Constitutional Law

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Health – in the House of Commons at 2:39 pm on 15 January 2013.

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Photo of Malcolm Bruce Malcolm Bruce Chair, International Development Committee, Chair, International Development Committee 2:39, 15 January 2013

I welcome the debate and the order. I appreciated the tone of much of what Angus Robertson had to say, as well as the fact that he acknowledged that the order has all-party support. I would not have guaranteed 12 or 18 months ago that we would have reached this point, and so I want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. I believe that he—to some extent, he in particular—has led the process in a way that has taken us from a situation that might have been confrontational to one that has been consensual. The fact that we have achieved that and that both Governments have come together is something that history will record as absolutely right.

We are, of course, passing the power and the legal right to hold the referendum to the Scottish Parliament, which means, as Mr Darling has pointed out, that we are effectively passing them to the First Minister and the Scottish National party. When my right hon. and learned Friend Sir Menzies Campbell asked earlier what influence this Parliament would have over the process once the order had been passed and the Scottish Parliament had control, I must record that from a sedentary position the hon. Member for Moray said, “Zero.” We must recognise that there is an indication that the SNP will seek to run the agenda to get the best outcome for its purposes. Of course, I completely accept that the SNP, as a political party for which independence is the driving force, wishes to do that, but I warn SNP Members about how they conduct themselves in that process.

We all noted the responses to a number of interventions on the hon. Member for Moray, which used what I shall not call weasel words but what were certainly evasive words and suggested that the SNP would listen to, but not necessarily act on, the advice of the Electoral Commission. Once we have passed the order, the SNP has the right to listen to and not act on that advice, but if it does that the people of Scotland will rightly have a deep suspicion that they are not being given a fair and clear choice. I believe that that will go against the SNP’s interests, so my advice is that the more we all work to ensure that the referendum is fair and objective, the more we will all be able to live with the result.

I echo what my right hon. Friend the Member for Skye, Lochaber and Ross—