Scotland Bill

My Lords, when I saw what my position I was on the list of speakers, and recognising the lateness of the hour, I was tempted to start by saying that everything I want to say has already been said and that I will therefore not make a speech at all. However, I decided against it. I have been a supporter of devolution for a long time. Throughout the whole of my parliamentary career I have campaigned for it. In fact, if noble Lords look back through history, they will find that my uncle, Jimmy Maxton, was one of the signatories to the 1924 Private Member’s Home Rule Bill for Scotland, introduced by one Geordie Buchanan; so even the family history, let alone my own, is good on it. I have always supported devolution because it is part of the process of moving to a more democratic state, where decisions are taken by people at the appropriate level for them to be taken. Therefore devolution for Scotland was right. When my noble friend Lord O’Neill started attacking the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Lang, I thought he was going to attack them because they did push the whole question of devolution forward. During the 1980s, there was an increasing democratic deficit in Scotland whereby legislation could be introduced down here without having a majority of Members in Scotland. In fact, over the years, there was a decreasing number of Members in Scotland. Of course, the introduction of the poll tax, for which both noble Lords can take some responsibility, was probably the thing above all that pushed people in Scotland to accept that there had to be a better way of running their affairs in Scotland. Devolution did not start in the 1970s. Arguably, it was started in 1885 with the introduction of the office of Secretary of State. Bit by bit, over the years, there has been a gradual increase in the number of things that Scotland has been allowed to do—separate Scottish legislation, the Grand Committee, and the Grand Committee meeting throughout Scotland, which the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, introduced. All that has been part and parcel of the process of increasing democracy. When my late good friend Donald Dewar said that it was a process, not the end, I am sure he meant that it was part of a democratic process that had to go on. In Scotland, we have not shifted democracy further down to the levels where people ought to be taking more decisions—in their own societies and communities. Nationalism has stopped that. Nationalism has been the enemy of the democratic process, not its friend. That is not because the SNP is an undemocratic party—I believe that it believes in democracy. The problem has been that every time anyone suggests that there should be some form of change to the democratic process—more devolution, more powers to Scotland—the SNP says that this is yet one more step towards independence. That is wrong; we must not allow that. That is why, in my view, the SNP and nationalism have been the enemy of democracy. That has also stopped us saying that some things might be better done taken away from the Scottish Parliament and given back to the British Parliament or to the European Parliament. There is a whole broad band of things that we might look at, but we do not look at them properly or logically in a democratic way; we look at them in terms of how they relate to nationalism and the SNP's agenda. That is wrong. Therefore, we ought to be doing three things. First, we ought to be arguing the case for the union as strongly as we can. My noble friend Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale—I am the only person who knows where Glenscorrodale is and has been there—who is not in his place at present, was quite right when he listed the organisations that had to make the case. He missed one out, which is the most obvious. We must persuade the Scottish media to be prepared to listen to our arguments and not just those of the Scottish National Party. I wrote at least three letters to the Herald during the election campaign; the Herald refused to take them because it said that they were too political.