My hon. Friend is right. Over the past eight years or so we have seen the Scottish Parliament become one of the most centralist Parliaments in the world, sucking up power from local authorities and ensuring that local authorities cannot raise their own taxation. What we want to see—we will table amendment to this effect—is double devolution so that we will devolve powers from Westminster to Holyrood and ask Holyrood to devolve those powers out to local communities, which are best placed to deal with the problems facing Scottish communities.
I was talking about the clumsy way in which the Prime Minister has dealt with the UK constitutional settlement. In our manifesto we called for a full and proper constitutional convention which would be able to examine some of these issues so that we could have a more coherent and sustainable approach to the way that the UK operates.
We will not oppose Second Reading today. We will seek to improve the Bill in Committee and I have set out some aspects of it where we will try to do that. This is a real opportunity to provide a stable and durable devolution settlement to create a fairer, more prosperous Scotland. When this Bill is passed and these new powers make their way to the Scottish Parliament, we look forward to the debate moving on to how the powers will be used, rather than who will use them. That is the real debate
and the one that the Scottish Labour party will relish in its historic fight for social justice, fairness and equality both in Scotland and across the United Kingdom.