, at federal examples as the way to ensure that this Parliament of Westminster treats the constituent parts in equal fashion. However, in moving with the proposals of the Bill, it has to be said that a hybrid English and United Kingdom Parliament would produce some rather dangerous fall-out consequences. I draw the House’s attention to a particularly interesting article in today’s Financial Times, written by Professor Vernon Bogdanor, the distinguished Oxford tutor of Mr David Cameron. He points therein to the practical difficulty for the Speaker in determining which Bills might be deemed ““English”” for the purpose of excluding non-English Members of Parliament from participation. He quotes the conclusion of the 1973 Royal Commission on the Constitution:"““Any issue in Westminster involving expenditure of public money is of concern to all parts of the United Kingdom since it may directly affect the level of taxation and indirectly influence the level of a region’s own expenditure””." He goes on to point out that the size of the block grant to Scotland and Wales depends on expenditure in England—another point made in that distinguished maiden speech. Substantial reductions in health and education expenditure in England could, through cuts in the block grant, have a knock-on effect in Wales and Scotland, which might run entirely counter to the policies of the Scottish and Welsh devolved and elected governments. Perhaps the greater anomaly that would flow from the Bill is the splitting of the collective responsibility of the Cabinet. That may be the undeclared intention of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. While all may participate on overseas questions, some might have to be excluded from consideration of health and education, affecting perhaps 90 per cent of the United Kingdom public. Conservatives have not always been so anxious to exclude the Celts from our counsels in Parliament. In this House we listen with attention to the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, from Wales, and to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, from Scotland, and to what they say on any matter before us. It is not so long since the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, broke what seemed to be a convention by appointing the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern—a Scots lawyer—to preside over this House and to head the English judiciary. Such anomalies have been accepted with equanimity when the individual is perceived to have the stature required for the position. Is the Bill intended to cut Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and John Reid down to size? Will it exclude, by consequence, the possibility of their becoming Prime Minister of this country? I note that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in his customary sedentary position, intervenes to deny that.