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House of Commons (Participation) Bill

I accept that we should have a mature debate about whether any further changes are required in our constitutional arrangements, but I do not accept that we need the Bill. Despite what the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) said, there is a minority—but a reasonably significant minority—of voters in Wales and Scotland who would like to be represented by Conservatives, albeit rather fewer than are represented in Westminster by the Conservatives at the moment. It is undoubtedly the case that one reason why we are in the current situation is the first-past-the-post electoral system for the Westminster Parliament. As the co-chair of the Labour campaign for electoral reform, sitting next to the other co-chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith, I merely make the point that it may well be that one of the elements that should enter the equation for the future is a change in the voting system for the Westminster Parliament. That would not resolve all the problems but it would reduce the sharp focus on the anomalies that is produced by the current system of voting. The proposals are not new and have been much debated, going back to the days of the Irish Home Rule discussions. There are three major obstacles to the Bill. The first—the in-and-out proposal—has been aired to some extent. It is about whether, in practice, it is possible on complex Bills, and most Bills are complex, to determine which matters should be voted on solely by English MPs and which should be voted on by the Westminster Parliament as a whole. Gladstone himself referred to this as a problem that was beyond the wit of man to solve. It is true that he ended up putting it in a Home Rule Bill because he could not think of any other way forward, but it hardly suggested that he was entirely convinced by his own solution. The Kilbrandon report and the report of the Constitution Unit last year came to a similar conclusion. Most of us who are familiar with the workings of the House would recognise the difficulties that would arise. The Higher Education Act 2004 was mentioned earlier. It is true that a separate English Parliament would be able to vote on tuition fees for English universities and take no interest in whether that had a knock-on effect on higher education in Scotland, but if a single Parliament were discussing such a Bill, it would be much more difficult to say to Scottish Members of Parliament ““The effects may be indirect, not primary, and you are therefore shut out.”” There would be considerable concern throughout the House if Members who believed that legislation would affect the interests of their constituents were barred from speaking or voting on it. Everyone who has seriously considered the in-and-out system in the past has concluded that it cannot be made effective, and I think the Bill falls on that basis. The second issue has not yet been raised today, but it is important. Our practice is to form a Government from Members elected to the House, and that means all Members elected to the House. History shows that it could be quite common for a Government formed from the Westminster Parliament not to be able to pass legislation on matters determined to be English-only. The whole position would become constitutionally unworkable in a relatively short time. Once a Government’s Bills were failing regularly, that Government would cease to be able to operate effectively on any United Kingdom scale. The Bill would turn out to be, inexorably, a staging post towards a separate English Parliament, which in turn would constitute a staging post towards the dissolution of the Union—which is why the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr. MacNeil) is nodding so enthusiastically. I happen to believe that the end of the Union would be very bad for all components of the Union. The Scottish Nationalist party has always perplexed me, as a political party that wishes to make a nation less important in the future than it is today. We benefit enormously in the Union from the participation of so many talented and able Scots in the government and the life of this country, and they in turn benefit from the influence that Scotland has in the Union, which it could not possibly have as an independent nation.