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Mr. Salmond: Will the Minister give way?
Mrs. McGuire: Not at this point. I am about to reveal the rest of what the Secretary of State said to the Select Committee. This is the bit that the hon. Gentleman did not reveal to the House.
- "they speak to each other. If you have to come through me, or Anne for that matter, then it just puts an extra barrier in the way and it is not necessary."
- "What is necessary is to make sure that, were that relationship not to be working or, as can sometimes happen, and I see this across Whitehall never mind Scotland and the United Kingdom where you get two departments where officials for one reason or another are not working with each other, it sometimes needs . . . intervention to make it happen. That is why it is important to get the Scotland Office there."
Mr. Salmond: Another dodgy dossier.
Mrs. McGuire: Probably the only dodgy dossier that is floating around Whitehall is the one that was not revealed by the hon. Gentleman this evening, but was previewed in his press statement on the debate. [Interruption.] Flattery will get you nowhere. I am not taking an intervention at this point.
The hon. Gentleman quickly flicked over some of the issues that he told the press he intended to raise this evening, one of which was tourism.
Mr. Salmond: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I know that the Under-Secretary may be confused about what Department she is in, but in any Department, when a Minister is replying to an Adjournment debate, it is the normal courtesy to give way to the hon. Member who sought that debate. I think that it is unprecedented for that not to happen.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): That really is a matter for the individual Minister concerned.
Mrs. McGuire: With the greatest respect to the hon. Gentleman, I did say "at this point", and we still have five minutes to go.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk, East (Mr. Connarty) has said, tourism is a devolved matter. One of the charges that I expect to see when the dossier is eventually published—we were promised it before this evening—is that Scottish interests were not represented
at the tourism summit. I do not see how that can be an issue for the Scotland Office. If tourism is devolved, responsibility for representing Scotland at tourism summits must fall to the devolved Administration, and Alasdair Morrison, the then Deputy Minister for the Highlands and Islands and Gaelic, attended the inaugural summit in 2000, and both Elaine Murray MSP and Mike Watson MSP were involved in the tourism summit in 2002, representing Scotland's interests.The hon. Gentleman also referred to trade and the Department of Trade and Industry. Certain aspects of trade are also devolved.
I will now, generously, give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Mr. Salmond: The Under-Secretary has just admitted that there was no one representing Scotland at the 2001 tourism summit, which was the point I was making.
The Government are meant to have concordats for exchanging information. "Prior notification" is meant to be given to the Scottish Executive of changes in UK policy that affect them. Why, then, was there no prior notification of the changes in the constitutional court, and the substantial implications that they will have for Scots law?
Mrs. McGuire: Both the Lord Advocate and the Lord Chancellor have said that these issues are matters for consultation. The Scottish Executive and the First Minister yesterday robustly rebutted some of the ludicrous charges floating around about the Prime Minister having to engage with the First Minister every time there happened to be a change in his Cabinet. Indeed, the First Minister firmly stated that if the charge was the other way round—that the First Minister had to speak to the Prime Minister every time he wanted to make a change in his ministerial teams—people such as the hon. Gentleman would be up in arms, saying that Westminster was attempting to make Scotland toe a line that it did not want.
The hon. Gentleman protests too much. There is still a need to have a Scottish Secretary in the Cabinet, and most hon. Members—certainly those from parties with
Scottish interests—would agree. That is certainly the case with the Conservative party, and I understand that even Liberal Democrat spokespersons have accepted that the way in which we have adjusted the work load of the Scotland Office is the correct way forward in the light of the devolutionary settlement. The only ones ploughing this very narrow furrow are SNP Members—although tonight they clearly have the assistance of their Welsh colleagues.Time is winding on, and I just want to say a couple of things by way of conclusion. Earlier this week, all manner of statements were made about the Scotland Office not delivering. According to certain press reports—including in the local press of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan—the Scotland Office is a dead parrot, but there are no dead parrots in our Department. All that we get from the Scottish nationalists is spam, spam and more spam; that is the sort of Monty Pythonesque world they want us to live in. For most people in Scotland, the devolution settlement has delivered. It has delivered for the thousands of people in the hon. Gentleman's own constituency who are getting the winter fuel allowance and the working families tax credit, and it has delivered for those now in work who did not have jobs in 1997.
Let me set the record straight once and for all: the Scotland Office continues to function as part of the new Department for Constitutional Affairs. Its essential work continues in advocating Scotland's interests in the Cabinet, as does the role of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland. Quiet, careful work is going on behind the scenes that does not often grab the headlines. I know that the hon. Gentleman likes to judge events in terms of how many headlines he can get, but I suspect that the real reason for this debate is not that the Scotland Office is as dead as a dead parrot, but that the hon. Gentleman is a sick as a parrot because devolution is working.
- Adjourned accordingly at twenty-nine minutes to Seven o'clock.
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