Scotland Bill

My Lords, I am not going to make a speech about the relevance of the definite article, but I wonder whether my noble and learned friend might help me by giving some understanding of why it was felt necessary to change the name of the Scottish Executive to that of the Scottish Government, but not at the same time to change the name of First Minister to that of Prime Minister. Given that we apparently have a Scottish Government and a Scottish Cabinet, why has he not felt it necessary to make a change to the title of the leader of that Government? I ask that question not in order to make mischief but to underline the point as to what is going on here. The Scottish Executive were called the Scottish Executive with very good reason: in order to demonstrate that power devolved is power retained, and that we did not have competing governments in a unitary system. If you are going to have separate governments, you have to have separate roles within some kind of federal structure. I do not know whether my noble and learned friend even considered changing ““First Minister”” to ““Prime Minister of Scotland””. Looking at the behaviour of the First Minister in Scotland, Prime Minister is probably not a grand enough title—there may be other titles which would be more appropriate, given the all-encompassing role which he carries out—but in order not to delay proceedings, I will not elaborate on that matter. I would be most grateful if my noble and learned friend could explain to me why it was thought necessary to change just this aspect of the nomenclature of the Scottish Administration.