Political commentary
The Flying Scots
Ferdinand Mount
Whoosh! Och aye! Zowee! Hoots! Vrrrm! The one streak of lightning upon the drear November is the Scotland Bill. If the Government has its way, the Bill will pass its second reading next week after only one day's debate, be guillotined with no blood a day or so later, whisked into committee and made law well before Easter. Referenda are pencilled in for next autumn (the Wales Bill having followed at a more leisurely pace) and assembly elections for March, 1979. This time the Liberals are in the Prime Minister's pocket and dissident north-country Labour MPs have this week been squared by Mr Varley's announcement of mini-National Enterprise Boards loaded with public money for industry in North-East and North-West England.
How it all brings back the dear dead days of 1707 when the ministry hustled the unpopular Articles of Union through the English Commons with no time for debate, taking the Committee stage at one long sitting while the Opposition bellowed impotently 'Post-haste!' The Scottish Parliament had been allowed longer for their deliberations the year before, but then the Scots had more to give up, not least their recently liberated Parliament, and some of them needed more material considerations to focus their minds. Lord Glasgow received the Register's Office for life and with it 'a settlement of 1200 1. yearly for my service in the Union Parliament'. Poor Lord Banff got only £11 2s. And the Duke of Argyll, usually accounted one of the greatest architects of the Union, had to write from the wars in Flanders to Lord Mar, who on Godolphin's orders was pressing him to come over and help persuade the Scottish Parliament: 'My lord, it is surprising to me that my Lord Treasurer, who is a man of sense, should think of sending me up and down like a footman from one country to another without ever offering me any reward'. Mar himself can scarcely be called an idealist, being later disappointed at court, turning Jacobite and leading the '15. Whig historians do not like to remind us of these things and are indignant at Burns's suggestion that 'we're bought and sold for English gold' (south of the border, the Scots readiness to accept the gold was generally held to be deeply shocking and to have lowered the standards of public life etc). The realities are that constitutional issues are decided no more than any other issues exclusively on high grounds of principle without resort to bribery or arm-twisting. And the fact that the present measure is inspired by electoral panic and, if passed, will be passed for reasons of political expediency in the face of apathetic and, in England at least, largely hostile public opinion does not make it unique or illegitimate or temporary or easily undone.
The government line is that a huge quantity of parliamentary time has already been spent on 'devolution', not merely on last session's ill-fated Bill where the second reading alone received four days' debate but on the flock of White Papers and Royal Commissions. This ignores the fact that highly significant changes have been made since the first Bill was printed. First, Scotland and Wales have been split into two different Bills. This was inevitable. The cases were different. The yoking together of the two assemblies falsely implied that there was something happening to the whole of the United Kingdom which was called 'devolution' — this pretence being furthered by the issue last December of a bizarre little government paper entitled Devolution: The English Dimension. Meaningless. There is no English dimension. They don't want federalism. They don't want any more layers of government. That pretence of a universal process permeating the whole of 'our changing democracy' (the canting title of another mind-fogging White Paper) has now been dropped. The Government, it seems, now openly subscribes to the interpretation casually let fall by the Prime Minister that the Bill should be seen as 'a new settlement among the nations that constitute the United Kingdom'. Government policy is that Scotland is a nation and the Scotland Bill provides fresh arrangements for dealing with that fact.
Other changes made since the combined Bill was first introduced reinforce this interpretation. Within a few days, the Government announced that there were to be referenda held, but that only the. Scots and the Welsh were to vote. Now a referendum is the characteristic device of modern politics to make manifest the sovereignty of a people and to give effect to their will. Then, after the combined Bill collapsed, there filtered out from the office of Mr Michael Foot, the Lord President of the Council, a trickle of changes which furthered the impression that the sovereignty of the Scottish people was to be expressed in their Assembly. The leader of the Assembly had originally been called 'Chief Executive'. That sounded too subordinate, too townclerkly. Now he is designated as First Secretary which has the ring of authority, although it also has a touch of the people's democracy.
Yet it is not a settlement if by that we mean establishing a settled and undoubted sovereignty, for the new Bill, like the old one, enshrines two competing authorities. The First Secretary is to be appointed by the British Secretary of State; but he is to be nominated by the Scottish Assembly. The British Secretary of State is to appoint the other Scottish Secretaries but only 'on the advice of the First Secretary'. A further shift within the balance of the competing sovereignties is that while under the old Bill elections had to be held every four years, now the Assembly may dissolve itself if not less than two-thirds of its members so vote, a further step towards an independent existence. Nor is the competition of sovereignty reduced by the transfer of the veto from the British government and Parliament to the judicial committee of the Privy Council. As Mr Gordon Wilson, the Scotnat MP for Dundee East, menacingly asked: 'What would happen if the Scottish Assembly, in exercise of the sovereign will of the Scottish people, refused to accept the decision either of the Privy Council, over which it had no control, or any decision from Westminster?'
Supporters of the Bill argue that the comparable system established by the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, worked tolerably well. But that was because in Northern Ireland it was in the interest of the passionately loyalist majority to make it work and any spanners thrown into the works by the nationalist minority would only tend to convince loyalist voters that their representatives were doing a grand job. BY contrast, the Scotnats can appeal to virtually all Scottish voters by opposing a British veto, whether the SNP constitutes a majority or a minority, for their Labour and Tory opponents in the Assembly can thereby by abused as 'the English parties who wish to make the Assembly 'all impotent puppet of Westminster.' The prospect of an Assembly tilts events to keep the SNP moving at a time when it might otherwise have been rolling to a standstill. As an equal and opposite force to arrest this slide, the Bill's supporters offer only what Mr Health called 'faith the people of Scotland', that is, faith ill the strength of their attachment to the Union. But if they are so attached to it, they could surely hang on for a little longer to allow a test of the durability of the SNP's electoral appeal in a period of economic stability. If the Scots love the Union, why should their loyalty be strained and perplexed by presenting them with an Assembly which could carry them willy-nilly to an independence theY don't really want?
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