Scotland within the United Kingdom

My Lords, I want to add something about understanding the context of what happened in those last 10 days. I am deeply worried. I absolutely welcome the publication of the Command Paper today and fully congratulate everyone involved in the campaign. Many on the other side of the argument conducted themselves well—not everyone but most people. We are now in a situation where expectations have been raised almost exponentially by the vow given in the last 10 days of the campaign. None of the three main parties’ proposals published today meet that expectation. The discussions that take place over the next few weeks must be serious. They must look at the detail of what my noble friend Lord Robertson, the noble and learned Lord and I spent weeks, months and years in the mid-1990s looking at when trying to get tax and financial proposals right for the Scottish Parliament. Unless these discussions are meaningful and go deep into the detail, we will not reach a settlement that will stand the test of time, even if we also solve the other issues in the United Kingdom that have been mentioned by noble Lords. I ask the noble and learned Lord to urge all those involved to be very careful. Having raised the expectations, we do not want to bring them back down again and find ourselves in a never-ending debate and unable to move on to other issues.