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United Kingdom: Treaty of Union

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, will not take offence when I say that, although I listened with great care to what he said, I hope that I never follow him again. It is always disagreeable to have to say that one does not agree with a single thing that a noble Lord has said in the Chamber. This includes the bizarre and geographically challenging notion that Lancashire is not part of England. Tell that to the Chancellor of the Duchy. I have four points to make. First, I like the union. It automatically follows that I liked the excellent speech of my noble friend Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, and agree with absolutely everything that he said in his robust introduction. Like my noble friend, I got an invitation—it was the first time in10 years of Labour rule in this country—to a party at the Scotland Office last week, on Tuesday 16 January, to celebrate the excellence of the union. I went there full of hopes of being entertained by my two hosts. Yet the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Gordon Brown, was unable to be there because he was absent in India dealing with the diplomatic fall-out of the ““Big Brother”” programme. I had not met and longed to meet Mr Alexander—I hope that he asks me again—but he scuttled off to a television studio rather than spending any time entertaining distinguished guests such as my noble friend and myself. However, I liked the excellent speech by the Leader of the House in another place, Mr Straw, who spoke stalwartly in favour of the union and saved what would otherwise have been a complete social debacle for Her Majesty’s Government in the Scotland Office. I liked whatMr Straw said and commend it to your Lordships. I also liked the party bag that we were given as we left, in the shape of a quite lengthy and well produced document, ““United into One Kingdom””, which was written not by spin doctors or special advisers, but by historians. The document is an excellent résumé of why the union is what used to be called a good thing, at least in every one of the 25 articles bar one—the second, which discriminates against what the Act of Union called ““papists”” in the matter of the succession. I will not dwell on this matter for long, except to ask noble Lords to imagine that, if the Act of Union had discriminated against a religious group, such as Sikhs, against people with some personal orientation, such as lesbians, or against someone with a disability, such as blindness, the other place and this place would be up in arms putting it right. It cannot be allowed to go on, and I look forward to the Lord Chancellor’s response to this in terms in his winding-up speech, particularly in these times of difficulty between the Roman Catholic Church and the state, in which some have sensed a bubbling anti-Catholicism in parts of government. My second point is that the Government have brought on themselves the difficulties that they are in now by their legislation since 1997. For the time being, they have institutionalised constitutional asymmetry in our constitutional arrangements. This wrong will have to be put right by the next Conservative Government. That brings me to my third point. This constitutional anomaly cannot be rectified by introducing an English parliament—perish the thought in an already grossly overgoverned country with a multiplicity of layers on which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and his close friend and ally the Deputy Prime Minister want to superimpose a great number of regional bodies. I have done a little rough arithmetic. If one multiplies pro rata the proportion of the electorate to MSPs in Scotland, one can very easily come to a number of, in England, about 1,000 Members of Parliament and the assembly, endlessly arguing about putting right some injustice in Wessex or some misapprehension of pressing social need in the eastern counties, or whatever else would be discussed. The way to put this right, as many of my noble friends have said, is by ensuring that the Scottish voice is properly heard in Westminster and supports Westminster, but that in Westminster Scottish Members of Parliament do not vote on matters that do not concern Scotland. That is a way of underpinning the union, not diminishing it. I do not know what the answer is in whole or in part to the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, who is not in his place at the moment, about what would happen to your Lordships’ House, but I suppose that the same logic would apply if there was ever an elected element, not that I think that there should be such an element in your Lordships’ House. Otherwise, it is a matter, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth said, for the Government to sort out the mess that they have created. Fourthly, what are we in the Conservative Party going to do, and what are the Government going to do, to right this injustice? We have, in England in particular, the UK Independence Party. I do not see the group represented in the Chamber this afternoon. I hope that those who were my noble friends will soon be back as my noble friends. One of them was good enough to tell me in the Corridor the other day that the two of them meet in a caucus each morning to toss up who should be leader for the day. They have probably not been able to resolve the issue today. Although I can say that the UKIP policy on withdrawal from Europe is completely wrong—I wholly support the stand of my right honourable friend Mr David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party—my party must recognise that there are many people in England who are not necessarily UKIP supporters but who are fed up with the way in which the English are being treated. Some of them may well go to UKIP unless they have a clear indication of what the Conservative Party intends to do to redress the unfortunate situation in which the English electorate are discriminated against by our present constitutional asymmetry. My party cannot and must not go into the next general election without having a clear policy on this. I do not suggest that it should have one now; there is plenty of time between now and whenever the next general election is to address this issue. Lastly, although we may now have a few problems not with the details of UKIP policy but with the growing English backlash against Scottish over-representation, major problems will come to bite the next Labour Government. The dulcet tones of the leadership of the Labour Party, desperate for English votes, will echo around the hustings and the media studios at the next general election, so let me name a few members of that leadership: Mr Alexander,Mr Gordon Brown, Mr Des Browne, Mr Darling and Dr—as he prefers to be known—John Reid. They will find a considerable backlash from the English constituencies from which they desperately need English votes to form another Government if they have not addressed the unease of the English at the discrimination against them. I promise the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, who said that we should simply tell people to forget it, calm down and leave it alone, that this issue will not be left alone at the next general election.