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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, not for the first time I rise in Committee to support my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock. On this occasion my noble friend has identified a very important issue of support for minority language rights and identities. He has afforded your Lordships’ House an opportunity to make a statement about such support in supporting his amendment. As I have said before, I have made a point of reviewing everything that has been said in these Houses in relation to this Bill. I have to say that I was surprised, given the makeup of the other place, that this issue was not raised in Committee or in any other part of the debate that they had about this legislation. This fact and the issue that my noble friend identified have indicated how important it is that we look at this legislation as carefully as we have been doing in Committee because I am sure that we will find many other opportunities to improve it quite significantly and improve the appreciation that the electorate have of the body politic in this country—a point that I made earlier. In researching my contribution to this short debate—and I am sure that it will be a short but valuable one—I came across the writings of a man, who I had previously not read, called Robert Dunbar, who was, at least in 2006, at the school of law in the University of Aberdeen. I will share his words with your Lordships’ House because they make the holistic case for my noble friend Lord Foulkes’s argument very well. In the Journal of Law and Society in 2006 in volume 33, number one, in an article entitled, ““Is there a duty to legislate for linguistic minorities?””, he wrote: "““All three Celtic languages are … threatened minority languages. Gaelic particularly so, and Welsh and Gaelic are only spoken as community languages—and will therefore only survive—in the United Kingdom. These demographic and sociolinguistic facts are a product, to a very significant degree, of state language policy, which until fairly recently has been directed at promoting the acquisition of English, with little or no regard to the impact of this policy on minority languages””." He goes on: "““Frequently, minority languages such as the Celtic languages have been viewed by the majority as not merely ‘less widely spoken’, but also as ‘inferior’, ‘backward’, ‘parochial’, and these value judgments have too often coloured attitudes to the speakers of such languages. When such attitudes guide the implementation of an integrationist policy, the effect changes from one of equipping the minority with skills in the majority languages to one of removing the minority language and identity altogether””." I apologise to your Lordships’ House for reading that at length. However, in those few sentences, Mr Dunbar made the argument for respecting the minority language of Gaelic, the Scottish people and the identity of those who speak that language in a very good way. I could have adopted his argument and changed the words, which, as a consequence of my researches, I have to say I have done in the past. However, I thought that I should attribute those arguments to him. I would expect the Liberal Democrats in this House to support this amendment because Scottish Liberal Democrats have for decades overtly supported the equal treatment of Scottish Gaelic and English. That position was adopted more recently by Scottish Conservatives. My noble friend put forward cogent arguments on this issue, which included what could be described as a human rights argument. I noted that that generated mild amusement on the part of some noble Lords, but I will not embarrass them by identifying them. However, that amusement was misplaced as this is a human rights issue. For more than 50 years, Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights has provided that the enjoyment of the various convention rights and freedoms, "““shall be secured without discrimination on any ground," including language. That guarantee in the European Convention on Human Rights, to which all parts of this House signed up, is enforceable in the domestic law of the United Kingdom through the Human Rights Act 1998. While the Liberal Democrats are part of a coalition that is reviewing its attitude towards the Human Rights Act, they should at least support it. Their principles on this matter may be tested at some time in the future when the review is concluded, but until that time they should respect an Act which I understand they support. My noble friend may well be right to suggest that the legislation could be challenged by Scottish Gaelic speakers. Why should we enable such an unnecessary challenge to occur? Will the noble Lord the Leader of the House expand on the statement by his noble friend Lord McNally on the front of the Bill, made under Section 19(1)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998, that the Bill is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights? I am sure that he will have somewhere among his papers a briefing note which describes how it is compatible with Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Will he make it clear to noble Lords exactly why the statement of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is consistent with my understanding of the convention rights, which are adopted in our law? My noble friend described the attempt made by the Scottish Parliament to accord the Gaelic language the official language status that is enjoyed by the Welsh language. The noble Lord the Leader of the House has the advantage of having at hand the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who was the Scottish Parliament’s Deputy First Minister when that provision was enacted in 2005. As far as I recollect, it was the stated objective of the coalition Government in Scotland at that time to achieve parity between Gaelic and the Welsh language. So far as I can see, the Scottish legislation is largely the mirror image of the Welsh legislation. If the reason for the discrimination between the Welsh language and the Gaelic language lies in the 1993 provision that promotes the Welsh language to an exceptional position in the United Kingdom, perhaps the noble Lord could explain—after taking advice from the former Deputy First Minister—why the Scottish Parliament failed to achieve that level of protection in Scotland in the 2005 legislation. The only other reason for discrimination that I can think of concerns my noble friend’s point about whether there are in Wales monolingual Celtic language speakers. However, the 2001 census makes it very clear that no such person exists, so there is no longer any reason for the discrimination as between Scottish Gaelic speakers and Welsh language speakers to exist, irrespective of the fact that there is a distinction in their respective numbers. I think that with this amendment my noble friend has given the House an opportunity for us to do what this House does very well—to improve proposed legislation to the advantage of a significant minority in Scotland and to send a message to them that we respect their rights. I trust that whatever the response from the Front Bench, if it is to reject rather than adopt this amendment—