| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Browne: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I realise that he is short of time. I have one simple point to put to him. There is no such thing as an exclusively English public spending measure in respect of health or education. Because of the way in which the block grant is calculated for Scotland, every single public spending decision that is made in the House has a knock-on effect on Scotland.
Mr. Grieve: I accept that the way in which the Budget is set will be a United Kingdom matter, but once that has been done and the Barnett formula has been brought into operation, there is no good reason why English Members of Parliament should not determine how the expenditure is spent in England. I do not follow the hon. Gentleman's argument on that point.
The second issue that exercised us considerably during the debate was the future of the Grand Committees. I confess that I find the Government's position inexplicable. As was rightly said by several hon. Members in the debate, the Grand Committees were set up as an alternative to devolution. Devolution has occurred. Although I accept that there may well be occasions when Scottish and Welsh Members of Parliament may wish to express a view in debate that is particular to the problems facing their own regions in reserved matters, I do not see why that cannot be done in a forum such as Westminster Hall, where Members of Parliament from English constituencies--or, indeed, from Welsh constituencies if the matter under discussion related to Scotland--could also contribute to the discussion.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh, South (Mr. Griffiths) highlighted the loss of cross-fertilisation of ideas between Members from different parts of the United Kingdom. I heartily endorse that view. One way of making sure that such cross-fertilisation continues is by ensuring that we have far more debates, for which Westminster Hall provides the very forum, and by ensuring that hon. Members who participate in those debates are drawn from all parts of the United Kingdom with interests in those matters.
The Grand Committee is a dinosaur relic. I was astonished when the hon. Member for Paisley, South (Mr. Alexander) suggested that the justification for the Grand Committee lay in the existence of the regional Standing Committees which, unless I am entirely mistaken, have not met since the late 1970s. That is a poor analogy. Regionalisation in England is not desired, and I would not wish to go down that road. There should be maximum opportunity for hon. Members to pool their ideas in a forum such as Westminster Hall, not through the Grand Committee.
The only proposal was that the Grand Committee should be suspended, not abolished. Such a measure could easily have been taken, but the Government have funked it, possibly because it has been a device that they could throw as a sop to their own Back-Bench Members from Wales and Scotland, to maintain the illusion that they would be able to continue as before. That is a failure to accept the reality of devolution, which the Opposition have shown themselves much readier to accept.
The role of the Secretary of State is a critical issue underpinning the Procedure Committee's report, although there is an exceptional lack of clarity on the matter. I hope that the Secretary of State for Scotland will not take my comments amiss. I fully recognise that through his efforts he is attempting to make sure that devolution works, even if I sometimes think that he is doing it wrongly, and that he is also attempting to define the relationship between himself and the First Minister in Scotland.
It is perhaps inevitable, but it is undoubtedly an unsatisfactory state of affairs that, several months after the devolution settlement has started, it is unclear what the Secretary of State is doing--whether he is simply dealing with the remaining reserved matters which belong to him, or whether he is acting in some sort of ambassadorial role as a broker and facilitator between the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive and this House and the United Kingdom Government.
It is important that we should have some more clarity because, as I said earlier, in fairness to the Procedure Committee, it is difficult to decide what questions should be allowed until one knows what answers can be given, and, above all, what answers can be given without those answers being a gross intrusion on the remit of powers that has been devolved to the Scottish Executive. It is an area that is ripe for conflict which the House needs to consider. The fact that the Procedure Committee has been unable to consider it completely is not its fault; it is because we have never had any clarity on the issue.
Simply by looking at what is in the concordats and then at what is said by the Government, one can see clear differences of emphasis about the role of the Secretary of State for Scotland. It would be helpful if we could have some further clarification from the Secretary of State on the issue.
The second problem, which appears to Conservative Members to be considerable, concerns the nature of the concordats. They, too, must underpin how procedure develops in the House. The concordats were published late and we may well have to have a far more detailed debate on them at some later date, but it is worth looking at what they say to start to understand some of the problems.
To begin with, the second paragraph of the introduction of this extraordinary document presented by the Lord Chancellor and, I presume, drafted by him, states:
But there is a point to this. The relationship between the different parts of the United Kingdom will work only if those who live in different parts of the United Kingdom wish it to work. There is no other basis to the concordats. There is no other basis to devolution. One of the most stunning aspects of the concordat document is that it blindly assumes that the Northern Ireland Executive, once set up, will be willing to sign up to it in exactly the same terms as has been done in Wales and Scotland, something which they have no obligation to do within their own devolved areas.
Therefore, the concordats will have to be renegotiated every time there is a change of Administration in Edinburgh or Cardiff--I think that the Secretary of State will have to accept that--unless they command such widespread acceptance in conventional matters that no one would wish to gainsay them.
The Secretary of State for Scotland (Dr. John Reid):
We have had a wide-ranging and useful debate this afternoon. I start by thanking the hon. Member for Macclesfield (Mr. Winterton) and all the members of his Committee for the obvious work that they have put in. We are all deeply grateful to them.
As the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr. Ross) said, the debate is not taking place in a vacuum and I shall remind the House of why we are having it. The Government came to power in 1997 with a clear commitment to modernise our constitution and to decentralise power throughout the United Kingdom. Devolution is about modernising the way in which we govern ourselves in this United Kingdom, decentralising power and empowering local institutions. I say that because devolution did not have the universal support of the House or of the parties represented in it.
Throughout the two decades during which we were working out the details of devolution, two parties opposed it tooth and nail: one party is represented on the Benches opposite me; the other is the Scottish National party. They were adamantly opposed to devolution. One party wanted to keep everything totally central; one wanted everything totally separate in Scotland. There has been a remarkable coincidence of views tonight, and the remarkable feature of tonight's debate is that the same two parties are still opposed to the devolution settlement.
Those parties oppose the role of the Secretary of State and of the Scottish Grand Committee--and what is, in practical terms, the outcome of the referendum. I am not for a minute suggesting that of hon. Member for Macclesfield, but merely pointing out the context in which the debate is taking place: the same unholy alliance of Tories and the SNP is doing everything to impede the practical working out of the devolution settlement, in the same fashion as they opposed the establishment of this partnership of Parliaments over the past 20 years.
Mr. Swinney:
Can the Secretary of State inform us of any devolution measures put before the House in the past 20 years that Scottish National party MPs voted against?
"This memorandum is a statement of political intent and should not be interpreted as a binding agreement. It does not create legal obligations with the parties. It is intended to be binding in honour only."
The last person I heard say that he was bound in honour only was a gangster who was about to appear in court, and it concerned his relationship with fellow gangsters. It all ended rather badly when the honour code under which they were operating collapsed.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |