Orders of the Day — Home Affairs

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:09 pm on 23 November 1988.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of John Home Robertson John Home Robertson , East Lothian 8:09, 23 November 1988

There may be many such people, but the hon. Gentleman would struggle to find them in heavy concentrations anywhere in Scotland. The Prime Minister is one of the most universally loathed people there.

This brings me to the points made by the now absent hon. Member for Glasgow, Govan (Mr. Sillars). I cannot help recalling that, 10 years ago to the month, he and I were on the Government Back Benches and he was kind enough to congratulate me on my maiden speech. Shortly after that, his new friends joined the then Conservative Opposition and voted down the Labour Government, ushering in 10 years of grim Government for the people of Scotland, about whom he claims to care.

I have been watching the hon. Gentleman's perambulations in and out of various parties and constituencies since then, and without wanting to be churlish to him in his absence, I must say that I do not welcome his election to the House. The loss of a Labour seat can only bring comfort to the Prime Minister and Cabinet whom he and most Scottish people so earnestly loathe.

However, I welcome the debate that has been initiated by the Govan by-election result. This is my first opportunity for five years to speak with the freedom of a Back Bencher. I must express serious fears about the prospects for the unity of the United Kingdom that I care about and support. The hon. Member for Govan is a comparatively trivial manifestation of the danger posed to the unity of the United Kingdom. The real source of the problem is the right hon. and learned Member for Edinbugh, Pentlands (Mr. Rifkind), the Secretary of State for Scotland. The general election of 1987 should, on any analysis, have been a constitutional turning point in Scotland. The result had been widely predicted as the Doomsday scenario and the Secretary of State now imposes alien rule on a nation which has returned only 10 Tory Members of Parliament and in which support for the governing party has slumped to below 20 per cent. in the polls.

The Conservative party professes to be baffled by the ingratitude of the Scots who refuse to embrace the message of the hard Right. That was the message conveyed by the hon. Member for Dover. We have heard various responses to that idea. the Prime Minister came to Edinburgh last year and addressed an astonished General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in her rather bizarre "Sermon on the Mound", and we are now being subjected to even heavier doses of hard-line Thatcherism.

It was the Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. and learned Member for Pentlands, who told the House in 1976: Scotland is the only territory on the face of the earth which has a legal system without a legislature to improve, modernise and amend it. This is a crazy anomaly".—[Official Report, 16 December 1976; Vol. 922, c. 1832.] It may have been a crazy anomaly they: it is downright intolerable today after almost 10 years of Conservative rule.

There are ways and ways of approaching the problems of government by minority. The wise approach should be through conciliation and, when possible, partnership with the people being governed. At the other extreme there is what I choose to describe as the Jaruzelski option.

It is interesting to contrast the styles of the former Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Ayr (Mr. Younger), and the present Secretary of State for Wales, with the Rifkind regime in Scotland today. The substance may not be so very different, but the style has been calculated to embitter and alienate the subjected people of Scotland. It is abundantly clear that the Secretary of State cares far more about his standing in Downing street than about his reputation in Scotland, the nation he is supposed to be serving. He seems positively to relish opportunities to humiliate and provoke the people whom he is supposed to serve.

Let us go through some examples. The poll tax is to be inflicted on the people of Scotland. The paperwork is already coming through our letter boxes and the tax will be levied in four months' time. The disruption of Scotland's excellent education system is to be taken one stage further as a result of the Queen's Speech. The Housing (Scotland) Act 1988 is designed to exploit the homeless for the benefit of private landlords. The Secretary of State is ruthlessly exploiting his power of patronage in Scotland. Examples of that include Sir Alex Fletcher, who was rejected by the people of Edinburgh, Central at the general election, turning up as a paid member of the Scottish Development Agency. There is also the bizarre phenomenon of the Greater Glasgow health board being nominated by the Secretary of State but not representing anyone in Glasgow. It is apparently exclusively composed of clones of the hon. Member for Stirling (Mr. Forsyth), and it is now confronting the nurses of Glasgow head on.

The Secretary of State for Scotland has enthusiastically embraced the Jarulzelski option. We in Scotland find it puzzling to hear the Prime Minister calling for freedoms in Poland which she is denying to the subject nations of the United Kingdom. The scenario of Government from the bunker at St. Andrew's house, supported by English Tory Members who seem to find the situation enormously amusing, must raise questions about how the Scottish majority should repond. Obviously, the conventional process of debates, questions and Committees must continue in the House, but the cynical manipulation of the composition of Scottish Committees and the shameless refusal even to set up a Scottish Select Committee have inevitably tarnished the image of Parliament in Scotland.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Garscadden (Mr. Dewar) and our hon. Friends on the Front Bench, past and present, have approached this task conscientiously and constructively, and sometimes, when we have been lucky, that fact has been reflected in Scottish press reports. But when the Government administer the devolved power of a nation such as Scotland with flagrant disregard for the wishes of its people and go out of their way to humilate the elected representatives of the majority at national and local level, other considerations must be raised. The situation calls for a little more than ritual debates that end at 10 pm and occasional prayers against statutory instruments which extend the process to 11.30 pm.

