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12.3 pm
Mr. David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) on obtaining this debate, which relates to matters of enormous constitutional importance. However, the field of argument is populated by more than its fair share of canards, Aunt Sallies, delusions and mirages, some of which I shall endeavour to knock down.
The Minister has argued that the case for an English Parliament originates solely from some unpleasant form of English nationalism. That is not remotely true--certainly not in my case. My hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman)--who has played a sterling part in bringing this issue forward--said that I have always argued that this is not an issue of nationalism, but of fairness and duty. It is an issue of fairness to English constituents, who have had their democracy diluted--a democratic deficit has been created for them--and it is an issue of duty on our part. Just as we can no more give away the sovereignty of our country on behalf of our constituents as their representatives, neither can we allow their democracy to be diluted and undermined. That is taking away from them something which they own and we do not.
This is an issue primarily of primary legislation. I had some sympathy with some of the points made by the hon. Member for North Devon (Mr. Harvey), but he did not spend long dealing with that issue. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean), I favour an English Parliament not from a sense of romance and emotion--although there is plenty of romance and emotion about feeling English--but through a clinical application of logic. Like my right hon. Friend, I would not have started from here, if I had been given the choice. I think that the United Kingdom's original arrangements were viable, and they were admired by many other democracies. However, we do not have that choice any more.
Now, it is possible for the United Kingdom Parliament to be unrepresentative of an English nation, but to legislate for that English nation against the political will
of that English nation. I arrived at my conclusion by eliminating all the other options--a sort of Conan Doyle approach. All the other proposals would lead, unfortunately and inevitably, to a constitutional crisis of one sort or another.
We have heard talk of English-designated days, English-designated legislation or an English Grand Committee. Let us imagine how that would work where the UK Parliament was of a different political persuasion from the English Members of that Parliament. People talk of Labour and Tories in this context. Frankly, we are designing a constitution for centuries, not years or days. Therefore, we must allow for the fact that there might be two completely different parties dealing with this system.
In circumstances where there were different political persuasions in the UK Parliament, the UK Government would have come to power on the basis of a manifesto which would have included policies relating to transport and health--issues that are massively important to the voters who put them there. They come top of the salience league when people are elected--they are what our electors care about most.
Mr. Harvey:
If a system had emerged where the English Parliament was responsible for those matters while the UK Parliament had a completely different set of responsibilities, why would the Government come to power on that platform? Surely their platform would be different.
Mr. Davis:
That is precisely my point. My argument concerns what would happen if there were not an English Parliament, but an English Grand Committee, or English-designated legislation or English-designated days. In those circumstances, the UK Government could propose a health Bill which, because it would be an English health Bill, would be defeated. The Executive would be defeated time and time again on principle planks of their manifesto. How long would this Government put up with that situation? Straight away we would have a major constitutional crisis.
It is for that reason that I come to the inevitable conclusion--with no great pleasure--that we need an English Parliament. It could sit in this place, and I am happy with the proposal made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill), which is a perfectly sensible option. There are many other options as to where it sits, how it is chosen and whether it includes people who are already Members of the UK Parliament.
We must have an English Executive. If we have anything other than that, we cannot solve the problem. That is why I arrive at my position--not by emotion or sentiment, but by the elimination of the other possibilities. If we choose the other possibilities, we will have a constitutional crisis, and then we really will have a problem with English nationalism. At that point, the English will feel badly treated.
I have one minute to deal with some of the canards, so I shall be brief. It is argued that such conflict does not happen very often, but we are legislating for centuries. If it happens once, it is a problem, and in centuries it will happen much more often.
Some argue that an English Parliament would accelerate the break-up of the Union. My argument is based on my experience in Canada, which has a similar
federal system. There are much greater tensions between Quebec and Ontario than there ever are between Scotland and England, yet the federal system has withstood the pressures.
