It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard). I do not agree with all his conclusions, but I enjoyed his speech, which was a passionate tour de force. I will speak from a text, so I will be sharper and a bit more focused, I think.
I am very pleased that we are having this debate. It can be quite tempting for the media who report on Parliament to assume that nothing important happens in the final days before the House rises, but the question of how best to strengthen the Union is absolutely the kind of debate that it is useful to have at this point in the parliamentary year.
Worrying about the state of the Union is a perennial occupation of British politics. It was not a new idea in 1601, when we had the Union of the Crowns. It has to be remembered that that was achieved by the King of Scotland becoming the King of England. I will come on to unhelpful narratives about the Union later, but suffice it to say that the myth of English domination does not really bear scrutiny.
In the corridor outside my office, there is an extract from The Illustrated London News of 10 August 1895. By that point, the Union had begun almost three centuries before, and one would be forgiven for thinking that it was relatively secure. But, even then, people were worrying about the Union.
“What does Unionism really mean?”,
two ladies ask their kindly Victorian vicar. “It means”, he replies:
“union of a mighty nation, union of national interests and, ladies and gentlemen, union of hearts”.
One hundred and twenty-three years on, that seems as good an explanation of why we have the Union and how it works and binds us together as any we may find. I encourage colleagues to have a look at the extract. It is conveniently located just off the Committee Corridor, and—I am pleased to say—a very short walk from the SNP offices.
Today also happens to mark the end of my time on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, three days short of eight years of continuous service. I would like to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friends the Members for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) and for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) for their chairmanship and friendship and to all colleagues past and present I have had the pleasure and honour of working with over the last eight years.
I am not presenting my absence on the Committee as an especially great threat to the strength of the Union, but it does give me pause to consider the situation in Northern Ireland today. There remain too many of what we euphemistically term “legacy issues”, violence is too quick to flare up and there remain a number of people well-trained, well-equipped and motivated to cause serious
disorder and loss of life. The legal status of the soldiers and security personnel who kept Northern Ireland and all the UK safe by fighting terrorism remains in question, while the Executive and the whole question of power sharing have been suspended for 18 months.
Unionism means we cannot just look at these problems as if they were distant from and unconnected to us. If Unionism is to mean a union of national interests and of hearts, as I believe it does, we should apply ourselves to these questions as if they were within our very own constituencies. I welcome the fact that the Government have taken direct action to ensure that good governance and public services continue. Again, if Unionism is to have any real meaning, the British Government, in the absence of a devolved Administration, must be willing and able to do the right thing.
The answer to the question, “How can we strengthen the Union in Northern Ireland?” is self-evident, and has been repeated time and again in this House: there needs to be a power-sharing Executive restored, an Assembly back in action and a lasting commitment to devolved government. While people from across the UK should support both sides in the process of restoring the Executive, we should all be equally clear that narrow, partisan, party political games are unacceptable.
Nevertheless, we must not allow the challenges facing Northern Ireland to blind us to the real strength of the Union, both there and elsewhere. Devolution is continuing apace in Wales, with the Assembly transformed into a fully-fledged legislature with responsibility not just for spending taxes but for raising them. The strength of devolution, though, and the reason it is good for the Union, is that devolution does not mean separation. I am proud to have both the Great Western line and the second Severn crossing in my constituency, which overlooks the Severn estuary into Wales. Wales and the south-west have extremely close links on every level, and I am proud that the world-renowned defence and aerospace industries in my constituency are daily enhanced and empowered by the contribution of commuters from Wales. That is soon to be helped dramatically by the abolition of the Severn bridge tolls.
The thing we can do, not as parliamentarians but as members of the Union, to most strengthen the Union is to fight the false narratives that suggest it was imposed on the nations of the UK. Throughout the centuries of the Union, men and women from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England have come together to do wonderful things and have improved the world massively. The contribution that each nation of the United Kingdom has made to the world is immense and it is an honour to be in a Union with all. We must not let win out the voices that claim that the English or the Union itself hold them back or oppress them. We must all remind one another what this great Union has achieved through free association and, as the Victorian vicar put it, what we can achieve through this union of nations, union of national interests and union of hearts.
6.43 pm