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House of Commons (Participation) Bill

As I have already mentioned, I fully intend to talk about what I believe is the proper way forward. As to timing, other hon. Members have spoken for far longer than I have so far. I am certainly going to continue with my remarks, but—[Interruption.] I hear the hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) muttering from a sedentary position, but other than the odd intervention, I have not heard him contribute to the debate. On the matter of what the Government are doing—or, rather, what they are not doing—on this issue, it was a great Labour politician, Donald Dewar, who famously said that devolution is a process, not an event, and he was absolutely right. Among the public at large, there is a great appetite for more constitutional change. In fact, within the Scottish context, recent polls suggest an appetite for more powers to be given to the Scottish Parliament, which is the most popular option. The ““Newsnight”” poll conducted by the BBC on the tercentenary of the Act of Union 1707 showed that there was a great deal of support in England and Scotland for the idea of an English Parliament. I would not necessarily support that, but it shows the public appetite for constitutional change. Furthermore, a British social attitudes survey noted a general decline in the number of people who felt that they had a British identity, as opposed to the individual national identities of English, Scottish and Welsh. That has been most marked in England. Clearly, there is an issue that needs to be addressed. I have put questions to the Secretary of State for Scotland on the general issue of the Act of Union 1707 and a future constitutional settlement,. The Leader of the House seemed to flirt with the idea of having a debate on that matter in Government time, but the Secretary of State for Scotland seems rather less keen. The Government have consistently said that they have no plans for further constitutional reform, which I think is a great shame. They are ignoring public opinion. It is a short-sighted and irresponsible position because it results in proposals such as this Bill—a well meaning but ill conceived attempt to address the issue—when what we really need is the Government to take the lead in a national debate on the issue. In the absence of that, what we propose—it has been proposed by the leader of my party—is a constitutional convention. Surely the best way to achieve constitutional change is by building a consensus and—[Interruption.] I hear Conservative Members ridiculing such an idea. They, of course, did not take part in the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which actually led to a very successful consensus being built around what should happen in respect of devolution for Scotland. That has to be the right way to do it. This is too important an issue to get wrong. Frankly, it is probably too important and too big for any one party to have a monopoly on determining a perfect solution. I would argue that the Scottish Constitutional Convention provides a good model. A variety of political parties were involved in it, as were religious groups, trade unions, local government, business people and community groups. Constitutional change affects all those groups within the community, so we do need to bring people together to discuss this. I mentioned previously that there is currently only a small issue of asymmetry, but I fear that there is genuine concern out there in the constituencies and that it will grow. Let us consider what happened in the Scottish context after the poll tax. As we discussed earlier, there was a feeling of injustice in the 1990s, which stoked up a great amount of concern, and it needed to be dealt with. Perhaps the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr. MacNeil) regrets this, but I think that if we had not had the referendum and the Scottish Parliament being created when it was, we might have ended up with Scotland resolving the sense of injustice by going down the route to independence, which is why I am so glad that we did implement a Scottish Parliament.