Scotland Bill

The margin of winning may have been very narrow but I certainly know where I stand. I am happy to debate with my noble friend outside but let us just say that there were very few bright lights that night and maybe we should savour them all. My third point is that I am grateful to the Government, the usual channels or whatever the processes are, which I have never quite got to grips with in this place, for the level of cross-party engagement to manage the order of consideration of the Bill. Having been party to that agreement I shall resist the temptation to discuss referendums and questions relating to referendums in this contribution. However, I will break that general rule in order to make one point. It struck me as very interesting—indeed, instructive—how quickly the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, who came to the aid of Alex Salmond, went from trying to persuade us that the proposed question was straightforward, via one very simple but telling intervention by my noble friend Lord Gordon, to a position of having to try to define one word of it in order to explain why it was straightforward. If I had had the opportunity to cross-examine him further, I suspect that we may well have got a long dissertation from him on that comparatively simple and straightforward question that would have left us all utterly confused about whether a yes or no answer would have made us any the wiser about the view of the people of Scotland. However, these are discussions for another day. Having agreed this with the Minister, as well as with other Members of the House and with the coalition Government, I shall resist the temptation to say more. At the outset of my remarks, I will assert that we on the Front Bench of this side of the House take the view that the Bill, while not perfect—nothing ever is—is good. It is a Bill that we wish to scrutinise and consider in detail, but it is a good Bill for two reasons in particular. It will deliver greater financial accountability to the Scottish Parliament and it will devolve significant economic powers, among others, that will unable that legislature to govern better in the interests of the Scottish people. In deciding how we proceed with the Bill, it is important that for a few moments we consider how we got to where we are. Whatever the current view of the Scottish Parliament's committee, the Bill has its genesis in the Scottish Parliament. On 6 December 2007 that Parliament, by a clear majority, passed a Motion to review its powers in order to serve better the Scottish people. As we heard from noble Lords, this was a cross-party initiative involving the Scottish Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties. It is probably well known that, of the major parties in Scotland, only the nationalists refused to participate, preferring to adopt a fundamentalist, all-or-nothing approach to these issues. The most important point is that the Scottish Parliament, which we are now told holds the key to the decision of the Scottish people, expressed an overwhelming view that it wanted to proceed down this route. Those who are now in government in Scotland—democrats that they are—refused to recognise that as a legitimate decision, and refused to take part. The second point is that this is an exceptionally good example of what my noble friend Lord Foulkes encouraged devolution parties to do: namely, work together in the interests of Scotland. There is a long history of parties who believe in devolution working together in various ways, most recently in the Parliament itself, in the interests of Scotland, and we should not be ashamed of doing that. If some people believe that working together exposes us to criticism that we are in bed or working with certain people who are either toxic or irrelevant to Scotland, we should cast that away. If we are to achieve our objective of more devolution for Scotland within the United Kingdom, we will have to work very hard together over the next couple of years, and the sooner we find a structure for working together to do that overtly for the people of Scotland, the sooner we can get down to debating properly the issues that the Scottish people want us to debate. We have to put all of this behind us. If we believe that in a referendum campaign it will not become apparent that we are all working together and that we all want to preserve the union, we are deluding ourselves. The sooner we get together to do that, the better. My noble friend's advice in relation to that is worth heeding. Following the decision of the Scottish Parliament in 2008, when I was Secretary of State for Scotland, the Calman commission on Scottish devolution was instructed to review the devolution settlement and to determine ways in which it could be strengthened to increase the financial accountability of the Scottish Parliament and to give it the levers necessary to introduce progressive policies to allow Scotland to blossom in the 21st century. We in your Lordships' House have the benefit of Members who were on the Calman commission. Indeed, we have two very prominent members of the Calman commission in the noble and learned Lord and my noble and learned friend who will speak from their respective Front Benches. Others in the Chamber who have already made contributions to this debate will tell us how the process worked. It was a very open process for the people of Scotland, and a very recent opportunity for Scotland—its political parties, its civic society and anybody who had an interest in the way in which Scotland was governed—to argue and give evidence to the Calman commission about the powers of the Scottish Parliament. It is interesting that what has now become known as ““devo-max””—whatever that is—was comparatively absent from the arguments that were made to the Calman commission. There were no significant, coherent arguments about lacunae in the powers of the Scottish Parliament that the people of Scotland thought they needed. I was not a member of the commission, but I am sure that those who were—I invite the noble and learned Lord to confirm this when he speaks—will confirm that that was the case. It was not 20 years ago; it was comparatively only yesterday in the history of Scotland. So it is interesting to try to figure out exactly who are the people who have a whole host of other powers that they think would be useful for the people of Scotland in the context of devolution, and what their arguments are. The first question we ought to ask them is: ““Why did you not surface these during the course of the Calman commission? Why did you not come and make this argument?””. The debate about Scotland currently tends to be one-sided in its detail. We have seen another recent example of this in relation to the legal basis for a referendum for Scotland. I congratulate the noble and learned Lord the Advocate General on the speech he made at the University of Glasgow last Friday evening. He may have breached the convention that the Government do not reveal their legal advice when he laid out in the clearest terms why this Scottish Parliament required legal help in order to have the power to do what it seeks to do, and for which it undoubtedly has an electoral mandate. I was in the audience. He spent a long time afterwards engaging with questions. Nobody challenged the advice. Some people implied that they did, but they did not set it out. He was asked questions about everything other than that, and he answered them very well. I hope that that does not sound patronising; it was not meant to. He handled it very well and I was very pleased; he knows that because I spoke to him afterwards. Interestingly, I spoke afterwards to others in the audience—I am tempted to name them, but I will not; they know who they are—who suggested that they disagreed with him. I offered them then, and I offer them now, the opportunity of the same platform to make the same quality of speech and to set out the arguments that they think support the alternative to the position that the noble and learned Lord put over. They had a whole series of biblical excuses about why they could not do it; there were all sorts of reasons to do with their backgrounds. I noticed yesterday that when the consultation by the Scottish Government was announced—they are perfectly entitled to do that—the issue was skated over. My point is that it is incumbent on us when we have this debate to be not just progressive in the sense of looking forward but to be detailed, informed and researched. Up until now, the Government, in relation to this issue in particular, have been detailed and researched and they have, in my view, won the argument comprehensively, but there are many other arguments that they need to win. To get back to how we got where we are—