Scotland Bill

My Lords, it had not been my intention to speak in this debate but the nature of our discussion since the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, introduced his amendment has spurred me to my feet. A lot of the debate we are having today is the debate we have been having in Scotland for the past 50 years. The argument for devolution began at the time of the Act of Union. Had the Act of Union been framed in a different way, there would have been no need for devolution. The noble Lord was Secretary of State for Scotland some years before I held that post. When he was Secretary of State for Scotland he oversaw the equivalent of 13 different government departments because of the nature of the legislative settlement post the Act of Union and the growth of Scottish legislation; namely, everything from the nature of the Scottish church to the nature of the Scottish legal system to the nature of Scottish education, and then some. I am a committed devolutionist. I came to it rather later than some of my colleagues, such as my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. I came through the trade union movement and looking at some of the issues that affected trade unionists in Scotland and the history of the very distinctive Scottish Trades Union Congress, which has very different origins from the Trades Union Congress. It is rooted in communities rather than in organisations and its history grew from that. Out of that I became committed to devolution. I have to say that I have been extremely sceptical about this legislation. I do not disparage the work of the Calman commission. I pay tribute to it. In another time and place, it would have been appropriate to have this legislation. But I have to say that the people of Scotland are not remotely interested in it because there is a bigger debate. There is a more significant debate that we need to enter into. Some of it has been touched on today and it is unfortunate that, in this kind of forum, very little of it will be disseminated to the people of Scotland. Yesterday in this Chamber we saw the start of a debate about the future of this House which has a devolution relevance. If we were in a situation where we were looking, not in a haphazard way, at the development of the British constitution, we would be looking at the role that this Chamber can have as part of devolution, not only for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London but how the regions of England fit into it as well. However, we have not gone about our constitutional change in a coherent way: we have done it in a piecemeal way and now we are running to catch up. I have been a parliamentarian for a number of years—although not as long as many people in this House—and my major regret about the Bill is that there is a real sense of, ““Well, we have started so we have got to finish””. When this Bill began its process the debate in Scotland was different in nature from the debate that we are having today. I would do nothing to prevent this Bill from reaching the statute book—whom am I, an unelected representative, to do so?—but I regret that, in looking at the issues involved, we did not properly address matters such as the Barnett formula. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, said when he was talking about the consequences of fiscal autonomy, we keep parking the Barnett formula. I hate to admit it but I was around when the Barnett formula was drawn up, together with the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, and the redoubtable Joe Haines, in the late 1970s. No one envisaged that all these years later the Barnett formula would still be the hook that gets us out of trouble. We have to be consistent and coherent, as the noble Lord, Lord Barnett, has been, when looking at the Barnett formula. It is unfortunate that, while we have included within this legislation fiscal, taxation and other changes, we have not taken the opportunity to look properly at the Barnett formula. I join with others in commending the work of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness. Since I came into this Chamber I have discovered that every time there is an intractable problem it tends to be the noble and learned Lord who is put up to the Dispatch Box to deal with it. It is a measure of his skill and good humour that we have got to where we are today. It is inevitable that we will be revisiting these issues because the world in which we are coming to our conclusions today is so different from the world in which we started this process with the Calman commission and in the other place. We have learnt a lot from this debate but, like my noble friend Lord Maxton, I believe it should perhaps have been done in a different time and in a different way.