Committee (1st Day)

Part of Scotland Bill – in the House of Lords at 3:30 pm on 8 December 2015.

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Photo of Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Conservative 3:30, 8 December 2015

Indeed. Perhaps I have missed out on this modernisation process that is going ahead, but I understood that laws are made by Parliament and receive the assent of the Crown. I did not think that they were made up by subcommittees of appointed party politicians meeting in secret and then getting together with the leaders of the parties, who did not in any way consult their parties, with Parliament then being expected to rubber-stamp them. This takes us back to the time of Henry VIII. We could save a great deal of money by getting rid of this whole apparatus of Parliament and leaving it to the leaders of the parties to get together, decide things and agree that they will be passed into law and leave the monarch with the dubious task of having to give Royal Assent to such matters.

A colleague I was speaking to earlier said, “I’m not coming in for the Scotland Bill. I’ve really had enough of Scotland”. I said, “But it’s not about Scotland; it’s about the United Kingdom”. He said, “Oh, I didn’t realise that”. It would appear that the Government do not realise that, either, judging by the nature of this clause.

I hope that the Minister will find it possible to accept the amendments that my noble friend Lord Norton has put forward, if for no other reason than that it will remove the obligation on me to move Amendment 2, which is based on the assumption that the Government will indeed hold to this course, which I believe undermines the sovereignty of Parliament. The noble Lord speaking for the official Opposition shakes his head in disagreement from a sedentary position. If it does not undermine the sovereignty of Parliament—and I suspect that that is what we will hear from the Front Bench—what is the point of having it? This is just legislative graffiti, then; it is stuff written in the Bill with the purpose of giving the impression that the nationalists have won some great victory. Well, graffiti can be very dangerous; it can be very difficult to remove, especially if people believe that it carries words like “permanent” associated with it.

What we see in the Bill, with the inclusion of the words,

The Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government are a permanent part of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements”,

is people saying things in legislation that are simply not true. No Parliament can bind its successor. Why are they saying this? In order to create an impression that the devolved parliament—I think it was the late Enoch Powell who said that power devolved is power retained—is not a devolved parliament.

I spent a great deal of energy, as did many other people in this House, arguing during the Scottish referendum campaign that we should remain part of the UK and continue to have a sovereign UK Parliament —and 55% of the voters voted for that. What on earth are the Government doing undermining that sovereign United Kingdom Parliament—or at least appearing to give the impression of doing so in order to appease the forces of nationalism?

This is a very dangerous thing indeed. With the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government, which used to be called the Scottish Executive, step by step, with grandmother’s footsteps, we create the impression of a sovereign independent parliament and play straight into the hands of those nationalists who do not accept the result of the referendum and still seek to break up the UK. We would be very wise to listen to the concerns that have been expressed by the Constitution Committee of this House and to the wise words of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, who is the nearest thing that we have on our side of the House to a constitutional expert, and who has great distinction and knowledge. I very much hope that if the Minister is not able to accept these amendments, he will at least take this clause away and rethink it, because it is being used as a kind of political statement and, in doing so, it undermines the quality of our legislation.

In my day as a Minister, you would never have got away with this; you would never have got it past the parliamentary draftsman. What has happened to the parliamentary draftsman’s office that it allows this sort of stuff to be written in legislation? What has happened to the machinery of government, of L Committee and others, which used to operate in a way to ensure the integrity of our legislation?