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United Kingdom: Treaty of Union

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean for initiating this debate, which times very neatly with the drawing to a close of the second term of the devolved Scottish Parliament. On 3 May the people of Scotland will go to the polls for elections to that Parliament. The central question before them will be whether the Labour/Liberal coalition and its several members, which they have had for those eight years, have delivered for Scotland, or whether they should be looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, this issue is becoming more and more confused with whether the Scottish Parliament is the correct constitutional arrangement. The Scottish press and locallyminded politicians see great mileage in stirring up this issue. The issue in 1707 and still again at this time is what is a realistic concept of nationhood for our time. The Scots need to be wary of choosing outdated goals in an interdependent world. The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, touched on this topic. The Scots have always treasured concepts of nationhood and I like to think that my direct ancestors have been among those who tried to play a part. It was an ancestor of mine who was recorded as the right-hand man of William Wallace, pace the authors of Braveheart. Others were a signatory of the Declaration of Arbroath, which is acknowledged as the inspiration for the United States Declaration of Independence, and among those who fell defending King James IV at the battle of Flodden. The Act of Union was bound to be a controversial issue as it was trading certain elements of nationhood for a very active part in the major power structures of the day. The noble Lord, Lord Steel of Aikwood, outlined some of the reasons for Scottish support for the concept, but it is also quite interesting to note that four previous attempts at union had failed, even though England was already quite reliant on Scottish soldiers to fill the ranks of the Army. It was only when both the Scots and the French began to be beastly at the same time that the English thought that it was appropriate that a union should be formed. My ancestor in 1707 was president of the Privy Council in the Scottish Parliament, but he turned down the invitation from the ancestor of the noble Earl, Lord Mar and Kellie, to be one of the commissioners to go to London for the negotiations. The Earl of Mar, in trying to turn his mind, wrote to him to say, "““the English nation were never in such a good disposition towards Scotland and if we get not a good union I have reason to believe it will not be their fault””." Perhaps the then marquis was aware that the Duke of Argyll as commissioner had complained that the Lord Treasurer had been, "““sending him up and down like a footman from one country to another””" and that any efforts made tended not to be reimbursed unless you finally fell in with the Government’s wishes. Now that we have politicians who know how to be completely above board about their financial dealings, it can be easy to pick holes in the way in which business was done in those days. The whole construct engendered endless suspicion. My ancestor kept a list entitled, The Peers and Gentlemen of Scotland who have appeared most zealous for the protestant succession with a note of the offices and pensions bestowed. It would be nice to think that this was just a record of what he had noted taking place as one might do today, but I suppose it is possible that he had some role in it. One element that is easily overlooked is that these men, by the responsibilities they held, were the local enterprise company, the highway authority, the social security providers, the financiers of education and even the local courts, so they had many calls on their finances, although, of course, for some reason which nowadays in our enlightened times we would find hard to understand, they often liked to do a bit too well out of it for themselves. Certain elements of the wrangling between partners have continued since then, but it is interesting to see in a letter from a young Graham relation the year after the treaty the statement—some of this was alluded to earlier—that, "““the revenue of the customs at Port Glasgow has increased: I find the merchants begin to taste the sweet of a direct trade to the plantations and how convenient it is to have their outward bound cargoes all of their own woollens and linen””." The Scots have had a prominent role in spreading concepts of nationhood and freedom to the far corners of the world, but what we spread was, luckily for others, not what we had evolved in the years up to 1707, but something that was achieved by the uniting of the two traditions thereafter. The idea of a Scottish devolved legislature is still a very green concept and, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, pointed out, even those who set it up admit that it is being worked out as it goes along. A great deal still needs to be done to find ways to address what a number of Peers have identified as needless duplication and more efficient delivery. However—I follow on from the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Maxton—for all these generations, our civil structures have been built on concepts of the nation state. The drive for greater separation from the United Kingdom is based on the fond hope that somewhere out there it is still possible to achieve a nation state. An issue that is being discussed at this very moment in a gathering at Davos is that the advent of globalisation and the knowledge revolution mean that our institutions and systems of global governance are disintegrating and being reshaped. Next year, 2 billion people will be connected by the internet. The nation state on its own has no answer for climate change, rogue states, terrorism, the collapse of the Doha talks or the crisis in Darfur. As my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford was saying in this House yesterday in terms of defence, we are entering a period of immense change from what he described, using the terms that Thomas Friedman used for our economic outlook, as a very flat world, where vertical structures of authority are being replaced by horizontal networks of social communities and collaborative platforms. Klaus Schwab, the chief executive of the Davos Group said, in his introduction to that conference that we will have to reinvent ourselves, our social structures and our power structures within this flat world. Seen in this perspective, my conclusion for Scotland is that it will be much more effective to remain working within the United Kingdom framework with those with whom we share so many concepts, rather than cast ourselves loose, like a shipwrecked container, in the hope that the winds of history will cast us up on some distant friendly shore.