Many people in Scotland would have liked the Opposition to make a major stand in the House to highlight the obscenity of the Housing (Scotland) Bill in the last Session of Parliament. I, too, should have liked the opposition to that Bill to be taken a little further and to have made a stand to block progress on that oppressive legislation—but that could not be done: we were overruled. I am not advocating a course of general disruption in the House—I have been here long enough to know the Standing Orders and to know that such disruption would not be practical—but properly targeted issues should be exploited to highlight the extreme examples of repression in Scotland. Under these extreme circumstances there is ample justification for the initiatives outside Parliament, as well as those in the House.

This potential for constitutional crisis has been on the Scottish scene for a long time. I think in particular of one of my favourite predecessors in the East Lothian seat in the Scottish ParliamentAndrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who wrote in a pamphlet in 1706: It is certainly the Interest of all Good Men to promote a nearer Union with our Neighbours in England … in the most Absolute and Incorporate Union that can be made betwixt these two Nations, there are several Interests (and of the greatest Consequence to which are and must be reserved separate to each Nation … It seems beyond human comprehension, how these separate distinct Interests, and Establishments, can be regulated and supported by one Parliament". He went on: and the Scots deserve no pity, if they voluntarily surrender their united and separate Interests to the Mercy of a united Parliament, where the English shall have so vast a majority". He was a man with foresight, but I doubt that he realised that the right hon. Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher) would one day become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and spring that trap on the people of Scotland. As we know, the Scottish Members surrendered Scotland's Parliament and it is only in comparatively recent years that a consensus has grown up in Scotland about the case for our own Parliament and for home rule within the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, our two nations have lived with that inherent contradiction of one Parliament and two legislative areas for 281 years. We have two distinct nations with separate legal systems, separate administrations, different Churches and separate financial centres, which still share one Parliament, in which one nation's representatives must be massively outnumbered by those of the other nation. It is to the great credit of a long succession of Governments that such an inherently flawed system has survived for so long. It is a great pity that the matter was not resolved by mutual consent in 1979, following debates in the House on the Scotland Act 1978 and the referendum, when the people of Scotland voted by a majority of 77,437 to set up their own assembly within the United Kingdom.

As we know, this Government unceremoniously repealed that Act and they have gone out of their way to confront Scottish public opinion ever since. We need initiatives outside Parliament too, and I suggest that the proposed establishment of the Scottish constitutional convention, following the extremely important and closely argued report of the Grieve committee entitled "A Claim of Right for Scotland", is a matter of profound importance and significance. The Secretary of State for Scotland has rejected an invitation to take part in such a constitutional convention in Scotland on the grounds that the Government do not believe that Scotland would benefit from an additional layer of Government". That conveniently overlooks the fact that the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Scottish Office are already a layer of government that is unaccountable in Scotland. That is what people in Scotland find so intolerable.

We are rightly and properly concerned about the rights of other small nations around the world—perhaps Estonia is a relevant and topical example. It is time to recognise the rights of the nations of the United Kingdom too. Conservative Members would do well to remember that Britain is not a nation—it is a union of nations and there should be respect between the nations in the union if the union is to survive and prosper.

The Secretary of State is provoking a potentially dangerous and destructive situation and he is opening the door for destructive forces, such as those represented by the crude nationalism of the Scottish National party. There is great irony in the fact that the Labour party should be made to suffer for the actions of a Tory Administration, but that is what happened at Govan two weeks ago. Nothing will be achieved by whingeing about that state of affairs. We must take the initiative on the Scottish political scene. That can be done by sharpening up our style of opposition in the House and instead of responding to pressure, we should be seen to be taking a lead in expressing the mandate that we have been given by the people of Scotland. If that means that the focus of Scottish politics has to shift temporarily from the House to the Scottish constitutional convention, so be it.

My immediate predecessor as Member for East Lothian, John Mackintosh, had a clear vision of dual nationality—Scottish nationality and British nationality. The overwhelming majority of Scots share that desire for a continuing close partnership with our neighbours south of the border. That is a union that is not incompatible with the election of an assembly in Scotland to control the legislation, the power and the budget—which has already been devolved to the Scottish Office. Scotland wants home rule within the United Kingdom and that is a legitimate demand which must be accommodated by the House and by any responsible Government. If the Government are not prepared to acknowledge that need they will be putting the unity of the United Kingdom in jeopardy. One must remember that they are the party that professes to be the Unionist party, yet the actions of Ministers are putting the union of the United Kingdom in jeopardy.

The Scottish majority—the Labour party and the Social and Liberal Democrats—will, I hope, approach the constitutional convention within the spirit of a union that we want to preserve. It would be a spectacular irony if, by its actions and omissions and by provoking the people of Scotland over the past nine years, the Conservative party was to open the door to the nationalism expressed by the hon. Member for Govan today.