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Mr. Robertson: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman to wait? He will have 20 minutes in which to speak.
Mr. Forsyth: I would like to intervene.
Mr. Robertson: I will not take an intervention at this point. [Interruption.] I wonder whether the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the hon. Member for Aberdeen, South (Mr. Robertson), can remember being enjoined, at the last Scottish Grand Committee, to remember that he is a Minister of the Crown, and perhaps behave like one for a moment or two.
We stand for the decentralisation of power to take power closer to the citizens who are affected by it, more openness in the way in which government is conducted,
more democracy in the way in which decisions are made, and a more transparent judicial system, with fundamental rights for the ordinary citizen. Where, in the Prime Minister's speech, was there any Conservative vision of what needs to be improved in this country? What ideas--what proposals--have we heard for change to this deeply centralised, quango-ridden, over-secretive British system, which is so unpopular?
In Scotland, we already have devolution--bureaucratic devolution. What we want is democratic devolution. Scotland already has a Scottish Office, a Department of State that covers eight areas of responsibility dealt with by existing Departments. It has a huge budget--£14.5 billion--and a Secretary of State to whom some 21,500 public servants are accountable. He alone decides how all that money is to be spent; he alone appoints between 4,000 and 5,000 quango members, who between them, spend £7 billion of public money. We now have three times as many quango appointees as we have elected councillors. He alone decides what the priorities in Scotland will be. We are talking about one man's priorities, one man's dogma and one man's waste--about one man whose party can barely muster 15 per cent. in the latest Scottish opinion poll.
Let me say to the House, with restraint and with care, that the present arrangement is not fair, that it is not just, that it is not working, and that it is threatening the unity of our country, but all we have seen, beneath the veneer of--
Mr. Robertson:
I shall give way to the right hon. Member for Dumfries (Sir H. Monro).
Sir Hector Monro:
Having sat through nearly all the debate, I am still awaiting an answer to a simple question. As the hon. Gentleman knows, my constituency runs along the border. Many of my constituents live in Dumfries and work in Carlisle, and many live in Carlisle and work in Scotland. Will the hon. Gentleman explain to whom those people will pay their tartan tax, and why?
Mr. Robertson:
People in Scotland will not have their tax increased or decreased unless they have first voted in a referendum to give the Scottish Parliament the necessary power, and subsequently voted in a Scottish parliamentary election for parties who say in advance that they will use the power. To say that power is a tax is a lie. A decision will be taken by the Scottish people. The liability to pay tax will be determined, as will other taxes in the United Kingdom, by residency, the definition of which will remain the same as it is in current UK tax legislation. That is the specific answer to the right hon. Gentleman's question.
Beneath the veneer of this absolutist, unbending devotion to the wholly negative campaign for absolutely no change is a profound mass of contradictions which at one and the same time debase the argument and produce an incoherence which seriously endangers this country's unity.
What a muddled, confused party are the Conservatives. The Government say in their document that their devolution plans for Northern Ireland will consolidate and strengthen the United Kingdom, but they tell us that devolution for Scotland and Wales would shatter the United Kingdom. The document proposes a 90-strong law-making assembly for Northern Ireland and states that that is how local people could take more power over the way their part of the country is governed, but the Government insist that a law-making parliament in Edinburgh and an assembly in Cardiff would be "teenage madness".
The party that is opposed to proportional representation proposes a PR system for the Northern Ireland Assembly, but when we propose a proportional system for Scotland and Wales, and in doing so give up the automatic advantage that we get from first past the post in those two countries, the Conservatives call it gerrymandering. The Government state:
When we propose a pre-legislative referendum for Scotland and Wales and White Papers, which we shall publish in advance, the Prime Minister promises to use the power of unelected peers at the other end of this building to frustrate a Bill for a referendum. They call the referendum a constitutional monstrosity. This is the Government who dare not even suggest tampering with the funding arrangements for Northern Ireland, and give it the highest per capita public expenditure in the United Kingdom. The same Government propose a punishment raid on Scotland's and Wales's fair share of the national cake as a penalty for democratising the business of running Scotland and Wales.
The Prime Minister:
The hon. Gentleman has been in the House a long time. In that time he must surely have noticed the special circumstances that exist in Northern Ireland; the special expenditure that is required and the special distress and sectarian difficulties that exist there. If the implication of what he says is that he would cut the expenditure on Northern Ireland against the background of the terrorism that people in Northern Ireland face, let him be specific. I hope that he will not continue with his misrepresentation of the past few minutes and the sheer, utter drivel that we have had from him since I came into the Chamber.
Mr. Robertson:
No, we are not suggesting cutting the fair share of the United Kingdom's resources.
Mr. Trimble:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Robertson:
Perhaps I may be allowed to reply to the Prime Minister. After that, I shall certainly allow the hon. Gentleman to intervene.
We do not intend to cut Northern Ireland's fair share of the United Kingdom's resources, but neither are we threatening to cut the fair share of those resources for Scotland and Wales. The Prime Minister is right when he says that Northern Ireland is special and different, but so
are Scotland and Wales. They have different demands and different needs, ambitions and aspirations. Why should they be denied what the right hon. Gentleman is offering the people of Northern Ireland?
Mr. Trimble:
Will the hon. Gentleman take account of the fact that absolutely no one is suggesting that any significant fiscal power be devolved to any institution in Northern Ireland, so the arguments for maintaining the same level of services in Northern Ireland as we are entitled to are consequently overwhelming? Will he also take account of the fact that, in the current financial year, Northern Ireland expenditure is being cut in real terms, whereas expenditure in the United Kingdom is rising?
Mr. Robertson:
I appreciate the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. It saves my coming back. I much admired his criticism of the Prime Minister on his double standards in offering Northern Ireland a settlement and rejecting it for Scotland and for Wales. The word that he used, although it is probably not parliamentary, was that the Prime Minister was making an ass of himself over his attitude to Scotland, and that is true.
This is the Prime Minister who tells us in a bizarre and historically illiterate speech that to tamper with the constitution would end a thousand years of British history, even though Scotland has been in the Union for only 300 years. The same Prime Minister changed a fundamental element in the British constitution to allow a single Tory Member to sue The Guardian newspaper. This is the Prime Minister who tells us that the Scots and the Welsh can vote for secession from the Union and that he will respect the decision, but who tells the same people that they cannot vote for devolution, even though it is by far the most favoured option of the Scottish people and it is that which will save the Union.
The Government say that devolution to Scotland and to Wales is
Mr. Robertson:
The finger of the Secretary of State for Scotland points at the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). I am not going to give way. He had better listen to what I have to say.
The finger points, and no wonder, because the tragedy of the hypocrisy, confusion and contradiction behind the Government's position is that the people of Scotland and of Wales are being used as pawns in a dangerously cynical game between wreck-it-all separatists and change-nothing Unionists--a genuine conspiracy between the Secretary of State and the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan to deny the people of Scotland what is their proper vote. Both of them have an interest in polarising the home rule debate between separatism and the status quo and in denying and defying the Scottish people, who simply want the safe, moderate and sensible improvement of the constitution, which is what we offer them.
"new arrangements for the governance of Northern Ireland must be acceptable to the people".
They propose a pre-legislative referendum as one of the Prime Minister's triple locks on the process.
"the most dangerous proposition ever put before the British people",
but the same Government and the same Prime Minister have no plans to abolish the Scottish Parliament if it is set up, and many key Tory Members were proponents of exactly the same thesis in the 1970s.
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