My Lords, I well remember the debate on the latest Scotland Act. I think that it was Clause 2 that enshrined the so-called Sewel convention. I remember arguing very vigorously that a convention was a convention and it was a mistake to try to incorporate a convention into statute. The then hapless Minister, reading from his brief, explained that “normally” meant that it would not be a problem. Some of us argued from different points of view that the word “normally” was rather vague and that its meaning could end up being discussed in the courts. We were given assurances that “normally” meant “normally”, but to argue that it is “normal” for the Sewel convention to apply to our repealing of the 1972 Act is stretching the meaning of the word.
I have great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and I feel very sorry about the position that his party now finds itself in in Scotland. It started off with the slogan that devolution would kill nationalism stone dead, but some of us on this side of the House argued that it would not; it would result in the nationalists getting power in Scotland and using their position in the Scottish Parliament at every opportunity to break the United Kingdom. Fortunately, there is a bit of a backlash in Scotland to the advantage of the Conservatives and unionists. I say to the noble Lord that this is not a unionist amendment; it is an extremely unwise amendment. It gives a veto to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly on United Kingdom matters. The noble Lord said that there are four parliaments in the UK. Yes, there are four bodies in the UK, but there is only one United Kingdom Parliament, and that is this Parliament. It is for this Parliament to implement the results of the referendum. The notion that the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly would be able to stop in its tracks the delivery of leaving the European Union, following the biggest vote in our history, is utterly absurd and ridiculous.
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If we look at this from a Scottish point of view, as I tend to do, one of the ironies of the Brexit vote, when we are told that in Scotland Brexit was not the majority view, is that the political party with most of its members supporting Brexit was the Scottish National Party—and those 400,000 votes are apparently just to be written off. We all know that the Scottish nationalists use every opportunity to turn everything into a constitutional crisis. Ministers have worked long and hard to reach agreement, and I believe that agreement is there on a way forward. Personally, I do not see how we could write an amendment that could resolve this problem; we shall come to that later in the Bill.
When I was Secretary of State, from time to time I disagreed with my colleagues because there was a particular Scottish interest, whether that was in fishing, agriculture or other matters handled in Scotland under the arrangements. We had a joint ministerial committee, we would argue about the merits and we would reach a
conclusion. It seems to me that when we have left the European Union and those powers have come back to the United Kingdom, it would be perfectly sensible to have some kind of administrative arrangement that enabled us to do what we have spent quite a lot of time talking about today, and preserve that single market. The nationalists are saying that they want to remain in the European Union because it is important to have access to the single market—but that single market is about a quarter of the size of the single market that is the United Kingdom. What is at issue here is how we maintain a United Kingdom single market and at the same time provide for devolved responsibilities to be carried out.
I look forward with interest to seeing what amendments may be brought forward, but providing a veto for the devolved parliaments is certainly not the way to preserve the single market.