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Home Affairs and Justice

In a moment; I want to quote to the hon. Gentleman what the leader of the Scottish National party has said. It was claimed yesterday that Scottish nationalists had always refused to vote on ““English-only”” issues, and up to a point that is true. During deliberations on the higher education Bill that introduced student tuition fees, the right hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) and his party—and my former colleague Tam Dalyell, who had entered into a similar self-denying ordinance—said that, in territorial terms, the Bill affected England and Wales only. However, they added that they intended to vote on the measures in the Bill because they would have really serious effects on public spending in Scotland that would not be covered by the Bill's territorial extent restriction. The proposal that we are discussing, Mr. Speaker, would mean that you would be embroiled day after day in arguments about whether a particular clause of a particular Bill would affect England alone, or Scotland or Wales too. My final point is that I am fully in favour of seeking ways to take better account of the views of English Members—if that is the problem, given that we already dominate spending by the House, including in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—but the right hon. and learned Gentleman has to take into account the effect on Cabinet Government. There could be a federal Parliament; that is fine—that is the Liberals' position and it would work, although it would break up the Union—but it would end up with two Cabinets in one, trying to operate both United Kingdom legislation and decisions as well as England ones. It would not work.