Some argue that we would play into Europe's hands by taking the federal route. In fact--I speak as an ex-Minister for Europe--the countries that are best at defending themselves against European predations are those that are themselves federal states. Germany is one example. I do not want to pick Belgium as an example, but we should note that it has to ratify European legislation through seven parliaments, so it has a ratchet.
Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset):
This has been an astonishing debate, first because the issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) are perhaps among the most serious that face the nation today and secondly because--with the honourable exception of the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), whom one would have expected, above all other hon. Members, to be present, and who has been present in so far as his diary has permitted--we have witnessed the entire absence of interest on the part of the very large number of Labour Members.
My right hon. and hon. Friends would agree that that is remarkable. It arises not from any lack of interest in Adjournment debates as such but from the fact that Labour Members, and the Government, do not regard these issues as serious. They do not think that there is a problem. We owe my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire a great debt for bringing a very real problem to our attention.
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow):
There is a packed meeting of the parliamentary Labour party upstairs, with the Home Secretary addressing us on the question of asylum. One ought to view these matters in proportion.
Mr. Letwin:
That may well be part of the explanation. I shall be most interested to see whether Labour Members show any real interest in the subject by raising it themselves on other occasions.
The Government have for most of the past two years taken the position that there is not a problem. I shall be very surprised if the Minister tells us anything other than that the Government do not think that anything needs to be done, with the possible exception of the creation of regional government in England. Some of my hon. Friends animadverted to that subject, but only the hon. Member for North Devon (Mr. Harvey) went into it in any detail.
The idea of regional government in England is far worse even than my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire suggested. We could add another layer of government and generate the huge paradox of accountability of no one having the slightest idea at which level various decisions are made. We are perilously close to that even now. The paradox is that the larger the number of forms of government we have, the less we can hold any of them to account, because the less idea we have about their actions.
The hon. Member for North Devon had a solution: to abolish county councils--and district councils, for all I know--and regionalise. That would move us in the opposite direction: far from bringing government down towards people, it would take it up away from them. Worse than that, the Government do not plan to introduce regional government in any rational form. They are suggesting regional referendums--no doubt without any rules to make them fair--and if, for example, the north-east, and no other area, voted in favour, we would have the bizarre arrangement of not only Scotland and Wales but other areas creating further imbalance in the constitution. I cannot imagine any less satisfactory form of dynamic constitution making.
Several of my right hon. and hon. Friends, absolutely rightly, said that the move towards regionalisation was part of a deeper plot. I do not know whether the Minister is part of that plot or whether the Government are aware that they are part of it. Much that happens in relation to our gradual absorption into a federal united states of Europe is not designed by anyone in this country; we merely fall into it by a series of lapses of attention. The European Commission has demonstrated its clear intention, in a series of remarkably well argued and powerful cases, proposed in various studies and in the maps to which my right hon. and hon. Friends have referred, that we should end with a Europe of the regions, without England, and indeed without the United Kingdom as an entity.
For all those reasons, the Conservative party is, and will remain, wholly opposed to the regionalisation of England as a solution to the West Lothian question. Moreover, such a move would require giving primary legislative powers to the regions, and that is not in the Government's, let alone anyone else's, wildest ambitions, so it does not even constitute the beginning of a solution.
How do we tackle the West Lothian problem? Conservative Members have lucidly and powerfully illustrated why it needs to be tackled: the imbalances and the sense of unfairness to which the current situation will increasingly give rise. There must be a solution. We must come up with a set of policies to begin to diminish what will otherwise be a growing feeling of unfairness.
My right hon. and hon. Friends have, to a man--and a woman--argued with eloquence in favour of various forms of the solution broadly known as an English Parliament, which is in a sense a misnomer, because it really means an English Executive or Government, together with an assembly or parliament with primary legislative powers. I understand the reasons behind that view, as well as the objections advanced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr. Davis) to other solutions, but I think that my right hon. and hon. Friends may have understated the difficulties attending the proposition that there should be an English parliament and an English Government.
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