Debate on the Address

It is important to remember that many of the men and women who stood duty outside the House for the ceremony for the opening of Parliament today have just returned from conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. Although the ceremony is rather ignored by the public, it is an important part of what we do. I pay tribute to the soldiers who made the ceremony what it was and performed to the highest professional standards. Unfortunately, the Queen's Speech did not match those standards. I am always surprised to hear Her Majesty the Queen use a new Labour turn of phrase when she reads out the speech. It is getting better in her 10th year of reading it—she obviously likes phrases such as ““inclusion””, ““step change”” and ““working in partnership””. Doubtless it will be our privilege one day to ensure that her speech is of a slightly different tone. I want to consider several Bills, which I believe to be important. The constitutional reform measure is clearly important, but the elephant in the room is the West Lothian question. I am a former Member of the Scottish Parliament and I therefore sat in a devolved Parliament at the beginning, in 1999. I am acutely aware of the constitutional settlement and that, as a Member of the Scottish Parliament, I could discuss anything from hunting to education in my Parliament, as it was at the time. The people of Scotland had a choice—funnily enough, in a referendum, for which the Government provided—and more than 70 per cent. made the decision. In this House, I am the second-class Member of Parliament; the second-class citizen. It is unfair of the Government to pretend that that is not the case. I cannot ask questions about hospital policy in Kirkcaldy, Paisley or anywhere else north of the border, but Members of this House who represent those constituencies can ask about hospital policy in my constituency. That democratic deficit and constitutional imbalance must be solved because I am a Unionist. I do not follow the end agenda of the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) and the Scottish National party. I do not want the United Kingdom to break up. I went into the Scottish Parliament as a Conservative and Unionist, to try to ensure that the United Kingdom was a stronger place. I remember that the Government claimed that devolution would see off the nationalists. That was one of their main claims. The late Donald Dewar used to say that the nationalists would be finished with devolution. It is interesting that we have a First Minister in Scotland who is from the Scottish National party and that, if my understanding is correct, there is power sharing with a Welsh nationalist in the Welsh Assembly. The nationalists are certainly not dead; they are alive and kicking. As the consequence of a vandalised constitution and an unfinished project, I see English nationalism on the rise, and I am not a nationalist; I am a Unionist. Unless we face those issues and try to find a solution, the Union will not last in its current form. To attack hysterically any offerings from the opposition parties—from the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives—as meaning the break-up of the Union is to raise the level of hysteria in a way that will only feed English nationalism and encourage the nationalists in Wales and Scotland to stoke it up. The Government need to be mature on the issue. There is a democratic deficit that must be put right, but the constitutional reform Bill simply skips that issue. We do not know the details, although no doubt the Government will offer us regional grand committees as a sop, but that is not the solution. I implore the Government to be grown up about the debate in the next year. If they are not and if they are not prepared to discuss the whole United Kingdom, I fear that we will end up with a bodge job and we will be attacked for asking the West Lothian question. That is not surprising, because Scottish Labour, which I saw in action in the 1980s and 1990s, used to go round Scotland saying that everything from the Conservative Government was anti-Scottish. It did not say that the policies were against people from low-income backgrounds, nor did it attack them on their merits or failings; it attacked them as being anti-Scottish. Scottish Labour persuaded the Scottish people that anything that came out of Whitehall was, in the end, anti-Scottish. That is why the percentage voting for the Scottish National party is now about 30 per cent. Scottish Labour persuaded enough people in Scotland to think that perhaps independence is the right way to go. Should the Conservative party come to power because we have more MPs in England, my fear is that the Scottish Labour party will resort to type and go back to its old ways, instead of saying, ““Well, in the United Kingdom you take the rough with the smooth.”” In the 1970s the Wilson Government was, in effect, imposed on England by Labour MPs. Again today, the Labour majority is made up of Scottish and Welsh Labour MPs. We could easily spend our lives going round saying to the English, ““It'd never happen, you know, if we just get rid of Scotland and Wales,”” but we do not say that. One has to take the rough with the smooth in the United Kingdom. The problem with the current devolution settlement is that it was peddled by saying, ““You'd never get the Tories in Scotland if you had a Scottish Parliament,”” but the Government have not thought it through. I hope that there are measures in the constitutional reform Bill to beef up pre-legislative scrutiny. One of the good things about the Scottish Parliament was that pre-legislative scrutiny was the de facto procedure. It was not in the hands of the Government to decide not to have it. I would like more of that. I would like a beefed-up Intelligence and Security Committee that has a power of investigation and is responsible to the House, not the Prime Minister. We will face more and more measures dealing with national security, so we need the confidence that the House has a handle on the security services and the agencies that will inevitably become ever more powerful. The Serious Organised Crime Agency is responsible to only one person, the Home Secretary, and is totally unaccountable to any democratic review. We must beef up the Intelligence and Security Committee. This leads me to the proposed counter-terrorism Bill. It is amazing, given that the Government's proposals for longer detention without trial were rejected, that they have returned to the issue. They say that this is because more and more people say that they need to do so, but the evidence is not there yet. The Government have not presented any evidence that there are terrorists out there who need to be held for longer than 28 days without charge. We were told that control orders were going to be a great success, yet three of the 18 people being held under them have absconded, so they are not much cop. Why should we believe the Government this time if they could not get it right the first time? I worked in counter-terrorism, and I can tell the House that locking people up without trial will lose the Government the consent of the community. Without that consent, they will not be able to recruit informers or to counter terrorism in the long run. Their proposals represent another short-term short cut, so that they can say that they are doing something about counter-terrorism. The United Kingdom already has the longest detention period without trial in the western world. We are the only ones doing this, so why do we want more? If the Government start to imprison people from the tight-knit Muslim communities in my constituency for longer periods, their sources will dry up. I have yet to see much evidence that suggests otherwise.