Scotland Bill

It is discrimination, but I do not think that a little discrimination is any better than a lot of discrimination. The fact of the matter is that there has been discrimination for 10 years, and we have established in this debate that no serious attempt has been made across the United Kingdom to deal with it. I will deal directly with the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Selkirk. There is an argument, and I am attracted by it, that we reserved to this Parliament the right to deal with issues of discrimination and that, as a matter of law, we can deal with it here. I am not learned enough in the law in this area to know whether that is so, but as a matter of law, in terms of devolution, we can deal with anything; we are the sovereign Parliament. We do not need to rely on the reserved area to claim our right to deal with it—we can deal with anything. This is politics and we are doing this in the context of probably the greatest challenge that the union of the United Kingdom has faced in any of our lifetimes. Those of us who believe in this union are trying to manage a difficult political situation in which all of the parties represented in the Scottish Parliament have their DNA in this discrimination to some extent. I exclude the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, from that. We now decide in an entirely opportunistic way—encouraged, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, points out, by the nature and the scale of the discrimination—to deal with it by imposing these conditions. And when do we do it? We do it at a time when a Government Minister can come to the Dispatch Box and say that they have just negotiated a legislative consent motion to deliver this Scotland Bill, which is the policy of all our parties after weeks if not months of negotiation. We are just at the point where we can do something that can ensure that all the negotiations and discussions are wasted. We are back to square one again, back into confrontation and back into giving those who lead the Scottish Government the script that they want: that the unelected House of Lords has told the people of Scotland what they can do. They will say, ““They give us devolution with one hand and then take it away. They let us use it for 10 years and then, when we use it in a way that they don't like, they take it away. That is exactly why we need to be independent of these people””. This is bad politics in my view. There is a way forward. We should accept all of our responsibilities for the situation that has been created by the actions and the interactions of the Government at the UK level with the history that was left to the Nationalists when they became the Scottish Government and the challenge that they faced in terms of university funding. We should sit down together and try to resolve the situation—not in the interests of whether we have the right to impose this but in the interests of the young people whom we want to live, work and be educated together for the benefit of the United Kingdom. That seems a much more sensible way of dealing with the situation, rather than trooping through the Lobbies tonight and making a point which will be to the detriment of the issue that most of us feel passionately about—the preservation of the union. The other point is that, because we have the benefit not only of the briefing of Universities Scotland but the benefit of the contributions to this debate from the noble Lords, Lord Sutherland and Lord Vallance, we are not in a position, other than by assertion, to say what the consequences of our decision, should we choose to support the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, in his Division, will be on the students who are expecting to go to Scottish universities this year or on the funding and future of those universities. There seems to be enough doubt about that that we have to be very careful that the combination of these two amendments, which the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has ingeniously put together, will resolve this and not cause the problems that four pages of briefing from Universities Scotland tell us about. I may not be in a position to make the arguments as to which is right, but there is enough doubt in my mind that I am not prepared to change the status quo, because I am persuaded by an argument that, emotionally, I think is right. Finally, I say to my noble friend Lord Foulkes, whom I respect enormously, that this is not a free vote as far as we are concerned. We support the maintenance of the status quo. I am happy to support a call for both the Government of the United Kingdom and the Scottish Government to try to resolve this, but this is not a free vote. This is a whipped vote, as far as our party is concerned.