My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. I am grateful to her for having responded with such grace and clarity to a point I made six months ago in a similar debate. I should begin by declaring my interests and saying that I am in the curious position of deeply respecting the people who have signed the amendment, and usually agreeing with everything they say, but of disagreeing with what they say tonight. I will explain why.
If we in this Chamber sought to legislate for Scotland in a matter of devolved competence, and we did so without the consent of the Scottish Parliament, we can imagine what a hell of a hullaballoo would be raised immediately. We would be reading about it in every newspaper and the media would be full of it. Indeed, the media are fairly full of warnings from the Scottish Government every day that we must not do that. As a resident of Scotland—not so far from Glen Clova, in fact—I can tell the House that there are deep feelings in Scotland about someone coming into our competence. I know that that will be the same in Wales. I was with the EU Select Committee when we visited the Welsh Parliament, and in the course of a
day that point was made to me probably half a dozen times by different Welsh politicians, from every different denomination and party within Wales.
Indeed, as a Parliament we developed the Sewel convention to cope with this situation, and it has been put into the memorandum of understanding. The October 2013 version says that,
“the UK Government will proceed in accordance with the convention that the UK Parliament would not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters except with the agreement of the devolved legislature”.
Indeed, we put that into statute—certainly in the Scotland Act 2016, and I think in the equivalent Wales and Northern Ireland legislation. It has, of course, been litigated.
I have here the Miller judgment, and in his outstanding judgment—from which I shall quote shortly—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, rather elegantly reminds us, in paragraph 144, that the Sewel convention was not invented at that time, but that its substance was actually in effect between the UK and Southern Rhodesia, because the leading case in the Privy Council from 1969 discussed that. The Sewel convention represents something that this Parliament has had for a long time, and it stretches out to our Commonwealth as well as to our devolved Administrations here.
In the final paragraph of the five pages considering the convention, the noble and learned Lord says:
“In reaching this conclusion we do not underestimate the importance of constitutional conventions, some of which play a fundamental role in the operation of our constitution. The Sewel convention has an important role in facilitating harmonious relationships between the UK Parliament and the devolved legislatures”.
I repeat all that, and make a meal of it, because I have to say that the countries concerned and named in the amendment—I use the word “countries”, having lived in Bermuda for a number of years—are very proud and sophisticated places. Bermuda is incredibly sophisticated: its GDP per head is much bigger than that of the UK; its reinsurance industry overtook the UK’s in size in 2004, and is much bigger and very sophisticated. It would hate any infection of the sort of corrupt and criminal behaviour that has been elegantly referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Stern. Everyone working on Bermuda feels—as I and every Member of this House does—that chasing down these corrupt and criminal individuals and their money is very important.
Therefore, we should not legislate without at least consulting these Parliaments, and getting their agreement to do so. It would be deeply wrong and very counter- productive not to do that. If one were to think of legislating, one should do so under the Sewel convention if there is strong evidence that something very bad is going on, and there is no ability to address that. However, I have to say that the evidence is the other way. I looked again at the Wikipedia article on the Panama papers. About half way down that article, there is a rather good league table of the banks that had been involved in that affair. Four of the top 10 banks listed in the league table were based in Luxembourg. None of the top 10 banks was based in any of the countries listed in this amendment. Therefore,
we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves. Certainly, there appears to be a bit of work to do at home in the EU before it starts trying to do a lot of work outside.
When responding on the then Criminal Finances Bill, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams—I am sorry not to be able to read out the relevant bits—said that the Government and the overseas territories discussed these issues round the table almost as if they were members of a family, and that there were a lot of subtle ways in which the British Government could try to make sure that there was continual progress on this very important issue. She assured the House that such measures produced continual progress. In my experience, I think they do as well. The thinking behind this amendment is admirable. I hate all this disgusting stuff perpetrated by corrupt and criminal people as much as anyone, but I do not think that the amendment pushes the ball further up the pitch. It would be very damaging constitutionally to our relationships with our loyal overseas territories. We should continue to take the road we have taken so far, which is to push the ball gradually up the pitch, as and when our Government meet representatives of our overseas territories and discuss issues such as that which came out of the EU yesterday.