The hon. Gentleman is right. In the past few days, we have had the Scotland Bill and a series of amendments that the Scottish Parliament decided were necessary. They were agreed with the Scottish Parliament. We put the amendments to the House— 56 out of the 59 democratically elected MPs from Scotland, reflecting the will of the Scottish people in those amendments. What happened? English Members voted them down. If EVEL is good enough for them, what about WVWL, Welsh votes for Welsh laws, or ScVScL, Scots votes for Scots laws? English Members are happy to turn up to Scottish and Welsh questions, as they should, but this has to work both ways. We cannot have English Members voting down the settled will of the Scottish people that comes to this House though 56 out of the 59 MPs and then demanding that we have no say over legislation that will have an impact on—a severe one in some cases—and have financial consequences for our constituents.
There is an elegant solution. It is called federalism. It is called doing things properly, and that is what we again put to the House. We do everything in terms of collecting our taxes and making our own decisions, and we come together in the United Kingdom Parliament to determine foreign affairs and defence issues. We put that elegant solution to the House. As long as we have asymmetric devolution, which never seems to satisfy English Members, our Welsh friends or us, we will always be revisiting the arrangement and it will always be untidy. There will always be problems and issues, but that is what the Government want and they will have to accept the consequences. It will never be neat and tidy. We will always have issues to deal with and tidy up.
Unless we adopt the solution, which we will offer again and again throughout this Parliament, whereby this nation comes as close to federalism as possible, as was promised during the referendum, we will never resolve a situation in which one nation makes up something like 80% to 85% of the population of this country. Unless we get close to federalism, we will continue to revisit this issue, we will never resolve it and we will have debates, like this one, in which no one is happy about something in the United Kingdom. We have great unhappiness in Scotland, England and Wales. For goodness’
sake, let us sort it out and get it fixed. Let us have federalism and ensure that everybody knows what they are dealing with.
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