Scotland Bill

I am most grateful to the right reverend Prelate, but the vow is something that was dreamed up, as I said at Second Reading, by the editor of a tabloid newspaper, the Daily Record. The party leaders, some of whom are no longer with us as party leaders, who signed up to it were unaware that it would be presented on the front page of that newspaper as a vow. It is the old story. When you complain to an editor about a newspaper story, they always say, “I am terribly sorry. It was the subeditors who wrote the headlines and they did not really read the text”. In this case, that is the status of the vow. I hesitate to intrude on the right reverend Prelate’s territory, but I certainly would not confuse it with the marriage vows, which, in my own case, I took as being absolutely permanent and for life. My worry about the Bill is that this marriage of the United Kingdom is being turned into a system where we appear to be living apart from each other, in houses next door to each other with different regimes operating in those houses, but that is for another day. I beg to move.