Queen’s Speech

Lord Soley Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been my view for many years that the union of the United Kingdom has been probably the most successful political and economic union the world has ever seen. It is quite remarkably stable and, at its best, it has been a remarkable defence for the ideas of democracy and the rule of law. We must do all we can to protect and enhance it. It is increasingly under threat because of the use of referendums on things such as Brexit without a clear idea of the rules on referendums.

I have never really liked referendums. I much prefer a system in which you answer to your electorate and they throw you out if they do not like you. However, if you are going to have them, a couple of golden rules apply. First, make sure that you know what you will do if you do not get the result that you want; that was a big failing of Brexit. Secondly, make sure that you have the balance right about what percentage of voters and what majority you need. We have had a mess over Brexit—big time—but just think of the mess that we will have in Scotland if a vote for independence is equally narrow, which it may well be. As someone who lives in the Highlands, I say that it is a mistake for the SNP to think that because it has had a good result at a general election, it automatically has a majority for independence. It has not. To be fair to Nicola Sturgeon, I do not think that she does think this.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, was right to say that we could lose this by default. We can make a good case for the union of the United Kingdom, and a strong case for why breaking it up would be a mistake. It is my view that “Scot-Exit” will be at least as big a problem as Brexit has been, or even bigger, and the reasons are economic, political and cultural. It is a very important issue, which is one reason why I would welcome a serious look at the constitution.

The oddity is that in Britain we began to experiment with a federal-type approach 300 years ago, before federalism was invented, so we have separate legal, church/state and other systems, but we have not moved into a full federal system of the modern type. Whether we should—I appreciate the difficulties—is an important part of the discussion. One of the issues, so people say, is that England is too big. Actually, the problem with England is that about a third of the United Kingdom population live in the south-east corner—from Southampton up through Oxford, across through Milton Keynes to Cambridge. Something like 20 million people live in that corner. That is why it is difficult for us to come up with a structure that gives us some identity over and above that.

I remember as an 11 year-old trying to work out whether I was British, from the United Kingdom, English, Scottish, Welsh or a Londoner. Like so many people, having spent much of my life in London, it was easy to say that I was a Londoner and leave it at that. One problem we have is with the language. Many Scottish people feel, as indeed do the Welsh and Northern Irish, rightly angry when people talk about Britain by using the word “England”, particularly when the BBC does it—it is not so often done now, and I raised the matter in the House some years ago. If you talk about England, you should mean England and not the United Kingdom, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. It is a mistake that I often hear in this House too, including by Ministers.

We need to get that language right because the SNP has been very successful in presenting an image of Scotland as though it has always been a totally independent nation—that something went wrong a few hundred years ago and now it will try to put it right. But it forgets. A few weeks ago, I even noticed a claim that Bonnie Prince Charlie took part in the first war of independence, or words to that effect. Bonnie Prince Charlie, to his credit, on his march through England leading his Highland clan, told his troops to be kind to the English people because he was their king too. He was very clear about that. In other words, he was not going to be the king of Scotland: he was going to be the king of Britain. That actually runs deep in the thinking of the British people.

We need to relate to that properly and get our message across about the strength of the union, about our history and about the acute dangers that would be produced for the Scottish people if they suddenly pulled out of the United Kingdom. They would have a really difficult problem with 60% or 70% of their exports going to the rest of the UK. I welcome any attempt by the Government to give careful consideration to the constitutional approach, because we really need to get serious about this if we want our country, as we have known it, to survive.