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House of Commons (Participation) Bill

I thank the hon. Gentleman for providing confirmation of my original point, which is that the matter is being discussed by our democracy taskforce under the chairmanship of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe. Let me go back to the West Lothian question. Of course, Tam Dalyell was very much opposed to devolution. In his 1977 book, ““Devolution: The End of Britain?””, he said:"““if the United Kingdom is to remain in being, then there can be no question but that the Scottish constituencies must continue to be represented at Westminster…Yet once the—" Scottish—"““Assembly had come into being, and was legislating for those areas that had not been reserved to the United Kingdom Government, the position of the seventy-one Scottish Westminster MPs could become awkward and invidious. Their credibility—like those of their counterparts in the Assembly—would be deeply suspect, simply because there would be so many areas of concern to their electors on which they could not pronounce.””" He examined and rejected four possible answers to the question and concluded that not one of them can be reconciled with Britain’s continued existence as a unitary state. I looked at those four answers but came to a slightly different conclusion.