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Mr. Michael Forsyth: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree with his right hon. Friend the Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Sir D. Steel) that one answer to the West Lothian question is that matters affecting English constituencies should be voted on only by English Members in an English Grand Committee?
Mr. Ashdown: My right hon. Friend tells me that he said that there could be an English Grand Committee.
Let us deal with the West Lothian question straightforwardly and, I hope, comprehensively. The issue is simple: should the number of Scottish Members of Parliament be reduced if there were a Scottish Parliament? We are clear about that. The answer is yes. The level of representation should be similar to that for the rest of Britain.
Mr. Forsyth:
That is not what Labour says.
Mr. Ashdown:
That is up to the Labour party. It can argue its case. I am giving my party's view--a view that we have always held.
Mr. Ashdown:
Let us say a figure in the order of 12 or 13.
The West Lothian question is a non-question. It is no more a question than is the West Belfast question. When Stormont existed, did Northern Irish Members of Parliament vote on education and health matters concerning England, Wales and Scotland? Of course they did. That was not a difficulty then, and it is not a difficulty now.
Let me move on a bit.
Mr. Ashdown:
No, I have answered the right hon. Gentleman.
Mr. Ashdown:
No, I have answered the right hon. Gentleman.
Go out and ask members of the public. There is ample evidence of what their response will be. Ask them whether they want a freedom of information Act--which the Government resist. Some 81 per cent. say yes. Why? They know that open government means better government.
Mr. Forsyth:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Ashdown:
The right hon. Gentleman has asked his question and he has had his answer.
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. If the Member who is speaking does not give way, the other Member must resume his seat.
Mr. Ashdown:
It is pretty bizarre--the right hon. Gentleman has a whole winding-up speech ahead of him.
Ask the public whether they want a Bill of Rights and 79 per cent. say yes. Why? They understand the need--God knows they do under this Government--to protect their individual freedoms against the arbitrary abuse of
power. Ask the public whether they are happy with the way in which Parliament works. Only 34 per cent.--a little more than a third--are happy about the way in which this place works, but 50 per cent. are happy about the way in which their local council works. After all the withdrawal of power and all the time that the Government have spent deriding local councils and insulting them, the fact remains that far more people trust their local council and the way it works than trust this place. Yet the Prime Minister tells us that nothing should be changed.
Mr. Richard Tracey (Surbiton):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Ashdown:
I must make progress. If the hon. Gentleman wants to intervene later, I shall give way.
Ask the Scottish and Welsh people whether they want more control over their Scottish and Welsh affairs, and the answer again is a resounding, overwhelming yes. They might reject it, but all that we ask is that they should be given the choice. Scotland is the only nation in the world with a separate legal system, but no legislature to determine the laws in that system.
Similar areas and populations all over Europe have their own assemblies, and remain firmly and proudly parts of the nation state to which they belong. I think of Bavaria, with its capital Munich, or Catalonia, with its capital Barcelona. I think of their regional autonomy and regional assemblies, but I do not see Germany or Spain splitting apart. Rather I see countries that have benefited and been strengthened because of the decentralisation of power, the accommodation of diversity and the fact that people are more responsible for the decisions that are made locally.
None of those countries has come unstuck over their equivalents of the West Lothian question. That is because the West Lothian question is no more a problem than was the West Belfast question when Northern Ireland had an assembly at Stormont. None of those countries sees greater self-determination for the historic nations within their borders as a threat to national unity. They see, rather, a means of preserving that unity. None of those countries has a problem devolving powers to raise or reduce tax levels.
The Prime Minister's argument was bizarre. Every parish council in this land has the power to raise tax. Is the Prime Minister's case really that we cannot trust to the Scottish people in a Scottish Parliament powers that are given to every English parish council? That is bizarre and makes no sense.
The Prime Minister:
Will the right hon. Gentleman tell me which body other than this House has the power to raise income tax, which is what we are talking about?
Mr. Ashdown:
For someone paying taxes, council tax also has to be paid. A tax is a tax. I know that the Conservative party has tried to deceive and betray the country on income tax, pretending that it is the only tax that exists, but everybody knows that that is not true. They know that their local councils can raise and lower taxation and that that has a real impact on their household budgets.
It is not a Scottish Parliament that poses a threat to the United Kingdom--quite the opposite. It is the continuing and contemptuous rejection of the Scottish and Welsh will
for more control over their affairs that poses the real threat to the Union. I do not normally find myself in agreement with Lord Tebbit, but he was right when he said a few days ago:
A week ago, the Prime Minister talked about a thousand years of British history being undone in a thousand days as if nothing in our constitution had changed for a thousand years. I hope that he will have time for a history lesson before the great debate gets under way in the general election campaign. Such claims are nonsense.
The Prime Minister fails to understand that the lesson of our history is exactly the opposite of what he claims. Our constitution is not a museum piece, but a living thing that has been changing, evolving and constantly renewing itself down the centuries. It is unrecognisable today from what it was 1,000 years ago; that has not been its weakness, but its strength. To argue, as the Prime Minister does, that tampering with our constitution would mean the collapse of Government, national disorder and the end of the United Kingdom as we know it, is rampant scaremongering that flies in the face of our history. Far from protecting our constitution, it denies its very strength.
The great irony and hypocrisy is that the very Government who tell us that the country will fall apart if anyone touches so much as a hair of our constitution are the same Government who have cut down our proud system of local government, destroyed parliamentary accountability in one area of government after another, and established such a tangle of arm's-length agencies that nowadays no Minister is responsible for anything.
They are the very Government who have created a jungle of unelected quangos, stuffed full of party political appointees. Those quangos now spend billions of pounds--one third of all public money--and meet in secret; their members are not required to declare their interests and have no accountability to the people they serve. How dare the very Government who have taken so much democracy out of our system tell us that we cannot change our constitution to put more democracy into it?
But then, resisting reform and democracy is what the Conservatives have always been about: it is what they have always done; it is their traditional role. Let us consider the following words:
Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock):
I bet his grandson is sitting up there now.
Who said the following words:
"We will not save the Union by mocking the idea of a Scottish nation."
"Our system of representation possesses the full and entire confidence of this country".
Was that the Tory party chairman railing against proportional representation? No, it was the Duke of Wellington opposing the extension of the franchise in 1830. Let us consider another quotation:
"Touch one atom of our glorious constitution and the whole is lost."
Was that the Prime Minister firing up the party faithful at a Conservative party conference? No, it was Lord Eldon, a Tory grandee, defending the rotten boroughs in 1832.
"Constitutional change . . . would endanger the very fabric of Britain . . . it would destroy in years what has been built up in centuries"?
20 Feb 1997 : Column 1084
Were those words said by a die-hard Tory opposing votes for women and the suffragettes to the very last? No, this time it was the Prime Minister.
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