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'Members of the House of Commons representing constituencies in Scotland may continue to participate in any vote in that House unless the Speaker deems the vote to relate to matters exclusive to England, or to England and Wales.'.
New clause 19--Restriction on voting rights of Scottish Members (Committees on English Affairs)--
New clause 22--Voting rights of Scottish members of the United Kingdom Parliament--
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow):
The guillotine falls at 5.30 pm, so we have 50 minutes. I hope that the Lords have a serious discussion of the clause, because it represents a geological flaw in the Bill.
With the benefit of the marvellous advantage of hindsight, we can see that it is perhaps unfortunate that, in 1977, the late Enoch Powell invented the sobriquet "the West Lothian question" as shorthand for the real dilemma with which I wearied Michael Foot and the late John Smith, who was doing the job now performed with less overt bad temper by my hon. Friend the Minister for Home Affairs and Devolution. If my hon. Friend entertains exasperations when I speak, he is better at concealing them than John Smith was.
I have come to believe that Mr. Powell did the argument a disservice, because the shorthand tends to camouflage the real dilemma, which is not about parliamentary niceties or, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State put it, the Schleswig-Holstein question, but about the exercise of power and the principle of direct relations between government and the governed. Power devolved is not power retained.
Mr. John McAllion (Dundee, East):
Hear, hear.
Mr. Dalyell:
My hon. Friend says, "Hear, hear," and his interpretation is important; we do not want him, my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk, West (Mr. Canavan) and my other hon. Friends to feel deceived.
In practical terms, I do not suppose that matters will come to a head during this Parliament, in which one party has a majority of 180. The size of the majority submerges the problem. As soon as Holyrood, or Strathclyde house, or whatever we call it, is inaugurated, the Chief Whip will have to get along without my vote on purely English business.
The self-evident problem becomes acute when a Government party has to depend on its favourable majority in Scotland to get its English business through the House of Commons. Then the Government really will be asked: how come whoever is the Member of Parliament for Linlithgow or for Livingston can vote--and vote decisively--on policies for Liverpool and London on matters that not only English Members but Scottish Members cannot trespass upon in relation to Linlithgow or Livingston, unless of course, clause 27(7) will be operated differently from how we have come to believe?
To put it in practical terms, I suppose that it is really the Two Feathers in Hebden Bridge question so beloved of Bernard Ingham. I will spare the House the expletives, but the Two Feathers question is this, "What are all those . . . jocks doing coming . . . telling us what to do when they've got a . . . Parliament of their own?"
That is the question that will be asked. Therefore, my question is, how long can such a situation last? It simply cannot endure in anything like the form that the Bill proposes. Whatever else it is, the Bill is not a settlement. The deal must not be seen by the English majority, either at the outset or as experience builds up, as giving Scotland one-sided privileges and advantages of an unacceptable type and scale.
We all have to curtail our speeches, so the House will forgive me for reading one quotation from Sir Michael Quinlan, one of the cleverest civil servants of his generation, who was called in by John Smith to tackle precisely those problems. Writing in The Independent on 2 January 1995, Sir Michael said:
Finally, judging by all the arguments so far, I see no reason to retract the view that I expressed constantly and daily during the referendum, that, unfortunately, we are on a motorway without exit to an independent state.
Mr. John Major (Huntingdon):
I echo the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. MacGregor) about the utter unacceptability of the fact that the time permitted to discuss this, perhaps the most crucial and central part of the whole Bill--the part upon which this whole constitutional experiment may founder to the damage of the whole United Kingdom--has been squeezed by a statement that could have been left until tomorrow, and an important Bill on broiler chickens.
Mr. McAllion:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Major:
No, I shall not give way. I have things to say that are more important than answering the hon. Gentleman's questions.
I am delighted to speak after the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell). Throughout the consideration of the Bill, he has bravely identified the difficulties inherent in it, as he did with its predecessor many years ago. He and I do not always agree. In Hebden Bridge terms, there have been moments when others, not myself, might have referred to him as a . . . nuisance, but the way in which he has campaigned against a very bad and blatantly wrong Bill that is self-evidently damaging to the United Kingdom redounds strongly to his credit. I much admire what he has done.
This bad Bill will do more damage to the United Kingdom than any Bill for generations, and will institutionalise advantages for Scotland and for Scottish Members of Parliament. The Bill will do more: over time, it will institutionalise resentment against Scotland and Scottish Members of Parliament, which is not a light matter for those of us who care about the unity of the United Kingdom.
Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Major:
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I shall not. Many hon. Members want to speak, so I shall be brief.
The key point--
Mr. Andrew Welsh (Angus):
The right hon. Gentleman has not attended a debate before today.
Mr. Major:
The debate is brief because there is a guillotine at 5.30 pm, and the Government have outrageously wasted most of the available time.
The key point--what has become known as the West Lothian question--is the way in which the Bill will unbalance the constitution. As the hon. Member for Linlithgow said, what the Bill proposes is unsustainable. Bluntly, what justification is there for Scottish Members of Parliament being able to vote on education, health and other matters affecting my constituents in England, when they cannot vote on those matters as they affect their own constituents?
'.--No member of the House of Commons representing a constituency in Scotland shall be entitled to vote in, or participate in any other proceedings of, any committee of that House established under any enactment or by the Standing Orders of that House, the functions of which are to consider matters exclusively in relation to England which are not reserved matters within the terms of Schedule 5 to this Act.'.
' .--Scottish members of the United Kingdom Parliament shall by standing orders be entitled to speak but not to vote on matters which arise in that Parliament affecting only those parts of the United Kingdom other than Scotland.'.amendment No. 259, in clause 114, page 52, line 13, at beginning insert--
'Subject to subsection (3) below,'.
"But this leaves the enormous and still unanswered 'West Lothian' question . . . If we take away from Westminster and give to a Scottish Assembly effective law-making power over, say, education, health and transport in Scotland by what possible right do the 70-odd"--
or 60-odd--
"Scottish MPs at Westminster continue to vote on education, health and transport for England? But if they are excluded, there stands to occur a situation--given particularly that, while Scotland is usually Labour, England is usually Conservative--in which there is a settled Labour majority at Westminster on some subjects and a Conservative one on others. (That would have been the case for certainly three and probably four of the five Parliaments in which Labour has governed since 1945.)
That is the considered view of the civil servant who, along with Sir John Garlick, was asked by John Smith, Bruce Millan and Michael Foot to give his mind to the problem in the late 1970s. Sir Michael Quinlan's view at least has to be answered in depth, and it cannot be answered this afternoon before 5.30 pm. On Report or in the House of Lords, we should hear a considered Government answer.
Such a political arrangement would not be coalition or even cohabitation. Given the interdependence, especially in tax and expenditure terms, of large areas of public administration, it is simply not possible to run coherent parliamentary government in this way."
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